In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  So, for example, in May 1914, only weeks before the outbreak of war, a postcard from Paris arrives in Saratov. It is decorated with almond blossom and Spring, perhaps the personification of April, leans down over a sleeping infant. The caption reads: sogno primaverile. On May 30, the day my great-grandfather received this card (in which Sarra writes that she is returning from an exam “quite shattered”), the young pilot Alfred Agostinelli, former chauffeur of Marcel Proust and the model for Albertine, crashed his plane near Antibes and drowned in the Mediterranean. Agostinelli registered for his flying lessons as Marcel Swann, as if the hero and the narrator of In Search of Lost Time had merged into one person. Proust paid for these lessons and he’d even promised to buy Albert an airplane with Mallarmé’s lines about the swan who couldn’t fly etched on the fuselage. “A poem you loved, even if you thought you didn’t understand it,” Proust wrote in a letter that was never opened. On the day it arrived the addressee didn’t come home.

  *

  Sometimes touch alone is enough to establish kinship. I’m thinking now of the famous 1950s experiment with baby monkeys. The babies were taken away from their hairy birth mothers and put in an enclosure with surrogate mothers: one made from wire and another from soft plush. All the babies without exception tried to squirm into the arms of the “soft mommy,” to hold on and press themselves against her and hug her. As the experiment progressed the soft mommy began to cause them pain: under the soft fur she was covered in spikes. But this didn’t stop the baby monkeys — they made little cries of pain but they didn’t release their hold. Perhaps she even became dearer to them because of the efforts they had to make to stay close to her.

  Month after month I transcribed my family’s letters and documents, poring over the microscopic handwriting, the rapid accounts of long-dead conversations. I began to understand them better and love them more. I wondered whether imitation often ended in this way: the young poet who was exiled to Voronezh together with Mandelstam began to think he himself was the author of Mandelstam’s poems and I, too, carefully copying out the commas and little mistakes of my ancestors, was no longer able to see the line that divided their lives from mine.

  I typed up my father’s thrilling and surprising letters, sent from Baikonur in 1965, where secret space installations were being constructed. There was a military presence on the steppe, and my father and his friend Kolya Sokolov were civilian instructors. I remember from my childhood the accounts of how my father had caught a wily little vixen, a qarsaq, on the Kazakh steppe and was attempting to train it, but the proud little beast wouldn’t eat or drink and wanted its freedom, so after three days they let it go. I found his letters among the papers at Aunt Galya’s, and there were lots of them: about the qarsaq and life on the steppe, everything down to how they made their camp and slept under an awning made from a damp sheet, and rinsed the floor with water every night. The people and circumstances of these letters became firmly fixed in my head as I typed them up, page by page. It was as if they had always been there, a natural progression of my own internal landscape. My twenty-six-year-old father hitching a ride to spend an evening drinking with a group of geologists from Moscow; arguing with the foreman over the empty shed under the workshop; losing patience with his team of fitters; stuffing a marmot; trying to send a rifle home wrapped in a fur jacket — behaving like the hero in a Soviet-era “cheerful-young-men-building-Socialism” film. This didn’t much surprise me: the letters were written fifty years ago.

  At some point in the process, without giving it much thought, I sent the file with the letters to my father and asked him whether I could quote from the letters in my book. I didn’t doubt for a moment that he would give me permission: they were wonderfully well-written texts; lively, funny, and very distant from our world now. Yet there was something else: in my head, the letters I had typed up had become my own. I had become used to considering them part of a collective history of which I was the author. Papers found in a pile, of no use to anyone else; do what you want with them, throw them away or keep them — their fate depended on me, their publisher. Quoting from them meant saving them, leaving them in their box meant consigning them to a long darkness. Who else, if not me, should decide how to deal with them?

  Without being aware of it, I had internalized the logic of ownership. Not in the sense of a tyrant, lording it over his hundreds of enslaved peasants, but perhaps like the tyrant’s enlightened neighbor, with a landscaped park and a theater in which his serfs acted and sang. The subject of my love and my grief had become my property, to treat as I wished. My other heroes couldn’t object or react, for obvious reasons. They were dead.

  The dead have no rights: their property and the circumstances of their fate can be used by anyone and in any way. In the first few months and years after death, humanity attempts to restrain its enterprising spirit and behave with decency — its interest in the not-yet-cold corpse is kept in check, if only out of respect for the living, the family and friends. Years pass and the rules of decency, the rules of the collective, the laws of copyright, all give way like a dam breaching under the weight of water; and this seems to happen more rapidly now than in the past. The fate of the dead is the latest gold rush; the history of people we don’t really know much about has become a major subject of novels and films, of sentimental speculation and sensational exposure. No one will defend them, no one asks us.

