In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  The music my relatives bought over the years was not complicated, it was meant to be played at family gatherings: waltzes, foxtrots, and tangos to dance to at home; Tchaikovsky romances, “We will be silent, you and I”; and a Technicolor range of hit parade numbers for singsongs. On the back of the sheets the names of other songs were pressed together in a list, a hundred or more on each sheet. The sight of them gave me to understand the volume of sound that had been lost and gone underground, pushed out beyond the periphery of the known world.

  None of this can be reproduced, least of all the kinds of feelings brought on by “Romances and Songs from Gypsy Life”: the endless sweet friends, the stars and the sunsets, the misty morns and gray dawns, dark nights and sleigh bells, the perfumed white acacia and the roses, the “sweet scent of you”; when the lilac blossoms, and countless “I want to love!” and “I don’t want to forget!” It’s hard to imagine all this being sung, murmured, and squawked by a million voices all at once: voices in tenements and rented rooms, in offices and on dacha verandas, over keyboards and to gramophone records. It poured from open windows like water from a watering can until it had flooded all Russia. Even when it began to disappear it still buzzed like a spinning top as it soaked into the ground. The simple quantity of music held in the airwaves back then, a time still unused to other joys, was enormous: it swelled in vast rainclouds, forever promising rain.

  Du Maurier’s cartoon advised bottling what had already been conserved, wound onto black shellac records. When sound was first recorded, the many imitators of Adelina Patti, pouring their own more modest voices into the romances and arias of Glinka, were out of a job. Caruso and Chaliapin now strode into the family parlor. In the new century people didn’t sing, they sang along and they knew the music not from the page, but from the voice, the raw and irresistible original. Fewer people now played music, and more listened to it; music imperceptibly ceased being a domestic affair at about the same time as domesticity itself began to reveal its ephemeral quality. Pillowcase-size, light as a feather, it could be folded into a traveling case. Music, like much else, became an instance of deferring to authority, his master’s voice. Listeners gathered around the communal radio, they swapped gramophone records, they rushed to the cinema to hear the jazz recordings played before the feature.

  *

  As the dead get more distant, their black-and-white features look ever nobler and finer. When I was younger people still used to say of prerevolutionary photographs: “What wonderful faces, you don’t see faces like that anymore!” Now we say that about the faces of Second World War soldiers, or students in the sixties. And it’s quite true: you don’t see faces like that anymore. We aren’t them. They aren’t us. A picture cunningly replaces this terribly obvious fact with simple parallels. They are holding a child, and we sometimes do that, too. That girl looks just like me apart from her long skirts and squashed hat. Grandmother is drinking from my cup, I am wearing her ring. Them too. Us as well.

  However effortlessly convincing the (full and exhaustive) knowledge offered by the pictures seems, the words that accompany them, written back then, relocate us in our own time. The little beak of the punctum taps at the points of similarity; whereas the voice, reminding us of the real extension of time, can barely be heard from the other side of the abyss. Years ago, the vivacious eighty-year-old redhead Antonina Petrovna Gerburt-Geibovich, an older friend of my mothers, admitted shamefacedly that her mother-in-law had reproached her for her “officer’s” tastes: “I love gladioli and champagne!” I was immediately aware that champagne and contemptible officer’s tastes were very far from the world I inhabited, and even the ordinary gladioli couldn’t bridge the gap. But Antonina had no regrets. She had come from a tiny shtetl in the middle of nowhere, was married for her looks and her boldness, could read in eight languages and used to recount, laughing, how her gallant Polish father-in-law said to her before the wedding: “I am so very glad of this infusion of young Jewish blood into our wilting dynastic line.”

  The Gerburt coat of arms (an apple on a red background, pierced through by three gold swords, two from the upper corners of the shield, and the third from below) and its dynastic history barely interested her. Jewishness excited her far more, and in her lonely little apartment she would passionately relive the successes and failures of those who shared her “young Jewish blood.” Around the age of twelve I used to visit her and she would treat me with volumes of ancient Greek literature and kovrizhka with nuts. Once, I left her apartment with a feeling of intense embarrassment, hardly able to explain this feeling to myself. On that particular day she had taken out a battered volume of poetry and read an old and sentimental poem. As she finished the poem, I noticed in horror that she was crying.

  Only photography shows the flow of time as if it had never existed: just the length of women’s skirts sliding up and down. Text is a different matter: it consists entirely of time, which opens the little windows of vowels and shakes out the mothlike consonants, filling the gaps between paragraphs and haughtily displaying the full range of our differences. When you look at the page of an old newspaper, the first thing you feel is its hopeless remoteness. There is a strange stylistic kinship between texts of the same moment, written in the same cross section of time, but it has nothing to do with authorial intention and can only be seen in hindsight. With a distance of twenty or thirty years it’s hard not to notice the single intonation, the common denominator welding together newspaper, shop sign, poem read from the stage at the all-women college, the conversation on the way home. It is as if every age produces its own particular dust that settles on every surface and in every corner. Even those who behave as if they stood outside the idea of the “typical” suddenly make a linguistic gesture that’s common to their contemporaries, without even noticing it, as if they were unaware of the pull of gravity on them.

