Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

I went to the kitchen, made a meal of lamb and potatoes, opened a beer, and sat reading a newspaper, absorbing not a word. Yellow rectangles had appeared in the view from my kitchen window, though it was still sunny. I wondered if the residents of those towers turned on their lights just out of habit, since according to our watches and clocks it should have been dark.

That night, as though hoping to make sense of something through the effort of recording it, I began to write about Moscow. Though with the sky still light at midnight it was really no night at all.

Chudovo, my mother’s hometown, was one hundred kilometres south of St Petersburg in the Novgorod region. Trains departed from Moscow station, as if something was determined to remind me of that city. As I purchased a ticket, I remembered Yura telling me I hadn’t properly parted with the city of my birth.

The train carriage was old but the seats were comfortable. The air was close, the heat trapped in there, so I took a can of beer from my bag. As I took a cooling, bitter sip, the train coasted out of the city, and for a while I followed only the shifting view of thinning towns.

My thoughts flickered back to that walk through Volkovskoye Cemetery. I saw the vivid green canopies protecting the graves. I imagined that the trees, as they grew, would one day lean right down and caress the faces of those walking by. One of the old Russians there, Radishchev, wrote in A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow about the people he met on that oppressively hot summer trip back home after his mother died. It wasn’t lost on me that I was making a trip under similar circumstances. Along the way the writer met peasants and townspeople who told him of their problems and all the things awry under the government of Catherine the Great. Radishchev, who had thought himself far removed from the small-town life he’d left behind, was haunted by a question from one of the poor souls he met on the trip. A man asked Radishchev whether he thought the peasants had been treated right by the leaders they had never met. It was a question Radishchev couldn’t answer. One of those without a question mark, that are asked again and again like a never-ending echo.

I looked out the window, thinking we couldn’t be far from Chudovo. Oleg had arranged to meet me at the station. When I thought of Oleg I often saw him looking down at me, kind eyes, a smile, or I was observing him from a small distance, as he stood near the kitchen table in our apartment, maybe with his arms folded across his chest, talking or laughing with someone I couldn’t see or had forgotten. They were all childhood images, as though my perception was fixed in those early years.

Now I could see powerlines, untended green fields, a few wooden buildings as we passed by quickly. I finished my beer. A girl maybe twenty years old got in at one of the stops and sat across from me. She looked quietly out the window while her pretty reflection looked back. We arrived at Chudovo station about twenty minutes later. It was a yellow classical-style building, bordered in white and topped by a sloping maroon roof. A yellow house . Dostoyevsky often put those in his settings, when his characters roamed uneasily around St Petersburg, a hint for readers who knew about the yellow-painted Obukhovskaya Hospital, a mental asylum. His characters often verged on the point of madness, tormented by delusions, thinking their actions sane. I almost turned to the girl in the carriage, as we were leaving, to explain to her the significance of the yellow building. But she slunk out of the carriage before I could say a word. She walked ahead of me and didn’t turn back. I slung my rucksack over one shoulder and walked out onto the platform.

Oleg was there. His thin hair was wispier, whiter than in the image I had ready in my head, though his eyes were the same bright blue. He seemed thinner, even shorter, or maybe I just wasn’t used to being taller than him. Hanging from his shoulders was a rucksack, which I remembered him carrying any time he was outside.

We hugged and said a quiet hello, then we walked along a wide road behind the station. A trio of black birds arced overhead.

As we walked in silence, I thought of the apartment where I grew up. Moscow. Our feet crunched on the gravel. I remembered that transformation at our table, from morning to evening. The adults who came in, each patting me on the shoulder, as if they were giving me something as they walked by, and I’d find myself almost nodding in thanks. Though I had kept in contact with Oleg, there were so many of those dissident aunts and uncles who seemed to disappear along with the world of my childhood.

Oleg had arranged everything for the funeral. There was a short ceremony in a small wooden community hall. At the burial itself, as if emerging from my childhood, voices I thought I recognised read poems and spoke briefly but earnestly about my mother’s role in the dissident movement in the Brezhnev years, especially her campaign for the release of political prisoners incarcerated in psychiatric institutions. I couldn’t really reconcile the old, wrinkled faces and grey heads of the people who were speaking with any concrete remembrance from childhood. I closed my eyes and imagined they reached me, those voices, from the faraway, comforting static of the radio on our kitchen table in the apartment in Moscow.

Afterwards we went to the home of a local family for drinks and zakuski snacks. Like the voices at the funeral, the house felt known to me, distantly, in that way rooms we’ve never before been in manage somehow to reach out to us. Simple brown carpet covered the living room floor except for the stone around an enormous old-fashioned stove. A large sideboard of dark red wood held painted plates on the upper shelves and, below them, rows of books behind glass, photos leaning against the books. A few women bustled around with food. I could smell the spice-scent of ginger biscuits, the tartness of vinegar; I saw the tumbling steam clouds from a boiling samovar. I poured a glass of brandy, finished it and had another. The intense familiarity of it all made me feel a bit weightless.

A man, perhaps in his sixties, came over to talk to me. He wore a thin short-sleeved white shirt tucked into trousers belted high at his waist. When I was a boy I knew that the dissidents’ day jobs included translating, accounting, bookbinding, even tombstone engraving, but their real work had been for the underground movement. Sergei Ivanovich was a geologist, and he told me stories of Siberian expeditions and taiga land studies, and described his admiration for the geologist and famous anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin. I tried hard to concentrate on his sentences. I explained that I didn’t see much of the countryside; I was usually in the city, my concrete-and-bitumen suburb.

He had a dacha near St Petersburg, he told me; just a small cottage in a forest. It’s yours anytime, he said. I like to see the old group—he waved an arm to encompass the people in the room—like to see them using the place.

I felt somehow validated to be included in the old group, that old life in the apartment of my childhood.

Oleg introduced me to a few more people, I had a little to eat, more to drink, and the afternoon blurred into a sunny evening. During the darkless night I stepped outside and walked some way down the wide rubbly road. A green field stretched out before me; its vastness was a freeing sight after so long in the city. I looked as far as I could into the distance, until the green merged with loose, bluish clouds. The next morning, I returned with a headache to St Petersburg.