Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

It was through music, above all, that the new Moscow flooded our lives. Ilya always knew where the latest, best, realest shows were going on. In the red darkness of concerts we could literally scream every thought, every want. We went to the Yolka Festival on New Year’s Eve 1986. Five hundred people filled a Moscow culture club; and there were ten live bands, and people crawled up the windows trying to get in—they could hear it, the sounds and the life; they wanted to be there, to reach that freedom.

This is it , Pasha, Ilya called out to me, shoving my shoulder. This will wake the fuck out of the country!

In the sweating crowd, a girl with long dark hair kissed me so forcefully I grasped her shoulders in my hands, then just kept holding her. As quickly as she’d appeared she vanished into the smoky darkness of the club, hands drifting above her like some swaying underwater plant, and I never saw her again.

Near the end of my degree, I applied for a job at the Gorky Institute library and, when I graduated, accepted a position there. It was steady, methodical work, processing loans and helping researchers. Each day I had lunch at a workers’ cafeteria nearby. This was, I reasoned, how I’d make a living before making my way as a writer. Ilya found a job with a stock delivery driver and so spent each day hauling boxes and chatting with his boss, the truck driver, Timofey. It was 1988, June had finally brought summer heat, and we were free young men ready for the world glasnost had brought us. We had weekends and most evenings off work, so Ilya and I spent every possible moment of that summer out in our city that felt like a new city.

Though memories don’t always have words, they usually have a place, and for me those years were one and the same with the Arbat. In 1986 they turned it into a pedestrian street, paved and lined with streetlamps. It became the stage of central Moscow, filled with milling shoppers and people strolling in any season, though the summer of 1988 was different. Thick crowds slowed the pace and new scenes slid by with the heat: the punks all pierced in their black leather, hair shaved or spiked like barbed wire. The man with long stringy hair cooing over his guitar while people threw him a kopek or two. Young guys in tracksuits dancing, falling to the ground and twisting on their backs before bouncing up again; a little further on a group of teenage girls swaying to music coming from somewhere, maybe a cassette player, one of them flicking her hair as though she liked the way it moved so freely. The tourist with a silver camera, and socks beneath her white high-heeled sandals.

We would walk and watch, listen to the music, bask in the wide sun. Ilya in his leather jacket despite the heat, squinting as he blew smoke rings to the sky. I even wore a New York t-shirt that I had bought from a seller at Izmaylovsky Market.

In the afternoons we would cool down in parks or beside fountains, with Pepsi or kvass sold from those large yellow barrels. We’d read or listen to music on Ilya’s black-market Walkman, Billy Bragg cassettes turned up loud. Sun-sleepy, hazy music, broad blue skies. Usually Ilya was breaking a girl’s heart somewhere in Moscow and he would tell me about this or that beauty he had just met or lost. I, on the other hand, usually fell for girls from a distance.

From the Arbat we would walk to Pushkin Square, along the green-lined boulevard of Tverskoy. The stengazety wall newspapers were posted on glass-covered noticeboards outside the news offices in Pushkin Square, so we would often go to read them. In April of 1988, the papers had reported that the square would be the site of the first McDonald’s in the Soviet Union. People laughed at the idea of fast food or fast anything in the city with a twenty-minute queue for eggs at Tagansky Gastronom, or thirty minutes if you wanted the Bulgarian deodorant.

Gorbachev’s glasnost loosened censorship’s grasp. He said it was time to fill in the blank spaces of history. Our favourite saying in those years came from the Belarusian writer Adamovich, who said it was more interesting to read than to live. In the stengazety papers at the time, there were articles about mass-grave investigations, reports on alcoholism and prostitution, stories on promised reforms, and letters from workers complaining about their bosses. Victims of the Gulag were writing their stories and sending them to the newspapers. And the newspapers were publishing them. Glasnost was supposed to open up society and perestroika , reconstruction, to change it. We read out this or that article to each other, or just stood silently with a cigarette hungrily reading the latest. Crowds vied for a spot in front of the noticeboards.

Also, in 1988, the Memorial Society started collecting signatures for a petition calling for a monument to Stalin’s victims. I volunteered with Ilya and a few other friends and we took to the Arbat, explaining the goal—a public monument, a statue of some kind, in central Moscow to commemorate the dead—to watchful and eager, if very quiet, groups of Muscovites. After seventy years of Communist silence, people were emerging like survivors of a storm, looking gingerly up and out, squinting in the light of the morning after, uncertain if the walls of remaining buildings might suddenly collapse.

We saw little difference between the mass graves of the dead and the mass of the living, the people. Indifference to the former would simply shift to the latter. How the state and citizens alike acted towards history would determine how anyone cared, or not, about people in the future. But it would not always be the case. History’s reach and its lessons would only emanate so far from the event. Over time, the impact would fade; knowledge would be lost after one or two generations. Then what we went through would simply become events; it would become something that happened to some people long ago.

The only people our age Ilya and I knew who had an apartment of their own were Sukhanov, an artist, and his wife Lena. When she and Sukhanov married, Lena’s parents gave up a two-room apartment in exchange for two one-room apartments, so Lena and Sukhanov had their own place, unlike most newlyweds, who lived with their parents or in-laws.

Sukhanov, a tall guy with wavy blond hair, was adamant that he needed noise and company after a day with his art. And so a never-ending stream of guests was invited over to their apartment every weekend evening. Sukhanov’s face would have the feverish look of someone in the midst of creative ecstasy, when everything is possible and the intangible in the mind will be touched in a future moment that is wonderfully close. He got by working at a desk job somewhere, though he so rarely mentioned it that I never could remember what he did there. Lena always seemed pretty glamorous; she was a sound technician at a local TV station and had an incredible ringing laugh.

Sukhanov’s style was varied: sometimes he painted abstract images—waves of colour or stunning metallic-looking sheets like oil on water—or he made the familiar uncanny, guitars and violins with their strings set loose, floating in the air, or a single term like glasnost or perestroika with the letters jumbled or put down in uneven jagged lines, as if they’d fallen out of their words.

Music, either from someone’s guitar or the cassette player, filled every space in their apartment. The place was tiny but decent. Their bed was the couch, usually folded out with several people lying or sitting on it. Scents of cheap Armenian brandy and bitter tobacco smoke old and new hung in the air. Even with a window open the air was close; there was something full about it, as though nothing from outside could intrude upon our loud oasis.