Fiction: A Basket Of Apples

By Rina Keough

 

 

“Marina!”

 

“Sorry?”

 

“Well, I’ll be damned. Long time no see. Marina. Marina Vlasova. Of course — of course it’s you,” the man’s voice is far too confident to be brushed aside so easily. “It’s Alyosha Velimirov.”

 

She looks up from the menu. A tall man stands in front of her, wearing a grey blazer and a faint smile, far too at ease among the champagne-coloured tablecloths and the soft yellow glow of lamps scattered across the small dining room. The restaurant is intimate, half-lit, with a copper sheen on the glasses and an old jazz record spinning somewhere in the corner.

 

“I’m sorry,” she says carefully. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

 

“Oh, come on, Marina,” he laughs, as if this were a familiar argument between them. “Don’t do this. We worked together like what, ten years ago? You remember, don’t you?”

 

She frowns.

 

“Where?”

 

“At the theatre on Vasilievsky. I’ll sit down, yeah?” He drops into the chair across from her without waiting for an answer. “Small stage, tiny auditorium, red seats, remember? We did The Cherry Orchard there. You played Anya. I was Trofimov.”

 

Her frown deepens.

 

“I’m sorry, but… I’ve never been in The Cherry Orchard. I’m not an actress. Not at all.”

 

“Oh, come on!” He waves his hand, as if she’s being stubborn on purpose. “Your hair was lighter back then, and you always wore it in braids, I remember that perfectly. We rehearsed till late at night, and afterward we’d always go to that twenty-four-hour crêpe place on the corner, stuffing ourselves with jam-filled crêpes. They played the Beatles on repeat, day after day. Lida Tarasova was always tagging along with us. Well?”

 

She falls silent. Annoyingly, a line from ‘Yesterday’ drifts into her head, but that’s just a coincidence. Right?

 

“Maybe you’re confusing me with someone else,” she says, her voice dropping slightly.

 

“No, no, no,” he cuts in quickly, with a growing excitement, as if there were already something at stake in this argument. “I’d never mistake you for anyone else. Do you remember when we left the props in the other building right before a performance? That big wicker basket of apples. You and Misha — I can’t recall his last name — volunteered to go get it. It was November, freezing cold, and you were in such a hurry you ran out without your coats. And of course it started snowing. I remember standing by the window, watching you rush down Seventh Line with that basket in your arms, covered in snow, with Misha running after you. I kept thinking how on earth you both managed not to get sick.”

 

She frowns, but a flicker of doubt appears in her eyes. The basket… She doesn’t remember a basket, but she had been around theatres in those years, attending performances, as a spectator. Maybe he’d seen her in the audience? But why was he so certain she’d been onstage? Had she even been living in Petersburg back then?

 

“I’m hearing this for the first time.”

 

“Oh, come on,” he leans closer, almost whispering, though his tone remains just as insistent. “That can’t be right. You even joked that the ‘basket of apples’ was a symbol of your personal freedom. Everyone laughed. Don’t you remember?”

 

She shakes her head, though not as firmly now. For some reason, the word apples lodges in her mind, and it makes her feel unwell.

 

“I didn’t act in any theatre. Honestly. At that time…” She hesitates. “At that time, I was living in Spain.”

 

“Spain?” He savours the word, squinting. “Oh, Marina, you and your imagination. What Spain? We rehearsed every day, practically slept in the dressing room. You were always joking that one day you’d bring a mattress in there, and Lida said sleeping on a mattress was your ‘Andalusian need.’”

 

“No, no,” she tries to reconstruct that autumn ten years ago, but her memories crumble like a mosaic with pieces knocked out. She had travelled somewhere then… Spain or Portugal? Or was that later? Why was everything so blurred? Of course, she’d lived in Valencia! “Sir, you’re confusing me with another woman,” she adds brightly, clutching at the memory.

 

“I’m not confusing you,” his certainty grows denser, heavier. He smiles, but his eyes cling, refusing to let go. “I even remember where you lived. A communal flat near Narvskaya. You were always complaining you had the longest commute. And your kettle — it roared like a steam engine, all over the kitchen. Once we even made a bet: whether it would boil faster than I could finish reading your monologue. And I lost.”

