Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

And so I didn’t see her parents for a while, either, though I often thought of Mikhail Sergeyevich. He was, like Oleg, someone older for me to look up to and think aloud with. The spring passed and summer arrived, and it felt far removed from the summer of 1988. A feeling of muteness crept into me, like a growing bleak landscape. I wasn’t sure where to look anymore for the things that inspired me. Probably it was the first fraught realisation I had that I was so attached to that group, to Anya, for my own meaning, and without them I was just a step away from feeling like nothing at all.

Then one night Anya called me. She was crying.

He’s dead, she said. He died. He’s gone. Tsoi is dead.

Our musical hero, Viktor Tsoi, had died in a car accident. He was driving alone, on his way home to his wife and son after a tour, and was thought to have fallen asleep at the wheel.

Come over, I said. I was surprised that my voice sounded as it always did: low, quiet, steady, without any hint of the absolute need I was sure would saturate it.

She arrived less than an hour later. I hadn’t seen her in a few months. For reasons neither of us really understood, the death of Tsoi drew us together. As if we were looking back at what his loss represented—the loss of our generation’s voice—and we wanted to preserve something of it by salvaging whatever was left of us. We each had a glass of something, probably brandy, and then went to bed and had silent and sad and fast sex. I held her and stayed inside her for a long time, and then we just lay there, and at some point fell asleep.

The night Tsoi died, someone started a memorial wall on the corner of the Arbat and Krivoarbatsky Lane. Anything could be a memorial, it seemed, once we made a mark, inscribed pain into a thing. We went to the wall: Anya, me, Ilya, Sukhanov, Lena, Yura. It had been so long since we’d all been anywhere together. I kept glancing at Anya, thinking of the night; her presence beside me again made every place feel as though it contained more. Other people sat or lay down nearby, some murmuring, most just staring or sleeping. We each lit a cigarette, pressed them against the wall, each at a slightly different time, till the fags were bent in half, then we left them on a plate put there by someone before us. The thin drifts of smoke joined one another until each shaky grey thread was indistinguishable from the next. Then we sat down, closer to each other than usual, quiet, the girls crying soundlessly, and we let our offerings burn their ends.

It was that summer, or maybe once autumn started, that Sukhanov and Lena started having troubles, and we didn’t go there so often. At first we would drink in the park, or have quieter nights at the apartments of others we didn’t know so well. But losing that place, we lost some spirit. A time passed after which I knew we would never go back there. Sukhanov wasn’t painting much anymore, he said. I think I’m losing the heat, he said. His wavy blonde hair looked ragged somehow, his eyes bleary. He said he still tried to paint sometimes after work, but the effort was wearing him down. It made me feel stranded in a way hard to describe, to think that he, Sukhanov, artist of colour, child of Kandinsky, could in some way feel the same slow spiral as me.

In October 1990, the memorial stone was finally laid in Dzerzhinsky Square. I walked through the city with Ilya—none of the others wanted to come, or maybe we didn’t ask them—among a long chain of people. Gathering darkness tinted the sky dark blue, towards night. Candlelight glowed stronger in its wake, while incense hovered, invisible, in the air. We had gathered first at Sretenskaya Gate, and then proceeded down Dzerzhinsky Street. Each person held a candle, some also a photo of a lost relative, or banners bearing the names of labour camps—Karlag, Bamlag, Alzhir—and walked to the square. A woman read out names, and after each one the word shot followed with the strange resonance of an echo from a moment that had taken place much earlier, perhaps even before our births. It also felt as though, with her voice, she was in some way re-enacting the shots that needed an honest witness.

On reaching the square, thousands pressed towards the memorial stone brought from the Solovetsky Islands. Something in the quality of the near-silence, disturbed only by murmurs and footsteps or the light wind, created the impression of a funeral. The stone was the body laid to rest in the open, cushioned by the mass of red flowers falling one on top of the other. The statue of Dzerzhinsky, the grandfather of the KGB, was an unwelcome and almost spectral presence in the square.

It was like a slow process of mourning in those years. Glasnost had taken us up, hardened our hopes to gold. We knew what we wanted—memory and suffering recognised, real change—but what to do with such memory once it is unrepressed, that was the uncharted course, the unanswerable question.

In the winter of 1990, McDonald’s appeared in Pushkin Square. Enormous queues, ridiculous queues, persisted weeks beyond the restaurant’s opening, more devout even than the lines to see Lenin in the Kremlin mausoleum. The square seemed to absorb it so quickly: the facade, MCDONALD’S in thick backlit letters, glowed boldly as night came. The restaurant seemed dirtied overnight, the remnants of meals on the tables looked withered; sagging napkins, tall drink cups tipped over.

We had an argument, Anya and I, when we went to it. Everyone was going to try the food and see what it was like, so we decided to go as well. We stood outside, waiting, just as we had in the long lines we’d grown up with outside grocery or clothes stores elsewhere in the city.

There’s your West, I said to her, half joking. You don’t need to go now.

I knew by then that she was going, that we were in a vague relationship, like the twilight of togetherness.

You’re not even giving the country a chance, I went on bitterly. Have some faith.

I want to go. I want change.

At night we were calmer; we seemed to thrive in darkness.

I wouldn’t mind talking to your father again, I said as we lay in bed one night. I hate that I never did anything with all the notes I made, all the things he told me and the research we did.

Anya was very still, and I wondered if she was sick of me talking about her family, about the past, and that old plan we had of writing something together.

You can talk to him, she said. But you can call him yourself to arrange it. I don’t want my mother using this as yet another thing to hassle me about.

When I called him the next morning, Mikhail Sergeyevich asked whether we could walk through the city instead of the usual parks. And so we met at Frunzenskaya Embankment and walked through a few streets, fairly quiet, and eventually reached Kotelnicheskaya Embankment.

Ah yes, he said, sighing in a sad sort of way. Yes, these huge buildings. I’ve kept away from these for a long while.

He meant the Stalinskie Vysotki, Stalin’s skyscrapers; the Seven Sisters, they were called. White-and-cream monstrosities, like disproportionate versions of other 1930s buildings—straight lines, towers, countless windows.

They’re just cruelly enormous, he said. I used to walk here a lot, as a young teacher. Every weekend, first thing in the morning. I loved that grey time which seemed like no time, at the start of a day, when you know that nothing has happened yet.