In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  My grandfather spent the whole war in the Urals, right at the back of the rear guard. It seems probable that the suspicions toward him lingered on (“when Grandfather was an enemy of the people” as the family remembered the episode). The frontline was barred to him, and how he must have felt injured by the rejection, this man who had prepared all his life for sacrifice. He was demobilized in 1944, very early, before the war was even over, and he hardly even protested when the door was slammed in his face. Perhaps he hoped there would be a change of heart, and he would be kept on, but this never happened.

  The Stepanovs moved to Moscow and saw with their own eyes the huge Victory Day firework display over the Kremlin and the enormous portrait of Stalin, lit up in the sky by salvos. In Moscow they lived in long barracks and my grandfather continued to wear his army uniform, as if the work he was assigned by the party in various offices and factories was simply a continuation of his military service. I absorbed my father’s stories of childhood through my skin, like adventure books of pirates and Indians: how once with a friend, for a dare, he ran down the roof of a moving train, or how they called his enormous mountain of a gym teacher, Tarzan. How after years of boys’ school he suddenly found himself in a mixed classroom — with girls. How a red-haired little boy called Alik was killed when he fell into a quarry one summer. At the end of the summer he bumped into Alik’s mother, and she asked him about his holidays and all his plans, and then she suddenly said, “For Alik all that’s over now.”

  A communal apartment was home to endless human variety: one family’s rooms were filled with hoarded relics, another family ate extremely well; the pampered resident lapdog had a liaison with the heroic stray dog in the yard and disappeared. My father once found his father’s gun in a drawer and ran out to the yard to play with it, shrieking in excitement. By the evening the police had been called, and there were remonstrations. My father got a hiding. There were plenty of cats, there were the parallel bars the grown-ups used for grunting exercise while curious children watched. There was the only toy they possessed, a much-loved woolen rabbit in army uniform. Grandfather worked at a car factory and left first thing in the morning. My grandmother, their mother, worked in a library, surrounded by her “girls.” She took on staff others wouldn’t employ: a Jewish woman; the daughter of a political prisoner. Yet at home their father reigned and everything revolved around him: his rules, his whims, his periods of unconscious sullenness. No one ever came round to see them.

  One day Grandfather came home from work covered in blood, his head cut open. An underground conflict had been simmering away at the car factory, where someone had been stealing goods, and Grandfather, out of principle, had made efforts to stop the thieving. That evening, as he walked through the January snow, two men caught up with him. They attacked him from behind with a piece of metal pipe, but the blow was uneven and Grandfather managed to turn and hit one of his assailants. The man fell to the ground and his hat fell off and was left lying there. The other ran away, covering his face. Grandfather picked up the hat, an expensive, thick fur cap, and took it home. His son, ten-year-old Misha, wore it for ages since he didn’t have one.

  It was a simple life: every detail distinct, as when all the tiny stones can be seen through the thin trickle of a stream. Once, my grandparents went on holiday to Kislovodsk in the south and brought back some branches wrapped in newspaper: cypress and larch and a brown hard leaf shaped like a saber or a violin bow. Dora kept these branches until they crumbled away to dust.

  Her mother, hooknosed Grandmother Sonya, sometimes came to stay with them; in the old photographs she sits with an ancient weariness on her, her skin the color of tree bark. The family remembers her as a beauty, so it must be so. Grandmother Sonya lived with Dora’s sister in a tiny room, together with a vast gleaming grand piano, which her husband had somehow got hold of. Guests slept on the prized piano’s lid. When Sonya came to stay Nikolai would get down a collection of Sholem Aleichem stories and place it on the table like a cake, so Grandmother Sonya could read it.

  They sometimes visited Auntie Masha, Grandfather’s sister in the country. Auntie Masha’s husband had a Mauser pistol and he allowed my father Misha to take it apart and reassemble it, and even once let him fire it. Then he took Misha down to the river and he threw the gun with all his might into the middle of the river, and they silently watched the rings of ripples where it fell. My father remembers that summer well. He remembers lying next to his own father in the hay, warm and sleepy, his father’s cigarette glowing in the darkness, and his father so big and solid and real, his close presence giving the boy such a sense of lasting contentment it felt like it would never leave him. And this sense of contentment lasted and lasted, until one day it was no longer there. Years later, when Dora died, seventy-year-old Auntie Masha wrote in her letter of sympathy to my grandfather: “At last you can get married to a real Russian girl.” And then, shortly afterward, she and my grandfather were dead too, and there was nobody left.