 

She looks at him and feels her palms grow damp. Narvskaya? Of course she’s been there. But had she ever lived there?.. She can’t remember for sure. She remembers only the studio on Vyborgskaya, where she used to visit a friend. Or was that her own place? No, no, she lived in Valencia, at… What was the address? she thinks. Calle Garcia Lorca 7, apartment 3B. And then she moved to Barcelona… Or Madrid?

 

“You’ve made all of this up,” she says, almost in a whisper.

 

“Why would I make it up?” He smiles too softly, almost tenderly, and that makes her even more uneasy. “I remember you in every detail. I remember how you always blushed when we were applauded. I remember your purple scarf, the one your mother gave you, the one you lost on opening night. And what about that evening when we were sitting on the windowsill in the dressing room, talking about how Ryabtsev would never manage to play Lopakhin? You laughed so loudly then that the costume mistress came running in to scold us. I remember you telling me that acting on stage felt like one form of escapism. You know, I thought about that for a long time afterward.”

 

She pulls back suddenly. The sentence sounds as if it could have belonged to her. The purple scarf. Ryabtsev. Lopakhin. Something painfully familiar. Her mother’s purple scarf from Brazil. Ryabtsev. Lopakhin. Anton Ryabtsev is bad at playing Lopakhin… It all carries too much of her own intonation, the familiar sweep of her thinking. But how could he have known? Or maybe she really did say it and simply forgot?

 

“I… I’m not sure,” her voice trembles. “Maybe I really did, back then… No, wait. I was in graduate school then. I was writing my dissertation…”

 

“A dissertation?” He picks it up instantly. “It was on Chekhov, wasn’t it? Something about psychological realism, metaphysics, and you brought in your own experience as an actress. You struggled with that topic so much, sitting up nights, endlessly rewriting. You even showed me parts of it.”

 

Her breath falters. She really had thought about a topic like that once, but she’d never written it. Why does he know? Or does it only seem to her that he knows?

 

“I didn’t show you anything,” she protests weakly. “I don’t even know who you are.”

 

“I’m Alyosha. Your stage partner,” he replies calmly. “I’m Trofimov.”

 

And in that moment she feels afraid, not because of what he’s saying, but because somewhere deep inside her memory, a strange shadow begins to stir, as if somewhere, sometime, there really had been that hall, the red seats, the snow outside the window, and the wicker basket of apples.

 

“Wait, this is impossible! I was living in Valencia then, and my dissertation was on the symbolism of female initiation in traditional cultures. I remember that very clearly.” Her voice comes out louder than she intends. The word initiation hangs in the air, as if she herself is trying to anchor herself to it.

 

He smiles gently, almost pityingly, and leans forward again.

 

“You always did this. You invented another biography for yourself, just to hide. You used to say that memory is like a stage: whatever happens on it can be replayed, or cut from the play as if it never existed; you can add a stage direction, you can replace Lopakhin. But I remember everything, Marina. I’m not an actor in your imagination.”

 

Her mouth goes dry. “Not an actor in your imagination” — the phrase grates on her, because it sounds far too much like something from her own old notebooks. But he couldn’t have read them. Or could he?

 

“Did you… were you following me? Are you some kind of stalker?” She tries to keep her voice firm, but it still trembles. “How can you know things I’ve never told anyone?”

 

“Oh, come on, a stalker,” he says lightly. “You did tell someone. You told me. There, in that little dressing room, behind the dusty backstage curtains, among a heap of damp coats. You were sitting on the floor, in your purple scarf, saying you were afraid of forgetting yourself. That if there were no audience, you would stop existing.”

 

Marina turns away sharply. Her fingers close around the glass of water on their own, but the glass slips in her damp hands. She takes a sip, but it only makes things worse; her throat tightens, as if she can’t get enough air.

