7.
Children are playing croquet on a lawn in a Moscow suburb. The adults are sitting on a bench, or standing, leaning against a tall pine. An old timbered dacha with a mansard roof and little onion domes continues out of the frame. The windows are wide open. The game has been broken off and everyone there has turned to face the photographer: little girls in knee-high socks and white dresses that are short like little smocks; barefooted little boys from next door’s dacha; the croquet mallets are still, the balls lie motionless. Only the girl on the right is still intent on the game, she is bent over and her bare shoulders are crookedly but determinedly curled over the mallet, her right foot is extended, her face in profile. Her pageboy haircut exposes her long, soft neck. She looks like an ancient Greek boy, she radiates a dark concentration and is entirely focused inwardly, in the emblematic manner of a bas-relief. All the others stand and sit in little groups and pairs, but she is alone in the foreground. She is not far from the others, but all the same she seems to be at the edge of the photograph, like the far wing of a large house.
8.
A floor-length black skirt and a light blouse: an unknown woman standing in front of a fence. An ivy-clad brick house, the painted shutters open. Two children, of about two and five, flicker at her shoulders like wings. She is holding their hands, and her hands are crossed over her chest. Two men stand to each side, slightly closer to us. One is taller and he stands with his legs crossed, his hands thrust in his pockets — his shirt is belted, not tucked in, his curls are ruffled. This is Sashka, or Sancho Pancho, a friend and an admirer of my great-grandmother Sarra. The other man is older. He is wearing a pince-nez and a blouse made of coarse material. He has a gloomy expression and I suddenly realize that I recognize his face. Yakov Sverdlov. Ten years later in 1917 he becomes the Chairman of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee and signs a decree beginning the Red Terror and “the turning of the Soviet Republic into a single military camp.”
9.
A dim yellow rectangle, a little brighter in the left-hand corner, but you can just about make out a table, a shoulder, a woman in profile. On the back, a note: “Don’t let it put you off that the picture is so dark, it’s not too bad if you take a good look.” A little lower in the corner, same handwriting: “Paris.”
10.
The first thing you notice are the words on a banner against a backdrop of endless birch trees:
FOR BEAUTY AND HEALTH IN WORKING LIVES
THE WAY AHEAD IS EXERCISE!
The lower part of the picture is such a tangle of women’s bodies that the eye directs itself involuntarily to a point above their heads, to the regular white letters and tree trunks. The composition of women’s bodies looks like a complex chemical equation. The upper row is standing tall and each subsequent row is squatting a little lower than the last, the final row lying spread out like mermaids in a sea of arms, PE knickers and identical PE shirts. About ninety women in all, but all their faces look surprisingly similar, or perhaps they all wear the same blankness, the same refusal to allow any expression to cross their faces. For this very reason I look at each individual face, and as I move between one woman and the next, I appear to see the different phases of a single mimetic movement. This is the Raiki Holiday Camp where Great-Grandmother Sarra worked as a doctor in around 1926. Her ten-year-old daughter Lyolya is lying in the front row, a long plait extending from her head and an absurd-looking fringed shawl on her shoulders. To make her easy to find, our Lyolya, someone’s added a blue-inked cross over her head. But you could just as easily tell her apart by her estrangement from the scene, how she looks away and to one side.
11.
Heavy card, a golden surround, a backdrop with a misty landscape — against it, the fat-pawed iron bench with its fancy wrought armrests looks particularly squat and solid. David Fridman, a doctor and the father of my great-grandfather, sits on the bench, his hand rests on the collar of an Irish red setter (the breed standard for this type of setter had been set only twenty years before the picture was taken, in Dublin, in 1886). The clothes he wears are almost unnoticeable, begging not to be scrutinized: a good overcoat with an astrakhan collar, a matching black astrakhan hat, unremarkable trousers, even more unremarkable shoes, a pince-nez on a long chain, which only serves to focus attention on his troubled eyes. But perhaps it is not the eyes that give the impression of a troubled man, but rather the legs, held close together, as if he was just about to get up and leave. In our family we keep the common custom of sitting down briefly before the road, half a minute’s respite to allow the journey to assume its proper proportions. The dog is nervy, it stirs. Both dog and man die in 1907, on the same day, or so my mother told me.
