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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms - essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents - Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
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‘A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn’t put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. In Memory of Memory has that trick of feeling both completely original and already classic, and I confidently expect this translation to bring Maria Stepanova a rabid fan base on the order of the one she already enjoys in Russia.’
— Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot
‘There is simply no book in contemporary Russian literature like In Memory of Memory. A microcosm all its own, it is an inimitable journey through a family history which, as the reader quickly realizes, becomes a much larger quest than yet another captivating family narrative. Why? Because it asks us if history can be examined at all, yes, but does so with incredible lyricism and fearlessness. Because Stepanova teaches us to find beauty where no one else sees it. Because Stepanova teaches us to show tenderness towards the tiny, awkward, missed details of our beautiful private lives. Because she shows us that in the end our hidden strangeness is what makes us human. This, I think, is what makes her a truly major European writer. I am especially grateful to Sasha Dugdale for her precise and flawless translation which makes this book such a joy to read in English. This is a voice to live with.’
— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
‘Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanova’s profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance, In Memory of Memory is a poetic appraisal of the ways the stories of others are the fabric of our history.’
— Esther Kinsky, author of Grove
4‘Extraordinary – a work of haunting power, grace and originality’
— Philippe Sands, author of East West Street
‘The poet Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, beautifully translated by Sasha Dugdale, is a deeply intelligent quest for the significance of minutiae that survive while grand narratives of history sweep over them. It makes for powerful and magical reading, reminiscent of Nabokov’s Speak Memory. Time and again the sheer richness of the task sustains us and drives us on. This is a wholly marvellous book that extends our knowledge of all that is valued and lost.’
— George Szirtes, author of The Photographer at Sixteen
‘A book to plunge into. “Everyone else’s ancestors had taken part in history,” writes Stepanova; building itself via accumulation, these chapters become an important testimony to the cultural and political lives of the people held beneath the surface of the tides of history’
— Andrew McMillan, author of Playtime
‘Stepanova has given new life to the skaz technique of telling a story through the scrambled speech of an unreliable narrator, using manic wordplay and what one critic called ‘a carnival of images.’
— Los Angeles Review of Books
‘In Memory of Memory is an invitation to accompany Maria Stepanova on her way through the land of the dead back to the present day. No more and no less.’
— Süddeutsche Zeitung
‘In Memory of Memory is a multifaceted essay on the nature of remembering.’
— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
5‘In Memory of Memory is the story of three generations of her family told through the preserved and remembered artifacts of their lives – the tale of people whose greatest achievement was simply to survive the perilous twentieth century.’
— Moscow Times
‘One of the most important texts written in Russian in recent years. Stepanova’s book gives grounds for claiming the triumphant return of Russian literature to the world literary scene.’
— Lev Oborin
‘In Memory of Memory is the most important Russian novel of 2017. An extremely personal crime story in which the interpretation of the past reveals itself to be part of another, more political plot: how we can come to terms with ourselves in the present.’
— GQ Russia
‘Maria Stepanova has turned the dead into her co-authors. The result is a book that was unknown in Russian before.’
— Novaya Gazeta
‘Not only the most important book of the year, but of recent years in general. This book is an event.’
— Ekho Moskvy
‘In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova is far and wide the best book written in Russian in 2017. Stepanova writes in a Russian like no one else.
— Afisha
‘It’s been a long time since I have read such a rich, generous book. At once whirling and lucid, strict and delicate, funny and moving. In Memory of Memory is nothing less than a tender masterwork of beauty and intelligence.’
— Sydsvenska Dagbladet
7
IN MEMORY OF MEMORY
A ROMANCE
MARIA STEPANOVA
Translated by
SASHA DUGDALE
CONTENTS
‘“And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”’ — Lewis Carroll
‘Grandmother said, “He’s old enough to be told. Drink in the company of the living, drink as much as you like. But never drink with the dead.” I was bewildered, “How can you drink with the dead? I don’t understand.” “Very easily,” grandmother replied. “Most of the time that’s what people do, they drink with the dead. Don’t do it. Drink a glass and a hundred years will pass. Drink another and another hundred will pass. Drink a third and it’s another hundred. By the time you leave, three hundred years will have passed and no one will recognize you, you’ll be out of joint with time.” I thought she was trying to frighten me.’ — Viktor Sosnora
‘“How awful!” said the ladies, “whatever do you find interesting in that?” — Aleksandr Pushkin
PART I
I. SOMEONE ELSE’S DIARY
Aunt Galya, my father’s sister, died. She was just over eighty. We hadn’t been close – there was an uneasiness between the families and a history of perceived snubs. My parents had what you might call troubled dealings with Aunt Galya, and we almost never saw her. As a result, I had little chance to form my own relationship with her. We met infrequently, we had the odd phone call, but towards the end she unplugged her phone, saying ‘I don’t want to talk to anyone.’ Then she disappeared entirely into the world she had built for herself: layered strata of possessions, objects and trinkets in the cave of her tiny apartment.
