Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Anya said she wanted to go home, she was sick of Ilya’s music. I was determined to stay out, as though the night could be salvaged somehow. After a couple more songs I agreed to leave. It was freezing outside.

Nothing here inspires me anymore, said Anya. Her mouth had an expression I’d come to know, tensed with worry. I don’t know what anything means, and everything feels worthless, she said.

She pressed the heel of her palm to her chest. Her eyes were dusty black, blurred by alcohol and smudged make-up, or maybe she was just tired. I noticed that she hadn’t put her hand on my shoulder or hooked an arm through mine like she used to.

Finally I started walking to the apartment of my childhood. At least three of the other large Khrushchev-era apartment blocks in the street were gone. New towers stood in their place, either apartments or offices, while shops—glass-fronted with mannequins or computer products on display—occupied the ground floor. All evidence of the sixties, my childhood, was now built over.

I went into the foyer, walked up the steps to the fifth floor. The lease was now in my name. I could afford one more month, I thought, but after that I’d have to either terminate the lease or give up my place in St Petersburg and move back in there myself. It seemed inconceivable to me that the people I’d known, the moments, looks, sensations and feelings I’d once had there, were really gone. Such memories seemed just beyond my immediate vision, no less real than what I could actually see. When I saw those rooms, I was in company with my boyhood self, and together we saw everything, as if perceiving and remembering were twin currents overlapping in a sea.

There was a bottle of brandy in the cupboard in the kitchen. I took a glass from a wooden shelf. I sat down at the table, put my glass on the cream tablecloth with its orange, brown and yellow flowers. Large utensils still hung from small spokes in the wall. On top of the refrigerator was the mint-green radio. I drained my glass and went to turn the radio on. For a moment I thought there was a voice emerging through the static, but as I twisted the dial this way and that, it seemed to get further away from me.

I went to the bookshelf as though looking for some kind of guide. In the final chapter of Radishchev’s Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow , he describes how, during an evening walk to Alexander Nevsky Monastery, he came across the grave of Mikhail Lomonosov. He scorned the mere cold stone of a graveside monument. Stone could not carry a name into future centuries. Only the Russian language could do that, according to him. I remembered my own walks to Volkovskoye Cemetery, where Radishchev himself lay beneath an inscribed headstone, and where the old trees bent down as though tending to his memory.

I lay on the divan in the living room; beneath me was our yellow crocheted rug. I watched morning arrive while I lay there, listening to music. Our old record player was still there. At first I put on Kino, Viktor Tsoi’s band, classic Russian rock as if that would mean I was in the old Moscow. I craved something gentler but didn’t know what. I tried Liszt’s ‘La Campanella’, from his suite Years of Pilgrimage . Like sounds from childhood. I pictured the latticed metal of the speakers of our radio I listened to as a boy, captivated by the bodiless sound. Music is loneliness and company at the same time, someone said once, or maybe I just thought that as I lay there. I got up, went to the kitchen, poured a glass of brandy, went back to bed. I drank that morning with a distant thought of my boyhood friend Dmitry, our secret brandy, showing him that forbidden record made on the bones —that old friend who might now be getting older too.

Once the morning had fully formed, I went to a supermarket because there was no food in the apartment. I had thrown out the milk and a few other things in the fridge, my mother’s lasts. At the checkout, I took my wallet out of my pocket to pay for the bread and whatever else, and on the five-hundred-ruble note was the Solovetsky Monastery. The thick, tall towers, the swathe of sea and stone. I couldn’t get away from any of it, that ever-rising past. As I put the note on the tray in front of the grim-faced teenage cashier, I wondered if she was looking at me like that because I’d given her such a reminder of old violence. And then I thought about how we were all passing that note around, how it had travelled and would travel through a thousand hands and more, and of course there were countless copies of it, each made from unique fibres so they were all different while appearing the same.

I went home, ate a little, then read, slept, smoked. I didn’t know why I was there, whether I had actually returned to Moscow or if it was a brief pause before a permanent goodbye. I did think of Sonya, that bare life we shared, apart, in Petersburg.

I woke in the early evening. I got out of bed at some point, half-heartedly chewed some bread while standing at the window, alternating a bite with a drag. Then I called Ilya. I had seen him only a couple of times on my few trips back to Moscow. But really we had drifted away from one another even before I left. Around the same time as I stopped going to concerts, after Anya was gone, he had taken his band touring Russia. And he’d still moved with politics, following elections and going to rallies, while I retreated from that world.

We met at a cafe near Pushkin Square. The sky was overcast, the light low. Ilya looked a lot older. His hair was cut short, black flecked with grey. He had a thin, short beard, also a mix of black and grey. He wore a band t-shirt (NAIV), and had tattoos on his arms, an earring in one ear and several rings on his fingers. His enthusiasm was foreign to me. He listed show after show at clubs I’d never heard of, proudly rattled off collaborations with bands whose names meant nothing to me.

Ilya asked me about Yura. I said that he was now married to Piia from Finland. They’d had a child. Ilya nodded, but I couldn’t help but think he seemed disappointed in Yura for not making a bolder statement by leaving the country, for not fighting anymore. Neither of us had seen Sukhanov or Lena in years. Ilya said that Sukhanov was still known around Moscow for his artworks. For no real reason we had lost contact, and I didn’t feel like trying to find them; perhaps I didn’t want any more meetings that felt like reckonings with all that I had once wanted but failed to do.

We walked afterwards, across the square, and I saw Pushkin’s statue. When Ilya asked me how it felt to be there—back on the old ground, he said—I merely shrugged and didn’t say that I’d been in Pushkin Square the day before.

We’ve lost something, he said. Russia’s definitely lost something.

He told me about a woman he had been seeing who earned money reading palms and tarot cards. Her customers were mostly old ladies, who returned again and again, as if the prospect of multiple futures reassured them. I imagined she wore long gold earrings, this woman of Ilya’s, and had long painted nails like pink talons, clattering bangles on her wrists and was dressed in layers of coloured silky scarves.

Ilya told me about the day of the bombing below Pushkin Square, just a month earlier. Eight people had been killed.

I wasn’t in the metro, he said, but I wasn’t far away. I saw the smoke coming out from the underground. And then all these people came up, covered in cuts and dirt and blood—the ones who could walk, anyway—like damned zombies.