In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  I remember that day well. I can see in my mind’s eye the morning light in an unfamiliar building; a huge dog coming out from under the table, which was too high for me; the strange window frames; and then later that day, a vast stretch of water, as far as the edge of the world, and bobbing and flickering in it, my mother’s head, for my mother had decided to swim out into this waste of water, and had near vanished. I was certain she was gone — a new and strange life had just begun and I was completely alone. I didn’t even cry, I stood on the bank of the river Oka, where it meets the Volga, and there was no one to hear me. When the adults swam back, laughing, something had changed irrevocably.

  I don’t really think life can begin with a catastrophe, especially not one that happened a long time before us. Misfortune, sweeping low and fierce overhead like an Orthodox banner, crackling with burning twigs and tongues of white flame — maybe it’s simply a condition of our existence, the maternal womb from which we emerge screaming with pain. Maybe it isn’t even worthy of the name Misfortune. When we got home that August and went out to our dacha, grandmother’s bouquets of dried flowers decorated the walls, and her bag still held her purse and season ticket; it smelt of phlox; and our life was already arranged for years to come, like a song with a repeating refrain. Grandmother Lyolya was only fifty-eight, she died of a heart attack before we could come home to her. And now my mother’s life had been given its shape, its model for imitation. If up till then she had just been wandering along, following her heart, now she had an impossible standard to meet. She never spoke it aloud, but she seemed to want to become someone different, for herself, for us: she wanted to become Lyolya, with her easy hospitality, her radiating joy, her cakes and hugs. She couldn’t do it, no one could.

  The story of our home, as I heard it, began not a hundred years ago, but in August 1974. Grandmother reluctantly let my mother and me go off on holiday, away from summer at the dacha with its curtains, patterned with red and green apples. When we returned it was to an empty house, and we were alone. My mother blamed herself, and I sat by her. I remembered the terrifying story of the little girl who was slow to bring water to her sick mother and by the time she got to her mother, it was too late. Birds flew overhead, and one of them was her mother, and it sang: too late too late I won’t come back. Somehow this story seemed to be about us, although no one had precisely said this. I just knew it, and I wept over the untouched water like an accomplice.

  All my later knowledge was in light of this story: my mother spoke, and I fearfully tried to remember everything although I still forgot. I ran away, like the child in the story, to play, to grow up and live a little. I think that must be how she felt too, a young woman, younger than I am now, with her exercise book of recipes written out in pencil, and her dependents: a two-year-old daughter and two old people who no longer recognized themselves or each other. Later she began wearing Sarra’s wedding ring; on the inside it had the name Misha, which was my father’s name as well. Nothing ever comes to an end.

  Squares of glinting photographic paper floated in ribbed trays in the red light of the bathroom, which served as my father’s darkroom. I was allowed to watch as shapes appeared: the complete blankness was suddenly roiled with lines and angles and they slowly became a coherent whole. I loved the contact sheets best of all, covered in miniature images that could potentially be enlarged to any size, just like me at that age. The tiny portraits of my parents fitted in my pocket and made the evenings spent at nursery school more bearable. I remember my parents realizing I’d torn the picture of my father out of his passport so I could keep it with me.

  My own first camera was a little plastic Soviet 35mm, a Smena-8, with dials to change the aperture and shutter speed. I was given it as a present when I was ten, and I immediately set about saving and preserving: the graying pines, the sleepers at the railway halt, someone my parents knew, water running over the stones — all industriously rescued from oblivion. The images, lifted from the fixing tray with tongs, dried on a line, but didn’t regain their former vitality. I soon gave it up, but I didn’t learn my lesson.

  This book is coming to an end. Everything I wasn’t able to save is scattering in all directions, like the dumpy birds in “The Forest Fire.” I have no one to tell that Abram Ginzburg’s wife was called Rosa, I’ll never write about Sarra’s joke, in the middle of the war, that mold was good because it produced penicillin. Or how grandfather Lyonya demanded that Solzhenitsyn’s dissident masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago (despite strenuous efforts to get hold of it) be removed from the apartment after only one night as it would “kill us all.” Not even how all the women in the Moscow communal apartment would gather in the kitchen with tubs and towels to chatter through the weekly ritual of a pedicure. Or even that a squirrel lived on the balcony of a Moscow apartment seventy years ago. The squirrel had a wheel and it would run round and round, watched by a little girl.

  In the 1890s the family in Pochinky sat down at the table for dinner every evening and waited silently for their meal. The soup was brought it. Amid the silence Father took the lid off the tureen and a cloud of fragrant steam rose. He would sniff the soup and then make a pronouncement: “I doubt it’s any good” — only after this the soup could be served. The terrifying paterfamilias always drank down all of his soup and asked for more.

