*
Isaak Gurevich Street had been given its new name only a few months beforehand, and had not quite inhabited it. It was in fact simply the space between the gates and fences that lined it on both sides, and seemed narrow as a result, but it was hardly used anyway. On the corner hung a plaque with the old name: Bauman Street. The place had no particular link with my great-great-grandfather but I was still grateful to Kherson for its act of remembrance. The house with the Atlases was now painted a chestnut-brown color, with a boarded-up basement and a little shop selling souvenirs. It gave me no sense of familiarity, although I walked through to the yard and even stuck my head in to see the creaking staircase to a veranda, where the colored glass windows looked out onto trees.
A corridor led into the depths of the building, and I followed it as far as the bright square at its furthest point — no one ever locks a door in the south. Washing hung on a line, a cat leaped out of our way, I was momentarily blinded by the light as I came out onto the veranda and saw the sky above it. All this was alien, belonging to the woman who shouted cross words at our trespassing, and I had no sense of sadness or loss.
Neither my grandfather Lyonya, with a mustache just like his father’s on his babyish face, nor his severe mother Betya, ever came back here, and I could see why. Apparently Grandfather had gone back to Odessa in later years, and even visited someone he knew. But Kherson and Kakhovka slowly faded, sank to the deep seabed of memory, as out of reach as Switzerland. There was nothing left to find here. Still, for the sake of propriety, I did have one more place I needed to visit.
The New Jewish Cemetery, as it was once called, was founded in the nineteenth century. We’d arranged to meet a local historian in a café on the day before, and when I’d told him we were planning to visit the cemetery he’d politely commented that it wasn’t in the best state. Natural enough, we supposed, as there were very few Jews left in the town to tend it. We took a taxi to the cemetery; the afternoon heat had settled like a lid and my skirt stuck to my legs. The town had petered out, its remains lay scattered over the scrub, half-built houses on large plots of land, looking for all the world as if someone had taken a bite out of them and then left them half-eaten. Everything was sky blue and yellow flax. We drove past a space of wild grassland behind a wire mesh fence and the driver suddenly said that this was it, but he wasn’t sure where the entrance was. A little way ahead were some garages or storage units and we walked for ages along the perimeter fence until we came across a locked gate. Beyond it was what looked like an empty kennel and then the tombstones. We could have scrambled over the low fence, but the lock gave way and the door opened. I went in. My husband waited outside on the road.
I had no real idea what I was looking for. The tombs of my unknown relatives could have been anywhere, and it was instantly clear that the cemetery had given up the ghost, had allowed the land to consume it — and this had happened not recently, but many years ago. A little farther off were tombstones, obelisks, and what might have been a crypt but looked more like a ruined military dugout. These seemed to have lost all purpose, they had collapsed into the ground, and between them patches of spiky scrub sprouted like mangy fur. The place was quite overgrown, it was an effort to reach them, and I felt a rising fury — at my husband who had left me on my own, at the spikes and thorns catching on my skirt, at this senseless search, which had never once brought me closer to my goal. The fury kept me struggling forward, I walked three hundred meters without even noticing, and only then did I hitch up my skirt to examine my legs, which were striped with scratches like a cuneiform tablet, and I gasped with the realization of pain.
From here, wherever I looked I found myself surrounded by pale-colored scrub, like a mess of untidy hair. From a distance it looked like high grasses, but in fact it was a mat of thorns, burned by the sun to transparency and covered in tiny shell-like growths. I had walked farther and farther in, and I now stood waist-deep in the thorny plant and it clutched at me. The tombstones were not far off now, but there was no way to reach them. I could make out yawning holes around their bases, and I could see that some of the older stones had name plaques that couldn’t have been from before the 1950s or 1960s. I could see the stumps of old railings around the tombstones, one little fence still shone with a flame-blue paint. The fallen tombstones were hidden by wild flowers, burdocks, and snail shells, and their surfaces resembled burned skin. There was no reason to go farther, nowhere to go, but it was equally beyond me to retrace my hundred or so steps across this merciless landscape. It was perfectly clear to me that even if there were some Gurevichs buried here, I wasn’t going to find them, and I didn’t even want to anymore. The past had bitten me, but it was only a warning nip, and it was still prepared to let me go. Slowly, very slowly, step by step and bawling gently at the effort, I made my way back to what had once been the beginning of the path through the cemetery.
