Before You Continue · The Story So Far
Oksana Kovalenko and Mikhail Volkov have shared the corridor between Studios 6 and 7 at Casa das Artes in Lisbon for five months without a real conversation. She is a Ukrainian sculptor. He is a Russian painter. Ukraine and Russia are at war.
In month three, Mikhail fell from a ladder. Oksana heard the sound through the wall. She stood still for three seconds, thinking about who he was and where he was from. Then she opened the door. She helped him. She saw a large unfinished canvas on his floor: a female figure in a broken space, a shape at the center split clean down the middle. She recognized the talent. She said nothing about it.
In month four, the new medium phase began. Oksana worked with Camila, the Brazilian ceramicist, who asked her quietly whether she really knew what kind of man Mikhail was. Mikhail worked with Johnny, the Canadian photorealist, who asked him who the figure in his painting was. Neither had a full answer.
Group tensions rose. Blue and yellow ribbons appeared on jackets. A German painter argued that art should stay out of politics. Benedita told him that was a position available only to those not inside the geopolitics. Mikhail stopped using the phrase special military operation in his own thoughts. He stopped writing back to his brother. Something in him went quiet in a way he did not yet have a name for.
Sofia Andrade said nothing. Every morning she brewed her coffee and the smell of it moved through the building. Every evening she left a French press, her weathered silver thermos of hot water, and two ceramic cups outside every studio door. She has done this for eleven years. She kept doing it.
Two doors are still closed. The final month begins tomorrow.
"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."
— Edgar Degas
The Last Cup, Part Three: What Connecting Over Coffee Really Costs
The Final Month
The showcase is three weeks away when Mikhail makes his decision. He has been thinking about it since the conversation with Johnny. He has been thinking about it, if he is honest, since sometime in month two, when he stopped being able to use the phrase special military operation and could not find anything to replace it.
He is not going back.
He does not say this to anyone. He thinks it on a Tuesday morning while he is looking at the central corridor canvas, and once he thinks it clearly, it does not leave. He is not going back to Russia. Not while the war is happening. Maybe not after. He does not know how to explain this yet. He only knows that he made a promise to his mother in her kitchen with the cab waiting, and he is going to break it, and he is at peace with that in a way he cannot entirely account for.
He writes it in his notebook in small letters, in Russian, in the back page where he keeps notes about paint mixtures and canvas weights. I am not going back.
He closes the notebook. He goes back to painting.
* * *
The last week before the showcase, the building crackles with the particular energy of twelve artists finishing work.
Camila fires three final pieces and burns her hand on the kiln and keeps working. Yusuf repaints an entire panel in one night. Genevieve frames twenty small photographs and then unframes them all and reframes them differently. Benedita works in total silence with the door closed and the light under it burning past midnight.
Mikhail hangs his corridor canvases. All eight of them. He hangs them himself, without the ladder. Johnny helps him with the heavy ones.
Oksana names her figure.
She is standing in front of it on a Thursday afternoon when the name comes. She says it out loud, in Ukrainian, to the empty studio. Вперед. Forward. That is all it is. It is not a clever title. It is the right one.
* * *
On the last evening before the showcase, Sofia Andrade does something she has never done.
She brews a second pot, later than usual. She goes to the cabinet for the French press. She fills the thermos from the kettle, the old silver thermos that has made this trip down the corridor eleven years of evenings, its sides dented and warm, the grip worn smooth where every hand before hers held it on the way. She finds four cups instead of two. She walks to the corridor between Studios 6 and 7 and sets everything on the floor: the French press, the thermos, four cups arranged around them. She looks at Studio 6. She looks at Studio 7. Then she goes home.
She does not know if it will work. She knows she had to try.
* * *
Oksana opens her door at nine-fifteen.
She sees the French press. She sees the thermos. She sees four cups. She looks at Studio 6. The light is on. She stands in the corridor for a moment.
She picks up the press and the thermos. She picks up two cups. She knocks on Studio 6.
A pause. Longer than she expects. Then footsteps. The door opens.
Mikhail looks at her. He looks at what she is holding. He looks at her again.
She holds out one of the cups without speaking.
He takes it.
She pours hot water from the thermos into the press and waits thirty seconds, then pushes
She looks at them for a long time.
He waits. He drinks his coffee.
"The light is right," she says.
"Yes," he says.
She looks at the central canvas. The corridor exactly as it is. The two doors. The light under both. In the space between them, those fine grey lines, barely visible, that she did not understand the first time she saw them through the window of his studio.
She understands them now.
She stands in the actual doorway, looking at the painted doorway, and something in her chest does something she does not have a word for in English. She finds it in Ukrainian. Pobachena. Seen. The specific experience of being seen by someone who did not announce they were looking.
"You heard me," she says. It is not a question.
"Every night," he says. "Through the wall."