12.
A portrait photograph, just a face and nothing else — but my goodness, what a face: a long beard spreads into two points on the chest; the nostrils are flared wide; brows drawn together, and above them a head that appears bald despite its gray fuzz. There’s no backdrop, just absence. This is Abram Osipovich Ginzburg, my other great-great-grandfather, the father of fourteen children, a merchant of the 1st Guild, the highest rank a merchant could achieve. He started his business in Pochinky, although he is not mentioned in the local archives, and in this picture he resembles “a God-Sent Tempest.” The eyes are the first thing you notice in an old picture: they seem lost because their gaze is searching for a person who is no longer there, a person who once recognized them. But his gaze in this photograph is directed to the side — it’s not a searching gaze, he has already fixed someone or something in his sights. You are drawn almost against your will to put yourself in their place, out of frame, in a space where nothing has been visible for a long time. The actual composition of the photograph, where your attention had been hitherto wandering, seems suddenly a cramped little triangle, and everything in it is regulated by that fiercely unbending gaze.
13.
A beautiful woman, wearing white, and a little boy in a sailor suit who looks like her. She is sitting and he is standing by her armchair. The white is a class signifier, a sign of affluence, of the creak of starched cloth and unlimited leisure. The boy is about six, his father will die two years later, in another three years he and his mother will find themselves in Moscow, who knows how, perhaps washed up in a basket of reeds, like Moses. I have on my shelf an old typewriter, a heavy Mercedes with the prosthetic jaw of a second keyboard. Betya took on any job she could find when she first came to Moscow, mostly typing work.
14.
A large copy (approx. 20cm by 30cm) of an old photograph, on the back: “1905. Left to right: Ginzburg, Baranov, Galper, Sverdlova. The original is in the Gorky Memorial Museum No. 11 281. Research Associate Gladinina (?) A round blue stamp above the number.”
It’s winter and the snow under their feet is trampled. Dark, shaggy fur coats and hats with a spotting of white — the usual smudging you get on an old photograph, the dots and lines that obscure the picture. Great-Grandmother Sarra, first on the left, looks older than her seventeen years. Her hat, the sort that’s fastened with pins, has slipped to the back of her head, a strand of hair has escaped and her round-cheeked face is red raw, you can see how cold she is. One of her hands is tucked into her coat’s cuffs, another is balled into a fist. Her right eye, injured on the barricades, is covered with a black bandage, like a pirate’s patch. This was in Nizhny Novgorod, the barricades were built during the uprising that began on December 12, 1905, and was put down by artillery after three days of street fighting.
In our family folklore this photograph is actually called “Babushka on the Barricades,” although of course you can’t see the barricades, just a white brick wall and to the side a little fence engulfed by a pile of snow. When you look carefully you can see how young they all are: the handsome young mustache in his gray fur cap, and Galper, with the prominent ears, whom I do not know, and her friend, with the childish face and high cheekbones. Sixty years later only t
he women have survived in the archival memory: Sarra Ginzburg and Sarra Sverdlova (“little Sarra”), the sister of Yakov Sverdlov, sitting on the bench outside the “Home for Old Bolsheviks,” two gray-haired old ladies in thick coats, warming themselves in the winter sun, pressing old-fashioned muffs to their stomachs.
15.