  A homeless person would have the right to be angry if her photo were used on the cover of a family calendar. A man condemned to death for murder is still able to prevent the publication of his letters or diary. There is only one category denied this right. Every one of us owns his or her history, but only to a point, only while we own our body, our underwear, our glasses case. At the beginning of the new century the invisible and indescribable majority of the dead became the new minority; endlessly vulnerable, humiliated, their rights abused.

  I believe this must change, and change within our lifetimes, just as it has changed over the last hundred years for other groups of the abused and humiliated. What unites all the minorities, puts them in the same boat (or on the same many-decked liner) is other people’s sense that their subjectivity is incomplete: women who need to be looked after; children who don’t know what’s best for them; black people who are like children; the working classes who don’t know what’s in their own interests; the dead, for whom nothing matters any more. Even if you aren’t in any of the former categories, you are certain to be in the last.

  My father didn’t answer for a day or two. Then he Skyped me and said he wanted to talk. He wouldn’t give me permission to reproduce his letters in the book. He really didn’t want them published. Even the one about the vixen? Even that one. He hoped I would understand. He was absolutely against the idea. Because, he added very clearly, nothing happened quite in that way.

  I was horrified and offended. My Not-A-Chapters with their family histories were working out nicely: a chronicle, an arpeggio, a ladder running up the book from the beginning of the century to 1965, and my father’s tales of jaunty builders and soldier’s boots felt like a necessary rung. How could I make do without it? I argued, I questioned, I gesticulated. When we’d both calmed down a little, my father said, “I can’t bear to think that someone will read those letters and think that’s what I am.”

  I could have carried on trying to persuade him, I still had things to say: it’s not about what you are, I thought petulantly. It’s not about you at all: it’s not you writing to your parents and sister, it’s the time itself writing, it’s a thousand Siberian radio programs and a hundred novels about Siberian construction projects and the vanquishing of the virgin earth, and about decent people and conscientious workers. I could have said: in our family’s letters you can see how the language used to describe the everyday experience changes — how the tone changes completely between the 1910s and the 1930s, how newspapers and films form internal speech. Your letters belong in that history, they are
templates of the 1960s, not “how it actually was” but written in that concentrated form that gives us a feeling for the age. It’s not a book about what you were, it’s about what we see when we look back.

  I said none of this aloud, luckily — we were already saying goodbye, and my sense of self-righteousness was growing — and it grew until I realized exactly what I was really thinking. I was very close to saying “I don’t care what you were,” but happily I didn’t get that far. Blessed are those who destroy all the letters and diaries they don’t want others to see. The written text creates a false impression of its own immortality: a silly billet-doux is set in stone, an irritable exclamation puts down a claim to be the last word. This was the subtext to our conversation: to put it crassly I was prepare to betray my own living father for the dead text, because I believed in it more. It then felt to me as if the letter itself had spoken and said: “Don’t touch me!”

  I am afraid to think what Great-Grandmother Sarra might have said if I’d asked her whether I could publish her correspondence. But no one asks the dead.

  I understood my father’s objections to be that his reports on life in Kazakhstan were stylizations of a sort, written to please and entertain his family. What I saw as a picaresque novel, adventures against a colonial backdrop, was a memory of dirt, depression, and desperate drunkenness for him; of barracks and sheds at the end of the world, swearing soldiers and constant and interminable thievery. The tone of his letters was faked, but time had preserved only this stylized bravado. Another sobering realization: if these letters, so detailed in themselves, couldn’t be used as witness accounts — those little fragments of bone from which the skeleton of the past can be reconstructed — then what hope was there of building anything from scratch, made of letters and handkerchiefs? It was what a psychoanalyst might dismissively term a “fantasy.” In the place of respectable research, I had been occupied all this time with the Freudian family romance, the sentimentalized past.

  That is how it must be. We look at the photographs of our ancestors as we might look at a human zoo, wild beasts whose lives lie out of sight, deep within the enclosure. It reminds me a little of a folder of recipes I have. The recipes are written out by my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother (and I spotted with a sort of shudder my own childish handwriting among them). For a long time the recipes were a call to action — wouldn’t it be marvelous to make all these recipes, to unite them in their culinary succession, to pretend to be each generation of woman in turn, bringing to life their circle of relationships, some known to me, some unknown: Murochka’s recipe for pie, Rosa Markovna’s biscuit recipe, Auntie Raya’s pike. Although in fact each possessive was a reminder to me that all these people with their pikes and pies no longer existed, and all that was left was the folder of paper. And it was unusable: when I sat down to read through the recipes, I immediately knew I would never cook these dishes. They were full of ingredients that had long since disappeared, Soviet-era cereals and grains, Soviet margarine. Mostly desserts and confectionery, each one so calorific it could replace an entire meal; rich creams and heavy sponges, endless biscuit recipes, tortes, pastries, and shortbreads, as if the lack of sweetness in life could be made up by ingestion. The diet of another, lost world. I had no desire to go back there, despite my nostalgia for its black-and-white inhabitants.

