Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

My uncle, I said—meaning Oleg—my uncle tried to describe this to me too. How the ideas of soon and now were somehow confused.

Exactly, Pasha, the neighbour said, pleased or relieved that his words made sense to me. And that, he continued, that is how you had a map of Moscow in the present, and a map of how it was going to be in ten years’ time. But the future map was already printed because that future was apparently just as real as the present.

As the neighbour went to get another bottle, I wondered about the effect of touching time as they did, causing it to change in strange ways. Those unlived towns, those maps of unreal roads. Most of us would never actually see the territories depicted on all the maps of the world. Like time, maps were something we created, a representation. And we had to trust the science of the cartographer.

I wondered about the tyranny of plans. About how much we let come to pass because we obscure the present with a future we think is real.

The neighbour returned with the samogon and some leftover salad. He sat back down, poured me another glass, then refilled his own. He was quiet for a while, looking over the map in front of us. Here and there with his right hand he traced the side of his smallest finger lightly over the page, over the roads and through the towns that never came to be.

In later years, he said, when things did not seem right, when the darkness, the troubles, began to touch my own family, the message from above still made a strong impression. You could never be sure where the source of the darkness really was.

I wondered how long the neighbour had been ruminating on these ideas. He’d mentioned over dinner that he had never been to university, but as though educated in other, deeper ways, he had something of the philosopher about him.

We returned to the kitchen, where Vera Sergeyevna was drying a glass with a cloth. She put them down to say goodbye. As the two walked me along the dim hallway, Vera Sergeyevna’s palm at my shoulder, I had the image of the neighbour’s maps in my mind. I saw the aborted roads to Moscow, cracked and decaying or maybe entirely overgrown with grass. The old rubble, now blended for good with the earth, would look just the same, I thought, as the roads that never left the paper. I thanked my hosts and, feeling tired, pressed a hand to the door, walking out into the late night where the sun was not yet ready for dusk.

Anya’s father, Mikhail Sergeyevich, looked older than I expected, older than the image I had formed of him in my head. Perhaps it was his hair, which was parted over his high forehead, grey with traces of brown. It seemed that he never moved from the wicker chair that was placed near the kitchen table but at an odd distance—just a bit removed, between the stove and a cupboard, away from the sink and the centre of the conversation. I noticed how the glow from the ceiling light was stronger by the wall, causing Mikhail Sergeyevich’s shadow to appear more fully formed than ours.

He sat with one leg crossed over the other, thin legs in slack trousers. His arms cupped his elbows and he leant slightly forwards in a delicate sort of posture that matched his gentle rolling voice and attentive, slight smile.

I glanced beyond the kitchen as I walked in, saw the living room and the large painting above the divan that I’d seen there a few weeks before. It showed a man in official-looking dress, with a tie and pin, a moustache thick and black as a cockroach, and a slightly hostile look about him.

Even though I couldn’t see the portrait from the kitchen, that glimpse stayed in my mind, perhaps because Anya had told me about her grandfather when we went to Izmaylovsky Market, and now his image loomed over the room, but maybe also because of its strikingly lifelike quality. I’d seen his face before, in a newspaper or a book somewhere, but the recognition failed to bring concrete details to mind. I recalled that he had been one of Stalin’s ministers for a time, though I didn’t know any other facts about his role in the Party, nor in the Terror, nor the circumstances of his death, if he was in fact no longer alive.

Anya’s mother, Yevgenia Fyodorovna, had a plump elegance about her, with her coiffed brown hair and distinctive perfume, her clothes deep shades of magenta, plum and red. She had studied art history, Anya told me, and also performed in theatres in her younger years. But when I met her she worked as a singing teacher in a music school.

Mikhail Sergeyevich seemed eager to talk, though his voice was gentle. I’d later think of it as having the softness of ash.

Tak , Pasha, he said, Anya tells us you are a writer.

Not really, I said as Anya waved away my awkwardness. I had only one story published in a journal when I was at the Gorky Institute.

Well, that makes you a writer, he said. His smile, his wise and kindly manner, reminded me of Oleg, though his eyes were green-grey, unlike Oleg’s bright blue.

We’ve got a few articles planned, I said. Anya has probably told you—articles for newspapers and journals.

Anya’s mother’s face took on a strange expression. Oh, she doesn’t tell us about her research, Yevgenia Fyodorovna said loudly, her laugh undercut with something disapproving.

Mama, said Anya in a low voice, sighing.

I thought I must have kicked up the dust of old arguments. Mikhail Sergeyevich, I said, turning to him, Anya tells me you were a teacher.

Yes, yes, secondary school, he said. Thirty years. Though I’ve been retired for a few years now.

I have been thinking, actually, that I would write about your father, Anya said to Mikhail Sergeyevich. Pasha and I would like to write something together.

He raised his eyebrows, an unspoken question.

Anya, Yevgenia Fyodorovna snapped. That is your grandfather you are talking about. You do not write about your family.

Yes, I should . It’s important for every story to be in the open now.

Ah yes, these times . Yevgenia Fyodorovna shook her head. You can go around embarrassing your family because of the times .

Anya had told me that her mother wasn’t happy with Anya becoming political , as she called it. Yevgenia Fyodorovna didn’t approve of Anya’s volunteering for the Memorial Society or of what she called Moscow’s obsession with the past during glasnost . But that was precisely why Anya had brought me to meet her father—to interview Mikhail Sergeyevich about his life. Anya had told me that her father was keen to talk, though I guessed his doing so might deepen longstanding fissures in the family, put pressure on their uneasy peace.

So, I said, as we sat at the kitchen table after the meal, I thought you could maybe start by talking about your childhood.

The idea with the interviews was that they would be formed of open-ended discussion, without direct questions. The environment was important: creating the right circumstances in which a person might feel able to talk freely. Some people preferred to be in their own homes, in a setting they knew and where they could be sure who was listening. Others wanted somewhere entirely different to their usual surroundings, as if being taken out of their normal environment helped them to talk about things they never usually mentioned. The Memorial Society offices were sometimes used for interviews. Some interviewees preferred to talk outdoors, as if our constructions—walls, conventions, boundaries, rooms—break down when we’re outside.

My childhood, said Mikhail Sergeyevich. Yes. I was born in Moscow in 1934. My father worked for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, my mother stayed in the home. We lived in an apartment in Arbatskaya and moved here, to Frunzenskaya, when I was about ten. I went to school in the centre, close to the Lubyanka. And so I used to play right near that haunted building for hours when I was a boy.