In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  Photographs that failed to live up to the photographer’s hopes are the unrealized scraps from a manufacturing process: a running dog, blurred to an unending streak, someone’s shoes on a wet pavement, a chance passerby in the frame. All this waste was filtered out and destroyed in the age of printing on paper. But now these very pictures have a special attraction because they were not intended for us (or for anyone). They belong to no one and so they belong to me — these moments that survived by accident and are freed from all obligation, stolen from life by life itself. These images of people are utterly impersonal and this is their advantage: they relieve the viewer of the burden of succession, historical memory, bad conscience, and a sense of indebtedness toward the dead. In return they offer a sequence of images of the past and future, the more random the better. These pictures are not of Ivan and Mary, they are of contingent beings, him and her, her and her, light and no one. Freedom from meaning gives us the opportunity to add in our own meaning, freedom from interpretation makes a mirror of the image, a square pool in which we can immerse any version of events we please. “Photos trouvées,” little foundlings, useful in their very readiness to become an object and abandon their past as someone else’s subjectivity. To bury their dead: both the photographer and the photographed. They have no wish to look us in the eyes.

  Not-A-Chapter

  Leonid Gurevich, 1942 or 1943

  My grandfather’s letter can be dated by its content to 1942–3. He is thirty and has been sent back from the rear guard to a Moscow hospital for an urgent operation, as a special expert, essential to the war effort. His wife, mother, and baby daughter are all in evacuation in the Siberian town of Yalutorovsk.

  On coarse buff paper, in violet ink that has seeped through to the back of the paper:

  Dearest Lyolechka,

  I received your letter (and you know I’m not sentimental), and once I’d read it through a few times I put it in my notebook where I keep Baby Natasha and your photographs, I haven’t been parted from them since I left, and now I can add a second photo of Natasha. Your letter touched me very deeply and left me thinking on a great many things.

  Now the doctors have told me that I am well on the way to recovery, and since I do honestly feel this to be the case, I can tell you some things about myself I didn’t want to write before.

  At one point I was very sick. I hardly thought I would survive.

  The doctors wouldn’t confirm this, however . . . they allowed me visitors at any time of the day (and they only do that for the most serious of cases). And when they found out I had no relatives in Moscow at the time they noted down your address in Yalutorovsk. I knew what all that meant, of course.

  But I fought back. In the hardest moments, please forgive me my honesty, I thought only about Natasha, and I felt better.

  When it had passed I was so weak, and I know you know this, the worst thing for me is helplessness.

  I got slowly stronger, I kept going. But I put up with a great deal (you can’t imagine what terrible headaches I had, my darling, the worst thing was how they never let up), and then suddenly I couldn’t bear it any longer and I gave in to my emotions.

  So many thoughts came rushing into my head and (I had plenty of time to indulge them) I saw my unhappy life pass before my eyes, and . . . well, I indulged in the writing of some pretty bad poetry. I sought oblivion, wanted to drown out this storm of emotions.

  I wrote an awful lot of drivel (I can’t even explain how now, but it all came easily and freely to me), and even a long poem, on a very difficult subject matter, but I didn’t finish it.

  But something had a very strong effect on me (my nerves were extremely strained and even the tiniest inconvenience made me suffer terribly). There was a patient in the ward with me, an accountant from the Moscow Meat Processing Plant, his name was Teselko and he was 54. He had a brain tumor and he’d undergone a complicated operation, but it had been a success, and he was in recovery. His wife was four years younger than him, such a gentle woman.

  You just can’t imagine how she cared for him, the love and the tenderness of her touch during her daily visits. There was so much love, intimacy, and friendship between them (everyone in the ward, even the most curmudgeonly patient, felt it). After his illness he had become anxious, fickle, querulous, at times coarse and cruel, even toward his wife. But she understood this and forgave him and he felt her forgiveness and appreciated it.

  She’s a good wife to you, I said once, and he answered, yes, and said nothing more. Then we both retreated into our own thoughts.

  I was thinking how they were older than us, but that they were still living and feeling far more fully than us, the younger generation. And how we could be living, if only we loved life and knew how to love as devotedly and boundlessly as they did, as our parents did.

  [two lines crossed out with thick marks]

  I’ve been thinking a lot, Lyolya. I’ve been analyzing my life, my past actions. I’ve been trying to understand things from your point of view and I’ve decided to change. I don’t mean in terms of my love for you, not that. I love you now just as I loved you before, with a strong devotion. But considering the flaws in your character, your tricky personality, I want to try to understand you in all your actions, and to yield to you. When you think about it, all our arguments grew out of silly misunderstandings, and it was only because neither of us would give way that they turned into nasty rows.

  Making this decision has forced me to grow up, to pull myself together and get a hold of myself, in a way I never have before. These last few weeks, I’ve felt quite different, I’ve felt sure that I have the strength to claim my proper place in life, to fight for it, to live and to be happy! [crossings out] I know now that life and happiness are in our hands and when we find happiness for ourselves we find it for those around us.

  And then I received your letter. It seemed like a continuation of my own thoughts and hopes.

