In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  Many years later I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in search of help and I am still thankful to the advisor who spoke to me there. We sat at a long wooden table in the library, which appeared to hold every book written on any matter that might be considered Jewish. I asked questions and got answers. Then the museum advisor, a historian, asked me what I was writing about and I began to explain. “Ah,” he said. “One of those books where the author travels around the world in search of his or her roots — there are plenty of those now.”

  “Yes,” I answered. “And now there will be one more.”

  PART THREE

  She saw all her knickknacks fly straight to heaven, tray cloths and photo frames and tea cozies and grandma’s silver cream jug, and the sentences in silver and silk, every single thing!

  — Tove Jansson

  At this point I must speak of my ancestry.

  — Viktor Shklovsky

  1. You Can’t Escape Your Fate

  “. . . And all this time,” said my mother, in her séance-like story­telling voice, “all this time Misha was waiting for her in Russia, Misha, who was to be her future husband and your future great-grandfather. And when the First World War broke out, she returned to him after all her wanderings and they met at last, and after that they were always together. At their wedding he gave her a little brooch, the one I always wear for special occasions. On one side it has her initials, SGF, for Sarra Ginzburg-Fridman, and on the other, the words you can’t escape your fate.”

  This you can’t escape your fate was inscribed on a round gold disc, like a dog tag, which was fastened to the front panel of the dark-blue “best” dress, and for a long time I thought it was awful (because fate chased and chased and finally caught up with them — Misha, who was irresistible and fun, with his high boots and long, long legs, only lived another seven years after the wedding). The “best” dress was always the same, made of a brushed cotton gathered at the bust, and hugging the waist. It was a comforting uniform that only came out on special occasions. In my early childhood my mother had more dresses for going out, and one of them, a brown dress with a white pattern on it, gave me a silent thrill. By the 1980s, when my parents had reached the age I am now, it was the unchanging nature of any special occasion that gave it its appeal. The blue dress came out of the cupboard; the brooch was fastened in its place; the white box of perfume was taken out of the little wooden medicine cabinet, always the same uncomplicated scent, or perhaps the bottle simply never ran out. The perfume was called Signatyur, and it was from Poland; the round crystal bottle with its gold-flecked contents lived in a silken nest on a cardboard pedestal, its cold little scented beak touched my mother and me behind the ears, on the chest, and at the nape of the neck. A few minutes before guests arrived I always took a quick peek at the back of the golden brooch with its blue stone to check the inscription was still there.

  “And all this time,” my mother repeated, just to make sure there was no doubt at all who the heroine of the story was, “she was in France.” Your great-grandmother studied at the Sorbonne (this, I surmised, was a sort of medical institution, the most important and famous, that much was clear without any explanation) and she returned to Russia as a qualified doctor. The milk-white certificate from the Sorbonne, with its inked calligraphic tails, its concave little letters, and its seal the size of a barn-door key, was another piece of proof of the seriousness of the deed and the righteousness of the victory. But none of this was important. The mesmeric heart of the story was that great-grandmother spent a biblical seven years in Paris, the length of time Jacob worked for his Rachel — and she returned from there, returned to the future “us,” as if from under the ground, as if her wonderful life over there had meant nothing to her. Working my way through the shelves of French books from the Musketeers to Maupassant, I couldn’t come to terms with how carelessly she had thrown over Paris’s dizzying possibilities (or impossibilities for my mother and me).

  I was five when she died, aged ninety, having outlived her beloved daughter by two years. Those two years she spent patiently searching for her daughter in her two rooms in a communal apartment, looking in the cupboard, then the sideboard: “Lyolya?” Gradually she began calling her granddaughter by her daughter’s name, as if the various nesting dolls in the family matryoshka could be moved around without changing the sense of order. She would sit on the divan at the dacha in a stripy housecoat: a tiny little woman, shrunken to a husk. In the jasmine-white light she looked almost transparent, but her gaze had a spiky, insect-like tenacity, you could see that whatever was coming for her would have a tough job of swallowing her down. Oh, she’s a rock, Lyolya had said, forty years before, and even now, in her minute and weightless state, she was a monument to her own past strength.

