In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  She is deceiving herself, pretending her obsession is a duty to her family, her mother’s hopes, her grandmother’s letters. This is all about her and not about them.

  Others might call this an infatuation, but she can’t see herself through other peoples’ eyes.

  The character does as she wishes, but she comforts herself by thinking that she has no other choice.

  If she’s asked how she came to the idea of writing a book, she immediately tells one of her family’s stories. If she’s asked what it’s all for, she tells another one.

  She can’t seem to be able to, or doesn’t want to speak in the first person. Although when she refers to herself in the third person it horrifies her.

  This character is playing a double role: trying to behave just as her people have always behaved, and disappear into the shadows. But the author can’t disappear into the shadows — she can’t get away from the fact that this book is about her.

  There’s an old joke about two Jews. One says to the other, “You say you’re going to Kovno, and that means you want me to think you’re going to Lemburg. But I happen to know that you really are going to Kovno. So — why are you trying to trick me?”

  *

  In Autumn 1991 my parents suddenly began to think about emigrating. I didn’t think they should. They were only just in their fifties, and the Soviet regime had finally fallen — they’d waited so long for this moment. It seemed to me that now was the time to be in Russia. Magazines were openly printing the poems and prose we had known only from typewritten copies passed around. Colorful things were being sold right on the street, nothing like the boring stuff we’d had before. With my first ever wage I bought blue eyeshadow, patterned tights, and lacy knickers as red as the Soviet flag. My parents wanted me to go with them, but I held my peace and hoped they’d change their minds.

  This lasted a good while, longer than anyone could have predicted. Permission to move to Germany came only four years later, and even then I couldn’t believe our inseparable life together would come to an end. But they were in a rush and wanted me to decide. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. Apart from anything, this new life fascinated me, it stood half-open, constantly inviting me in. I simply couldn’t see what was so clear to my parents: they had lived through enough history. They wanted to get out.

  A process began, and it was somewhat like a divorce: they left, I stayed, everyone knew what was happening, no one spoke about it. The guts of the apartment had been ripped out, papers and objects were divided up, the Faulkner and Pushkin Letters disappeared, the boxes of books stood ready-packed and waiting to be dispatched.

  My mother spent more time thinking about the family archive than anything else. Under the Soviet rules still in place, all old objects, whether they belonged to the family or not, could only be taken out of Russia if you had a certificate stating they had no value. The country had sold priceless paintings from the Hermitage, but it wanted to make sure that other people’s property didn’t escape its grasp. Grandmother’s cups and rings were sent away to be certified, along with the old postcards and the photographs I loved so much. Their old order was disrupted; my mother, not trusting my memory, wrote down names on the backs of photographs and placed them in piles. She stuck the pictures she’d selected into an album with a once-fashionable Japanese patterned cover. On the first page a crooked line of writing read: For Sarra. To remember me by, Mitya.

  Now everything was in this album: everyone she remembered by name, everyone she felt compelled to take with her on this freshly provisioned ark. Grandmother’s school friends rubbed shoulders with mustachioed men and the pink-cheeked children of the London aunt, who, it’s said, became close to the exiled Alexander Kerensky. Lyolya and Betya shared the same page, I was there in my school photographs, and Grandfather Nikolai sat glumly on a hill. Our dogs, Karikha and Lina, and then me again, grown up, aged twenty, stuck on one of the last pages, in grand company, squeezed between two newspaper portraits of the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov and the priest Alexander Men. We were all listed, even Sakharov, in my father’s hand: “Friends, Relatives, Family Members from 1880 to 1991.”

  They left on the train. It was during the hot month of April in 1995, and the weather was celebratory: the sky above Belorussky Station, formerly Brest Station, in Moscow, was a giddy blue. As the train’s tail lamp zigzagged into the distance, we who were left behind turned and wandered back along the platform. It was Sunday, quiet, and I was just considering whether I should be crying when a man holding a can of beer glanced at me from out of a train door and said: “Kill the yids and save Russia.” It’s all too neat, but that is how it happened.

  Later, I went to Germany to visit them and stayed a month, not convinced I could build a new life there or elsewhere. In the huge hostel in Nuremberg where ethnic Germans from Russia occupied ten of the twelve floors, the top two floors had been allocated to Jews, and they were half-empty. I spent two days there, all on my own like a Queen in my enormous empty room with ten bunk beds fixed in two lines like a sleeping car. No one else was put in the room with me. I was given food tokens to buy food with, a little like green postage stamps (Germans were given orange tokens). When I first arrived I made myself a cup of tea and sat down to watch the European night: in the distance, surrounded by black trees, I could see the twinkling lights of an amusement park and the shape of a stadium. I could hear the sound of someone playing the guitar from the floor beneath.

