In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  Do I need to mention that I don’t remember a single one 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 outward, 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 endeavor 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 for 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 extragrand 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 hardly made 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 hardly 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 rear guard. 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 August 1, 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 odor 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 told me 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 rumors 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 anesthetic 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, learned from her.

  It’s hardly worth saying, but there were no famous people among 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 on 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 prize 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, prewar pebbles collected from Crimean beaches, an antediluvian baby’s rattle, grandfather’s drawing instruments (you can have these when you’re old enough), other odds and ends. 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, de
corated in metallic curls and the image of a Japanese geisha, 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 neighboring 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 toward 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 that contained photos 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, mustachioed men, children in little 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 streetcar 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-colored 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 musketeer’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 over. 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 didn’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 recounting 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 streetcar, usually a legend or a curiosity, the narrative equivalent of Barthes’s punctum. Among 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 and 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.

  But I never did ask those questions or set things straight in that way, despite my ability to retain inessential facts and my chimp’s memory for anything to do with words. The puzzle was never completed; I was left with the tongue twister of my aunt’s names, Sanya, Sonya, Soka, a lot of p
hotographs of the nameless and the noteless, some ethereal and unattached anecdotes, and the familiar faces of unfamiliar people.

  To some extent this resembled a mah-jongg set that was kept at the dacha. The dacha (a little one-room place with a tiny kitchen, a terrace, and a scrap of boggy ground where some stubborn apple trees clung to life) was just outside Moscow, and for decades my family had been taking anything worn or shabby out there to assume its rightful place and live out its second life. Nothing was ever thrown away, and these elderly objects made the world more densely present, less ethereal. The former furniture aged with its summer’s hard labor: harvesting, storing, the seasonal tasks. Ink stands kept pointlessly in the shed, drawers full of hundred-year-old nightshirts, and, on a shelf behind the mirror, a mah-jongg set in a little canvas bag. For years I was intrigued by this mah-jongg set, and every summer holiday I nursed the forlorn hope that I would set it all out, work out what to do with it, and return it to useful service. It never happened.

  We knew that my great-grandmother had brought the set back from her travels abroad (and as we possessed two kimonos in the house, a large one and my smaller one, both gossamer-light with age, I had no doubt that abroad in this case meant Japan). The little bag contained lots of ivory pieces, brown with age, each with a white front covered in hieroglyphics, which I was never able to decipher or match to another piece, domino-fashion: a sailing boat to a sailing boat, a flourish of leaves to a flourish of leaves. There were simply too many different images, and alarmingly few common elements. And then I had the sudden thought that probably over the years some of the pieces had gone astray, and that made me feel completely lost. I could see there was a clear system, but just as clearly I knew I couldn’t work out what it was, or even design a simpler version for myself. I couldn’t even keep a piece in my pocket, because I didn’t want to take a part from the whole.