Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

I met Anya one night at the Sukhanovs’ place. Anna Mikhailovna. On that night, or many, Anya wore a white t-shirt belted into jeans—it was 1988, most of us were wearing jeans. She stood by the sink in the kitchen—really a few cupboards and a stove just off the main room—pouring red wine into a glass, her head tilted to one side. She had a round, pretty face and blonde hair to her shoulders. We got talking and she said she was studying philosophy.

I went to Gorky with Ilya, I said. I looked over to where my friend was laughing and talking loudly at the other end of the room, drink in hand.

She nodded, raised her eyebrows. I heard there were a few writers here, she said. My friend from class kept talking about your group. Painters and poets and novelists.

We want to be, anyway, I said.

Yeah, I want to write, she said. But everything feels too constricted here. I’d love to leave. Move to Berlin or Paris or somewhere.

She spoke about her idol, Lou Andreas-Saloméa, a Russian-born woman said to have been the first female psychoanalyst. Lover of the poet Rilke, friend of Nietzsche and Freud.

She was really interesting, said Anya. Something made her feel separate from the people around her, alone in company. Even as a child she preferred to talk to flowers and made up stories about people she saw in the street. She was all about her ideas. I want to write books that are good thinking , not just good stories.

Anya had a kind of hard confidence about her and didn’t smile much. She had ashy-looking dark circles under her eyes, but rather than make her look tired, they gave her face a beautiful weariness. I was hooked.

We were all struck by a deep longing for art. From Kandinsky we all took on the idea of inner necessity—that there is something inner that drives you to make your own art. We were all trying to create something of our own, to paint the canvas given to us by glasnost . It felt like an inheritance, in a way, from the underground, the repressed artists and writers who came before us. A thing we could only make together but that came from our individual inner lives.

This country suffocates me sometimes, Anya was saying. Like something is wrong with the air.

I said something ridiculous, only half serious, about how great art is made under repression. Look at the greats, the poets, I said. They fought back with their art. Look at music today—that’s all about working against the system.

She shook her head. Saying art thrives under suffering gives some kind of excuse to the things that cause the suffering. Illness is illness. Pain is the beginning and the end. Political killings are murder.

We moved from the kitchen to sit against the wall below the windowsill in the lounge room. Anya seemed interested in my parents’ lives, Oleg and the dissidents, in my writing or at least my impatience to create. It was as though we both sensed we were on the verge of something, of art maybe, and like the others in that apartment, cramped yet free, we stood there, at the edge, together. Really it was an unknown abyss in front of us, but we were tired of Moscow’s state-sanctioned life—boring culture clubs, monotonous working days at grey jobs, eating the same food every day and barely able to afford the black-market clothes and music we wanted—and so the abyss was, like any freedom, full of both fear and beauty.

Anya and I began to see a lot of each other. She said the group at the Sukhanovs’ place inspired her. I hoped that she also wanted to be around me. I was never as confident as Ilya, but it must have been obvious that I liked her: I gave her books that I loved, and we tentatively shared our writing, our ideas. Like many Soviet couples desperate for space of their own, we took each other to our favourite spots—walks in parks and through narrow suburban streets, finding places to sit on the river embankment or on park benches. In novels and in life, it seemed every couple in Moscow had a story of their favourite bench, their beloved park, and that over time we all shared the same embankments and benches and grassy parks as our parents and grandparents.

The city was our canvas. Our lives that summer were all about loud, smoky gatherings in the Sukhanovs’ apartment, shouted political demonstrations on the Arbat, and the dimly lit, thumping world of rock concerts in basements or abandoned shopfronts. From the bustling, musical Arbat to Novopushkinskaya Park, rippling green with dashes of colour where people lay or walked, and then to the crowded crimson-brick desert of Pushkin Square.

Summer heat, summer sun. A thin breeze. We stood on the Arbat. Anya reached out to hand me a placard. We held them in the air: HELP FILL THE BLANK SPOTS OF HISTORY, SUPPORT THE MEMORIAL FOR STALIN’S VICTIMS, or something similar. Ilya stood on a wooden box, calling out to the crowds. Slowly we collected signatures on single sheets of onionskin paper. Our placards shuddered in the breeze. The importance of words felt unbounded, and their repression the strongest method for locking away the horrors of the past: To keep alive the memory of the victims of political repression was the Memorial Society’s motto.

I understood early on that Anya’s aversion to the Soviet Union, her desire to leave, was not a fleeting thing. She had been drawn to the West for as long as she could remember. One night that summer, we were sharing a cigarette on a bench in Novopushkinskaya Park. The heat was pressing. In the humidity, Anya’s cheeks, neck and chest had a thin shine of sweat that made me wish our bodies were close. The park hosted a shifting crowd, a summer crowd: mothers with pigtailed girls, kids kicking cans or soccer balls, grandfathers with ice cream and cigarettes.

Germany, said Anya. That’s where. When I was little, I had this picture of somewhere in Germany. It was probably the East, but right now anywhere is fine by me. From there I could get to the West. I don’t even know where we got it, but it was a postcard with nothing written on it. I’d seen something about Germany on TV, and just had this strange feeling, knowing there was this other place where, right now, people were living lives I knew nothing about. It was like this strong desire.

Germany, I said.

Germany.

We sat for a while longer, an easy quiet between us. The sun lowered, our silence smooth as the easing heat and the drifting, indistinct voices collecting in the heights of the air over Novopushkinskaya Park.

In a way it attracted me, knowing she wanted a world away from the one we lived in. I didn’t need to think too far ahead. Young summers always feel endless.

Anya made me want to stop sitting around talking about writing and actually finish something. When she asked me what I was working on, what my plans were, it was with the expectation that I’d actually do something. I felt high on anticipation.

After a few weeks Anya invited me over. She lived with her parents in an apartment not far from Frunzenskaya Embankment. It was a Moscow I didn’t know well: affluent, leafy, with neoclassical mustard-and-sand buildings looking to both Neskuchny Garden and Gorky Park. Her parents weren’t home. Anya said they were away in Leningrad visiting relatives.

Beyond the kitchen I could see a living room and doors leading from it into other rooms. There were bookcases of dark wood with a few neat volumes, a leather chair in one corner, another chair and a divan against the wall. On the wall was a large painting, in the shadows, and curtains that looked plush in their heavy, mountainous folds.