Galya lived her life in the pursuit of beauty: the dream of rearranging her possessions into a definitive order, of painting the walls and hanging the curtains. At some point, years ago, she began the process of decluttering her apartment, and this gradually consumed her. She was permanently shaking things out, checking anew what objects were essential. The contents of the apartment constantly needed sorting and systematizing, each and every cup required careful consideration, books and papers stopped existing for themselves and became mere usurpers of space, forming barricades that crossed the apartment in little heaps. The apartment consisted of two rooms and as one room was overcome by more objects, Galya would move to the other, taking only the absolute essentials with her – but then the tidying and re-evaluating would begin again. The home wore its own viscera on the outside, unable to draw it all back into itself again. There was no longer any deciding whether a particular thing was important or not, because everything had significance in some way, especially the 17yellowing newspapers collected over decades, tottering piles of clippings that propped up the walls and the bed. At a later point the only spare living space was a divan, worn concave, and I remember we were sitting there on one occasion, the two of us, in the middle of a raging sea of postcards and TV guides. She was attempting to feed me the chocolates she kept reserved for special occasions, and I was attempting to turn down these precious offerings with anxious politeness. A newspaper clipping at the top of a pile bore the headline: ‘Which saint rules your sign of the Zodiac?’ and the name of the paper and the publication date were written carefully at the top in her beautifully neat handwriting, blue ink across the dead paper.
♦
We got there about an hour after her caretaker rang. The stairwell was in half-darkness and there was a hum in the air. People we didn’t know stood around on the landing and sat on the stairs, they had heard about her death somehow and had rushed round to offer their undertaker services, to help with registering the death, dealing with the paperwork. How on earth did they know? Had the doctor told them? The police? One of them came into the apartment with us, and stood there without taking off his coat.
Aunt Galya died in the early evening on 8 March, Women’s Day, that Soviet festival of mimosa and greetings cards festooned with chicks. Women’s Day had been one of those celebration days in our family, when everyone gathered around a single enormous table and the minerals splashed liberally into ruby-coloured wine glasses. On Women’s Day there were always at least four 18different types of salad on the table: carrot and walnut; cheese; beetroot and garlic; and, of course, the common denominator of all Russian salads, olivye. But all that had ceased thirty years ago, long before my parents had emigrated to Germany. Galya was left behind, fuming, and in the new post-Soviet world her newspapers began publishing unprecedented and titillating things: horoscopes, recipes, homemade herbal remedies.
She desperately didn’t want to end her life in a hospital and she had her reasons. She’d seen her own parents, my grandparents, die in one, and she’d already had some sobering experiences of state medical care. But still the moment came for summoning an ambulance, and we might well have done so if it hadn’t been a holiday weekend. It was decided to wait for Monday and the working week, and in this way Galya was given her chance to turn onto her side and die in her sleep.
In the other room, where her caretaker slept, photographs and sketches by my father Misha hung like squares on a chessboard, covering the whole wall. By the door was a black-and-white photograph taken in the 1960s, one from my favourite series of ‘pictures taken at the vets’, a beautiful picture: a boy and his dog waiting their turn, sitting against a wall, the boy a sullen fourteen-year-old, and the dog, a boxer, leaning into him with its shoulder.
♦
Her apartment now stood silent, stunned and cowering, filled with suddenly devalued objects. In the bigger room television stands squatted grimly in each corner. A huge new fridge was stuffed to the gills with icy cauliflower and frozen loaves of bread (‘Misha loves 19his bread, get me a couple of loaves in case he comes round’). The same books stood in lines, the ones I used to greet like family members whenever I went round. To Kill a Mockingbird, the black Salinger with the boy on the cover, the blue binding of the Library of Poets series, a grey-bound Chekhov set, the green Complete Works of Dickens. My old acquaintances on the shelves: a wooden dog, a yellow plastic dog, and a carved bear with a flag on a thread. All of them crouched, as if preparing themselves for a journey, their own stolid usefulness in sudden doubt.
A few days later when I sat down to sort through papers I noticed that in the piles of photographs and postcards there was hardly anything written. There were hoards of thermal vests and leggings; new and beautiful jackets and skirts, set aside for some great sallying-forth and so never worn and still smelling of Soviet emporia; an embroidered men’s shirt from before the war; and tiny ivory brooches, delicate and girlish: a rose, another rose, a crane with wings outstretched. These had belonged to Galya’s mother, my grandmother, and no one had worn them for at least forty years. All these objects were inextricably bound together, everything had its meaning only in the whole, in the accumulation, within the frame of a continuing life, and now it was all turning to dust before me.
In a book about the working of the mind, I once read that the important factor in discerning the human face was not the combination of features, but the oval shape. Life itself, whilst it continues, can be that same oval; or, after death, the thread of life running through the tale of what has been. The meek contents of her apartment, feeling themselves to be redundant, immediately began to lose their human qualities and, in doing so, ceased to 20remember or to mean anything.
I stood before the remnants of her home, doing the necessary tasks. Bemused at how little had been written down in this house of readers, I began to tease out a melody from the few words and scrappy phrases I could remember her saying: a story she had told me; endless questions about how the boy, my growing son, was doing, and anecdotes from the far-off past – country rambles in the 1930s. The woven fabric of language decomposes instantly, never again to be felt between the fingers: ‘I would never say “lovely”, it sounds so terribly common,’ Galya admonished me once. And there were other prohibited words I can’t recall, her talk of one’s people, gossip about old friends, the neighbours, little reports from a lonely and self-consuming life.
I soon found that there was in fact much evidence of the written word in the apartment. Amongst the possessions she kept till her dying day, the possessions she often asked for, sometimes just to touch with her hand, were countless used notebooks and diaries. She’d kept a diary for years, not a day passed without her scribbling a note, as much a part of her routine as getting out of bed or washing. These diaries were stored in a wooden box by her headboard and there were a lot of them, two full bag-loads, which I carried home to Banny Pereulok. There I sat down at once to read them, in search of stories, explanations: the oval shape of her life.
♦
For the interested reader, diaries and notebooks can be placed in two categories: in the first the text is intended to be official, manifest, aimed at a readership. The notebook becomes a training ground for the outward 21self, and, as in the case of the nineteenth-century artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, an open declaration, an unending monologue, addressed to an invisible but sympathetic ear.
