Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

My life in Moscow, layered like stacked slides of an old magic lantern. And I could see a little of each transparent slide through the others, somehow making the whole.

I hitched my rucksack straps over both shoulders. Though I zipped my coat against the wind, the chill stayed inside for a while. I lit a cigarette and walked across the square. The old Rossiya Cinema which had stood behind Pushkin’s statue was now a casino. It looked both dark and festive, neon and cold, as the coloured lights shone beneath the sun. A young couple walked past me, the girl holding a single rose. Three or four young guys sailed by me on skateboards with wheels softly growling. The boys held out their arms, graceful, the unzipped sides of their baggy hooded sweaters spread like the wings of large birds.

I walked over and stood at the statue. Pushkin had one hand at his chest, half tucked into his jacket, as if thinking or feeling deeply, though Tolstoy said he looked like a footman about to announce dinner. At the foot of the statue was his poem ‘The Monument’.

Perhaps it was from Pushkin’s words, glinting gold in the summer, frosted over in the winter, in the background of so many days in the square, that I absorbed the idea that literature could be a kind of memorial.

Come on, Pasha, it’s time to go to Pushkin’s.

It was winter, I was woken by the ringing of the telephone just after midnight. It was Anya and her voice was thick with tears.

Mikhail Sergeyevich took his own life in February 1991. Anya came over very early the next morning, and she and I sat on the divan in the living room, my mother across from us in a single wooden chair, silent and grave. I felt as though I was holding the dying; sometimes Anya cried, but mostly she was still as if frozen.

I pulled the yellow crocheted rug that had been on our divan for so many years over Anya’s knees. When I tried to comfort her, with one arm around her body, the palm of the other hand at the back of her head, I had a strange feeling, like the echo in me of a moment from very long ago, a moment still resonating, trying to come to an end: I was a boy, my palm rested on my mother’s shoulder. I couldn’t see her face or remember her expression, but I knew she was pained. Her sadness was linked to a quiet terror for me. And so maybe that was why I had a horrible feeling, when I held Anya, that some grievous crime was behind her sadness. It was a strange thing to feel, but then again if that was my first grief, watching my mother cry, then perhaps I would forever circle back to it.

Mikhail Sergeyevich’s suicide was a question never answered. For a while—the first few months after, at least—I assumed it was something that would come up, at some later date. I took it for granted that Anya would one day be ready to speak to me about it, or that the history of his illness would one day be unearthed. But it was like a constantly missed moment; I never asked, she never told.

We stopped mentioning anything to do with the psychiatric repressions or psychiatric hospitals, especially our now distant plans to write together. And because those topics were connected to our artistic and activist hopes, those too seemed to be muted by the cover of silence we pulled down, together and between us, after her father died.

In the next months, fraught and fractured, I no longer saw the expectant white canvas of glasnost and the eighties, but rather a kind of murky pool we had to wade through, unsure. After years of stagnated stability, the leadership of the country, things going on up there , seemed shaky. It was exciting but at the same time we weren’t used to such uncertainty.

Anya would sometimes raise her shoulders in a stiff shrug and say, bitterly, that she couldn’t believe she was still in the country. I was so sure about leaving before, she said on our way to a concert one night. We were walking through the city on dusk and she spoke ahead as if to the streets and sky. I wondered if she regretted staying with me; maybe she saw me as the cause of her inaction.

On the anniversary of Viktor Tsoi’s death, August 1991, we went back to the wall and lit our cigarettes again. It was as if we were mourning our own lives, or that’s how it felt to me then; how it feels when you’re young and you learn those first pangs of loss for things that haven’t happened. In horror you realise that it doesn’t take long for you to transform into a person with regrets. People can fall from the heady precipice of nascent art, feeling the ashy death of burnt-out desire.

A few weeks later, I was sitting in the apartment, on the divan, watching TV. I changed from one channel to another, the state news, and saw a single white figure, a woman, spinning on a black surface like a dove in the night. It was unspoken knowledge that when something was happening in the country that they, up there, didn’t want us to know about or didn’t yet know how to present to us, the news stations would abruptly broadcast ballet instead of news. And so as I sat on the divan in the living room that August and saw Swan Lake , I knew something was up.

That night, Ilya called me.

Something’s up, he said.

I know. I saw the ballet dancer.

We went to the city centre. One of Ilya’s friends had called and said things were happening in Dzerzhinsky Square: Anya, Ilya, Sukhanov, Yura and I were there, but not Lena. It was madness. Protestors everywhere, shouting, jostling crowds. There had been a failed coup against Gorbachev, started by devout Communists horrified at the changes wrought by glasnost and perestroika , by openness and change.

That uncertainty from above seemed to shake people into seeing a true alternative: the end of Communism. Felix Dzerzhinsky’s statue had stood over the square in front of the Lubyanka building since 1958. He, founder of the Cheka, was hauled by a crane to the ground that night, after the failed coup.

The square was floodlit by the lights of surrounding buildings—or maybe they were car headlights from afar. I looked at the faces of my friends in the ill gloom. Anya had her arms crossed, a cigarette in one hand resting on her elbow, her mouth a straight line of wariness, her blonde hair tinged a strange green-gold. Yura had his hands in his pockets, his glasses reflected white dots, he moved his head slowly as if searching for something. Sukhanov, in his denim vest and jeans but without Lena at his side, Ilya with his gelled hair and leather jacket—both stood smoking and staring, their eyes creased a little by unasked questions, and it made them both look older than their twenty-seven years.

The light shed a green glow over Dzerzhinsky’s figure. The rope around his neck was like a coiled snake. I later saw on TV similar scenes across the Soviet Union as other statues—Lenin, Stalin, heroic workers—were hauled down. It was an eerie sight, to watch the way that stone giant, Iron Felix as they called him, did not crash to the ground nor break into pieces, but instead glided on the flight of his noose with an ethereal, birdlike grace; not a hangman’s dance but a spectral hovering, stone face high in the air as though looking ahead to his next destination. I didn’t want to get too close. It felt unfamiliar to me; I was used to protest waged by words, not barricades and ropes. A few people ran over to the statue and scrawled graffiti on him: antichrist—bloody executioner—shit in a leather coat .