Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Oleg took a deep breath. Although his voice was steady, it had grown quiet. For me, image overpowered speech, my mind awash in flashes of things I’d imagined as a boy as well as new images: Marya in hospital, her striking features drained of colour; an arm rising out of a white sheet; a waiting needle hanging in a white background. They wouldn’t leave my head, and until they did I was sure I’d never say another word.

Oleg lit a cigarette. Science, he said, and cleared his throat, his voice louder as smoke rose in the air, science should need no authority but its own inviolable truths. And yet with those false diagnoses, the political authorities were changing truth itself. By creating false science, they redefined what it meant to be ill in the mind. Aside from the obvious outrage of the practice, it reinforced their whole philosophy, that it is delusional for the individual to see in themselves the capacity to change things. Yet it is about more than just the lie of the practice: it is about removing the individual. No one was permitted to have other thoughts, so to speak. And I worry about the next generation—the younger psychiatrists, who will not know how to diagnose, will not know a healthy dissenter from a real sufferer of illness. Once false science, false truths, are learnt—through no fault of our own—it can be very difficult to unlearn them.

What was strangest of all, Oleg continued, was that when I spent my first night alone in the room, after Marya left, I could not hear the cries of the neighbour’s boy. It happened that, as she told me the next afternoon when I saw her in the stairwell, the boy’s mother had taken him to her sister’s for a night. And so the crying resumed, as long and slow as it had been on other nights. So it was a coincidence, that’s all. But I never did know, said Oleg after a moment, what to make of that one night of silence that marked the threshold to our solitude.

He stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his boot and we stood up, continued walking.

When Oleg told me those things I sensed that a parallel story was taking place, as if through the story of Marya he was telling me a million other truths. We took a train back into the city, and Oleg walked me through the dim foyer, up the stairs to the fifth floor, and stood at the door of the apartment where my mother and I lived. He smiled but his eyes looked troubled somehow. We said goodbye in the hallway. My mother wasn’t home. I went into the living room, lay on the divan and thought I might be sick. I thought of my father and all the silent spaces in our apartment where he still lived, despite his death, where every day he still breathed.

After dinner at the neighbour’s, I went to bed and fell asleep straight away. But I woke in the night. I sat up, blinking at the glowing white room. I couldn’t find my watch, but the silence outside, as if birds and wind no longer existed, told me it must have been very early in the morning. I seemed to wake up in the moment of that old conversation, in the company of Oleg, those trees, that forest in Moscow.

I went into the front room, which was next to the bedroom. Standing, I leafed through a few of the books on the tall narrow shelf. I read a few pages of Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist . I remembered Sergei Ivanovich saying at my mother’s funeral that he was a great admirer of the writer, philosopher, adventurer, anarchist. I read about Kropotkin’s early years in military school, camping at Peterhof, where the young men slept in tents and bathed in the sea. I turned over several years’ worth of pages, and read about a fire in St Petersburg on 26 May 1862, and how the archives at the Ministry of the Interior were nearly lost. Clerks rushed out of the building carrying piles of documents in their arms. But the wind upset the piles; burning sheets flew over the streets, and tiny orange cinders mixed with floating traces of paper. Then he described his five years of exploration in Siberia. I read about his studies in geography and cartography, and his assertion that the then current maps of northern Asia, made by Europeans, included mountains that didn’t exist or which were shown at the wrong latitude, representing an entirely false view of what was really there.

Yawning, I closed the book and went to make tea. I wished I had a map of Moscow. I wondered if I could draw one, or if I should just wait until I was back in Petersburg to buy one there. The Moscow in my mind was like several cities trying to make themselves seen, in their slight variations, all at once. Maybe from one summer to another the blue of Moskva River was slightly different, less vivid perhaps, or there were fewer people along its banks. The slightest shift and it would be like a photograph taken ten years earlier or later, though I had both images before me. What the neighbour said was true: time was just a thing we made, a construction of our thoughts. And so it was difficult to ignore the reality of the aftermath. That Anya had left Moscow, left Russia, that her father was gone, that I had left, too. I could only look at it all from above, like a horrible bird’s-eye view of everything, all at once.

In my writing I was trying to see not my own Moscow, but the city of my parents and their dissident friends. I was a child of that disappeared city. When I left I’d resolved that it didn’t matter whether I preserved it. Yet there were things I wanted to know now, and the need to learn what had happened to Mikhail Sergeyevich seemed connected to the sense I’d long felt of having lost all connection and meaning, all belief and understanding. Since leaving Moscow, I’d been living in a long autumn. A persistent twilight life. I needed to know that there was some point to glasnost , that some essence lasted despite my failure to preserve the truth of that time.

Kafka’s hunger artist came to mind again. My father had starved to death, but to see that as art, to see death as art, was a troubling idea. To find some logical—let alone philosophical—cause for what he did seemed to put forward ill-conceived notions about something that was ultimately just death. Perhaps both murder and suicide. But maybe in a murderous system, such an act was all he could do to express what that system was—a suicide inflicted upon a people. Every ‘enemy’ created within the mind of every citizen came from the system that grew such enemies in those minds.

Maybe he was the ultimate artist, my father, at the moment he attained death by starvation. If art is free—something I didn’t know for certain—then he chose what would happen to his incarcerated body and so was ultimately free. But he didn’t choose the condition of that incarceration. It was an endless loop; I longed for clarity.

I didn’t know what to do with such thoughts, however; my father’s death was in no gallery or bookshelf. Nor did I know what I was writing. It was as if we all stood at a window—me, Anya, her father, my father, countless others who had shared their histories during glasnost and after—and our collective breath covered the glass in vapour. Ghosts of old hopes, words long said and dead. I didn’t know what was through the window, if anything.

When it seemed like morning, I called Sonya. I imagined her standing by the kitchen window of her small apartment in Petersburg, standing by the stove where flower-patterned cloths were put to dry. I pictured her long eyelashes as she gazed out the window. Maybe she’d be drawing on a cigarette. I could hear her boys in the background, like gentle echoes. She told me she’d like to see me soon. I said that I was thinking of going to Moscow for a brief visit, but that I would come over before I left. After we hung up, I stood by the phone for a moment. I hadn’t mentioned to Sonya that I was at the dacha . It was strange to think that for her, I wasn’t here.