Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

At other times I wasn’t sure of the point of the story. I couldn’t understand what the artist was doing it all for. Perhaps, I thought, the story symbolised the very act of making art: there would never be the satisfaction of attainment. He couldn’t say, Yes , I did it , I starved to death . The artist doesn’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, truly know what it is they have created.

At the end of the story, the hunger artist says that he didn’t eat because he couldn’t find a food that he liked. That made me feel uneasy somehow, to think there was no real inner need behind his art, or that the cause we expected, creative desire itself, wasn’t really there. Maybe Kafka was saying we never know the true roots of our need to create. Maybe we destroy, just a little, a work of art when we try to touch it, to shape it into words. According to this view, what is important is the hell of the attempt to create.

My fixation with that story, at a time when I wanted to read nothing, was likely because I’d reached a point where I doubted I could ever be a writer and, by extension, doubted the point and power of art. Since I was a boy, the knowledge that I was an outsider, a holder of certain truths, gave me a reason to exist. I wanted to carry on the work of the dissidents who raised me and preserve, through my writing, the memories of oppression they’d fought so hard to keep afloat in the mire of repression.

But Moscow had undermined me, and since I’d left I’d felt I had no reason for being, no meaning. And the truth was that my mother, her life, had indirectly stopped me ever trying to be rid of my own. My father had died when I was very young and it would be too great a tragedy, I reasoned, for her to lose her son as well. In that summer of 1999, the wall between myself and death, a wall I’d constructed and maintained for six years, fell when my mother died. I had to meet with whatever was on the other side of that wall.

All of my dead were in Moscow, and in my memory they thrived, an especial ability of the absent. They left a resonance, faint wind chimes haunting my consciousness, and in that sound I strained to hear some kind of meaning.

Just as I didn’t know why that artist starved himself—a question that dogged me—so I didn’t understand my own need to write about the dead, to preserve their memory. Once one person dies, their memory beats in others as though it is a life. Not just the memory you have of them, but their own individual memories that they have passed on by words or other means. If that knowledge falls away, is forgotten, it exists nowhere. I was so long estranged from art, from the desire to remember, that I knew I had a tough task in front of me.

The writer Andrei Bitov said that writing was a state of being. He had to find time for expeditions to places ideal for writing—escapes, he called them—where there was no time and no information. That summer in Petersburg, in that overheated, overthought place, I craved a similar state of being.

From our apartment to the street was a walk of five floors downstairs, there being no elevators in the new sixties buildings with their apartments comprising two rooms and kitchen, or sometimes only one room and kitchen. The street was lined with other five-floor blocks—Khrushchev had had them built all over Moscow—as well as a post office, a small shop, and a bus stop at the end.

On the first of September every year, like every Soviet child, I clutched my bunch of flowers and, holding my mother’s hand, walked in my uniform shirt and jacket with the murmuring mass of colour through Moscow’s streets to school.

I was a quiet boy. With my friends Artyom and Dmitry I played in the playgrounds in apartment yards or sailed boats in the streams formed by clogged drains in the street. To me the water flowed as beautifully and as fast as any clear blue stream you might find in the countryside. We tried our first cigarettes as twelve-year-olds, sitting on the cold bars of an outdoor gym in the snow.

At school my class teacher, a man with a broad chest and receding hairline, stood beneath the red banners, the colourful posters, and the portraits of leaders past and present. He spoke with eerie reverence about the Great Patriotic War. Years later, it occurred to me that perhaps his own father was one of the dead. He told us about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, which held the remains of some unidentified soldiers killed between 1941 and 1945. Those unknown dead were once buried in a mass grave at the forty-first kilometre of the Leningrad Highway, at the city of Zelenograd, precisely resting at (almost guarding, I thought) the place the Nazi armies reached on their march to Moscow.

And I was horrified, sitting at my school desk, to learn that in 1966 the remains were dug up out of the earth. They were moved to Moscow, buried at the Kremlin Wall by the Alexander Garden, with the words Imya tvoyo neizvestno, podvig tvoy bessmerten —Your name is unknown, your deed is immortal—inscribed in bronze. I wondered what the scene might have looked like when the grave was unearthed at Zelenograd; the remains, I supposed, were skeletons, but I also pictured crumpled remnants of clothes, a belt buckle, weapons.

I wondered who was assigned the task of unburying the dead, and how they went about transporting them (probably by train, I eventually decided). And I was struck by the strangeness of reburying bodies long dead with names never to be known. I had also, more than once, thought of the old burial place in Zelenograd. I wondered what it might have looked like in the silent years after the unburial, whether it was recognisable for what or whom the earth once held.

For me there was an enormous silence in those classes. The people, places and events that existed within the walls of my home were not mentioned at school. The Gulag prison camps, the mass shootings under Stalin, the dissidents locked away in psychiatric hospitals, those things were present only upon the precious, dangerous, hidden papers at our apartment, or in the bodiless words drifting from the mint-green radio, from Radio Liberty or the BBC, or in the looks between the adults who came to meetings in our apartment.

There was a line to follow in the world outside and a different one at home, and I understood that those lines stood for two very different stories. And so I only really felt like my true self at home.

Though I could never remember being told, I somehow always knew that silence and secrecy kept us safe. I understood that I could not tell the other story at school. I knew I couldn’t say that as the vodka flowed and cheeks grew red, my mother’s friends laughed as they spoke of kopchushka , the smoked fish, when really they meant Lenin, or his body preserved forever in his tomb in Moscow. Maybe sometimes my mother whispered, Not for school, Pasha, or maybe I imagined that loving censure when later trying to grasp how I knew the things I did. The importance of silence. The existence of a parallel, invisible line running beside the official one, as real to me as the unseen passages of blood in our veins.

Sometimes I didn’t want to hold the silence in me anymore. After school one day I showed Dmitry a record that was pressed on the bones— made by underground musicians on old X-rays. It was probably a copy of some jazz or rock album from the West. Look at it! It was too impressive not to show him. We knelt on the floor in front of the divan where I usually slept and I held it up between us. You could see the skeleton of some unknown person and you knew that the music was somehow, impossibly, inside the image of those bones. I could just see Dmitry’s face, his chubby chin and blond mop of hair, through the large circle of shadowy film.