*
On May 30, 2015, I left my apartment on Banny Pereulok in Moscow, where I had spent a biblical two score years and one, amazed even myself at the length of time I’d spent here. All my friends had moved about from one place to another, and even from one country to another, and only I had stayed put like some ancient Aunt Charlotte on her country estate, living in the rooms my grandmother and mother had inhabited, with empty sky through the window where once there were tall white poplars, like in Odessa, planted by her grandfather. The rooms were repainted, but even the new decor had begun to look shabby. The furniture was long used to standing in a different formation, so when you shut your eyes at night, the rooms of the empty apartment became ghostlike and all the furniture returned to its original places in the darkness: the bed where I lay was itself overlaid with the shape of the writing desk that had once stood there. Its lid covered my head and shoulders, and above me hung the shelf with the three porcelain monkeys refusing to see, hear, or speak, and in the other room the heavy orange curtains were back, and the lamp stand covered in a silk shawl, and the big old photographs.
None of this remained, there wasn’t even a chair to sit on, the apartment had become no more than a series of empty boxes, workboxes of odd buttons or spools of thread. The chairs and divans had departed for different homes, in the farthest room an anxious light burned, even though it was day, and the doors were already thrown back wide as if to welcome new owners. The keys were handed over, dropped from one palm into another, I took a last look at the pale sky over the balcony — and then life suddenly sped up, moving faster than ever before. The book about the past wrote itself while I was traveling from place to place, counting up my memories, just like the children’s poem about the lady and her luggage: “a punnet, a pug, a painting, a jug . . .” And off I went on my wanderings to Berlin, where the book stopped, held its breath — and so did I.
I found a home in a beautiful old part of Berlin, which had once been considered a Russian area, and had always been associated with literature. The streets seemed familiar, Nabokov had lived in the house opposite, and two houses down, a person who had, by mutual and loving consent, eaten a man alive. In the little square yard a dozen bikes gathered like horses at a watering trough. Everything was underpinned by a feeling of durability and presence, but a strange sort of presence when you remembered that this city had for years been known for its wastelands and its yawning voids, rather than the buildings constructed on these empty spaces. I enjoyed the thought that some of my notes about the impossibility of remembrance would be written within another impossibility: in a city where history is an open wound, no longer able to mend itself with the scar tissue of oblivion.
It was as if the city had unlearned the skill of coziness, and the city’s inhabitants respected this quality of bareness. Here and there construction sites opened the wound further, streets were barred with red-and-white barriers, the asphalt was cut open to reveal its granular earthen heart, and the wind whistled, clearing the space for new wastelands. By every entranceway little bronze plaques in the paving stones told a familiar story, even if you didn’t stop to read the names and count the years to see how old they were when they were taken from these elegant houses with their high ceilings to Theresienstadt or Auschwitz.
I managed nothing of the work I had planned in Berlin, in my cheerful little apartment with its Mettlach-tiled stove. Once I had arranged my life there, laid out my books and photographs, signed up at a library and been given a library card with a grinning stranger’s face on it, I quickly resigned all my energies to a gnawing unending anxiety, which turned its toothed cogs in my stomach. I don’t remember how I spent the days. I think I spent more and more time wandering from room to room until I realized that the only thing I could actually do well was move from place to place. Movement was forgiving, the thought of unachieved work was pushed out of my head by the number of steps taken in a day, the physical shape of my achievements. I had a bike. An old Dutch beast with a bent frame and a yellow lamp on its forehead. Once it had been painted white, and at a good trot it made a snuffling-grinding sound, as if its last ounces of strength were being squeezed out of it by contact with the air. It braked with a ticking noise. An old German novel that my mother had loved featured a car called Karl, “the ghost of the road,” and there was something similar and ghostly in the way my bicycle and I blended in to the hidden underpasses, slipping between people and traffic, leaving no trace of ourselves, not in their memory, and not in mine.
Riding a bike in Berlin was a new and unfamiliar experience. The whole city lived on its wheels, pushing the pedals round diligently but with ease, as if there was nothing untoward in this behavior in a grown-up person. In the evenings a quiet chirruping and a flicker of light were the only trail we left behind us, and it was transparently clear that the city had been built for this constant falling through the absences without noticing, like in that Kafka text where the horseman rides across the steppe, his stirrups gone, his bridle gone, his horse gone, and even he himself no longer there. The streets seemed to give way obligingly when a cyclist came through, offering themselves up as flatness, so the ride cost no energy and the rider hardly realized she was flying somewhere beyond. The lightness of travel allowed a feeling of safety — the shop windows, the passersby and their little dogs were not even beyond a thin glass screen, but speed and the insect rustling of the bike made everything around untouchable, slightly blurred, as if I were as invincible as the air passing through my fingers.
I wondered then if the people who were destined sooner or later to be air and smoke remembered this sense of invisibility and invincibility and longed for it when they were condemned to walk on the ground on May 5, 1936, losing their right to own and ride a bike. In the laws that came later it became clear they would always remain on the unshaded side of the street, never able to slip among the shadows, or allowing themselves the luxury of freewheeling without obstacle. When public transport was forbidden to them it was as if someone had had the explicit task of reminding them that their body was the only property left to them and they should rely on that alone.
