Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Anya listened closely as I talked, watching me with those eyes faintly ringed with dark circles, blonde hair tucked behind her ears, her hands resting lightly together.

It’s interesting that you haven’t written about him before, she said.

Yeah, I said, feeling distantly that she was pressing at thoughts I hadn’t myself touched. My writing so far had been surreal stories, inspired by Bulgakov and other writers who distorted reality in a disturbing way—I wrote a story about the Soviet bureaucracy operating in hell, for example, with applicants taking years to get there, hanging in limbo while the devil decided if he’d let them into the inferno.

Well, I said, sensing that we were forming the thing we wanted to write, well, maybe I will, now.

We took the metro back into the city. I walked with Anya to Frunzenskaya Embankment. I pointed to the other side of the river, the embankment running alongside Gorky Park, and told her how Oleg used to take me walking along there. I knew she liked to hear those stories.

It was while we were walking together along the embankment when I was a boy that Oleg told me about the Philosophers’ Ships. Oleg often took me for walks. He must have sensed when home was too quiet for me, particularly after my father was taken and it was just my mother and me in the apartment. Over the long holidays, in the summer, we would buy birch tree juice somewhere near the Arbat; that glass of sugary liquid was all the more attached to my childhood as it became a far rarer thing to see in stores in later years. On one of those outings, we were watching a ferry edge its way up or down Moskva River; we could not see anybody on board and it looked just peaceful, gliding over the teal ripples of the water, reflecting away the strength of the August sun.

Pausing, staring out across the water with his arms crossed at his chest, Oleg said to me, It was about this time of year—early autumn, in fact—that the Philosophers’ Ships set sail from a port in Petrograd, which was the name of Leningrad for some time, at the end of September in 1922. There were two ships, filled on Lenin’s orders with the strongest intellectual minds of the time: the philosophers and the historians, the sociologists and the economists. The ships set sail on that autumn day, exiting through the Gulf of Finland, and the philosophers were sent away forever. Some argue that banishment was more humane than what came later for other such free thinkers, but I see it as just as destructive as any physical death. The ships went to Germany, so it is said, and from there the philosophers and scholars moved on, scattered across Western Europe and America. Yet I sometimes like to think that those ships did not set down in Germany that autumn and send forth our thinkers to new lives there, but rather that they never actually docked anywhere. I see them continuing their voyage over the oceans, never finding another place of their own, rocking over midnight-dark waves, passing unknown islands that emerge just above the surface like a slumbering ocean beast, easing the ships over calm dawn waters where lonely, pink, beautiful skies very nearly break their hearts each morning. And I sometimes have it in mind that they found their way back, so to speak, in more recent years, arriving unbeknown to us on a dark winter morning in Moscow or Leningrad, Perm or Murmansk, but were then lost in this Russia they did not know. At certain times, in those gruff, bearded drinkers you see out in the city on winter nights, their faces lit by flames in an old drum, in orange glow and shadows, rumbling seriously to each other, I almost see the image of them, the lost philosophers, roaming and adrift, wondering where their Russia has gone, without anymore having a place here.

The rippling blue of Moskva River, the water pulled along by a thin breeze. It was warm along the embankment, in the heat of the summer sun.

Ifirst went to Patriarch’s Ponds, in Moscow’s Tverskoy District, when I was eleven years old. I took a metro by myself after school, using a five-kopek metro coin I had in my schoolbag, then walked along Gorky Street and took a left turn onto one of the side streets to reach the ponds. There was only one pond that I saw, round and dark blue and still, surrounded by snowy lawns and lampposts. It would have been 1976.

I was there again in the summer of 1988. Ilya and I sat on one of the benches and I described that first visit. It was a location in my favourite book at the time, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita . Oleg had handed me a copy a few weeks earlier, very worn, its cover wrapped in an old copy of Pravda newspaper. I’d read the book, I said to Ilya, and just wanted to see what it was like. I laughed. But it was February, four in the afternoon, winter dark. Ran home terrified.

Ilya laughed too and smoke tumbled from his mouth. For a while he had been talking of an odd group, some of them underground writers, some drunken bums, who were meeting in Bulgakov’s old apartment building for readings, or just for a place to go. The apartment was on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, not far from Patriarch’s Ponds, the infamous place where Berlioz, editor of a literary journal and board chairman of a Moscow literary association, is murdered in the opening pages of Bulgakov’s novel. He meets a strange man, a very chatty ‘foreigner’, and within a few pages of that meeting Berlioz is hit and killed by a tram. It terrified me as a child: innocently Berlioz asks the foreigner Woland where he intends to stay while in Moscow, to which Woland replies with a smile, Your house .

What scared me was how subtle and almost benign the evil had appeared at first. Words, that was all, just words between poor Berlioz and a man sitting on a bench at Patriarch’s Ponds; but it was a man who just happened to be Satan. Words became tinged with some unknowable madness, and Berlioz met his end.

Though it was summer as I sat on the bench with Ilya, I kept thinking of my winter trip there as an eleven-year-old. Being in the place of the crime, which seemed very real to me, was terrifying. The pond had sealed itself in ice and the trees were thin, sickly bodies. Thick fog stole the streetlamps and I may or may not have seen a man, dressed in a suit, on the other side of the water. I almost shivered again now at the memory. Somehow the warped Moscow given to me by Bulgakov in his novel amplified past horrors I’d not witnessed, and left a greater resonance than the Moscow that our dissident friends at home recalled late into the night, sipping tea after mentioning three disappeared friends in one breath. They spoke of the repressions , the Terror , and I could not really see or comprehend those things. But in Bulgakov’s writing, it became starkly real. It was always books that told me life.

Come on, brother, Bulgakov’s apartment—let’s go, said Ilya, nudging me with an elbow. He had on his leather jacket, his black hair was heavy with gel, and he tapped his leg restlessly against the park bench. He was always like that before a night out. And always humming, as though he had a beat or melody permanently switched on in his mind.

Number ten, apartment fifty, Ilya recited, nodding as we walked, stepping in time with his nods. Off busy Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, awash with cars and heat, number ten began at a wide, low-ceilinged entranceway, the number marked just above head height. From there we went into a courtyard. High walls made a cool dim dusk away from the sunny street. Number fifty was on our left. Bulgakov’s apartment was on the fourth floor but it was really the stairwell, not the apartment, that had become the meeting place of students, young dissident artists and writers, fans of Bulgakov, curious observers, lonely drinkers. I wasn’t sure what Bulgakov’s old rooms looked like, since we never actually went inside. Sukhanov and Lena were already there. Sukhanov pushed through a few people and came over to say hello. Lena followed slowly, taller than ever in thin-heeled boots, her lips painted pink. She kissed my cheek and then Ilya’s, and asked me if Anya was coming. I briefly explained that she was busy with her family. Her mother had to go out, and Anya had to stay home with her father. A guy in a denim jacket, an artist friend of Sukhanov’s, shook our hands enthusiastically, and a few others handed us each a can of beer.