Still I’m fascinated by the other sort of diary, the working tool, the sort the writer-as-craftsperson keeps close at hand, of little apparent use to the outsider. Susan Sontag, who practised this art form for decades, said of her diary that it was ‘an instrument, a tool’ – I’m not sure this is entirely apt. Sontag’s notebooks (and the notebooks of other writers) are not just for the storage of ideas, like nuts in squirrels’ cheeks, to be consumed later. Nor are they filled with quick outlines of events, to be recollected when needed. Notebooks are an essential daily activity for a certain type of person, loose-woven mesh on which they hang their clinging faith in reality and its continuing nature. Such texts have only one reader in mind, but this reader is utterly implicated. Break open a notebook at any point and be reminded of your own reality, because a notebook is a series of proofs that life has continuity and history, and (this is most important) that any point in your own past is still within your reach.
Sontag’s notebooks are filled with such proofs: lists of films she has seen, books she has read, words that have charmed her, the dried husks of completed endeavours – and these are largely limited to the notebooks; they almost never feed into her books or films or articles, they are neither the starting point, nor the underpinning for her public work. They are not intended as explanations for another reader (perhaps for the self, although they are scribbled down at such a lick that sometimes it’s hard to make out what is meant). Like a fridge, or as it was once called, an ice house, a place where the 22fast-corrupting memory-product can be stored, a space for witness accounts and affirmations, or the material and outward signs of immaterial and elusive relations, to paraphrase Goncharov.
There is something faintly displeasing, if only in the excess of material, and I say this precisely because I am of the same disposition, and far too often my working notes seem to me to be heaped deadweight: ballast I would dearly love to be rid of, but what would be left of me then? In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm describes an interior that is, in some ways, the image of my own notebook (and this was a horrible realization). It is littered with newspapers, books, overflowing ashtrays, dusty Peruvian tat, unwashed dishes, empty pizza boxes, cans, flyers, books along the lines of Who’s Who, attempting to pass as real knowledge and other objects passing as nothing at all, because they lost all resemblance to anything years ago. For Malcolm this living space is Borges’s Aleph, a ‘monstrous allegory of truth’, a gristly mass of crude fact and versions that never attained the clean order of history.
♦
My Aunt Galya’s diaries were completely peculiar, and their strangely woven texture, which reminded me above all of chain-link fencing, intrigued me more and more as I read them.
At any of the big art exhibitions I visited as a child, there were always a few viewers who stood out to me, and they were usually, and inexplicably, women. These women went from one picture to another, bending over the captions and making notes on pieces of paper or in exercise books. It dawned on me at some point that they 23were simply copying down the names of all the pictures, making for themselves a sort of homemade catalogue – a shadow copy of what they’d seen. And I wondered why they were doing it, and hadn’t yet realized that a list creates the illusion of possession: the exhibition would pass and dissolve in the air, but the piece of paper held the order of sculptures and pictures, as freshly as when they first saw them, long after the actual images had faded.
Galya’s diaries were just such lists, but of daily occurrences, recorded with astonishing exactness, and with astonishing opacity. The diaries documented the time she got up and when she went to sleep, the television programmes she’d watched, the number of phone conversations she’d had, who they’d been with, what she’d eaten, whatever else she’d done. There was a minute and virtuosic avoidance of content – how she’d actually filled her hours. It might say ‘read’, for example, but with no mention of what the reading material had been or what it had meant to her – in fact everything in her long and exhaustively documented life was the same. Nothing indicated what this life had been for, there was nothing about herself, nothing about other people, only the fastidious details, the fixing of the passing of time with the exactitude of a medieval chronicler.
I kept thinking that surely life would rear its head, if only once, and reveal itself in all its colour. Hadn’t she spent her life reading – wouldn’t that alone have provoked intense reflection? There were also the constant slights and grievances that my aunt clung to, and only reluctantly relinquished. Surely something of this would be preserved and laid out in a final furious paragraph, in which Galya would tell the world, and us, its representatives, what she thought of us – the unexpurgated truth. 24
But there was nothing of the sort in the diaries. There were hints and semitones of meaning, folds in the weave that denoted emotion, ‘hurray’ written in the margin against the note of a phone call with my father or with me, a few opaquely bitter comments on her parents’ anniversaries. And that was it. It was as if the main task of each and every note, each completed year’s diary, was a faithful witnessing of the exterior, and a concealment of the authentic and interior. Show everything. Hide everything. Preserve it for ever.
What was it she held to be of such value in these diaries? Why did she keep them by her bedside until her dying day, frightened they would be lost, often asking for them to be moved closer to her? Perhaps the written text as it stood – and it was the tale of a life of loneliness and the imperceptible slide towards non-existence – still had the force of an indictment. The world needed to read all this, to realize just how shoddily we had dealt with her.
Or, strange as it seems, for her these pinched records might have contained the substance of joy, which she needed to immortalize, to add to the pile of manuscripts that, as Bulgakov wrote, don’t burn, and which speak without any intention towards the future. If that’s the case then she succeeded.
