Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

She held up a map, very worn, crinkled but soft in the way of well-handled paper.

This one, said Yevgenia Fyodorovna, Misha drew himself, shading in all the dark spots—see there, and there—to mark the areas where the Great Fire of Moscow wiped out most of the city last century, in 1812.

The map showed, in black-shaded masses on the paper, how three-quarters of the buildings in Moscow were lost.

And Misha told me about the different accounts of who was to blame for the fire. How some said the invading French, under Napoleon, were responsible for setting the city alight when they arrived. Others said that it was actually the Russians who did it, when they knew the French were coming. The scorched earth method, he said. When people set fire to their own land. Killing the city to save it from invasion. But many Russian historians hated that theory, saying we would never carry out such an act of suicide on our own city.

Misha was fascinated by the history of the fire. First he would read and research, then make his markings on the map, and set out on his walks, seeking out the old borders of the city, as though he might somehow find a trace of them there, even though there was probably nothing left to see.

Yevgenia Fyodorovna stood up slowly, as though with pain, went to one of the high wooden cupboards over the sink and brought out a packet of sweet biscuits. Gratefully I ate three of them. The food eased my nerves, somehow warming me too, though I hadn’t known I felt cold.

At some point, Misha decided to add a second layer to his original map. It would be a layer that showed the world beneath all of us, he said, the hidden, buried world, which he could now make visible.

I thought of my own conversations with Mikhail Sergeyevich, and his meeting with the man who explored the underground and met people resident in that world. We were in Gorky Park at the time. They live down there, Pasha, down in that reversed world, Mikhail Sergeyevich had said to me. Almost as if they are people from the past who lost their way many years ago and can’t live or die, they only keep on walking beneath Moscow.

Yevgenia Fyodorovna said she felt it was time she had a rest, but that I might come again to visit, if I wanted to talk to her again. Here, you can have his maps, she said forcefully, as if purging herself. Take them, she said. I’ve had enough of papers for three lifetimes. And take these pastries, I have too much food here, and clearly you need some, Pasha.

Iarrived in St Petersburg alone in the winter of 1993. When I moved there, to my apartment by the gulf, it was as though I was walking outside, never to go inside again. I barely read a thing. I didn’t care what was going on in the country, didn’t care for the bland movies and music from the West, the bad novels, the overflow of brand names and things and labels and nauseous varieties of every object or food.

I did not bring many relics with me. I left things behind at my mother’s: a photo or two and my beloved books, and newspaper articles on the Memorial Society, its petition for a monument, and the demonstrations on the Arbat. But I wouldn’t have been able to say with any certainty what I had thrown away, or what I planned to throw away and perhaps kept out of longing or to protect against forgetting. In the end there was so much forgetting and I had come to fear its potential contagion, its incubation in the heavy smog-mist in Moscow, breathed in, or picked up on the soles of shoes in the caked ice and dirty snow.

We only have the photographs that survive, just as we only have the memories we remember. A choice was made by someone, or some part of us, or by circumstances.

After a few days in the new apartment in Primorsky, which felt sparse and grey, cramped in a different, soulless way to my childhood concrete block in Moscow, I walked through the city. It was freezing. At first my walks usually took me along the gulf or from one edge of Vasilyevsky Island to the other. The steely, flat, purplish water was so wide, perfectly poised in a tenuous balance—just a little wave and it would overflow. As I ventured further into the city centre, I got lost so many times, as though Petersburg was determined to hide herself from me. I’d only been there once before, with Oleg in 1989.

Canals crosshatched the city. Bridges arched over them, connecting footpaths and boulevards. Something about a city riddled with water, it seemed colder than landlocked Moscow. I thought of those stories about the city just after the revolution. Aristocrats threw their swords into the Neva River, breaking the ice and hiding the evidence of their identities beneath the freeze. I wondered if Mikhail Sergeyevich knew that. His death was raw in those first months in Petersburg.

Then I started to take elektrichka suburban trains further out, to dilapidated suburbs where I’d wander for hours. I saw people begging or selling on the streets, it was hard to tell which.

I went outside. Often I walked till the late hours. The sky’s was a darkness I could deal with. I wanted to stop living by the measures of everyone else: before and after, death and life, sea and self. Being out there—in towns where I spoke to no one, in green deserted parks, along the edge of the gulf’s water—allowed me to turn inwards. It reflected the silence I felt in me. I wanted to be outdoors for good. Yes, I went outside.

Before I left for St Petersburg, Oleg had given me a copy of one of Shalamov’s books. I thought of that night on Solovetsky Island when Oleg quoted Shalamov, so fluidly his quotes were like breathing. I believed , says Shalamov’s narrator, I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography . It was this awareness that provided the will to live. I checked myself—frequently—and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive .

The trip to Leningrad in 1989 was fresh in my mind when I first arrived in 1993. There were certain flashes, scenes of the city, shades of past moods, that followed me. I remembered walking through the city by myself, staying with Ivan and Susanna, who I should’ve contacted but didn’t, and I remembered the gaping skies, Solovetsky, the sea bathed gold, Vasily’s fires at the water’s edge.

I sometimes spent time with Yura and his girlfriend Piia, who eventually became his wife. She was a quiet, kind woman with long dark hair always tied in a high ponytail. Their gentle routines, their generosity and shared meals, somehow both increased my sense of isolation and eased a pain somewhere in me.

Oleg and I exchanged a few letters, and I called my mother sometimes, but I detached myself from them, because they were Moscow to me, just as Anya had been. Or maybe also because they were a reminder, for me, of what I hadn’t done, and my failures were amplified by their efforts, their work and the constant struggle that had been their lives. I was lonely but never really wanted company.

Sometimes I wondered if I really wanted to be there anymore, to be anywhere any longer. Thoughts of suicide strayed across my mind, like the shadow of a skulking fox gone before I could really look at it. Mostly I thought of my mother, back in Moscow, and that it would be a crime for her to lose both her husband and her son to self-inflicted deaths. And so I just persisted, drifted, and the years kept going. I met Sonya in 1998, at a social event at the university, something to do with Yura’s work. She was there with a friend, neither of us really knew anybody, a condition which always seems to bring people together, the brief solidarity of the lost ones, the extras, at gatherings like that. And so we had begun to see each other after that night, every few weeks and then a little more frequently. It suited me that Sonya didn’t seem to want me to stay for long. I reasoned that she looked at me in the same way as I did her: another person adrift, who for brief times is willing to cling to shore. There was a kind of closeness born of that sense of detachment—I never felt the need to fill silences and she seemed content with the same. Neither wishing to turn in for light or warmth, in a sense we were both outside and wished to stay there.