Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

From Petrozavodsk the train continued past Lake Onega and on to the north, to Kem and its port on the White Sea. Oleg was quiet for a while, looking out of the window, his eyes ticking from side to side as he watched the view from his seat moving backwards. I faced the other way, looking forwards. Curved expanses of water emerged over the flat, green rushing view. Oleg mentioned Kizhi, pointing it out on one of his maps as the train’s path slithered close to the island. He said that he had never been to see the collection of churches on Kizhi Island, but that one day he would like to go, look up at the Church of the Transfiguration with its twenty-two domes, and see the ancient wooden Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus, built in the fourteenth century without a single nail.

Next there was Medvezhyegorsk, some three hours and one hundred and fifty kilometres from Petrozavodsk. Again we emerged onto the platform for a cigarette, and bought pastries from a woman selling food. A wide sky stretched silently above us. It was evening time but not dark. Lake Onega had accompanied the train north, and Medvezhyegorsk stood on its northern bank.

This is where the White Sea–Baltic Canal begins, said Oleg.

The canal connected the White Sea to Lake Onega, which then flowed into the Baltic Sea via Svir River, Lake Ladoga and Neva River.

Prison labour, said Oleg. Worked them at a ridiculous pace under a Five-Year Plan, determined to defy time. Stalin, with his mania for complete control, even legislated on the granite to be used on the river embankments in Moscow. Frunzenskaya. Prechistenskaya. He gave the engineers a box of grey stones sent from here, from the canal. He made laws on all matters like that, Oleg continued—city planning and so on. He mandated a six-floor minimum for apartment buildings, and prowled the city by night, flanked by bodyguards, making orders for the watering of lime trees and the banning of double-decker trams, paranoid as he was that they would tip over.

Back on the train, we folded out the seats into beds for the night. The sun was very low, glowing orange as it fell slowly towards the horizon. I sat up watching the light change, the precise shifts impossible to really grasp, until the sky was awash in orange-gold. It looked as though invisible fires were reflecting their burning light upon the walls of wooden houses in the distance.

Eventually I pulled the curtains across the window, covering the shifting view and the long dusk, then lay down. Such silence. Only the rock of the carriage and gentle ticks. I missed Moscow’s music. I wished I’d asked to borrow Ilya’s Walkman.

After a while, Oleg started speaking into the dark. I was just thinking about the writer Platonov. His son was imprisoned under Stalin. The boy was only fifteen. I cannot remember where he was taken, but I know that he returned from prison and when he did, he had tuberculosis. And so Platonov cared for his sick son. Maybe it was easier for him to care for that physical ailment; those symptoms, the fevers and sweats and night terrors, the hallucinations and insomnia, would all have been something of a veil to obscure whatever other horrors the boy had brought home with him. But then poor Platonov himself caught the disease, and it killed him. Nothing can immunise us from all things.

I lay there looking up at the grey ceiling of the carriage. I recited one of Platonov’s lines: The cricket lived under the porch many a summer and sang there at eventide; perhaps it was the same cricket that sang the year before last, perhaps his grandson…

Oleg gave a soft laugh. That’s the one, he said.

I heard him roll over and we went quiet.

I slept a little, and then we arrived at Kem. It was a strange sensation to arrive at the station with the sun, at five o’clock in the morning. We’d left the night somewhere along the tracks behind us.

Kem was the gateway to the Solovetsky Islands. It was a silent place. We stood at the harbour, where the White Sea pooled in through Kem River. I could see a few wooden boats hovering on the water. A mass of logs lined the waterside in rows; others extended out across the water like an unstable pier. A few stood upright, resembling stakes in the ground or the trees they were once.

Beyond the river I saw buildings, brick and wooden, that looked haggard from a distance but still had something uniform about them, in the way they all faced the water, and in the symmetry of the multiple chimneys on each of their roofs. From one or two chimneys rose a grey feather of smoke, ebbing almost imperceptibly towards the sky. After walking a few minutes in silence broken only by stones at our feet and the breeze at our ears, Oleg began to speak about Kem’s past. The wooden cathedral, he told me, had been built some two hundred years before. Its three octagonal towers, like sorcerers’ tall hats, were called tent towers. I imagined the transient dwellings of some nomadic race of the steppe, camped on a grey barren earth. Now the logging industry sustained the town, Oleg told me as he pointed out a sawmill. The Solovetsky Monastery nearby had mostly retained control of Kem throughout its long history, but Kem was once also known as a transit camp on the way to the Solovetsky Gulag.

A man walked along the embankment, close to the water, so slowly he looked almost still from a distance. There were two shadows next to the man, one stretched to an unnatural length in front of him; the other, which I realised was actually the shadow of a nearby tree, looked like it was following him. His hands were clasped behind his back.

The sight of him reminded me of a photograph in the Sukhanovs’ apartment back in Moscow. They had a lot of movie and music posters, paintings, and black-and-white photos pinned to the walls. One of those was a copy of a photograph from the sixties, taken by the Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus. It showed Jean-Paul Sartre walking in a mass of white, bent forwards like the man I could see at the water. There were two shadows on the white: Sartre’s own and one of a figure behind him. The second shadow looked to be attached to him, but it wasn’t his. I thought the tree’s shadow on the embankment, immobile and still as the sea appeared to be in the light, looked just the same. The photo was called I Exist .

We were not sure where to stay for the night. On a pale, dusty road we approached a local woman who sat mending a pair of shoes. She directed us with a silent gesture of her hand to another local, a man with a very round figure and thick, arthritic hands. Boris, his name was, said we could stay at the house of his sister.

He took us to the house, which was away from the town but close to the water. After telling us that most of the lights didn’t have working bulbs and that it was possible a rat colony lived beneath the house, he ambled away, disappearing around a corner of grey road. We never saw him again, nor did the sister ever appear in the house. But it was close to the harbour, from where we’d take a boat the next day to Bolshoy Solovetsky Island, the largest of the Solovetsky archipelago.

We moved the only working lamp into the front room, where a couch sagged, a broken clock was stuck on twelve fifteen, and some plastic toys lay, their colours dulled by a layer of dust. There were a few photos on a low table. A young couple stood on an open stretch of grass, squinting without smiling at a past sun, perhaps late afternoon, which threw their faces into half-shadow. Another, the same man from the first photo. He wore an army uniform that could have been brown—one of the older Soviet uniforms of the Great Patriotic War. He had the cruelly sterile and calm look of young soldiers in new uniforms, somehow already carrying their bloody futures. Next to that was a more recent photo of two young soldiers in Soviet Afghanka uniforms, guns slung casually at their sides. They stood in a foreign street and there was a feel of the desert in the quality of light, the dust on the ground. I felt like an intruder as I stared at their faces and they looked back at me.