  Before Mikhailovna became Lyolya’s nanny, she was married to a soldier. In the drawers of the archive where everything has settled like sediment, there are three photographs and an icon. The icon shows the Virgin Mary appearing to Russian troops somewhere in the Galician marshes. The three photographs told the story of Mikhailovna’s life: here she is as a young woman standing head-to-head with a dour and innately weary man in a worker’s smock. And here she is holding a pitifully skinny little baby. The last picture shows the man in the cap and thick greatcoat of a soldier. Her husband was killed, the baby died; her entire earthly estate consisted of the paper icon, depicting a Pre-Raphaelitish Madonna, and once framed by a heavy silver surround that my great-grandfather gave her. When life got hard again after the revolution, she secretly took the silver surround off the icon, sold it, and brought the money back to the household she stayed with for the rest of her life. In all later photographs Mikhailovna is in her own icon-surround of pale gray, her cone-shaped black headscarf covering everything except her face. All that is left of her are a few cheap religious images and a Psalter that she read every evening.

  Aunt Galya made me a present of a colorful Indian dress not long before her death, saying that she’d only worn it once, “for half an hour, when I had a dog come in here.” I knew of her secret and unrequited love for her neighbor who walked his dog in the yard and who died without ever guessing why she used to come out every evening to see him.

  Sometimes it seems like it is only possible to love the past if you know it is definitely never going to return. If I had expected a small box of secrets to be hidden at my journey’s end, something like one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, then I would have been disappointed. Those places where the people of my family walked, sat, kissed, went down to the river’s edge, or jumped onto streetcars, the towns where they were known by face and name — none of them revealed themselves to me. The green and indifferent battlefield was overgrown with grass. Like a computer game I hadn’t mastered, all the prompts lead to the wrong gates, the secret doors were just blank walls, and nobody remembered anything. And this is for the best: the poet Alexander Blok tells us that no one comes back. The poet Mikhail Gronas replies that “living comes of oblivion.”

  The parcel had been packed with all possible care, the box was lined with cigarette paper and each of the items was wrapped in the same thin, opaque stuff. I freed each one from its swaddling, and they lay on the dining table in a line so you could see all their dents, all their cracks, the earth ingrained in the china, the absences where feet, legs, hands should have been. Most of them still had heads, and some even had their little socks, the onl
y item of toilet they were permitted. But on the whole they were naked and white, as if they had just been born, with all their dents and flaws. Frozen Charlottes, representatives of the population of survivors; they seem like family to me — and the less I can say about them, the closer they come.

  Author’s note

  The author would like to thank the publishers who believed in this book even before it slowly began to take shape: Suhrkampf and Novoe Izdatel’stvo. It seems likely that the book would not exist if it wasn’t for a conversation with Katarina Raabe, who convinced me to finally get on with writing the book.

  Some of the book’s parts were conceived of and written with the help and support of a number of institutions. They gave me time and library resources, but also space for intellectual debate and discussion. They include the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna), Tatiana Zhurzhenko and Klaus Nellen, the Kennan Institute/Wilson Center (Washington), Isabella Tabarovskaya and Matthew Rozhansky; Marion Dönnhoff Stiftung (Berlin) and Maria Birger, New York University and Josh Tucker, the Queen’s College, Oxford and Charlie Louth.

  I am deeply grateful to Anna Glazova, Linor Goralik, Sasha Dugdale, Helga Olshvang-Landauer, Olga Radetzkaja, Mikhail Yampolsky, Vadim Alskan, Anna Golubeva, Anton Karetnikov, Erich Klein, Sergei Lebedev, Anna and Maria Lipkovich, Maria Mushinskaya, Olga Naumova, Elena Nusinova, Katya Petrovskaya and David Riff.

  My thanks also go to Irina Shevelenko and Andrei Kurilkin, my friends and the first readers of this book.

  And of course to my beloved Gleb and Grisha.

  Translator’s note

  Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory is a living text and the English translation has been changed and modified from the original Russian in collaboration with the author.

  The Russian text embeds unattributed quotes from other texts in a flowing narrative, and the English translation follows this convention. The translators whose work has been quoted in this English version are listed here in the order they appear:

  Harold N. Fowler (Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus); Thomas Scott-Railton (Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archives); John Felstiner (Paul Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains”); Don Reneauith, (Thomas Mann’s letter to Heinrich Mann of February 27, 1904); C. K. Scott Moncrieff (Proust quotes); Richard and Clara Winston (Thomas Mann’s Diaries); Anthea Bell (W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction and Austerlitz); Michael Hulse (W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn); Maureen Freely (Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City); Alan Myers (Lydia Ginzburg’s Notes from the Blockade, revised by Emily van Buskirk); Alistair McEwen (Robert Calasso’s Tiepolo Pink); Robert A. Maguire (Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls); Seán Jennet (Journal of a Younger Brother: The Life of Thomas Platter); Michael R. Katz (Vladimir Jabotinsky’s The Five); Charles H. Kahn (Heraclitus fragments). Translations of Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theater? are taken from the digitalized version online at the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam.

  Thanks are due to Aviva Dautch, Henry Hardy, Ruth Martin, and Robina Pelham Burn. I’d also like to thank J. O. Morgan, for his invaluable and patient help, and my family, especially Max and Paul, who have contributed words, sense and encouragement. I’ve benefited from Maria Stepanova’s highly literary understanding of English and English-language culture, and the generosity and freedom she gave me to recreate her brilliant work in a new poetic language.