In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  The more the contemporary world plays at olden days, the further those days recede, spinning slowly down to the murky depths where nothing can be made out. The impossibility of exact knowledge is in the physical disintegration which protects the past from our trespasses; it forms a hygiene barrier against mixing with us, the present. For us, this impossibility is an advantage. The owners have left the house, they’ve gone away, and there is no one to see how we are dividing up all their many goods. For the full enjoyment of those olden days we need those who once peopled them to die — then we can begin the yearning process, trying out the role of rightful heirs. The heaped mass of witness accounts only teases us in our hunger: rifle through the bank of pictures, enlarge them, bring them up close to your eyes, spend a lifetime gazing at a single iconic image. It’s all pointless: scoop it all out, to the very bottom of the cup, its tin walls, you can walk in to the house of the past, but you can’t penetrate it, nor will it enter you, like the chill slick of a ghost that appears out of nowhere in the warm twilight of a July evening.

  Obverse:

  . . . and then I suggested to myself that I divide memory into its three types.

  The memory of what is lost, inconsolable, melancholy, keeping tally of these losses while knowing that nothing can be returned.

  The memory of what has been received: sated after-dinner memory, contented with one’s lot.

  The memory of what has never been — seeding ghosts in place of the real. Like the magic comb of Russian fairy tale: a deep dark wood springs up where the comb is thrown down and helps the hero to escape pursuit. The phantom memory does much the same for whole communities, protecting them from naked reality and its drafts.

  The object of remembrance can be the same in all cases. In fact, it is always the same.

  Reverse:

  My fear of forgetting, of allowing anything to escape my hold — my mind — from the still-warm past, was justified and even extolled in the Old Testament. What is more, the people of the Old Testament were obliged to remember, and any failure to do so led to certain death. The chapters of Deuteronomy insist repeatedly on the remembrance of God: “Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day.” The scholar of Jewish history Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi recounts in his book (itself called Zakhor, the Hebrew imperative “remember!”) how this powerful drive to remember lasted all the centuries of exile and diaspora. It was memory that demanded the scrupulous adherence to laws, to the achieving and the preservation of perfection — not by the individual, or the family, but by a whole people taken as one. A pure, holy life became the pledge that ensured survival, and no single detail could be lost or omitted.

  Unusual historical events, understood to be without precedent, gave rise to the fear of forgetting. The prohibitions and obligations of Jewish faith were in some ways the result of these events, their imprint left on the mutable human wax. For many generations there was no further attempt in Jewish tradition to chronicle what had happened to the Chosen People, as if the Torah was the last word on the subject and nothing more was needed. It’s said that the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov quickly lost interest when reading out his own poems and would break off with “and so on and so forth . . .” Yerushalmi describes something similar in Zakhor, but with different words: “Perhaps they already knew of history what they needed to know. Perhaps they were even wary of it.”

  It wasn’t that they went into a new age utterly unaware of the discipline of history: there are plenty of examples in the texts and missives circulating around medieval Europe showing that the dates and markers of an unwritten history were well within the field of vision for Jewish scholars. They noticed these events, but nothing had the necessary magnitude to become part of the holy tradition. All the major events were long behind them as they’d happened at the very beginning. In a world dominated by precedent, when the destruction of the First and Second Temple was one single event, and the difference between Babylon and Rome was insignificant in the face of perpetual catastrophe, all the assaults and pogroms of the new wave of persecution (in France, Germany, and Spain) were simply continuations on a theme. The epitome of this approach to the past is Megillat Ta’anit (the scroll of fasting), which also sets out the red letter days in the calendar, the days for feasting, rather than mourning and fasting. These were the dates of feats and celebrations, recorded from pre-Maccabean times and up to the destruction of the Second Temple. A Scholion or commentary gives the dates of events separately. The scroll is not an effort to make history, but has a very different task: structured around the turning of the seasons it lists the days and months and not the years. In a later incarnation it becomes the Christian liturgical year. In the Jewish tradition there is no difference between the recent and far past, just as there is no difference between past and present.

  In this way the Judaic memory is free from the need to commit everything in history to memory, free to choose the significant and essential, to cut away the inessential. The limitations were of a different kind; the imperative not to forget fitted well with the duty to focus — on one’s own history among other things — when multifarious details threatened to overwhelm the fundamental truths. Jewish historiography (which barely existed before the Enlightenment and which suddenly blossomed in conditions of assimilation, departing from tradition for the simple reason that there was no real tradition; even the first persuasive history of the Jewish people was written by a gentile) seemed an unnecessary science; everything one needed to know was stored on a different shelf. Yerushalmi quotes Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, in which Rosenzweig maintained that the meaning of Jewishness lies in its ahistoricity: the Jewish people stood outside the general current of time and had even achieved a desired stasis through their observance of an unchanging law. Rosenzweig’s work was published in 1921. Twenty years later the current once again washed against their shore. History claimed its own.

