Maybe he was the ultimate artist, my father, at the moment he attained death by starvation. If art is free—something I didn’t know for certain—then he chose what would happen to his incarcerated body and so was ultimately free. But he didn’t choose the condition of that incarceration. It was an endless loop; I longed for clarity.
I didn’t know what to do with such thoughts, however; my father’s death was in no gallery or bookshelf. Nor did I know what I was writing. It was as if we all stood at a window—me, Anya, her father, my father, countless others who had shared their histories during glasnost and after—and our collective breath covered the glass in vapour. Ghosts of old hopes, words long said and dead. I didn’t know what was through the window, if anything.
When it seemed like morning, I called Sonya. I imagined her standing by the kitchen window of her small apartment in Petersburg, standing by the stove where flower-patterned cloths were put to dry. I pictured her long eyelashes as she gazed out the window. Maybe she’d be drawing on a cigarette. I could hear her boys in the background, like gentle echoes. She told me she’d like to see me soon. I said that I was thinking of going to Moscow for a brief visit, but that I would come over before I left. After we hung up, I stood by the phone for a moment. I hadn’t mentioned to Sonya that I was at the dacha. It was strange to think that for her, I wasn’t here.
I was thinking of Sonya but also Anya. I seemed to have the same feeling when I thought of them both, of a gently pressing emptiness.
I spent the rest of the day trying to write. I needed to write both forwards and backwards: find somewhere to begin in the past and write running towards the future I already knew, as well as stand in the present and not run, exactly, but fall backwards into the past, feeling the inertia of knowing, and the despair of never really holding a moment that had passed.
I ate some bread, tomatoes, sour cream for dinner. For a few hours I lay outside the dacha, stretched out on a long seat in front of the house, taking a sip of beer now and then, dozing into an evening that never really arrived.
As if I hadn’t moved, a few days later I was again stretched out on my back, now in the shade of the trees behind the dacha. With the intense heat, I had started spending a lot of time there. I lay as close to the forest as possible, where the air was coolest. The day wasn’t sunny at all, but heavy cloud seemed to press down the humid air, so it was tiring to be anywhere but in the shade.
Sometimes I felt as though the dacha was a halfway point, balancing precariously between a past I was trying to recall and a present I was barely in. A place where memories came to gather and where present time, such as it was, didn’t touch.
I heard light feet on grass, the breaking of thin wood, then saw the three children from next door. Two boys and a girl. The oldest, one of the boys, said they were going for a walk, and I could come too.
The sea is near here, said the boy.
They were quiet kids, and the thought of the sea appealed to me, so I joined them. We made our way along the dusty road in front of our houses, shaded by towering forests at either side. Eventually there wasn’t a single dacha in the wild around us. It was still gloomy, cloudy overhead. With a warm breeze a few stray, cold drops hit my forehead, my arms. I brushed them away with my palm, and would’ve thought I’d imagined them if the children hadn’t done the same, the younger boy looking back at me as though asking whether to keep going. I just grinned and raised my eyebrows, and we kept walking along the road towards the train station and the produkti.
Before we got there, the rain came. A sudden downpour, large drops of a deep cold as though from a lost winter. I knew there was a bus stop with a small shelter on the main road. We ran there laughing, streaked then saturated, my head blissfully cold, and we waited with the marching taps of rain on the shelter roof above us. The three children had the excited faces of those who have lost control of their surroundings, giggling and shivering; the rain, heavier and heavier, seemed to exhilarate and terrify them. A truck approached, two beacon headlights shining, its passage silent until it passed us with a thin hiss of wheels grasping the wet road.
Time seemed immeasurable in that wild loud rain, but after a while the rain eased and we stepped out again onto the road. I knew we were close to Penaty, the estate where Ilya Repin had lived at the end of his life, and that his former house was a museum. I had been to see Repin’s paintings in St Petersburg. They were sad and beautiful, as if he was letting us peer into an everyday moment of struggle made poignant and stoic. Rough, bedraggled peasant faces on the Volga, cast in a pearly light; or Tolstoy, looking like history itself, lumpy nose and beard like a pine tree in snow. One showed a scene in St Petersburg during the 1905 revolution. A crowd in wavy, silent chaos, open-mouthed exclamations fixed in time forever. I remembered that there was a well-dressed woman holding a bunch of red flowers. What had struck me at the time was how they floated, those flowers, just above the crowd, as if risen like blood. There was a coil of chains somewhere too, if I remembered rightly; turning and curving like seaweed in the depths.
Come on, I said to the children, let’s see if we can find the painter’s house.
We left the main road, but approaching the entrance gate I saw a sign: CLOSED DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES. I was sure there would be nobody inside the property; possibly there never was and we were waiting outside a ghostly museum that operated on its own. We climbed the gate, helping the youngest boy over the crosshatched metal arms. We met a dense wall of russet tree trunks and vivid green leaves. Repin painted in the forest. Although fences enclosed it, there was something unrestrained about the place. I saw one wooden structure, a kind of outbuilding, brightly painted in white, blue, maroon. I thought of the mystical Russia of skazki fairytales, of the princess who never laughed, waiting for the one to marry her, of Father Frost who froze children to death.
Being in the forest reminded me of folk stories from my childhood, or at least the feeling of those stories; something about the way the air was heavy with fear of unknown things, and the scenes of stark beauty. I pictured the place in winter: crystalline ice shards hanging from trees, as if daring the wind to shake them.
A few drops of rain dashed my arms again, my forehead. I couldn’t tell if it was light rainfall or just the echo of old rain dripping from the leaves.
Look up! I whispered to the children, and the three all craned their heads back. Above we saw a sky that looked scattered with green-leafed snowflakes, birch and aspen grew so thick that barely a spot of blue sky was visible.
Vera Sergeyevna had pinned a tiny gold bell to each child’s shirt, as my mother had done for me whenever we went mushroom picking in the wide forests near Moscow, and so as they trotted here and there between the trunks of the trees, a faint ringing from the bells tinkled through the forest air. The little girl was humming, a sound bare and small like a fairy’s song left in the air after the wolves have eaten the vampires, and the wolves themselves have run into the mouth of the mountains.
Soon there was sand at our feet, and the trees were thinning. Slowly easing our way down a subtle slope, the loose, sandy soil falling with our descent, we pressed through bushy undergrowth until the soil gave way entirely to sand. The beach, the beach! Their cries were long left behind as they ran from forest to sand.