  “Surely we won’t turn into old people like them. The very thought horrifies me. I’ll never allow it! It must be that in old age we think differently and want different things — otherwise life would be unbearable.” In February 1914 something made her send her future husband a few postcards with pencil sketches of old women, together with this note, and a few weeks later she wrote to ask him if the old women had arrived. She still had her university exams ahead of her — and then two wars, the birth of a child, revolution, evacuation, her daughter’s and granddaughter’s illnesses. Then the Jewish Doctors’ Plot, which didn’t quite reach our family, and the milky skin of poststroke life, simply termed “senility” back then. The deft precision of her youth didn’t leave her, but it seemed to stand out more sharply, like her ribs, her mandibles, her wing cases, or the heavy line of brow over the little, almost childlike face.

  A little earlier, at the beginning of the 1960s, Rufa, one of my mother’s distant cousins, came to Moscow from Saratov and stayed with us. She came home one evening to find Sarra sitting on her own in a rocking chair in a dark room: “Why on earth didn’t you turn the light on? You could have been reading a nice story!”

  “Oh I just have to shut my eyes and I see such stories, my sweet girl.”

  *

  In her old age, or so I was told, she used to sing. There was always music in the house (on the title page of one very old romance published in 1934 there was an inscription by the author, who went to the same Moscow holiday camp as Sarra: For you to sing). An old Blüthner piano with yellowing keys stood neglected in the corner of the apartment. Occasionally Rufa’s husband, Alik, a professional pianist, visited from Saratov to play in Moscow’s concert halls, and in the mornings he would slide his hands into the Blüthner’s mouth and the piano would growl and lisp obediently. But Great-Grandmother remained indifferent to hers or anyone else’s musical accomplishments — she saw music as a trivial occupation, something to fill an idle hour. I remember tales of her calling the guests, who had just gathered at the piano, to the dinner table, saying, “Alik will play along as we eat.”

  Her return to singing, just before her death, was of a different order, as if the songs of her youth had returned and settled in her throat, releasing their long-forgotten words, shorn of meaning, dim and terrible: “You Fell, The Victim of a Fateful Battle,” composed in the 1870s and sung at the graveside, the basis for the funeral march in Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony. Or the “Song of Warsaw,” the revolutionary song from the Barricades in 1905, with its “March, march ye toilers and the world shall be free.” And all the repertoire of underground songs sung by the kids of 1900, which formed the living language of their battle and their slightly postponed victory. Fifteen-year-old Mayakovsky in Butyrka prison, schoolboy Mandelstam with his Erfurt Program, thirteen-year-old Tsvetaeva at revolutionary gatherings in Yalta — all of this was infused with historical necessity, and hovering overhead, the gramophone buzz of the relentless “Worker’s Marseillaise”: “Let Us Denounce the Old World.”

  The memoirs of the revolutionary movement at the turn of the century make it sound as if they were always singing, even rather demonstratively rep
lacing speech with song. The stories of strikes and the secret meetings of conspirators were punctuated by musical interludes: “we set off up the river singing revolutionary songs,” “we returned by boat singing revolutionary songs again and waving red flags,” “after his speech we ended the meeting with songs.” “The Marseillaise” is seamlessly replaced by “The Internationale.”

