In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  I should add here that in contrast to his generation of compatriots who never left the Soviet Union, Lyonya was a lucky exception. He had been abroad — this family story was repeatedly told to me from my earliest childhood. Lyonya was born in 1912 with clubfoot. I couldn’t see anything wrong with his feet in the old photographs, just a baby with such pale eyes they looked white, lying on his stomach. They treated the condition thoroughly, took it all very seriously, and managed to cure him. Every summer Lyonya’s mother took him to the same Swiss sanatorium where there were green hills, and Lyonya learned to walk better and better on the hills until he was ready for the new life, in which all travel would cease. But he remembered Switzerland very well. When he was privy to those classic Soviet intelligentsia conversations about where one would go if one were able, and Paris, Tokyo, and Rome were flung down like hands of playing cards, he would sit without saying a word. If you asked him directly he would answer without hesitation: I would go to Switzerland.

  *

  Lyonya, or so I was told, wrote his first academic thesis on a hospital windowsill, during a period of recuperation when he was supposed to be resting, although he couldn’t bear to sit still. He was full of curiosity, he always had a new interest, and the range of these different interests brought its own financial rewards: they always lived well.

  Articles, books, lecturing in three different academic institutes didn’t satisfy him. It was as if he sensed that he’d been made for bigger things, or other things, and he threw himself into ever newer pursuits, ticking more and more boxes on some invisible form. I suspect that the shadowy “little friends” were all part of this hunger, if they didn’t fill a hole, then they momentarily satisfied a need that was invisible to everyone else. His cup of life ran over. He designed transport interchanges, he played chess, he invented things, and applied for patents for them — including an object that always fascinated me. I boasted about it in childhood, and I am still proud of it today: a complicated mechanism for testing whether a watermelon is off. The pointlessness of its complication gave it a special thrill because you knew even as you used it that you could tell whether a watermelon was off simply by flicking a finger against it and listening for the tight echoing of its belly.

  These displacement activities were joined by the constant rhyme-mongering. His talented nature found expression here too, and the verses came tumbling out whenever there was an occasion for such jokes in verse. Before the war he had enjoyed a reputation as a very witty man, adept at table talk. Nobody I spoke to remembered him from that time, though. My mother’s friends remembered him as a preoccupied and glum man, who would greet them and then disappear off to his own business. Lyolya was the life and soul of the house, everyone loved her and she loved everyone. She baked cake after cake, embroidered table­cloth after tablecloth, knew everyone and remembered everything. She kept a whole huge family of second and third cousins together, held them close to her heart. The Doctors’ Plot left her without work until a contact of Sarra invited her to work with them at a medical inspection point. Offering work to a Jewish doctor was a gesture of extreme nobility, almost a suicidal act at that time, and she remained there for the rest of her working life, either out of gratitude or because she had no more desire to move.

  After Lyolya died my mother didn’t mention her to me for a very long time, and then suddenly she asked if I remembered Grandmother. I did. “And what was she like?” “She adored me,” I said with certainty. And I know this of her: she was adored by everyone, near and far, the light of collective adoration is blinding to this day and prevents me from seeing any detail. What was she like? Auntie Sima, my old nanny, who remembered a time when everyone was young, answered my questions brusquely: “She was a happy creature. She’d put on her perfume and her lipstick and run off to a meeting on the boulevard.” What meeting? Who was she meeting — the mysterious Nelidov? My mother’s friend came to see me to tell me more family history, and when I asked for details, she said simply: “She was a . . . she was a proper lady,” and would say no more.

  What she meant by this couldn’t actually be said in the language of a new age. By “proper lady” she perhaps meant a living anachronism, a person of another era with qualities and virtues that had long since disappeared. And this demanded a language that had vanished too, full of “properness” with regard to long-defunct rules and obligations. Lyolya’s good-heartedness made her way of surviving bearable for those around her. The alternating softness and harshness, the uncompromising, and then the suffering, spirit — it is all so familiar, and it can’t begin to be lined up against how we see the world today. I remember I was once stunned by my mother saying, “If I’d done that my mother would have slapped my lips,” Even now I shudder at the thought. Her lips? These were the words and actions of a dead language, and even if you wanted to, there was no one left to speak it with.