  There were plenty of other entertainments besides Trilby in the 1890s, many of them relating to science. The century saw itself as enlightened (and in a sense it was): a little hill onto which humanity had climbed and was now happily looking back over the ground traversed. Behind it lay much to learn from: prejudices overcome, wars that could never be repeated, religious extremism, the depths of poverty; all of this, to be sure, had taken watchfulness but it had yielded to rationalism. Civilization had reached into the furthest parts of the globe and was busy gathering its unusual souvenirs. The World Exhibitions and their many clones presented to the public the highest achievements of humanity, but the audience also wanted to hear about its darker corners, remained curious about the strange nations at the earth’s rim, doomed by fate to be the comic sidekick to the victorious and favored children of progress. This natural-historical curiosity needed feeding.

  In April 1901 a daily paper in Moscow reported to the educated public that an all-female troupe of Dahomey Amazons, who could be seen in the Manezh, were “more curious than any ‘blacks’ who had come to Moscow before. They demonstrate some interesting dances and military formations.” The Amazons soon transferred to a more appropriate venue. “Yesterday at the Zoological Gardens the Dahomey Amazons began their performances of dancing and military moves. These will take place three times a day on weekdays and five times a day on holidays.”

  It hardly raised eyebrows, this idea of adding to the exotic fauna of the zoo with enclosures for rational man in his natural surroundings. What became known as a human zoo — Laplanders, Indians, Nubian villages “with live inhabitants” dressed in traditional costume, holding naked live babies — was an everyday reality in American and European zoos by the mid-1870s. Public morality at the time demanded that “natives” be dressed decently and sometimes public taste demanded quite the opposite: the clothing didn’t seem “revealing” enough, nakedness befitted the savage man. The exhibits wove their mats and smoked their pipes, demonstrated their bows and arrows and the now unnecessary accoutrements of labor. Sometimes they died, sometimes they revolted. Between the
exhibits and the millions of spectators there was nearly always a barrier or a fence to illustrate the boundary between humanity’s past and its much-improved present.

  In 1878, when the couple in Du Maurier’s drawing were busy inspecting the bottles of stoppered music, the Exposition Universelle in Paris featured alongside the megaphones and phonographs a “Negro Village” with around 400 inhabitants. Twenty-five years later, at an even more visually arresting exhibition, the representatives of the “lesser races” were confined in cages. At the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 the crowds streamed to view the primitive nations. On that occasion, the evolution of man had been illustrated carefully with a line that ran from “primates to pygmies” (“Cannibals Will Dance and Sing!”) to Filipinos, Native Americans, and on, at last, to the happy visitors to the Fair. Racial theories prevalent at the time embodied the competitive system, and white man’s victory was a plain indication of his superiority.

  The Amazons came in handy: they were more interesting to look at than the glum Inuits with their shaggy dogs. They offered an almost real threat. These female warriors who had been defending the Dahomey throne for two hundred years still had terrible strength and were the stuff of legend, potboilers, and wet dreams. The war between Dahomey and the French dragged on until the army of Amazons was decisively routed. Their weapons (machetes, and something resembling an ax) were no match for bullets, and long bayonets gave Europeans the advantage in hand-to-hand combat. But even a year before, a troupe of “tame” Amazons had visited Paris to demonstrate their fighting techniques. They were dressed in the wildest of outfits: to survive one has to fit in with other people’s preconceptions.

  An eleven-year-old boy was taken to see such a demonstration of fighting techniques in Moscow. Later in his life Boris Pasternak would remember how

  in Spring 1891 they showed a regiment of Dahomey Amazons in the Zoological Gardens. How my first impressions of woman were linked forever wsith that naked line, the closed ranks of suffering, the tropical parade to the beat of a drum. How I became a captive to form earlier than I should have been, because I saw the form of captivity on them.

  *

  I look at the words and the possessions of the dead, laid out for us in the cabinets of literary museums, or ready for printing, or lovingly conserved, and I feel more and more as if I were looking into an enclosure containing the silent and closed ranks of the “exhibited.” When you spend a long time with what the old inventories called “linen belonging to the deceased,” the bars of the cage start to come into focus more sharply, and what lies behind recedes from view.

  The letters of my grandmother written in her girlhood, which I transcribe, line by line; the Soviet songs Aunt Galya wrote up; the letters of a philosopher, the diaries of a machine worker — all of this reminds me more and more of the brain, pelvis, and sexual organs of Saartjie Baartman. The Hottentot Venus, as they loved to call her, was a much-favored object of scientific interest at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shape of her body, the diameter of her nipples, and the line of her buttocks were living proof for various different types of evolutionary theory and formed the basis for boldly sexual prepositions. The well-known naturalist Dr. Georges Cuvier paid particular attention to the length of her labia. She was exhibited to medical students, enlightened amateurs, and crowds at freak shows. On occasion you were allowed to poke her. Her service to “humanity” did not end with her death: for one hundred and fifty years her remains were exhibited in museums in France and only reluctantly withdrawn from view in 1974. We, the people of the past and the present, are endlessly vulnerable, desperately interesting, utterly defenseless. Especially after we are gone.

