In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  Montgolfier balloons, round, satin-sided, rise into the air.

  Two people, one anxious, the other reassuring.

  Women in long skirts race little balloons along the ground, waving them on with fans.

  An embarrassed, gentle smile beginning in the left-hand corner as if a light had been turned on.

  Rowers hurrying down to a pier, carrying long, flipper-like oars.

  Water rushes up a beach, then recedes, exposing the loose pebbles.

  Picnic chairs cast their shadows across the wet sand.

  A pure white sky above a concert and musicians.

  Skirts fly out in a dance.

  A little boy selling violets.

  Glasses of water and newspapers on a table, a packet of Chesterfields on a saucer. A newspaper headline: Buffalo Bill.

  A brick wall lit by the sun.

  A sign saying Dancing tous les soirs.

  Flashing legs of a horse.

  Boxes full of grapes, shall I wrap them for you?

  Lacemakers bend over their bobbins.

  Two hands linked.

  A tired, soiled collar at the end of the day.

  A hat brim shading the eyes.

  A car turns a corner.

  Accordion buttons.

  The swallows were smaller back then and the roses were larger.

  Men in caps watch some men in hats passing by.

  A bride’s veil is adjusted.

  A spoon lies face down on the edge of a coffee saucer.

  People in bathing suits crowding in the gray sea.

  Grass and fallen trees behind a garden fence.

  Striped beach umbrellas, striped beach tents, and striped summer dresses.

  A wheelbarrow, its handles pointing up to the sky.

  Flags flutter.

  A dog runs across the sand.

  The round shadow of a table on wooden floorboards.

  It’s easy to see the white blouses and dark skirts, lacemakers at their work, men sitting outside cafes and clinking glasses, as memory’s errand boys, fulfilling one (obvious to me) task. The film is composed of old documentary material, it can be seen as a requiem to the Old World (or one of its sections at least: as far as I remember it covers decades and is barely broken into individual voices). The film’s final credits are a long list of names, finishing with a single line by the film’s writer: “The last scenes were filmed on the coast of Europe in late August of 1939.”

  There is so much documentary cinema occupied with this archaeology, that any scene, even any face, looks instantly familiar: crowds brought together at random by the cinecamera, divested of their names, their fates, doomed forever to scatter across the street in front of the oncoming streetcar, and to illustrate any historical situation: “Citizens of Vienna Welcome Anschluss,” “Love and Honor,” “We’ll All Be Dead Soon.” The ancient division between important and unimportant is everywhere: the hero speaks, the girl eats ice cream, the crowd loiters as crowds do. We requisition this found footage as we might the goods in a warehouse: there is so much of it that we can select what we want. The author tells a story, and passersby illustrate that story. It’s never about them, they are cutaway scenes (to use the filmmaking term), they fill the pauses, delight the eye, and don’t distract from the general idea.

  It never occurs to anyone to set these people free, to give them one last opportunity to be themselves and not just typical representatives of the 1920s. Yet this is what Helga Landauer does, without taking away a second of their screen time — everyone gets as much time and space as the cameraman originally allotted them. A kind of freedom that is usually inherent to life rather than to art makes Diversions a refuge for the lost and forgotten, a paradise of democracy in which everyone is visible. A long-awaited equality between people, objects, and trees is achieved in the film, with each given its position as a representative of what has been. In some senses the convention established here is the equivalent of emancipating the serfs. The past is relieved of its feudal duties to the present, to us. It can walk freely.

  Only now do I notice that every one of these people at some point lifts his or her eyes and looks into the camera, looks at me, at us, and this is one of the extraordinary things about this film: that gaze into the lens never finds its addressee. And this to such an extent that in ten or twelve viewings I have never been aware of meeting any eye: meetings have been replaced by nonmeetings, which may be more important. The people and objects depicted radiate the unbroken peace of a memorial and that makes this fifteen-minute film persuasive: where else (or where still) do they not know about suffering, where still (or where else) is there no place for it? The gaze stares out and through me, without leaving any trace or impression. It has no direction, no aim, no addressee, it is as if a landscape lies before this gaze and it can be entered and exited at will. In the lens’s eye, all causal relationships are gone: they lie beyond judgment or interpretation. Every time I watch it the order of the episodes seems to change, as if they had been given permission to stand up and wander at will.

