Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

The night after Anya left, in 1992, I lay alone on the bed behind the screen in the living room. It no longer felt like my bed but the one I’d once shared with Anya. I’d forgotten to turn off the light above the kitchen table, and the yellow square thrown onto the ceiling above me, that old childhood comfort, was now something I blamed for keeping me awake. I was imagining the next time I might see her. I couldn’t precisely picture the situation, how such a reunion might happen; it never did, anyway.

Every scene played at once, as in dreams, when all sorts of strange impossibilities are possible. Some days at the dacha , by evening I would be annoyed with myself, horrified even, that I couldn’t really say what I’d done for so many hours. I kept letting the present disappear or get away from me. And it annoyed me because I didn’t really want her anymore. She didn’t exist to want, that girl with a burning heart in 1988. I had no idea who she was in 1999. She was a place in time, a time in me. I wrote in my notebook: You don’t exist to want .

But then it all ended, too soon. A new set of classes was about to begin at the language school. I couldn’t afford to miss any more work, and I knew I had to leave the dacha . Two days before I was supposed to return to Petersburg, I stood with the neighbour at the edge of his yard, close to the forest. The voices of Vera Sergeyevna and the grandchildren drifted with the wind from a short distance away. Four chairs from the kitchen had been moved outside. Vera Sergeyevna sat on one; the other two were empty as the children played on the ground near her feet. They were all going back to the city that afternoon, the neighbour had told me; he wanted to secure the doors of the greenhouses and sheds before the winter came, and pack a few bottles to take back to the city. Heavy dew saturated the grass. The greenhouse windows were foggy and traced with lines from the plants’ reaching branches.

You’re a good man, Pasha, talking to an old man like this. Vera, you know, he said, his head knocking the air towards the house, she doesn’t like me talking about anything like that. You mention politics and she starts banging pots. I try to tell her; I say, Vera, it’s so different now, you have to understand it’s different now. But no, she says, it’s none of our business, not our place to talk about it. And then she repeats her mother’s saying: The further from the Tsar, the longer for your life . He waved a thick finger in the air.

I saw a lot of that hesitation back in Moscow, I said. We recorded interviews at the Memorial Society with survivors of the repressions, the Gulag. But sometimes even people who came by choice to speak found that they couldn’t. They would sit there looking horrified, as though they’d stumbled in by mistake.

The neighbour nodded vigorously, and I wondered what he knew, what stories he could not quite tell me. It’s good for you young ones to see that, he said. He crossed his arms at his chest. That fear in the eyes—it’s an old fear, Pasha. Always wondering who is listening, who will tell. It’s how we grew up. Hard habits to break.

The neighbour looked over at Vera Sergeyevna. The way the voice lowers, he said, when she wants to complain about the food at the markets or the cost of certain things. An old fear.

The neighbour motioned to one of the greenhouses. I followed him over and helped him tape some old newspaper over a window that had a deep crack running its length.

We learnt when we were growing up to be careful with words, he said, using his forefinger to smooth the tape over the paper with great care. We were raised with those warnings from our mothers: You’ll get in trouble for your tongue . You know you can’t speak about that . The walls have ears! That kind of thing. And so it really was a surprise when Vera turned to me one day, after thirty-odd years of marriage, and told me about the other half of her childhood.

I told you, he said, that Vera is from an old farming family. The committees, or their loyal followers, came in 1931 to turn over the farms to state control. Vera was eight. With her mother and siblings, she was deported to the Altai region, in Siberia. Her cousins fled, an aunt and uncle were killed. She never saw her grandparents again. They were put in one of those special settlements for kulak families, so-called ‘rich’ peasants said to have exploited the poor. A wooden barracks beside a river. She has said very little about it other than to mention the cold and hunger.

We walked into another of the greenhouses. Inside, it felt cool.

A different kind of air in here, the neighbour said. As though we’re not entirely outside or in.

I looked through the window and saw Vera with the grandchildren. She leant forwards, slightly regal in her chair; there was something of a sad queen about her as she spoke words I couldn’t hear.

One of the grandchildren, the little girl, stood for a moment beside Vera Sergeyevna, touched her face with a palm and used the other hand to trace lipstick onto her grandmother’s pursed lips. She then returned to her doll on the ground, whose face she had been decorating from a make-up kit. The wind lifted her hair.

As he passed me two bottles, the neighbour remarked that his and Vera Sergeyevna’s children had never known what their grandparents looked like. When my father was taken, my mother destroyed all our photos, he said. I’ve wondered if I should try to draw them, the faces of my parents, to try to pass something on to the children and grandchildren.

It was the first time the neighbour had hinted at his father’s fate. Certain words had telling connotations when loaded with meaning from the past: taken —my father was taken , he had said. They’re inside. They’re lost. Disappeared. They’ve had troubles . It reminded me of the people who disappeared during my childhood and turned into names or just a word— Gulag, the charge— which held so much within it. I said that I could help him write something, or perhaps use his story as part of the larger work that I was writing. He nodded but didn’t answer straight away.

After a long moment the neighbour went on to speak of how, in recent years, things had gone fairly well for his children, and his son whose children were here for the summer, had purchased the dacha the previous year. Their daughter had taken a job with a foreign company in St Petersburg, which paid in dollars not rubles, and so they had all survived the fearful inflation of the past decade.

So perhaps breaking with the past has been good, he said, though his expression was still sombre. Yet these days, it seems that things are worse for most people. I sometimes wonder whether it was better before, with the USSR. Back then, you didn’t see old babushki begging at corners in Leningrad like you do now. You didn’t hear stories from neighbours who can’t afford a funeral bus to take their families and the coffin to the cemetery on the day of a funeral, travelling together like the old ways.

He stood watching Vera and the children. But yes, he said. Yes, I think I’ll come visit you in Petersburg, Pasha. Write the story down.

I gave the neighbour my phone number and he said he’d call me to arrange a meeting in the city. At the end of the day, the neighbour and Vera Sergeyevna packed the car and I waved goodbye to the family as they drove out along the dusty road into Repino and back to Petersburg. Again I was alone.

My thoughts shifted to the city. I felt uneasy about returning, though I wasn’t exactly sure why. I liked the dacha . If I could, I’d just remain there. I’d found my timeless place. In fact, I wasn’t even sure of the time. I had misplaced my watch somewhere along the way from St Petersburg to the dacha .