Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

My mother and I walked slowly together around the large hall. She wore a navy-blue coat and a black scarf. The place, or the event, seemed to take a toll on her. She was very quiet, and looked shaken and distracted.

The last year or so has brought past time back to me, Pasha, she said. It feels like the years of the Thaw, after Khrushchev’s speech thirty years ago. After that day, people wrote letters to the newspapers asking the meaning of Khrushchev’s words, asking how he could possibly criticise Stalin. Some were relieved, some were angry. While now we say Stalinism and Terror , in those years it was unjustified repressions and cult of personality , those words that were suddenly delivered up, as the devil’s name might be given to the church, as the excuse for everything, but which really in the end excuses nothing.

In that strange way the past has of coming back to us in patterns and faces, she continued, lately I’ve been seeing the same expressions, reading the same phrases. I see the wary relief on some faces, the anger on others. Or it’s as if the angry letter sent by a woman after Khrushchev’s speech, defending all that Stalin did to bring us up in the world , is then echoed word for word by her granddaughter thirty years later as she angrily watches a Memorial Society protest. As if the sad letter written by a middle-aged man, about the pain of his return from the Gulag and how he no longer feels he exists in the world, has been posted through time and re-sent by his great-nephew, newly released from Brezhnev’s camps.

My mother’s face was sombre and she took my arm as we left the hall.

The emergence of memory seemed to me like a warped wound, with a welt or bruise that had arrived inexplicably late. As if the visible evidence of the injury had suddenly sprung up now, though the blow itself had occurred years before. I wondered what might be the consequences of that delayed bruise, the cost of long-unseen blood that finally rises up under the skin; an injury not treated soon after the impact.

I wrote a rough draft of a short story about a town of people covered in bruises that were the sudden, overnight manifestation of every knock and fall that had happened during their lives. But the story turned into a mess as I tried to list the multiple injuries, attribute each mark to its inflictor, discern between that which might have been caused by a childhood fall or by a beating by a parent, or by something that nobody could remember. The narrative became twisted and confused when I tried to account for the more vague maladies, such as the days plagued by anxiety, or widespread aches. Both allegory and realism escaped me; maybe I wasn’t meant to be a writer after all.

After the Week of Conscience, the Memorial Society received numerous letters of protest. Memory was raw and angry, never old, never over.

Stalin defended the socialist course adopted by the Party, and he advanced a culturally and economically backward country… Don’t destroy with Stalin all that was accomplished by the people. You must not dishonour and insult all that is great in Russia.

The conversations with Mikhail Sergeyevich in the park and with Oleg in the forest near Moscow had brought back something—not so much memories as the feeling of my childhood, of uneasiness and a nebulous sense of confusion. The only research I enjoyed was talking to Mikhail Sergeyevich, which felt more like a conversation with an old relative than anything I might one day write about or the books I had read.

It got me thinking about the roots of knowledge, and made me wonder how I knew the things I did about my country, about the meaning of words and concepts used without a second thought.

At some point as a boy I grew old enough to understand the meaning behind the words used by the dissident aunts and uncles in the apartment of my childhood. There was a shift in my perception, after which I understood meanings, or could appreciate, if not explain, a difference between Gulag and repression and psikhushka .

The word Gulag I associated with older stories, of the kind told in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago . I understood that the word didn’t refer to one camp in particular, but to an administration system. I learnt that so much could stagger under the weight of a single word, that there were hundreds upon hundreds of camps in enormous networks across the Soviet Union, where prisoners—criminal and political alike—mined gold in Kolyma, built canals in the north and even, as Solzhenitsyn himself did, constructed tower blocks in Moscow. And I gradually came to know (it was strange to me that I could never recall the first moment of that realisation) that the people who sometimes disappeared from the kitchen table meetings had been sent to those camps, or had once been in one. The woman who made the delicious kotleti , the young man with black hair who left his cap behind on a chair in our kitchen, who both disappeared in my childhood—them I associated with Gulag .

The word repression was often said along with execution , shot , false charge , show trial , the Terror , the Purges , the Lubyanka , the KGB , interrogation .

The likelihood of a person returning from the fate either word suggested— Gulag or repression —seemed to be equal. To me both words went to the same place of disappearance and silence. Twenty years in a labour camp sounded like forever, and the indefinable place of repression never meant certain death, as paper could not be trusted and sometimes people thought to have been shot did come home.

The psikhushka was different. This I associated less with words than with indistinct utterings, as if emerging from underwater, spoken by Oleg or my mother. Thinking of the word now I felt a certain tone of memory, a sense of disquiet and inner pain. Though I knew that the word was connected to my father and his death, such an association began at a time when I didn’t have the information to make the right connection between word and event. It was only when I was older that I understood enough to be able to picture the place of my father’s incarceration, to join word and image.

We had, in the apartment, an official document, a charge sheet, dated 8 May 1973, which cited a crime under Article 190-1 of the Criminal Code of circulation of fabrications known to be false which defame the Soviet state and social system.

My father was taken first to Butyrka Prison, from there to the Serbsky Institute on Kropotkin Lane in Moscow for one year; and from there to Oryol Prison, two hundred miles south-west of Moscow, from where his body was retrieved in the autumn of 1974 after he succumbed to the effects of a prolonged hunger strike.

Strangely, I couldn’t recall the first time I saw the charge sheet. But reading it must have made me able to connect my father with specific places, with psychiatric hospitals and prisons. I looked at it, sometimes, as a teenager. But as I got older I didn’t; I had essentially memorised it, anyway. My mother and I never spoke about the charge sheet or the circumstances of my father’s death, and rarely about him at all. There was nothing to say beyond the things we already knew, and so we left him as a silent presence, a fully formed absence, inside our apartment.

But at any time, a word could have an association without my knowing what it really meant, such as Anya talking often about over there , about wanting to leave. The threat of her absence always had its own form and I felt it lodged somewhere, even though I didn’t know what her absence would look like or when it would happen. Yura had still had no luck getting an exit visa, and often the talk among our group would turn to the idea of leaving the Soviet Union. At the Sukhanovs’ for dinner one night in the winter, Yura told us the story of a Jewish scientist who had obtained an exit visa and gone to the United States, and who had then returned for a short visit to Moscow. Yura seemed in awe of the man.