  Among the various traditions lubricating the family machinery, there was Lyonya’s New Year’s poetry. Lyonya would write a number of funny poems to members of the family: daughter, wife, grandmothers Sarra and Betya, and guests, if guests were expected. These were simple ditties, rhyming “new year” with “cheer,” they radiated the coziness that comes of repetition and settles on the walls like scale in a teapot. But there was one constant motif that always surprised me and I wondered how Lyolya felt about it: the poems addressed to twelve-year-old Natasha recommended she “be like Daddy and not like Mommy.”

  They were by all accounts happy, and they got on, Lyolya the beauty, with her cameo brooch at her throat, her Dickens (she’d made marks around her favorite passages with her fingernail), her embroidery and her sullen, busy husband. She baked and cooked and had people round, grew jasmine and went, as before, on holiday as a couple with Lyonya. Natasha was sent with her nanny for “feeding up” in Svyatogorsk, where she waited, desperately missing her parents, growing her hair into a thick long black braid down to her waist. By the time it reached her knees she had quite grown up. Like her father she wrote poems with ease, and wanted to be a poet: she wanted to be Pushkin, as she said as a child.

  At the time poets were produced in industrial quantities, in a special production plant called the Literary Institute, based in an old building on the Moscow Boulevard behind a wrought-iron fence and surrounded by trees. It was a complicated place with its own heritage and an ability to attract those who needed to be there. In earlier Soviet times both the writer Platonov and Mandelstam managed to survive there briefly and unhappily, and at the end of the 1950s it was considered to be, and perhaps even was, “the place to be.” Natasha dreamed of studying there, but her father, who’d never denied her anything in her life, unexpectedly said no. He forbade her to apply to the Literary Institute with absolute and unbending resolve, reminding her of the age-old, We are Jews. You need a profession. So she obediently went to study in a Construction Institute, graduating with an excellent degree (everything she did was excellent) and receiving as her reward the title of “Pile Foundation Engineer.” Then she actually worked under the ground, in a little basement in a research institute, spending half the day in the underworld, like Persephone. Around her, women in black lab coats stared into microscopes, swapping slides with their friable contents, and the most enormous range of weights was laid out by the old weighing scale; they gleamed and had a pleasant heft in the hand. I dreamed of stealing one.

  The subject of Lyolya’s icy and near-nonexistent relationship with her mother-in-law, Betya, was off-limits in the family (and this silence was just one of the expressions of Lyolya’s famed obstinacy). They weren’t good at hiding their mutual dislike, in both women a sense of dignity demanded the highest standards of behavior. At celebrations and gatherings, the lifeblood of a big and welcoming family, where everyone was loved and everything remembered, they watched each other closely and suspiciously. Natasha was dragged into all of this, and she made valiant attempts to love everyone, but sometimes it was just too hard. Her mother
was the most important person in her life: her mother’s shape and her content were the story she had learned off by heart. Even years later, in her own stories of family life, although she never judged Betya, she pushed her away, held her at a distance, at the very margins of the family’s history.

  Betya Gurevich, born Berta Liberman, lived quietly and independent on the fringes, cherishing and saving every line of poetry written by her son and granddaughter; all the children’s pictures, little poems, telegrams. She spent fifty years working as an accountant for various state institutions with unpronounceable acronyms for names, and in her free time she led a spartan life, never permitting herself any form of excess, especially of words. She left behind no letters, no diaries; she was the odd one out in our family, everyone else was constantly occupied with noting everything down, rhyming it, putting it on a postcard. Inscrutable Betya preferred to say nothing about herself, she was cloaked in silence. I don’t think anyone ever asked her any questions about herself, and that is how I know very little about her — apart from the air of disapproval that I breathed in my childhood. I remember that my mother was wounded when someone commented that I looked like my great-grandmother Betya. She didn’t respond but her silence spoke volumes. I remember the ring Betya left my mother, which my mother never wore. The ring had a chunky setting and a large opaque stone and my mother thought it “too ornate.” All in all, hardly any space was left for Betya, the bête noire, in the family’s accounts of itself.

