Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

He described how, all around Pushkin’s statue, the ground was glazed with blood, littered with bandages, torn clothes, a woman’s shoe.

The papers and TV stations had all reported the same story: Chechen terrorists were blamed for the bombing and for several others in the previous year, including those of two apartment blocks in Moscow.

I don’t know, brother, said Ilya. I don’t want to leave Russia, no way, but there’s no telling where we’re going.

We sat down on a bench. Ilya lit a cigarette, scratched the side of his face, shook his head. He still bounced his leg like he used to, as if to an ever-present beat.

I teach guitar to some young kids, he said, leaning in. They don’t care about anything. Their only hero is Tsoi and their only salve is marijuana.

We made tentative plans to meet again while I was in Moscow. Ilya mentioned an upcoming show and I gave a vague answer before we parted ways.

Across the square, McDonald’s glowed in the low light. I walked over, hands bunched in my jacket pockets, went inside where it was warm and ordered a coffee, which when it arrived was watery and burning hot.

Thinking of that woman Ilya was seeing annoyed me; tarot cards and fake fortunes, babushki delirious on incense, giving all their coins to a future killed already by our past. I saw, too, the wavering calm on Sonya’s face, imagined her sad eyes looking up at her saints: Feodor Kuzmich, a king who had faked his death to become a hermit—even non-believers like me had read about him—and John of Moscow, called Blessed John the Fool for Christ. And my mind bathed Sonya’s hair in light from candles I’d never seen in churches I’d never set foot in. The void of Communism had been filled, the maps of dead futures rewritten and the ghostless ghost towns populated.

I sat drinking my weak, hot coffee under the fluorescent light. Each moment, every memory of the place I was in, were piled one on top of the other. I felt heavy, somewhere in me, to think that I was in every moment and none. In nowhere but the place of every moment.

I went to the Tsoi Wall, as it was now known. I remembered us all leaving our bent cigarettes on a tray on the ground, our travesty incense, how close we’d sat together. Graffiti lovingly coated the walls, words warring to grieve, layers and colourful layers of it.

Viktor Tsoi died today.

You were our voice, you were us.

Listen listen listen forever.

We fucked to your music, now we can’t even kiss.

Tsoi is alive!

I lit a cigarette and walked away from the old words. Around the corner, another line of graffiti in thick black lettering said, Don’t travel with a corpse—the point of life is to ponder the cross on your own grave.

The last time I saw Anya, we stood in Pushkin Square. It was early 1992. We stood oddly apart on the red bricks, still as stone, like stage actors frozen at the point when the curtains should come down. That hair I’d touched, blonde to the shoulders, hidden away in a brown felt hat. She looked at me as though from another shore.

You don’t even know why you’re going, Anya, I said, or yelled. You say you want to search for something, but you don’t even know what.

She just looked at me. Whatever I said seemed to confirm something for her. It had rained. There was a persistent wind, or maybe my memory just thought that seemed fitting.

I must have yelled, because her voice went softer, a calm that unnerved me, and she took my forearm and sat me down on one of the benches near Pushkin.

She said she knew somehow that there was more out there, more that she could feel.

I can’t make myself feel it here. I know this is a horrible thing to say, she said. That a person isn’t enough for your capacity. That you know somehow you are capable of feeling more, but you can’t feel it with them, can’t feel it here.

She spoke as if about some hypothetical other person.

It’s like you’re talking about Russia, not me, I said. I’m not a country, I’m not a city , Anya.

I stood up, moved away from the bench.

Anya came over. From a distance we must have looked like a duo in a strange call-and-answer dance, the one slowly following the other’s movements. She lit a cigarette, passed it to me, and then just stood there.

When I’m alone to think, I feel alive, she said. I want to start a life of my own, away from here, away from my mother and this country, the dragging past.

I said something about having met her too soon. That’s what I said: I’ve met you too soon, Anya.

She said again that she was leaving, as if to confirm it for me. We remained there for a while longer, performing our strange, slow choreography of sitting, standing, yelling, silence. Then she went. I couldn’t remember our final words. A heavy night rain had stopped and nearly every surface of the ground was obscured by polished reflections of the sky.

It’s dangerous to your own sense of calm when a person, when she, stands for more than she should, for a life, for a country that didn’t happen. She was a time that was over, and a place that time had changed.

If I’d happened to be afflicted with some illness not long after she’d left, I probably would have also associated losing Anya with all I couldn’t do anymore because of that illness. Circumstances and people that are separate from each other can join if the mind tries hard enough. I really did wish that we’d met later, when we were both older and those years had become the past.

Two days after our Pushkin Square scene, I went to the Frunzenskaya apartment. But Anya’s mother, Yevgenia Fyodorovna, was there alone. I knew I was just going there for some self-paining confirmation.

Yevgenia Fyodorovna had lost the tension or spark of previous visits, before her husband’s death and at the height of arguments with Anya. We had a brief, quiet conversation, dull voices in the hallway. She leant against the doorframe, holding the edge of her red cardigan in a desperate sort of way. She told me Anya really was gone. Her flight had left from Domodedovo airport.

The next months were a mess of days without meaning. My wretchedness was probably just as much about failing to really do anything as about Anya’s leaving. I told myself that Anya and I could only understand each other in that old world, the one we grew up in. Our world had changed but our inner selves hadn’t caught up with it.

I looked at my mother and Oleg, and was sure they must have thought me hopeless. I went out with Ilya a lot. Slept with a few girls. Being out with him, drunk, experiencing weeks of night-time wakefulness, not knowing the city during the day except for blurred hours at work, removed me from the normal time of others, and that was just what I wanted. But even Ilya started to bother me, with all his plans and ambition. He organised a tour with his band, with bookings in St Petersburg, Murmansk, Yekaterinburg. He had lost his job when the stock delivery driver had to shut down his business—mafia blokes monopolised all now, Ilya said—but had chased work with a radio station, organising interviews with musicians, helping write the scripts. Yura worked all the time now, and went to St Petersburg for a few weeks to teach a short course. Sukhanov and I went out drinking sometimes. He and Lena were patching things up, he hoped. They had a kid, a little girl. If ever we all caught up—Ilya, Sukhanov, Lena and I, the only ones left—it just seemed to emphasise who wasn’t there. And any talk of the old days, trying to revive moments in which we’d laughed or loved, just left an ashy bitter feeling in me.