3. Boys and Girls
A mother and her son and two daughters once lived in the district town of Bezhetsk. By their village standards it was practically a capital city, with houses made of stone and even a cathedral and monastery. They’d come from Zharki, their native village. The father, Grigory Stepanov, did seasonal work in a St. Petersburg factory and traveled back and forth. There is no record of what he did there. They lived as people generally do, causing no trouble to anyone; they were not poor, the children could all read and write and the oldest, Nadya, who was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, wanted to study in a school. There was a girl’s gymnasium in the town and her parents were just considering this. Nikolai was born in 1906, his sister Masha was a year younger. Nikolai later remembered them sitting together in the summer heat on the riverbank, reading the exciting Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton, and Walter Scott.
There was an accident at the factory: their father was dragged into the machine and the machine, like a living creature, bit off his right arm, his working arm. So he returned to Bezhetsk for good. The factory owners paid him a huge amount in compensation, as he was a qualified worker who was no longer able to work. No one knows how much, but it was enough to buy a house built partly of stone, and a cow called Zorka, and to send Nadya to the girl’s school. In the aftermath, in the suddenly empty life of an invalid, Grigory took to drink and his drinking killed him. It happened terrifyingly fast. By the time they buried him, a few years later, they’d lost both cow and house.
There’s no one left to tell the rest of the story. A family of local gentry took Nadya on and treated her as their own, paying for her school books and school aprons, but they didn’t help the others; poverty swallowed them like a black hole.
I remember how my grandfather Nikolai used to sit for hours by the silent piano and recount his story to my mother. Some small fragments I can remember to this day, not because I was listening particularly carefully, but simply because it was always the same story, repeated countless times — only my mother’s courteous attentiveness shielded him from the realization that everyone knew the story already. Once my grandfather began to lose his memory, nothing between his destitute childhood and the death of his wife interested him anymore: the sense of being abandoned returned as if it’d never been gone, and he was quite alone again.
He often returned to the same part of the story, the lowest ebb of their fortunes, the year when he and his mother were forced to go begging for alms. They sewed a canvas bag to put offerings in, and went hand in hand in the sunshine from one house to the next, knocking at the low windows. They stood at the cathedral’s entrance at one o’clock when mass was over and the churchgoers thrust bronze coins into the outstretched palms. The utter disgrace of this changed his life for good, and at this point his story began to break apart into strings of confused phrases. He ran away from home and lived rough, slept in railway sheds, derelict houses, in foundation pits (I still don’t know what he meant by this). Then he went home, because the family couldn’t manage without him. He was working by the age
of fourteen, minding the community herd of cattle, weaving their cumbersome way down the Bezhetsk streets in the evenings. His mother considered returning to their native village, but there was no one left to help them.
When I was twelve I was inexplicably occupied by the fate of runaway children and juvenile criminals. I drank in the books of the Soviet educationalist Anton Makarenko, who had run a juvenile detention center in the 1920s, where hard-nosed young villains were recast as exemplary young Communists (obviously I preferred these heroes in their former guise, it fitted with my own longing for a more exciting life). I kept bothering my grandfather with questions but I could see that he had nothing more to tell me. He didn’t want to recall those years of sleeping rough for a reason I couldn’t then comprehend. He shook off my pleading with an expression of morose revulsion. Only once, in response to my endless questioning, he agreed to sing “Lost and Forgotten,” a song you could hear back then in every railway carriage and at every flyblown little country halt.