  I have her school photographs and I can see her, curly-haired, among the lines of girls with their heads held high. There are a few photos from her girlhood and youth, though not many. Her childhood was spent on the edge of poverty; with eight children in the family, and no hope of a decent education, she was forced to give up her dreams of becoming a doctor. Both she and her sister were reputed to be real beauties, fair-haired, fine-boned, with dark eyes and a melancholy gaze. Family legend has it that she married young and well, to the son of a man who manufactured agricultural machinery in Kherson. They were wealthy (among my parents’ papers I found the plans for a large house), and took their son to Switzerland for treatment. And then one day they appeared in Moscow, where everyone appears, sooner or later. This is how I imagined it, and in some details at least I was correct.

  *

  My grandfather was from the southern port city of Odessa. He was an Odessan — this little description stands for a million words. In a well-known Soviet wartime film a girl asks a soldier, “Are you an artiste?” “No, an Odessan,” answers the soldier. Heroes like him became artistes by birth, not by calling — it was an inevitable outcome of being born in Odessa. The soldier in the film then sits down at a grand piano and plays a blithe little song, nothing to do with the war, all chestnut trees and boats and the love between a fisherman and a girl. I can’t entirely explain the charm of the song, but it’s still weaving a spell on me.

  By 1925 Odessa was known as a special place, its uniqueness agreed upon by all; not wholly Soviet, but definitely not quite Russian either: a strange anomaly, cherished by the entire population of this vast land. The nineteenth-century writer Ivan Aksakov called it “foreignized,” tied neither in body nor in soul to the rest of the huge imperial carcass. And it was true: rules and customs that applied across the rest of the Russian territory had no sway here, simply weren’t taken seriously. A German traveler who found himself in Odessa in the mid-nineteenth century wrote: “They say whatever they want about politics, when they speak about Russia it’s as if it’s a foreign country.” Currency exchange signs were in Greek, Odessan writers wrote in French and Italian, high society spoke in French, and the theaters produced plays in five languages. The dark figures of Moldovans, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Germans, Englishmen, Armenians, Crimean Karaites all walked its blinding-white streets like shades. As another witness at the time put it: “If Odessa had to put up a flag that represented its dominating nationalities, it would probably be a Jewish or Greco-Jewish flag.”

  In fact Orthodox Jews didn’t have an especially comfortable time of it in Odessa. According to a local proverb, “The fires of Gehenna burned for seven miles around Odessa” (“zibn mayl arum Odess brent dos gehenem”). The profound indifference to officialdom crossed all borders of nation and faith — both churches and synagogues were less frequented here than in other places, and more than a third of couples with children were unmarried. But the opera was very good. The poet Batyuskkov thought it better than the Moscow opera. Everyone went to the opera, including religious Jews in their sidelocks and hats who were mocked in the stalls for their loud and excessive enthusiasm. The cab drivers sang opera arias as if they were gondoliers. The Odessan way of things was unusually tolerant of difference; it demanded of Odessa’s citizens not so much a readiness to assimilate, as a readiness to hop from one language to another, one idea to the next.

  Odessa resembled one of the ancient Mediterranean towns, in that it belonged to no single culture or nation. Laws ceased to have effect here, its mafia was immortal, its cuisine had no equals. But unlike Naples (for example), Odessa only rose from the sand and the foam two hundred years ago, and at beginning of its history it barely had time to invent a mythology of its own. The mythology was gradually invented around it, and it fitted surprisingly well. A Russian officer wrote that

  everyone is younger and having more fun in Odessa. A yid walking along the street doesn’t cringe as much or look over his shoulder, and a foreigner looks you more squarely in the eye. On the boulevard people stand around chatting and laughing and eating ice cream. They smoke on the streets.

  This is confirmed by an anonymous Jew from Lithuania, quoted in Steven Zipperstein’s The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History praising the “dignity and stateliness of the community, the calm way they walked along the streets, conversed in the Café Richelieu, enjoyed music at the Italian Opera House, and conducted religious services showed how at ease they felt.”