  *

  One of the strangest things I found in the boxes of papers belonging to the Stepanov family was not really even a “thing.” It was a page from a notebook, folded vertically into four and kept by someone. On it, a single sentence, unaddressed and without date or signature and written in a hand I didn’t recognize — unremarkable handwriting, perhaps Grandfather’s, perhaps Aunt Galya’s. But the sentence was as much of a shock as if it had been addressed to me, although perhaps the shocking part was the fact that it was intended for no one, spoken as if from inside a silent mouth. It read: “There are people who exist on this earth not as objects in themselves, but as extraneous specks or tiny spots on objects.”

  I didn’t recognize the quote at first, although I did briefly appreciate the phrase’s beauty and precision. I thought that the sentence was perhaps an attempt to say something about the self, but in a way that didn’t upset or put anyone out. Someone who was known to me and yet quite unknown had secretly come to this phrase, and the fact that the words originally came from Gogol’s Dead Souls didn’t actually make much difference. The writer had altered one word. In the original this word is лица, which can mean both “faces” and “types (of person),” and they had changed it to the unequivocal люди (“people”). This small shift had surprising consequences: ripped from its context and framed by the notepaper the phrase had been transformed into a sort of poem, or a verdict.

  Here is how it was:

  . . . It was hard to say definitely who she was, a married lady or a spinster, a relative, the housekeeper, or a woman simply living in the house — something without a cap, about 30, and wearing a multicolored shawl. There are types of people that exist on this earth not as objects in themselves, but as extraneous specks or tiny spots on objects. They sit in the same way, they hold their heads in the same way and you are almost ready to take them for a piece of furniture.

  And here’s what it became:

  There are people

  that exist on this earth

  not as objects in themselves,

  but as extraneous specks

  or tiny spots on objects.

  This, I feel, is how I see my family: their fragile, barely noticeable existence is like a speckled bird’s egg, so delicate it is crushed by the least pressure. The fact that they were tested and proved resilient in life only makes them more vulnerable. Against the backdrop of history and its well-constituted heroes, these lodgers with their photo albums and New Year’s greetings cards seem destined for oblivion. I hardly even remembered them myself. But although much was unknown or half-known or under a veil of darkness, I thought I knew a few firm facts about my family:

  No one died in the Stalinist purges

  No one perished in the Holocaust

  No one was murdered

  No one was a murderer

  Now this seemed doubtful, or even simply untrue.

  Once when I was ten or a little older, I asked my mother one of those questions you only ask at that age: “What are you most scared of?” I don’t know what kind of response I expected, probably “war.” In Soviet society at the time Kant’s starry heavens had been replaced by peaceful skies. The country lived in the fearful expectation of a third world war; in school we had military training in how to assemble Kalashnikovs and what to do in the event of a nuclear attack (it seemed clear that a machine gun wouldn’t help much). The abundance of old women arranged on the benches in the yard spoke as if in one voice: “If we can only avoid war . . .”

  To my confusion, my mother answered momentarily and enigmatically. It was just as if she had held this answer in her head for a long time, waiting for someone to ask the question. I was puzzled by her answer — and I have always remembered it. She said: “I’m afraid of the violence that can destroy a person.”

  Years passed, decades. Now I am the one who fears this same violence that can destroy a person. In me this fear has a sheen on it, as if my feelings of fear, anger, and resistance predate me and have been polished to a gleam by the many preceding generations. It is like entering an unknown room as if you had lived there all your life (and the demons I share the space with find it swept and garnished, as in the Gospels), in this room an undated film is being shown. When I awake I realize that the Germans have entered Paris and I need to hide the children; that the fearsome woman who sweeps the snow in the yard will interrogate me about my right to live there, that Mandelstam has been arrested and is entering a stadium through iron doors that resemble the doors to an oven. I was eight when I was told about Mandelstam and seven when I was told: we are Jews. But the bla
ck hole of the unspoken that lay at the center of the tale (perhaps because they themselves didn’t know) was more ancient than any explanation or example.

  Every example, every photograph and book among the dozens I have read only confirms what I remember too well, with my gut memory. Perhaps this ancient horror began in 1938 when my still-young grandfather Nikolai gave up his service pistol and sat waiting to be arrested. Or perhaps later, in 1953, with the Jewish Doctors’ Plot, when Great-Grandmother and Grandmother, both doctors, both Jews, came home in the evenings and sat silently under the hanging lamp at the table in their communal apartment, waiting to be taken away. Perhaps in 1919, when my overly successful great-great-grandfather Isaak, “the owner of factories, property, steamships,” disappeared. We don’t know how or when he died, but we can well imagine what was going on back then in postrevolutionary Ukraine. Perhaps, and probably even earlier, in 1902, 1909, or 1912 when pogroms were taking place in Odessa and all across the south of Ukraine and the bodies lay on the streets. My relatives were there (a person is always there, in close proximity to the death of others and one’s own death), and it turns out I didn’t need to hear any of this from them. The knowledge has lived within me.