  Even the Nazi imagination worked as if from inside the logic of the Jewish world, as if they desperately wanted to confirm or deny a thesis, to test the strength of the contract the Jewish people had with their God. Acts of punishment were meted out in accordance with their foreign calendar, although without discerning between days of mourning and days of feasting. The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar took place on Erev Yom Kippur and the destruction of the Minsk Ghetto was timed to coincide with Simchat Torah. The clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto began at Passover. Even such violent plungings into the black hole of catastrophic knowledge can be considered a sort of confirmation. The impossibility of forgetting searches out its own markers, its own mounds, familiar stones, or ravines and refuses to be comforted for its children, for they were not. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor is a book about memory as the highest of all the virtues, and yet it ends with a near prayer for oblivion: that it might cease to be a sin, that all the rips and tears might be left in peace, to be themselves, untroubled.

  Obverse:

  Dybbuk means “cleaving to” or “clinging to”; the description often involves the sense of grafting, like a gardener experimenting by splicing a pear shoot to an apple tree, or a briar rose to a garden rose. The restless soul of Ashkenazi legend cannot be parted from this world, either because the weight of sin is too heavy upon it, or it has simply got stuck staring at something living, and can no longer trace the way home. A soul whose death was terrible or shameful, or who won’t be divested of earthly joys, wanders from door to door looking for a crack to force themselves through, a person who can be inhabited like a tidy, well-swept house. It might be an old man, weakened by illness and no longer able to pinch tight the corners of his own body, or a woman tormented by waiting, or a person whose own soul is not stationary, but wanders back and forth like a pendulum. Clinging to this person, the dybbuk worms his way in, puts down roots — this home is warm and raw. Ten men wearing burial shrouds and blowing on a shofar (ram
’s horn) must beg the evil spirit to leave the body, but are not always successful in talking it round. It cries pitifully and begs its tormentors in many different voices, calling them by their names and listing the sins they have until now kept private, and their birthmarks and their childhood nicknames . . .

  This is just like the past when it won’t leave. It cleaves to the present, burrows under its skin, leaving its spores there and talking in tongues and ringing its bells, so there is no greater joy for a person than listening and remembering what has never happened to him, crying for those he never knew, calling by name those he never saw.

  Reverse:

  I once read a book on the ghosts of birds that described the relationship between an Indigenous tribe and its dead ancestors. It was laid out very precisely, like diplomatic protocol, and based on a complicated system of agreements and indulgences. Its descriptions of protocol included chance meetings — that awkward moment when you walk into a dead person on a dark road, like a pillar of icy air. I’d like to quote from the book but I can’t — I picked it up and read from it in an overseas bookshop, and I’m afraid I will misremember the text. In many ways this resembles my negotiations with the past, which are based on hard facts, like the hard cover of a book, but I have to resurrect them from thin air and resign myself to the inevitable inaccuracies: in the same way they draw the image of a bird from just its claw or its feather, once it has become a shade.

  It’s no secret that the people of the past are easily and quickly transformed into something unrecognizable and often nonhuman. In “The Arm,” a short story by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, a dead pilot drags a burnt log from his cockpit with the words: “This is my navigator.” This fictional account has its nonfictional doppelgänger in a dream the prose writer Vsevolod Ivanov had just before his death. He dreamed that he was with Anna Akhmatova at a World Congress of Writers, in Greece of all places (at the time it was easier for a citizen of the USSR to cross the Lethe than an international border). This fantastical trip, the dream of a Soviet writer in hospital in the summer of 1963, had a distinctly paradisiacal nature. “In the morning I went downstairs and I saw a woman sitting at the table and weeping. Anna Andreevna, I said to her, Anna, why are you crying? And she answered that she had seen her son in the table, only her son was pink, and the table was black marble.”

  The records of dreams are inaccurate in an unintentional way: did the oneiric Akhmatova see the face of her son (who was brought up by strangers a long way away from her, arrested, rearrested, and rendered unrecognizable by labor camps) in the polished marble surface? Or was the table actually her child in the dream, like the burned log of the navigator: a four-legged marble child, black instead of pink, her little Lev, found by her in the unattainable and paradisiacal Greece? Her table son, upon whom the dead are laid out to be dressed for the grave, like the rock where Jesus was laid to be washed and anointed. In “Requiem,” Akhmatova compares her still-living son with the crucified Christ, and her suffering with the suffering of the Mother of God. Years later he returned from the camps and was rearrested, as if these passages into the world of the dead and back again were quite normal.

  The philosopher Yakov Druskin was a member of the Chinarei, a group of Leningrad poets and philosophers who had formed a very close circle in the thirties and who were slowly squeezed out of existence by Soviet reality. They were excluded from official writing structures (by their own choice and also because the radical nature of their texts hardly met the expectations placed upon “fellow travelers,” those writers who weren’t currently aligned with official party policy, but were “catching up”). For a while they flourished in their modest way, working for children’s magazines, writing virtuosic poems and short stories, playing cards and spot-the-difference, going to the races and sunbathing on the thin strip of Neva sand by the Peter and Paul Fortress. Little by little their untroubled and dimly lit patch of shade shrunk in size, and they became more and more conspicuous. Members of the circle were arrested, exiled to other towns, or they lost their work, but they kept coming back, as if unaware how transparent their spare little existence had become. In his diaries Daniil Kharms, perhaps the best known of all the Chinarei, interspersed prayers, metaphysical problems, and longings for female folds and smells with the odd note that he had no money, nowhere to get money, and was growing hungry. Kharms did indeed die of hunger in an NKVD jail in the terrible winter of 1942, during the Siege of Leningrad. Aleksandr Vvedensky died in a freight car during his enforced evacuation from Leningrad in December 1941. Leonid Lipavsky went missing in action in September 1941. Nikolai Oleinikov didn’t last as long as his friends — he was executed in 1937.

