Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Another week, then two more. My thirty-fifth birthday passed. I went to work, I travelled the metro, tunnelling through the city. I went home again, ate the same food every night, smoked and stared out the windows. It was autumn soon enough. Each day gave a little more darkness to the sky. At night I could no longer see the gulf; the windows hit back with the image of my own apartment, my own yellow-lit face. I went to Sonya’s two or three times. We didn’t talk again about the dacha , nor about her husband or children, but I sometimes thought about our earlier conversation while I was at her apartment. I thought that maybe we were a little similar, Sonya and I, living in the presence of those lost—for Sonya her husband, while for me it was not just Anya but Moscow itself, and my dead who were there.

I wondered if my writing about Moscow was bringing back to me the feel of the place, the memory-feeling, fraught departure from the city. I might have been slowly turning back into the twenty-something-year-old man who had everything to say, every hope, and no idea how to say it.

One morning, glancing through a newspaper, I read an article that reminded me of the neighbour. It was about the Salekhard–Igarka Railway, also known as the Dead Road. An expedition group had been out there to take photos. Its construction ordered by Stalin, the railway was supposed to span more than one thousand kilometres, to creep and weave over the vast, desolate northern parts of Siberia, and between the prison camps dotted across those lands. When Stalin died, the project was abandoned, but some seven hundred kilometres of track, leading to nowhere, were left behind. Like his maps of roads to nowhere, the neighbour might’ve liked to keep the article. I would hold on to it for him.

That night I had a dream about the Philosophers’ Ships, which Oleg had told me about when we stood by Moskva River one autumn, a story I’d repeated to Anya when we too were by the embankment. I was alone in a room on one of the ships. The floor was panelled with dark wood, and beneath it I imagined the ocean floor holding the remains of old wrecks in its shifting sand: remnants of ships, wood, algae, seaweed, bones and belt buckles, while schools of fish, thick comets of silver, streaked through the debris as though they couldn’t bear to look at it all. I never left that room, in my dream, but I heard the sound of voices and murmurs and laughs from outside, up on the decks of the Philosophers’ Ship. One of them sounded like the neighbour’s wheezy grey laugh.

In my dream (or perhaps I’d woken by then and had begun to imagine such scenes), as I heard the neighbour’s laugh I thought about his father, lost perhaps to a firing squad or the Gulag. But then I imagined that he’d escaped somehow and was traversing the barren, camp-riddled lands of Siberia, trying to come home, or living as a fugitive in a Moscow criminal gang, biding his time. I wondered whether I would recognise him, should I one day stumble across my father—for now it was he as well as the neighbour’s father who I saw or sensed was lost in our vast Russia. I wondered if I’d know it was him, if he was there in the streets around the Arbat, or the crimson-brick desert of Pushkin Square, or in St Petersburg passing the statue of the Bronze Horseman, or walking beside the canals off Nevsky Prospekt. It was a comfort, of a sort, to see my father camping a windy night by a fire on the Russian steppe, or waking to a summer sky, beneath an old blue coat, sheltered below the arch of a bridge somewhere in Moscow.

In the morning I seemed to take a very long time to wake up. As I sat with my second coffee, staring towards the television in my kitchen, more annoyed than anything by its sounds, I went back over my dream thoughts several times, knowing that soon enough they would likely be gone from my memory.

Soviet psychology abhorred dreams. Something so internal and individual ran counter to the ideology. There were to be no uncontrolled, unreadable inside selves.

In one of Dostoyevsky’s short stories, the narrator describes a dream about his dead brother. The brother was part of his life, he said, was with him each day and had a role in his affairs, but all the while he knew his brother wasn’t alive anymore. Yet because it was a dream, it was possible for both states to exist together, for the dead to be fully present.

I swear to you gentlemen , he wrote, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness .

The sky above Solovetsky was a yawning blue, unending. Though I was a child of tower block apartments and loud Moscow, I grew used to the new quiet.

Oleg had arranged for us to stay with a man named Vasily, who lived in a cold wooden house on the island. His father had been imprisoned on Solovetsky in the early 1930s and the family had lived there ever since. I had heard of such Gulag families; a people deported, a course of life uprooted and forced to start again in a new, wild environment. They might have been dying out by then, Vasily’s family almost the last of their kind.

It rained heavily in the night. By morning, mosquitoes travelled in thick masses, unrelenting even in the strong wind that had gathered while we slept.

We walked again over the roads of grey stone and grey dust to the Solovetsky cemetery to see the new monument to victims of the Gulag. It had been erected that month, June 1989, by members of the Leningrad Memorial Society.

With gentle, silent movements, Oleg took from his pocket three photographs, two of young men and one of a young woman, three red silky ribbons, and one dried, pressed flower. They were from friends who couldn’t come themselves, he told me. He placed the tokens on the ground at the foot of the memorial, covering the edges of the photos with stones, tying the ribbons and flower to a stray branch lying on the ground. When the photos shuddered in the wind, as though longing to take flight, Oleg secured them each one with another stone. The ribbons danced.

In the afternoon, Vasily arranged for us to borrow bikes from a friend, and the three of us rode the ten or so kilometres north to Sekirnaya Gora, Hatchet Hill. Oleg and I followed Vasily along a dirt track carving its way, an adder through grass, across the forest floor. Our path was obstructed sometimes by fallen logs, dense clumps of pine needles, and roots crawling out of the ground and over the earth. Once or twice a rabbit stopped suddenly to stare at us, apparently horrified, before disappearing into the trees. I passed close by the hanging branches of a pine and saw, up close, the remnants of the night’s rain clinging in droplets. And in the weight of that forest air I felt strangely moved, as if those drops had run down a face that I knew.

When we stopped for a rest, sitting on a few fallen logs with cigarettes, and tea from a thermos, Vasily told us about the winters on Solovetsky.

The way to recognise the truly cold days, he said, is when you see a bright, shining mist that completely fills the air. And when a person walks through it, their body forms a corridor in the thick whiteness, like a passageway. It holds the shape of their body in silhouette. After they have passed, the corridor remains and the silhouette of the vanished person is still present in the mist. You know, I remember looking out the window of our house as a boy, and I watched the town walk around without ever seeing a person. You could tell by the shapes in the mist whether a child, or a tall person, or two adults, had not long ago passed by.