  I answered you in my head. I said: forgive me. And at that moment I was desperate to be with you, if only for a minute, so I could take you by the hand, take the hand of my wife and my friend.

  This letter is clumsy, poorly expressed, I know it is, but I mean it, I mean it with all my heart. I know you’ll understand what I am going through.

  I took all my driveling poetry and ceremonially, without an ounce of self-pity, burned it all in the stove on the ward, along with those dreadful poems I got rid of some very unhealthy urges.

  Your letter taught me a great deal, it gave me so much hope and love. Thank you for it.

  And to my dearest wife

  I give thanks and love

  For the daughter, and the son

  We will one day have.

  I imagine you before me

  Embarrassed by my emotion

  But things are quite decided

  And not open to discussion.

  I remain, deeply in love,

  Your only Leonid.

  I couldn’t resist it after all — I lapsed into poetry! Thank you thank you for Natasha’s photo. Kiss her from me.

  5. Aleph and Where It Led Me

  I am talking far too much about objects, and perhaps it is inevitable. The people I wrote this book for died long before I started writing it, and objects were the only permissible replacements. They are just as dear to me as some strangers in a photo album: a brooch with my great-grandmother’s monogram; my great-grandfather’s prayer shawl; and the armchairs that miraculously survived their owners, two centuries and two homes. Their promise of knowledge is a false one, but all the same they radiate the stove-warmth of uninterrupted time. Here I remember Aunt Galya with the stack of newspapers she couldn’t be parted from, and the piles of diaries, and I have the sudden realization that nothing can be preserved.

  Tove Jansson has a story about a Fillyjonk who lives in continual fear of a terrible disaster. She arranges all her furniture and get
s out the silver cream jug and the iced cakes, she even washes her best carpet in the sea, and she waits and waits, and is terrified she will lose it all. When the tornado comes (and they always do), it takes with it her house and all her knickknacks: tray cloths and photo frames and tea cozies and grandma’s silver cream jug. All the past is carried off into oblivion, and it leaves a clear space for the future. The Fillyjonk is left playing in the shallows with her carpet, finally happy, “Never in her life had she had such fun.”

  I remembered Janet Malcolm and the house with the cluttered interior, the aleph of her book, when I was in Vienna, as there was something like it on every street corner. The building I stayed in was built in 1880 (and in the yard a smaller building, enwombed like a matryoshka doll: a house with white shutters, built in 1905 when the family had grown up). The owner of the house, anywhere between seventy and ninety, had high cheekbones, architectural eyebrows, and a voice of otherworldly depth with which she told me, at the end of our conversation, that she’d always lived there — ever since returning in 1948. To read her history correctly I’d need to have known when she left the house, but our polite conversation didn’t stretch this far. A handsome family genealogy book, published in 1918, lay neglected by the TV remote control. She rented her apartment to me with its two hundred years of tat and old trinkets, with apparently barely a thought for the preservation of these things: porcelain objects crowded the shelves, as tightly packed as books; boxes were bent by their weight of silverware; oil paintings hung on the walls; and ancient matchboxes lay on the tables and coffee tables. Gift messages decorated the albums (a Christmas card from 1941, slipped between the pages of an album, made her family history a little clearer). This white, tall-windowed house with its grand staircases resembled a huge store cupboard where the odd rental tenant might go unnoticed. At night everything in the building creaked and groaned and twitched. I came to the conclusion that the owner had crammed it full with the layers of unwanted history that kept her from sleep — and then emigrated into her own life: the little house on the other side of the lawn, her medical practice and garden chairs.

  I found out quite by chance — by flipping open a guidebook to a random page in a museum shop — that the oldest Jewish cemetery in Vienna was close to where I worked. The cemetery was first used in 1540 or thereabouts, and had been razed to the ground by the Nazis. Later, after some time had passed, the decision was taken to restore it. The gravestones hadn’t gone anywhere: they lay under the soil, they’d simply gone underground, so they were brought back to the light and arranged around the wide, grassy garden of an old people’s home that had sprung up in the cemetery’s absence.

  There was a chill in the air that day, the sort that catches us unaware, a presentiment of winter. The street slowly narrowed; on its left-hand side the old people’s home: a two-story house of the sort you might see in London, perhaps adorned with a couple of blue plaques. But there were no plaques here, and no people on the street. It grew colder still, a few very frail old men stood in the entrance hall, sheltering from the wind. They must have been at least a hundred years old, I guessed, using my landlady’s appearance as a yardstick, and their emaciated forms gave them the appearance of happy, withered little shrimps. They inched about the hall in wheelchairs or on foot and held on to each other’s sharp elbows with trembling tenderness. When they approached the nurse it was with the same faint smile, looking up into her face to ask or answer a question. I approached her in turn, and she pointed out the way to me.

  A long, wide balcony ran the length of the building and faced a walled garden. The ground was a few meters lower here and a fierce wind bent the grass flat. The balcony was kept at the height required for the present to be able to say with certainty that the past was past: it had been tamed, restored, and fenced off. It wasn’t even possible to enter the garden below, where the grass was being whipped by the wind. An unambiguous iron padlock hung on the door to a metal ladder descending from the balcony.