  *

  The more I think about our family history, the more it seems like a series of unfulfilled dreams: Betya Liberman and her hope of becoming a doctor; her son Lyonya, spreading himself thin and clutching at straws all his life; Misha Fridman who didn’t make it to forty, and his stubborn widow, who couldn’t quite bring the family ship safe into harbor; my mother Natasha Gurevich, who wrote all her poems without any hope of publication, in faint pencil as if she intended the words to fade almost before they reached the paper. My father’s family were no different: Galya would sing her endless romance songs, written up by hand and bound into a book, but only when no one was listening; Grandfather Nikolai had his drawing — he spent all his childhood painting, producing sketches, and he kept going into adulthood. “He painted even better than your father,” my Aunt Galya told me (and for Galya my father was the highest being on the earth so this was extraordinary praise). The pile of drawings and paintings grew until 1938. She remembered the day when, awaiting arrest, her parents burned all the family papers. All the correspondence and the photographs went into the stove, and last of all Nikolai’s stack of paintings went into the fire: everything he had ever painted, his life’s work. He never picked up a paintbrush again.

  There was something in each life that didn’t work out. We did have one distant relative, a singer, whose voice on the radio filled the kitchens and corridors of communal apartments. It was as if she represented an intentionally mute family. She was our triumphant voice — although of course she was never aware of her role in our lives.

  Viktoria Ivanova is to my mind one of the most gifted singers of the twentieth century. She was married to Yura, a descendant of one of the Ginzburg clan. Her life, which began as a celebration, filled with Schubert and “The Blue Scarf” and applause and concert halls, ended in tragedy. Her only daughter, Katya, fell ill, and after an unsuccessful operation it became rapidly apparent that Katya’s development would forever be stunted, that she would remain at the mental age of a ten-year-old all her life, although her body would grow and age. Viktoria’s life became much harder, the fans fell away, and the performances dwindled. Only her voice remained the voice of a young woman, strangely at odds with her expanding body. Her voice could fill any space, make it swell with sound, and the chandeliers would tremble, and a shiver would run across the skin.

  All this time Viktoria was the subject of an absolute obsession. I am talking now of Aunt Galya, my father’s sister and Nikolai’s daughter, whose name in the family was a byword for headstrong behavior, doing exactly as one pleased: “Let people say what they want, follow your own path,” she often repeated. In the fifties Galya qualified as an engineer and got a job in Kyrgyzstan. There are family legends about this period: how she bought an expensive camera with her first wages and then just abandoned it; how she ordered Muscat wine by the crate from a Southern resort; how she gave princely gifts to her friends, and maintained a princely indifference to her family. When I give som
e thought to her life, and everything it lacked, then these pathetic efforts to give some panache to her existence seem far more human and understandable. There were rumors about an affair she had as a young woman with a married man, but Grandfather didn’t approve, and that was that. She dressed in expensive clothes, she went to exhibitions and discussed her friends’ children with them.

  At the beginning of the seventies Aunt Galya fell ill with cancer. She was operated on and the operation was successful, but the episode had a lasting and severe impact on her mental health. She was hospitalized once, then again. My father took on the role of caring for her, as her own father, who had never experienced anything remotely like this, was paralyzed by shame and horror. Hospitalization was followed by periods of remission, and then hospitalization again. Her condition had a direct link to her unfulfilled dreams, and to the singing voice. When it deteriorated she began desperately trying to attend every concert she could, and this rush of excitement always ended in hospital. Viktoria Ivanova’s angelic voice (or perhaps rather her far-too-human voice) was especially important to her. She was a relative, if a very distant one, and I suspect that made Galya think of her as a more “victorious” version of her own self. I dimly remember my parents’ perennial anxiety if Galya asked them to get hold of tickets for her: every time she attended one of Viktoria’s concerts it ended in another attack.

  They are both long dead. Viktoria died first, barely outliving her daughter, who had needed constant nursing for the last years of her life. Galka was chatting brightly to me from her bed, when she suddenly said, very clearly and distinctly: It’s time I went back to Mother. But Viktoria Ivanova’s whole singing repertoire is stored in the deep silos of the internet, all the lighthearted tunes from the fifties, as well as the Schumann and Mahler she sang in later years. There’s something macabre in the very youthfulness of the recorded voice, which floats above both their tombs, above the heaps of paper and the concert programs, as if nothing had happened; all being is inviolate, immutable, immortal.

  *

  When my son was only a few months old I developed an unexpected talent (it opened in me like a drawer, and then later slammed shut again). It was at its height in the metro on my way to work. I only had to glance at the faces of the people standing and sitting opposite me, and something would shift, as if a shroud had fallen from them, or a curtain opened. A woman with carrier bags coming home from the dacha; an office worker in a suit with too-short trousers; an old woman; a soldier; a student carrying a folder — I could suddenly see them all as they would have been at the age of two or three, with rounded cheeks and serious expressions. This sudden skill was akin to an artist’s ability to note the clear structure of the skull beneath the skin: in my case it was a forgotten defenselessness that began to shine through the worn faces. The whole carriage looked to me like a nursery. I could have loved them all.

