Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

He turned to me. I feel as if the weight of things is catching up with me, Pasha. I don’t know which has come first, really. Whether my talking has begun because of glasnost or whether I helped start glasnost itself by talking about the past.

He shook his head in a strange, irritated way that I wasn’t used to.

A couple of years ago, when you first met my Anna Mikhailovna, I was very disturbed to hear that the history exams had been cancelled in schools. It reminded me of the Secret Speech that Khrushchev made back in fifty-six. Suddenly he admitted Stalin did wrong. Suddenly they want us teachers to explain the unexplainable, answer unanswerable questions. I was sure I’d freeze in front of my class of students. I had no idea what would happen in there, that dreadful classroom. I wondered, at the time, whether I could explain things to my students by likening that past, the Stalin years, to a cut—a single injury, which could heal, which could be overcome. That was what the newspapers and Party statements at the time seemed to encourage. But I felt I couldn’t say that. It seemed more honest, more true, to call that past a disease. Something that spreads to others, which can be passed between families and colleagues and generations. I can tell you, Pasha, that it kept me up at night, the worry of how to get things right; the question of how to tell the right story. My desk at home—covered in all sorts of papers and books, history textbooks and newspapers, novels and memoirs. Piles of notes, but no matter how often I ordered them the piles seemed to sneak themselves back into a hideous mess overnight.

What a mess, he said, sounding irritated. What a horrible mess it was. Someone needs to set this right, I told Yevgenia at the time. I felt as though nobody in this godforsaken place would tell the story right. I was difficult, then, said Mikhail Sergeyevich, glancing once at me. And I feel like that time—like that certain time in my life is a place to which I have recently returned.

I had a bad fall then, Mikhail Sergeyevich said a moment later, and his voice went strangely dreamy, even wistful. In 1988. Tripped on the escalator at Kirov station. My body was a bit off then, and I lost my balance. There I was… lying on my back at the foot of the escalator. I just stared upwards for a while, at those sharp silver steps coming towards me, and then at the people who began to glide down too. So still, they were. So still.

My father, he said abruptly, my father slept with a gun beside his bed. He was close to the power. You don’t want to be too close to the sun, Pasha, or it’ll burn you. He came out of the 1930s, the Purge years, alive, rose up in the forties, working with Kaganovich here in Moscow, as I’ve told you, helping to direct the construction of the Moscow metro and the collectivisation campaign in the provinces and Ukraine. There was a bad purge over in Leningrad at the end of the forties. Lots of top officials killed. It scared my mother no end. No matter how loyal you were, no matter how loyal you felt inside , death could come for you anytime. Fear was a constant presence, a state of being , Pasha. A constant background sound, like a high-pitched violin note.

I listened but I felt powerless to help him and wasn’t sure what to say. It was as though so many old moments, the night-time of his thoughts, were returning. His present was punishing him now but began so long ago.

From Leningrad station in Moscow I walked to the metro at nearby Komsomolskaya. It was early in the morning, October 1999. A few men and women in business clothes sat or stood in the carriage. A couple of elderly people held bags or baskets for shopping. The voiceover at each station called out names so familiar to me. Krasny Vorota , it said, Krasny Vorota . And then, Kuznetsky Most. I listened so carefully, as though it was the voice of all meaning. Kuznetsky Most . I didn’t want to go straight to the empty apartment, so I changed at Kuznetsky and then got out at Tverskaya.

At the top of the escalators I met a light wind, clear sun. It was early autumn when summer seemed close but then so did winter. The lime tree leaves were yellow on Tverskoy Boulevard and the wind was cold. At the end of the boulevard was Pushkin Square, where my mother took me as a boy. In summer I’d see girls with orange or red umbrellas, white socks to their knees and braids down their front like golden knots. I would devour an ice cream, pure white, from the round-bellied man in a navy-blue apron, whose cart stood near the Pushkinskaya metro. In the winter, I’d see the old ladies in headscarves walking together, hooked at the elbows, and through the fog the curved iron arms of streetlamps holding up the light. I’d hold on to the hem of my mother’s coat so I wouldn’t slip on the red bricks, a crimson ice lake. Pushkin himself would be cloaked in snow. I’d hold the iron chains around his statue and stare up at his tall figure. I had to brush away the snow, and the chains were cold. Then it was summer again and in my hands the coils were warm, and as we walked on, my sweaty palms would smell of rubbed kopek coins. I was sure that Pushkin himself felt the seasons.

When I was a young boy, my mother taught me to memorise poems. She spoke often about the Poets who lived and died for words under Stalin. It’s important to remember their words, Pasha . In my mind I saw those Poets as tall figures with long cloaks and sad eyes and white hands gripping their pens. Like a silent citadel they stood in the back of my mind while I heard their poems, a dead choir who somehow still sang.

I sat beside my mother on our sagging divan and she coaxed the words from her memory to mine. She never wrote the poems down. At the height of Stalin’s Terror years, she told me, the Poets could not risk the ink drying on their pages and those pages being found. They would memorise each other’s works, and in that way the poems moved from one person to another. And if at rare times they did put words to paper, the lines were to be read in the moment and then burnt in the stove. From ink to ash to memory.

During glasnost , a group of activists led by Lev Kopelev worked on drafting a constitution for the Soviet Union, to take to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989. Oleg called that constitution the new poetry. From my earliest years I learnt that language was a thing to both love and fear.

From Pushkin’s my mother and I would sometimes take a white-and-red tram, or a blue bus, along the boulevard near Red Square. As cars flew past, I felt as if we might have been aboard a ship, sailing the concrete expanse. I’d never seen the ocean. In the winter, sometimes the sun couldn’t rise. Streetlights and windows in the distance looked like dusty lamplight. We might stand in a queue for a while, edging our way up to the women in striped dresses, white aprons and hats who would weigh potatoes on enormous scales. If we saw a street seller with slabs of meat in deep silver trays, my mother would inspect the quality, and sometimes she would take home a piece.

I couldn’t see my father in those memories. It was a strange thing. As though because he was in my life for so little of it, he faded even from the memories he was actually in. The precise years of those images in the square, I couldn’t say; 1968, perhaps 1970.

And then, years later, the square with Pushkin’s statue was a place to meet Ilya and Yura, to meet Anya, to read poetry in circles or listen to Billy Bragg on black-market Walkmans. Let’s meet at Pushkin’s. Pushkin’s at midday. Always there were people waiting, reading a book, savouring a cigarette, always someone waiting for another. In spring and summer the fountains soared, long veils of white water hanging in the air. Groups of us, students dancing, awkward and in love in the open sun.