Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

As we sat quietly for a moment, I contemplated the dead writers and banned books, the forbidden thoughts, and I wondered why I had such a love for, or faith in, words. Shklovsky said art has the ability to shake us from those lazy habits of perception, to recover the sensation of life and things as they are , not as they have been branded with words. I felt a great need to find what it was that made words art. I knew that Shklovsky had come back to Russia after his exile but was forced to denounce his old ways of thinking—though for him they remained his true life, existing between the official lines, and so in a way he was spiritually exiled.

And so here is Shalamov, Oleg went on, holding up the book in his hand. You could say that his writings taught me my father. In his Kolyma Tales I read how the train journey from Moscow to Vladivostok took weeks, and that often the prisoners were made to stand the entire way. There was a final trip north by ship, through the Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan, which I imagined to be a treacherous voyage, the boats moving through eerie, dark blue waters, broken sheets of ice glinting in moonlight. The air cold in any season. The prisoners certain they were descending from the known world and into some kind of Arctic underworld, to the heart of a darkness never known to them before.

I believed , quoted Oleg, I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography . It was this awareness that provided the will to live. I checked myself—frequently—and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive. I sometimes imagined that my father was the one who wrote those words spoken by Shalamov’s narrator, who was possibly the author himself. I even heard a certain voice, not actually my father’s but one that seemed all the more real to me because the things he said sounded so true. In this imagined voice my father described to me his mundane days in the camp, and his return from Kolyma. It was as if I could use Shalamov’s words as a kind of foil, to look through them and see the essence of my father, as though in the reflection of a dark mirror.

Oleg handed me the book and I read a few lines to myself while he silently smoked. I had the feeling somehow that the lines were going through Oleg’s head, learnt by heart, at the same time as I read them.

I saw what a forcible argument a simple slap could be for an intellectual.

I saw an isolation cell carved out in rock, and spent one night in it myself.

I learnt to ‘plan’ one day ahead, no further.

I learnt that passing from a prisoner condition to civilian is very hard, and nearly impossible without a long adaptation period.

That a writer must be a stranger in the subjects he describes. And if he knows the matter well, he will write in such a way that no one would understand him.

But you know, said Oleg after a while, a lot of men met their best friends there, in the camps. They laughed in there, Pasha. They had the odd day that wasn’t so bad. They heard and read and wrote poems in there. For some it was the only place that was real. The true state of things—they could see it there. In the cities, in the supposedly free places, the appearance of things belied the reality they knew.

Thinking of all those physicists mining coal in Magadan, the poets and teachers digging canals, the engineers, doctors, young parents buried in unknown, unmarked mass graves with a single, neat, horrific hole in their skulls, you wonder what might have been. You wonder what today could have been, and at certain times you imagine in some fantastical way that it is actually occurring, our other Russia, somewhere else. As though that essence lives on elsewhere, away from us.

I read Shalamov so much, said Oleg, that I began to lose the sense of the words. As if they could not speak anymore. Rather than see my father there, I had the sense that I was returning to the same story, with a character that never changes and scenes that remain static. I have bought countless copies of Kolyma Tales over the years, since I threw the book away so many times: thrown into Moskva River, onto railway lines, left at bus stops, at the foot of trees in Alexander Garden. Poor Shalamov, he’s strewn all over the city. But I needed desperately to be separated from words. They had given me all that they could.

Perhaps you needed to write your own, I said.

I think that’s true, Pasha. Though I’m no writer, not like you. I think of my maps as my books. They are my biography, and my father’s.

Oleg and I returned to Moscow at the end of June. As the train took us closer and closer to the city, I was thinking of Oleg, of his father and my own father. It was hard to take in the scale of things—all those statistics and articles that came out with the freedom of glasnost . All the memory that returned. I could see why Oleg would need to throw the Shalamov book away at times, when words could only take him so far. But then he’d buy a copy again and again. Perhaps we return to words because a human needs their experience reflected somewhere. We return to art because it reflects our incompleteness; true art is full of gaps, and so we need it again and again, because that is how we live and remember.

I remembered a conversation with Anya, more like an argument—one of those you revel in having, passionate, as though it’s taking you somewhere, making you a better person—about how to adequately represent the scale of mass murder committed in the name of the Soviet Union. She maintained that there weren’t enough statistics being published. I said numbers destroyed faces. She said people should be confronted with those numbers, made to count them until nauseous. I said to recite numbers was like asking questions about the meaning of it all—those things can’t be done because they attempt to impose order on the incomprehensible. Maybe it was true that numbers and questions were both the essence of the past and its blinder. I agreed with the poets in the thirties who banned questions among their group—you can’t grant the system the dignity of attempted explanations. There was no logic to it. I swore to her that if I ever wrote a book about it all, I’d make a point of there being not a single question mark in the entire work.

In St Petersburg I was still drifting in that sort of halfway place, living in a city different to the one my mind walked through so often. In the parks the oak and lime branches shuddered, red hearts and gold coins, in a breeze that whispered winter. A few fell. By October the ground was covered.

I met up with Sonya early one morning in the city. She was holding a bunch of flowers. We went to a cafe and then I walked her to the stairs of a church nearby. A few women in headscarves passed us on their way inside. Sonya was on her way to her mother’s, she said, holding the flowers up as if to show me. But she wanted to make a quick visit to the church first.

Her blonde hair reminded me of Anya—or Anya as I knew her, because I didn’t know what she looked like anymore.

I looked at Sonya for a long moment, until she asked me if everything was all right. She said I seemed preoccupied. I looked at this woman as she tucked her blonde hair under a headscarf, looked at her slightly glassy eyes fringed with thick lashes. I wondered whether I hadn’t let Sonya be her own woman in my mind. As though I’d only seen her as someone who wasn’t Anya.

I was always one who let memory plague a present moment. I wondered whether I was just repeating old feelings of hopelessness, revisiting prior loss. A lack of peace. It was as though there was a building where we once lived together, Anya and I, and that building was a tower still standing, even though we weren’t in it. And I was walking by it every day, throwing glances at it, in my mind taking Sonya into it, too. Most of us can only draw a city based on the structures we’ve seen before.