In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  This lens, this way of looking at the world as if through a film of ash, through Celan’s stationary screen, is particularly persuasive when you realize that the author will be with you until the end, that he is himself already on the other side, and is stretching out his hand to you from over there. In Marina Tsvetaeva’s terrifying poem “Pity . . .” a woman stops by the unknown dead (“Not your husband? No. // Do you believe in the soul’s resurrection? No.”) hardly herself understanding why, until at the end:

  Let me oh let me lay by him

  Nail—down—the—lid!

  But Sebald’s speech doesn’t just follow the departed. It is as if he has fastened himself to their slant rain-like structure, actually becoming one of those moving along the road toward the past. The narrator of his documentary fictions occasionally inhabits the contours of the author: he has the same history, a few friends among the living, the mustache and passport photograph of Sebald, but a strange transparent quality stops us from thinking of him as real. We follow everything this person does — his movement, which resembles a person driven along by a gust of wind; his hours of work and leisure, which do not coincide with ours; his chronicles of journeys and transfers, of bus routes and long-past hotels, where he watches a woman busying herself at a rolltop desk, as if the forces of gravity still acted on her as they had in life, and there was no point in hurrying on. The listing of street names and railway stations, as if the author doesn’t quite trust his own memory and preferred to note everything down with the greatest care, attaching restaurant receipts and hotel bills. And the photographs that are embedded into the text serve to identify Sebald’s work as accurately as a set of fingerprints. When the photos were being prepared for print Sebald would devote long hours to making them indistinct, as muddily unclear and homogeneous as he could.

  Mandelstam pushed the past away, shoved it aside, compressing it into hard matter. But Sebaldian time is constructed quite differently — it has a porous, interstitial structure, like the monasteries in cliff faces, each cell in the rock still maintaining its parallel existence.

  When we get close to these texts the problem of their authenticity comes to the fore. It’s as if in working out the relationship between invention and truth, we make a decision on whether or not we can trust the author. This is how you might choose a guide through mountainous territory where every mistake could mean death. It’s almost touching, how pragmatism shapes our persistent interest in the documentary carcass, in the prototype for this or that character and to what degree they are acquainted with or related to the author. Whether the boy on the cover is a real image of the boy inside — what if none of these people are actually real? Critics of Sebald sometimes cast him in the role of a museum curator or a park guard, wrapping the statues to protect them against the frost and checking the glass in the orangery windows: that role is redundant. If we bear in mind that there are no windows and there is no orangery then the function of this prose becomes clearer: it provides the illumination needed for a few things to become discernible. In Austerlitz he describes it like this: “. . . the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.”

  I am so very in favor of any combining of the real and imaginary past, the documentary and fictitious, which allows Sebald to set his light machine in motion so the transparent discs of the past move, overlapping each other, filtering the light from one to the next, so that when a real event unexpectedly manifests itself (a real uncle from the family album, an original picture) I am strangely troubled, as if the chosen prototype had unexpectedly turned out to be a special case. I feel this particularly when Sebald is writing about images.

  The last part of The Emigrants ends with an extraordinary fragment of memoir. When I haven’t read the book for a while I remember this passage as an enormous text, almost infinitely extending, making up at least half of the entire book. But when I reread The Emigrants I am shocked to find it painfully short, no more than twenty pages. And I think to myself that I don’t really want to know who wrote it. Is it the real woman with a name that begins with the letter L, who decides to think about her childhood, only her childhood, on the very threshold of death: her mother’s books, roses, the road into town? Or is it Sebald himself, speaking in the woman’s voice? Whichever it is, the fragment breaks off suddenly and the book ends with a cinematic darkening of the scene. And then the author tells the story of a photograph he once saw by chance.