  8. Lyodik, or Silence

  In Spring 1942, in the Leningrad Region, lines of soldiers walked through the twilight, one behind the other, holding on to each other as tightly as they could. They were usually led by the soldier with the best sense of direction. With a stick he felt for potholes and the bodies of people and horses, and the chain of the unseeing followed him and tried their best to wind their way around obstacles. Nyctalopia is the Greek name for a condition that begins in the following way: the sufferer stops being able to tell blue and yellow apart, the field of vision narrows, and on entering a lit space he sees colored spots in front of his eyes. Its name among the people is “moon blink.” It is caused by the long winter, a lack of vitamin A, and extreme fatigue. I once read this description of it in a memoir: “I could only see two small stretches of land and they were directly in front of me. Everything else was hidden in darkness.”

  Leonid Gimmelfarb, my grandfather’s nineteen-year-old cousin, was somewhere in the marshes and forests in this district: his 994th Rifle Regiment had held its position since the autumn, during which time the regiment had completely replaced its personnel as well as its commanding officers several times. Lyodik, as he was called at home, wrote regularly to his mother who had been evacuated to the faraway Siberian town of Yalutorovsk. He’d been in these parts before: he’d sent his first letters to his mother from training camps in the region in May the previous year. In one letter, he wrote that he’d gone to Leningrad to apply to the college of aviation, “although of course I wasn’t accepted, they said I wasn’t right.”

  On September 1, 1939, the first day of the Second World War, a conscription act was passed in the USSR, leading to mass conscription. The children and grandchildren of all those of doubtful lineage (aristocrats, factory owners, merchants, officers in the Tsarist army, priests, richer peasants) were also included, although they had to serve as infantrymen without hope of promotion — the military academies and colleges remained closed to them as they had been before. The new act seemed fair on the whole, since it was based on a need for equality, though it lowered the conscription age quite considerably, from twenty-one to nineteen, and even eighteen for those who had left school early. Lyodik wrote that it was warm and comfortable in his tent, which slept ten recruits. They’d built a bench and a table and even decorated it a bit, and he’d set himself the challenge of learning to play chess better. New regulations had come in and now instead of a kilo of bread they each received 800g. There was a “vegetarian day,” when they ate cheese instead of meat, and even if it wasn’t exactly fun, at least they understood what was going on, and it kept them busy.

  In my mother’s papers there was a special bundle with Lyodik’s letters and childhood postcards. The little boy, standing in his felt boots with shining galoshes and his lambskin cap pulled down over his eyes, was an important part of her own childhood — his absence made him almost her contemporary, and the fact that he was fated to die at the terribly young age of twenty was overwhelming. When Lyodik’s mother, the wizened, gray-haired Auntie Verochka, died and was buried somewhere along the wall of the Donsky Crematorium, all that remained of her worldly possessions was this little bundle. The death notice, and strips of army paper with numbers on and little notes: “greetings from the front,” “all my love,” “P.S. I am alive and well.” “Alive and well” was pretty much all Lyodik’s letters amounted to, although he used every possible occasion to send word. “Nothing much to report” was the mantra, and it filled the sheets of paper — whatever was going on around him was by now beyond description. What he couldn’t quite suppress though was a strange ringing, it wasn’t in the words themselves, but still it sounded in the background. Much as if a calm person were writing calming words, just as a tank rumbled down the street and all the china in the cupboards began to hum.

  In pencil, on the lined sheet of an exercise book:

  May 28, 41

  Dearest Mother,

  The day before yesterday I received a lot of correspondence: five letters, a postcard and two letters from you, one letter from everyone, and one from Father. You can probably imagine how pleased I was to receive these precious letters. I haven’t written for a while because I wasn’t able to send letters. Now our political officer is involved and the postal
service is much improved. I’m moving around but the address is always the same.

  I am in good health, feeling well and certain of our victory. I hope to be together with you for my twentieth birthday. I’m so proud of Father and his brothers. In a letter sent on May 6 he said that he had signed up as a Local Defense Volunteer and would make himself useful in the rear guard and on the front line. Uncle Filya and Uncle David are also joining up, Father writes. Auntie Beti’s husband has been called up — he’s a political officer. Father has found a placement from May 2. I’m so pleased for him.

  Have you been troubled by air raids? As a soldier with some experience, I want to give you a little advice. It’s best to find shelter in the metro if you are near a station, or in an air raid shelter. If you are a long way from both, then try to run to a low place, and don’t stand at full height.

  Many thanks for all the warm words from Auntie Beti, Lyonya, Lyolya. Congratulations to Lyonya on becoming a father, Lyolya on becoming a mother, and Beti and Sarra Abramovna on becoming grandmothers.