  Druskin alone survived, hardly understanding himself why he had been spared. He never once ceased his conversation with the dead. More and more space in his philosophy notebooks is given over to writing out dreams in which he sees his dead friends and tries to make certain that it is really them, that they have returned at last. He can’t be certain; the experiment is fruitless. Druskin and his friends are cutting open the chest of a person they believe to be Lipavsky “to see whether this is a dream or not” but they immediately forget what they are trying to prove. One of his ghosts doesn’t want to acknowledge him, another is transformed so he looks like a Soviet writer (just as he might a log of wood or a marble table or a wardrobe). On April 11, 1942, Druskin writes up yet another dream meeting with his dead friends. He dreams of them all the time, he sees them more now than when they were alive:

  We all gathered, I prepared some refreshment, some fizzy water. We looked at each other and laughed. Who had we come to look like? Lipavsky, for instance, he and I, we’ve changed more than the rest. But L is utterly unlike himself. And the third L — well I would never have taken him for L. A. D. I. [Kharms?] I would barely have recognized him. And perhaps it isn’t him, although it should be. And there were some others around, one of them was Shura (Vvedensky), but which one? And there was a Pulkanov there. With a different surname.

  Pulkanov is not a common surname. No one in Druskin’s circle had that name. The dream had fitted the name over someone like a cloak and masked that person, hidden him so well we don’t even know who he was. Perhaps he was the dreamer.

  6. Charlotte, or Acts of Insubordination

  I love books, films, and stories that begin like this: a person arrives at a small home in a remote part of let’s say France, opens the windows, goes out onto the balcony, moves the furniture around. She lays out her books, crawls under the table to plug in her computer, studies the contents of an unfamiliar kitchen cupboard and chooses the mug she will use. She walks to the village for the first time and buys tomatoes and cheese. Sits down at a table in the only local café and drinks coffee or wine. She wrinkles her eyes in the bright sun and returns to the house. She watches the television, looks out of the window, up at the ceiling. If she’s a writer (let’s say) then she starts work earlier in the morning.

  Usually this moment of unspoiled happiness, work that has at last found its proper space and time, blessed utter peacefulness, is interrupted by some unasked-for act. In Islamic texts there is a euphemism for death — “the destroyer of pleasure, disbander of gatherings” — and this seems to me to be the perfect description of the storytelling dynamic, which has the task of pitching the peaceful prehistory at such an angle that everything is set in motion and the hero begins the slow roll down the slope, arousing both the reader’s sympathy and irritation. We know and dread what literature and history offers us in this situation. The heroine will never finish the page she is writing because uninvited guests will arrive. The hero has no time on his own because a murder happens nearby. The resurrection is halted because a war has just begun.

  At the end of 1941, twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Salomon did something rather odd. She left Villefranche-sur-Mer, a villa with a view over the Côte d’Azur where she had been staying with her grandparents. Things were different now: the money had run out,
her grandmother had died, and they were relying on the pity or the whim of their hosts. Like many other German Jews, they had once been respectable, but hardly knew where to turn now. Charlotte left abruptly, in the manner of a person suddenly standing up and leaving a room. She took lodgings in nearby Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and stopped seeing friends. It isn’t clear what she lived on, but we know where she lived, in a tiny hotel with the age-old name “La Belle Aurore.” She spent six months there, quite alone, working on what would be her great work, Life? Or Theater?, a sequence of 769 gouache pictures in which images are interspersed with text and musical phrase. There are also a number of pages of material that didn’t make it into the main body of the piece: all in all she painted 1326 gouaches. When she ran out of paper she painted on the other side of the rejected sheets, and toward the end of the process she painted on both sides of every sheet.

  The gouaches were painted on sheets of A4 paper in such terrible haste that she had to hang them around the walls of her little room so they would dry quicker. They were overlaid with tracing paper on which phrases, “stage directions,” and what might be termed “instructions” were written to tell the viewers what musical phrase they should have in their head when looking at the picture. Sometimes this could be complicated: the melody itself had another text attached, a bitter little street ditty to the tune of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied” or “Habanera.” Music was an intrinsic part of the narrative. The pages themselves are ordered in three parts with a prologue and epilogue and even a defined genre: a “Dreifarben Singespiel,” a three-color singspiel — the phrase should instantly bring to mind The Magic Flute, the most popular singspiel in the German canon, and also Brecht and Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper, banned only a short time before, but still resounding in everyone’s ears.