BEFORE YOU CONTINUE · THE STORY SO FAR
Oksana Kovalenko, a Ukrainian sculptor, arrives at Casa das Artes in Lisbon to find that her neighbouring studio belongs to Mikhail Volkov, a Russian painter. It is 2022. The war is three weeks old.
They built a system of careful avoidance. The corridor between their doors becomes a border. They share biweekly meetings with the other ten artists, sitting at opposite ends of the table. They do not speak.
Sofia Andrade, the residency director, brews coffee every morning before anyone arrives. Each evening she leaves 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 does it for all twelve artists. She does it without comment.
Mikhail, still repeating his government's language to himself, stops painting in month two. He heard Oksana crying through the wall one Tuesday morning. He does not knock. He picks up a brush instead and paints the first true thing he has made in weeks: a female figure standing in a broken space, a shape at the centre of her that is split clean down the middle.
At the end of month three, Mikhail falls from a ladder while hanging a canvas. The sound travels through the wall. Oksana stands at her workbench for three full seconds before she opens the door. She lifts the ladder off him. She held a cloth to his head. She sees the painting on the floor and stops. It is raw and uneasy and unmistakably talented. She sets it carefully against the wall and goes back to her studio without a word.
The French press and the old silver thermos are on the floor outside both doors. Tomorrow is a new month.
Two months. A new medium. And the distance between studios begins to change its shape.
“You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.” — Indira Gandhi
The French press and the thermos are still on the floor outside Studio 7 when Oksana opens her door at six-forty. She picks them up the way she always does. This is what connecting over coffee looks like here. Not a conversation. Not a gesture. Just a thermos, still warm, and someone who left it.
Two cups, the press loaded with grounds, the thermos still holding heat inside its dented sides. Sofia Andrade leaves this for every artist, every evening, without exception. Everyone knows this. Everyone accepts it as the rhythm of the building, as natural as the coffee smell that comes from Sofia’s office every morning before the studios open.
Oksana pours hot water from the thermos through the French press grounds and sits at her workbench. She did not sleep last night. She lay on her mattress and looked at the ceiling and thought about the canvas in the studio next door, the shape at the centre, the broken thing.
She calls Daryna at the usual time.
“He fell,” Oksana says. “The Russian. Off a ladder. I helped him.”
A long silence.
“Was he badly hurt?” Daryna asks.
“No. A cut. He will be fine.”
Another silence. Then Daryna says, very quietly: “Good.”
Oksana is not sure which part her sister means.
* * *
Month Four: A new medium, and the first real connecting
Sofia pairs each artist with a partner from a different practice. The point is friction; she says. Productive friction. You learn more from watching someone work in a medium you do not know than from working in your own.
Sofia pairs Mikhail with Johnny Haas. A painter with a painter, but Johnny works in photorealism, precise and architectural, where Mikhail works in abstraction, loose and intuitive. Sofia gives them a shared workspace in Studio 2 two afternoons a week."
Sofia pairs Oksana with Camila Rocha. Sculptor with ceramicist. Oksana does not know clay. Camila does not know steel. They set up in the common room three mornings a week, and within the first session it is clear that Camila has no intention of keeping the pairing professional.
“He has not said a single word to you in three months,” Camila says on the first morning, both of them at the clay table. “Except for the night he fell, which barely counts.”
“I don’t need him to say anything to me,” Oksana says.
“I know you don’t,” Camila says. “I’m saying it anyway.”
Oksana works the clay with more force than is strictly necessary. Camila watches her hands.
“You should let me be angry about it,” Oksana says finally.
“I am angry about it,” Camila says. “I’m angry at all of it. I’m just not angry at the same things you are.”
Oksana looks at her.
“You don’t know what he thinks,” Camila says.
“I know where he’s from.”
“Yes,” Camila says. “So do I.”
They work in silence for the rest of the morning. It is not a hostile silence. It is the silence of two people who have said something real and are giving it room.
* * *
Mikhail and Johnny work well together.
This surprises Mikhail. He expected it to be difficult, the way most things here have been difficult. Johnny does not make it difficult. He asks questions about the process and lets the answers sit without pushing. He makes very good coffee on a small pour-over kit he brought from Vancouver, and he shares it without being asked. It is the quietest kind of connecting over coffee.
On the third afternoon, Johnny is working on a large photorealist study of a Lisbon doorway, and Mikhail is watching the way he builds up the detail, slow and precise, when Johnny says, without looking up: “What are you working on? The big one, in your studio.”
“A figure,” Mikhail says.
“Who is she?”
Mikhail does not answer right away. He looks at the table. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “I’m still finding out.”
Johnny nods. He goes back to his doorway. He does not push.
Mikhail thinks about the figure on his canvas and thinks about what his brother wrote last week: "The operation proceeds as planned. The Nazis are being cleared out of the east. Come home when you are done there, and it will be finished."
