Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

I was thinking of Sonya but also Anya. I seemed to have the same feeling when I thought of them both, of a gently pressing emptiness.

I spent the rest of the day trying to write. I needed to write both forwards and backwards: find somewhere to begin in the past and write running towards the future I already knew, as well as stand in the present and not run, exactly, but fall backwards into the past, feeling the inertia of knowing, and the despair of never really holding a moment that had passed.

I ate some bread, tomatoes, sour cream for dinner. For a few hours I lay outside the dacha , stretched out on a long seat in front of the house, taking a sip of beer now and then, dozing into an evening that never really arrived.

As if I hadn’t moved, a few days later I was again stretched out on my back, now in the shade of the trees behind the dacha . With the intense heat, I had started spending a lot of time there. I lay as close to the forest as possible, where the air was coolest. The day wasn’t sunny at all, but heavy cloud seemed to press down the humid air, so it was tiring to be anywhere but in the shade.

Sometimes I felt as though the dacha was a halfway point, balancing precariously between a past I was trying to recall and a present I was barely in. A place where memories came to gather and where present time, such as it was, didn’t touch.

I heard light feet on grass, the breaking of thin wood, then saw the three children from next door. Two boys and a girl. The oldest, one of the boys, said they were going for a walk, and I could come too.

The sea is near here, said the boy.

They were quiet kids, and the thought of the sea appealed to me, so I joined them. We made our way along the dusty road in front of our houses, shaded by towering forests at either side. Eventually there wasn’t a single dacha in the wild around us. It was still gloomy, cloudy overhead. With a warm breeze a few stray, cold drops hit my forehead, my arms. I brushed them away with my palm, and would’ve thought I’d imagined them if the children hadn’t done the same, the younger boy looking back at me as though asking whether to keep going. I just grinned and raised my eyebrows, and we kept walking along the road towards the train station and the produkti .

Before we got there, the rain came. A sudden downpour, large drops of a deep cold as though from a lost winter. I knew there was a bus stop with a small shelter on the main road. We ran there laughing, streaked then saturated, my head blissfully cold, and we waited with the marching taps of rain on the shelter roof above us. The three children had the excited faces of those who have lost control of their surroundings, giggling and shivering; the rain, heavier and heavier, seemed to exhilarate and terrify them. A truck approached, two beacon headlights shining, its passage silent until it passed us with a thin hiss of wheels grasping the wet road.

Time seemed immeasurable in that wild loud rain, but after a while the rain eased and we stepped out again onto the road. I knew we were close to Penaty, the estate where Ilya Repin had lived at the end of his life, and that his former house was a museum. I had been to see Repin’s paintings in St Petersburg. They were sad and beautiful, as if he was letting us peer into an everyday moment of struggle made poignant and stoic. Rough, bedraggled peasant faces on the Volga, cast in a pearly light; or Tolstoy, looking like history itself, lumpy nose and beard like a pine tree in snow. One showed a scene in St Petersburg during the 1905 revolution. A crowd in wavy, silent chaos, open-mouthed exclamations fixed in time forever. I remembered that there was a well-dressed woman holding a bunch of red flowers. What had struck me at the time was how they floated, those flowers, just above the crowd, as if risen like blood. There was a coil of chains somewhere too, if I remembered rightly; turning and curving like seaweed in the depths.

Come on, I said to the children, let’s see if we can find the painter’s house.

We left the main road, but approaching the entrance gate I saw a sign: CLOSED DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES. I was sure there would be nobody inside the property; possibly there never was and we were waiting outside a ghostly museum that operated on its own. We climbed the gate, helping the youngest boy over the crosshatched metal arms. We met a dense wall of russet tree trunks and vivid green leaves. Repin painted in the forest. Although fences enclosed it, there was something unrestrained about the place. I saw one wooden structure, a kind of outbuilding, brightly painted in white, blue, maroon. I thought of the mystical Russia of skazki fairytales, of the princess who never laughed, waiting for the one to marry her, of Father Frost who froze children to death.

Being in the forest reminded me of folk stories from my childhood, or at least the feeling of those stories; something about the way the air was heavy with fear of unknown things, and the scenes of stark beauty. I pictured the place in winter: crystalline ice shards hanging from trees, as if daring the wind to shake them.

A few drops of rain dashed my arms again, my forehead. I couldn’t tell if it was light rainfall or just the echo of old rain dripping from the leaves.

Look up! I whispered to the children, and the three all craned their heads back. Above we saw a sky that looked scattered with green-leafed snowflakes, birch and aspen grew so thick that barely a spot of blue sky was visible.

Vera Sergeyevna had pinned a tiny gold bell to each child’s shirt, as my mother had done for me whenever we went mushroom picking in the wide forests near Moscow, and so as they trotted here and there between the trunks of the trees, a faint ringing from the bells tinkled through the forest air. The little girl was humming, a sound bare and small like a fairy’s song left in the air after the wolves have eaten the vampires, and the wolves themselves have run into the mouth of the mountains.

Soon there was sand at our feet, and the trees were thinning. Slowly easing our way down a subtle slope, the loose, sandy soil falling with our descent, we pressed through bushy undergrowth until the soil gave way entirely to sand. The beach, the beach! Their cries were long left behind as they ran from forest to sand.

The air by the gulf was still. There was nobody else. The water, metallic and reflecting, barely swayed. Where small currents pulled or sandbanks rose up, the watery sheet looked like a blanket unfolded, a bed unmade. At a distance, the drenched sand, scattered with stray branches and stones, was all that gave any sense of presence or sign of movement to the absent land.

Closer to me I saw the fast footprints of the children trailing them on the sand. One of the boys stood next to me and looked out at the water, squinting or smiling under the bright clouds. He asked whether the mass he could see in the distance was an island.

That’s Kotlin Island, usually called Kronstadt, the naval base, I said. Where the sailors revolted against Lenin and the Bolsheviks a few years after the revolution. Lenin was brutal, though. Over a thousand died, maybe two. Lots were sent to the prison camps up north, the Solovetsky Islands.

The boy was silent, maybe taking in what I’d told him. I thought of the unburied dead, the perhaps thousands of skeletons unresting but gradually wasting away in the water. The other boy and the girl circled back, still running. They had not noticed Kronstadt floating so far from the shore.

On the way back we stopped at the produkti and I bought the children some sweets. The woman at the counter, her nails painted orange this time, asked me if we had been mushroom picking, and warned me to be careful of losing the children in the woods.