11 October 2002
Working backwards again. It’s 1.45pm. Just put the towels, nightgown etc except dark colours in to soak. Will do the bedlinen later. Before that I brought everything in from balcony. 3 degrees, the vegetables might have frozen. Peeled and chopped pumpkin and put in a box ready for freezer. Very slow work! Watched television and did it in two hours and a little more. Before that I had tea with milk. 25
Slept from 4-6pm, couldn’t resist a little nap. Before that T.V. rang about the telephone. And he rang before 12 as well to check whether the television was working. This morning not a single channel worked. Got up at 8 when Seryozha was washing in the bathroom. Left after nine, took my time to get ready. Bus No. 3 didn’t come till 9.45. We waited an age. Should have taken the 171. There were crowds everywhere and it took far longer than usual. Bus station. Newspapers. But I did manage to buy the pumpkin, first I’ve seen this year. And carrots. Got home around 12. Wanted to watch Columbo. Took my hypertension pills last night just after 1.45 after measuring B. P. Waited for it to come down so I could take more pills. Spent 20 mins trying. Couldn’t measure B. P. Got to bed at 3am.
8 July 2004
Lovely sunny morning, not the rain promised. Had coffee with condensed milk and went out around 11. Crowds everywhere. Sat for a long time, until 1pm, by the pond, looked at the grass, the trees and the sky, sang, felt very well in myself.
People were out walking their dogs along the paths, and pushing babies in strollers, and lots of parties of youngsters in their swimsuits, relaxing and having fun.
Managed to pay without queuing, bought cream cheese. Strolled home. New school has a beautiful border. Tall plumes of bedstraw and wild rose. Just perfect! On the way home saw some boys playing in an abandoned old car. They had a plastic bottle stuffed full of seed pods. Apparently they’re edible.
11 October 2005
Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t much want to get up or get going or do anything. 10.40 post was delivered and I went back to bed 26after that. Sveta came just after that. She’s such a good girl, she gets the best of everything for me. Had tea and spent the day in bed. Thanked V. V. for bringing up post.
Bobrova rang after 12. She came on Thursday.
I rang the clinic. Ira from Social Services, and Yura in the evening. Watched television and tidied all the washing on the chair. Went to bed at 11.30pm.
Hot day. I wore the skirt Tonya got me. ‘Dreary sort of life, of no use to anyone,’ as you might say. Tea in the afternoon, coffee in the evening. No appetite whatsoever.
But there was one note, quite different from the rest. On 17 July 2005 she wrote:
Sima rang this morning. I got down the photo album afterwards. Shook all the photos out and spent a long while looking at them. I didn’t want to eat, and looking at the photos gave me such a feeling of melancholy, tears, real sadness for the times passed, and for those who aren’t with us anymore. This pointless life of mine, a life lived for nothing, the emptiness in my soul… I wanted to lose myself, forget it all.
I went back to bed and slept for the rest of the day, strange, can’t think how I could have slept so long, didn’t get up till the evening, till 8pm. Drank some milk, closed the curtains and lay down, and again this sleep to transport me away from reality. Sleep is my salvation.
♦
Months passed, maybe years. Galya’s diaries lay around the place, caught up in piles of other papers, the sort of papers you leave out, thinking they will come in handy, and instead they discolour and age like old kitchenware. I suddenly and involuntarily remembered them when I 27arrived in the town of Pochinky.
Pochinky had a dubious claim to fame in our household. This one-horse dead-end little town, over two hundred kilometres from Nizhny Novgorod, was the place we’d all come from and no one had ever returned to. No one had even made an attempt to return there in the last seventy-odd years. Nabokov writes about existence as ‘but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’ – well, this quiet little provincial town, of little interest to anyone, became over the years that first dark eternity in the collective memory of our family.
Ours was a large family back then. I dimly remember accounts of dozens of brothers and sisters, photographs of carts and horses and wooden buildings. But these accounts were eclipsed by the tales of the wild adventures of my great-grandmother, Sarra Ginzburg, a native of Pochinky. She had been in prison in Tsarist times and had even lived in Paris, and trained as a doctor and then treated Soviet children, including my mother and me, and everything I was told about her had the laurel-leaf taste of legend. There was no one left to verify all these fantastic tales and no one would have wanted to.
We had a relative, Leonid, who was constantly on the brink of visiting the shrunken husk of this nineteenth-century town. He talked about it as one might an imaginary polar expedition. He spent his days attempting to instil this enthusiasm in others, his near and distant relatives (I was one of his last converts). He had striking, almost transparent, pale eyes and his enthusiasm was a constantly running motor. On the rare occasions when he found himself in Moscow he would visit to discuss his plans with my parents. Then one day he arrived unexpectedly and found my parents gone, they’d emigrated to Germany. I was the family’s 28sole remaining representative in Moscow. I’d never considered a sentimental journey like this, and I was intoxicated: for the first time it seemed as if our family’s native home was within reach, and therefore a real place. The more Leonid insisted on the hardships we would face, the distances we would travel and the elaborate preparations that would need to be made, the more the journey seemed quite against the odds – and the more promise it held for me. In the end this Leonid, who spent so many years planning a trip with the whole extended family, a sort of return of the Tribes of Israel, died without ever realizing his dream. Pochinky remained as fantastical and unknown to us all as the fairy tale city of Kitezh.
And here I was, just that little bit closer to Pochinky. Why I went I can’t say, and I can’t remember what I hoped to discover there, but before I left I spent a long time online, turning up facts. Pochinky was at the outer limits of the known world, I found it on an ancient map: beyond Arzamas, tucked in the wilds beyond Pushkin’s estate at Boldino, surrounded by villages with doomsday names. There were no railway lines in these parts, the nearest halt was three hours’ drive. I decided to cut my losses and hired a driver in Nizhny Novgorod.
