In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  When I began to think seriously about my memories I had the startling realization that I had nothing left. Almost nothing from those evenings looking at old photographs in the lamplight: no dates, no details, not even the skeleton of a family tree. Who was whose brother or nephew? The little boy with the sticking-out ears, in a short jacket with gold buttons, and the man with his sticking-out ears, wearing an officer’s woolen coat were clearly the same person — but who was he? I had the faint stirring of a recollection that his name was Grigory, but it didn’t help me much. The people who had once populated that other world with all its valencies, family connections, and warm embraces across the miles had all gone: they were dead, or displaced, lost. The history of a family that I had at the outset learned at the speed of a straight line was now fragmenting in my head into tesserae, into notes indicating textual omissions, into hypotheses there was no one left to prove.

  Perhaps, for this reason, a number of unverifiable stories hovered around the edges of my mother’s recollections. The sort of tales that add piquancy to the usual movement between generations but exist as apocrypha, the friable appendices to firm facts. Such fables are mostly like sprouting twigs, still to unfurl and grow to their life’s proportions, and they take the form of half-spoken phrases in the margins of the story: “I’ve heard he lived in . . .”; “She must have been this or that . . .”; “There’s a story about him . . .” It’s the sweetest part of the tale-telling, the fairy-tale element. These are the embryos of a novel, what we remember forever, over and above the boring circumstances of time and place. I want to take them and blow life into them, tell them anew, stuff them with details I have prepared myself. I remember these stories so much more easily. The pity is that even they become meaningless without a subject to hang them on; they cannot be verified, and over the years they lose their individual quality and are incorporated into the memory as part of the wide current of the everyday, the typical. It is hard to say now what actually exists of the stories I have retained. By that I don’t even mean what actually happened, but rather: was it passed down from mother to daughter, or simply a product of my imagination, invented without me even realizing?

  Although sometimes I did realize. I remember once, a terrible teenager with a desire to fascinate, I told someone the family story of a curse. “And so, passionately in love” (I intoned) “with an impoverished Polish aristocrat, he converted to Christianity and married her, and his father cursed him and never spoke to him again, and so they lived in poverty and soon they died of consumption.”

  This wasn’t exactly true — no one died of consumption. In the photo albums there are pictures of the cast-out son, looking happy in his prodigal state, wearing glasses, with grandchildren, all against an ordinary Soviet backdrop. But what about the Polish aristocrat? Did she exist or did I add her merely to embroider the story? Polish, to add the “exotic,” an aristocrat to add spice to the line of merchants, doctors, and lawyers? I don’t know. I can’t remember. There was something in my mother’s story, the faintest lighting of the way forward for my imagination. But there’s no way back: fantasy can’t be placed under the microscope to discover its kernel of truth. So my story continues to feature an unreliable Polish aristocrat — the doubtful cause of real and doubtless hardship. There was a curse, and there was genuine poverty, and my great-great-grandfather never did set eyes on his firstborn son again, and then they did all die, so in one way or another it is true.

  I inherited one other thing that bears on the construction of this story, on how it was told and by whom. It’s the sense of our family as a matriarchy, a tribe of strong, individual women standing like milestones spanning the century. Their fates loomed large in my life, here they are in the front row — holding on to each other, merging into each other — of the many-headed family photograph. Strange when you consider that they all had husbands. The men in this family are barely illuminated, as if history consisted only of heroines, and couldn’t quite stretch to heroic men. There is truth to this, though it’s hardly the men’s fault. Women kept the family line going — one husband died young, another died even younger, a third was busy with other out-of-frame matters. In my head, and perhaps in my mother’s too, the line of transmission (that part of the story left, once the cheerful bustle of life has been tidied neatly into prehistory) was a staircase leading steadily toward me, consisting entirely of women. Sarra begat Lyolya, Lyolya begat Natasha, and Natasha begat me. The matryoshka (nesting) doll insisted on the preeminence of single daughters, each emerging from the one before and inheriting, with everything else, the gift and the opportunity to be the single teller of the tale.

