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FICTION
KATHERINE BRABON
THE
MEMORY
ARTIST
KATHERINE BRABON
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THE
MEMORY
ARTIST
KATHERINE BRABON
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PART I
If you ask me, Did this happen? Iwill reply, No.
If you ask me, Is this true? Iwill say, Of course.
Elena Bonner, Mothers and Daughters
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CHAPTER 1
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K ATHERINE BRABON
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K ATHERINE BRABON
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Years later, when I was no longer the little boy with fair hair
and wide brown eyes, Iwould wonder what the dates were,
or even the years, when shades of tension, sadness and anger
seeped into the mood of those gatherings. It wasnt the dates
or events I absorbed as a child, but the sightless shifts in the
air, which harnessed themselves to memory and came to define
my recollections.
Once, a woman whose name I never knew, or eventually
forgot, entered the kitchen, sat down heavily on a chair and
looked away from the table with wet cheeks. Iwas struck by
the way her hands lay, upturned and inert, on her lap. My
mother sat with the woman while others brought out bottles,
crystalline vodka or golden brandy, and asked me where extra
glasses were kept. A man I didnt know washed the biscuit
plates at the end of the night because my mother did not leave
the sad womans side.
Another time, Oleg looked at me with clouded red eyes and
such an unfamiliar tension around his mouth (since it seemed
to me he was always smiling) that I actually hid, pretendingto
read, on the floor by the couch in the other room. His sadness
frightened me.
And sometimes, certain friends stopped coming. Perhaps
the young man with black hair who left his hat under the
chair at the back of the room, or the woman who was known
for her good kotleti patties; they would be reduced to names
I heard, still spoken at the table, but now turned into stories,
or a telling expression on anothers face. Gradually, Iforgot
what they looked like. Sometimes even the names vanished
from the air and were only scribbled on paper, handed across
the table with a knowing look, before nervous hands tore
upthe paper and threw the pieces in the stove. Those people
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K ATHERINE BRABON
became slightly unreal to me. Iknew that the men and women
attached to those unspoken names were not dead, exactly. Yet
they had disappeared from the two rooms that were my real
world. Like characters in a long-lost book, I could scarcely
picture them in prison or a labour camp or exile. Perhaps that
was how I came to think, even when I was no longer a child,
that those who disappeared were not gone forever, but went
to some other place, in the present or the past or somewhere
else entirely, where terrible truths hid.
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CHAPTER 2
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K ATHERINE BRABON
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K ATHERINE BRABON
Yura was waiting for me at the bar, two full glasses of beer
on the table. He wore a sky-blue business shirt and had thickrimmed glasses. He worked at St Petersburg State University
but wed met years before, in Moscow. Wed both wantedto
leave that city, for our own reasons, though Yura seemed
tohave settled in our new city far better than me. Itold him
how my mother had been ill for a while, with blood pressure
problems, but it hadnt seemed life-threatening and so her
death was ashock.
Mostly we spoke about Moscow. The longer we were both
in Petersburg, the more it seemed that our old city was the
main thing we had in common. In the six years since I left,
Id been back three or four times, but each visit was less than
three days. Yura hadnt been back atall.
We probably wouldnt recognise the place now, he said.
He looked down at his beer. Yura somehow still had a young
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face, though his light brown hair was thinning and his eyes
seemed a little tired.
Well, Ill know soon enough, Isaid. Ilooked down at my
own drink. Ill have to go back to sort out the apartment.
Maybe Ill move back there.
It was a throwaway line, but the thought wasnt completely
unappealing. Sometimes when we had a drink I would mention
to Yura that I never really felt comfortable in Petersburg. It
was as if the city was hostile to me, though Id never said
it in those words. Secretly Id always admired, even envied,
Yuras ability to detest the city of his birth. He had been
stuck therein the eighties, when Moscows Jews were trying
hard to leave but they were repeatedly denied exit visas. It
was particularly hard for well-educated Jews; Gorbachev
maintained they were causing a brain drain, trying to leave
all at once. So when he finally left the city, even though he
stayed in Russia, it was surely like breaking the bars of a
prison. But me, Iwas neversure.
Well, you know what Ive said before . . . Yura held up his
beer glass, tilting it at me. You left the city on bad terms. Left
things unfinished. If youre like me, you make a clean break:
goodbye, Moscow.
Yura pressed four fingers, hard, into the table and drew
an invisible line across the marbly white laminate. Ive never
been back. But you, he said, you were never sure. You left so
quickly and had those few trips back. Short flings. Like a
lover you cant leave behind.
We nodded anddrank.
Well, Ill let you know, Isaid.
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I had to teach a class the next day. It was an easy one, just two
businessmen from Rotterdam who both wore neatly pressed
light green shirts and were always polite. Itaught fewer classes
in recent years, working more on organisation, marketing,
helping to manage the language school business. After making
a few phone calls, I wenthome.
I sat at the square wooden desk in my bedroom, smoking
and looking out the window to my right. Iwatched the gulf,
the water silvery and still from this distance, though it would
have been rippling with a current. Sometimes the endless
daylight was jarring. It seemed unnatural to me, that we were
put in charge of the hours likethat.
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. Iwondered if the
residents of those towers turned on their lights just out of
habit, since according to our watches and clocks it should
have beendark.
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 atall.
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CHAPTER 3
hudovo, my mothers 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 hadnt properly parted with
the city of mybirth.
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 thinningtowns.
My thoughts flickered back to that walk through Volkovskoye
Cemetery. Isaw the vivid green canopies protecting the graves.
Iimagined 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 motherdied.
It wasnt lost on me that I was making a trip under similar
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