Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

I lay on the seat in front of the dacha , drinking the remainder of the beer I had bought at the produkti , and fell asleep for a few moments, wishing on the edge of sleep for the warmth of a girl next to me, the weight of her on my chest. The garden sweated, the white night hummed.

As winter thickened, the walls of the Sukhanovs’ place seemed to close in. Perhaps more people were coming at that time of year—the snow had arrived as if for good—craving the alcohol, heat, inspiration of the tiny confines of the apartment. There was a strong sense of need and energy buzzing through the rooms.

Yura’s story on Jewish exit visa restrictions had been published, and he’d received a good response: letters of thanks from others in the same position, and he was quoted in news articles about refuseniks , those unable to leave the Soviet Union or attain decent academic positions within it. When I’d first met him, in the stairwell of Bulgakov’s apartment back in the summer, Yura had been quite despondent, feeling hopeless about his situation. Since his article had appeared, he seemed a man transformed. His mood lighter, he joined us often for drinks and was eager to talk about politics. And he seemed less intent on leaving Russia. He kept thanking me for suggesting he write a story in the first place, and though I didn’t feel I had done much to help him, his excitement fuelled my own support and hopes for glasnost .

Meanwhile, Ilya was still all about the music, and his band was gathering a strong following in Moscow, holding concerts in clubs or apartments. He organised a semi-regular night at the Sukhanovs’ apartment to play new songs to a small group there.

Not everyone believed in glasnost —some thought Gorbachev weak, too scared to really bring Stalin’s name down once and for all, or just as power hungry as every other leader we had known, wary of giving the Memorial Society too much leeway.

When a Memorial Society member, Dima Yurasov, was arrested, the doubt could be felt drifting through the room at the Sukhanovs’. The KGB were waiting at the airport, we heard, when Dima returned from the north after giving lectures on the Stalinist repressions. From the kitchen I heard someone yell, Glasnost is a joke, and the sound of a glass shattering, though I didn’t know if the two were related.

My own writing wasn’t going very well. I worked full time at the library, and at night, if I wasn’t distracted by concerts, Sukhanov’s weekend gatherings, or spending time with Anya, I would try to work.

In me was a whole history that I longed to convey, but there was a strange halting, as if time had gathered, become confused, causing a blockage, a sense of inertia. I couldn’t really explain the nebulous space between my boyhood horror, that edge-of-knowing awareness, the heavy silence, and my present understanding of the facts in the press, in the open now.

It was similar to the feeling I had when I tried to describe for Anya the apartment of my childhood. Physically, it was the same as it appeared now, but in other ways it was so different. Back then that apartment reflected my internal reality: just like me, it held the secrets unspoken outside. But by 1988 that reality was out in the streets, out there in Moscow. And it was so difficult to convey what that shift meant, or what really happened with that change. It made me feel unsteady, uncertain, because I couldn’t write about what was so important to me.

I grew dissatisfied, easily irritated. I started walking by myself, ridiculously long distances. One day I thought about going to the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, where my father had been taken. But instead I found myself suddenly diverting, following some other course through the city.

I had read in one of Viktor Nekipelov’s books, Institute of Fools , of his encounters with others in Serbsky who were, like him, clearly of a sound mind but who had feigned madness because confinement in the psychiatric ward was thought to be better than imprisonment in a Gulag camp.

Although it had been constantly in my mind, I was never sure if I’d actually been inside the Serbsky Institute. It was true that I had memories of being inside an asylum, though the memories didn’t extend to the building’s exterior, so I could never be sure which hospital it was. All I could remember was the ward where my mother and I went to see my father. I wanted him to stop smiling, because his face scared me; the creases around his eyes looked unnatural, so many wrinkles, and his mouth contorted as though grimacing. Only as a grown man did I understand that it was probably the combination of fatigue, medications and horror that had made him seem much older than the thirty-something he would have been then.

It occurred to me that going to the actual place where he, my father, had been held for a time—for two months of psychiatric evaluation in the seventies—was unlikely to help me in my writing. It seemed the more I came into contact with knowledge, with information, with tangible experience, such as standing on the very road the truck or car he was put in would have driven down, the less close I felt to him. Perhaps keeping him in the space of my childhood memory, where I didn’t know many details but had intense bursts of feeling, was more real than the facts and figures I could find through research, or even the understanding I gained by talking to Mikhail Sergeyevich about what it was really like inside.

Anya and I still spoke about our plans to write something together, but in the meantime we were working on separate things. I had one story published in early 1989, which felt like a tiny salvation after months of nothing. And so I decided to stick with writing short stories for the time being. Anya had grown close to Lena, Sukhanov’s wife, and became interested in working on film and TV editing. In early 1989 she got a part-time position at the TV station where Lena still worked as a sound technician.

Lena was sometimes able to get hold of films that weren’t screened at the usual cinemas. Some filmmaker friends of hers in Leningrad were compiling newsreel footage, unedited, of parades on Revolution Day in the Brezhnev years.

Anya said she wanted to go to Leningrad to meet the filmmakers and work with them. It’s brilliant, she said, using their footage, the state propaganda, for their own work.

One afternoon we sat down with tea, crammed into the Sukhanovs’ one small room, watching some of the film. Cheering crowds stood in the rain, smiling even as the ice showers from the skies ran down their faces, waving flags and shouting Long live the Party! like some scene of collective madness. The old Communist leaders watched on, raising an arm regally, nodding slowly, as if the reel had slowed down or they were eerie windup toys slackening with age.

Watching those scenes now is important, Lena said. We can show how what seemed normal then—what was reality—was just a construction of the system. Perspective is everything; change the conditions of perception and you see things in a completely different way. Make people think about what to do with the information we have.

It’s true, Anya agreed. You can only understand our situation now by appreciating that— she pointed at the screen—as once being real life.

Another film which Anya said really changed things for her, made her think this was the form she wanted to work with, was called Protsess ( The Trial ). We all watched it together at the Sukhanovs’. On the screen for the first time, as if delivered up from nightmares, was footage of Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s. The prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, a stocky figure in a suit, was delivering a tirade at the trial of Bukharin. His arm rose and fell as he denounced the deviants, saboteurs, spies who were plotting to bring down the Soviet system. The shadow of his arm moved on the curtain behind him. His voice was glazed with that antiquated, slightly surreal waver of old movie footage.