We left Nizhny Novgorod early in the morning along wide, pink, still-wintery streets. The town slipped into valleys and then reappeared in the car windows with its peculiar, not-quite-heedless clutter of industrial sites and picket-fenced wooden houses, conceding nothing to the modern world. When we reached the road out of town the car seemed to move by itself, racing along with unnecessary speed: the driver, father of a three-month-old baby, kept his hands on the wheel and was disdainfully silent. The road flexed up and down in tight 29little waves, frail remains of snow clung to the ground under the fir trees. The world grew poorer with every kilometre. In the blackened villages new churches gleamed like china, white as new crowns on old teeth. I had a guidebook extolling the beauty of Arzamas, now long behind us, and a little book on Pochinky, published twenty years before: it mentioned a shop owned by the Jew Ginzburg, who traded in sewing machines, and that was all. There was no mention of the legendary Sarra.
We travelled for long hours. At last the hills began, a dusky ridge of them, Umbrian hills, the colour of dark copper, rising and falling as evenly as breath. Sometimes a brief flash of water. After we passed the turning for Pushkin’s Boldino estate there was a series of Pushkin memorials along the road. According to legend his local mistress had lived in the village of Lukoyanov. Little groups of trees like herds of animals.
Pochinky was built along a long main street: little side streets departed from the high street at tidy right angles. An attractive church in a classical style stood on the far side of the road. I learnt from the guidebook that this was the Cathedral of the Nativity, where a certain Orfanov had once been priest. I knew the name, Valya Orfanova often sent us greetings when I was a child, and once she had asked my mother to buy me a book from her, so Masha will have something to remember me by. Mother picked out a poetry collection by the Symbolist poet Fyodor Sologub at the second-hand bookshop, but unfortunately it turned out to be a late work, The Great Good News Herald, a book of Communist poems published in 1923, filled with proletarians with flaming ideals. Useless to me, as I judged it then, not yet able to appreciate the exquisite soundplay underlying the hackneyed sentiments: 30
The officer’s horse
The enemy force
Treads in its dance
Treads on my heart
I had a strong desire to abandon the deserted main square in search of a place where there was something I could see and touch, but Maria Fufayeva, a local historian, was waiting for us there. It was a Sunday but they’d opened up the town library just for us. An exhibition of watercolours of Pochinky’s streets hung in the library; painted a hundred years before, they’d been sent from Germany for the exhibition. A German family had lived in Pochinky towards the end of the nineteenth century and I had a sudden memory of the painter’s name, Gethling, being mentioned when I was a child.
The pictures were gemütlich, cheery: a pretty house with a chemist’s sign and some flowering mallow, the house of Augusta Gethling, the painter’s sister, who had tutored my great-grandmother for her school entrance exam. The house was still standing, but its little porch was gone, the facade had been concreted over and the mallow and the carved window frames had disappeared. No one could tell me anything about the house with the large yard and the horse and cart, the home of Sarra and her family at the beginning of the twentieth century.
And that was all. Much like the diaries of Aunt Galya, the reader had to content herself with shopping lists, notes of television programmes, descriptions of the weather. Whatever stood behind this, swaying and rustling, was in no hurry to show itself, and perhaps didn’t intend to show itself at all. We were offered tea, we were taken for a guided tour of the town. I searched the 31ground beneath my feet constantly as if hoping to find a dropped kopek.
The village had the shrunken feel of a vanished town, a once bustling centre which had sprung up around the largest horse fair in the whole region. We crossed a vast market square, a vacant space now overgrown with trees, somewhere in its centre a lead-grey statue of Lenin, but otherwise a place abandoned by people; too large to be useful in any new reincarnation. It was fringed by pretty little wooden houses, like the ones in the watercolours, some showing the signs of hasty, ugly renovation. And we were shown another square, a little asphalted space where Solomon Ginzburg, Sarra’s brother, had owned a shop in the 1920s. Here we stood a while and took photos, a group of us, surly women in coats and hats. The wind was too icy for smiles. On a kerb by the main road another monument glittered in the grass, dedicated to Kapral, a mighty stallion and a stud horse for a full twenty years.
A little drive beyond the bridge over the river Rudnya was a derelict complex of buildings, the size of a small town, used for horse breeding. They had been built at the beginning of the nineteenth century and had once belonged to the cavalry regiment of the Imperial Guard. But even before this, horses had been bred here: … kabarda and Nogay, stallions, horses, geldings and Nogay mares, and Russian colts and herding horses.
Catherine the Great built up the business to an industrial scale. The resulting huge square building with its classical lines and peeling whitewashed walls, its subsiding central tower and the arched entrance, symmetrically matched on the far side of the square, was intended to be an outpost of civilization, a little island of Petersburgian refinement. It had fallen into total 32disrepair relatively recently, in the 1990s, and it now stood surrounded by bare earth, blasted by the long winter. The last horses moved about the open paddocks: heavy-set chestnut horses with pale and tufty manes. They lifted their heads and pushed their muzzles into our palms. By now the sky was dazzling, the clouds formed a mountain ridge across the horizon and a skin-pink light glowed under the crazed white facade of the buildings.
We’d already travelled halfway back when I realized I’d forgotten the most important thing: there must have been a cemetery of some sort, Jewish or otherwise, where my ancestors were buried. The driver had his foot on the accelerator, the names of villages were flashing past: surreal, earthy names. I called Maria Fufayeva on my mobile. There was no cemetery, just as there were no longer any Jews left in Pochinky. Actually, no, in fact there was one Jew left in Pochinky, she even knew his name: Gurevich. Strangely enough it was my mother’s maiden name.
II. ON BEGINNINGS
I stopped writing this text for the very first time thirty-something years ago, after filling two or three pages of a lined school exercise book. The size and ambition of the task were simply too much for me. I put it aside, left it to grow into. I comforted myself with the thought that I could leave it be for now.