I will never forget it. Grandfather Nikolai began to sing in a quavering tenor, closing his eyes and rocking slightly, as if he was using his body to inch his way down into a dark and seemingly bottomless well. He no longer saw me, he’d forgotten my request. In his stumbled phrasing, and shorn of its upbeat, romantic qualities, the simple song was a horrifying spatter of sound. It sounded like nothing I’d ever heard, as if something very ancient had fought its way back to life and stood in the middle of our room, twitching and blinking. The original song was a sentimental thing, about a boy in a foreign country and his lonely little tomb, all of it very lovingly described, but there was nothing human in that performance, neither in the words, nor the voice of the singer — it was as if he was singing from the afterlife, already indifferent to the fate of humankind. A deadly chill touched the room.
*
Back in the mid-1970s my grandfather suddenly decided to visit the town of his birth, to see whether it was still standing. What happened then resembles a film from my youth: my father and my seventy-year-old grandfather, shaved and smartly dressed, set off after lunch on a motorbike, the older man holding tightly to the younger. The pair traveled for 300 kilometers along broken roads, staying over somewhere when it got dark, and reaching the town the next morning. They wasted no time looking around, but drove down one street and then another, my grandfather pointing the way, until they reached a featureless low house, identical to those around it. The ground floor was uninhabited, and they climbed up to the first floor. The owner answered the door. She didn’t want to let them in — what did they want with the house, she’d been there since the war — but Grandfather said in the terse voice of a military officer that he hadn’t come to claim the place back. The woman wasn’t convinced, but it shut her up. Grandfather stood under the low ceiling for a few moments, looking about him, and then said they could go. They got on the motorbike and set off back to Moscow.
Bezhetsk was once part of the lands owned by Tsarevich Dmitry, Ivan the Terrible’s son, who died aged nine in May 1591. The bell tower with its tented roof was built ten years before his death. When we visited the town it was untouched, as if time was just beginning. A four-cornered pool encased in pondweed lay behind the tower, right under its tiny square window; the window had been blocked up because drunken locals used to climb in hoping to steal things. The church the bell tower had once belonged to was gone — it had been razed to the ground.
“Those thieves who climbed in the window after the icons, they all came to a bad end,” reported the old woman who looked after the box of candles in the chapel in the former bell tower. “They drove off in two cars and the cars crashed and no one survived.” Only three or four of the original twenty or so churches in the town were still standing, although the half-destroyed, half-reconstructed outlines of some of the others could just about be made out in garage and warehouse buildings. The weeds had been given free rein: every gap and space was occupied by growth, proliferating and swelling with the sense of its own importance, dock leaves the size of sheets of newspaper, and cheery pink and blue lupins lighting the town. The main square, once named Nativity Square after the cathedral where my grandfather had been christened, was now named Victory Square, and a puddle, fringed by grass, ran the length of it. The cathedral itself was huge, with eight radiating chapels. Built in the eighteenth century, it boasted “a ciborium of rare beauty,” supported by sixteen columns, and oval icons. It was entirely destroyed in the revolution, when the building was turned into a sewing factory. When we visited it was bare, its windows yawned, its domes had been lopped off; it belonged to the realm of the lupins and the towering cow parsley.
We walked down a street that had already had three names, the last the name of a Bolshevik: the little town had got used to each in turn. On the corner was a building that had not changed very much. In the 1920s another little boy had lived there, Lev Gumilev, the son of two poets. His father, Nikolai Gumilev, was executed in 1921, when the little boy was only seven; his mother, Anna Akhmatova, lived in Saint Petersburg. Lev was brought up by his grandmother in Bezhetsk; his mother visited the town only twice. It was a two-story house, like most of the houses there, still residential, with a vegetable plot in the garden behind a fence. My family lived only a few hundred meters away — any of the overgrown buildings nearby could have been ours. In the same year, 1921, Nikolai Stepanov, a blacksmith’s apprentice, had just started work. Lev Gumilev went to a Soviet school, where, as he later said, he was beaten half to death.