  My parents came back to Moscow once, six months before my mother had her operation. The coronary artery bypass she needed was not an operation undertaken very frequently in the 1990s, but we were sure that they’d be good at that sort of thing in Germany. Anyway there wasn’t much choice, the congenital heart defect first diagnosed in wartime Yalutorovsk had deteriorated and now needed urgent treatment. I was twenty-three, and I felt quite grown up. We’d lived with my mother’s condition for as long as I could remember. At the age of ten I used to wake up and stand in the hall outside her bedroom to check that she was still breathing. But the sun always rose and the morning came, and all was fine. I slowly got used to it and never asked any questions as if I was afraid of upsetting the already delicate balance. We never properly spoke about the operation itself, perhaps just the insignificant details of her hospital care. So it was not to us, but to her friend that she said wearily: “What’s to be done? I don’t have any other option.”

  Although I tried very hard to ignore all the signs that this was her last visit to Moscow, I wondered at her unwillingness to enjoy old memories. It was a carefree summer, and Moscow smelt of dust and dried up ponds. I was sure she would want to visit our old home and sit on a bench outside on the boulevard, or go and have a look at the school where her mother, she and I had studied. I’d also planned a long conversation about “the olden days” just as we’d always had in my childhood, and I was going to make notes this time, so not a drop of precious information would be lost. After all I was going to write this book about our family. But my mother resisted the idea of a nostalgic stroll, at first with her usual gentleness, and then she simply refused point blank: I’m not interested. She started cleaning the apartment instead and immediately threw away some old bowls with chipped edges we’d had since the seventies. I would never have attempted such blasphemy and I looked at her with a mixture of shock and excitement. The apartment was cleaned and polished until it shone. Her school friends and relations visited, but no one spoke the truth aloud: that they were all saying goodbye. And then my parents left.

  I remembered all of this many years later when I tried to read the old family correspondence to my father. He sat and listened for ten minutes with an increasingly downcast expression, and then he said that was enough, everything he needed to remember was in his head anyway. Now I understand him almost too well: over the last few months my state of mind has likened looking at photos to reading an obituary. All of us, both the living and the dead,
seemed equally to belong to the past, and the only possible caption: “This too will pass.” My father’s old and new photographs in his Würzburg apartment were the only things I could look at without feeling shaken: the empty leaf-scattered riverbank with a black boat, a yellow field without a single human figure, or a meadow of a thousand forget-me-nots, no human touch, no selectiveness, just purity and emptiness. None of this was painful to look at, and for the first time in my life I preferred landscape to portrait photography. The Japanese album with the grandparents lay in a drawer somewhere and neither of us wanted to let it out.

  *

  One spring I had the pleasure of spending a few weeks in Queen’s College, Oxford, where my book and I were received with open arms, as if my occupation were reasonable and respectable, rather than some embarrassing obsession, a sticky flypaper spotted with quivering, half-dead associations. My college lodgings had white walls lined with bookshelves, but I had nothing to put on them. In the dining halls and libraries memory had a different meaning, one that had so far been alien to me. It was no longer the endpoint of a wearisome hike, but the natural result of duration: life generated memory, secreted it, and it deepened with time, disturbing no one and causing no one anxiety.

  I’d come to Oxford to work, but I found it hard to get down to writing because life there was tranquil and it made me feel stupefied, as if I’d been placed back into a cradle that had never in fact existed. Every morning I touched my bare feet to the old wooden floorboards with the same feeling of gratitude. The gardens were vessels of trembling greenery, and the nightingale rattled its empty tin above them; even the way the delicious rain dispensed itself on the perfect facades and stone follies filled me with tender delight. I sat at my desk every day with my pile of pages and stared straight ahead.

  The road outside the college was called the High, and it loomed very large in my life. The right-hand side of the window was turned toward the interior of the college, and its cool shade. The left-hand side faced the High that in sun or rain drew my gaze like a television screen; it stubbornly refused to disappear into the horizon as a road should and instead tilted upward like a ship’s deck, higher and higher, so the people and buses seemed to become more visible as they moved away from me and no figure, however tiny, ever quite disappeared. Against all probability they seemed to move closer and become more distinct — even the mosquito cyclist, the slant line of his wheels — and this trick of perspective preoccupied me, halted my already intermittent progress.

  The endlessly fascinating life of the street moved in intricate patterns like a puppet theater, to the hourly ringing of bells. The long-distance coaches thundered down the street, eclipsing the light, and at the bus stop the drivers changed places; people appeared from a distance and moved closer, while remaining always in view, and sometimes deliberately standing out, like the long-legged lanky girl who came out into the middle of the road, performing a circus-style leap. In short, my idleness could not be justified, but like a character from a Jane Austen novel I sat for hours at the window watching passersby who did not fade into oblivion, but became larger and more recognizable with every passing day. I was continually amazed that I could look out of the window and count the buses at the top of the street where it twisted away, and I became obsessed by the way people, with their tiny jackets and even tinier sneakers, remained forever in focus. It was like watching the mechanism of a clock that had moving figures to mark the hours. A large and glossy black car turned the corner as if this was the deepest past, when even the smallest detail gained the aura of a witness. Only there was nothing to witness, it grew warmer and lilac shadows brushed the opposite pavement.

