Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

But then I could also see us as if from a distance. I could see my childhood self, a boy of five or so, lying with my face turned to the right, lying on his thin body as he talked, gesturing with one hand, maybe smoking with the other, or patting my back. It couldn’t be a memory, but I didn’t know what it was, other than perhaps the image of a memory.

He was first arrested in 1968, when I was four years old. Then again, for the last time, in 1970. I was six. The fact that I was likely in the room when my mother was told he had died and when the circumstances of his death were spoken about, but that such things were either buried so deep in my mind or were entirely forgotten, horrified me on some level. I hated to think of how words dissolve like smoke.

Countless past conversations emerged, speaking over one another but somehow together all at the same time. Mikhail Sergeyevich saying to me, I can attest that I’m here, as a man, with a body right now sitting on this seat, but I cannot say I am sure what I’m made up of—what is going on inside. Whether, by virtue of the system I grew up under, the very household in which I was raised, my mind has been conditioned… It’s too tempting for us to destroy our bodies to protect our minds from further distortion.

Oleg reciting Shalamov, who wrote that if he had the strength to die, if his mind could still decide that, it was still his mind. He still had intellectual freedom though his body was confined in a prison camp.

And memories of my own thoughts emerged among the other voices. Art should tell us of life, but in a place where the official perception of reality had been so manufactured by the state, in some ways art was the only thing that was real. Art represented the truth of our inner lives.

Maybe when we are pushed to the limits, art and death are so similar. Maybe art, like people, cannot escape the conditions around it. To consider whether my father’s death was art might have been the ultimate unspeakable question, born of a system that crushed all logic. You cannot ask why, the poets said.

Perhaps they were all artists of memory, something I had failed to be. Oleg, my mother, the dissident aunts and uncles, Mikhail Sergeyevich, the neighbour. Forgetting was their thread and with it they constructed a gauze-like tapestry, an image of how things might have been. Memory was, after all, made by what forgetting let us have. It must have pained them, to feel the limits of their knowledge and the insubstantiality of it all; it must have felt as though they were using the dust from moth wings to paint a vast canvas. The pink-blue glimmers were beautiful but always nearly gone.

I walked away from the Serbsky Institute. I took a metro back to the centre, walked down a few side streets until I found a tattoo parlour. Sitting in the chair, feeling the sharp sting of the needle on my inner forearm, the left, it occurred to me that I was the same age, thirty-five, as my father was when he died. The tattoo I had inked into me that day was just a small grid, straight lines. I had in mind that they stood for the street I grew up in with the apartment I had just given up; the Arbat, where life seemed to open up in 1988; Kropotkin Lane, where the Serbsky Institute stood; and Frunzenskaya Embankment along Moskva River. Nothing like true to scale, but that wasn’t the point.

No street names, for they could change as easily as the seasons. Just the lines, the roads I’d walked down as a boy and then as a man. Eight lines showing four streets and their counterparts beneath the ground; whether there were pipes or drains or rivers or train tracks, I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. That below-ground reflection was probably for the memory of Mikhail Sergeyevich as much as it was the echo of my old life, as a child of the underground, a life existing between lines now gone. A couple of crossroads gave it a kind of pattern. It could’ve been depicting the streets in any year, season, minute. Just midnight-blue lines, lines as good as veins, veins of my city etched on me, all time gathered and returned to write itself on the body.

Itook a return train to St Petersburg at the end of October 1999. I had left Moscow on dusk, but because the trip took me north, the sun was only just going down when I arrived in Petersburg five hours later. However, the light did not mean warmth, and it was far colder than Moscow. By the time I reached my apartment in Primorsky, it was dark. I put the picture of my father on my bookshelf, behind the glass.

I returned to work, and the city grew colder seemingly every day. After a week of brisk air and sun, the city was then beneath endlessly grey skies. Most mornings a low fog obscured the buildings as I looked out the window of the bus. Nothing about my daily routine changed. In a pile on my desk were the pages I had written. I felt time soundlessly circle me back to the same place each morning.

I met with Yura for a drink at a bar in Primorsky not far from my apartment. He wanted to know about my trip to Moscow, what it was like to see Ilya again, and all the places we had once been.

I was thinking about the place a lot the last few weeks, he said. Knowing you’d gone back. If I could go back anywhere, it’d probably be those nights at Sukhanov’s.

Yura looked down at his drink; I wondered if he did in fact want to see Moscow again. I considered telling him not to bother, that it wasn’t there anymore—our Moscow wasn’t there.

Maybe you should try to publish what you’ve written, said Yura.

I shrugged. The kids don’t care what we leave behind, I said. It’s not interesting anymore to hear our memories of standing in long store lines with our mothers, or that we only got candy, and only one type, at New Year. That you can see the crackling coloured wrapping in your mind and feel like you’re nostalgic for a dream you once had is of no interest to anyone anymore.

I drained my drink and we sat in silence for a while. I was thinking that I wanted to know where it had all gone, the memory that rose up, like plants after heavy rain, during glasnost . Maybe some people had told their children, This was Grandma, this was Russia . Or maybe by 1999 they were in a new apartment, and as the kommunalki walls were knocked down, as the old witnesses fell, the memory was lost in the move.

One night, a week after I returned, I was surprised to receive a phone call from Sonya. She said that she wanted to meet. The next day I took a metro into the city centre and we met near her work. It was late afternoon. I realised that I felt a sense of relief to see her. The sky had remained grey all day; the light was already tinted dusky blue. We walked for a little while and then she took me into a church. I could smell the sweetness of incense, see patches of candlelight in the gloom.

I know you don’t believe in all this, she said, gesturing to the interior of the church. Her voice was hushed but clarified in the wide, cool space.

I nodded, and without speaking we both took a few steps to the pews, sat down beside one another, facing the altar. Sonya’s hands were folded neatly over one another, and she looked utterly at peace.

Let’s go to this dacha that you so like, she said after a long moment. And then, as I listened in the quiet, Sonya began to talk about her husband. Just a few words: she spoke his name, Andrei, and told me how they met at high school, how he had been shot—she didn’t tell me the circumstances, but the omission told me that such things were perhaps not yet for her words—and she recalled a few disparate moments, memories of her boys and her husband: how he had worked too much, as she always told him, but that he could get carried away spending time with the boys, taking them to the playground in the apartment yard, or mushroom picking in the autumn. Sonya told me these things in a relaxed way, looking ahead and occasionally smiling, as if the moments were rising up on their own and she was happy to tell me what she saw. And then after a while she went quiet.