Morning on the open terrace of a dacha: someone is sitting in a wicker chair but all you can see are legs and the corner of a striped dress. An oilcloth over the table, and on it a cornucopia of china dishes, cups, sugar bowls, the old yellow butter dish, a tall vase filled with flowers and foliage, and beyond that a saucepan, but the contents aren’t visible. A girl in a summer dress is eating breakfast fastidiously. Her elbows are resting on the corner of the tablecloth, her right hand holds the knife, and in her left hand, the fork. Her feet, in fashionable shoes (rounded toes and little ankle straps), rest on the bar of the chair. The second girl, sitting opposite her, is bent over her teacup, stirring in sugar. Her suntanned knees stick out from under her skirt, her bare arms reflect the light, her hair is drawn up under a hairnet. An older woman in an apron, encased in a blinding white scarf, is watching Lyolya from afar to make sure she gets a good breakfast. This is Nanny Mikhailovna, who attached herself to the family and never left. It must be about 1930. There’s a pile of papers and on the top a copy of the weekly Ogoniok, with a faint outline of a woman on the cover. You can’t quite tell what the woman is doing.
16.
A gravel-tinted picture, you almost expect to feel granular dust when you touch its surface. Everything is gray: the face, the dress, the coarse woolen stockings, the brick wall, the wooden door, the twisting branch of a shrub. An older woman is sitting on a bentwood chair, her hands half-resting in front of her, she looks like she had started to move and then forgot what she was doing, and simply froze in that position, one hand half-covering her stomach. Her smile hasn’t quite reached her whole face yet and her expression is serene, as if the clock had stopped at midday, that quiet hour of moderate approval. Everything in the picture is underpinned by a sense of abject poverty, it is the unspoken language of the image: the heavy hands, unadorned by rings, the only dress of canvas, it is all kith and kin with the sparse weeds under her feet, they share the same root. She has made no attempt to clothe herself for eternity, to allow her workaday appearance a moment’s Sunday best. But this is as it is, because she has nothing else to choose from. This is my great-grandmother Sofia Akselrod, who used to read Sholem Aleichem in her village not far from Rzhev. This could be any year: 1916, 1926, 1936, it isn’t as if anything changed with the passing of time.
17.
A five-year-old girl holding a huge doll that isn’t hers. It’s a sumptuous doll, dressed in folk costume, an embroidered skirt and ornate headpiece, with a thick braid of hair and rosy cheeks. The mysterious thrill of the object! The little girl can’t even bring herself to look at the doll, and instead she directs her delighted gaze at the camera: Look at her! Look at us! So many contrasts: the little girl is frail and thin, and the doll is disproportionately large and plump; the little girl is dark-haired, her curls stick out in all directions, and the doll has a smooth flaxen plait. The lover and the beloved. The childish little hands hold the doll with a fervent tenderness: one palm cups the waist with care, the other hand encircles the doll’s porcelain fingers with the lightest of touches. The image is black-and-white, and so I can’t tell the color of the dress, with its embroidered сherries, or the color of the extravagant bow on the top of my mother’s head.
18.
A tiny picture, the epaulets are faded and impossible to read, but I know my grandfather reached the rank of major and was only demobilized in 1944. This is clearly a picture taken before all that. The face is as closed as a fist, it expresses nothing but strength: the arched brows, the ears close to the head, the whites of his eyes, the mouth. All of it molded to form a single billiard ball: a single typical portrait of the military officer at the end of the 1930s. A collective image of a face, one portrait standing for everyone, like the faces of the heroes in Aleksei German’s film My Friend Ivan Lapshin. I watched it when I was fifteen and I’d hardly seen any proper films, and I couldn’t be sure of what was happening, or who the main character was, who was in love with whom — all the characters seemed interchangeable to me, all cut from the same piece of boiled army wool. There was something familiar about them, their speech and posture all seemed vaguely familiar, as if I’d known it for a long time, and only years later I realized that every one of them was in some sense my grandfather, his antique courtesy and eau de cologne, his sternness, his shaved cheeks and bald head.
19.
Somewhere by a stream in the mid- to late 1930s two young women are posing for a photograph and they can’t stop laughing. One has let her hair loose, she leans down and is about to lay her white knitted shawl in the grass. The other is holding her hat to her head in the invisible breeze. They wear short, lightweight dresses. Their bags are already lying on the ground and their underclothes are crumpled at their feet.
