Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

At the sight of her, the bride, I felt something vaguely familiar, like an old longing or maybe just the appeal of a pretty face.

I watched as she held out a long white-sleeved arm, as she bent down, graceful as a lady in paintings of the past, to let the flowers fall from a small height. The couple left soon after, stepping into a polished white car.

From the square it was just a short walk to Moscow station. The foyer was full of ornate plaster carvings, white sculptured faces and curves like smooth snow. A few tourists milled about, their voices low or lost in the towering ceiling. A statue of Peter the Great stood in the place where Lenin’s was a few years before.

The woman at the cashier desk blinked long and carefully, showing a light purplish glitter on her eyelids, then told me to come back on the day I actually wanted to travel.

I sat down in the foyer. The passage between St Petersburg and Moscow, a journey of some five hours by train, was for me once the road from Moscow to Leningrad. But then the name of the city had changed, and I had moved cities, so those small shifts took place. I had a strange feeling, then. As though I was only just realising I would never again travel to or from Leningrad. I stayed in the foyer for a while; I must have looked like a man pinned to my seat.

I went to a public phone and called Yura, an old friend who lived in the city, on his office number. He offered to come to Chudovo with me for the funeral. I said no, I wouldn’t be there long.

I could have a beer now though, I said.

I finish at six.

Thanks, brother.

It’s nothing. I’ll see you.

I had two hours to fill somehow. I crossed the road and from a stall outside a metro station bought a bunch of flowers, they might have been carnations, mostly yellow, red and pink, wrapped in white paper. I took a tram away from the city centre to Volkovskoye Cemetery. I’d gone there many times before. My sanctuary among the dead. Through the large grounds by Volkovsky River, through the heavy woods, past immobile stone faces on plinths. As I walked I thought it must have been winter when I’d been there last, because I kept imagining an old coldness, bare trees, pastel clouds and hanging fog, whereas on that afternoon it was warm even in the shade.

I read the headstones. There were some familiar names. Alexander Popov, a pioneer of the radio, resting embraced by vivid green leaves. I’d always had an attachment to radios. As a boy I loved their strange ability to bring faraway words to me in our small rooms in Moscow. Oleg once told me that in 1942 a performance by twelve-year-old piano prodigy Lazar Berman, playing Liszt’s ‘La Campanella’, was broadcast out of Leningrad all the way to the United Kingdom. Whenever I thought about that astonishing broadcast, I connected it to the reverence my mother, Oleg and their fellow dissidents had for the bodiless wisdom that came from our radio speakers, which had left me with a similar devotion to the tiny lattices of metal. I would sit so close my breath would leave wet warmth on the speakers. In our enclosed world of whispers, hidden from the Moscow outside, the radio seemed to say that it knew me, knew our hidden world, that it knew I existed.

Not far from Popov’s grave was that of Vladimir Bekhterev, the famous psychiatrist. I stared at the statue of his bearded face; there was something severe and challenging about his expression. Bekhterev was said to have been the first to make a link between the brain’s hippocampus and memory. During an autopsy on a patient with severe memory impairment, Bekhterev noticed lesions in a certain part of the brain, and so found the connection. The psychiatrist had died in mysterious circumstances the day after he met Joseph Stalin. I’d long had an interest in, and unpleasant associations with, psychiatric hospitals in Moscow.

At the end of a bright green canopied path of very old graves lay the writer Alexander Radishchev. In 1790 he wrote A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow , describing a trip from one city to the other after the death of his mother. Everything he saw along the way disgusted him as gradually he realised the state of the country, the poverty and decay. So he wrote about it. Our earliest dissident, who also thought he could change the world with words.

I let the flowers, yellow and red and pink, fall down together to the ground at Radishchev’s grave. All of my dead were in Moscow.

Yura was waiting for me at the bar, two full glasses of beer on the table. He wore a sky-blue business shirt and had thick-rimmed glasses. He worked at St Petersburg State University but we’d met years before, in Moscow. We’d both wanted to leave that city, for our own reasons, though Yura seemed to have settled in our new city far better than me. I told him how my mother had been ill for a while, with blood pressure problems, but it hadn’t seemed life-threatening and so her death was a shock.

Mostly we spoke about Moscow. The longer we were both in Petersburg, the more it seemed that our old city was the main thing we had in common. In the six years since I left, I’d been back three or four times, but each visit was less than three days. Yura hadn’t been back at all.

We probably wouldn’t recognise the place now, he said. He looked down at his beer. Yura somehow still had a young face, though his light brown hair was thinning and his eyes seemed a little tired.

Well, I’ll know soon enough, I said. I looked down at my own drink. I’ll have to go back to sort out the apartment. Maybe I’ll move back there.

It was a throwaway line, but the thought wasn’t completely unappealing. Sometimes when we had a drink I would mention to Yura that I never really felt comfortable in Petersburg. It was as if the city was hostile to me, though I’d never said it in those words. Secretly I’d always admired, even envied, Yura’s ability to detest the city of his birth. He had been stuck there in the eighties, when Moscow’s Jews were trying hard to leave but they were repeatedly denied exit visas. It was particularly hard for well-educated Jews; Gorbachev maintained they were causing a brain drain , trying to leave all at once. So when he finally left the city, even though he stayed in Russia, it was surely like breaking the bars of a prison. But me, I was never sure.

Well, you know what I’ve said before… Yura held up his beer glass, tilting it at me. You left the city on bad terms. Left things unfinished. If you’re like me, you make a clean break: goodbye, Moscow.

Yura pressed four fingers, hard, into the table and drew an invisible line across the marbly white laminate. I’ve never been back. But you, he said, you were never sure. You left so quickly and had those few trips back. Short flings. Like a lover you can’t leave behind.

We nodded and drank.

Well, I’ll let you know, I said.

I had to teach a class the next day. It was an easy one, just two businessmen from Rotterdam who both wore neatly pressed light green shirts and were always polite. I taught fewer classes in recent years, working more on organisation, marketing, helping to manage the language school business. After making a few phone calls, I went home.

I sat at the square wooden desk in my bedroom, smoking and looking out the window to my right. I watched the gulf, the water silvery and still from this distance, though it would have been rippling with a current. Sometimes the endless daylight was jarring. It seemed unnatural to me, that we were put in charge of the hours like that.