10. Things I Don’t Know
There’s a memorial in Moscow at Lyubyanka, a square surrounded by high buildings that have housed the various incarnations of secret police for the last hundred years. It’s an unobtrusive memorial, usually just called “the Stone,” the Solovetsky Stone, brought from the Solovetsky Islands where, in 1919, one of the very first Soviet prison camps was opened. Many more followed.
Every year in Autumn there is a special day when people gather to take part in a communal event. Everyone is given a little square of paper with the name, surname, and profession of a person who was executed during the years of Communist Terror. Then they line up to approach the Stone in order to say these names aloud. It lasts a whole day, and could go on far longer. Even toward evening, when it’s getting cold, there is no shortage of people in line. Those who lost parents and grandparents read their names alongside the names of strangers. Candles are lit by the Stone. A few years ago our ten-year-old son went to stand in line. He knew more or less why he was there, but he got cold and miserable waiting his turn. Then suddenly, when he heard the names and dates being read out, he seized hold of his father and burst into tears: “They killed that person on May 6, on my birthday, Dad . . . how unfair is that, Dad?”
*
Birthdays do matter after all. My grandmother Lyolya was born on May 9, Victory Day. I learned that important fact almost before I learned to walk. My mother loved to remember the Spring of 1945 when they returned to Moscow from evacuation: fireworks over the Kremlin, a long table with everyone eating together: family, friends, all the inhabitants of the communal apartment, and all this felt like a natural ending, like a long-awaited birthday present. Grandmother was born in 1916, but the year wasn’t important. The general victory celebration completed her own quieter celebration, confirmed that her birth date wasn’t just chance.
The natural connection between Grandmother and May 9 was such an integral part of family mythology that it was only recently that it occurred to me that the she was in fact born on April 26, back in the old world and according to the old Julian Calendar. It occurred to me, too that her father, my great-grandfather Misha, was born under a different name and lived with it for a few years. Among the old papers there is a certificate given to Mikhel Fridman, apothecary’s apprentice, and however hard I strain my eyes I can’t make out the moment of transformation, when something shifts and Great-Grandfather appears in the world as the young lawyer Misha, a court solicitor in polished boots, carrying volumes of Tolstoy. All I know is that he gave his student nephew a single piece of advice: “Live an interesting life.” Did he live an interesting life, I wonder? For these people, changing names was as common a matter as moving from one town to another. My other great-grandfather, the handsome Vladimir Gurevich — in his striped jacket with a jaunty group of friends at the seaside — unexpectedly turns out to be Moisey Vulf, according to his papers. How did he pull off the old skin, and how did he choose the new one? Mikhel becomes Misha almost effortlessly, Vulf becomes a Vladimir, as if he had always been a Vladimir. Sarra’s brother, the wonderful Iosif, the firstborn and favorite son of Abram Ginzburg, who broke his father’s heart when he converted to Christianity, was transformed into Volodya (hardly the obvious shift from Iosif), as if the age demanded of its children only blue-eyed straightforwardness.
Other surnames stayed in place and their owners wore them as they were. The Ginzburgs and the Gurevichs, who were from distant Polish and Bavarian towns, heaved toponyms around like sacks of possessions. The Stepanovs, with their bland newly built surname (with its vaguely Greek root: “stefanos” meaning crown or garland), had nothing distinctive in their names. The branches of the family tree are curiously bare of “Rosen” and “Mandal,” of stars and precious jewels. But it is peopled with apparently gentle, peaceful Libermans and Fridmans.
In our own history the most interesting part is what we don’t know. In other people’s histories it’s the animal magnetism of elective affinities that singles out this one from hundreds of others. Sebald’s method, his way of thinking and speaking, is founded on refusing to choose. Although when you begin reading, his books can seem riddled with tunnels like an ant nest, all leading to unexpected consonances. “Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?” If we are to believe him, then these connections come about of their accord, in the way that a magpie drags everything it can find into its nest. Sebald was touched above all by dates that coincided, birthdays, deathdays, and events through which you could see your own life.