 

She remembers: winter, Petersburg, a curtain of heavy velvet, the smell of dust, and applause so sharp it rings in her ears; Lida Tarasova squeezing her hand during the curtain call; she’s thinking about her Chekhov dissertation; soon they’ll go eat crepes with strawberry jam… But that could just as easily be a fantasy, the product of her countless theatre visits. She’d always loved imagining herself in the actors’ place. Could she have immersed herself so deeply in other people’s scenes that her memory finally confused them with her own?

 

“No, listen, I… that’s not true. You’re wrong. I can prove it now, if only my memory holds. Ten years ago I was living in Valencia. In a studio apartment at Calle Garcia Lorca 7, 3B. I was writing my anthropology dissertation, and every evening the air from my window smelled of the sea and mandarins from the market. Above me lived an elderly woman — Doña Mercedes — she was forever banging her cane against the floor whenever I played music a little too loud. Below me were two students who constantly argued about football and made it impossible for me to work. And once I even had a fight with an old man from the first floor, everyone called him ‘the Professor,’ though no one knew what he actually did, and he accused me, imagine that, of being responsible for his cat’s death! And every Sunday someone left a crate of peaches by my door, and I never managed to find out who it was. What do you say to that?”

 

“I’d say it sounds like a play as well,” he smiles a little crookedly, though his eyes remain serious. “A neighbour with a cane, a professor with a dead cat, a crate of peaches every Sunday… Do you hear yourself, Marina? You’re telling your life as if you were reading someone else’s part.”

 

She opens her mouth to object, but a strange knot rises in her chest. Something between anger and shame.

 

“It’s not a play,” she exhales sharply. “It’s my life. A real one.”

 

“Real?” He tilts his head slightly. “And are you sure you could tell it apart from one that’s been performed?”

 

For a moment, Marina feels as though the music in the restaurant grows louder. The saxophone cuts through the air, as if it, too, were arguing with her. The people at the neighbouring tables seem to drift away, and only the two of them remain, along with the scattered fragments of their tangled memories. She squeezes the napkin in her hands so tightly that the paper tears.

 

“If you really did know me,” she says in a low voice, almost through clenched teeth, “then tell me something I couldn’t possibly have told you. Something no one else knows.”

 

He looks straight at her, without blinking, and says quietly:

 

“You have a habit of writing letters to yourself. And rereading them.”

 

She freezes, not understanding.

 

“What letters?” There’s a nervous laugh in her voice, too high, almost alien.

 

“The ones you wrote and sealed in envelopes,” his voice is even, without a trace of doubt. “You put a date on them two years ahead, sealed them, and hid them in an old shoebox. I remember, because once you gave me one of those envelopes and said, ‘Open it if I disappear.’ You invented that ritual yourself, as if you wanted to prove to yourself that you had a past and a future, even if the present kept slipping away.”

 

Her breath catches. Her throat tightens so sharply she feels she might start coughing or lose her voice altogether. The box… the envelopes… How could he possibly know that? She can clearly see a dark wardrobe in the apartment she rented during her second year of graduate school. Or was it earlier? No, she really did write those letters, as a girl, hiding them under her mattress. But he couldn’t have known. No one could have.

 

“Listen,” she says, trying to regain control. “Even if you know me. Even if I once saw you… it wasn’t me. Maybe it was some other girl who looked like me. You’re just experiencing some kind of… false recognition, or something like that.”

 

“No,” he shakes his head. “Everyone has their own particular voice, their own way of walking, their own mannerisms. I’ve always remembered things like that. Others didn’t have your voice, your walk, your gestures, just as you didn’t have theirs. You don’t understand: this is all too detailed. I remember your hands, the way you always held a script, lifting your fingers slightly, as if it weren’t paper but something precious. You held your glass the exact same way when I walked in. I remember how you always said, ‘Well yeeeah, yeeeah,’ stretching out the vowels when you wanted to joke your way out of something.”

 

“Well yeeeah” — that really is her manner. No one would notice such a detail unless they’d heard it live, over and over again.

 

“Enough,” she says quietly, but firmly. “You’re confusing reality with some kind of… script. Maybe you’re an actor and everything’s gotten mixed up. Maybe you really did perform with some girl. But it wasn’t me.”

