Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Mikhail Sergeyevich bristled, a vague shiver. He smiled, but it seemed a falling defence, a frail wall soon down.

Oh no, I said to the underground man, no, thank you. Enclosed, dark spaces—no, thank you. But he told me what he saw, and I could almost feel as though I had made that terrifying trip myself. Down there it was cold but very, very still, he said. Though sometimes he came across rivers; real, flowing rivers that were lined with brick and white stone, their waters knee-deep, and a breeze would carry off them. The darkness pressing his eyes was the thickest he’d ever known; his torchlight could barely lighten even the smallest circle.

And I think it was during another conversation that he told me of the people down there. The true underground people, as it were—homeless, vagrants, what have you. Keeping out of the elements and away from anyone up there , I suppose you could say.

They live down there, Pasha, down in that reversed world, said Mikhail Sergeyevich. Almost as if they are people from the past who lost their way many years ago and can’t live or die, they only keep on walking beneath Moscow.

Mikhail Sergeyevich coughed once, scratched again the back of his head, and apologised. I’m not here to talk about some old fascination, he said. I should tell you something useful. Of my father, perhaps.

He looked up at the sky, softly squinting, clearing his throat as if dissolving webs. The sun leached his face to grey.

Let me begin, he said, by saying I believe that how a country treats its ill tells us much about that country. It was my father who decided I needed treatment. When I was about fifteen he had me admitted to the Kashchenko Hospital here in the city— the right environment to control your agitation , as he put it.

Obviously this is something that’s interested me for a time, said Mikhail Sergeyevich. And so I can tell you that the authorities above first involved themselves in treating the mentally ill back under Peter the Great, and before that it was the monasteries. After the revolution, Western ideas such as psychoanalysis were still allowed in, but all that changed with Stalin. Only a blend of Marxism and Soviet psychiatry was allowed. No longer was it simply a matter of science, or medicine. Pavlov’s theories were chosen and made their way into medical textbooks from then on.

When my father died, he continued, I managed to reach a decision, and that was to abandon the treatment he, my father, had imposed. And you know, I felt finally detached from the system, Pasha. The system connected to him, to his work, and by extension to Stalin. That freedom of my mind was wonderfully liberating but also, in a way, quite terrifying.

He paused for a moment.

But I felt I’d learnt things in there, Pasha, he said. Learnt things about the way we talk about the mind, about the fact that, maybe after all this—he raised a light hand—all we have are our minds, not our bodies. But the way they get at your mind is through your body. So you have to find a way to protect yourself, to not let them in.

His face was grave. I crossed my arms at my chest, feeling uneasy in the face of the images in my mind, of hospital beds, the contours of white sheets encasing an immobile body still alive, the shiny corridor floors.

I told him how, in my research, I’d read that dissidents locked away in psychiatric hospitals feared that they actually would lose their minds in there.

Yes, Mikhail Sergeyevich said, nodding. When they have control of your body, you feel it encroaching upon your mind. The system was founded on total control. In that cold cell of a bed, I felt a war was being waged between my mind and my body. But it was a war begun by them, up there . They sought to control inner lives by control of external conditions. But I grew to feel there was something else—maybe it came from inside, from our bones and heart and thoughts—that works independently. But it struck me that perhaps our innerness has been damaged by our past. It’s hard to know your direction when you are born into a system and then, suddenly, free of it. I wasn’t sure how to proceed once I was released from the hospital. And I haven’t been sure how to proceed since.

We continued to sit side by side in Gorky Park. The October breeze threw leaves around, and Mikhail Sergeyevich sat very still, his hands resting in loose fists on his knees.

This could be, I thought, a continuation of that afternoon several weeks ago with Oleg, when he told me about his wife’s incarceration in a psychiatric hospital under Brezhnev. If each of us has our own inner chronology, for me those two moments were neighbouring pages of the story.

Mikhail Sergeyevich began speaking again, and rather than pulling me into the present I felt that he was joining me in that other conversation, a scene quite fixed in my mind, when Oleg sat next to me in the forest near Moscow and told me about Marya.

I have no doubt you’ll write, Pasha, Anya’s father said. As I grow older I’m more certain that what I’ve got to say is beyond my powers of expression. So it feels a good thing to pass it on, I guess.

Anya came over that evening, and we sat up talking on the divan after my mother had gone to bed. When Anya asked me how the meeting with her father had gone, I told her how we’d visited Gorky Park, and of our conversation there.

Or, actually, he spoke around the time he was in hospital. He didn’t really describe it exactly, I said.

Anya nodded. Well, you can speak with him again. He seems to really like you, Pasha.

I’m not sure where it’s all going, though, I said. What we’ll be able to use or if we can write something from this.

I think it’s just good for him, said Anya. And it shows my mother that talking isn’t so bad after all. He seems fine. He seems to enjoy it.

In November the Memorial Society held a Week of Conscience in a Palace of Culture in Moscow. Survivors and relatives of victims of the Gulag and the repressions brought in hundreds of photographs. We displayed them on the walls of the Palace of Culture, along with the maps of camps and lists of names, which ran in long lines that seemed never-ending. Despite knowing of the volumes of testimony received by newspapers and by the Memorial Society, despite knowing the numbers, it was a staggering thing to see so many people gathered there. The pieces of paper, the stories and photos, seemed after generations of silence to be the first collective cry. The society received letter after letter during and beyond that week. The requests were simple: My father was last seen on… His name is… I would like information on where he was taken.

I have been told that my parents were put on trial on… sentenced and shot at… I would like to know where they are buried…

Some of the photographs on the wall had been sent along with those letters. Mostly they were black and white. There were austere family portraits, and young faces radiant beneath a professional portraitist’s flash. Others were police shots, immediately gaunt and somehow suggesting a halfway point, as though some kind of torment had begun but wasn’t yet over. No matter whether the photographs were of carefree young faces or haggard images taken by the police, they all seemed to hold the weight of what was to come. The perfect epitome of the fiction of time, all prior innocence lost, like memories they absorbed what was then and all that happened, even what came before them.

As people walked among those photographs on the walls of the Palace of Culture, a resonating hum seemed to accompany their murmured conversations. It was hard to tell if the people were speaking to each other or talking softly to the images as they walked up and looked at them closely. In fact, it almost seemed as if the sounds were released from the photographs themselves. Like a murmured symphony, a conversation between the living and the lost.