  On our way back from Bezhetsk we passed the town of Kalyazin, which was flooded by the Volga river and now lies deep beneath its waters, with only the monument of a lonely church spire to show where the town once stood. We sped on to Sergiev Posad, where there is an ancient and much-loved Toy Museum. It was opened in 1931 and the collection of rag dolls, dolls made of clay and wood, lead soldiers and ice skates has been gathered lovingly over the years. It includes Christmas tree decorations, the close relatives of the baubles and figures my grandmother and mother hung on our tree: children holding snowballs, little rabbits on parachutes, skiers, cats, stars, a jaunty troika, with a line of terrifying women, impassive as a frieze of korai, riding in the sleigh. The poorer children of Bezhetsk might have played with some of the simple toys on display: swaddling their baby dolls, or blowing on whistles that hadn’t changed their design since the twelfth century. I gazed longest of all at a glass case containing a simple piece of canvas folded to resemble a baby, fabric twisted into a bonnet shape where its head should be: the most basic doll shape. It had something approaching human features, but you could see these were unnecessary, the unknown owner of the doll needed nothing more than its little babyish bulk to wrap her arms around and love.

  The museum had two new spaces for an exhibition of toys belonging to a single famous family. The exhibits: dolls, Indian canoes, drums, and tiny sentry boxes with sentries in, were on display for the very first time, although they had lain in museum stores for nearly a century. They’d been brought there from the royal palaces at Tsarskoe Selo, Livadia, and Gatchina, and had belonged to the Romanov children, who were all killed in Ekaterinburg on the night of July 16, 1918. The four girls and the boy had names: Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, Maria, Aleksei — he was the youngest child, aged fourteen — and they had probably outgrown the games of Lotto and the tiny suitcases for dolls’ clothes, and the mechanical theater with its single play: A Life for the Tsar, but they wouldn’t have been able to take these games with them into captivity anyway. It seems unlikely they would have played with the huge rocking horse with its dashing profile and foolish expression — that had come from a different palace and had belonged to another little boy, Pavel. He grew up and became the Emperor of Russia and was assassinated one March night in 1801. The horse, in its fine crimson saddlecloth, was left waiting for a new rider.

  All old things are the property of the dead, and the simple wooden toys in the neighboring rooms were no exception to this. Here I knew exactly who the owners had been and what had happened to them, and even their little lead cannons seemed orphaned, let alone the mechanical parrot in its gilded cage. Most of the toys from the royal household were given to children’s homes in the early thirties but these had survived, lying in storage, and now behind glass, like forgotten memories, suddenly rearing their heads and blocking out the light. I can’t remember what I was thinking about when I stood and regarded them. Perhaps I thought of the little boy Yakov Sverdlov, who loved to suck on caramels and, later in life, according to popular opinion, gave the order to shoot the Romanov family. Or perhaps little Misha Stepanov with his woolly rabbit soldier who took bites out of the gingerbread on the Christmas tree. My own little boy hadn’t wanted to go to the cemetery in Bezhetsk and sat cross and lonely on the baked earth while I strolled the paths between brightly colored tomb railings, reading the names of the countless former residents of the town. Then he changed his mind and announced he still didn’t like cemeteries, but he’d like to photograph all the monuments in this one. “I’d put them on Instagram,” he said, “and then no one would ever forget anything.”

  Soft, plump Grandmother Dora died in 1980. My grandfather never did learn to live without her. Right at the end of his life, in autumn 1985, he moved in with us, and he would wander from room to room, waiting for my mother to come home after work. Then he’d take her by the hand and they’d sit down and chat. He desperately wanted to talk, there was so much that needed to be said, over and over: the death of his father, his fear of adult life, his first shame, first hurt, running away, work, loneliness. My mother listened as if she were hearing it all for the first time. His forgetfulness grew and grew, I used to come home from school to find him sitting in the hall as if about to go out, in a coat and cap, shoes polished to a high shine, clean-shaven, his shirt ironed, a string bag with a few books by his feet. He wanted to go home, to Dora. He had two months to live.

  I have one of the little notes he used to write while he was waiting for my parents to come home:

  Thank you to the friendly people who live in this lovely house. I am off home now, as they are waiting for me there. Please don’t be angry. We’ll meet again, I’m sure.

  Love

  Nikolai.

  I don’t know today’s date

  Please ring, I’d be delighted!

  4. The Daughter of a Photographer

  Let’s suppose for a moment that we are dealing with a love story.

  Let’s suppose it has a main character.

  This character has been thinking of writing a book about her family sinc
e the age of ten. And not just about her mother and father, but her grandparents and great-grandparents whom she hardly knew, but knew they existed.

  She promises herself she will write this book, but keeps putting it off, because in order to write such a book she needs to grow up, and to know more.

  The years pass and she doesn’t grow up. She knows hardly anything, and she’s even forgotten what she knew to begin with.

  Sometimes she even startles herself with her unrelenting desire to say something, anything, about these barely seen people who withdrew to the shadowy side of history and settled there.

  She feels as if it is her duty to write about them. But why is it a duty? And to whom does she owe this duty, when those people chose to stay in the shadows?

  She thinks of herself as a product of the family, the imperfect output — but actually she is the one in charge. Her family are dependent on her charity as the storyteller. How she tells it is how it will be. They are her hostages.

  She feels frightened: she doesn’t know what to take from the sack of stories and names, or whether she can trust herself, her desire to reveal some things and hide others.