In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  Once when I went to hospital to see Dora she told me straight out all her wishes for after she was gone. She said, “Just in case. Who knows how this operation will go and I’d like you to know my wishes. Look after Galya. She’s all you’ve got. She’s an introverted girl, she won’t come begging. You take the lead. She has a difficult life as it is.” And when I replied, “What are you talking about, it’ll all be fine, and you’ll be back home with us soon,” she answered that she didn’t know what the outcome of the operation would be, but she had at least told me her dying wish.

  3.

  Undated, but clear from the content that this is July 1980. Father and I were traveling and staying by a lake, Galka was in a sanatorium. On two scraps of writing paper, paper-clipped together, my grandfather has written in his firm hand: “Page from diary.” He is writing here (as it later becomes clear) about my mother.

  I am a person with quite a developed sense of personal responsibility so I was working hard until four o’clock in the morning to make the apartment look presentable for someone I’d describe as being very close to me. And today I continued the work, so I could receive her without embarrassment, despite being a man, and not a woman with all the experience and skills in household matters. It took up all my time and energy, but I was sure it would all be worth it and I wouldn’t be ashamed to have her in the house.

  So the job was done. But all in vain.

  She didn’t come.

  I waited so long, I did all that running around, I made such an effort so the meeting would take place in the best possible circumstances . . .

  But she didn’t come, despite telling me that Monday was a day when she could do as she wished . . .

  She didn’t come.

  Clearly she just doesn’t want to admit to a mutual relationship — between a woman who loves the revolutionary “Gadfly” and her just-a-good-friend, who is like the character of the doctor in the book . . . who loved her and cared for her, never asking for anything in return. And she knew it and was a friend to him, a comrade . . . and was even grateful

  4.

  Nikolai Stepanov to Natalia Stepanova

  Grandfather is writing here to my mother in Mishor, the Crimean resort where we were holidaying in 1983. It’s possible he didn’t send the letter. This is a draft and I couldn’t find a clean copy in my mother’s papers.

  Moscow, June 5, 1983

  My dearest Southern Belles, Masha and Natasha,

  Thank you so much for the letter which I received last night from my southern belles! Thank you. Please believe me when I say that I heaved a huge sigh of relief on receiving it. The weight on my heart, the anxiety which had burrowed deep into me, all was removed by your warmth and kindness . . . and I felt young again! Thank you, thank you, Natasha, for recovering my heart’s balance. If I were a believer I would say “may god give you and all your dear ones immense joy.” Thank you. All my gratitude.

  That Crimean landscape, the nature, the sea . . . I remember well how Dora and I once spent a holiday there back in the good old days, and we stayed in a little privately owned house belonging to a Ukrainian woman, very neat and tidy, very welcoming and kind. That was a long time ago, in those precious days of youth, when two young people still had everything ahead of them — still free, nothing to tie them down. And those were simpler times. We were still in the Komsomol youth movement, no children, no cares, nothing to make our lives harder. We were just starting our family life together. And yesterday your little postcard nudged my memory and your letter made me feel livelier and I couldn’t get to sleep for ages for the memories, I was transported to the past, to our youth together. Just for this — not to mention that you are there, in the South surrounded by all that wonderful nature, and yet you didn’t forget that somewhere in the world, in one of the world’s great cities, there’s a person called Nikolai, who is also known as “Grandpa Kolya,” and for that, Natasha, dearest girl, I send you all my gratitude. But I also want to say that I appreciate your straightforwardness and your warmth, and that you exist and that you are mother to my (Dora would have joined me in this, I am sure) our very first grandchild. They used to say about Vladimir Ilich Lenin that he was “simple as truth” and I believe this to be one of the best qualities in a person.

