Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

I’m so sorry!!

If I’d known I would never have been so cruel.

And then today I had to tell you what I never wanted to have to tell you.

I’m so sorry about that, too!

I underestimated your feelings, I was scared to share what belonged to me. But your tear taught me that I don’t exist anymore, there is only “us” and we have to get through difficult times, full of self-denial, and we have to repay the sacrifice to a person who gave up so much for one of us. This is the only way out I can see, my darling. Will you be able to do this, my sweetheart? Will you have enough strength and resolution? Please decide. From today onward I will be absolutely open with you. You must understand absolutely what I am asking of you.

It may be that our sacrifice will help us look into the future with joy, perhaps by supporting each other we will be able to get through those dark hours. Perhaps the inescapable nature of our situation will make us stronger.

I can’t bear to think of a different outcome. I’m sure you will support me, after all how could I lose you now that you’ve become so close and dear to me? I can’t!

Please promise me that you will help me carry out what I have always considered to be my sacred duty. Promise me that your love is deep enough, and I will be so very happy. I will feel renewed certainty that I made the right choice in you…

I promise in return that I will lighten the heavy burden of your daily troubles with my gratitude and loving attention, because I value your sacrifice very highly. That tear, your tear has done so much good, my love.

2.

Undated.

My dearest

How endlessly slowly the days are passing, how depressingly slowly.

These last three days have seemed an eternity.

I’m out of sorts, I can’t do anything. I want to be with you, to bear your troubles with you, although, thank God [crossed out] , they are behind you now, but that only gives me a little relief, mostly my mood is desolate.

I sit and read your letters and I realize once again just how good you are.

My sweet friend!

How can I tell you what I’ve suffered and what I’ve thought over these last long days, how can I tell you about all the terrible sadness, how my soul ached. My dearest, I hope our life together will be lit by the love and tenderness I feel in your letters.

So much has been left unsaid. But I have no words! I’m no good at sharing confidences.

On the other side of the paper:

I want our happiness to be enveloped in the new feelings you have woken in me. I want our relationship to be one of tender touch and attentions, and for the bitterness to remain undisturbed deep in our hearts, the angry words to remain unspoken. Even our thoughts should be constantly occupied with each other’s happiness.

I am changed…

Farther down, in my grandfather’s large handwriting:

My darling

These few words will tell you everything I am thinking, everything I desire and dream of, more than if I wrote a hundred words, because you would still have to read between the lines to understand what I want to tell you. It can’t be expressed in words because words only convey my thinking, and not my feelings. My darling, be happy!

“All the earth is a sacred tomb, the ashes of our fathers and brothers are everywhere” is a line from the Orthodox Burial Service. Since there is only one earth (and we are its only human dwellers), the meeting place between the quick and the dead, traditionally the cemetery, could be in fact any scrap of land under our feet. But the cemetery still works for us, in fact it has even too many functions. In eighteenth-century Venice, monasteries had special reception rooms where the secular and worldly could come to make music, play dominoes, chat among themselves, drink coffee, and (almost incidentally) visit their dead. The monks and novices sat separated from them by an iron grille, nodding at their conversations, but leaving back into their own very different lives. Over the last two or three hundred years the cemetery has become such a zone of one-way conversation, like a visiting room in a monastery or a prison camp, always fragmentary, always partial. But the cemetery has other, far more ancient preoccupations: it is also the place of letters, of inscribed witness.

The cemetery as address book for all humanity sets out everything we need to know with concision. In effect it comes down to names and dates — we don’t need to know any more. We read and remember at most two or three familiar names, for who could fix all its thousands of pages in the mind? But supposing those who lie there have an interest in whether they are remembered? All they can hope for is a chance passerby to stop and read; a stranger, filled with an age-old curiosity about life before he appeared in the world, who will pick out their grave from all others, and stand and remark on it. This belief in the redemptive regard of a stranger — in his eyes, flickering between the stone-carved lines of text, from letter to letter, imbuing each with temporary life and teleological warmth — makes orphans of the tombstones without inscriptions, or the stones with such worn faces they can no longer be read. A tombstone might seem almost pointless, functioning merely as a road sign (Here Lies a Person!). After all, the important stuff is under the tombstone and not on it, and people know their own dead, don’t they? Still, for some reason, the inscription, what the person under the gravestone was called and how old they were, is essential to us. Why it is so is another matter entirely.

This need is very ancient, far older than Christianity and its belief in resurrection for all. In Economy of the Unlost Anne Carson offers a careful and surprising comparison between two bodies of work (by Paul Celan and Simonides of Keos), and maintains that it is on the burial mound, where there is only a stranger’s death, a stone, and the need for a clarifying text, that poetry emerges from its shell of sound and comes into its own as a written art, aimed at the one looking at the tomb, and his ability to do what the words cut into the stone ask of him: to use his memory and its “sense of order.” The epitaph is the first written poetic genre, the subject of the contract between living and dead, a pact of mutual redemption. The living offer the dead a place in their memories, and they believe, to use the poet and songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky’s words, “the dead won’t leave us in our hour of need.”

The poet, whoever he might be, is quite essential: he carries out the task of redemption, makes a life “portable,” decouples the sign from the body and the memory from the place where that body lies. Once read, the epitaph takes wing: a vehicle, a right of passage, giving the dead a new verbal existence, unlimited movement within the internal and external space of memory, in the anthologies of world poetry and the corridors of our minds. Still, what do the dead care for our anthologies?

“The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple,” writes Carson. “It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here — deny them their nothingness — by naming their names. Out of these two wrongs come the writing of epitaphs.” Poetry as an epistolary form, a letter intended for a recipient, begins with the attempt to right the wrong inherent in the idea of choice, which divides the human population into two categories, the interesting and the less interesting, those who are fit for retelling, and those who are only fit for oblivion.