  A particular way of being, and a particular language: by the beginning of the twentieth century Odessa was becoming known as a preserve of the grotesque, and for its distinct style of humor, jokes peppered with Yiddish phrases. This is the warm south, where everything is more theatrical and histrionic, where street runs seamlessly into street, and house into house. The sea and the port were the ideal backdrop in a town where everything followed the comedic principle that the scaffold of the joke existed only to deliver the punchline. Lightness of touch, tethered to the ground but always pulling at those tethers (like a hot air balloon) — these were the necessary conditions of life in Odessa. Their flair for criminality stemmed from these conditions, and they cultivated it, enjoying their Wild West image — young hotheads, indulging in hotblooded violence as a natural process and therefore somehow an acceptable one. The gangsters of Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories gave generations of readers a warm fond feeling: this was humanity before it could be civilized by reading, and in its natural habitat: exotic beasts in a brightly colored zoo. Occasionally this happy-go-lucky sunlit life came undone, revealing its own ugly stuffing — and this began to happen more and more until it became an equal part of the bubbling pot of daily life. Violence racked the city like an involuntary convulsion. The port was full of arms and early in its history you didn’t even need permission to own a gun. Street fights crackled like Roman candles; striking workers and bombers were newspaper heroes. In the period February 1905–May 1906 alone, 1273 people died as a result of “terrorist activity” in the Odessa District: policemen, civil servants, factory owners, and bankers. Politically motivated requisitions were hardly any different from gangster heists. Expropriation became a popular cross-cultural sport. Everyone was at it, from Anarchists to Communists and groups of Jewish vigilantes in black shirts. Suicides were also in vogue — the number of suicides had dramatically increased in the years before 1900, and though the number of those who took their lives in little Odessa was hardly less than in Moscow or St. Petersburg, in Odessa it was don
e with theatricality: the victims shot themselves on balconies with a sea view, or on the smartest street in town, Deribasovsky. Other approaches included the following: “An actress from a minor theater had her hair done at the best hairdressers, put on perfume, a specially chosen dress and white satin shoes, and holding a ready prepared bouquet of flowers she climbed into a warm bath and opened her veins.”

  All this happened in what you might call the public domain, spaces in this cosmopolitan metropolis that were set aside for theater; when you approached its white-hot nucleus, the town began dividing into tribes: “one’s people” and “strangers.” In Vladimir Jabotinsky’s novel The Five, there is a passage in which the narrator describes this phenomenon:

  in our homes, it seems, we lived apart; the Poles visited and invited other Poles, Russians invited Russians, Jews, other Jews; exceptions were encountered relatively infrequently; but we had yet to wonder why this was so, unconsciously considering it simply an indication of temporary oversight, and the Babylonian diversity of our common forum, as a symbol of a splendid tomorrow.

  Jabotinsky also remembers that despite his secular upbringing he had no close childhood friends who weren’t Jewish. Pogroms and rumors about pogroms, the terrified chatter about what was coming and the much quieter conversations about what had happened, were everyday matters from 1882 onward (and up to 1905, when Odessa seemed even to frighten itself with the violence, and finally put a stop to it).

  News of pogroms spread like wildfire around Southern Ukraine. It traveled on trains with the railwaymen, down the Dniepr with the ferrymen, jostled at hiring fairs, and served as a model for new outbursts of pointless cruelty: “Let’s do it the Kievan way!” All the towns with a connection to my well-heeled predecessors bore the traces of this violence. My grandfather Lyonya was born in Kakhovka in 1912, and could well have witnessed the pogrom there in 1915, initiated by retreating Cossack forces. Kherson, where the family owned a fine house with figures on the facade, saw its own pogrom in 1905. Death could come at any moment, it had not a shred of dignity, it was coupled with shame and horror. None of my relatives ever mentioned the pogroms. Were members of my family killed in Odessa in 1905? Were they among the dead, laid out in the streets, barely covered with sheets, their chins jutting out? Or among the ones who hid in attics, in basements and dog kennels, or sheltered by Samaritans? I will never know.