Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Tak , Pasha, he said suddenly. Tell us about your friends, the ones who were here before you. He waved a piece of bread towards the house next door and then took a bite.

I wasn’t sure what to say. Sergei Ivanovich was a member of the Memorial Society, and so I assumed that a few other members stayed at the house from time to time. The neighbour would have noticed different people coming and going. But I didn’t know much about their current work. And most of all, I didn’t know what it was safe to say. Not that the neighbours looked untrustworthy in any way; I just didn’t want to burden them with things they weren’t supposed to know. I knew the Memorial Society was still conducting investigations into suspected mass graves from the Stalin years. Oleg had told me as much. Since glasnost , ten years earlier, people had continued to come forward with information. For a few years, volunteers had been researching a suspected gravesite thirty kilometres from St Petersburg, near Toksovo.

I thought those things were probably reported in the press. There had been grave-digging expeditions going on for years. If anything, they would probably be ignored by the authorities. But I wasn’t sure. I realised, with a pull of guilt or just unease, that I didn’t even know what was safe or dangerous anymore.

They’re part of a historical research society, I said carefully. The Memorial Society. I used to volunteer for them sometimes when I lived in Moscow. I’ve come here to write a sort of history, I continued, as if telling myself I still had a cause. I was in Moscow during glasnost and the start of the society, so I’d like to record those years somehow.

The neighbour nodded vigorously, murmuring Da, da, konechno , as I spoke. Vera Sergeyevna was silent and did not once nod her head. The children focused on their food, looking up now and then, neither interested nor bored. I wondered how much they understood or absorbed from the conversation.

I’d like to show you my own little research project, the neighbour said as we finished the meal. Especially since, as you say, you’re writing about the past as well.

I took another drink and nodded.

Vera Sergeyevna scolded him, Oh, don’t start on all that, you silly old man. He doesn’t want to hear that. She looked away, turned her attention to the children. She seemed uncomfortable, as though she couldn’t find enough mouths to wipe or glasses to refill.

The neighbour waved away her protest then beckoned me away from the table. He stood, tucked in the blue-and-green-checked shirt that had escaped his belt, blinked heavily underneath his thick eyebrows, and wandered out of the room. I thanked Vera Sergeyevna for the meal and followed the neighbour down the hallway. We reached a small room, similar to the one I used for writing in the dacha next door. The curtains were drawn and the room was dimly lit by two lamps.

Smotri , he said, look at this. I call them ghostless ghost towns.

He tapped his fingers on two maps and a few newspaper articles on the table. Resting in two puddles of lamplight, the papers looked yellow with age, though I gathered the neighbour had collected them relatively recently.

The children, who had crept into the room, looked on, innocently taking on the strange, eager mood of their dedushka , as though he held a secret that was either exciting or terrifying, they weren’t sure, but in any case they wanted to know. I leant in as well, somehow also caught by the neighbour’s voice, its fairytale tone, the shadows thrown across the room and the dormant silence of old papers.

This map here, said the neighbour. I took this map from a newspaper article about towns that were built during industrialisation and then, when the money ran out or workers were needed for other projects, were abandoned before a soul had ever lived there. Imagine it, Pasha, an entire city of new buildings left empty like that. A ghostless ghost town. And this here—see all the lines—is a map of the roads from Moscow to Leningrad that were never built, but were printed as real on the maps anyway.

He gave an uneven laugh. The madness of planning, he said, gave us maps that showed the future instead of the present, and entire cities created but never actually lived in!

While I had heard of abandoned Soviet cities, when whole populations fled overnight after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the power and life of the city cut off, pot plants left on windowsills, books on living room shelves, these towns without life to begin with—ghostless ghost towns—were new to me. The children seemed mystified by the maps that showed things that did not really exist, and wanted to know what those areas looked like.

Well, as for the roads, there’s only the one main highway from here to Moscow, said the neighbour. I have only ever taken the train, so I haven’t got any idea what’s out there. There’s probably not much at all, maybe the remnants of where the roads were started but never finished. Maybe a house or two, or forests. But what I would like to see are the abandoned towns. The towns without ghosts.

He grinned. Perhaps one day I might make a trip out there. As he smiled, the skin at the corners of his eyes pulled together in tight wrinkles. With the dim light, the expectant quiet, it felt as though we were seconds away from the moment when old folk stories descend into inevitable darkness.

I thought of my recent trip to Chudovo, which was on the M10 highway to Moscow. Perhaps the town hadn’t died because it was close to the highway, unlike abandoned cities across the old Soviet Union.

I heard the shuffle of slippers near the door, and Vera Sergeyevna entered the study. Her face looked firm in the attempt to get the children to bed. But I thought there was also a sadness that seemed to come and go from her expression, the sporadic shadow of a shifting cloud. She glanced once or twice at her husband before nudging the children out of the room. Their small calls of goodnight, Pasha, goodnight, Dedushka , tolled like faint bells from the hallway.

My wife, she’s always worrying, said the neighbour. She thinks my little project here is going to bring trouble. He laughed, wheezing. She’s terrified I will make a trip out there, to these towns, and find things I’m not supposed to find. He shook his head. She still thinks as though it’s the days of closed cities and KGB towns. Although these days it’s the mafia that terrifies her.

The neighbour frowned, then raised his eyebrows and held up his hands for a moment. She cannot fathom it, the investigations into the past. She cannot see anything other than dark consequences. Research of any kind is dangerous, so she says.

He put his hands down, resting the heel of each palm on the border of the papers before him. His fingers fell to the pages, neatening the layers.

And so, i tak , he said. These places that never really existed. They have something uncanny about them, I think. They tell us the history of a future that did not happen. But they’re also a sort of relic of how things were. The way of thinking back then. They show how time is just a thing you make. In those years, the way time worked was changed— they changed it. The neighbour’s thumb went to the air again, to them, up there .

We were living for the future, not the present, he continued. And you know, I think we almost lived in the future. If we didn’t have something we needed, well, that was okay, because we shall have it when there is Communism, we shall have it tomorrow. That was what we were taught. The world, the true world, was not life in the present, in a cramped communal flat, or another day on the kolkhoz farm. No, the world was as it would become in the Communist future. The present felt like a grey halfway point.