The two boys barely shared a world, apart from the dust and the burdock on the walk they must both have taken toward the market square and the library, which Lev Gumilev remembered in old age: “complete collections of Mayne Reid, Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and many other exciting books.” The library was free and open to all; anyone could come and borrow those books beloved of boys of all ages: Dumas, Conan Doyle, Walter Scott. There, without knowing each other, two boys reached for books from the same shelves: a teenage boy whose childhood had been drawn into the whirlpool of history, and my grandfather, who might have been delighted to have been drawn into the whirlpool, but was luckily saved.
*
I have to reassemble his life from its constituent parts, from various accounts, breaking off and beginning again from the same place, from records of employment, military ID and photographs. The most detailed of these is the “record of employment,” which begins in 1927 and gives Nikolai Stepanov’s nationality (Russian), his employment (joiner), education (three years at a village school, elsewhere it is recorded as four years), first employment (cowherd in Bezhetsk and Zharki). At sixteen he found work at a privately owned forge, but only lasted a couple of months there. From November 1922 he was employed as a joiner’s apprentice in the Bezhetsk Mechanics Works. It is there that he joins the Komsomol, the Communist youth movement created in 1918 as a first step to joining the party. At eighteen he is the secretary to the workers’ committee in the same factory, and at nineteen he moves to Tver as a cadet in the local party school.
To try to imagine this journey, I had to wind the film back to its beginning, to its very source, where there is nothing, just the midday heat, and him walking behind his mother, moving from yard to yard, and when they open the gate to her and she mutters “for the sake of Christ,” he can only focus mutely on the cracks in the loam. My paternal grandfather was the only person in my family for whom the revolution was like rain in July, like the emptying of a full load of grain onto the waiting earth. His life began just as all hope was over; all of a sudden everything was made good and filled with meaning. The injustices could be set straight like a broken arm, and the world made better for people like Nikolai Stepanov. Each and every person had a birthright to land and work; working class young people could finally access learning, it was there for them to reach for, like library books on freshly scrubbed shelves.
This new and more caring reality spoke in the language of newspaper
headlines and party decrees, and all its promises were directed at him and his interests. It was now possible to gain an important set of masculine skills without leaving work, like handling arms properly, and learning to shoot and to command the groups of fighters the factory workers were producing munitions for. The Bezhetsk Mechanics Works was also called a Munitions and Firearms Works, and it ceaselessly strove to provide the young republic with what it needed more than bread: revolvers, rifles, mortars, and machine guns. In time, their grim production was watered down with the needs of a nation at peace — plows and coffee grinders — but it was clear that the workers in the factory were intent on defending what they had won in battle, holding onto the gains of the revolution. Nikolai was the secretary of the factory committee, an organization combining management and union, which dealt with everything from purchasing raw materials to paying workers. This committee was also responsible for forming battalions of armed workers who were familiar with the tactics of street fighting and conventional combat.
It was a time of confusion and uncertainty. The peasants in the surrounding villages — in the family’s native Zharki, for example — weren’t so keen on giving up their grain for the new state. It was quite as if they hadn’t realized that it was in their own interests, and they hid the grain wherever they could, and when asked for it directly they were sullen and hostile. Rumors circulated around the villages that there would be a war soon, or certainly an uprising, and that the Bolsheviks were about to bring in new taxes: five rubles for a dog, thirty kopecks for a cat. Waves of peasant uprisings moved across the area, thousands joined in. Tiny Bezhetsk District saw at least twenty-eight riots over three years. Newly formed detachments of Red Army soldiers were sent to put the rebellions down. Both sides had meetings, passed resolutions, beat up offenders, executed them, buried them alive. After the war, the natural fear of killing another human had gone. It was easier to pull the trigger, and there were more arms “lying around” — the piles of requisitioned rifles had multiplied. The political “agitators,” who were in charge of convincing the peasants to cooperate with the Soviets, set off for the villages as if they were heading into battle: “A revolver hanging at his waist, sometimes two, grenades stuffed into his pockets.”
In Memory of Memory Page 39