  *

  What did I think I was up to all those years? I clearly wanted to build a monument to those people, making sure they didn’t simply dissipate into the air, unremembered and unremarked upon. But in fact it seemed I didn’t even remember them myself. My family history was a confection of anecdotes, barely attached to names or faces, unrecognizable figures in photographs, questions I couldn’t quite formulate because they had no starting point and, in any case, there was no one to ask. Despite all this, I had to write the book and here is why.

  Jacques Rancière’s essay Figures of History makes many arguments that seem urgent for our times. He says, for example, that the artist’s duty is to show “what can’t be seen, what lies beneath the visible.” This pleases me, because the late Russian poet Grigory Dashevsky always saw this as the role of poetry, to bring the invisible to the point of visibility. Rancière’s most important point is this: in his writing about history, he contrasts “document” and “monument.” A “document,” for him, is any record of an event that aims to be exhaustive, to tell history, to make “a memory official.” A “monument” is the opposite of “document,” in “the primary sense of the term”:

  that which preserves memory through its very being, that which speaks directly, through the fact that it was not intended to speak — the layout of a territory that testifies to the past activity of human beings better than any chronicle of their endeavors; a household object, a piece of fabric, a piece of pottery, a stele, a pattern painted on a chest or a contract between two people we know nothing about . . .

  With this in mind, I began to see that the monument-memorial I’d hoped to raise was in fact built long ago. It seemed I even lived in its pyramid chambers, between the piano and the armchair, in a space marked out by photographs and objects, which were mine and not mine, which belonged simply to the continuing and disappearing thread of life. Those boxes of our domestic archive hardly spoke directly, but they were the silent witnesses, those piles of greetings cards and trade union cards were the epidermal cells of the lived and unspoken past, and, as storytellers, they were hardly worse than the documents that could speak for themselves. A list was all that was needed, a simple list of objects.

  Perhaps I hoped to reassemble and reanimate from all these objects the corpse of Osiris, the collective family body, which had disappeared from the home. All these fragments of memory and pieces of the old world did create a whole, a unity of a particular sort. A whole vessel, but flawed and empty, consisting mostly of cracks and gaps, no better and no worse than any single person who has lived her term and survived — or, more accurately, that person’s final and unmoving corpus.

  And of this twisted body, no longer capable of connecting its memories into a sequence — would it want to be seen? Even supposing it wants nothing, am I right to make it the subject of my story, a museum exhibit, like the pink stocking of Empress Sisi, or the rusty file with traces of blood that brought her story to its end? Putting my family on general view, even if I do it with as much love as I can muster and with the best words in the best order, is, after all, something of a Ham’s deed, exposing the vulnerable and naked body of the family, its dark armpits, its pale belly.

  And most likely I would learn nothing new in writing it, and just knowing this made the act of writing even more fraug
ht. Yes, free of scandalous revelation, far from the hell of Péter Esterházy, who found out that his beloved father had worked for the secret police, but also far from the bliss of having always known everything about your people, and bearing this knowledge with pride. Neither of these outcomes were mine. This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.

  *

  In late spring 2011 a colleague visited me in Moscow to invite me to Saratov to give a talk about the internet journal where I was working. Our conversation very quickly turned to Saratov itself, a city I had never visited, and the birthplace of my great-grandfather. My colleague pulled out a tablet. He had a wondrous digital haul of scanned prerevolutionary postcards with views of Saratov: predominantly green-white vistas with trees and churches. As I flicked through, the lines faded into each other, and now I can only remember the wide expanse of river, dotted with ships. The tablet contained other wonders, a downloaded directory for 1908: gray lists of names and streets. “I’ve tried looking for my family,” said the colleague. “Hopeless task, really. There are ten pages of my surname.”

  My great-grandfather was called Mikhail Davidovich Fridman, and this gave us a head start. We found him easily — he was the only one of that name in Saratov, and a hundred years before he had lived on Moscow Street, clearly an important street in the town back then. I asked if the street was still there, and it was.