On a rainy October evening, when all the passersby walked at an angle better suited to trees in the wind, I turned the corner (from Knesebeck Strasse onto Mommsen Strasse and only from Mommsen Strasse onto Wieland Strasse, as Sebald might have written) onto the street where Charlotte Salomon once lived. Salomon who, for a number of reasons, felt almost like a relative to me. She lived from her birth until 1939 in the house on this street, only leaving when she was fetched and sent to France in haste to be saved from the common fate. The worst stories of flight and salvation are the ones with a twist in the tale, the ones where right after the miraculous escape death pounces anyhow, grown thickly shaggy while waiting. That is what happened to Charlotte. But this Berlin house took a gentle leave of its child, except for perhaps the crowds of protesters she happened to see from the window with their crooked canvas banners. Back then you still could have seen such things through any window, and those fine art nouveau frames with their excellent proportions were simply doing their job. On this evening the rain was getting heavier, and a faint light could be seen inside, not lighting the whole huge apartment, just one of the rooms, and the others in a sort of twilight, so I could only really guess at the height of the ceilings and the stucco. In a scene from a book I hadn’t read since childhood, a painting in a gilded frame hung at an exhibition. In the painting was a snow-covered town, a recognizable street corner, windows lit warmly — the resemblance took my breath away — and then a sudden trick: a horse cab traveling from one side of the picture to the other, a shadow, shape-shifting. There was a movement above me on the dark balcony, a cigarette burnt bright, a wisp of smoke. It startled me, although I don’t know why.
I came to love the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, the over- and underground railways, the orphaned smells of sweet rolls and rubber wheels, the spiderlike map of lines and connections. The
glass dovecots of stations with their arched roofs seemed to suggest that you could hide under them but to me they looked temporary, untrustworthy. All the same I always relaxed when the train I was on entered the iron womb of the Hauptbahnhof as if its see-through helmet guaranteed me a moment to catch breath, a sudden eclipse before departing again into the light. There was always a crowd moving on the platform, the carriage filled instantly until no one else could get on: someone carried a bike, someone carried an impossibly huge double bass in a funeral-black case, someone had a little dog that sat so obediently it might have been posing for a black-and-white photograph. Even back then it seemed to me that all of this was happening in a past that had long ago departed, and was only now in reach if you stretched out a hand right out. Sometimes I found myself looking at the lit carriage, and me inside it as if at a distance, as if it were a model railway with tiny plastic figures sitting on the seats. The wet city circled in the window like a Ferris wheel on its side, and in it mostly the bits in between: the wastelands, underexposed scenes, and sometimes something more real and present — a column, a cupola, a cube, or a globe.
During that stagnant period in my life, everything felt close enough to touch, especially when we passed places I had once known, forgotten, and seen anew — these places gave me a brief sense of warmth. In one place I’d spent a few days in a hotel, where the guests were entertained in the oddest manner. The long narrow entrance hall was uplit with turquoise light, it was like walking down a plastic straw. At the end of the hall, where the glum residents congregated, there was a hearth with a fire burning brightly, giving off a visible heat. It was only when you reached the reception desk that you realized it was a deception: the fire burnt across the full width of a TV screen on the wall, crackling and creating an apparition of real coziness. Together with my plastic key card I was given two turquoise boiled sweets like cough drops, and I took them upstairs to the little bed-shaped room, with its basin-in-a-cupboard arrangement. The wall opposite the bed was empty of pictures and photos, there was nothing to distract from the main show: yes, there in the room a smaller but otherwise identical screen with a burning fire. The creaking and champing of the flames could be heard from the door, and, as soon as I entered, I sat down on the turquoise bedspread, as I was clearly meant to do, and looked the fire in the teeth.
In the middle of the night, still unable to find the off switch for the screen, I began to understand the little lesson the hotel’s owners had provided for their guests as a sort of undemanding but compulsory entertainment, like the poems used as decorative inscriptions on soft furnishings, or embroidered proverbs in a frame: “The early bird catches the worm.” The single screen, standing upright like a young conscript, was touched by a tiny flame, a halo at the very edge of the screen first, the forewarning of a future martyrdom. The fire grew stronger, seeming to reach out and touch my face, the flames unfurled, droning and subsiding before reaching the very top of the screen, where the bee whispering grew thicker. Then gradually the intensity dropped and the screen grew darker and then gasped softly and disintegrated into ashes and cinders. A short darkness followed, then the picture momentarily shuddered, straightened, and before me again the quick lithe fire, the resurrected image, as if nothing had ever happened to it. The whole business repeated itself over and over (the recording seemed ever more horrible, the longer it went on), and I followed it more and more attentively, as if I was trying to make out some variation, however small. Again and again the darkness gave way to the wood, repeatedly resurrecting itself from the dead.