  Photographs are reproduced throughout the pages of Sebald’s work, scattered like the breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel plan to use to find their way home. But this image is not shown, merely described, and I have this description before my eyes, always. It is a workshop of some sort in the Łódź Ghetto, dimly lit, in half darkness. Three women bend over the diamonds and triangles of a woven carpet. One of them, says Sebald, has blonde hair and the air of a bride. The second woman’s eyes are in shadow and can’t be made out. The third weaver is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long.

  I never thought I would ever see this photograph. Like the well-known portrait of Barthes’s mother in a winter garden, which is described but doesn’t appear in his great book, I thought of this photo as simultaneously real and nonexistent. How strange it was therefore to find that it fits the description absolutely. The picture of the three women was taken by a man named Genewein, a Nazi, the chief bookkeeper of the Łódź Ghetto. In his spare time he documented the hard work being done in the workshops under his charge with a confiscated Movex 12. The collection of pictures includes color images: a group of children dressed in various shades of brown with their caps to one side of their heads. The picture with the carpet and the three weavers is black-and-white, and, unlike the others, when you see it you don’t immediately go cold with horror — the scene imitates life so closely, the calmly seated subjects in front of the camera, the light from a window in the background falling on them, touching their shoulders and hair as if nothing much is happening. This is exactly how it is described in The Emigrants, but with one important omission. In the softly lit air between us (between the women and the camera, between them and me) something that looks a little like a frame hangs at an angle, made from many vertical threads pulled tight. The carpet is rising slowly up this loom and it will soon obscure the room and all those in it. Strange that Sebald didn’t notice this rising veil of carpet. Perhaps it wasn’t there when he looked at the picture.

  Not-A-Chapter

  Lyolya (Olga) Gurevich, 1947

  Undated, written after 1944 and the return from evacuation.

  Addressed to Berta Leontyevna Gurevich, her mother-in-law (the mother of Lyonya), who lives separately from them.

  Dear Berta Leontyevna,

  I came to see you, but Lyonya doesn’t know this and I would prefer it if it stayed between us.

  It was very hard for me to come here, as you know I have my pride, but I have been thinking a great deal over these last few days and I decided that I had to do this. I came to see you with pure intentions. I felt very bad that I was the cause of our appalling conversation. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, it’s just that I haven’t been well recently, my nerves are in a terrible state and I was hurt that Lyonya didn’t consult me. Well, it doesn’t matter now. I’m ashamed that such a trivial thing has caused us to exchange bitter (and I think, on both sides, undeserved) reproaches.

  I have forgotten everything you said to me and I beg you to forget everything I said, too. Life is hard enough as it is without making it harder with unnecessary rows.

  You have a son and a granddaughter, and I have a husband and a daughter and I think that the purpose of life is, in the end, to bring joy to those close to us.

  I came to see you to make it up with you, to put our differences aside. I hope you will understa
nd why I came and that you will be able to feel warmly toward me.

  Sadly you were out when I came round, so I’ve had to use your writing paper. I won’t write more, I am leaving with the hope that you will be with us for the New Year.

  Allow me to kiss you.

  Lyolya.

  5. On One Side and on the Other

  Obverse:

  Painted porcelain boys and girls of various sizes, with bright mouths and caps of black or yellow hair. Other cheaper versions, plain basic-white. All are bisque dolls manufactured in Germany for decades from the 1840s. In the small town of Köppelsdorf, in the oak land of Thuringia, whole factories produced nothing but dolls. Most of them were large and expensive with real hair, bodies of kidskin, and flushed porcelain cheeks, but there were other simpler figures. In Ernst Heubach’s furnaces thousands of tiny dolls were fired, on sale for pfennigs and sold everywhere, like boiled sweets or soap. They looked like lost stubs of soaps, stiff little hands slightly in front of them, motionless legs in tiny socks, and because they were hollow and only their faces were varnished to save money, they could be put in the bath and they would float, little and modest, on their painted fronts.

