Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

Iwent to the entrance of the Frunzenskaya apartment building for the second time since my return to Moscow. The mustard-yellow paint glowed in the afternoon light. I pressed the button at the street entrance and was again let in with a gentle click of the door. I crossed the foyer, entered the wooden lift and travelled upwards, walked down the hallway and pressed the doorbell for number eighteen. Yevgenia Fyodorovna opened the door. I must have looked desperate. She invited me in with a grave expression on her face.

I just want to know what happened, I said. The last time I saw him, he was talking about the year the history exams were cancelled. He seemed so agitated.

After what felt to be a never-ending moment, heavy and silent, Yevgenia Fyodorovna started speaking. Her voice was stern, low, almost curt, as if to let me know she would tell me things in her own order, and only as much as she decided to tell me.

I remember when Stalin died, in 1953, she said. March the fifth. My mother seemed to believe everything would change for the worse, that it would mean chaos. She lit a candle beside Stalin’s portrait on top of our bookcase. She was sure something would happen to my father, that he’d lose his job or worse. For three days and three nights there was a stream of mourners queuing for the House of Trade Unions, where they could see his body and pay their respects. I did not go, but saw photographs. Above the entrance of the building was a gigantic portrait of him, draped in curtains. Gorky Street looked transformed, with huge crowds. And there were photos from Prague, from Riga. A stampede in Trubnaya Square, right here in the city. They say thousands were crushed.

Then they buried him. I remember the funeral well. It was March the ninth—Anya was born on the same day, nine years later. Even though I was not there, of course, at the funeral, I recall very well the reports and photographs, the endless mourning. I can see his portrait, cradled by red flowers, absolutely everywhere, and I think it has given me the impression that I in fact was there. And then there was Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, three years later. Well, nobody knew what to think after that.

I stayed quiet, letting Yevgenia Fyodorovna find the memories. I thought of how lost the Secret Speech must have left teachers like Mikhail Sergeyevich feeling. The speech blamed Stalin’s cult of personality for all ills and criticised only the losses under Stalin. As though an errant child had made a mistake and its parent, Communism, couldn’t be held responsible. This new official line had to be propagated to the next generation without undermining the system as a whole. But even Soviet officials were horrified, either because they hadn’t known the scale of death under Stalin, or perhaps because it could now no longer be called necessary sacrifice. I thought of how Fadeyev, the head of the Soviet Writers’ Union under Stalin, had shot himself in the heart the same year, 1956. He wrote a suicide note to the Central Committee, lamenting the death of literature as much as his hopes for Communism.

Misha even wrote to the authorities, continued Yevgenia Fyodorovna, as he said many teachers had already done, asking for guidance, asking how on earth to acknowledge the speech in their lessons without denying the history they had been teaching all along. But in reply he received nothing more than token statements, re-renderings of the speech. The pedagogical council at the school held agitation meetings, as they were called, to discuss the situation, but the meetings were so frustrating, Misha said. The committees spoke in circles, tak tak tak , tapping their pencils like schoolchildren who had been given a complex equation with the wrong formula to work it out.

As I listened to Yevgenia Fyodorovna, I wondered if the cancelling of the exams in 1988 brought it all back to him again, had caused Mikhail Sergeyevich to revisit past anxieties. Buried on Anya’s birthday, it’s a funny thing, said Yevgenia Fyodorovna. Anya was always a sad girl. I worried that she was somehow absorbing her father’s melancholia, his preoccupation with the past. She surely heard him speak about his own father. He was a butcher, Yevgenia! poor Misha would say to me. Children’s ears are sharp, and I could never be sure quite how much she heard or understood of the things her father spoke about. But then there’s also that special ability of children to take on things that they have not actually heard or seen for themselves, as though they are somehow born with certain traces in them. As it is, I think that perhaps children of these times are born with too much memory already.

I say this because Anna Mikhailovna, even as the delicate little girl that she was, sometimes had such a heaviness to her mood, a brooding that seemed beyond her years. She never threw tantrums or had the silly little wants of most children, but when she was unhappy it seemed to be on such a deep level, what should be beyond a child, that I worried she was already showing signs of the darkness that lived within Misha.

Yevgenia Fyodorovna took a long breath, utterly silent, or so it seemed to me. I sat holding a glass of tea. I caught myself turning one ear towards her, as if terrified I’d miss something.

Anya said to me, not long before she left, that she didn’t want to go that way, the way of her father, said Yevgenia Fyodorovna. It was as though she was convinced his memory was going to… invade her, pass on to her, like a disease she might catch.

The last day of Mikhail Sergeyevich’s life, the first of his death, was relayed to Yevgenia Fyodorovna by a former colleague of her husband’s.

Misha had spent that morning wandering the boundaries of the school at which he’d taught for over two decades, she told me. A few students and this teacher looked out the window and saw him. At intervals he would stop and look through the wire fence. Then he’d begin walking again with an appearance of lightness. He was holding one of his maps and didn’t seem surprised to see his former colleague, who had walked around to the entrance of the school and now stood on the same side of the fence.

Mikhail Sergeyevich then said, according to the teacher, that he hadn’t planned on visiting the school that day. He had merely been following certain lines on the map, letting them lead him around the city, but now that he had arrived at the school he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave. One always wonders , he said to his former colleague, whether the students remember the things you have said to them. How much they remember. He then seemed to lose what little balance he had and swayed towards the fence, holding his head, then his stomach, obviously overcome by nausea. A film of sweat on his face and neck. He was very disoriented. The colleague helped him home, by bus, to the apartment. He assured the man he would be fine. Yevgenia Fyodorovna found his body in the bedroom when she arrived home that evening.

When she was finished, Yevgenia Fyodorovna took my hand and blinked so heavily she might have been sleeping. We stayed like that for a long time. Then I said I should be going.

Yergenia Fyodorovna nodded, went to a wooden dresser in the living room—I thought of the portrait of Anya’s grandfather there watching—and returned with a photo.

Here. I would like to give you this photo of Misha and Anya and me. Na pamyat —for the memory. Look at our smiles, how happy we look! I suppose there is no one after me… and I don’t know, it is a funny thing, Pasha, that in the end we feel we must leave something behind.

She followed me to the door. It has been good to see you, Pasha. I wish you well.

I left the apartment, took the tremulous wooden elevator down to the ground floor.