He did not write back. He has been not-writing-back for three weeks.
* * *
The tensions at the group meetings shifted in month four.
It starts slowly. Benedita begins wearing a small blue and yellow ribbon on her jacket. Camila follows. Then Genevieve. Then, Ji-ho. Yusuf does not wear one. He says nothing about those who do. He says nothing about those who do not.
There is a German painter named Klaus who has said very little since the residency began. At the fourth-month meeting, he says carefully that he thinks art should remain separate from geopolitics. He says it is not that he does not care about what is happening. He says he cares deeply. He says art has a different responsibility.
Camila looks at him the way a woman looks at someone she is deciding not to argue with.
“With respect, Klaus,” Benedita says, “that is a position available only to people who are not inside geopolitics.”
Eduardo Fonseca tries to move the meeting along.
Oksana says nothing. She does not need to. Her presence in that room, her work on the table in front of her, her phone with Daryna’s number in her pocket, is enough.
Mikhail looks at his hands.
He has stopped using the phrase special military operation, even in his own thoughts. He does not know exactly when it happened. He knows it was somewhere between the second and third meeting, somewhere between the news on his phone and the sight of Oksana’s face every time someone mentions Kharkiv.
He has not replaced it with anything. There is just a space now where the phrase used to be.
* * *
Midway through month four, Ingrid Larsen arrives.
She is staying in a hotel down the street, and she comes every morning with her recorder and her good coat, and her careful eyes. She watches everyone who is connecting over coffee, over clay, over a shared wall. She is not rude. She does not push. She is something more unsettling than both; she is patient.
She has two weeks, and she already knows what story she wants. She can see it from across any room. Two artists from warring nations sharing a building, a corridor, and recently, what appears to be a single conversation. She has already written the opening paragraph in her head. Two enemies who found common ground. The power of art to bridge divides.
It is a good story. It is also not the right one.
Sofia watches Ingrid watch Mikhail and Oksana. Sofia says nothing. She makes her coffee every morning. She sets her French press and her old silver thermos outside every door every evening. She tends the building and waits. That is what connecting over coffee has always been here.
Eduardo finds Sofia in the hallway after Ingrid’s first meeting. “Two weeks,” he says. “She will be here for two weeks. Sofia, this is a beautiful story.”
“It is their lives,” Sofia says.
“Yes,” Eduardo says. “Beautiful lives.”
Sofia goes back to her office and makes another pot and does not speak to Eduardo for the rest of the afternoon.
Month Five: What the coffee knew before they did
The new medium phase ends. The artists return to their own practices for the final months of preparation. The closing showcase is eight weeks away.
Mikhail goes back to oils. He goes back to the large canvas with the female figure and the broken shape at the centre. He worked on it for three days and then stopped. He stands in front of it. He takes it down. He set it against the wall.
He starts again. Blank canvas. Same size.
This time he paints the corridor.
He paints it eight times, on eight separate canvases, in eight different lights. Early morning with just the smear of Sofia’s glow under the kitchen door. Midday. Evening. Night. In each one, the same two doors. Light under both.
He works on the large central canvas for three weeks. He does not show it to anyone. Connecting over coffee is one thing. Showing the painting is another.
Johnny sees one of the smaller studies in Mikhail’s studio during a coffee and says: “That’s your building.”
“Yes,” Mikhail says.
“That’s your door. And that’s hers.”
Mikhail says nothing.
Johnny drinks his coffee. “It’s very good,” he says. “The light is exactly right.”
* * *
Oksana’s figure is nearly complete. The steel figure stands one meter tall on its wooden armature, weight forward, hands open, face lifted. She has not named it yet. She knows the name is waiting somewhere she has not reached.
She calls Daryna on Thursday evening. Daryna sounds better than she has in weeks. The school reopened. She is teaching again.
“How is he?” Daryna asks.
“Who?”
“The Russian.”
A pause.
“I don’t know,” Oksana says. “We don’t speak.”
“But you see him.”
“In meetings. In the corridor sometimes. We pass each other. Nothing more.”
Daryna is quiet for a moment. Then: “Is he a bad man?”
Oksana looks at the wall. “I don’t know what kind of man he is,” she says. “I know where he is from. That is enough for me.”
“Is it?” Daryna says.
Oksana does not answer. She says good night and puts down the phone and stands at the window a long time looking at the Tagus.
She does not know why that question will not leave her alone.
— End of Part Two —
In the corridor, the morning light moves through the window and settles on the floor in a long rectangle. It has done this every morning for five months. Two studio doors are still closed. Sofia’s French press and the old silver thermos are on the floor outside each of them. Two cups. Still warm. Still connecting over coffee, in the only language the building has ever agreed on.
