Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Once back in the city, though, I was feeling strange—perhaps because I hadn’t slept in a while. When I was a boy our friends would say that my mother never slept. I thought it was just a figure of speech because she was always working late. Of course she sleeps, I would say, too young then to comprehend the worries that might keep one awake at night. After the funeral I was often hit by such fragments of conversations.

The funeral was on a Tuesday, and I went back to work Thursday. On Saturday I went to the city centre. In the metro carriage, every noise was excessively loud. Sound seemed to physically touch me, and the yellow light was harsh on my eyes. Insomnia brought about a kind of loneliness, as though nobody else in the world felt that way. It was like watching the world through glass. In the train carriage I had the sense that people were looking, staring, as if they knew things about me that I didn’t know myself. At those times, I felt just a trip on the pavement or an elbow on the metro away from madness. Gestures were obscene, buildings malign.

I called Yura, arranged to meet for drinks, but then phoned back an hour later and cancelled. I ended up calling Sonya, a woman I sometimes saw. She had two children, sons, and a husband who had died. She had a long oval face and eyes that always seemed to look away, mournfully, out a window or across a room. Her hair was bright blonde and her dyed eyelashes were long and very dark. The building where she rented a one-bedroom apartment was on the other side of St Petersburg to my place, and she worked at a travel agency near Griboyedov Canal. We would sleep together sometimes but, like me, she favoured solitude; my lonely Sonya who for both practical and emotional reasons never wanted me to stay for long.

When I visited, Sonya’s sons stayed at their grandmother’s. Her bed was a low mattress, the softest I’d ever lain on. The room was sparse, just a small chest of drawers, light orange curtains, a low bedside table with a few magazines and always a glass of water and vitamins or tablets. And her lingering smell, a muted perfume. That night we were both very quiet, though Sonya pulled me towards her with a sad strength in her palms and fingers, and at one point she cried out loudly. It was on those nights I knew she was particularly lonely, her dead husband closer to her than I.

I didn’t tell Sonya that my mother had died. I rarely talked to her about Moscow and my previous life. I preferred to be solitary in every way, and clung to the feeling that I had no defined story. As if I had no edges.

We lay in that soft bed, and Sonya told me about her sons, how she had taken them to a church ceremony. She had been attending services for the past few months. I hadn’t ever met her children—she was strict about such a separation, always making sure I arrived after they had left—a choice that was part of her desired solitude, I always assumed.

It was very moving, Pasha, she said. To see my two little ones holding out their candles for lighting, and carefully following the words in their little songbooks. A languid smile passed over her face. I like to see them care about something, she said.

I listened, touched her blonde hair. She knew I didn’t believe in any god.

I left Sonya’s and went home, though I couldn’t sleep. The hours changed but not the light. At two in the morning, I stood watching the silky gulf water. The wind picked up, as though ready for the approaching, premature day. It sounded high and very close, right at my window and almost like waves; I imagined that the gulf had broken its banks to leak over the suburb, leaving only the concrete tower island of the apartment. The sky was stone grey.

The next morning, I left the apartment. The wind persisted and it was hot already. I never knew what to do on a Sunday, such a quiet, cavernous day. I wandered, lost in thought, to the metro and boarded a train that was empty. Primorskaya station was the end of the line, though in the morning it was more like the beginning. I was often indecisive, prone to seeking out diversions, and that morning even more so. At first I went to the city centre, walked along Nevsky, turned to walk alongside Griboyedov Canal and then down past Yusupov Gardens and along Sadovaya. It was busier there in the narrower streets, or maybe the wide boulevards in the centre gave an illusion of thinner crowds, greater calm. Around Sennaya Square the mood was brittle, the heat close. Teenagers sat on steps or stood in those fractured circles of the young, where the attention is usually on one or two players, laughs are uneven or mocking, and nobody ever seems to be still. Mothers pushed prams. Soldiers, young men but old veterans, drank on the edges of the throng. I walked down a lane and emerged at the end into another crowded square, people pooled into these cramped spaces. Vendors called out from stalls in the square.

I’d walked in those parts many times, especially when I first arrived in the city and knew nobody. So many repetitions. If someone inked in our footsteps, and the footsteps of those who came before us, there might be only a series of widening and constricting circles, endless turns and corners. My aimless walk gave me nothing but the decision to take some time away from the city.

In the afternoon I returned to my apartment and called the language school. I explained that I would need a couple of weeks off work. The school was owned and run by a young Dutch guy, Joran. He had moved to Russia the year before, with the view that with our wretched economy it was a good time to start a business with foreign money, teaching Russian to businessmen and students, about which he was probably right. He was easygoing and didn’t seem to mind the prospect of my absence, since there were plenty of university students looking for summer work.

I had little money or direction, but I wanted to leave the city for a while and find a place to write whatever it was I had started since my mother died. I called the man I had met at the funeral, Sergei Ivanovich, and arranged to stay at his dacha for a couple of weeks.

Since moving to St Petersburg in 1993, I had not struggled with life so much as with death, the allure of it. I would go to work, function like the machine I needed to be, but then on the weekends I’d lie staring at the ceiling and feel myself turning to stone. An inner silence lived in me. Life had a dreamlike texture. Perhaps at the highest point of melancholia you exist in the silence and truth of dreams. Dreams are, after all, something of which we are the bewildered authors; we don’t know what we have created with that blend of what we have lived and what we haven’t, what we desire and what terrifies us.

I looked back on the last six years since I’d left Moscow and felt that nothing filled them. One of the few things I’d read in the years after I’d moved, and I read it quite often, was Kafka’s short story ‘A Hunger Artist’. An artist starves himself and people come to watch. His art is their entertainment. But the authorities dictate that he can’t starve himself for more than forty days, because after that time he starts to look gruesome and the public find it too confronting.

Perhaps I read it over and again because of my own thoughts of dying. Or maybe I kept going back to the story because it seemed to tell me different things at different times. I sometimes thought it was Kafka’s way of saying that people don’t know what they really want; they have to be shocked into appreciating the new because nobody ever knew that the greatest works of art or song or literature were coming. To dictate art is to rob it of its very definition.