  But there was something going on down in the garden. A tentlike awning with long green ramps hid the farthest part of the garden and two people were busying themselves around graves in the corner of the tent. The graves stood facing me, they were nothing like the cozy, almost armchair-like memorials I was used to. These were like gates, portals for transportations to the void — in some of them I could even sense the shape of an archway. In the cemetery in Würzburg, where my mother is buried, you can sometimes detect some little figurative elements, nods to the people left behind: a simple little emblem of a flame or two hands blessing the Star of David. Here, there was nothing of that sort, only letters, text. The cemetery could have been read like a book stitched from scattered sheets. On one stone the script rose in a crescent arc. A single decorative image, a horse that faintly resembled a hare, raced from right to left across the stone.

  Meanwhile the old men had disappeared out of the frame of the lit glass, and I could see a girl in white carefully wiping the tables down in the dining hall. There was no one out here on the balcony with me, no one by the ashtray or by the muttering fountain a little farther on, where plastic ducks floated upside down in the black water. I’d read they’d found two or three hundred tombstones but it looked from here as if there were hardly any.

  The grass was long, not like grass on city lawns, but the harsh grass of the plain, and the wind blew it into furious waves.

  A few days later I was told about a very particular grave in the cemetery. My Viennese friend asked me whether I’d seen the fish: what looked like a heap of cobblestones was in fact a stone fish, coiled into a ring. There was a story attached to the fish: a man named Simeon bought himself a fish for supper and was about to prepare it for cooking when right there on the kitchen table, under the carving knife, the fish opened its mouth and spoke: “Shema Yisrael,” the words a Jew says before death, and it might have said something more, but it was too late, the knife came down and severed the fish’s head. The Rabbi said that the business smacked of a dybbuk, a wandering soul separated from its body, so they buried the fish just as they would a person in the cemetery. Sometimes I feel just like that fish, or the householder hiring men at the eleventh hour, or even like a conscript in the last wave of conscription at the height of war — managing to say and do what must be done, but only just, in the nick of time.

  The museums in Vienna all reflected my own preoccupations, albeit each in their own way. In the Museum of Applied Art, I wandered into a Valhalla for furniture, a room filled with ghosts, the long shadows of Thonet chairs in bentwood cast across a white screen. In the same room you could read a list of the names of rocking chairs and armchairs and they sounded like human names: Heinrich and Max, whose wicker forms reminded me of our three-legged basketwork chair, which had hobbled its way into the twenty-first century. Nearby, an ancient forest of feathery, spidery lace lay draped on black velvet, composed of tiny holes and tears, just as my story is composed of silences and rents in the fabric.

  Blinds were drawn over the windows of the Natural History Museum and I looked out at Vienna as if through a layer of ash. Lamarck’s spiral staircase of evolution twisted backward through the reassuringly old-fashioned twilight of the museum’s rooms. All the subjects of nature’s experiments were on display: bears, both large and small; a host of spotted cats; a game park with deer and antelope, all necks and antlers; giraffes and the rest of the beasts, some of them surprisingly like cultural artifacts, speckled like clay pots. Even less life remained in the shrunken stuffed birds, despite their still-bright plumage. Beyond them the dreadful serried ranks of glass jars with a collection of bony parts connected with the production of sound, taken from the voice boxes of birds. Somewhere among the parrots and the corvidae was a small gray bird, round and fluffed up with a strange red brow and splashes of red around its tail, aegintha temporalis, and I nodded to it as if we were family, as I myself am temporalis, on my way to the barnacles and the segmented worms, and the fish in methylat
ed spirits, standing on their tails.

  Karl Kraus wrote “Immer passt alles zu allem” (“Everything fits with everything else”) — or, in Tsvetaeva’s words: “Everything rhymes.” Every exhibit in the long suite of rooms provided another metaphor, explained another element in my history. It preoccupied me, but didn’t change anything, since I knew that the real aleph of my story lay in my pocket already.

  This aleph was a tiny white china figurine, about three centimeters tall. A very approximately molded naked little boy with curly hair, who could have passed for Cupid if it hadn’t been for his long socks. I bought him from a stall in a Moscow flea market, where one or two things could still be picked up very cheaply, and in a tray of paste jewelery I found a box containing a heap of these little white boys. It seemed strange to me that not a single one was intact, each differently mutilated, missing a leg or a face, and all the faces were scarred and chipped. I spent a while sorting through, looking for the most presentable, and eventually found him: nearly whole, he still had his curls and dimples, his ribbed socks, and he shone with a winsome gift-gleam — even the dark stain on his back and his lack of arms didn’t spoil my admiration.

  I asked the shop owner, just in case, if she had any figures in a better state, and she told me such an odd story I felt the need to find out more. The little figures were made in a German town from the 1880s onward, she said. They were sold everywhere, in groceries and hardware stores, but actually their main function was as packaging — dirt cheap, they were heaped up as loose fill around goods, so that heavy things didn’t rub together or dent each other in the darkness. The little figures were in fact made to be chipped. Just before the war the factory closed and warehouses, filled to the roof with boxes of the tiny figures, stood locked until they were bombed. A few years later, when the boxes were opened, all that remained were splinters of china.