Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

I said to Sonya that I needed to go to Moscow for a while. I wasn’t sure how long I’d be there.

Sometimes, I said, sometimes I look at a clock and time means nothing to me. And it’s the same with a word, such as a station sign on the walls of the subway. There’s a moment, I’m not sure how long, one of those never-ending seconds, and whichever hour it is or whatever station I’m in, the words and numbers have no meaning. Then I think of somewhere I’m supposed to be or the next thing I have to do. I cling to those things, and I find myself again. But lately I feel less and less that there are those things to do or places to be.

You’ll find them, she said, reaching out to tuck strands of hair behind my ear. You’ve maybe just forgotten where you are. We sometimes forget why we’re doing things or what we care about. You won’t disappear just yet. And when you come back from Moscow, we’ll go to the dacha .

I nodded. Her words had a simple strength, something very real about them. I waited outside while Sonya was in the church.

Then she emerged, and we parted ways with a kiss. As I stood watching her go, she turned and smiled and held up the flowers, as if to show me again. I watched her, Sonya in her belted blue dress, cream stockings and white tennis shoes, walk away from me, wait at the traffic lights, cross the street and go down the escalator to the metro. As I turned and left I heard airy choir voices call out behind me, faint as dissolving smoke, high in the air.

I was finding it hard to stop thinking about things that couldn’t happen anymore, all those futures not possible, and of the things I still didn’t know about the past. Maybe, I thought, I was one of those former people , and in the world here, the present, I was not really a person at all.

That afternoon I bought a ticket for the overnight sleeper train leaving for Moscow the following evening. A journey of five hours, though in other measures it was a trip to a place very distant, years away from me. I’d heard it said that you should never go to the places in the most beautiful of paintings, or in the books you knew well, for it would destroy with the real the effect of the art. Moscow had for me become a kind of loved painting, a set piece, a handful of photographs. But I was never at peace and could not stop sifting through those photographs.

I went home late in the afternoon. I checked the answering machine but there was only a message from my boss; nothing from the neighbour. I sat writing at my desk, writing down the neighbour’s story and then returning to the Moscow years again. By evening I’d had more beers than I could remember. It was the kind of drinking that turns you inwards, that amplifies loneliness. When thoughts seem acute but then the world seems blurry.

The next evening, I was ready. The train was due to leave at five to midnight. Buses to the metro were few at night, so I walked through the dark to the station. Even the dogs were quiet. I lit a cigarette.

Nobody else boarded the metro at Primorskaya station. I took out the notebook in which I’d been recording the trip I’d taken with Oleg. Past expectation seemed to blend with present.

In 1989, Oleg and I had taken the Red Arrow train. I’d never been to St Petersburg before, but it was called Leningrad then anyway. Names were false certainties, just markers made.

In 1989, the camps had awaited me, too, up in the islands of the north.

And on my return, Anya was waiting for me back in Moscow, in a future I didn’t yet know.

Ten years later, and I was again taking the Red Arrow. Only Moscow was waiting. But for a minute a phantom feeling, one of those ghostly birds that pass the cheek, convinced me that someone, Anya or my mother, was waiting too.

Leafing through my notebook in the lonely fluorescent glow of the metro, my attempt at re-creating those moments, the 1989 trip, the weeks on Solovetsky, as if I didn’t know what came next, seemed absurd to me.

The train arrived at Mayakovsky station. There were no direct metros so I walked for twenty minutes to Moscow station, where trains left for that city; a station so sure of the future.

Perhaps, at the height of creativity, one is also verging on a total abandonment of art. And maybe, when a political system seems strong, it is a step away from fallen. And when the conditions around love change, that is also maybe the start of its loss.

June 1989, spring broke over into summer. Seeing Anya was like we were beginning again. Summer again, love again. Rather than a different year, the season felt like a return to the old. The Arbat continued to contain an ever-shifting crowd, the punks and dancers, the families and ice-cream vendors. The parks were bright green again.

I returned to work at the library. Anya was studying for her candidate’s dissertation in philosophy. Yura got a job at Moscow State University, not a proper academic position but something like a tutor or assistant. He was warier now about writing for journals or newspapers, as he’d likely lose his job if he did. Sukhanov held an exhibition of his paintings in a small gallery, a second-floor room of an old kommunalka apartment in Tverskoy District. We still went to see him and Lena every weekend. We went to concerts held in apartments and basements. We went to movies. Ilya had a girlfriend, briefly, who played bass in a punk band; she was from Leningrad but squatted in a friend’s apartment because on her internal passport she wasn’t registered to live in Moscow. Ilya still worked for the stock delivery driver, but it bored him.

When I went to the Frunzenskaya apartment, Yevgenia Fyodorovna seemed to avoid eye contact with Anya, who showed an equal coldness to her mother. But I was struck not by the distance between Anya and her mother—I knew they’d long argued—so much as the transformation in her father. Mikhail Sergeyevich looked far older than when I’d left in the spring. I knew there had been family disagreements about Anya’s writing, her ventures into activism. But more than anything, Yevgenia Fyodorovna looked very wary. Anya had told me about what she saw as the sometimes-strange behaviour of her parents. How any time they stayed away from home, her mother insisted that Anya sleep in the room furthest from the front door, and how her father had been severe to the point of madness about Anya’s schooling, particularly anything to do with history or social studies. If she didn’t feel like reading something or called a topic boring, he would berate her for it. Their upbringings have warped them, Anya had said, almost scathingly.

After I returned from Solovetsky, we never really spoke about our idea of writing together. Anya loved her job at the TV station and said that she sometimes thought she could stay in the Soviet Union and be happy. We even spoke about every Soviet couple’s dream of having our own place, a room and a half somewhere that was just our own. It was more of a laughing dream, though, with the wait for any apartment likely to be a decade.

Still, even if we weren’t to write the stories of our fathers together, I wanted to continue my conversations with Mikhail Sergeyevich. I felt a connection with him that I couldn’t really explain. It was as though a link existed between him and my own father, and I couldn’t stop trying to find a pattern, to join things together somehow. It could simply have been that Mikhail Sergeyevich knew what it was like inside those hospitals that often occupied my thoughts.