Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Despite knowing some specific locations, the Memorial Society searchers could never identify who it was they found, since the remains were too jumbled, numerous and decayed. Finding a mass site at least gave a measure of certainty, however. A defined forest, a few mounds of grass, was a place at which to stand and mourn; a veritable pinpoint compared to the endless silence of the Russian expanse.

I wondered about the consequences of inadequate mourning. I wondered whether the dead found other ways to remind us of their presence. Plagued by the uncertainty of loss, the lack of a gravestone, perhaps there would be a sense of disquiet, nauseas of the mind, deep depressions—all as manifestations in the living of the mute presence of the dead, the knocking without hands, the calls without mouths.

We stayed a few nights in Leningrad. On our last night, Susanna cooked a large meal and the four of us sat at the table, sharing one of the bottles Oleg had brought with us, smoking and talking long into the night. The conversation turned to art and the consequences of controlling it.

Some kinds of art come before language, said Ivan. We begin, in our earliest years, with images in our mind before words form in our mouth. And so to command imagery is to have power over the very beginnings of our understanding. To control art is to control all. As we grow older we rely more and more on words. The height of our thinking, so we are told, is when we can understand only with words—abstract thought. Yet even the naming of something as abstract is our attempt to control that which we cannot grasp. I think of certain words— justice , freedom —we can name without needing an image. Yet they are the hardest to grasp, the easiest to lose.

He reached out to touch Susanna’s face, his palm over her hair, his thumb on her cheek. It is both the beauty and tyranny of words, he continued. How beautiful, when we cannot say what it is that moves us most, though we try.

Susanna smiled, took his hand from her face and held it in her lap.

A tender moment becomes the crispness of air, said Ivan, the diffusion of light, a look between two people.

He kissed Susanna’s hand and then rested his own on the kitchen table, forming a small arch with his fingers.

A lost moment of childhood becomes the scent of polished wood, he went on, the eyes of a rocking horse, the feel of crawling over floorboards.

Ivan crossed his arms. Oleg did the same; he was nodding slowly.

And yet, continued Ivan, the dictatorship of words works in the same way. Enemy . Other . Madness . To control such labels, or their apparent meaning, is to command fearful hearts, to dictate the worst in our nature. Even now, we use their words—Ivan pointed a thumb to the air—we use the repressions , when really we should say the murders . Abstraction becomes dangerous. When we cannot see the enemies among us, we see them everywhere.

I looked across the room, where several of Ivan’s paintings hung on the walls or were stacked among the clutter of art supplies and blank canvases. Most of Ivan’s works depicted people in murky locations, dwarfed by tall buildings or lost among trees bare or dead. On each of the painted faces there was an expression of searching, longing or sadness. An embracing couple, beneath a purplish cloud, could not seem to meet each other’s eyes. A long line of people snaked away from a building, waiting for something the viewer couldn’t see. They all felt uncannily quiet. I could feel the cold concrete, the windless air, the tiredness in the immobile figures.

It seemed to me that art had a peculiar importance under tyranny. Art should tell us of life, but in a place where the outward perception of reality has been so manufactured by the state, in some ways art is the only thing that is real. Art represented the truth of our inner lives, which was not real according to the official word. Oleg had told me that Ivan’s works were despised by the state, condemned for their severe style , their unrealistic depressive quality , which ran counter to the acceptable way of doing things—set down by Stalin as socialist in content and realist in form, all thick-armed heroic workers and senselessly happy peasants in the kolkhoz .

We sat in a comfortable silence, the four of us. Susanna served more tea and biscuits. At some point past midnight, Oleg suggested we get some sleep.

We were travelling north from Leningrad to Kem with Lake Ladoga and Finland to the left, Lake Onega at the right. The word Arktika , plastered on the side of the train, made me think of an icy rush leaving its mark on the carriage, telling where it had been and where we would arrive after a journey of around twenty hours.

We travelled in a four-berth carriage, though the other two bed-seats were empty. Wood-grain panels covered the interior walls. Thin curtains, pink or brown depending on the light through the window, shifted with the carriage’s sway. It became my unofficial duty to get tea from a samovar at the end of the carriage. Often I stood for a long moment at the window. I saw an old man walking on a grey road, weighed down by a bag in each hand. Two children in a green field ran and ran alongside the train, their pounding steps and excited calls muted by the glass. I liked to see how the view had changed once I went back to my seat, as if time had sped up or a moment had been missed; the children had disappeared from view, the old man could now be seen up close to the window.

Oleg slept a lot for the first few hours. I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. The train rocked with gentle clattering noises. A few people stood talking in the corridor outside, and the attendant bustled past them. On the spare seat next to Oleg were his maps. I stood up, took them lightly off the seat, and sat back down opposite Oleg. He dozed, seemingly peaceful.

Next to neatly printed names, a symbol appeared over and over on the maps: a triangle sitting on two wide rectangles, which then sat on two more rectangles, long and narrow. Sort of like an arrow, sort of like a tower. I didn’t count the symbols myself, and couldn’t decide whether Oleg would surely have done so, or would surely have not.

The arrangement reminded me of a cemetery: the jagged, haphazard layout of graves, how in some areas the headstones are clustered together, while in other parts there are blank expanses. It was as though the grassy walkways in a cemetery found their counterpart in the vast Russian plains on those maps.

I was sure that, now I’d seen Oleg’s maps, any time I looked at a map without camp markings, the absence would be shocking. As if the map’s creator had made such a grievous error as forgetting to include the capital cities or neglecting to mark an entire country. Names referring to a camp but missing the symbol would hide what was truly there. Safe behind a word, the label could conceal the reality on the ground: Kem, Arkhangelsk, Vorkuta, Magadan, Kolyma, Krasnodar. In the absence of those small markings symbolising a camp, I likened it to an entire metropolis or the depths of an ocean disappearing by the omission of the cartographer’s hand.

I put the maps back on the seat next to Oleg, then sat back in my own seat, watching the view.

After six hours we had a twenty-minute stop at Petrozavodsk. Travellers emerged from the carriages, stretching their legs, chatting and smoking. A couple of food stalls were open. It was late afternoon and the sun was high. Being suddenly thrown outside, into the open air, I was struck by the loneliness of unfamiliar surroundings. We’d travelled far beyond any place known to me.