The history of this book consists of a number of such denials: moments when I managed to escape it in various ways: I put it off for my older, better self to complete, or I made tiny, painless and deliberately inadequate sacrifices: jotting notes on scraps of paper or on my mobile whilst on the train or on the phone, a little like notching a stick (to remind me, so that from these two- and three-word distillations the memory would be able to put together a whole viable and elegant construction, a silken tent for the narrative to reside in). In place of a memory I did not have, of an event I did not witness, my memory worked over someone else’s story; it rehydrated the driest little note and made of it a pop-up cherry orchard.
Early twentieth-century Russian memoirs sometimes mention an amusement for children which consisted of placing yellow discs in the bottom of a teacup and then filling the cup with water. Under water the discs began to glow with the extraordinary, exotic and otherworldly intensity of Japanese and Chinese paints. I’ve never seen these discs – where did all that go? But in the family treasure trove of Christmas decorations handed down from my grandmother, there was a little incense burner, the height of a match, in the shape of a swarthy-faced boy, smoking microscopic white cigarettes, and the smoke kept rising and the pinpoint of light endlessly 34disintegrated to ash, until our tiny cigarette supplies ended for good. Now all I can do is describe its workings, and perhaps this is a happy end of sorts? Paradise for the disappearing objects and everyday diversions of the past might simply exist in being remembered and mentioned.
I began writing this book when I was ten, in the apartment on Banny Pereulok in Moscow, where I am typing the first lines of this chapter now. In the 1980s there was a battered desk by the window with an orange desk lamp, I would stick my favourite transfers to its white plastic base: a plush mummy bear, pulling a sledge with a Christmas tree, a sack of gifts and her baby bear sitting sideways on it under a snowy sky. On each sheet of transfers there were usually five or six drab pictures, gleaming with a sticky finish. Each one was cut out separately and wetted in a bowl of warm water. Then the transparent coloured image had to be peeled free of the backing with a practised movement, placed on a flat surface and smoothed out, all the creases removed. I remember the little cat boy wearing a raincoat and a carnival mask on the door of the kitchen cupboard, and the penguin couple on a background of pink-green wheeling Northern Lights. Still the bears were my very favourite.
It is as if it brings some relief to share all these scraps from the past as I remember them, half-wryly, the transfers dirty and rubbed away a good twenty years even before the kitchen was redecorated, and only now reanimated, illuminated again – fat little boy in a sombrero and yellow-green domino mask but with no face behind the mask, a mass of gold curlicues around his head… As if, like a vanquished wizard, I could disappear, becoming a thousand ancient, neglected, blackening objects. 35As if my life’s work was to catalogue them all. As if that is what I grew up to do.
The second time I started to write this book without even realizing it, I was sixteen, wild, errant; in the afterglow of a love affair that felt as if it had defined everything in my life. With the passing of years this love has dissipated and paled to such an extent that I can no longer conjure up the sensation of ‘everything beginning’ that I felt while I was in its grip. But I remember one thing with absolute clarity – when it became clear that the relationship was over, to all intents and purposes, even if not in my head, I decided it was of vital importance to record a sort of ‘selected impressions’: details, assemblage points, the turns our conversations took, the phrases we used. I wanted to fix them in my mind, to prepare for future writing-up. A linear narrative made no sense for this: the line itself was so shakily drawn. I simply noted down everything that seemed important not to forget; on each square of paper a single word or a few words, which straightaway reconstructed a location and happening in my memory; a conversation, street corner, a joke, or a promise. Every incident struggled desperately against my attempt to contain it, to give it order and sequence – alphabetical or chronological – and so I set on the idea of one day putting all these little twists of paper into a hat (my father’s hat, he had a wonderful grey hat that he never wore) and of pulling them out, one by one and then, one by one, noting them down, point by point, until I was able to leave alone this chartered land of tenderness: a memorial to my own self. After a while these forty or so bits of paper ended up in various drawers of a table we had, and then dissolved somehow, lost in a procession of moves and spring cleans.
Do I need to mention that I don’t remember a single 36one of the forty words I was so frightened I would forget all those years ago?
♦
And yet I am still smitten with the idea of blindly retrieving and reliving scraps from my life, or from a collective life, rescued from the shadows of the known and accepted histories. The first step of this salvaging is my habitual working process: notes on the back of an envelope, scrawls during a phone call, three words in a notebook, invisible library cards piling up in a hasty and unsystematic manner, never to be reread. All this is the continuing mounting up of my life to date. Only there are ever fewer people with whom I can still discuss how things were.
I always knew I would someday write a book about my family, and there were even periods when this seemed to be my life’s purpose (summarizing lives, collecting them into one narrative) because it was simply the case that I was the first and only person in the family who had a reason to speak facing outwards, peering out from intimate family conversations as if from under a fur cap, and addressing the railway station concourse of collective experience. None of these people, not those still alive, nor those already dead, were ever seen. Life gave them no opportunity to be remembered or to remain in view, to stand briefly in the spotlight; their ordinariness put them beyond the usual human interest and this seemed unfair. There was, it felt to me, an urgency in speaking about them and on their behalf, and the endeavour frightened me. To start writing was to cease to be a curious listener, an addressee, and to become instead the horizon point of the family line, the destination 37for the many-eyed, many-decked ship of family history. I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.
It struck me that my grandparents’ efforts in life were largely dedicated to remaining invisible, to achieving a desired inconspicuousness, to hiding in the dim household light and keeping themselves apart from the wide current of history, with its extra-grand narratives and its margins of error: the deaths of millions. Perhaps this was a conscious choice, perhaps not – who knows. In Autumn 1914, when my great-grandmother was a young woman, she returned to Russia from war-torn France, taking a detour to stay clear of the war. She might have gone back to her old ways, her revolutionary activity; she might have had her name in school history books or, just as likely, in the lists of the executed. But she remained well beyond the reach of the textbooks and their footnotes, in a place where all we can see is swirly-patterned wallpaper and an ugly old yellow butter dish, which survived its owner and the old world, and even the twentieth century.