20.
It’s raining and people are wandering through the wet meadow like lost souls. A whole crowd of people, about twenty in all, the men in straw boaters, the women in long skirts, the hems brushing the damp grass, above their heads the hopeless domes of parasols. A long way off, on the horizon, there is a wall, but who knows what was behind it. To the right is the glimmer of gray water. They stand in groups of twos and threes, some apart, some closer, some farther away, and the longer you stare at them, the clearer it becomes that this might resemble the landscape of the afterlife, its shoreline, where each of us is quite alone.
On the back of the photograph is a note written in French. Handsomely written, all curlicues and flourishes. I translate it as I read: “Montpellier, 22 of the VI month, 1909. To remind us of our zoological excursion to Palavas. How sad it was . . . The weather let us down. D. K. Genchev. For Mademoiselle S. Ginzburg, Pochinky.” Palavas-Les-Flots is a small resort south of Montpellier where a long spit of dunes divides the Mediterranean from inland freshwater lakes. The flat beaches are covered with gray sand, and there are colonies of pink flamingos not so far away, which perhaps in part explains the zoological nature of the trip. Nowadays, Palavas is a busy and inexpensive holiday destination, but one hundred years ago there was nothing there, the hotels had not yet appeared, only the newly built church of St. Peter.
Among the wanderers in the meadow there is one woman who holds herself very erect. She stands on her own, turned away from the camera, her slender back in a light summer jacket is the axis of the image, she is the central pole of the stopped carousel wheel. She wears a stiff-brimmed hat and her head is thrown back, she is carrying a ragged bunch of flowers. I like to think it is my great-grandmother Sarra.
4. Sex and the Dead
I must have been about twelve. I was hunting around for something interesting to look at. There was plenty of interesting stuff: with every death a pile of new objects appeared in our apartment, deposited just as they were, trapped in a sudden end state, because their previous owner, the only person who could have freed them, was no longer among the living. The contents of Grandmother’s last handbag, her bookshelves, buttons in a box, everything had simply stopped, like a clock, on a particular hour of a particular day. So many objects like this in our house. And then one day I found an old leather wallet in a far drawer. It contained a single photograph.
I could see right away what sort of a picture it was. Not a picture, or a postcard or, say, a picture calendar. A naked woman lay on a divan, looking at the camera. It was an amateur shot, taken long ago, already yellowing with age, but the feelings it aroused in me were utterly unlike the way great-grandmother’s Paris letters or grandfather’s jokey poems had made me feel. This picture added nothing to the throat-tightening feeling of family collectivity, to the black-and-white many-headed chorus of unknown relatives, always happening just behind my back,
or to the hunger I felt when I saw something unknown and foreign: The promenade at Nice by night, on a prerevolutionary postcard. There was something clearly illicit about the photograph, although that could hardly have bothered me, quietly avoiding my parents, and on my own private search for the forbidden. There was a faint licentiousness in it, too, although the woman’s nakedness was open, straightforward, and full to the camera. Strangest of all, the photograph had no relationship to me at all. It belonged to someone else. The fact that the wallet had lost its owner long before did not change this feeling of strangeness.
The woman lying on the leather sofa was not beautiful. My sense of aesthetics had been formed by the cast gallery in the Pushkin Museum and a book on ancient Greek myth, I was affronted by her many bodily defects. Her legs were shorter than they were supposed to be and her breasts smaller, but her bottom was much larger and her tummy pudgy in a way that was very unlike marble. All these defects made her look lively, as anything living in ignorance of perfection looks lively. She was grown-up, in her thirties, as I now realize, and not a “nude,” simply a completely naked woman, although that wasn’t the most striking thing. The woman was looking straight at the viewer — that is, at the camera, that is, at me. Her stare had such intensity: it was utterly unlike the radiantly unfocused gaze of a goddess, or a model in an artist’s studio.
In Memory of Memory Page 5