  Somewhere among the students and girls, the Mayday meetings and leaflets, is the indistinct shadow of seventeen-year-old Sarra Ginzburg, marching, clutching hands with another, as the letter describes. The gymnasium she studied at in Nizhny Novgorod was only a few houses away from the Sverdlovs’ Engraving Workshop. It was noisy and busy in the workshop and this is where she met all of the comrades of her best friend Sarra’s brother, Yakov Sverdlov. In the darkly mysterious memoirs written collectively by three Sverdlov siblings many years later, there’s a story about one brother going for a boat trip with their sister and her friend (the waves were rough and threatened to overturn the boat, but the girls didn’t cry because they were more afraid of the brother than the water); Sancho Pancho moves through the work silently like a shadow; long lines of schoolboys engage officer cadets in fisticuffs; prison visitors bring sweets to the prisoners. A strange combination of comfort and horror dyes the eggshell of their youth, as if with onion skins. “Between 1901 and 1903 she [Sarra Sverdlova] often passed on notes, carried proclamations, printed leaflets on the hectograph, and did other tasks that were illegal.” Her friend must have done much the same: in 1906 Sarra Ginzburg is predictably arrested for distributing leaflets at the barracks.

  When I was fourteen, in 1986, my mother decided to take me to Leningrad — she had long promised to show me her favorite city. It was summer, the time of the “White Nights,” when the sun hardly sets, and we sat together, first on one damp bench, and then another. She got quickly tired, so all the walks we took were short, and ended with us resting on benches, the mass of pigeons pecking at the cracked paving stones around us.

  Occasionally I would badger her for presents, as if a new place was hardly worth visiting without a little souvenir of some sort that I could carry home as a memento, to console myself when the adventure was over. I grieved over a completely useless piece of tat being sold for the outrageous price of three and a half rubles in the theater shop Maska on Nevsky Prospect. It was a theatrical prop, a “historical” ash-colored lock of hair that fastened at the temple and fell as a long curly braid down to the lady’s soft neck. The braid felt completely plastic to the touch, it was impossible to think of an ordinary nontheatrical situation in which it could have been worn, but with my mop of black curls I only yearned all the more to keep it treasured in my desk drawer.

  On the first evening in Leningrad we went walking toward the stretch of river and, beyond it, the dark walls and glinting golden spire. “That, Masha, is the Peter and Paul Fortress,” said my mother, “where Great-Grandmother Sarra was imprisoned.” And we both made a goose-like movement with our necks, stretching and leaning down at the same time, as if we were both bowing to Sarra, and attempting to escape our own skins.

  We gave the Peter and Paul Fortress our minute attention, as we did the fountains of Peterhof, the side rooms and staircases of the Hermitage, and even the Chinoiserie of Oranienbaum. It beggars belief how much we managed to see on that trip. The Fortress that June was as bare as a parade ground, hollow as a Christmas decoration. It bore no resemblance to anything. Everything that had happened there was long over, my Sarra had been blinked away, like a mote in the eye.

  Whenever I have visited Petersburg since, I have always gone out to the banks of the Neva to face the granite wall of the Fortress, the angel at the top of the spire and the narrow river beach below — and I’ve made the same goose-like bow, my neck stretched forward, bowing either to my great-grandmother or to the place that held her and then spat her out, as the whale did to Jonah.

  The Trubetskoy Bastion Prison was built in the early 1870s. It had sixty or so cells and two solitary confinement cells, allowing for a constant flow of hundreds of “political prisoners.” Sarra’s stay in the Fortress was sure to have been in here: dirty-white ceiling, gray walls, prison issue sheets, round-toed prison shoes. The corridors have a life of their own, twisting abruptly like elbows; the cells breathe their underground chill on you as you approach the doors, and the iron bed frames cast their cross-shaped shadow on the stone wall. The beds and the iron tables, bolted to the walls and floor, resemble the furniture in sleeping cars on a train: a white mattress, two pillows, a coarse blanket. Every possession had to kept in plain sight, books, mug, comb, tobacco. The archivists in the Fortress could not help me with my inquiries. It was too late, there was no trace of Sarra Ginzburg in the papers left in the Bastion — the place would not acknowledge her existence.