  Everything I have written here is true. I have the most ordinary personality. Russian, but with some particular qualities. These are not just to do with my simplicity and openness, but to do with the fact that anyone I have a spiritual connection with I open my heart to, and I trust that person absolutely. And so I wanted to say that your postcard delighted me, that simple little message, but I was also delighted that I hadn’t been deceived in your friendship. In these difficult times there aren’t many people one can rely on and trust. I’m happy you are who you are! Looking back I can see that I always felt close to serious women and girls, with whom I could have fun, but also talk about the serious things, the real things. Who made me feel trust, and also, no less important, respect for them. I am sorry to say that these days there are many young people of both sexes, who are indiscriminate, who aren’t able to blush or feel any kind of shame.

  Well. There we are, Natasha. Dearest mother to my very first granddaughter.

  5.

  A draft of a letter from Grandfather to his own sister. It is undated but I think it is from 1984 or even 1985, when Grandfather was fast losing his memory and becoming sadder and more remote.

  Moscow. Sunday the 16th.

  I send my greetings and best wishes to you, Masha, my dear sister! How are you? How are you getting along? How’s your health been? And — once a teacher, always a teacher — I want to know how your pupils are getting along and what successes you’ve had with them. What classes are you taking in school? How many teachers are there in the school and what have they done in the past? Are there any you can fully rely on in school as well as in life? Does the school have its own party organization or are your communist teachers registered elsewhere? Who is running the school: a nonparty-affiliated person or a communist and what sort of relationship have you got with that person in school and outside school? I’m full of shame that I haven’t seen you for so long, and I can hardly imagine you alive, and working hard. As a teacher and school leader of old I’m interested in the conflicts and where they come from. And one last question: is everyone friendly toward each other? Do you work a single or a double shift? Oh yes! I meant to ask how many teachers there are, and whether there are more men or more women. And the main question: how does everyone get on? Do they get on with each other? And with the school leadership?

  And my last question is to you personally. Why haven’t you written to your brother since the beginning of the school year? I thought long and hard about that and couldn’t find an answer. Surely after the death of our mother you had someone you could write to in the immediate family. Surely you didn’t suspect us all

  7. Yakov’s Voice and Isav’s Photograph

  When you start sorting through the things and concepts of the past you can tell instantly which are still wearable, like old clothes, and which have shrunk, faded, like a jumper that’s been through the wrong wash. Those yellowing suede gloves, like plate armor in a museum, look as if they belong to a schoolgirl or a doll. They seem to belong with certain intonations, certain opinions; they’re smaller than we imagine humans to be — if you look at them through the wrong end of the telescope, they have an ant-like precision; yet they are very far away. Sebald describes an empty house with its dusty carpets, a stuffed polar bear, and “golf clubs, billiard cues, and tennis rackets, most of them so small they might have been intended for children, or have shrunk in the course of the years . . .” Sometimes everything in the past (untranslatable, unusable, barely meeting today’s needs) seems child-sized, to be treated with the fond condescension of those who have left childhood behind. The simplicity and naivety of the past is habitually overstated, and this has gon
e on for centuries.

  The once-acclaimed novel Trilby graced my parents’ shelves like a living presence, its spine still hard, the golden letters gleaming. The Russian edition was published in some haste in 1896, by then George du Maurier’s tale had been published in America and Britain in unprecedented print runs of hundreds of thousands of copies. The only picture in the Russian edition was on the cover, a tall woman in an infantryman’s greatcoat, caught around the waist by a belt, standing determined on a small rise, bare white legs, one hand held out, holding a cigarette, her hair loose on her shoulders. Despite all this she resembles nothing more than a milkmaid. She has a purposeful straightforward air, as if to quash any ideas of silliness, and this impression is borne out when you read the book.

  The story of Trilby follows an artist’s model, posing “for the altogether” in Parisian art studios. She makes friends with some jolly English artists whose odd habits include daily ablutions in hip baths, then falls in love with one of them but gives him up, convinced he is destined for a better woman. All of this is very sweet, especially the heroine with her wide-eyed loving-kindness and her tuneless singing. The softhearted Trilby suffers from neuralgia and the only person who can help her is a man named Svengali, a rogue, a hypnotizer, a great musician, and a dirty Jew. Dirty in the most literal sense — the cleanliness of others merely makes him laugh uncontrollably. He has bony fingers and a “long, thick, shapely Hebrew nose”; “he would either fawn or bully, and could be grossly impertinent.”