  This is the great gift: to explain nothing, to imply nothing; a woman in polished boots riding a horse, perhaps through the Bois de Boulogne, she’s in a hurry, she lights a cigarette, she poses, she lowers her new jacket with a languid gesture, she likes that jacket, she smiles as a person might smile when someone else is gazing at them appraisingly. In the film’s space she is free of all appraisal, like an animal in a zoo — what is the point in comparing a lion with a toucan, or a walrus with a bear, or me with not-me?

  *

  The Russian poet Mikhail Kuzmin has a short story about an English governess who lived in Russia. She hadn’t heard from her brother for a while, and when the First World War started she went to the cinema to watch the news, short reports on how conscripts in uniform were being sent off to the front, and she sat running her eyes over the lines of troops, their faces and sleeves, hoping for the unthinkable. And her faith triumphed — she recognized her brother. The miracle happened. But just like the oldest stories, she didn’t recognize him by his face but by what made him stand out from all the others: a hole in his trousers. I think this may be one of the very first texts of the century in which people find each other through loss and damage: holes, rents in the fabric, participants in a common fate.

  There is too much past, and everyone knows it: the excess (which is continually being compared to a flood) oppresses, the force of its surge crashes against the bulwark of any amount of consciousness, it is beyond control and beyond description. So it is driven between banks, simplified, straightened out, chased still-living into the channels of narrative. The quantity and variety of sources, those babbling rivulets to the left and right, bring on a strange queasy feeling, rather like the perplexed anxiety a city dweller has when confronted by nature in its rawest state, free of its straitjacket.

  Unlike nature, past lives are endlessly submissive, allowing us to do whatever we may decide to do with them. They reject no interpretation, endure any amount of humiliation, exist outside the rule of law or any notion of fair play. Culture treats the past as a state treats its mineral wealth, mining it for all its worth; this parasitical relationship with the dead is a profitable industry.

  The dead agree to everything we do with them, and with such compliance that it provokes the living to do ever more. There is something horrible about the new fashion of purses and notepads decorated with faces staring out from old photographs, whose names and fates are long lost. And there is something offensive about the way “authentic lives” are sent to stroll the pleasure grounds of historical romances, as if the text would be lifeless without a drop of real blood in the mixture. These are all manifestations of some strange perversion, which leads only to the dehumanization of our own ancestors. We attribute our own weaknesses and passions to them, our amusements, our optical instruments, pushing them slowly out of the w
orld, dressing up in their clothes as if they’d been made for us.

  The past lies before us, like a huge planet waiting to be colonized: first the raiding parties, and then the slow modification process. It looks like all culture has been mobilized to preserve the little that remains; any effort at memorialization is an excuse for complacency. More and more silences rise up out of the abyss, people forgotten by their own time and discovered like islands: pioneers of street photography, music hall singers, war journalists. How easy it is to be thrilled by the jubilation, the opening of the stores where you can purchase any colonial souvenir from the past and interpret it as you see fit, without even considering what the mask or the rattle meant in its own time and place. The present is so certain that it owns the past, just as once “both th’Indias” were owned. The present knows as much about the past, as Donne did “th’India,” and barely notices the ghosts that float back and forth, ignoring state boundaries.