When I bring to mind a date or an important event, sometimes it gives rise to a thought experiment, the point of which I hardly know myself. “If a child had been born to that day,” I think to myself, “then that child would now be x years old.” I express it like that — born to the day, and not to me or someone else, as if the event that changed my life had also given birth to someone new. There are by now lots of these invisible children, and they are growing up; but I remember one of them more often than the others. The child born to January 15, 1998, a frosty, radiant day in Moscow and a gray tricklingly damp day in Würzburg — the date of my mother’s death — would now be an adult.
*
One evening in Moscow in E. P Peshkova’s flat, Lenin, who had been listening to Beethoven’s Sonatas, played by Issay Dobrowen, said, “I don’t know anything better than the Appassionata. I could listen to it every day. It’s wonderful, superhuman music. It makes me think, perhaps childishly, naively, but with pride, of the wonders humans are capable of.” And smiling and narrowing his eyes, he added sadly, “I can’t listen to music often, it acts on my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet and stupid things, stroke people on the head, who can still create such beauty although they live in filth and horror. But right now stroking people on the head is out of the question. They’d bite your hand off, it would be better to beat them about the heads, beat them mercilessly, although ideally we are against all violence toward men. Hmmm, it’s a hellish task.”
This paragraph from Maksim Gorky’s Days With Lenin, which was censored by the Soviet authorities, is often quoted, and especially the bit about “beating them about the heads.” It’s also been noted that Lenin got the Sonatas confused. Dobrowen himself later confirmed (from emigration) that he had actually played the Pathétique to the Great Leader. The story of the evening when Lenin was Gorky’s guest is fixed in the nation’s official memory, so much so that the 1963 film of the meeting Appassionata simply lifted its visual composition from the previous painting by the artist Nabandyan, “V. I. Lenin at A. M. Gorky’s home in 1920”: the striped divan, the warm half shawl worn by Peshkova, and the low-hanging lamp in the painting were as much part of the mythology of the evening as the music and the discussion, and the snowstorm whirling outside the window. The film opens with a shot of snow falling over the crenelated Kremlin walls; it’s an epic, hungry, terrible winter. Lenin and Gorky are feeding firewood into an iron stove in the icy apartment, a little girl runs in and begins talking about Crimea: “It’s not safe! The Whites have occupied Crimea!” In fact winter was still a way off. Dobrowen was summoned to play for Lenin on October 20, an autumnal evening. They say that Lenin constantly pressed Gorky to go abroad during that evening, and as he left he famously said: “If you don’t go, then we’ll exile you anyway.”
So everything happened — and yet it didn’t happen. They played music, but it was a different piece; there was a snowstorm, but only ten days later; the famous “we’ll exile you” comment was made, but was it really made then? Gorky himself was only a guest in the apartment, he hadn’t lived with his former wife Ekaterina Peshkova for many years; Dobrowen was actually a strange and invented pseudonym (meaning “good wine,” as he later explained). The pianist was by then a celebrity — schoolgirls treasured postcards with his portrait. I found one such po
rtrait in my family archive: curled hair, a starched dickey, circles under his eyes: an artist at the height of his powers! Across the image is a sprawling signature, and on the other side there is a dedication:
To my dear friend
Isai Abramovich
With warm affection and in memory of graduating
from the Conservatoire
Your Isaichik
Moscow
20
May 1911
How did this postcard find its way into our family album? Isai Abramovich Shapiro, my great-grandfather’s brother-in-law, was a doctor with a practice in Nizhny Novgorod and a specialist in skin and venereal diseases. He was well-known locally and he lived in an expensive part of town. In another picture in the album he is with his wife and three children — sheepskin caps, coats with half capes — in a snowy garden among the birch trees, sitting on one of those ubiquitous slender bentwood chairs. Isai Abramovich could only have known the pianist from Nizhny Novgorod, where they’d both lived. Gorky was from Nizhny Novgorod, too: the hilltop house where he lived with Ekaterina Peshkova as a young man is still there. It’s one of the few places in the world where everything is as it was — plates with a cheerful pattern around the edge, the long table in the dining room, a relaxed couch with bolsters, metal-framed guest beds, porcelain washbowls, and slightly macabre bouquets, gathered by the owners a hundred or more years ago from the profligate green roadsides, and now condemned to last forever. I was told that the reason for this rare degree of preservation was due to “womanly foresight”: Peshkova knew she was married to a great writer and she made efforts to save everything for posterity: the blinds, the shutters, the toys of her living son and her dead daughter. When her marriage to Gorky fell apart she conceived of a time-delayed monument to their short life together. Their possessions were put away into boxes, inventoried, wrapped in fabric, and left until they could be brought back to the old house and placed in their former positions.
