Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

The danger of what I did only shocked me in retrospect. At the other end of that act could have been the interrogation, surveillance, even arrest of my mother, Oleg, the musicians themselves. But in return, at Dmitry’s place, we took some forbidden brandy from his dad’s shelf. His parents both worked in a factory and usually left for work as he arrived home from school. Standing at the window, which looked straight at a white-walled building, we passed the bottle between us. The brandy warmed my throat and thrilled me. I didn’t really like it but I loved it all the same. We sealed our pact with a glance and never mentioned those things—the record or the brandy—again.

It was my first sense of knowing, of creating myself, a secret space separate to the one of my mother’s dissident life. Firsthand, I grasped how something could form between two people, only known because of certain contingencies—a look, an encounter, a decision not to speak. It was probably the first time, too, that I unknowingly learnt—felt, more than anything—that there could be an entire universe of spaces like that.

The view from my childhood window in the kitchen didn’t change much over the years, only through the seasons. A few more buildings grew up in the narrow gaps I’d never noticed existed until they were gone, and so a few more shifting drifts of smog appeared, like winter breath in the schoolyard, as did a few dozen more squares of light in the evening and most of the day in winter. During my high school years, the dissidents still gathered in our apartment and I became more interested in following their activities, rather than simply absorbing them in that subconscious way a child takes on the things their parent knows.

There seemed to be something about the new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, a suggestion that his time in the Kremlin might have a different hue from the unchanging grey of all the other leaders. I saw him speak on television after he took over. He was young. He had no cue cards, no prepared monotone speech. There was the faintest hint of uncertainty behind his neat suit, the microphone, the wall of comrades nearby. His appearance and manner coloured the image on the television, as though the picture was clarified, the sound amplified; I sat up on the divan and watched closely. Even my mother was listening, instead of turning up the radio as she usually did when the Central Committee were droning on the television. She had stopped whatever she was doing and stood behind me in the living room. I glanced back once or twice and saw her eyes on the screen, lips compressed and arms crossed. Though Gorbachev mostly parroted the usual lines—about strengthening socialism, about the bright future ahead—he also spoke about taking off the rose-coloured glasses, about the need for change. The era we would call glasnost , openness, had begun.

In 1985, after a few years of working boring odd jobs because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after high school, I started studying at the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow. There was some tension at home when I said I wanted to study at the Gorky Institute. Because of who my parents were, there was doubt as to whether I’d be admitted in the first place. Probably, too, my mother was worried that I would run into trouble if I studied at university. That’s where things go wrong for people, she had always said. So when the Gorky Institute question arose, she called in help. Oleg came over and there was an uneasy meal at our apartment during which they tried to convince me not to apply.

You cannot study humanities in this country, my mother said. There’s no truth in those novels. You can’t call them real Russian literature when they just write what that Writers’ Union decrees is acceptable.

I’ve decided, I said. I’m going. I was young and stubborn.

Oleg leant in, calm and serious, his vivid blue gaze on me. He pushed back his thin hair. But Pasha, he said, they might give you a hard time. More than others, given your background.

They’ll crush you because you can think for yourself, said my mother. She had long forgotten her soup. Her arms were folded across her chest, her voice unsteady in a way that made me feel guilty. To her, true writers existed between the official lines; censorship was the highest form of praise. But I didn’t want to be an above-ground accountant and underground writer. I was sick of being split: I wanted to just be.

And so I went. It wasn’t as bad as they feared. I studied Bitov (some of his works were banned, others were deemed acceptable), who had been at the Gorky Institute some thirty years before and was a tutor there after I left. He was Russian enough for my mother. She seemed to grow used to the fact that I attended Gorky after the first few months went by and nothing sinister happened to me, though I was never sure what she was expecting.

I had a girlfriend in my first year, Tatyana. We would meet at boring culture clubs, dance awkwardly over the wooden zigzag pattern of the parquet floor that looked the same in every Soviet culture hall. We’d go to the cinema or kiss in parks like all the other students, and we had sex in her friend’s dorm room a few times. The excitement of the new lasted maybe five months before we drifted apart, saw each other less and less, kissed other people, and eventually went our separate ways.

I spent three years at Gorky, sometimes writing my own stories or sketching out chapters for a novel, but mostly writing studies of other authors. I always associated the start of college with change. Since Gorbachev’s first year, the life of the city had felt different. A new law allowed public groups to form—everything from drama groups to car enthusiasts to garden appreciation clubs—groups that were not connected to the Party. The dissidents of my childhood began to make contact with other underground groups. They formed the Memorial Society, and words previously unspeakable in public rose up from underground. The society’s objectives included the release of political prisoners and the creation of a memorial to victims of Stalin’s Terror. It was silence, my mother always said: silence enabled the murder of millions under Stalin. Breaking that silence would ensure that the terror would never return. And that was how, slowly, the people and ideas around our kitchen table became a solid presence in the Moscow outside.

By 1986, when I was in my second year at Gorky, people were taking to the new freedoms in their own ways—even those who learnt conformity at home. Borya, whose parents were Party members, walked around wearing a USA t-shirt, and Elena, once a leader in the Komsomol Communist Youth League, now wore her hair short and dyed black, her eyes lined with black pencil, and as we sat in class chewed a silver cross she wore on a chain around her neck.

It was during my second year that I met Ilya. If I was the solitary aspiring novelist who sat up the back scribbling, Ilya was the brash poet who would have stood on the desk to recite his work if he could have got away with it. He was always late for class, forever wearing that leather jacket, his black hair messy; he was likely not long out of bed. Ilya could be confronting, loud; he worshipped Hemingway and Yevtushenko, and had a restless energy about him—each time he walked into a room he would sit in every chair, talking all the time, before stretching out in the chair he’d started with.

Some of our classmates lived in the filthy dorms at the Gorky Institute, and we would often meet there to drink on the weekends. Or we would lose hours in front of the TV watching all the concerts that suddenly began to be broadcast then—The Beatles or the Velvet Underground, anything out of London or Liverpool or New York. I longed for an electric guitar, and wondered if I could pull off an ear piercing.