  *

  Walking through the Jewish cemetery in Würzburg where my mother is buried, past the gray backs of tombstones and glancing about as I walk, I start to remember her neighbors, those lying beside her, by the emblems which are hidden in their names: rose wood and rose hills, stars, deer, people of love, freedom, Würzburg’s men and women, Swabians, the lonely Miron Isaakovich Sosnovich (the totemic tree of his name — sosna is Russian for pine tree — goes unheard in these parts) from Baku (but born in Białystok, the tombstone adds helpfully), those killed in the First World War, those killed in Theresienstadt, those who died in good time, that is, before anything happened, in 1920, 1880, 1846. They have become my family, because we share the same ground, but their emblem-names are all I know about these new relatives.

  There is a room in the Berlin Jewish Museum put aside for what is called family histories: children’s photos, the teacups and violins of those who didn’t manage to escape. On a screen facing me a homemade cinefilm plays on a loop, the sort of thing that everyone produced in the age of early home video, but back then a cinecamera was a signifier of wealth, along with ski lifts and summer evenings at the dacha.

  In this film, as in Diversions, the foreign past is given the freedom to speak about what was, and to remain silent about how it ended. In this case we know a few of the circumstances, and we have an eye to the likely outcome. One jolting characteristic of film is very clear: unlike an old text, which goes to lengths to underline and shade in the differences between then and now, video insists on similarities, on the joined-upness of time, on how there is no difference between then and now. Streetcars and trains still clatter past, the S-Bahn above ground, the U-Bahn below, women lean over cots and coo. No hesitations, no moments of awkwardness: someone simply disappears from the frame, and that is all.

  And then there is all of this: a dog bounding joyfully in a heap of snow; the dog’s cheery owners, their ski trousers bobbled with snow; an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate the nursery slopes without falling; skis going their separate ways; barn doors, the family porch and the tiled roof of another house, a child, waving its arms from an old-fashioned deep pram, a Sunday morning street, looking much like a street today, filled with people in their Sunday best, cloaks, nuns; pools or lakes, a rowboat, children growing up in front of us, winter again and long-distance skaters are clearing the ice in front of them. 1933 or 1934, the film is now in reverse and a moon-colored little boy flies up out of the black water back-first onto the planks. When I’d watched the montage to the end I waited for the credits to see the family’s name. Their surname was Ascher. I stood by the screen where once again they were checking their skis, the half-transparent family plumping down in the snow. I know how this story ended. The surname spoke for itself. The daughter (who was in the films) had given the museum these films in 2004, but there was no mention of what had happened to her parents, the boat, or the dog.

  All war films look the same if you take away their captions: a dead man lies on the ground and it could be Donetsk, Phnom Penh, or Aleppo. We are simply presented with the face of misfortune, which is always the same, a hole that can open up in any place. Children’s photos are also all the same (the smile, the teddy bear, the little dress), as are fashion shots (monochrome backdrop, taken looking up from below, arms outstretched), or old photographs (mustache, buttons, eyes; puffed sleeves, hat, and lips). All that remains of The Iliad is a catalog of ships.

  When I watch the homemade cinefilm of the Ascher family, skiing in 1934, the dark ski tracks in the snow and the lit-up window, the film is just a conduit for the preexisting knowledge of what happened back then to people who looked like them. Dust to dust, ashen snow to ashen snow, the collective fate of the unlucky ones: the trajectory is so very clear that any diversion from it shocks, like a divine apparition. Half an hour’s internet research tells me that both parents and children, with their skis and boats, belonged to the small number of those who survived. They left in 1939, settled in Palestine, then moved to America. They managed to escape the common fate. It’s a shame that the people in the film don’t yet know that their film has a happy end. None of the rents in the fabric suggest it.

  Not-A-Chapter

  Lyolya (Olga) Fridman, 1934

  My grandmother was barely eighteen. My grandfather Leonid (Lyonya) was older than her by four years. They met at a party of architecture students at a dacha, but they only married after a few years: Lyolya’s mother, Sarra Ginzburg, insisted that she finished her degree in medicine first, and wouldn’t allow Lyolya to drop her studies.

  1.