She holds her cup with both hands. She looks at the painted corridor. "My sister is still in Kharkiv," she says.
"I know," he says.
"You understand what that means."
A pause. Then: "Yes."
She looks at him. He does not look away.
"What kind of man are you?" she says. She is asking the question her sister asked her two weeks ago.
He holds his cup. He looks at the floor. Then he looks at her. "I don't know yet," he says. "I'm still finding out."
She holds that for a moment. Finding common ground is not what this is. What this is has no clean name. She holds her cup. He holds his.
She drinks her coffee. He drinks his. The corridor is quiet around them, the light from the Tagus window sitting on the floor between their feet.
They stand there until the coffee is gone.
* * *
What the Painting Said That the Painter Could Not
The showcase happens on a Friday evening in late November.
The twelve artists display their work and place their statements on the wall in small white frames. The common room and the two largest studios have been opened into one space. Eduardo Fonseca has invited collectors and press and people from the cultural ministry, and the building smells of wine and good cheese and, beneath all of that, faintly, Sofia's coffee, still drifting from the kitchen where she has kept a pot warm all day.
Oksana's Вперед stands at the center of Studio 5. The figure is finished: one meter tall, welded steel over wood, a woman standing with her weight forward, hands open, face lifted.
Mikhail's corridor series fills the far wall of Studio 3.
Oksana does not go there right away. She spends the first hour talking to collectors and holding a glass of wine she does not drink. She is performing, and she knows she is performing, and she is very good at it now.
Then the room shifts. People move. Eduardo is pulled toward Camila's ceramics. Yusuf and Mei-Lin are deep in conversation by the window. Ingrid Larsen is near Mikhail, recorder running.
Oksana moves toward the far wall.
* * *
She stands in front of the central canvas for a long time.
She saw it last night, half in shadow, through a door frame. She sees it now in full light, finished, in a room full of people.
It is their corridor. She knows it from the proportions, from the window, from the shape of the light on the floor. And in the space between the two doors, those thin grey lines she now knows are her sound, her crying on the phone to Daryna, contained inside this building and made into something that will outlast both of them.
A woman beside her asks, in Portuguese, what the grey lines represent.
Oksana does not turn around. "Everything that cannot be said out loud," she says.
* * *
Ingrid Larsen finds her twenty minutes before the showcase ends.
She holds her recorder the way she always does. She has been watching Oksana and Mikhail all evening, something in the way they moved through the room separately but with an awareness of each other that she cannot quite name.
"What has this year been like?" Ingrid asks. "Being here with him?"
Oksana looks across the room at Mikhail. He is talking to Johnny. He does not look over.
"He is not my friend," Oksana says. Clearly. The recorder catches all of it. "I do not forgive his country. I cannot. My sister is in Kharkiv. I will not forgive that." She pauses. "But I watched him choose something harder than silence. I watched him come to his studio every morning and make work that was true, and I watched him choose that over something else. I respect that. That is not a story about peace. That is a story about choosing."
She looks at Ingrid. "Write that one."
Ingrid looks at her recorder. Then at Oksana. "That is a much harder story," she says.
"Yes," Oksana says. "It is."
* * *
The building empties slowly.
Collectors leave. The cultural ministry people leave with Eduardo. Ingrid Larsen leaves with her recorder and her carefully recalibrated story. Camila and Yusuf clean up in the common room, talking softly. One by one the lights go off.
Oksana is in her studio at eleven when she hears a knock.
She already knows who it is.
Mikhail is at the door with the French press and the thermos. Sofia's last delivery of the evening, left outside his door an hour ago. He is holding them the way a person holds something they are not sure they have the right to carry.
She moves aside. He comes in. He sets them on the workbench. She finds the cups.
They sit the way they stood last night. Him near the window, her on the workbench edge. Вперед watches them both from the center of the floor. She will ship it to Amsterdam next week. She is glad it found a home. She is also a little sorry.
He pours hot water from the thermos into the press, pushes the plunger down, fills two cups. He slides one toward her. She takes it.
They do not speak for a long time.
Then Oksana says something in Ukrainian. A sentence, maybe two. Her voice is quiet and level. She looks at the steel figure while she says it, not at him. He does not understand Ukrainian. He does not ask her to translate.
She does not offer.
Some things do not need translation. They just need to be said out loud, to someone, before the year ends and you go back to whatever you came from. Or, as the case may be, do not go back.
The building is quiet. The coffee is still warm. And somewhere down the corridor, faint as a rumour, the smell of Sofia Andrade's first pot of the morning is already in the air.
She brewed it an hour ago. She left the thermos full. The coffee ritual that has kept this building alive for eleven years.
She always does.
— End —
The Artist Residency is the third story published in Coffee and Connections, a collection about people connecting with people over coffee. Published by LOVEz Coffee in partnership with Konect2One. Read Part One: The Wall. Read Part Two: The French Press.