 

“Then why are you trembling?” He tilts his head slightly, almost admiring her. “Why are your eyes darting around as if, any second now, you’re going to have to step onstage and play Anya?”

 

She says nothing. The restaurant grows too small: the jazz record plays louder and louder, the clink of glasses turns sharper, and the lamplight feels painfully yellow. Everything around her begins to resemble a set, a carefully constructed stage, with her and this man at its centre. And it is precisely this feeling — that everything has been arranged — that frightens her most of all.

 

“You’re… you’re lying,” she whispers, but the words sound hollow, stripped of force.

 

“No,” he shakes his head gently. “No, Marina, I’m not lying. You gave me those letters to read yourself. There were lines in them about memory being a theatre, with amnesia in the leading role. You wrote it exactly like that: ‘amnesia is the director, and I’m merely the actress.’ I remember your handwriting — the letters slant slightly to the left, the lines always drift downward, as if the paper were too heavy for your words.”

 

Marina presses her palms to her temples. Her head is buzzing, and the restaurant seems to split in two. She sees the man in front of her, his grey jacket, the glass of water, the glow of the lamps, and at the same time, sharp, unmistakable images: sheets of paper, worn envelopes, her own uneven handwriting. She sees them too clearly to say it never happened.

 

“But… that’s impossible,” her voice almost breaks. “I never… I never showed them to anyone. Not even my mother. Not even—” She cuts herself off.

 

He stays silent for a few seconds, simply looking at her, and that silence becomes more frightening than any words.

 

“Do you want to know the truth, Marina?” he finally asks, quietly, almost with sympathy. “Your ‘Spanish past’ is just another play. You wrote it the same way you wrote those letters to yourself. I watched you do it: choosing the city, the smells, the neighbours, inventing entire biographies, and believing in them. You lived inside those roles until they replaced reality. And I was the only witness who remained.”

 

Marina pushes her chair back abruptly; it scrapes loudly across the floor. A few people turn to look. She stands there, shaking, but her gaze is sharp, almost furious.

 

“No!” she says too loudly, startling herself with her own voice. “That’s not true. I have a life. A real one. I remember the smell of the sea. I remember Doña Mercedes and her cane. I remember the students bringing me a pot of gazpacho when their fridge broke down! I remember those peaches!”

 

“Of course you do,” he nods, and there’s a trace of weariness in his smile. “Because you chose to remember them.”

 

And in that moment she understands that he will not step back. That he will keep returning her, again and again, to these memories that feel like her own, tangling them tighter each time. And the most frightening thing is that, deep down, she no longer has anything to argue with. Because somewhere in the shadow of her consciousness there really is that dressing room, that scarf, that laughter, the basket of apples, the snow on Seventh Line.

 

She sits back down. Her face is pale, her lips dry.

 

“I’m not Marina Vlasova,” she finally says, with desperate resolve. “I’m someone else.”

 

He looks at her for a long time, and his smile fades. For a second, something like regret, or even pity, flickers in his eyes.

 

“If you want to be someone else, then so be it,” he says at last. “But I still remember you. And memory doesn’t change just because you’ve decided to reject it.”

 

She stands up again abruptly; the chair scrapes against the floor. The glances of the other patrons slide over her and immediately away — no one lingers. She is about to leave when she suddenly feels his words settling somewhere deep inside her, like a heavy stone: memory doesn’t change. And then, for a split second, it truly seems to her that behind her it’s not lamps and glasses, but a velvet curtain, and behind it, a whisper: “Anyuta, your cue.”

 

When she finally makes it home, she stops in front of the large wardrobe in the hallway and pulls down, from the very top shelf, a worn shoebox from an old pair of boots. 

 

There are no letters inside. No documents.

 

It is empty.

 

 

 

 

 

Rina Keough is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She is interested in literature, music, and narrative form. Her work has appeared in Everscribe Magazine, Schlock Magazine, WIA Magazine, and other publications. She is currently working on several literary and film projects.