Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

The scientist’s friends said it was like he had disappeared for good, said Yura. So when he came back for a conference, people looked at him as though he’d returned from the dead. No one could see , they couldn’t even imagine, where he might have gone.

Yes, said Anya. The West or anywhere abroad, over there , always seemed to be a place that didn’t quite exist. A made-up place.

But now, said Yura, now things are different. There are more openings, people can see footage and photographs of places, there’s more contact with other countries.

Exactly, said Anya. And we should all be allowed to see those places for ourselves.

I didn’t say anything. I had grown up wishing that I didn’t have to have a secret life, a hidden history, and now that a life without secrets had arrived I had no desire to leave my city, my country. The question of Anya leaving was a mostly unspoken but noticeable presence between us, like a small stone carried around. It gave an uneasy edge to our relationship. I felt a sort of veil between us, sometimes—I could still see her, she was still with me, and at times I could push it aside and she’d seem content. Other times I sensed that she had pulled it down again and saw a world on her side of the veil that did not include me.

Each night at the dacha a glowing orange sun and a weak pearly moon hung together in the sky. I spent a week of ageless evenings on the long seat in front of the dacha , although Vera Sergeyevna next door warned me, with her babushki superstitions, not to leave the chair out overnight. Careful, she said, you should know that moonlight destroys furniture. But still I lay listening to the summer sounds of insects, tree shivers, creaking wood. I was so tired by the end of each day, but it was the kind of fatigue that brought only difficult, disturbed sleep.

My routine began in the morning, brewing tea and eating bread, usually standing at the front window, as if the trees and sky gave me some regularity. At least I knew the beginning of each day. I would write a bit, drink more tea, stand again at the window, then go back to the desk. The phone never rang. The windows rattled if it was windy.

Oblivious to whether they wanted me there, I kept returning to the neighbours’ house. Vera Sergeyevna would make tea and we’d sit in her kitchen snacking on fruit or sunflower seeds. Sometimes she asked how my writing was going. She always had the radio turned on in the kitchen and I once mentioned something about seeing Popov’s grave in St Petersburg, and how he had invented the radio.

Ah yes, Popov, we know him well, she said, smiling. I was just a girl when the radio arrived in the countryside. Like a voice from heaven! But there was something terrifying about it.

I nodded, drank my tea. I knew that a nationwide radio network had been installed under Stalin. The Ministry of Ideology was behind it—their goal to enter the home, mind and heart of every person, so it was said. Even the radio, like my city, seemed tarnished by old violence.

The neighbour would come in after a morning outside, short of breath, his checked shirt coming untucked from his trousers. We would chat about nothing in particular—the weather or the city or the children. The slow, easy conversation had something warm about it, like summer, green and softly breezy.

I had a theory that the neighbour knew more about those dead roads than he let on. Perhaps he’d already been there but didn’t want Vera Sergeyevna to know. An image formed in my mind, like a still frame from a movie, of the neighbour standing on the concrete edge of an unfinished road, holding a bottle of samogon . It was nearly dark, and he was just standing because there didn’t seem to be anything more to do after arriving at such a place. My head was full of those kinds of still images which never went anywhere.

I talked more than usual when I was with the neighbour. It was something about his manner; as though he belonged to another place, a time separate from my present life, so that I somehow knew anything I said wouldn’t leave the dacha boundaries.

Early one afternoon the neighbour and I went walking in the forest. For some reason I hadn’t ventured in there yet; I’d kept to the road to the beach, the produkti and the station, or the yard bordered by the wall of trees.

A bit further, a bit further, said the neighbour.

The trees huddled closer together the deeper we went. The air cooled.

We had a conversation about Moscow. He’d been there once. When he started talking about it I felt not so much longing as a pained admiration for the city. The neighbour mentioned the main sites, well known to anyone. Dzerzhinsky Square. Detsky Mir toyshop. GUM department store. Red Square. The Arbat. We stayed pretty late, sitting on a fallen log until early evening, nearing the end of the bottle. At some point the neighbour asked me what I was writing about, or maybe he asked me who I was writing about. And so I told him about Anya and her father, and more or less what had taken place in Moscow. I couldn’t decide if the slow process of remembering and writing down felt less taxing than to suddenly, upon being questioned, state so briefly the things that had happened.

So they’re both gone now, he said. The girl and her father.

Yeah, I said, taking a shot, then eating some pickles the neighbour had brought with him. Both gone. But it’s hard, when you go to write about something like this. There’s no before when you know what happened. Time is just there, all at once. Linearity is a lie.

Just write it, my boy, said the neighbour. Start anywhere and just tell what happened.

We went to the forest again the next day, and the day after that. It became a strange memory place, that green around us, the clear air; almost a city, almost Moscow. We were bringing back so many past moments, the neighbour and me, with our samogon and our words.

But really, Moscow was always with me, in fragments that were difficult to put in order. I wondered how or whether we decide what to remember. In the sun of those evenings in 1999, I was bathed in the heat of 1988. Probably it is unavoidable, our tendency to recall past seasons as the same sun watches over another summer, then autumn, and then the cold returns again. As if doing so might provide an essential marker: what was before, what had since come.

Just start anywhere, the neighbour had told me. Just tell what happened. The memory of an event takes on the shadow of its aftermath, like a second skin. Skins of memory: I felt those layers over me, over the apartment near Arbatskaya where I grew up, over the city. In the apartment I couldn’t only see Anya in the mornings, getting dressed as I lay on the divan, relaxed, murmuring to her. The scenes could never fully play out in my mind; they broke down partway through as later events demanded their own time on show, as did the half-hopes of what might have happened instead.

In 1990, Anya was there again, in our apartment, through nights that felt completely different. Her father was very unwell then, and Anya wasn’t speaking to her mother. Looking back now, I wondered how her face might have looked in the dark. Draped over us were the thin sheets I had slept beneath for years. We would have spoken softly, so as not to wake my mother. I wondered how many conversations I’d forgotten. I tried to bring back what we said, how her voice sounded, recall my hand resting on her side just beneath her breast. I wondered if she had been able to sleep at all.