Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

And across the concrete sea, at the edge of the square, as though washed ashore, was the Solovetsky Stone, resting low in the view of the Lubyanka building.

Things spiralled from there. The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. We now lived in the Russian Federation.

Iate lunch at a cheap bistro and then kept walking. Like St Petersburg, Moscow was now full of small chain restaurants. A lot of the old kommunalki apartment blocks had been knocked down. Tall, modern buildings, with countless reflective sheets of grey glass, stood in their place.

I went to Gorky Park. It was barely recognisable. I was a stranger. The place had become so dirty, full of fast food stalls. The carnival rides looked worn out, broken or old. There were people with wild animals—a crocodile, a puma, and I thought I even saw a woman holding a young lion. A thin old babushka with a bent back saw me gazing at the zoo, the old rides, and muttered to me, It’s like a madhouse, nowadays.

I thought of my meetings with Mikhail Sergeyevich in the same park, the conversations about our fathers and the past, about Moscow and all that was beneath the city. I looked up to the trees. In the wind, their beseeching twigs scratched the sky.

Dzerzhinsky’s statue, a ghost of stone, now stood in the park. That same statue I had watched soar down, with the frightening silence of heavy stone falling, from his height in Dzerzhinsky Square—soon to be renamed Lubyanka Square—in 1991. It was full of statues, that graveyard of memorials, full of other former leaders, former Soviets, now toppled and probably cracked in places, with a missing limb or crushed cheek but otherwise intact, while some were stunted half-bodies removed from their plinths. All lying or standing together in apparent repose.

Looking at those malformed statues, I told myself that if I could make some kind of shape out of the memories of the men and women of my life—Mikhail Sergeyevich and Yevgenia Fyodorovna, Vera Sergeyevna and the neighbour, my parents and friends, Oleg and Marya—then somehow, impossibly, the broken past could be given form. Not put back together so much as refashioned into a kind of warped, fragmented sculpture. But nonetheless it would be something that I could hold, at least in my mind. I linked all things—Anya leaving, our group drifting away from one another, Mikhail Sergeyevich’s suicide—with this lack of a form, our collective failure to make art out of what had happened. We didn’t make what we set out to create. None of us did.

I was ready to cry out for all that had happened, but at the same time I felt that my eyes, my cheeks, my face had slowly hardened just as concrete sets. My numb chest hid a heart gone grey, as if the sadness, too old now, couldn’t come out in the usual way.

I thought of men and women moved to take their own life in old age, those who are not far themselves from a natural death, but who nevertheless decide to take their leave by their own hand. And in thoughts I would probably not have shared with anyone, for they seemed to ask unforgivable questions, I wondered whether in those cases the long road towards the final act, sometimes the years and years of consideration, as in the case of Mikhail Sergeyevich, in some unspeakable way made the act intelligible. The death which was to come was perhaps always inside them, attached to memories repressed and to a past that was latent, due to arise at some future time. And when that death did rise up inside them, the confrontation with all that was dormant proved too overwhelming for a single mind to comprehend. But then I thought they perhaps failed to see the impermanence of death. With the death of one, countless others then carried it inside them, the dead lingering and emerging at certain times, like the stars which at times are not visible yet never disappear.

If I died now, as a thirty-five-year-old man in Moscow, I supposed certain important memories would die with me. I wasn’t ready to kill myself, I just felt indifferent about death. It made me wonder about the value of a thought. Those men—my father, Anya’s father—thought about something to the point that they died because of it. Their minds had thoughts that came from beliefs that came from somewhere else, or maybe from them. They had let their bodies die because of their thoughts. And if nobody knew that, those thoughts might as well be the ash of the names once written on paper around the kitchen table of my childhood. Ash to memory to oblivion.

I had the sense of those other things being in me—the shot that might or might not have killed the neighbour’s father, and the weight of never knowing, which was itself like a well-lodged bullet; the camps where Oleg and his father sat, and the moments of their return, when they started again as though newly born from the grave. The shiny-floored asylum rooms, the white-sheeted beds where my father, Marya, Mikhail Sergeyevich were confined. I felt stuck at the moment all those things happened. To go forwards left them behind; to go back only made them happen again and again.

I thought to myself that we are all merely fractured creatures, forever wanting, always in search of our story. Our memories joined with every missed moment and unspoken utterance, and together those things lived in us as did the people we once were. Every little failure, the things never done and the memories forgotten, they too are upon the maps we draw, the maps we are.

After the fall, life became less understandable. We’d lost our story, our cause, after 1991, as though the spinning white ballet dancer on the black TV screen a few months earlier was a pointer on the dark compass of our lives.

I didn’t want to miss the Soviet Union and hated feeling nostalgic for the excitement and hope felt behind the bars of Communism. But when I was a boy, a teenager, a twenty-year-old, real life for me existed between the lines, in the novels and poems given to me by paper and voice, in the line I followed within the walls of our apartment near Arbatskaya. There was clarity under oppression. After the fall, those lines were entrails strewn about, like the insides of half-destroyed buildings when wires and cables emerge as if from wounds.

During the repressive years, official censure told us we were doing the right thing. If they, up there , didn’t like our works, we knew we were right. In the nineties, we were just ignored. Editors would laugh sadly and say there was no space anymore for articles about the Gulag or someone’s shot relative. And scathing articles about Yeltsin dragging the country into mud, calls for him to go, didn’t make a ripple with the censors. Academics stood in the street wearing placards demanding months of wages. There wasn’t even the respect of censorship.

On the street, people were tired of the past. Inflation ate pensioners’ life savings overnight; though people were struggling just to eat, the price of vodka plummeted, and so it fed a void. People could barely think beyond each day, let alone carry their thoughts above the city, to cloudy heights, to the abstract or the ideal.

Sometime in the new year, 1992, we went to see Ilya perform, and we all got filthy drunk. It was winter. I couldn’t remember much from the night, except feeling wretched about everything, how we all looked like disoriented children left in the playground. Just four years earlier we had been, apparently, capable of anything. Ilya screeched out lyrics I couldn’t understand. Girls tripped on high heels, like statues nearly toppling over. Guys hovered around as though longing to catch them. It had been over six months since Mikhail Sergeyevich died. The Soviet Union was no more.