  November 25, 1934. On a lined sheet of exercise paper.

  Moscow, 27 Krasin Street, apartment 33.

  To Leonid Gurevich

  A tear, my darling, a single tear, has turned all my thinking on its head. A tiny, tiny tear rolled out of your eye and conquered everything. It defeated all my stupid doubts, my fear, shame, everything that stood in the way of your happiness.

  That little point of shining light seemed to enchant me, it filled me with a real and bright happiness.

  You know, my love, I never imagined that the suffering and grief of another could give me so much happiness. Now I understand your desire to see my tears, and I forgive you for all the suffering you forced me to endure.

  I’ve never felt such blessedness. To see a person who is endlessly dear to you suffering terribly, simply to avoid causing you suffering, to feel how dear and necessary you are to that person — my darling, that is happiness!

  It’s both a painful and blessed feeling. A special joy, one I don’t fully understand.

  Really, I can’t even quite explain to myself how I felt at the moment when that magic jewel of a tear — a single tear for all your months of suffering — forced me to finally overturn my inner self. I’ve never had to watch people suffer, I’ve always felt as if it’s only me who suffers so deeply, but how can what I feel be compared to the depths of your suffering? It can’t! Only now I’ve realized what it means to feel, only now I’ve realized where what is called “desire” resides. I didn’t see you for a day and I was heartbroken, I didn’t know where to put myself, but I didn’t ring you or tell you how my heart was feeling. I was held back by my doubts, my fear, I thought it would divide us, I thought that I shouldn’t be in the grip of my desires to such an extent, I thought . . . I couldn’t stop thinking . . . But I’m used to being reserved, not giving in to impetuosity, and my reserve saved me.

  Still, you, my darling, you are impetuous in your passion, and today I realized what it has cost you to keep your desire under control. And my own sufferings seemed so little in comparison, and I even had the brief fleeting thought that perhaps I’m not worthy of you.

  I don’t want you to think that my feelings are shallower than yours, or that I’m more superficial. That isn’t the case. Please don’t misunderstand me. But you seem so much finer in your feelings, so much finer . . . No, that can’t be right! I can’t have you think that you love me more than I
love you! That would be a lie!

  But you’re spoiled, you’ve never had to deal with difficulties, or withstand your desires. And I’ve always had to do it. You’re egotistical, you think only of yourself, and most of all you have never had to choose between two things, both equally desired, even if they are loved very differently, and share between them what you are desperate to give up to only one.

  Think about it, my little boy, think how hard it is to love like that, and maybe my suffering will give you even more spirit for the fight, for the wait.

  I didn’t want to tell you all this, I didn’t want to cause you pain, not on my account. I’ll admit it . . .

  But today was enough to convince me.

  I have always put my own needs second. Recently I decided to live a little, for myself, without taking anyone else into account. But I have realized that this is a mistake, a cruel mistake, or perhaps an insubstantial dream, because living just for myself and making my beloved suffer — well I just can’t do it! I realized today that I no longer exist as an individual, I have merged with you, I am dissolving into you, and I had already decided, my darling, to be all yours, but when I came home I met mother, all agitated and upset, and felt a huge pain, a burning pain in my heart. I had decided, but mother’s troubled, suffering expression said, “You must wait.”

  How could I forget her, even for a moment?

  Mother has seen so little happiness, she’s known such hard times, she has endured so very much on my account and she is still suffering and I don’t think I can hurt her even more. I’m her only family. I’ve got you. Your mother still has a husband, but mine has no one. For me she gave up her chance of happiness as a young woman and sacrificed her whole life and because of me she didn’t remarry and brought me up all by herself. Quite alone.

  I know what it cost her. I can feel just what a sacrifice it was, I just know, although mother has never ever spoken of it, not even a hint or a faint gesture. Oh, she’s a rock! All her suffering and pain will be buried with her, not a single soul will guess how she suffered. To suffer so and to hide it — only she could do that.