  At the beginning of the twentieth century the “Svengali” became a phenomenon in and of itself: not the name of a literary hero but a term to describe someone exerting a mysterious force on others. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary dryly defines a “Svengali” as a person who “manipulates or exerts excessive control over another.” The Oxford English Dictionary adds the words “mesmeric” and “for some sinister purpose.” The inexplicable ability to control another, to turn that person on and off like a desk lamp according to your will, so intrigued readers that the story, rather than falling into obscurity, lived on in a whole series of screen versions. Most of these were no longer named after the novel: from the end of the 1920s the novel became indistinguishable from the magnetic “Svengali, Svengali, Svengali.”

  Neither author nor reader would have had cause to reflect much on this matter-of-course anti-Semitism. It was as natural as birdsong; simply another feature of Du Maurier’s book, as much as the constant jokes at the expense of the Germans or the discussions of women’s beauty (a “deformed” woman, a “squinting dwarf” will only “inflict on his descendants a wrong that nothing will ever redeem”). But the difference is that, unlike all the prejudices expressed en passant, the Jewishness of Svengali seems to fascinate the narrator. He returns again and again to the theme, picking through a fairly standard selection of descriptives: greasy hair, bold and brilliant eyes, a comic aspect, a cruel sense of humor, physical and moral uncleanliness. And there is his great talent, which for a time even allays the disgust of the hearty, hygienic heroes with their drooping whiskers: “There was nothing so humble, so base even, but that his magic could transform it into the rarest beauty without altering a note. This seems impossible, I know. But if it didn’t, where would the magic come in?”

  Du Maurier’s Trilby is entertaining and good-natured, uniting both author and reader in a rare feeling of satisfaction, even self-satisfaction: “and they would try and express themselves to the effect that life was uncommonly well worth living in that particular city at that particular time of the day and year and century, at that particular epoch of their own mortal and uncertain lives.” The action of the novel takes place toward the end of the 1850s, and everything is retrospectively gilded with the spirit of the Belle Époque: the three Baudelairean flaneurs taking their strolls down the “crowded, well-lighted boulevards, and a bock at the café there, at a little three-legged marble table right out on the genial asphalt pavement”; and enjoying more traditional amusements, like donkey rides and hide-and-seek in the Bois de Boulogne. The suspension springs of progress are well-oiled: these children of civilization laugh at prejudice, and even illegitimate love engenders sympathetic respect in them. The horror and the repulsion they feel for Svengali is all the more striking against the backdrop of this Great Exhibition of modern virtues. It feels as if it has something to do with the rasping friction between two extremes: a superhuman ability and what seems subhuman to the author.

  This ancient combination presents itself as a threat once again in the post-Romantic age, the source of a scandal that might blow up at any moment. The raw element of virtuosity, born of the gutter, the dirt, and the dust, stooping at nothing, in the hands of the “foreign” — Jews, gypsies, mediums — is balanced by the presence of standards, the flowering of complete ordinariness that knows its boundaries and is pleased with this knowledge. The cheerful little Parisian art studios are pleasurable forays into the life of a Bohemian. With the same cozy pleasure the novel’s heroes perform Romantic and realist roles, drawing toreadors and coal miners. Painting in Du Maurier’s novel belongs to the decent world — but music is to be avoided at all cost.

  George du Maurier himself drew cartoons for Punch for several decades, caricaturing modern aesthetics, the emancipation of women, the mass enthusiasm for china. He was especially excited by the comic potential in technological progress: “Please look a little pleasant, Miss. I know it’s hard; but it’s only for a moment!” says a photographer to a young woman. Elderly parents sit by an enormous plasma screen, called the “telephonoscope,” and watch their offspring play lawn tennis. A housewife gaily operates dozens of levers: pull one and you hear an opera transmission from Bayreuth, turn another and it’s from St. James’s Hall. One hundred and fifty years later the jokes aren’t so very funny, the problems they face are pint-size (“doll-like, puppetlike” as the poet Elena Shvarts writes), but one of the drawings from 1878, a year after the phonograph was invented, is incredibly touching.