*
Whenever I go into a bookshop, I see there are more and more such inventories of possessions, especially in those parts of the world where they use Latin alphabets. In a New York bookshop the books lie with their covers catching the light: Proust’s Overcoat, Monsieur Proust’s Library, Rembrandt’s Nose, Van Gogh’s Ear, Catullus’s Bedspread, Vermeer’s Hat, The Brontë Cabinet, the history of a family in eight objects, one hundred photographs, ninety-nine discoveries.
I wondered if I had been too wrapped up in my thoughts to notice that the old world had breached its banks and flooded the current world; the search for lost time had become a general obsession, and everyone had thrown themselves into reading, writing, and describing our relations with the past. What I was still preparing to write turned out to be simply part of a much bigger movement. Everyone was engaged in “getting a good view” on the past, as if there was nothing else worth doing, as if this was the new form of the Grand Tour. The emptiness that fills villages burned to the ground, and the people inhabiting the rooms of others — all this has become part of the cultural program, like the Roman forum or the Paris Opéra.
I devour all these books, one after another, hardly pausing to marvel at my own unsated appetite as each new text requires me to seek out and devour the next. Pointless knowledge expands at an unstoppable rate: not like a building, which grows with the slow addition of floors, more like that terrifying wartime spring thaw when the bodies were slowly exposed by the melting snow. Perhaps I might have preferred to stand alone in the chalk circle of my obsession, but the circle is as crowded as a waiting room at the doctors where everyone is pronouncing gloomily on each other’s afflictions. It matters to all of us. When I meet someone new I hardly notice the moment when we begin talking about our grandparents and ancestors, comparing names and dates as happily as animals who have finally reached their watering spot and drink, shuddering with the delicious cold of the water. It usually happens about half an hour into the conversation.
One thing saddens me. This search for the past, like the search for the Holy Grail, separates the successful from the failures, and I belong to the latter: assiduous, but unlucky. I have never lost my hope of discovering the kernel at the center of the mystery, a key of some sort that opens the door to a secret corridor in our old apartment, where a shaft of sunlight falls on a host of other unseen doors. Not since I was taken, aged seven, to the green meadow where the Battle of Kulikovo had been fought. I knew about the battle, of course: the bloody encounter between a Moscow Prince and a Tatar Khan had taken place not far from Moscow, a few hours by car. I’d read and reread the Pushkin poem, where the hero, sometimes a knight at arms, sometimes a Russian warrior, wanders onto the site of the ancient battle, the valley of death. There, under the bright sun, he sees something along the lines of a vast educational installation: a heap of yellowing bones, armor and shields, arrows stuck into the ground, heads rotting in their helmets. All of it overgrown with ivy, the organic and inorganic piled up, as if that’s how it had always been. The hero grieves a little, then chooses himself some armor, and knows it will serve him faithfully and true.
I knew exactly what to expect. The excitement of this dramatic and possibly terrifying sight was augmented by the promise of booty: I’d find myself a souvenir, a little thing to remember it by, sure to be such a thing among the skulls and shields, rusting under the sky. A few arrow tips to carry in my pocket would be nice, although an elegant little dagger would be best of all.
The field was quiet and empty, and the wind blew waves over the bare green grass. Our dog ran about madly but found nothing; there was a little obelisk at the side of the field, nothing else. The main quality of an ancient battlefield turned out to be how transitory it was — all the interesting stuff had been dragged home by others well before I got there.
*
I once heard that “a small bag of Marina Tsvetaeva’s possessions” was kept in the drawer of a table at a certain literary museum (which is after all a place where the words and possessions of writers come, if not for immortality, then at least for a rest). The bag had been brought back from the place of her death, Yelabuga, by her sixteen-year-old son Mur after her suicide. Despite its survival, nothing had been written about it, and it hadn’t been exhibited — turn Proust’s overcoats, jackets, and all the other items inside out and this is what you get: objects that disappear, slipping easily through a tear in the lining into absolute oblivion, the deep pocket of nonexistence.
