Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

The men and women in the audience looked odd, unnerving to me. They shifted with the strange tics of footage running at an increased speed, hands flitting to their glasses, blinking, scribbling notes, sharply turning their necks to look around them. The flickers and occasional spots in the images all created the impression that they were either very nervous or possessed by some fervent impatience. At times, a voiceover stated facts and numbers about the show trials and repressions.

The thing is, said Anya, pointing energetically with her cigarette at the screen, the voiceover is from someone today .

I watched, impressed by the creation, but also envious, perhaps jealous of Anya’s admiration for these Leningrad filmmakers I’d never met. Although she continued to ask me how my work was going, I felt increasingly that the difficulties I was having with my writing weren’t interesting to Anya anymore; that in her eyes I was no longer suffering the pains of burgeoning art but wrestling with inability.

That winter I finished a short story but couldn’t get it published anywhere. It described a network of psychiatric hospitals, grown so large through the designs of the authorities that it formed a territory of asylums. Sane dissidents were locked away, tied to beds arranged in rows in rooms where lamps glowed light green and dark yellow for days and nights on end. As those in power tightened their control over the populace, and more and more dissidents were locked away, the number of asylums for the so-called insane grew. Eventually the asylums covered the land, overtaking the territory of the so-called sane, where the rulers were the only ones left. I called the story ‘Territory of Fools’. I guessed that something was lacking and I left it alone.

I felt a distance growing between what we hoped to do and what we were doing, perhaps a young man’s first realisation that you do not always grasp the great things in your mind.

Anya went to Leningrad in the winter of 1989. She suggested we have some time apart to follow our own paths , as she put it.

I probably didn’t fight for her then, because I knew she was right, that I hadn’t done what I was hoping to do and I wasn’t the best company; I was frustrated all the time, as if constantly engaged in an internal argument, and sometimes Anya got caught up in it. It was as though I could feel what I wanted to create but not see it. I knew what the words sounded like but couldn’t write them.

While Anya was away, I alternated between seeking company and desperately wanting to be alone. Sometimes I threw myself into messy nights out with Ilya, at concerts or drinking in the park. Billy Bragg toured, bringing the West to us. I saw Bragg’s photo in a newspaper, a KGB minder at his side, the singer wearing an ushanka , the sides of the hat pinned up. Ilya and I went to the concert, held in the old weightlifting hall from the 1980 Olympics. We walked around aimlessly afterwards, and as I went to a tabak to buy cigarettes he loped past me to a Pepsi stand up ahead. He came back with two cans, yelling, Gorbachev’s juice! Keeping Soviets sober! in his most comradely and patriotic voice. The tired morning light was somehow relaxing. Our stupid mood transcended the mist and we laughed, held high our Pepsi cans, walked and drank and smoked through the freezing morning.

Going out became addictive, the apartment painfully quiet and boring. One night I went to a music festival. Live bands, people everywhere. Inside, every face seemed lit from within, somehow bright in the red-tinged, smoky darkness. There was a girl, a friend of Ilya’s girlfriend at the time, who talked and stood close to me, and in the wisp of a moment took one step, rising slightly as though a dancer poised, and kissed me. The girl pulled away and I realised I’d kissed her back. I looked at her and then around me, saw Ilya looking over, grinning.

Though I put my arm around the girl, I was thinking of another moment, a few years before, at the Yolka Festival with Ilya, and that girl in the darkness who had walked over and kissed me before leaving, trailing her arms in the air. A great distance seemed to separate those two moments.

In the morning we walked through the city. We hadn’t slept. The wintry sky was barely distinguishable from the night just over. Moskva River blew icy air over our faces. Ilya stepped as though avoiding cracks in the pavement, tired chuckles lifted his shoulders, his leather jacket in place as ever. At some point I said I had to get home, get some sleep. The girl waved and smiled, I held up my hand to the group and then went the other way.

When I returned home, the apartment was quiet; my mother’s bedroom door was closed. My mouth was heavy with beer and my head was starting to hurt already.

To me, Ilya stood for the now, the present, and only the closest future. We rarely spoke about things from the past, though one night that winter, when leaving the Sukhanovs’ apartment we sat down, with the sudden logic of the intoxicated, to have a conversation in the dirty stairwell.

So they just rehabilitated my grandfather, Ilya said. Rehabilitated! They say the crimes have not been proven . Ilya spat out a laugh. It’s bureaucracy gone mad, he said. Bureau crazy . So according to them, there was a crime, they just haven’t got enough evidence . Neither of us spoke for a moment. His beer bottle broke the silence as he scraped it along the walls. The concrete looked ripped and the grating sound echoed.

Ilya told me that his grandfather had been arrested in the forties, after being found at the factory where he worked with a leaf let of apparently unpatriotic thoughts. He was given a ten-year labour camp sentence. And so his son, Ilya’s father, was labelled a relative of an enemy of the people . He was marked, as the saying went; certain jobs and courses of study were barred to him. Ilya’s father was now a labourer at an electrical plant, his grandfather a pensioner.

It is a joke, Pasha. It’s absurd. The papers—this so-called rehabilitation certificate —should say he is rehabilitated because of the absence of a crime in the first place. But no, they must have their crime; they have to pretend there was a threat. Even now, after all that time, they’ve got to create their fucking enemies.

March arrived. One day, when Anya was still away, I went to Red Square to take some photographs for the Express Chronicle , the paper my friend Sasha edited. It was the anniversary of Stalin’s death, 5 March. The group called Pamyat were laying a memorial wreath at the necropolis by the Kremlin wall. The square had a sense of desolation at that point of the year, when it seemed that time was stuck forever in a continuous moment of winter. Beside the red walls of the Kremlin, from beneath the still, grey concrete, spruce trees and statues of former leaders rose up like a malformed forest.

An elderly woman in a navy-blue hat stood with three flowers, one red and two white, in her gloved hand. Another woman and two men wore old army uniforms. On their chests were golden medallions pinned side by side, the one nudging the other to form a golden patch like glowing dragon’s scales. I looked through the lens and captured the scene from a distance, thinking that perhaps it would be better to do away with any kind of anniversary, when such things can be used to remember in all sorts of ways, for good or ill.