  And now where to look for her? There were so many like her. It isn’t easy, after everything that has happened, to picture the wholeheartedness with which those young people threw themselves into battle, yet it still rises, like steam from bread, from the memoirs, documents, the crudely typed police spy reports: “They unrolled a red scarf with ‘Down With Autocracy’ written on it in ink”; “Propaganda classes take place one-to-one or in small groups on boats”; “In the Passazh Inn we caught a group of new recruits singing ‘The Marseillaise’ among a very different crowd: ‘Arise, arise, working class!’” And over all this the constant refrain: “Participants were singing revolutionary songs.” In the soft-gray fortress corridor, carefully researched panels of information about past prisoners hang on the walls: “sentenced by military court and executed in 1908”; “committed suicide in her cell”; “killed in Mexico by an NKVD agent”; “died in Moscow in 1944.”

  Alongside the panels hang photographs of the graffiti found on the walls. The photographs were taken in the mid-1920s, when the Bastion was no longer a prison. In one photograph, there’s a drawing of a woman in a light blouse with puffed sleeves. The picture has a frame drawn around it, as if to pretend that it’s a proper picture, or even a window we are looking through. The woman sits at a table, on which there is a tall vase of flowers, a silver butter dish and a samovar on little iron feet. She’s ugly, and it feels as if this is because she has been drawn from real life. Her simple face has an expression that combines both concentration and surprise, she has just brought a match up close to her cigarette and is now taking the first drag, smiling all the while. Her hair is drawn into a bun. Through the window the play of summer shadows and light. It is terrible to consider the degree to which we are absent from this picture.

  The letter from Platon with its Pushkin quotes was sent to Sarra “in her fortress” in February 1907. Ten years later, in Autumn 1917, in the general collapse and confusion, something strange happened to the Fortress archives — they disappeared in murky circumstances and less than half of them were saved. Any trace of Sarra might have been wiped out then, which worked to her advantage. She never once, on any paper or form, mentions her revolutionary past or her prison stay. “In Russia, as a Jewish woman, I couldn’t study in higher education and I was forced to study abroad,” she wrote about her French sojourn. Although, in fact, as a daughter of a merchant belonging to the 1st Guild, she could have lived and studied in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and in any of the cities’ universities. The story handed down through the family is different: efforts were made on behalf of this girl with her revolutionary past. Connections were used, levers pressed. And it worked: she was offered the choice of exile to somewhere in the remote east, or departure in the opposite direction, to Europe, to study, recover her health — to get her out of the way, in short. Her next postcards were sent from Montpellier.

  In her declining years, on her way home from a walk with her old friend Sarra Sverdlova, the two of them in their weighty coats, fur hats and ancient fur muffs, Great-Grandmother spoke of herself as a “Bolshevik without a party ticket” — another cliché of a time when phrases were minted like
postage stamps. But it was true, she never did join the party, not in forty years of living in Soviet Russia and knowing all the right (and wrong) people, and coming from antediluvian Nizhny Novgorod, with its exhortative speakers, assemblies, tea parties with Maxim Gorky. Sarra Ginzburg worked in managerial roles, she survived purges, and attended party gatherings — but she never signed up. There were plenty of opportunities, but she didn’t take them. Her departure for Paris, like crawling up on dry land after flailing in the deep, symbolized some deep and irreversible break: for her the revolution was over. Something else had begun.

  Many years later she went back to Nizhny Novgorod from Moscow for the first and last time. The Soviet town was now named Gorky. She was taken to the local museum, which stood high above the town on a promontory over the river. The museum guide gave a detailed account of the heroic lives of the Nizhny Bolsheviks, moving between one photograph and the next. On one photograph, which looked dirty because of the grainy snow whirling down, a group of young people stood by a low fence. There were four of them. One young woman’s face was covered in an absurd black bandage, her bonnet was in disarray, wedged on the side of her head, and bits stuck out from it like rabbit’s tails. The museum guide commented that this was on the barricades in December. “We know very little about these people,” she said, “it seems most likely they are all long dead.”