Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

A day or so later, at the produkti , there was a woman who bore a resemblance to my mother. It was scarcely nameable, this likeness; some inner tone was similar. Perhaps it was the slight incline of her head as she waited in the queue, or the sense of patience, of solid, quiet confidence. The navy-blue coat she wore, and the hair coiled into a thick black bun, also reminded me of her. In a memory of one moment or many, I saw my small child’s hand pulling at the edge of that coat. Come on, Pasha, my mother would say, we’re going to Pushkin’s. On the weekends we would go to Pushkin Square, taking a crowded trolleybus. They had a sense of lightness, those memories of our trips to Pushkin’s. Maybe that was when my mother herself felt a little lighter, less plagued for a moment by the burdens of her life, heavy with risk and unresting fears for what her dissident activity might bring for the young boy beside her, and still ringing with new grief at the loss of my father. Maybe at Pushkin’s she took comfort in seeing other children with mothers or aunts, running up to the ice-cream vendors that were there no matter the decade, beyond the violence that thrashed the city.

The woman in the produkti paid for her things and left, and for a moment I felt yet more alone, losing that graze of the past.

Back at the dacha , I started drawing a rough map of the Moscow streets I knew so well. The Arbat, I saw it paved and lined with streetlamps. Tverskoy Boulevard, wide and green, down to Pushkin Square. Red Square, a cold desert by the Kremlin. Broad Bolshaya Sadovaya Street leading to Bulgakov’s apartment. Frunzenskaya Embankment and the bridge over to Gorky Park. It eased me, drawing it, imagining the images beneath the lines, as though I had finally found the photo of a loved one whose face I thought I’d forgotten.

Come on, Pasha, time to go to Pushkin’s.

Moscow in the autumn, every autumn, was a brief time. Just a twilight almost missed, gold light to grey. The parks always seemed full of couples, maybe clinging to the last days of walks without snow, without frost in the skin. Novopushkinskaya Park, lime trees letting go yellow leaves in the breeze, shuddering as though already cold. Tverskoy Boulevard, down to Pushkin Square, lined with colour from the trees. Couples hand in hand, palm to cheek, promises made. Our first autumn together, I saw the small changes that came with the season. The first time I saw Anya wearing the grey felt hat that pushed her blonde fringe out to the sides of her face. The first time she clung to me for warmth, walking down the Arbat, which was still streaming with people, on a day that felt as cold as winter. The first time she paused in walking to pull her white socks up over her leggings, or tie her shoelace, now that she was no longer wearing the brown summer shoes that showed the skin on the top of her feet.

Sometimes Anya stayed at our apartment. The two rooms of our dvushka were a bedroom and a living room. My mother had the bedroom and I still slept on a divan behind a screen, a sort of constructed room within a room. Anya explained that things were tense at home, especially since she’d said she wanted to write about her grandfather’s life. She had the feeling that it was dividing her parents; Mikhail Sergeyevich supported her writing, Evgenia Fyodorovna was opposed to it. I thought of Mikhail Sergeyevich from time to time after that abruptly ended interview. Anya said she was determined to let him talk, and that we’d go back there soon to speak with him.

When she first slept there, and as she began to stay more often, I couldn’t believe Anya was lying so close to me, couldn’t believe I could be warm just from half her body lying on half of mine. She had become part of that apartment, that place. Cooking sometimes with my mother, or sitting talking with her into the night. I’d hear their quiet words first thing in the morning. My mother gave her books to read, and she would tell Anya about the lives of her dissident friends, the writers and musicians and artists who inspired us.

At night sometimes Anya would write. I liked to watch her as I lay in bed. I loved the small depression between her thigh and hip when, with bare legs, she sat up with the sheet a mess beneath her, an article or journal or notes resting on her knee, under the heel of the hand which held her cigarette.

In the morning I’d watch as she stood next to the bed pulling on her clothes, first her underwear, then stepping into her jeans, then slipping on her shirt, a cardigan. Watching her dress after we’d both been undressed for the night was somehow such an attractive thing. I’d ask her where she was going. It was never a question and we both knew that. Of course she was going to work. She’d just smile, roll her eyes, and continue to get ready. Where are you going, Anya, though it wasn’t a question.

In the autumn I began to take a few walks with Anya’s father. Anya said it would be better than continuing our interviews at the apartment. My mother, you know, she said.

And so Mikhail Sergeyevich and I would go to Gorky Park or Neskuchny Garden. Both were across the bridge from their apartment, on the other side of Frunzenskaya Embankment. The first time Mikhail Sergeyevich spoke about his time in a psychiatric hospital, we were in Gorky Park. Autumn was deepening then, the day sunny but cold. We walked a few minutes and then sat side by side on a bench. I took out a notebook, as I would do during all the conversations we had, so that I could preserve something of what he said to me.

I met a strange man here once, said Mikhail Sergeyevich. In this park. I came to think of him as the underground man. He was oddly dressed, in some sort of protective clothing, grey and shiny like armour, and his hair was tied in a long ponytail. He was bent over a manhole, opening the cover with a crowbar. I guess I was only going to pass by this man, but he started talking to me. He told me how he often went beneath the city. Perhaps his job had something to do with maintenance down there, perhaps he just explored of his own free will. Another whole world exists under the ground, said the man, and most of us rarely give it a thought. He described to me how instead of parks and railways, buildings, windows or clouds there was a maze of sewers, tunnels, underground rivers and metro lines. His father drove trains in the subway, and had taken him on rides as a boy.

As Mikhail Sergeyevich spoke, I imagined the underground from a view I hadn’t before, looking ahead, into the darkness. I saw, as if I was that underground man as a child in the driver’s seat of a metro train, the sudden twists into dark, now into light, now again into darkness as the train rushed from one station to another. I saw countless branches sprouting from the tracks, the travels like a dark flight guided by the threads of a web, the silver underbelly of our city.

And so he still explored under there, said Mikhail Sergeyevich. He told me how he had a collection of relics he’d found over the years: coins from Tsarist times, a flask and gas mask, a telephone from the 1940s, a horseshoe, a mortar and pestle from who knows what time. He’d even found bones, unidentifiable limbs but also once a human skull. Didn’t collect that, though. Didn’t tell anyone until me, it would seem.

Mikhail Sergeyevich scratched his head absently, messing the grey and brown tufts. He looked younger, or lost, with his hair all askew like that.

I cannot explain to you why I found it all so interesting, he continued. But I kept on standing there, listening to this man speak. And I went back again the next day. He was there. Sitting on a bench smoking, as if waiting for me. We spoke again. He asked if I wanted to go down there one day, too.