Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

I took off my shoes and socks, setting one foot then the other onto the hard, damp sand. I walked a few paces into the water. The cold sand stirred. The water wasn’t freezing, as I’d thought it would be; it must have been icy just a few months before. I decided I’d come back to the house in the winter sometime. The snow would fall as it liked, uninterrupted by buildings or cold commuters and schoolchildren trying to get through city streets. It would just fall, silent and violent and soft. Suddenly I craved winter, its consoling quiet.

Small waves rolled between my legs in the water. Old words, nearly forgotten, ebbed and drifted, coming close to my mind before rolling away, as though I’d lost the full moment as the water receded from my legs. I wondered if the waves on this shore were ever big enough to make a proper ocean roar. Sometimes in Moscow if you walked close by the multi-lane boulevards when it was raining, the roll of traffic on the enduring wet bitumen made the sound of waves.

I thought I should go back to the dacha and continue with my writing. I once spoke to an old writer, from my parents’ generation, about how there were so few novels around about more recent events in the country, like the fall of the Soviet Union and even glasnost in the eighties. He said to me that we were not ready. A decade was a small measure when it came to history’s shifting fault lines. It was too soon after the events. I wondered, standing in the water near Repino, if that immeasureable time was more effective than physical distance. I’d fled Moscow, but maybe time was the vital gap needed to view things as the past instead of feeling them as the present, such as it was.

For some reason I thought about the time I’d said to Anya that if she ever died, I’d move away, to the other end of the country. As far east as I could go: Vladivostok or Magadan or further, over the Bering Sea and beyond. Looking back, I was struck by how easy it was for me, as a young man, to throw words around like that, as though throwing them at fate. If fate existed. But in a way it had thrilled my young self, the starkness, the confessional feel of the words. She never said the same thing back to me, but then again she didn’t like to say too much about what she felt, let alone about some imaginary future emotion. The future is forever not here.

I had a couple of hours before dinner at the neighbour’s house, so I went back to the produkti and bought a few bottles of beer. At the dacha I sat on a seat outside the house, slowly drinking, watching nothing much at all. The clouds broke, giving way to an invisible evening of bright sun.

Iwaited outside our apartment building, leaning against a wall with a smoke. It was a Saturday or Sunday—I didn’t have to work that day—and families were out in the street, probably walking towards the Arbat, to weekend markets or the cool of city parks. I never really stood in the street anymore. When I was a boy I’d get bored after a while and walk around the building, or find Dmitry and Artyom to hang around with. Now I just rushed on; there was always somewhere to be. It was hot and muggy, the sky heavy with masses of grey and white.

There she was. Anya walked along the street, stepped quickly aside for an entwined couple walking the other way, and then spotted me. She smiled and held up one hand in an unhurried wave.

Though we were both children of the Freeze, Brezhnev’s years, Anya wanted to hear my stories about what it was like to grow up a child of dissidents, of those who tried to break the ice. She wanted me to describe what the apartment looked like during my childhood when the underground meetings were held there. Although she was now standing in those very rooms, it was as though Anya saw two separate places, and the apartment of my childhood was an entirely different place, kept in a past she did not know but longed to. I told her about the adults standing around the table, my mother at the typewriter, the brandy-and-smoke air, the way I’d lie on the divan, listening to the radio and the murmurs beneath the yellow light from the kitchen.

It’s like there’s been two lines, I said, describing them in the air with my index fingers. One to follow outside, and one to live by at home. Easier not to confuse the two. Not to bring the outside in.

But now, she said. Now it’s so different.

Yeah, now. Glasnost has been strange. I had a sort of inherited reality—the truth of the camps, the repressions under Stalin—and now it’s here , in the world outside.

I looked at the bookshelves, which Anya was standing beside, browsing through. She moved to sit on the divan. Her presence there seemed to change the apartment for me, turn it into something else, some other place. She, my girl, in the apartment of my childhood, where I’d rarely had anyone from the outside visit.

Just as she now existed there, inside, the authors I’d read and loved now existed somewhere other than on those shelves, other than between the four walls we stood within. They were mentioned in newspapers, published in Novy Mir and Ogonyok . They weren’t just confined to precious single copies handed from one underground meeting to another. Suddenly people were reading them, Shalamov and Platonov and Brodsky, on the metro and on park benches. Whenever I saw those writers, my writers, being read in public, I almost felt as though the reader had taken the book or journal from my own home.

We took a train to Izmaylovsky. Still overcast and humid, the day threatened rain. Anya had a scarf around her shoulders. I could hear the echo of voices from the Izmaylovsky Market, but we kept to the forested area. There were birch woods, dense with thin white trees, papery trunks with dark brown splits like slashed paper. The artificial ponds carved from the rivers hundreds of years ago were glassy, coolly inviting, and I could see Silver Island, where a cathedral stood.

I don’t really need this, Anya said. My babushka scarf. She laughed and pulled it around her. We sat down under a big oak tree. Anya crossed her legs and she started telling me about her father and grandfather. Her grandfather was some tyrant for Stalin, she said, and had been one at home too, it seemed. He drank, had lots of affairs. And Anya’s father, he hadn’t been well for as long as Anya could remember.

He’s just returned from the hospital again, she said. I have this idea that he needs to talk to someone separate from that system. He keeps going back to those psychiatric clinics, but I don’t think they’re helping him. He seems interested in the Memorial Society, the work they’re doing with recording people’s stories, oral interviews. I thought at first that I’d try to write about my grandfather, and my father, about their lives. But my mother doesn’t like me bringing up anything about the past, especially not around my father. Maybe if someone else asks to speak with him, it would be different. You could write about my father.

I suggested that we could write together, and so that was what we decided to do. We’d write about both of our families. I told her how my own father had been arrested for his underground activity and was analysed in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow. I was so young when it happened, I remembered little. Or maybe the mind sends those sorts of memories somewhere deeper than we can readily perceive. I remembered things on the cusp of feelings, though they didn’t feel like real emotions, just dull anxieties or unformed fears. I could recollect a handful of images, usually involving adults talking around our table and me hearing his name from the divan where I’d been sent to sleep; the fraught peal of the telephone and that yellow light thrown on the wall from the kitchen. A light with voices, it was, always accompanied by the radio or murmurs from the table. I could recall vitamin pills and how important they were, those orange pills, for his health, the way my mother sent them with a look of such fierce care, sent them to the prison ward, along with letters, or so I imagined, that I never got to read. He had never made it out of prison; he died in there when I was ten. He and some other prisoners went on a hunger strike.