  So I set off for Saratov. The Volga river basin was as bare as an empty soup dish, and the narrow streets descended toward it like tourniquets. Where there were once just spaces of green and white, now shopping centers and Japanese restaurants vied for space. The steppe pressed in: mannequins stood outside the open doors of dress shops, wearing lavish wedding dresses with fluttering ruched skirts, soiled yellow by the dusty steppe wind. I went to Moscow Street the next morning, after checking the address again.

  The house was unrecognizable, but then I’d never seen it before to recognize it. The wide gray facade had been smeared with a layer of cement and shop windows cut into its front. A shoe shop. But it was still possible to pass through an archway into the yard.

  I spent a good while in the yard just running my hands over the rough Saratov brickwork. Everything was as I’d hoped, perhaps even more so than I’d hoped. I recognized my great-grandfather’s yard unhesitatingly. There was no doubt in my mind, even though I’d never seen it or had it described to me. The wooden slatted palisade with the Rudbeckia growing up against it, the crooked walls with their bricks and wood, and a useless old chair with a broken frame standing by a fence — all of it was mine, all of it instantly part of my family. It seemed to speak to me, saying: here, you needed to come here. There was a strong smell of cat, but a stronger smell of plants and greenery, and there was absolutely nothing I could pick up to take with me. But I didn’t need souvenirs, I remembered everything beneath the high windows with such a sense of heightened native precision that I seemed to know how it had all been, in this, our, place, how we had lived and why we had left. The yard put its arms around me in an embrace — that’s what it was. I hung around another ten minutes or so, making huge efforts to commit it all to memory, to extract the picture, as you might a mirror from its frame, and fix it for once and for all in the memory’s grooves. Then I left. And it worked. From the train window I saw long, bright drainage ditches running alongside the tracks, and once a little tornado of dust, twisting over a deserted crossroads.

  About a week later my colleague from Saratov rang me sheepishly. He’d mixed up the address. That street all right, but a different house. God, I’m so sorry, Masha.

  And that is just about everything I know about memory.

  3. A Handful of Photographs

  1.

  A large hospital ward with a black-and-white checkered floor. The sun beats down through the tall arched windows and the right-hand side of the picture is bleached white by the light. There is altogether plenty of white in the picture; the beds stand feet-forward, their metal frames covered in canvas and on them high-stacked pillows, the heads of the patients. Men with whiskers stare toward the camera, one has propped himself up on his elbow and a nurse is making a quick adjustment to something at his shoulder. Only one woman in the whole huge room. In the left-hand corner of the picture a swarthy man in a hospital gown sits by a table, leaning on crutches, his face creased into a toothy beaming smile. This table is covered with paper, doctor’s notes, discharge papers. Two men are sitting at the table, radiating the untroubled contentment of the hospital visitor — they are the focus of the composition, the event, the reason for the photographer’s visit. One sits back in his bentwood chair; he wears a black suit, his shoes shine, his collar is brilliant white. The other wears gray and a flash of starched collar beneath his transparent mustache. A row of auxiliaries stand farther back, their arms crossed over their chests and stomachs, as if waiting for orders. The iron bed legs and the ribs of columns run in parallel; someone peeps out from behind a column as if everyone is obliged to be present in this picture. The fronds of an institutional potted palm wave from a corner. The window is a pool of light, and the picture is most interesting where the light washes out the detail of the window frame and even eats away at the nurse and her patient.

  2.

