Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

We met through mutual friends who formed the dissident groups in Moscow in the sixties, said Oleg, groups so far underground, as the saying goes, who had to keep so quiet in their activities, that each scarcely knew any others were operating. In 1968, friends of ours started, anonymously, the Chronicle of Current Events , a true record of the state of things. It was the greatest crime against the state, sending those truths out into the world, across the borders.

Mostly our goal then was to disseminate information: helping truth to flow, writing the truth in journals and circulating true literature. Marya studied in Leningrad, and then came back to Moscow, her hometown, to work as a translator. She also wrote poetry.

We stopped to rest, sitting on a small slope of soft earth and pine needles. Oleg unlaced the thick cloth straps from the metal rings that bound his bag closed, reached into some precise place, as though in an oft-repeated gesture, and then handed me a photograph.

I had never met her, or at least I didn’t remember seeing her at our apartment. The photograph, taken in the soft lighting of a studio, showed a woman with a defined nose and cheekbones, thick eyebrows and dark hair. Her skin looked smooth: white beads of light caught her chin, forehead, cheekbones, the way a pearl might take a lamp’s glow. She looked away towards the right-hand edge of the photo. Alert eyes, an inner smile barely glimpsed by the camera.

She was pretty, I said.

Oleg took the photo from my hand and put it back in his bag. She is, he said.

What I should say, continued Oleg—it’s funny how you forget the most basic facts sometimes—what I should say is that she was released from prison in 1973, after two years spent confined either in psychiatric hospitals or in regular prisons. We continued to live together right up until her departure, for the reason that there was nowhere else for either of us to live. It was very difficult to change apartments in Moscow. It was an awkward time. Once, some time after her return, Marya saw me looking at the photograph I just showed you. She seemed sad as she told me that she wished I could stop looking into that photograph as though the woman there was a lost love who I was still hoping would come home. You look at her as though she is going to say something , Marya said to me. She glanced only briefly at the photo and I had the impression that she didn’t want to look at it any closer.

What I remember most vividly was that the boy in the room next to us—there were several families in the apartment, we could hear sounds next door almost better than those in the room with us—the boy suffered a string of ear infections. He was only three or four years old, and they must have been extremely painful. For weeks on end his cries could be heard all through the night. The woman next door, his mother, told us when we met her in the hallway that the infections would have to pass on their own, as so far no medications had worked.

It was pretty miserable in that crowded apartment. Lots of bickering, as so-and-so stole someone’s sugar, someone-or-other broke the tap in the bathroom, the alcoholic down the hall stole the light globes again. It was made even more miserable by the crying of that little boy. With each night his cries became more tired and drawn out, until they took on something of an animal tone, a primitive wail. Marya and I still shared the same bed, as there was no room to sleep separately, and so every night for those last months before she left we were forced to lie side by side. I could not reach out and touch her, nor pull her to me, for she was no longer mine, though my body seemed to remember and long for her. So I just lay there listening to the heartsick moans of the child. On it went, as a bird cry might echo long after the call.

How darkly the imagination travels during a long night, Pasha. I saw—Oleg looked ahead as if in a trance, tapping two fingers roughly into his temple—I saw indistinctly in my mind some feeling creature, one of our ancestors, letting out that unending lament, and I was unsure whether it was sorry for what had been or for what was to come. Marya would put her pillow and then a towel over her head, and her sighs would sometimes wake me up or pull me out of strange half-dreams of crying half-humans. And we would, at some point, emerge into the morning, and the sound stopped with the sun. We would rise early, pour tea to drink, alone together in our room. We moved into another day, but we became increasingly fatigued as the long nights continued, and I felt less and less alert, which was all the more distressing because it seemed imperative that we remain ourselves, so to speak, for the last of our time together.

There was a slight flinch, almost unseen, when either of us recalled times from before our imprisonment. It was as though our experiences of incarceration, unknown to each other, set the course for who we were from that time on, rendering us mere traces of that young couple we had been. She took some small translation jobs, but rather than return to her dissident work in Moscow, Marya focused on making a pathway out, determined to bring about change from another shore. It was not that there was a sudden rupture, or any sense of ill feeling between us. But those years apart had damaged us, withered and changed us, leaving something entirely new and strange. Eventually we crossed a vague threshold, after which we were no longer husband and wife.

Oleg had been imprisoned years ago—I had somehow always known this, and I knew that it was when I was very young, though I couldn’t remember him ever mentioning the experience to me. Time had blurred and I couldn’t recall his long absence, a failure which always made me feel guilty. Surely that should have loomed as a memorable void in my early life. Even then, during our walk in the forest, he barely touched on it. A few words— our experiences of incarceration— were the tiny traces he left behind in his sentences, like drops of dye in a puddle of water; the dye was there, but some complex process of chemistry was needed to detect its presence, to understand what memories lived in the betraying lightness of a word.

You never really know what happens to another, Oleg continued, but I tried to understand what had happened to Marya. I read an article by one of our friends, published samizdat in an underground journal. It was about the use of psychiatric repression against political dissidents. The pseudo-diagnosis was continuous sluggish schizophrenia . It was ingenious, really, in its horrific logic. The diagnosis made political dissent a mental disease. The psychiatrists were trained—ordered, as it were—to diagnose this condition according to symptoms such as delusional aspirations , or a heightened sense of self-empowerment . By changing the meaning of medical words, of disease and symptom , they created a science of absurdity according to which dissidents must be mentally sick to act as they did, there being no other logical rationale for why one would oppose a system that was, apparently, the best in the world.

I read an anonymous report, he went on, about a woman, newly released, telling of the drugs given to political activists such as herself. The woman described the effects of the drugs: paralysis of the vocal capacities so that she was unable to unclench her teeth, to put food into her mouth, to speak the words she wanted to say. A certain haze, a mist in the mind—she couldn’t see herself except as a shadow or, if such a thing were possible, as her former self, standing motionless before a mirror, her head turned away. And I could not call her back , said the woman.

I read it all, and as I did so I looked up now and then at Marya, who was sitting on the divan reading a book, her head tilted to the side while the tip of one finger moved slowly across the uppermost line of her lip. I watched her, I read, and the irrepressible notion came to me then that she, Marya, was the subject of that article. I was horrified.