Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

A while later I was released into the hallway. My apartment felt unchanged, though stuffy from the summer heat, the lack of air. I stood at the window and smoked. I felt restless. I missed the peace of the dacha , the walks with the neighbours’ grandchildren, the warm evenings lying on the chair at the front or in the shady cool of the trees behind the house.

I went to see Sonya that night. I told her that my mother had died. It had been weeks since the funeral. Her death didn’t feel so much like raw experience as something that had happened some time ago, a thing now to be told. But I didn’t say how her death seemed to bring me closer to my own; how my mother’s passing was like the falling of a wall between me and repressed thoughts about death. I hadn’t really confronted those yet myself. Or perhaps it was the same thought rendered in two different forms: a longing to cease living and a desire to find a reason for being alive.

I told Sonya how I’d been to stay at the dacha . I described the small house, how the yard at the back extended right to the forest wall, and how the neighbour and I would sit either in the forest or in his yard that was like a city of greenhouses, and that we would drink and talk.

I thought you seemed tired, she said as we lay in bed. And your face has had lots of sun. She smiled her gentle, languid smile.

I told her about the walks with the grandchildren, how they loved to run along the empty beach, how it looked to me as though they were running in a liberated way that was impossible in the city. I said that maybe her boys would also like such a place. I had not met Sonya’s two young boys. She didn’t answer me directly but rather, after remaining quiet for a while, told me about an acquaintance of hers, a woman of the same age, who had also lost her husband. She had two children, a girl and a boy. The woman had remarried, and her children had a great fondness for the new husband. This pleased the woman, or she felt it should. But the day they first called him Papa very nearly destroyed her, said the woman.

Sonya reached to the low bedside table next to her, lit a cigarette and lay back, looking up at the ceiling. I rested the back of my hand on my forehead, closed my eyes, tasted the welcome drifts of smoke.

Sometimes, she said, I don’t want too much to change. When you lose someone, every week you live after that day takes you further away from them. If things stay the same, you can pretend—

Sonya held up one hand as she tried to find the words, but then lowered her arm and drew on her cigarette.

I would like to see this place, she said a long moment later. It’s strange that you didn’t say you were there. The tone of her voice wasn’t accusing; rather it seemed like a detached observation.

I was trying to write there, I said. At the dacha .

I didn’t know you were a writer.

I’m not. I used to try to be.

She stubbed out her cigarette and turned onto her left side, listening.

I rolled onto my right side, put a hand to her face. She had one hand holding the sheets at her waist, the other arm tucked under her naked ribs. Her hair touched her breasts.

Stupid youth, I said.

She smiled and kissed me. I left soon after, exiting the drab apartment building and the brief place that was time with Sonya, feeling that perhaps I didn’t want to leave so soon. Back at my apartment, I struggled to sleep. My mind was plagued by toxic, naked-body flickers. Glimpses long gone: Anya was sitting up on the bed, maybe talking to me, maybe silent. One bare leg bent up on the bed, the other splayed out next to her, down to the floor where her toes would have grazed the carpet. The image didn’t move; I couldn’t remember anything else around it. There was also a phantom recollection—maybe the memory of a photograph, black and white—of a woman crouched down beside a bed, naked, as if she was about to pick up something from the floor. The blankets on the bed next to her were disturbed but it didn’t look as though anyone else was in the room with her. Maybe one of the Sukhanovs’ friends had taken the photo and I saw it at their place.

A day or so later, the neighbour from the dacha called me. He suggested we meet at a bistro, a good and quiet place, he said, on one of the narrow streets near Dom Knigi bookshop on Nevsky Prospekt. He said he would like to tell me more things, more about the past, if I was still willing to write those things down for him. I assured him I was, and we arranged to meet two days later, very early in the morning.

On the appointed morning, I found the bistro easily enough. It was in a large old building painted bright blue, the windows trimmed with white, with large yellow signs just above them. A man in a business suit was leaving with a paper bag and a coffee cup, and when I went inside I was the only customer there. I ordered a coffee. The neighbour walked in a few minutes later. He looked different. His grey hair, usually a bit wild, was combed, either wet or held in place with cream or gel. He wore a light blue shirt, buttoned at the collar, and a dark green jacket of a thin material, maybe cotton. And instead of his dirty overalls and brown boots he wore black trousers and black lace-up shoes. I didn’t know if that was how he always looked in the city or whether he had dressed that way for this occasion. He ordered tea, I another coffee. I had my notebook on the table.

The feeling of quiet and expectation that came over me then, as if my mind was clearing itself and I didn’t want to speak but only hear what was to come, reminded me of the times I had sat in similar situations with Mikhail Sergeyevich. But I felt changed in some ways since those years; a man heavier with the passing of time.

I wanted to start with the day Vera and I first spoke about these things, said the neighbour. About our pasts. It was because of all the newspapers. The late eighties, with glasnost . Every new copy of Moscow News or Novy Mir or Ogonyok had something in it about the past. One day I just told Vera. I told her: when I was a boy, my father was arrested, and I never saw him again. It was 1935.

I could describe to Vera—he held up one hand as if to grasp that brief moment as it flared up in his mind—I could describe the feeling of that time, the Terror years, as they call them. Every person around me had a look about them as though they were capable of anything. I was a boy of ten years. Even the old babushka who sat in the hallway and lived in one of the rooms in the apartment upstairs changed from a sad, withered woman to a thing of dread, like a witch from a folk tale, with the power to tell them , them up there , that we had done wrong, that we were enemies of the people. It was a suspicious feeling, a metallic fear in the air. And there were shocks before then, before my father’s arrest. Neighbours and friends and even the most harmless of shopkeepers disappearing overnight. Not them, you’d think, surely not them, who seemed protected from all that. To me as a boy they were like the good characters in a book, the ones who stay safe. Such a shock, each time, hearing the news of who was taken in the night. We would hear the next morning, They’ve had problems next door or He’s not working today , and we’d know, Pasha, what those words meant. Some mornings you’d see a piece of paper pasted on a neighbour’s door with the secret police seal stamped on it, marking who had been arrested. There was a feeling that something incomprehensible was happening, that we were living according to rules I didn’t understand, that terrible things happened because of them—and the worst thing was that the adults didn’t seem to know how the rules worked either. That’s what scared me the most.