  Then one day Sasha took me to the Ashmolean Museum, to see a picture by Piero di Cosimo called “The Forest Fire.” The long horizontal picture resembled a multiplex wide screen showing a disaster movie. It occupied a prime position in the museum, but in the shop there wasn’t a single postcard or coaster with an image from the painting. Perhaps that’s understandable, as the painting is far from any notion of comfort. It was painted in the early sixteenth century and is supposed to make reference to Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura and contemporary controversies over Heraclitus’s doctrines. If that is the case, then Piero agreed with Heraclitus, who said fire coming on would “discern and catch up with all things.” Something similar is depicted on the wood panels of the painting: Doomsday on the scale of a single island, overgrown with bushes and trees and inhabited by all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

  The painting resembles a firework going off, as if a carnival were taking place in the forest: flashes of red, yellow, and white streak the panels to an inaudible and deafening crack. The fire is not only the center of the picture, but the omphalos of their universe, and from it the dozens of stunned beasts canter, crawl, and fly in dotted lines, not knowing what has happened, or who they are now. My sense of it is that this is an image of the Big Bang, although the painter wasn’t yet aware of such a name.

  Animals, like the newly created galaxies, scatter from a central point — you can’t look away from it, it’s like the open door of a stove, or the mouth of a volcano. Like lava they have not yet ceased their flowing, to the extent that some of them have human faces. There were doubtless also people in this world, at least there were before the fire. They have a wooden well on an outcrop. And there are a few people, just sketched lines, like frescoes in Pompeii. They are definitely humanoid, although alongside the beasts with their warm corporeality, they look like shadows, like the outlines of humans on a wall lit by an explosion. There is one survivor, a cowherd, clearly drawn, standing half-turned toward us, as bewildered as his lumbering cattle, ready to lower his head and charge with them. His face is not visible, just the stick, the implement he uses because he knows, like Heraclitus, that “beasts are driven by blows.”

  The beasts cross the painting in pairs, like the inhabitants of the ark, and the fact that some are partly human causes neither distress nor affront. The human faces grew on the beasts as they ran — on the domestic pig and the deer — and they are notable for their expression of gentle thoughtfulness. It’s said that the artist added the faces at a late stage, when the picture was nearly finished: one theory is that they are caricatures done at the patron’s request. Yet there is not a shadow of comedy about these wreathed hybrids, they look more like students of philosophy who have gathered to stroll under the oaks. Still, even this I can’t quite comprehend — a transformation is taking place, but its logic is hard to grasp: is man becoming animal before our eyes, or is animal becoming man, growing a human face, just as it might grow horns or wings? Did Daphne become a laurel, or did the bear become its human hunter?

  It would seem that in a postapocalyptic world the beasts are the remaining humans; and all hope resides in these animate creatures. There they are, the family of bears bowing fearfully before the lion’s fury; the unbending golden eagle; the melancholic stork — all the carriers of distinct qualities, ready to emerge as egos, as “I”s. In contrast we, the humans, are barely distinct, we seem no more than raw material, or rough drafts for a future that might or might not come to pass. The rest were saved and they inherited the earth, and walked upon it, live and blocklike like the figures in paintings by Pirosmani or Henri Rousseau.

  It’s surprising that the focus of the picture falls not on the predator, the King of Beasts, but on the harmless ruminant. A bull with the powerful brow of a thinker stands dead center, aligned with the tree of knowledge, which divides the picture into two equal parts, and the furnace mouth of the fire. His expression of tortured reflection makes him look a little like the sinner in Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment,” mouth opened in incomprehension, furrowed face. But here the creature is without original sin and it has a choice: the bull is free to decide whether or not it becomes a human.

  In the dark days of 1937 the German-Jewish art historian Erwin Panofsky
described Piero di Cosimo’s pictures as the “emotional atavisms” of a “primitive who happened to live in a period of sophisticated civilization.” Rather than a civilized sense of nostalgia, Piero is in the grip of a desperate longing for the disappeared past. In my view this interpretation stems from the age-old desire to see the artist as “other,” as a transported creature, an Indigenous person at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, a Martian on a foreign planet. It might be worth arguing but he is right in one important way: the state of mind he describes is also a sort of metamorphosis, the result of a terrible disaster that has thrown the world out of joint.

  In “The Forest Fire” we see the moment of exposure, the flash, when light burns out the image and replaces it with the blinding white of nonexistence. The point at which everything shifts into its final shape is beyond memory and impossible to convey. It’s the moment we first open our eyes.

  Piero di Cosimo’s picture is for me a close equivalent of Courbet’s “L’origine du monde” — its exact rhythm, even the way it shocks and spellbinds, is the same. This equivalence is due in part to the directness of the message, the documentary scale of the narrative of the formation of the universe, how it casts off new detail, forcing life to roll ever onward down the eternally angled slope. Is catastrophe then simply the starting point of genesis? The kiln for firing small clay figures? The crucible for transmutation? This is how creation happens in a post-Promethean world, and this is how the fall from heaven must have looked in an age of aerial warfare and chemical weapons — the flaming sword of the forest fire, and partridges swooping in the skies, triangular as jet fighters.

  *

  In one of the exercise books where my mother wrote down all my childish phrases and conversations, right at the top of a lined page filled with notes about summer and dandelions and cows, she has written: My mother died today. And we didn’t know.