Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

That haunted building, as he called it, was in all of our collective knowledge, so Mikhail Sergeyevich didn’t need to explain it. The Lubyanka was the home of the Committee for State Security, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB. It was a large pre-revolutionary building, painted yellow, with seemingly endless rows of windows across multiple levels. At the very top, in the centre, was a white and blue circle that could have been a clock, though from a distance it looked like a single, wide, lashless eye.

And you know, continued Mikhail Sergeyevich, when the weather began to warm and the mud rivers dried from the streets, we’d all run around the streets during our breaks. There would be a soldier standing by each door of the Lubyanka, in a budenovka hat, holding a rifle with a bayonet. We’d all heard rumours—talk from parents or from each other—about shootings down in the basement. It’s strange how even as a child you know these things; they are your unquestioned reality.

As he spoke I was reminded of a joke told to me by one of the dissident uncles who visited our apartment when I was a boy. The Lubyanka basement is the tallest building in Moscow: you can see all the way to Siberia from down there. And somehow I always knew that Siberia meant exile, camp, disappeared people thousands of kilometres away in the frozen north.

Mikhail Sergeyevich had stopped for a moment. Yevgenia Fyodorovna was very quiet, watching her husband with a stern expression. Anya was listening carefully. I would not have thought so many words could rise from his soft, ashy voice and kept expecting him to run out of energy to speak.

My father helped with the planning and construction of the Moscow metro system, said Mikhail Sergeyevich. Kaganovich was in charge. The stations were supposed to be palace-like. Palaces for the people. The most ornate in the world, so it’s said. And they are remarkable, even when we look at them now: chandeliers, mosaics, statues, pillars, marble, walls painted so many colours. And the lighting, bright as day down there, like another city with its own sun. We are so used to those stations now, I suppose, but when they were first built they were something to behold.

Maybe that explains my interest in the underground, he continued. I’m interested in the subway network, the rumours of a library beneath the city. A lot goes on underground that we don’t even think about. We might even say it’s the subconscious of the city.

Mikhail Sergeyevich looked utterly transfixed, sitting there next to the wall, next to his fully formed shadow. He was very still and there was something picturesque about his pose there in the wicker chair, gently holding his elbows. Despite his stillness, I thought he looked distressed.

Okay, that’s enough, said Yevgenia Fyodorovna. And though Anya protested that her father had barely had the chance to say a word, we were ushered out with kisses and goodbyes, awkwardly putting on our shoes at the door, and then the door was closed behind us. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened or what I’d missed. It was such a strange, abruptly aborted encounter.

In the elevator, which was old and wooden and screeched its way down, Anya buried her head into my collar. My mother, she said in a long, laughing drawl. It’s difficult with her.

The elevator opened and we walked the ten minutes or so to the embankment. I said I liked them, her parents; liked listening to her father talk. Anya stood looking out over Moskva River, as though trying to see something on the other side.

It’s all difficult, she said again. Families. At the same time, it’s the first time I’ve really shared my family with anyone. She turned to me. Nobody has ever really known me like this. She was smiling distantly.

I put an arm around her shoulders and we stood facing the other side of the river, the inviting green wall of trees. The sun was still high and the water wore a tinted orange layer. We spoke about our plans for writing. Anya had clearly given it a lot of thought. She suggested we could write a history of psychiatry in the country—from the beginning—and show how the state had taken over the hospitals, used them for its own aims. Subverting language, manipulating psyches. It would almost be like studying the whole country. I said I could ask the dissident aunts and uncles for information. She would go to the library. We would both start taking detailed notes. With our words we linked our creative futures to the pasts of our parents.

Yura called me a few days later. He had been keen to meet up after we met at Bulgakov’s apartment, and had joined us at a concert and a poetry reading organised by Ilya.

You know, he said on the phone, I’ve been thinking about what you said, Pasha—about writing a story. Or an article, perhaps. Something to do with the bans on emigration. I was wondering if you could help me.

I said of course I would. I was sure my editor friend would want to publish something. We arranged to meet for a drink and work it out.

When I called the editor, Sasha Podrabinek, about Yura’s story, he told me there was some space for me to write too.

I looked up to Sasha. He had been a political prisoner in the seventies and was adamant about exposing how, when most labour camps were closed in the 1980s, the barbed wire of the Gulag merely morphed into the locked white doors, the vicious injections, the patrolled corridors of the psikhushka asylums.

We each had our cause and we were running towards them. It was the time for everything to be open—the past, the state of our lives; everything that was wrong about our country was finally being confronted. The long days lent a haze, golden, to the city; a ringing gold, since to us noise was a promise, and the light promised clarity.

Meanwhile, our dissident hero and key voice in the Memorial Society, Andrei Sakharov, was preparing to go to parliament, and supporting rallies were organised across the Soviet Union. Sakharov had been in exile in Gorky—a closed city, no foreigners, riddled with KGB—since Brezhnev sent him there in 1980. He had been allowed to return in 1986, when glasnost began. An older man, grey-haired with glasses, Sakharov was a model for us during glasnost . He brought us ideas of a system of democracy that we could never quite picture, but which we knew resembled something we wanted.

When Sakharov spoke, I heard people comment on the purity of his Russian. When he wrote, his words had an honest clarity. He scorned the vague charges of anti-Soviet agitation or anti-constitutional actions —they were not precise terms, he argued. He wrote real words and described his dealings with councils and parliaments: I spoke of the need to repeal the laws on demonstrations and on special troops, and of the flaws in the decrees of April 8, which were intended to replace articles 70 (anti-Soviet agitation) and 190-1 (slander of the Soviet system) of the Criminal Code. I repeated my main thesis, that it is unthinkable to allow criminal prosecution for opinion or for acts of conscience, provided there is no use or advocacy of violence. Real words. From his sentences I had a sense of solidity I’d never felt before in the public world.

Ilya was pushing ahead with politics and music. It was always Ilya who would be charging into the room with tickets to or tip-offs about an underground concert, part of the tusovka music scene from Leningrad, where there were spontaneous concerts anywhere, everywhere, in apartments and basements, old shopfronts—any place that was deserted—lit by lamplight or torchlight or no light at all. Always it was Ilya tapping the latest cassette against his palm. He joined a band, inspired by our idols Kino. The lead singer of Kino, Viktor Tsoi, stood for our dreams, he stood for us . His lyrics told of our boredom with everyday life—we lived for our art, not our day jobs.