The bag’s contents hadn’t been cataloged, and so might be considered not-quite-existing. There was no way of guessing from the museum catalog that the single unit of the bag in fact held many items. It contained objects that have been passed over, despite the last forty years of passionate attention to Tsvetaeva’s every word; objects that were too damaged or homely to merit a museum cabinet. Tsvetaeva took them with her into evacuation, packing hastily what could be sold (anything French), things to remember others by (mustn’t be lost), and other unnecessary bits and pieces that found themselves in the pile almost by chance. No one knows why Mur thought these things important enough to gather up and bring back to Moscow from his mother’s dark hut in Yelabuga. Was he trying to save and preserve them — or was he in a blind haste, as his mother had been, simply seizing everything? Battered little tins, their contents unknown, beads, a pen, locks of children’s hair, some other nameless bits and bobs, which might have just been stuffed in the bag. But perhaps they were the dearest things, things that reminded her of her mother, her husband, daughter: a special stone, china fragments of an unforgettable cup. There was no one to tell. Objects no one knows anything about are instantly orphaned, they seem to protrude more, like the nose of a dead man. They join the ranks of those who are no longer permitted to enter.
Among the books, papers, chairs, dickeys that I inherited, there are far too many things life forgot to label — or to leave a reminder for, even a hint of where they came from and how they are connected
to me. In the family album, Dobrowen’s portrait is next to a good quality reproduction of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow. On the back my great-grandmother has written in her big handwriting: “Who gave you this picture of Nadezhda Krupskaya? I saw quite a different picture of her in a big portrait at Moisey Abramovich’s. S. Ginzburg, July 2, 1956.” It seems likely that Sarra’s companion took this picture. He had a photographic studio nearby in Moscow and his stamp is on this image. But I will never know the details. These huge and terrifying people who strode the century, Krupskaya, Sverdlov, Gorky, have slipped out of the family memory as if they were never there, and I will never be able to confirm their presence.
Once when I was fifteen my mother showed me something I’d never seen despite my endless rummaging in search of curiosities. It was a tiny, delicate lace purse, half the size of my palm. Inside, folded into four, the paper beginning to tear at the folds, was a piece of paper, and on it, written in a clear hand, the name Victor Pavlovich Nelidov. My grandmother Lyolya, Sarra’s daughter, had kept this little purse in the pocket of her bag, which she carried pressed to her side. I began asking about it, but my mother didn’t know who it was. I persisted, I wanted to know what to make of it. “Make of it what you will,” said my mother, and ended the conversation.
Do I need to say that I’ve tried more than once to find a trail to the invisible Nelidov? Who was he? A doctor? Why a doctor? I have had no success, only the usual feeling of walking into yet another empty green field and realizing once again that the absence of an answer was the answer, and if that upset me, I just had to get over it. As soon as I appeared, the past immediately declined to make anything useful of itself, or to weave itself into a narrative of seeking and finding, of breakthroughs and revelations. The division between what was mine and what belonged to others was the first to break down. Everything around me belonged in one way or another to the world of my dead. I was no longer really surprised to discover paper strips with French on them in the drawers of an old writing desk I had bought: tickets to a cinema in Paris to see two prewar films. One of the films was named after a poem by Victor Hugo “Lorsque l’enfant paraît.” If Great-Grandmother Sarra had been to the cinema in Paris one hundred years ago, then she might well have seen this film, even though the writing desk had nothing to do with her. Perhaps she didn’t see it, perhaps she saw other films (so of course I then rushed off to immerse myself in the chronicles of cinema, as if the names of films would reveal something to me). She must have gone to the cinema, to cafes and exhibitions, and met up with Russian and French friends — she must have had some interests. I’ve always felt that the popular device of making your fictional hero meet Gertrude Stein or Picasso or Tsvetaeva on the Paris streets was a rather shameful example of a sort of coercive literary logic, but in my head I did this constantly, chasing after any coincidences and proximities that might have helped my independently minded great-grandmother feel less lonely.
In Memory of Memory Page 31