  There are many tales of these dolls as possessions. Apart from their obvious occupations (born “for the roll of a fist, for the life in a pocket” or the work of the tiniest units of humanity, as in the Tsvetaeva essay “My Pushkin”), they were placed on the shelves of dolls houses, hidden in Epiphany pastries to bring luck to the finder, and even, if it is to be believed, dropped into cups of tea instead of ice. I can’t find any confirmation or rebuttal of the story that the broken dolls were used as packaging chips for transported goods, but it is clear that they were the foot soldiers of the toy world, ephemeral, easily replaceable and multipurpose.

  The lion’s share of this clay army was sold outside Germany. The tiniest were thumb-height and cost next to nothing. The bigger dolls were thirty to forty centimeters tall and were more prized by shopkeepers and their owners. Their export only stopped during the First World War, when selling dolls to the enemy began to feel awkward, and enterprising Japanese manufacturers took the place of the Germans. The Japanese dolls were made to the same model but using cheaper materials and only fired once. They smashed more easily, too. Lonely, valueless dolls crushed under the weight of time, like bird skulls crushed underfoot, they reappeared without limbs, black holes in place of joints. Some even returned from the earth, soil ground into the bisque, piles of broken dolls dug up from factory land. Years later their scarred white bodies were once again salable commodities, like everything from the past, sold as virtual lots on eBay, regiments of them, in sixes, tens, dozens. They are grouped carefully, or so it seems to me, with one or two near perfect specimens, victorious in the battle against time. An overfired back or a broken wrist hardly matters to these heroes, their heads are thrown back proudly, and their cheeks are round and glistening. The rest hardly aspire to being anything beyond splinters. This heap of survivors has only one name in the English-speaking world: frozen Charlottes.

  Reverse:

  Charlotte is one of the classic names of the Germanosphere, where the number of blonde little Lottes nearly outnumbers the contingent of Margaretes or Gretchens. Lotte, the cause of Werther’s suicide, with her apples and Brötchen, a pink band round her white dress — and before you know it she’s back as Thomas Mann’s muse. Goethe’s Lotte, who came involuntarily to mind in 1939 when the old world crumbled under the jackboots of the new. Despite this, the German dolls were only called “Charlottes” in America.

  On February 8, 1840, the New York Observer reported: “A young woman, whose name is given as Miss _____, froze to death while riding twenty miles to a ball on the eve of January 1, 1840.” A Portland journalist, Seba Smith, known for his love of maudlin subject matter, used the story as the basis for a ballad, which had some success: a few years later the “blind Homer of Benson, Vermont,” William Lorenzo Carter, set it to music as “Young (or Fair) Charlotte.” The 1840s was a time of snow fascination, the romance of the blizzard and frost. In the early 1840s Hans Christian Andersen published his “Snow Queen”: “She was fair and beautiful, but made of ice — shining and glittering ice. Still she was alive and her eyes sparkled like bright stars, but there was neither peace nor rest in their glance. She nodded toward the window and waved her hand.” Seba Smith wrote a second snowy ballad in the early 1840s “The Snow Storm,” in which a young mother perished to save her baby, but the success of this fell far short of his “Young Charlotte.”

  “Young” or “Fair” — the song was sung with interchangeable epithets to suit sentiment across ten US states, and its story is both like and unlike the version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes,” where the girl’s terrible vanity is the cause of her undoing and amputation. But there is no morality, no anguish in “Young Charlotte,” the text has the marmoreal balance of an antique frieze. A beauty rides to a ball with her intended, on a winter’s night, desiring to be “seen,” and so they drive across the snowy hills to the sound of horses’ hooves and merry bells and all she wears is a silken coat and a silken scarf. The sleigh’s speed increases with every verse of the ballad (“Young Charlotte said with a trembling voice: I am growing warmer now”), the stars shine coldly and the ballroom grows closer and closer. But when they arrive the heroine is cold and hard as stone. One of the less polite names for this song was “A Corpse Going to a Ball.” The young man dies of a broken heart and is buried alongside his love.