  If you didn’t know you might never guess that this is a body. It looks like a pile of rags on a low marble table, and some attentive students sit behind it. Anatomy class. Closer to the camera there’s another little table with something indistinct on it, a sack or a bundle or some such, I can’t quite make it out. Six women crowd around the table, white lab coats over their dark everyday dresses. The only man stands a little apart, he has turned away and is deciding whether to smile or frown while the others are occupied. He wears a comic pince-nez, behind him a school blackboard covered in chalk scrawlings, and if you look closely you can see a mass of information: a diagram of the vegetative nervous system left on the board after a lecture; the profile of a soldier in a high peaked cap; another profile of a beautiful woman with a cigarette in her mouth and a determined jaw; a smiling round face, presented straight on with a huge pair of ears added on each side. The blackboard is to the side of the picture, and at the table we see a restaging of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp but with an all-female cast: a black-haired girl with a stethoscope around her neck is reading from a book and her listeners are sitting absolutely still. Their faces are as impassive as the faces of watchmen on duty, only one has allowed a smile to soften her features. But if you thought at first that they were all listening attentively then you would have been wrong: one is stretched out on her chair and her gaze is remote, another is sitting up with a sudden start as if her name had been called. One student in glasses hasn’t managed to put on her doctor’s coat, and is attempting to pass off her heavy embroidered bodice as a medical robe. The woman sitting with a book, her hair gathered into a bun at the nape of her neck, is my great-grandmother, Sarra. The women direct their gazes in different directions, like a bundle of badly behaved twigs, anywhere except at the articulated pile of rags that is the corpse in front of them.

  3.

  All the French doctors are whiskered and their whiskers point skyward like wings; all the women are in white with their sleeves pushed up; an electric light hangs down from the ceiling. You can tell the nurses from the students by the huge cornettes they wear. Constant collective activity like a spindle turning, faces peeking out from behind backs, glances over the shoulder at a point in the picture where there is a mound under sheets, and the gray-bearded head doctor is holding a clamp or a lancet: this is the dead zone, the static center of the composition and the operation, so silent you can hear the ticking in your own head, and the women, who are standing so close to the hands and what is under them, are turned away to look at the camera, and seem to be frowning.

  4.

  The picture is the col
or of wood, and even seems to be wood-paneled, everything in it is planked, the walls, the fence, the shed, a little lean-to at the side of the house. There’s a cat nearby, but the chickens are maintaining their dignity. A girl, wearing a new school dress, you can tell that the wide sleeves are newly stitched. Her whole being says that she is resigned to being photographed but doesn’t quite see the need. A bentwood chair has been brought outside for the occasion and she is seated in it and the camera readied, and there she is, her smile both proud and ironic.

  5.

  There’s no note on this one, but it’s Switzerland, around 1910. Wedges of pine forest to the left and right and cone-shaped white mountains in the gap between. A few pine trees are visible, higher up in the whiteness, a couple of different-sized trees on the edges of the plantations, and beyond them the regular spikes of saplings growing under the trees. Above, the indistinct Alpine cloudscape, and just below the top edge of the picture a fringe of greenery, from which we, Russian travelers, have only just emerged.

  6.

  A little photograph, old, and it looks even older than it is, because it’s so faded. On the lower edge, printed in pink: Cherson and B. Wineert. It looks like the mid-1870s, a bride stands, immovable as an upturned cup on a tablecloth, her wedding dress falls in a triangle of thick material around her, a cliff of fabric descending from her stomach to the ground, buttons all aligned. Her wide face is fringed by lace. She stands, calm and steadfast, and beside her the groom seems barely to exist, leaning against her, as he might against a gate. Not unequal in the crude and obvious sense of an unequal marriage, but almost as if they presented to us the union of a triangle and an exclamation mark. He is thin-faced, long-boned, like a taper, or the last splinter of soap, and stretched to attenuation, even appears to be growing still in his frock coat with its lapels drawn on, his wife holding on to his elbow. The frock coat is almost too straight, the top hat unexpected, like a rabbit in a conjurer’s hand. My great-great-grandfather’s particular beauty seems so ephemeral that it’s hard to imagine him twenty or thirty years later, an established man, a paterfamilias. As a child I used to think that the other great-great-grandfather with his bushy beard was the same man, except much older, and the difference between them horrified me. But there are only two photos of Leonty Liberman, and in both he looks the same: as if he might disappear into the background before he even reached adulthood.