Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

The neighbour accepted the cigarette I offered, finished his tea, and went on. I’ve heard, since those glasnost years, that there are lists of those executed. I’ve wondered if my father’s name is on them. I’m not sure if I want to see a list like that. I haven’t suggested this to Vera. And you can never be sure if a list is trustworthy.

He looked up at me as if asking a question.

It’s true, I said. Sometimes the lists were wrong.

I remembered how back in Moscow, at the Memorial Society, there were stories of people whose names had appeared on a list of those executed, but who then turned up at their old homes years later. They might have been twenty years in a camp. And that usually meant the person killed was murdered under the wrong name. There were quotas to be met: a certain number of enemies to be found. They were like enforced predictions—deaths marked in ink so that they were bound to happen.

Identity didn’t matter to them, up there , I said. It was just about the numbers.

Yes, yes, said the neighbour. And you imagine them dying in so many different ways, when you don’t really know. You lived in fear of hearing the creaking ascent of the elevators at two in the morning, but I’ve never been sure if I actually heard that sound on the night they came for my father. He was gone in the morning. We never saw a grave.

I’d like to try to help, I said. A lot of archives are open now. There might be something recorded.

The neighbour nodded, rubbing his thumbs one over the other. He accepted another cigarette. It’s a funny thing, he said. You don’t expect the young ones to be all about the past, like you, Pasha. It’s a good thing. It’s good for the kids to know.

I’ve just remembered what Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, I said, about a rule among her friends. The rule was that you could never ask why—you couldn’t ask what a person was arrested for. In their circle of poets and dissidents, they actually forbade the question. Because if you ask it, she said, if you ask that question, then you are granting a dignity to the system that it does not deserve. Questions fed the Stalinist system. Asking why or what for suggested there might be some kind of logic to it, some higher order and truth behind the persecutions. But there wasn’t. There was only fear, a kind of persecution mania.

The neighbour nodded and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. Senseless, he said.

I was suddenly struck with the image of Mikhail Sergeyevich—or, more precisely, the setting: a man sitting next to me, drawing on a cigarette, talking about his father, something both grey and shattered about him, his voice. I wanted to help the neighbour as I hadn’t been able to help Mikhail Sergeyevich.

Look, I said, feeling uneasy, so averse to my old faith in information, in the ability of words to find answers. Look, there are no certainties, but we can try.

Yes, he said slowly, yes. I think I would like to see what you can do.

We stood up and left the bistro. He thanked me, shaking my hand with his left, his right palm pressed on my forearm.

Let’s meet again soon, Pasha, he said.

That evening, wary of sleeping badly yet again, I took a long walk through the city. It was late in the summer, so the white nights were waning. A thin darkness tinted the city in the early hours. The streetlights were only needed as guides for the shortest time. The lights glowed on Nevsky, along Griboyedov Canal, and then petered out to rare orange beacons on the more deserted streets and beside the silent, thin canals.

I went to a bar for an hour or so, drank beer, then left again. I saw the usual groups of people who seemed to exist at no other time of year than summer. The laugh of one girl peaked high in the humid air like a lone dusk bird. Others then joined her as if in echo. On the sandy embankment by Peter and Paul Fortress there were a few white-night drinkers. Their words were muted by distance as they splashed, seemingly silent in the steely Neva water.

I walked past queues at nightclubs, caught glimpses of girls with winking gold jewellery, heads turning with smiles, men looking identical, all dressed in black. I heard the hum of words, the perceptive beep of metal detectors, and the haze of music as the crowds waited for their drinks and dance and lights and pills. I walked away from those queues but inevitably found others.

I kept moving beneath Petersburg’s pressing sky, aware of some encroaching eventuality that if I stopped, I would look too closely at the smiles, which seemed somehow malicious, and see that they had forgotten, or didn’t know, all that had happened and the weight of the past. Despair would win, a weight of loneliness would bear down, as would a deep repulsion from the facade, the apparently clean slate that seemed to be made by that girl’s laugh, which had long drifted into the warm heights of the air.

At about two in the morning, the glowing grey sky turned briefly dusky and I saw the bridges rise. It was that time of night when the bridges of Petersburg split in two and open to allow the steamers, ferries and ships to pass through the canals before closing again at the end of the night. Once the bridges had risen, they stood out due to the bright orbs of orange and red that lit the ends of the bridges and rose with them. Only at certain angles could I see the black silhouettes of the structures themselves, standing upright like eerie corpses, inert bodies suddenly struck with life. As the bridges stood cracked in half for those few hours, I couldn’t escape the impression that time itself had been suspended by the great arms reaching up, as if calling to a halt all that was progressing relentlessly with the hours.

I thought of those stories from years before my own, how after the revolution those who remained from the old, extinguished aristocracy were called former people . I didn’t know if the term was used for more recent history, attached to the names of former camp guards, prisoners, executioners.

On my way home, when I saw a figure walking here and there in the night, unspeakable questions formed in my mind. I wondered who they were back then, what they had done which had then been forgotten. I wondered what former people hid inside them.

Even in the glasnost years we had all heard of Lazar Kaganovich, the last of Stalin’s closest circle. Mikhail Sergeyevich had mentioned that his father had worked for him. Kaganovich still lived on Frunzenskaya Embankment and stories were told of how he answered the phone only after a coded number of rings, and played dead when American journalists came knocking on his door. A ghost who still woke every day, still washed his hands and face, blood still moving through his limbs and organs, just like the system of which he had been an administrator. Kaganovich and Communism survived long after Stalin. It was a system that thrived on its ghosts, the power of memory, the tyranny of words and silence. Perhaps Anya’s grandfather, even in a grave, was as alive as old Kaganovich on the embankment. Memories did not settle, the children breathed in the dust. Nor were we separate from the dead, for the horror was surely greater than time.

It was dark when I reached Primorsky, feeling uneasy and alone. Near the stray dogs on the way to my apartment, I saw on a prefabricated wall the words Death to Yid! painted in red beneath a streetlight. A swastika was enclosed within the arch of the final letter and I wondered at how real the red paint looked, like blood or tears—perhaps more convincing than real blood or tears would have looked.

A week went by and I didn’t hear from the neighbour. It unnerved me a little. I didn’t have his phone number. Perhaps he felt that he’d said too much, associated me too closely with the things he’d spoken about, and so was happy to leave me behind. Or maybe something had happened to him; he might have been unwell. Every connection was utterly fragile. I would wait. Surely we were now in a time when people no longer disappeared.