Not-A-Chapter
Nikolai Stepanov, 1930
Fragile, crumbling gray paper, typed text.
My grandparents’ marriage was only registered in the early 1940s.
To Whom it May Concern
Rzhev Registry Office
From N. G. Stepanov
Citizen of Tver
I request the Rzhev registry office to register me as the father of the child born to Dora Zalmanovna Akselrod. I sent my identity documents as requested.
According to my information the child has not yet been registered by the registry office and this is only because I am not yet officially (please see the empty pages of my identity documents) registered as married to D. Z. Akselrod. But this is not correct.
There are no illegitimate children in a Soviet country, they are not possible. Therefore the nonregistration of my marriage cannot result in the nonregistration of my child in my name.
I am not currently able to travel to Rzhev so I am asking the registry office to fulfill my request, that is, to register me as the father of the girl, born to my wife, on the identity document I have sent you and not to delay with the official registration of the child’s birth.
Signed here:
N. Stepanov
Stamp Tver Local Council (All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks))
Signed and witnessed by member of the Tver Local Council (All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)) Comrade Stepanov
Added by hand: if the child is already registered but not in my name, in accordance with all laws I insist that the child is reregistered to me. I have no interest in simply agreeing to what suits you. N. Stepanov.
8. Rents in the Fabric, and Diversions
Every now and then a friend will send you some startling image of a face on a postcard or via an internet link. To them the face seemed to resemble yours, the features, the expression, hair, eyes, nose. When you put all such pictures side by side they suddenly reveal themselves to have nothing in common, apart from their likeness to you, the common denominator. As they say in film credits, any resemblance is purely coincidental.
But perhaps this is not true? Why do these apparent resemblances excite both sender and recipient of the postcard, as if something really important had been revealed, some secret mechanism? It’s tempting to see them as an expression of another order: a selection based not on family resemblance or proximity, but design, by mirroring a pattern you don’t know. It’s hard to resist evidence of hidden rhythms in the world order, and writers from Nabokov to Sebald have taken pleasure in the ringing of signal bells to mark coincidences: such as finding your birthday is the date of death on a stranger’s gravestone, or wearing a certain color for luck, or when a resemblance with Botticelli’s Zipporah or someone’s great-grandchild becomes the cause of passion. Such coincidences seem to confirm that we aren’t chance presences in the world, that everything is interrelated, woven into a warm nest of twigs, excrement, and fluff: people were here before you and they will still be here after you are gone.
And yet this isn’t the only version of events. The anthropologist Bronisłav Malinowski described the way that classic observations along the lines of “doesn’t he look like his grandmother” were met with unease and horror in societies constructed to a different model. “I was then told by my confidential informants that I had committed a breach of custom,” writes Malinowski of the Trobrianders in Papua New Guinea, “that I had perpetrated what is called “taputaki migila,” a technical expression referring only to this act, which might be translated as “to defile by comparing to a kinsman his face.” Pointing out a family resemblance was seen as an insult: an individual was like no other person, he was without copy, he was the first of his sort to appear on the earth, and he only represented himself. To deny that was to doubt a person’s existence. To quote the poet Mandelstam: “do not compare: the living are beyond comparison.”
There’s a short film by Helga Landauer, made in 2009. I have it on my computer and I watch it again and again, as you might read and reread a book. It’s called Diversions, and the title could refer to many things: an entertainment; a distraction; a turning aside or deviation from the route; or even a tactic designed to draw your enemy’s defense away from the main attack. In place of instructions, I, the viewer, am given a sequence of waymarks, each pointing in a different direction. Not a map or a route — more like a swinging we
ather vane. Something very similar happens on the screen as well:
People in absurd pith helmets crowding in the shallows, a rowboat is about to set off. The bare-legged sailors carry them out to the boat on their backs, like luggage. Parasols rock over their heads.
Hanging lace sways in a draft.
A dark mass of leaves, a parasol over an artist’s easel, a dim rain-filled light.
Children, like deer, peering out from behind trees.
An oar slices through the shining water, a long ripple runs across it. Sunshine. You can’t see who is rowing.
A woman lifts a fishing rod out of the water, her smile stretches from ear to ear, like a skull’s.
The victorious bustle of ladies’ hats and their fur, feathers, wings, fearsome excess.
A mass of leaves, the wind troubles the leaves, children run across the image from corner to corner like little beasts.
Tall flowers in a white vase standing on a table, almost invisible, like everything that is not important.
The whiskers and biceps of an athlete.
The whiskers and bowler hats of passersby. One sees us and lifts his hat.
Bicycles and boaters, walking sticks and briefcases.
The pine tree bends forward. Someone wearing black wanders along the shoreline, only his back is visible.
People pass by, more and more people.
Funny little miniature trains trundle through parks. The passengers wave.
Children peep through branches like gophers.
Dead trees lie alongside the roads.
A man in a workman’s suit cups water in his hands, and offers it to a small dog to drink.
Pigeons come to rest on a path through a park.
A little girl with a parasol searches for her family in a crowd.
In Memory of Memory Page 10
