He found there was someone else in this forest of the dead that summer’s day.
“Looking for someone? Can I help?” a man asked rather directly. He was sitting on a bench, evidently at a stranger’s grave, and wanted to ingratiate himself.
“I’m Valeriy.”
He was an engraver, and this was his workplace. He took it from there.
“Don’t have many commissions now. Some of the monuments get restored, but rarely. Look how many are in ruins. Memorials. Yeltsin is buried here, ‘The First President of Russia’; Mikhail Ulyanov, the film actor; Rostropovich. That’s about it. But there’s no shortage of tourists. They do excursions. You can imagine them, trooping about.”
It was a strange favour, a conversation without strings.
“Then we are colleagues! I paint the dead as if they were alive.”
He started
