Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

I nodded slowly, struck by a strange muteness. I still felt a sense of relief, sitting there next to Sonya, but wasn’t sure what to say or whether she wanted me to say anything. I looked up at the mournful face of a woman in a painting in the church, and remembered reading, just a few weeks before I left for Moscow, an article about a new artwork in St Petersburg, a memorial sculpture. I hadn’t been to see it yet, but right then I very much wanted to. There were a few others sitting in the quiet church, so I silently motioned for us to stand up and leave.

Outside, the cold air struck at our skin and it was nearing dark.

I said that I would make arrangements for us to go to the dacha as soon as possible. Sonya said that maybe her boys would come one day, too. We didn’t say anything more about it then. I briefly explained about the sculpture I wanted to see, and we took a metro to Chernyshevskaya. In the quickening dusk, we walked down an intersecting street to Robespierre Embankment. After a few minutes we reached the river. We faced Kresty Prison, a cluster of red-brick buildings across the river. It looked like an old, low-built temple newly excavated. On the embankment near where we stood was the artwork by Chemiakin, of two sphinx sculptures facing one another on thick plinths.

I heard about this a while ago, I said to Sonya, but I didn’t really want to see them, for some reason. I haven’t been here before either.

Sonya stared at the sphinx face closest to us. She put one hand up to her mouth, like a slow movement of mourning.

Unlike the graceful, feline sphinx statues over on University Embankment, brought over from Egypt hundreds of years before, these sphinxes were new, just a few years old, and they looked half dead. Their bodies were emaciated; soft creases in the greenish metal showed ribs emerging from the skin. Half of each face was that of a woman, looking ahead, the other half a skull. Poems and quotations, from winters and dissidents like Allmatova and Sakharov, were inscribed on the plinths. Maybe, I thought, these sphinx-women are the memory of the dokhodyagi , the soon-to-be-dead, set in stone so that they neither die nor live.

Sonya let me stand there for a long time, looking out from the sphinxes’ view, over the water, across to the prison that was gradually receding into the dark. We walked back to the metro together in a comfortable silence. The night was cold and I put my arm around her shoulder.

That evening I called Sergei Ivanovich and arranged for Sonya and me to stay at the dacha that weekend. I was glad to be going there. The city was too familiar to me, too connected to the unsettled feeling I still had since my return from Moscow, a feeling that I was still searching for something.

We took the elektrichka train, as I had in August. We arrived at Repino station and walked the forest road to the dacha .

Summer had gone. The feel of the dacha and that quiet place, of dusty paths, hidden houses, the always-silent forest, had changed. In the shade of the largest trees I could see a thin coating of white, the first snow. There was a new whisper, heavier, in the trees, and the wind felt thicker as it travelled along its own wild corridors, straying onto the road as we walked. Sonya pulled a scarf high up to her mouth and we both wore thick jackets. On the way, we went to the produkti , where the woman greeted me familiarly, putting my cigarettes, bread, ham and tea into a bag. She had blue-painted nails this time.

The key was under the brick at the front of the dacha , and I opened the door and let Sonya walk in. I looked over at the neighbour’s house; it was lightless and locked, as though long unoccupied. I thought about leaving a note, in case he or Vera Sergeyevna returned there soon. I went inside, and after we had unpacked our things, we went out walking. The beach was as deserted as ever. On the stretch of damp sand, along the wet trails of the Gulf of Finland, the colours were so different now; there was more grey and uncertainty, the tide seemed thin and stretched, receding almost as if the ocean had turned its back, turned away.

A slow tide pulled lazily over the sandbanks, caressing lines into the sand when it left. Further out, the small waves looked hard, freezing and inviting all at once.

We should swim, I said.

Sonya was unconvinced, but I told her that plenty of people jump into icy oceans during winter. It was tradition.

They do it in Moscow, I said, in the river.

Yes, but they have somewhere warm to go afterwards, she said. A hot spa.

We each took another few steps towards the water, and I took her hand.

I’d had swimming lessons all through primary school. My school—in fact, probably every school in Moscow—was adamant about participation in sports. I didn’t like the games but enjoyed the pool. Swimming felt solitary, even among twenty-five rowdy classmates. I loved the aloneness allowed in the echoing warm water.

Salty air moved in a cold breeze. I took off my clothes, Sonya did the same. Her skin was ashen, striking, reflecting the cloudy sky, her blonde hair paled, as though her body was blending with the sand, the landscape. There was no way I could walk in slowly, so I ran in waist-deep before the water had a chance to hurt—then I dived in. Ice and pain. Sonya was right behind me. The weight of nothing, nothing but the cold, crushed my chest. I heaved in a breath and kept my arms moving. I both loved and hated the feeling.

Oh, this is ridiculous! Sonya was laughing, her deep voice rising. Her wet hair was dark, coating her head as if on a sculpture. Gasping laughs, she waded over to me, wrapped her arms loosely around and kissed me with her gentle, sad force.

The house was cold when we returned; it had a small gas heater in the kitchen, so we sat on chairs beside it, Sonya wrapped in a blanket from the bedroom, and we sat smoking, occasionally talking with an ease that I’d not felt in our fragmented relationship up until then.

I woke in the night with a strange feeling that I’d been imagining, or dreaming about, a funeral. It was a night scene, and I had no idea whose burial it was, nor why I was there. I couldn’t get back to sleep and so got up, lit a candle and walked out of the bedroom. I stopped at the front window. My reflection was weird in the uncanny shadows, my face all battered and broken up by the orange glow, the flicker of the flame. I was almost unrecognisable. It was so dark beyond the window and in the room behind me that I could see nothing of either. I walked in cautious, measured steps, expecting in the darkness to mistake a wall for a doorway or knock over a vase. And for a moment I felt I could’ve been back in Moscow, in October 1990 on a cold afternoon, when we walked through the city, holding candles, for the ceremony honouring the dead at the memorial stone near the Lubyanka. It could’ve been a walk that never ended and I was just re-entering it for a moment with those night-time steps. I imagined the sounds of the marching feet of the crowd, growing louder; then the woman’s words came back: one name— shot— another name— shot —the dead the dead the dead, her voice a latent echo of the gun, but then the names were cruelly indistinct, too many for memory.

I went to the desk at which I’d written during the summer. I was disappointed; I had been sure that coming back to the dacha would begin a course of rest, of decent sleep at the very least. I thought about Moscow, the dead there. Not all the pain and horror and loss began with us; much of it came through the past to the time we called the present. Perhaps those emotions not born with us were among the most vital and we didn’t know it; maybe to forget past pain was tantamount to a grievous, criminal blindness. When there were breaks in the thread of the past coming to us, if our understanding was severed in some way, by denial or silence or a loss of knowledge, surely we would meet consequences somewhere. I wondered if I’d ever write anything else.