Earlier in my life this gave me cause for some embarrassment, although the reason for this is hard to put into words and shameful to admit. I suppose the embarrassment had something to do with the ‘narrative drive’. I felt bound to notice that my ancestors had made hardly any attempt to make our family history interesting. This was particularly clear to me when we commemorated the war each year at school. The war had happened forty odd years before. Other peoples’ grandfathers came into school with their medals and bouquets of flowers, they never said much (because what had happened to them 38hardly bore being salami-sliced into episodes of derring-do), but they stood very upright by the blackboard, and even if they gave no witness accounts, they were in themselves pieces of evidence. My grandfather Lyonya did not fight: he was an engineer in the rearguard. I pinned more hope on Kolya, my other grandfather, with his officer ranking and his Order of the Red Star. But it turned out he had served in the Far East during the war, and I could never quite establish whether or not he did any fighting.
When I conducted further research, it began to look like he hadn’t fought after all. He had been under suspicion, something had happened – and the shadowy tale hung untold, like a dark cloud, over that side of the family. This story had a title – ‘when father was an enemy of the people’ – and it took place in 1938-39, during an ‘unspoken’ Beria amnesty, when some were suddenly set free and others, like my grandfather, escaped imprisonment. It was only when I compared dates that I realized that my grandmother was pregnant with her second child during those dark days: my father was born on 1 August 1939, exactly a month before the outbreak of the Second World War, and the composition of Auden’s poem:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Lord knows by what miracle he survived and even grew up in an intact family with a mother and a father and a sister. I know two versions of the story. The one they 39gave voice to in my childhood now seems a confection and apocryphal – I’ll write of it later. But the image of my grandfather the warrior didn’t really stick: in the story told at home he was a mere splinter in a whirlpool: hardly the hero of a stirring tale of war and victory.
Everyone else’s ancestors had taken part in history, but mine seemed to have been mere lodgers in history’s house. None of them had fought or been repressed or executed (there were dark rumours of arrest and interrogation surrounding the other grandfather, but it seems the affair died down and he escaped persecution), none had lived under German occupation or fought in the battles of the century. One story stood like an obelisk in all this: the life of my great-great-aunt’s twenty-year-old son, who died defending Leningrad. This was a tale of the unfairness of life, and no amount of icy anaesthetic running through the veins could dull its horror. Wasn’t it impossible for the little boy in the photos in his round-toed felt boots to die? The news of his death is so inconceivable that sometimes just the mention of the boy’s name is enough to make me go dark before the eyes, as my mother used to say – both the story and my response to it, learnt from her.
It’s hardly worth saying, but there were no famous people amongst my relatives; they seemed almost to insist on their inconspicuousness. They were doctors, engineers, architects (but not of dreaming spires and facades, only of workaday constructions like roads and bridges). They were accountants and librarians. They led very quiet lives, appearing to live utterly apart from the grinding mills of the era. Almost no one belonged to the Communist Party, but at the same time there was nothing demonstrative in this – it was simply that their lives ran deep under the skin, that nothing was acted out 40on the surface, where every little movement is scaled up, noticed, and has consequences. Now that they have departed into permanent darkness and their personal histories are concluded, I can examine these lives, talk about them and hold them up to the light for inspection. And, at the end of the day, there is a sort of inevitability to being seen – would this one last time really harm them?
♦
From time to time, always in the evening, and usually on a school holiday, or a day when I was recuperating from sickness, my mother would call me to look at the photo albums. We’d prise open the cupboard door – the cupboard was jammed up against the divan so it took some skill to open it – and before we got out the albums we’d pull out a drawer filled with boxes (this extra diversion was the icing on the cake). The boxes contained all sorts of objects that were very dear to me, passport photos and pictures from different generations, pre-war pebbles collected from Crimean beaches, an antediluvian baby’s rattle, grandfather’s drawing instruments (you can have these when you’re old enough), other bits and bobs. The photo albums themselves were kept in the main cupboard, and there were a lot of them. Some of them were stuffed so tight with photographs that the leather binding was stretched thin. Others were nearly empty, but we still took them out. The most impressive album was bound in orange leather and had silver buckles and straps; another was black patent leather with the emblem of a yellow castle on a hill on the front, and ‘Lausanne’ printed slantwise. There was an art nouveau album, decorated in metallic curls and the image of a Japanese 41geisha, which would have looked dated even a hundred years ago. There were thinner albums and thicker ones, larger and smaller ones. The pages had a certain old-fashioned weight to them, with wide silver edges and slits for the corners of photographs. There was a touch of melancholy in the fact that our modern glossy, slippery photos didn’t fit in the albums. They were either too narrow for the slots, or they bulged between the slits, and they were always too lightweight. The old photographs had an abiding quality, they were intended for a different life span, they cast into doubt all my efforts to fit my own image into a neighbouring slot in the album.
