Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Listlessness wrapped me in her sweet, grey arms. I didn’t want to want anything anymore.

Even as I tried to avoid the lag of the past, the trial of the Communist Party pushed its way into every form of media and I couldn’t get away from it. It was a filthy hot summer, 1992. Crowds were out in the sun reading the stangazety newspapers.

While the trial began as an appeal against Yeltsin’s banning of the Communist Party, Yeltsin’s supporters argued that the Party was itself unconstitutional. Yet the Party was included in that Constitution. And the judges had all been Party members, since only Party members could be appointed, and so they were judging the system that gave them their careers. It was a legal labyrinth and I could not see how any trial would offer a way out. Party supporters argued that defeating Hitler and making the Soviet Union a great power were reason enough for a decision in its favour. Yet such reasoning only judged the actions of the Party, not the issue of whether it was a criminal state to begin with.

A couple of months later, Yura said he was moving to St Petersburg. I met a girl, he said, looking away as though expecting a caustic reply.

Yeah, she’s from Finland, he continued. She just got a permit to work here, works for a Swedish furniture company. You should come too, Pasha. Have a change.

I shrugged. I’ll come visit sometime.

I helped Yura with his bags and waited with him at Leningrad station, bound for the newly renamed St Petersburg. Autumn 1992. I thought about what was lost with a name and felt that the silence of that loss extinguished something in the very depths of me.

When it was close to the time the train would leave, we made our way to the platform. People all moved in the same direction towards the train; there must have been nearly twenty carriages. The engines hummed, voices rose, suitcases scraped, the platform full of the energy of departure.

Yura seemed excited. Come visit, brother.

I nodded, we shook hands, he picked up his two heavy suitcases, one in either hand, and stepped onto the train. I stood there while others rushed on, suitcases or carry bags in hand, coats and toys, food and presents, until eventually the doors were slammed by attendants, hands waved inside and out, and with a great groan the carriages began to move. I couldn’t see Yura inside, but I held one hand up anyway, for a moment.

I wondered if it would be another permanent farewell; whether, one by one, I would bid goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, until Moscow was empty of everyone I knew.

One morning, after another unsettled and slightly nauseous walk through Moscow, I stood on Frunzenskaya Embankment. I was holding a newspaper—Sunday, 3 October 1999. If I hadn’t had that pinpoint, it could have been any year, any time.

I went to a payphone in front of a tall pink building. It took Yevgenia Fyodorovna only a moment to place me.

Pasha, she said, I didn’t ever think it would be you. Yes, you can come. Come for tea tomorrow.

I walked past the mustard-yellow building where they all used to live—Anya, Mikhail Sergeyevich, Yevgenia Fyodorovna—with the strange, connected but separated feeling of knowing I had just called those rooms. I kept walking. I walked until midnight and then went home to uneasy sleep.

Twelve hours later I arrived at the apartment building near Frunzenskaya Embankment. Perhaps because I hadn’t eaten breakfast, I felt weak, slightly disconnected from my body. The wooden door of the building had been replaced by a thick heavy black door, locked and alarmed. I pressed the button and, shortly after, the door clicked unlocked. The dim wooden elevator was empty; its slow shudder felt familiar. I pressed the doorbell of number eighteen. Yevgenia Fyodorovna looked pale. Her hair, once deep brown, was now lined with very light grey, tinsel threads in a thick bun. She wore a brown cardigan, a constrast to the strong magenta and purple and reds I remembered her wearing.

Pasha, she said, come in, come in, Pasha.

On entering the apartment, I tried to reconcile the place with how I remembered it. I was in the place where Mikhail Sergeyevich had died. Whenever I returned to that thought, his death shocked me anew. As though I’d forgotten entirely and it may as well have occurred that very day. Though even my memory of his death was a chimera. When I thought of it, I didn’t only remember the moment Anya had called me, or the words she had used to tell me. Cutting across that real memory was my own reconstruction of the scene. I saw the discovery of his body and the imagined, possibly real, cries of shock—all of the things that may or may not take place at such times and which those who were not there try, in vain repetitions and slight variations, to see in their minds. And with this, my imagination made memories of its own, memories of moments I didn’t witness myself.

We sat in the kitchen. With the curtains drawn over the windows the light was dim, and in the air was the lingering suggestion of a small breakfast, bread or porridge and tea. I thanked her for inviting me over. Yevgenia Fyodorovna seemed to have trouble sitting down and I asked after her health. She told me she had arthritis in the spine. Bekhterev’s disease, they call it.

On hearing the psychiatrist’s name an uncanny film of recognition passed over my mind. I’d seen his statue in stone at Volkovskoye Cemetery in Petersburg. He had discovered the place where memory was thought to be stored in the brain.

Yes, Bekhterev’s disease, she repeated. It’s genetic. The doctors tell me my spine will fuse together, and I’ll either be walking like this, tall as a tree, or like this, at a mountain angle—she laughed, first holding her arm up vertical, then at an alpine slope, to show me.

Next I asked Yevgenia Fyodorovna if she had heard from Anya.

Anya’s far over there . She waved an arm. I hear a word from her sometimes, but she has been moving around. Europe mostly. Working. Always working.

I tried to ignore the twin arms I felt reaching out, like snaking branches, of bitterness and longing interest. Maybe she had found someone else, someone from over there . Time condensed and I felt I was a bare second away from our final meeting in Pushkin Square.

Maybe, I thought, she just keeps running, settles in a place only as long as nobody knew much about her or asked after her past. A fragment of a long-ago conversation found me. Anya said she enjoyed first meetings, and the second, but after that it was hard. You have to show too much, she said.

I explained to Yevgenia Fyodorovna that I’d come because I was trying to write a sort of history, a book about life in Moscow. And because Mikhail Sergeyevich had been eager to share his story, I thought maybe she would be willing to talk to me about him.

Yes, she said, Misha had an interesting and difficult life.

She asked me to wait a moment, went to another room and returned with a small pile of loose notepaper.

You hear of people leaving papers behind when they die, she said. And those of us still here have to grapple somehow with the job of working through or sorting out those papers. Well, in Misha’s case what he left were maps and his classroom notes. Yevgenia Fyodorovna sat down, holding the papers as she spoke.

A lot of men play chess, it seems, when they retire, she said. In the courtyards of the apartments here you see them all the time—she waved a hand—sitting there, facing one another across a table. And in the gardens and parks around Patriarch’s Ponds, too. But Misha preferred walks. He didn’t want to sit there playing chess like the old Bolsheviks , as he said.