  The little china figurines crossing the Atlantic from Europe would soon be known as “frozen Charlottes” because of their rigid little bodies. To this day they are known by the same name, it’s become a shorthand for these creatures of horror, the tiny white people of nightmares, and without a voice they are unable to object. The male figurines rapidly became known as frozen Charlies and they were no more able to object. Their curls their socks and their spectral whiteness makes them look like the small gods of a less ancient pantheon. Unlike the Greco-Roman Gods, who lost their color together with their power, there was never enough paint to go round for all the frozen Charlottes.

  Obverse:

  Arthur Rimbaud was interested in new technologies. He sent his family long lists of essential items, dictionaries, reference books, tools, and equipment to be delivered to him (no easy task) in Abyssinia. The parcels arrived in Harar. There was always something missing, but his camera at least arrived safely. Seven of the photos Rimbaud took have survived. In a letter to his mother and sister, written on May 6, 1883, he describes three self-portraits, including one “les bras croisés dans un jardin de bananes.” In another he stands by a low fence, which looks like a cartoon railway track. Beyond the fence there is nothing. Uninterrupted desert, filling the whole print. You might think you can see a point where the gray of the land washes into the gray of the sky but it’s unlikely. If we believe his account, Rimbaud the entrepreneur, in his white trousers, was photographed in “un jardin de café” and “sur une terrasse de la maison,” but it would be hard to imagine anything less like a garden. Although we can only really guess at what we are seeing because something in the developing or printing of the pictures went wrong. All the photographs Rimbaud took — the market square with its awnings, the tiny building with a many-sided cupola, a man sitting in the shade of a column with bowls and gourds laid out in front of him — are fading to white, and there is no way this process can be stopped. The photographs are disappearing before our eyes, slowly, imperceptibly, like the ring of moisture left by a glass on a table.

  Reverse:

  Google Maps makes efforts to renew its satellite photographs as often as possible, but not always and not everywhere. Many towns, with their boulevards, tourist information offices, and unattractive monuments have a reliably unchanging profile for months, if not years: if you zoom in on Moscow on a snowy evening you see summer roofs and green spaces. Nearer the center of the earth, or wher
ever the program considers that to be, the changes happen faster — but even so they aren’t fast enough. A woman leaves her lover, he smashes up the car and it goes to the scrapyard. He leaves town, she unfriends him on Facebook, but on Google Maps the colorless box of the car is still parked outside her door.

  Obverse:

  In his documentary tales of Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk describes a particular variety of local misery called hüzün, very different from European notions of melancholy, which arise from an awareness of the shortness of life. Hüzün, on the other hand, is not directed at the future and the sense of life passing, but at what has already passed and yet still suffuses our daily lives with its soft glimmer. The sensation is brought on by the counterpointing of past greatness with present wretchedness and mediocrity. For Pamuk it is based on a classic “before and after,” what was and what has come to be, his bifocals allowing him to keep both the created model and its destruction (the ruin and its former glory) in focus. He remembers Ruskin in a passage where he talks about the chance nature of the picturesque, about how we find a visual pleasure in decay and dissolution, a pleasure that no urban architect has ever intended us to feel, in the deserted yards and marble flagstones overgrown with grass. A new building becomes picturesque “after history has endowed it with accidental beauty.” In other words, after history has chewed it up and spat it out, unrecognizable.

  Pamuk also quotes Walter Benjamin’s phrase about the exotic and picturesque features of a city being of more interest to those who do not live there. When you think about it, the phrase applies equally to different forms of the past, not just its visibly aging stone skin of towers and turrets — but all the other boxes and cases in which a person packs and unpacks herself. Houses, beds, clothes, shoes, and hats — anything abandoned by its owner that hasn’t yet quite fallen apart is suddenly filled with a new posthumous brightness. Our delight in vintage, as we call it now, comes precisely from entering a past life not as equals, but like a little girl in her mother’s wardrobe, knowing full well we are trying on someone else’s belongings.