Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

They’re children of asphalt, she said, waving her hand, these kids of the city. In my childhood, we could tell where we were in the forest, and find our way out, by the way the light came down through the trees. Children can’t see these things anymore. She shook her head, putting the sweets, my cigarettes and bread slowly into a bag. They get lost so easily, she said. They’ve forgotten the knowledge.

I took the bag and nodded my thanks. As we walked home, the little girl went on humming faint songs under her breath. The bells on the children’s shirts tinkled. As we took the road back to the houses, they stopped here and there to tap their shoes over the surface of the large puddles that had formed in the grey dirt of the road.

And so I had begun my escape. I quickly came to love it. The mornings glowed early but were fresh thanks to the trees, which still knew what time it was and overnight took in the old air of the previous day. In the morning I would make tea, eat bread and jam, and write. Then I would lie outside next to the forest. I didn’t have any music with me. The silence felt strange, because even though I’d stopped certain things I’d once loved—reading and writing—after I moved to St Petersburg, I still had my record player and radio.

Late summer rains, sometimes unbelievably heavy, sometimes just a sunlit sheet hanging in the air, continued for a few days. The wet weather sometimes kept me inside from one afternoon until the evening of the next day. When I didn’t leave the dacha , there may as well have been no other houses, no neighbours, messy garden, dusty road, quiet dripping forest or overflowing rain-soaked sea out there beyond the walls. I hadn’t brought many books with me. I sometimes read something from Sergei Ivanovich’s collection; most books were by Kropotkin, and there were also a few uninteresting novels about small-town life on the steppe.

Late afternoon on one of those rain-soaked days, the neighbour came to visit while I was working at the desk in the front room. A grin cut deep wrinkles into his face, which seemed to have tanned darker over the past week. He held up a samogon bottle, a question. I beckoned him in, and went to get us glasses and a snack. We sat in the small front room.

The autumn rains are with us, he said, pouring and handing me a drink.

Though I was tired and liked my isolation there, talking with the neighbour wasn’t like talking to other people—my boss, students, strangers. It wasn’t an intrusion upon my solitude. His gruffness, his jokes, reminded me of the old dissident aunts and uncles of my childhood. Or maybe it was the place—the dacha , the forest, the timelessness of it all—that removed me from my usual self and helped cleave open something in me, just a fraction.

This air, said the neighbour, raising his arm, Vera tells me it smells like childhood to her. Mushroom weather. Vera’s was one of those old peasant families. The seasons marked time—the rituals, their lives, you know.

I lit a cigarette, then passed one to the neighbour; he accepted with a nod.

She gets gloomy, though, he said. It’s an old sadness. Her parents were believers. Celebrated Easter with all the traditions, the paskha cake, the vigil on Easter eve. It was very remote, where they lived. Relatives in the city, who couldn’t go to church, would give them prayers written on paper so they could take them to their priest.

I’m interested in this kind of… secret knowledge, the neighbour said, stubbing out his cigarette and crossing his arms. I think you are too, Pasha.

I nodded. I felt worn out and intrigued at the same time. Bitov’s ideal writing conditions involved a place with no time, no information, but here I was, stumbling on new stories after only a week.

It’s hard to know, he said, how to tell the grandchildren and the children these kinds of things. Ten or so years ago, I read news about a famous old church. The old kremlin in Rostov Veliky right up north. The bells could be heard thirty kilometres away from town, so it’s said. But in 1935 they were taken out when the church was shut down and turned into a stable or storehouse or something. And then there I am, an old man in Leningrad, and in the newspaper I read how because of glasnost the people in Rostov could go to the archives, find the old instruction manual and restore the bells. After fifty years they were ringing again. But the children, you know, they know what a bell sounds like. Of course. So it doesn’t mean anything to them. You can’t really say what fifty years of silence feels like.

The neighbour’s face was very still, and without his smile the skin across his cheeks and forehead looked far smoother, just small cracks in sand.

I don’t know if I’ll ever go there, to those places on the maps and in the articles, he said. I just keep collecting things. Just keep collecting, the articles and the stories. I don’t know what to do with them.

He rubbed a thumb harshly against his forehead. Vera hates it, he said. She hates it. My collecting, my maps. His voice was a bit drink-wavy. But you know, Pasha, it’s only after a lifetime that you can start to understand the sort of country you are living in.

We didn’t say anything more for a while, just had a couple more drinks and then spoke about other things; I said I’d help him with some work next door at his dacha , and then he went back home, leaving me once again to my seclusion, my silent walls and watchful windows.

I had a quiet few days. Time drifted. One evening I stood at the window in the bedroom, at the back of the dacha . I could see my yard, and the neighbour’s greenhouses. There he was. He stood near the house, looking out to the forest. I sort of liked having the neighbours there. When I saw them outside I felt a lonely kind of company, in the way I imagined one in an isolated house in Siberia feels connected to the sight of a lone truck moving along a distant road.

There were strange reminders after I came to the dacha in the forest, when I thought I saw someone from my old life. When I was young there was an old woman who cleared snow from the streets at a quiet crossroads near our apartment in Moscow. She had the bundled, broad figure of babushki everywhere, and her rounded shoulders rolled with each low sway of her shovel. It was her eyes that were so distinct. Acute and Asiatic, beneath a straight fringe of slate-grey hair. Both severe and peaceful, the sort of eyes that knew and had seen all that it was possible, both good and ill, to see. Probably we never exchanged more than a low, wintertime murmur of greeting, yet she was there on the street, scraping the ground to raise up the snow, the dirt which had tarnished it to russet, a bruised sludge, on most days throughout winter in my childhood and teenage years. After that I no longer saw her, or was perhaps too distracted to notice her quiet presence.

And now, at a small stall near the train station at Repino, I thought I saw that woman from my childhood. I passed her some rubles in exchange for the three apples she held in one hand with uncommon dexterity. I watched her release the apples at once into a wind-whipped plastic bag, take the coins and hand the bag to me, her elbow stretched nearly straight as she sat on a stool so low and small I couldn’t see it beneath her. Her eyes had the same watchful, ancient beauty of the Far East, beneath the same rim of dark grey hair. A barely perceptible difference in their features separated the two women. Perhaps it was that the lips of the Moscow babushka were thinner than those of the one in the forest town, or that the eyes of that woman from my childhood had clouded slightly, as though with age.