And then the photographs themselves, each with a story attached. Men with thick beards and men in glasses with thin gold frames, who were directly related to us, our great-grandfathers, or great-great-grandfathers (and sometimes I added another ‘great’ in my head quietly just because it gave them an air of grandeur), their friends and acquaintances. Young girls, who turned out to be grandmothers or aunties, with interchangeably dull names. Auntie Sanya, Auntie Sonya, Auntie Soka, a long line of them, swapping ages with ease, their expressions unchanging; standing, sitting, against a backdrop of dim interiors or staged landscapes. We began looking from the beginning, from the very first beards and collars, and somewhere towards the middle of the evening everything began to swim out of focus, except my sense of the enormity of it all. The geographical reach alone was huge: these people and their sepia-faded children lived in Khabarovsk, Gorky, Saratov, Leningrad. But no sense of family history attached itself to the city names, family history was merely made more distant and foreign by their roll call. At last, and with a sense of contentment, we reached a small album which contained 42photos of my mother as a child: looking gloomy in wartime evacuation in Yalutorovsk; standing holding a doll in a pioneer camp; wearing a sailor suit and holding flags in her nursery school. I could understand this scale, it was proportional to me. In some ways the whole evening’s activity culminated in this: to see the child who was my mother, sullen, frightened, running as fast as she could along some long-forgotten dirt track, was to enter into a new territory of anticipated closeness, a place in which I was older than her and could look after her and feel sorry for her. When I look back at this now, I realize that the sting of pity and equality I felt back then came too early in my life. But at least it came. I had no other chance to feel older than her, or to pity her.
Only much later I noticed that all the bound albums, the stories and the golden-edged photographs (for they all had milled and gilded edges and monograms and the name of the photographer and the place the photograph was taken on the back) were of my mother’s family. There were in the whole house only two or three photos of my father’s family standing out on a bookshelf. In these pictures my grandmother Dora as a young woman looked surprisingly like my own young mother, and stern-faced grandfather Kolya looked for all the world like Pasternak in his old age. They were silently present, like icons in the corner of a room, almost as if they stood outside the wide current of family history, its river source, its jetties and shallows.
There were also albums of postcards (these later turned out to be the remains of Great-grandmother Sarra’s correspondence, dashed-off lines from Paris, Nizhny Novgorod, Venice, Montpellier), a whole miniature library of a disappeared visual aesthetic: beautiful full-cheeked women, moustachio-ed men, children in 43little Russian high-necked jackets, Symbolist death-and-the-maidens, gargoyles and beggar girls. And other cards without scribbles on the back: vedute of the even brown walls of Italian, French, and German cities.
I loved best of all a series of postcards with night views of cities, parks at dusk, a bright tram turning a tight corner, an empty carousel, a lost child standing by a flower bed and clutching a useless hoop, tall houses, windows so impossibly red they could have been lipsticked in, and behind them the old world lived on. This dark-blue world with its lit lamps radiated the purest sense of yearning and was doubly and triply unattainable. Unattainable because the impossibility of foreign travel was a constant ungainsayable presence in our everyday lives – people in our world didn’t travel. (Our two or three acquaintances who had been given permission to travel abroad seemed to glow in the golden light of a rare fortune – it happened so infrequently and to so few people). And modern Paris, as described in André Maurois’s Paris, had nothing in common with that dark-blue-and-black Paris, which seemed to prove conclusively that it had disappeared long ago, with no hope of ever returning. The postcards, like the visiting cards and the pale envelopes with their raspberry-coloured paper lining, were all just waiting to be used in some way, but we couldn’t imagine how to make use of them in this very different era. So we closed up the albums again and put them back on their shelf and placed the postcards back in their boxes and the evening came to a close as all evenings do.
Some of the objects from this old world (and our home was full of them, even seeming to rest on them, like hen’s legs) had made a place for themselves in the new world. Yellowing lace was sewn onto the cuffs of a 44musketeer’s greatcoat for a school carnival, a black hat from Paris with an ostrich feather of insane length and curliness came in handy over and over again. I couldn’t pull the kid gloves over my hands (they had shrunk with time, but it looked as if they were simply too small for me, and I felt shamed by the breadth of my hands, like a wicked stepsister trying on a glass slipper). We drank tea from hundred-year-old cups once or twice a year when guests came round. Everything came out for high days and holidays, those days that were mismatched to the everyday, like two odd boots; those days when all the rules slipped sideways and you were permitted the impermissible. On other days the albums lay on the shelf and time merely passed.
I need to make it very clear at this point that our family was quite ordinary. After the Soviet Union disappeared, everything began rising up to the surface, objects regained little by little their primary function and our accumulated and preserved past became once again what it was to begin with: a museum of cultured life at the beginning of the twentieth century, complete with battered bentwood furniture, a pair of oak armchairs, and a black leather-bound Complete Works of Tolstoy. It genuinely was buried treasure, but in a different sense from the usual. The clock struck the hour, the barometer indicated stormy weather, and the owl paperweight did nothing in particular. Remaining together was the sole purpose of these mild-mannered, uncomplicated objects, and they achieved it.
♦
Strange really to think that this task – of committing everything to memory – has hung over me all my life. I 45didn’t feel ready for it, not then, not now.
I couldn’t get it all off by heart, however often I went over the same ground – and every dive down to the underwater caves of the past meant doing just that: the re-counting of the same old names and circumstances, nothing gained, no new slant on things. Some things leaped into my memory ticketless, like a kid on a tram, usually a legend or a curiosity, the narrative equivalent of Barthes’s punctum. Amongst these were the stories that could more easily be retold. And how much did it matter anyway if one starch-collared ancestor became a lawyer in the retelling, rather than a doctor? But guilt at the missing details hampered my ability to remember, forced me to put off asking more detailed questions. It was already clear that I would one day (when I became that better version of myself) open a special notebook, sit down with my mother and she would start at the very beginning and then there would be some meaning to it all – and a system, a family tree, and every cousin and nephew would be in their rightful place, and at the end of it there would be a book. I never once doubted that this moment of setting things straight would be essential to the process.
