Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

We didn’t meet again until the autumn. Anya said that his health hadn’t been good for a few months, so he wasn’t up to going out during the summer months after I returned. When we finally did meet, we walked in one of the parks, as we had the previous year, and then once again sat on a bench.

Mikhail Sergeyevich spoke about the mass-gravesite discoveries. That year it had felt as though we were witnessing a re-emergence of the dead. A branch of the Memorial Society in Novosibirsk sent an open letter to Ligachev at the Politburo. He’d been Party leader of the Novosibirsk region in 1979, when the banks of the Ob River burst and the torrential waters flooded the site of a former prison of the NKVD, the secret police, releasing from the earth a mass of mummified corpses. It was all hushed up at the time, the bodies reburied. The letter from the Memorial Society called for those responsible for the cover-up to be held to account.

Burial sites were being uncovered everywhere. A mass grave on a building site at the Rutchenko fields in Donetsk province. On Golden Mountain near Chelyabinsk they found the remnants of bullet-pierced skulls. Diggers in a sand quarry in Poltava in Ukraine found another site filled with the unknown dead. It was as though they were all coming back, that they knew glasnost had arrived.

I feel an almost incomprehensible horror, said Mikhail Sergeyevich. It seems there is so much work to do—the work of memory, if there’s such a thing. Your work, the writing you and Anya want to do, it is a good thing.

I told him how, in the past year, it had been my hope to contribute in some way, to record from my outsider’s view, as a child of dissidents, what I knew, what I’d learnt. But, I confessed, I wasn’t getting anywhere.

He nodded. You’re still young, Pasha; there’s still time. You feel empty, sometimes, when you’re young.

I nodded, looking down at my knees.

I’ve long felt a similar sensation of emptiness, he continued. Feeling a void, I suppose it’s kind of a paradox—it’s not something you can comprehend other than through knowledge of an absence. I can attest that I’m here, as a man, with a body right now sitting on this seat, but I cannot say I am sure what I’m made up of—what is going on inside. Whether, by virtue of the system I grew up under, the very household in which I was raised, my mind has been conditioned. That’s how the Marxists would have it, in any case. Material being determines consciousness.

We sat in silence for a while, both looking ahead, over a path and to a view of trees, a few people walking through them and near us. I had the sense that Mikhail Sergeyevich and I were preoccupied with similar questions: whether we were products of our upbringing—for me, whether I really could carry on the work, preserve the life, of the apartment of my childhood; for him, whether he could estrange himself from his upbringing and still know who he was. Unsure if our mental lives really came from within us or outside, whether the things we did because of those thoughts were even under our control, we were perhaps both haunted by causation.

I think there’s something more, I said, as much to myself as to Mikhail Sergeyevich, more than just conditions that make us think things. Well, I hope there’s more. I look at the apartment I grew up in, and I think that it was the other way around— thoughts made that apartment. Our inner life, consciousness or whatever, made the apartment a place where that manipulated and censored world couldn’t get in.

Mikhail Sergeyevich gave a slight smile. I certainly hope there’s some truth in that, Pasha, he said. Because otherwise it’s too tempting for us to destroy our bodies to protect our minds from further distortion.

I looked down again at my knees, not sure what to say. We sat there, in the silence of our separate thoughts. Afternoon sun elongated our shadows and the air began to cool.

One freezing winter morning I returned home from somewhere—maybe Anya’s, maybe a night out with Ilya—and saw my mother sitting at the kitchen table, silent tears racing down her face. I’d never seen my mother cry before, not about anything.

It was 15 December 1989, and Andrei Sakharov—dissident activist hero—had died the night before, died at his desk, at which he’d been writing a memorandum to take to parliament the following day.

I went over to my mother and put a palm on her back, ran my hand over her spine, like I used to as a boy when she’d sit there at the table, working at the typewriter. Her black hair, streaked with a little grey, was tied in a loose bun, a few wisps around her ears. She nodded as if in thanks, stood up, poured a glass of brandy, poured me one too. We drank and her tears stopped.

It feels like my whole generation has died, Pasha, not just poor Sakharov.

New Year arrived, 1990. Anya was staying at our apartment more and more. She and my mother got along well—better than what I’d heard from friends about their girls and mothers. Anya was still studying, I was still working at the library, and so our days were long.

Anya’s research was moving in a different direction, she said. Lately she had been researching the life of the first female psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas-Salomé. She had mentioned her the first night we met, I remembered. That had been almost two years ago.

As we loved to do, we just lay on the divan talking, smoking and thinking together. Sometimes my mother would sit across from us, on a chair she brought in from the kitchen. My mother said she missed the long conversations around the kitchen table. Gatherings were still sometimes held at our apartment or the apartments of other dissidents, but there was a different structure to things now—public discussions and lectures, meetings held in halls and offices in the city. It wasn’t a negative change, my mother said, it was just different.

I think the idea of the subconscious is important, Anya was saying, but I think we’re closer to it than people realise—we just don’t tell others about that inner life. My mother, you know, she lives with this whole world of Stalinism in her still. This ongoing state of fear. It’s conditioned her to think a certain way. It’s not that she just keeps thinking about the past; to me it seems like she is still living those moments.

Then Anya mentioned how she would prefer to study those ideas abroad, travel to the places where Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé had been.

We both were quiet; a pause that held unsaid things. Often we used Anya’s hypothetical journeying out of Russia as fuel for our thoughts, our conversations. It had become very abstract to me; more of an opinion of hers than a plan.

One day in the spring we were sharing a meal—Anya, my mother and I. My mother had left the room for a moment—maybe to go to the bathroom or the living room. The radio murmured in the background and I could see a square of blue sky through the window.

I’ve applied for an exit visa, said Anya, looking straight at me for a moment and then back at her plate. She pulled at her thin cardigan as though securing it over her.

Anya and I broke up for a while. She said she just didn’t believe in the idea of love being transcendent, of it being something more powerful than other desires. She could feel love for me, she said, and at the same time feel fine about being alone—making her own path, as she often called it. It was as if she felt a stronger love for the things she couldn’t have: the places she had never been and the unattainable fullness of art. Of course, such a maddening paradox just makes the one left behind, made me, feel more drawn to the thing that was constantly leaving me. For it always felt, in some way, like a circular, never-ending sort of loss.