  A woman in a housecoat and a man in a jacket and hat stand studying the contents of a wine cellar. They have already chosen a few bottles and they are intently looking round at the shelves, but the bottles contain voices, and not wine. The long caption (all Du Maurier’s captions are long) reads:

  By the telephone sound is converted into electricity, and then, by completing the circuit, back into sound again. Jones converts all the pretty music he hears during the season into electricity, bottles it, and puts it away into bins for his winter parties. All he has to do, when his guests arrive, is to select, uncork, and then complete the circuit; and there you are!

  On the wine cellar’s shelves are Rubinstein, Tosti, all the musical hits of the period, long since scattered and vanished; opera stars whose voices we have been told about but will never hear. Perhaps only Adelina Patti, recorded later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, can still be heard, although it’s a strange sensation, the voice barely emerges from the bottle throat, and the 1904 coloratura sends shivers down the spine, as if a ghost were tickling you. The other inhabitants of the wine cellar were not so lucky. The more famous ones look down at us from old photographs: garlanded, bright-eyed, monochrome. One or two didn’t even have this honor, just a name, a few mentions: “never made gramophone recordings of her voice”; date of death unknown. Sometimes the picture ripples, there is the flicker of an anecdote: St. Petersburg students once lay in the February snow so Christina Nilsson could walk across them to her coach. In another story she’s taking aim in a damp, cold wood and firing — and the bear drops down to the ground, flat as a bearskin rug. Here’s another: the graduates of West Point each cut a golden button from their dress coat and make from the buttons a heavy golden wreath to lay on the singer’s shoulders as a souvenir of her audience. The aria swells, but we can’t hear a single note. The “great Trebelli,” as Joyce called her, putting on her men’s clothes to play the role of Gounod’s Siébel: white stockings, ruffled sleeves, and a wh
ite feather. Another diva signed her name on the wall of a London restaurant where they served borscht on a Sunday: blue curtains, light-blue wallpaper, and the autographs of the habitués preserved under a piece of glass.

  Somewhere in the lowest drawers of my parents’ polished cabinet were deposits of sheet music. There was no one with any musical skill left in the family to sort through the scores. When we moved to a new apartment in 1974, the piano that had stood for seventy years in the old apartment was on the list of essentials, what needed to be taken up into the new life. The millipede-like dining table that could seat twenty, the huge carved sideboard that looked like a house, the rocking chair and the chandelier with its serried rows of crystals — all remained in the old life. But the “musical instrument,” like the portrait of a half-forgotten relative, took up its position against the wall and stood patiently, putting up with my reluctant scales, studies, and Old French chansons until they dried up of their own accord.

  The pages of music were a different matter. The jumbled sheets were marked with little blackberry stains of sound I couldn’t decipher, but they were interesting for other reasons: their names written in a spidery script, running from beat to beat, syllable to syllable, with my finger following. These had nothing in common with the everyday Soviet world: “Lit-tle-black-boy-Tom, in-Alger-ia-born, where none-fear-death and love-is-strong.” Sometimes a piece of music would be illustrated. I have a dim memory of the cover of “The Salon Waltz: A Dream of Love after the Ball,” cherubs teeming under the sleeping debutante, the silky puff of her gown, her tiny slippers on the carpet. All this seemed ancient, and not because of its remoteness in time — at that point, the 1920s felt like yesterday. Then and now were completely irreconcilable. We had our own intimate pleasures, but they were from an entirely different songbook with different lyrics: the wooden seats on the train to the dacha and the noisy blue-tinged counters at the grocery shop, with their alkaline tang and sour-cream smell. Next door in the hardware store the wooden drawers held oily mounds of nails of differing sizes and shapes; at the market black-eared rabbits were sold alongside poorly gilded wooden angels; farther on, a line for liters of fermented kvas stretched as far as the telephone box.