Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

The photographs, there were six of them, showed bleak landscapes, all coated in snow, sometimes fenced areas or depressing buildings that might have been abandoned, but it was hard to tell. One was entirely white, as though the camera had failed to focus. A sense of heaviness, helpless anxiety, slowly crept at me when I thought of all the things I had been given—the neighbour’s maps of aborted roads and ghostless ghost towns, Mikhail Sergeyevich’s maps of Moscow, and now Oleg’s journal and photographs. As though I’d been given everything I needed and yet I still would keep searching for the rest of my life.

I woke the next day feeling that I didn’t want to be in Moscow much longer. Each morning I woke with an increasingly numb feeling, ever closer to the stone-like man I always felt on the verge of becoming. A man who didn’t care about either living or dying. Aside from writing, and the couple of visits to Oleg and Yevgenia Fyodorovna, I’d had little to do but walk by myself through the city. I was aware of an alternative path: that if I stayed there I would be more alone and wretched than ever. I had loved the city, but I was no longer in that version of it. I wondered whether the routine of work in St Petersburg, so mundane a lot of the time, had actually held me together all of those years.

That morning, after I made tea, I sat at my desk. At times I felt I’d come close to finishing what I had been writing since my mother died. The only time I didn’t feel numb was when I was working at the desk. I had a few hundred pages that I’d handwritten in Moscow and at the dacha . I hadn’t reread any of it and was not sure whether that was something I wanted to do. I didn’t really want to know if it was finished yet. I thought of Bitov’s saying that writing was a state of being, and thought perhaps I just had to keep writing forever, to remain in that state of being, because I didn’t know what to do without it. Sometimes, surely, a writer feels as though the thing they are staring at cannot go on any longer. And maybe sometimes a writer wishes with their all that instead of producing thousands of pages, they could plunge into the well of themselves and come up with something that translates their overwhelming innerness into a single painting, or one wordless song, and in that concentrated form their art would be realised.

I finished my tea, took up the papers of Mikhail Sergeyevich, Oleg and the neighbour, and left the apartment.

I stood on the old Arbat, beside a lightless streetlamp. Looking at Mikhail Sergeyevich’s map, I could see that where I stood had been completely destroyed by the Fire of Moscow. Every building around me, in pastel green, pink, yellow, or dark grey, was in fact built on ashes.

Beyond the Arbat, it was impossible to tell whether a building stood before me because it had survived the fire or because it had been rebuilt to look just like the earlier, burnt building.

I walked to Patriarch’s Ponds, another significant site in the landscape of my life, like a man paying last visits. I walked to Tverskaya metro, which used to be called Gorkovskaya. After a moment’s hesitation, I took out a pencil and put a neat line through the word Gorkovskaya on the map, marking in the new name but making sure the old was still visible. An uncanny feeling passed over me and I kept on walking.

In Red Square, which I had rarely visited at any time in my life, I overheard a tour guide speaking about the rumour of the hidden underground library of Ivan the Terrible, which had been the subject of renewed interest lately from academics and researchers who were sure that it was located somewhere beneath the Kremlin. Ivan III had married Princess Sofia of Byzantium, and she brought with her a dowry of ancient books and scrolls. To protect them, the newlyweds employed a famous Italian architect to design a hidden library underneath the Kremlin. Her grandson Ivan the Terrible was apparently the last to know the location of the library, and the tyrant took the secret to the grave.

The tour guide told her listeners how Khrushchev had permitted some investigations into that hidden past, but the searchers didn’t find anything beneath the Kremlin. When Brezhnev came to power, the investigations were shut down, and everyone was quiet about it until new investigations began in Gorbachev’s years. By then it wasn’t only historians and architects searching beneath the city, but also people who could apparently detect the presence of gold or silver beneath the earth’s surface, as well as psychics to guard against dark forces preying on the investigators, since those who searched for the library were said to be prone to misfortunes, accidents, disease or premature death.

A city would see a stranger if it saw itself as we describe it. So much would always remain unknown to us. We lived there for the briefest of a place’s moment, our lives mere stones falling through a lake’s surface, leaving a quickly forgotten ripple. I wondered if, with all those maps I now had, all those layers, the country might finally recognise itself in all those attempts to represent it, amid our collective, desperate scrawls.

I had lunch at a bistro, and then went to a public phone to make a call to terminate the lease on the Moscow apartment. Averse to returning there, almost guilty, as though I’d betrayed those rooms, I had a compulsion to go to the psychiatric institution where my father had once been incarcerated, a place that had long haunted my imagination. To reach the Serbsky Institute from the Arbat District I took the metro to Smolenskaya. From the station I walked about ten minutes to Kropotkin Lane. Along a grey-white wall, seemingly endless, was a small recess, just wide enough for two wooden doors. Above, the number twenty-three was written in white on a blue oval sign.

I felt I’d returned to a place I’d never been.

What little I knew about the institution came from books. I remembered the account by Leonid Plyushch. He wrote of how he felt increasingly that the tranquillisers and pills administered daily against his will were deadening something inside him, the will to read and think, the very idea of politics. His memory, he felt sure, was slipping away. And it was particularly painful to have his children come to visit; forcing smiles, making jokes when his heart was as grey as could be. And worst of all, he said, was the increasing fear that his mental condition was in fact deteriorating with each day in that oppressive ward, and that perhaps the job of his torturers would become easier if he went mad.

And I remembered Nekipelov’s recollections of awaiting the ride in a Black Maria truck from Butyrka to the Serbsky, the desperate etchings he saw scratched into the prison wall with pencils, nails or burnt matches: K, they’re taking me to the Serbsky, V and Waiting for transit to Serbsky or simply, I’ve been committed . And of Serbsky, he recalled the tranquillising drugs administered to the prisoners; how the most passionate, aggressive, stubborn inmates would suddenly fall onto their beds, and thereafter move about as though dazed, empty vessels with no will or want.

I could see us together, sometimes, my father and me. It was a feeling, an impression, more than a memory. Lying on his bony chest (to me he was always thin, maybe because I knew he’d starved to death, maybe because he never was very big anyway), I could smell tobacco, thick and strong; he might have been smoking, or it could have been an old scent buried in the fibres of his shirt, or even just the association of that smell with the dissident aunts and uncles I so loved. And on his chest I rose up and down with his breath, moved as he talked (maybe my mother, or Oleg, or someone else was in the room), as if together we rode light waves. I wasn’t asleep but maybe close to sleep; all I could see was the edge of him, his shirt, and a section of the floor, the linoleum sea streaked with light from the curtained window.