Then Anya mentioned how she would prefer to study those ideas abroad, travel to the places where Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé had been.
We both were quiet; a pause that held unsaid things. Often we used Anya’s hypothetical journeying out of Russia as fuel for our thoughts, our conversations. It had become very abstract to me; more of an opinion of hers than a plan.
One day in the spring we were sharing a meal—Anya, my mother and I. My mother had left the room for a moment—maybe to go to the bathroom or the living room. The radio murmured in the background and I could see a square of blue sky through the window.
I’ve applied for an exit visa, said Anya, looking straight at me for a moment and then back at her plate. She pulled at her thin cardigan as though securing it over her.
Anya and I broke up for a while. She said she just didn’t believe in the idea of love being transcendent, of it being something more powerful than other desires. She could feel love for me, she said, and at the same time feel fine about being alone—making her own path, as she often called it. It was as if she felt a stronger love for the things she couldn’t have: the places she had never been and the unattainable fullness of art. Of course, such a maddening paradox just makes the one left behind, made me, feel more drawn to the thing that was constantly leaving me. For it always felt, in some way, like a circular, never-ending sort of loss.
And so I didn’t see her parents for a while, either, though I often thought of Mikhail Sergeyevich. He was, like Oleg, someone older for me to look up to and think aloud with. The spring passed and summer arrived, and it felt far removed from the summer of 1988. A feeling of muteness crept into me, like a growing bleak landscape. I wasn’t sure where to look anymore for the things that inspired me. Probably it was the first fraught realisation I had that I was so attached to that group, to Anya, for my own meaning, and without them I was just a step away from feeling like nothing at all.
Then one night Anya called me. She was crying.
He’s dead, she said. He died. He’s gone. Tsoi is dead.
Our musical hero, Viktor Tsoi, had died in a car accident. He was driving alone, on his way home to his wife and son after a tour, and was thought to have fallen asleep at the wheel.
Come over, I said. I was surprised that my voice sounded as it always did: low, quiet, steady, without any hint of the absolute need I was sure would saturate it.
She arrived less than an hour later. I hadn’t seen her in a few months. For reasons neither of us really understood, the death of Tsoi drew us together. As if we were looking back at what his loss represented—the loss of our generation’s voice—and we wanted to preserve something of it by salvaging whatever was left of us. We each had a glass of something, probably brandy, and then went to bed and had silent and sad and fast sex. I held her and stayed inside her for a long time, and then we just lay there, and at some point fell asleep.
The night Tsoi died, someone started a memorial wall on the corner of the Arbat and Krivoarbatsky Lane. Anything could be a memorial, it seemed, once we made a mark, inscribed pain into a thing. We went to the walclass="underline" Anya, me, Ilya, Sukhanov, Lena, Yura. It had been so long since we’d all been anywhere together. I kept glancing at Anya, thinking of the night; her presence beside me again made every place feel as though it contained more. Other people sat or lay down nearby, some murmuring, most just staring or sleeping. We each lit a cigarette, pressed them against the wall, each at a slightly different time, till the fags were bent in half, then we left them on a plate put there by someone before us. The thin drifts of smoke joined one another until each shaky grey thread was indistinguishable from the next. Then we sat down, closer to each other than usual, quiet, the girls crying soundlessly, and we let our offerings burn their ends.
It was that summer, or maybe once autumn started, that Sukhanov and Lena started having troubles, and we didn’t go there so often. At first we would drink in the park, or have quieter nights at the apartments of others we didn’t know so well. But losing that place, we lost some spirit. A time passed after which I knew we would never go back there. Sukhanov wasn’t painting much anymore, he said. I think I’m losing the heat, he said. His wavy blonde hair looked ragged somehow, his eyes bleary. He said he still tried to paint sometimes after work, but the effort was wearing him down. It made me feel stranded in a way hard to describe, to think that he, Sukhanov, artist of colour, child of Kandinsky, could in some way feel the same slow spiral as me.
In October 1990, the memorial stone was finally laid in Dzerzhinsky Square. I walked through the city with Ilya—none of the others wanted to come, or maybe we didn’t ask them—among a long chain of people. Gathering darkness tinted the sky dark blue, towards night. Candlelight glowed stronger in its wake, while incense hovered, invisible, in the air. We had gathered first at Sretenskaya Gate, and then proceeded down Dzerzhinsky Street. Each person held a candle, some also a photo of a lost relative, or banners bearing the names of labour camps—Karlag, Bamlag, Alzhir—and walked to the square. A woman read out names, and after each one the word shot followed with the strange resonance of an echo from a moment that had taken place much earlier, perhaps even before our births. It also felt as though, with her voice, she was in some way re-enacting the shots that needed an honest witness.
On reaching the square, thousands pressed towards the memorial stone brought from the Solovetsky Islands. Something in the quality of the near-silence, disturbed only by murmurs and footsteps or the light wind, created the impression of a funeral. The stone was the body laid to rest in the open, cushioned by the mass of red flowers falling one on top of the other. The statue of Dzerzhinsky, the grandfather of the KGB, was an unwelcome and almost spectral presence in the square.
It was like a slow process of mourning in those years. Glasnost had taken us up, hardened our hopes to gold. We knew what we wanted—memory and suffering recognised, real change—but what to do with such memory once it is unrepressed, that was the uncharted course, the unanswerable question.
In the winter of 1990, McDonald’s appeared in Pushkin Square. Enormous queues, ridiculous queues, persisted weeks beyond the restaurant’s opening, more devout even than the lines to see Lenin in the Kremlin mausoleum. The square seemed to absorb it so quickly: the facade, MCDONALD’S in thick backlit letters, glowed boldly as night came. The restaurant seemed dirtied overnight, the remnants of meals on the tables looked withered; sagging napkins, tall drink cups tipped over.
We had an argument, Anya and I, when we went to it. Everyone was going to try the food and see what it was like, so we decided to go as well. We stood outside, waiting, just as we had in the long lines we’d grown up with outside grocery or clothes stores elsewhere in the city.
There’s your West, I said to her, half joking. You don’t need to go now.
I knew by then that she was going, that we were in a vague relationship, like the twilight of togetherness.
You’re not even giving the country a chance, I went on bitterly. Have some faith.
I want to go. I want change.
At night we were calmer; we seemed to thrive in darkness.