Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

A cemetery doesn’t make that choice: it attempts to remember everyone. That must be why they have been pushed out to the very edges of our towns, to the periphery of vision and consciousness, as if the volume of life lived by others, as well as the quantity of these others, is simply too much to contain in the mind. Our daily lives are surrounded by the displaced peoples of human history, the agitated sea of the dead, who have been crossed off the list and denied every right, except the right to an inscription and the occasional posy of flowers. There are rare times when they become more visible, and at these moments reality distorts, breaks down into its separate layers, and as my little boat makes its way across the black surface of the water, pale faces rise from the depths. I can make out each of them clearly, I regard them, I can put my hand out to them and pull them into the spotlight.

Yet how to choose and whom to choose? Between the clear necessity of saving everyone indiscriminately, and the desire, equally human and obvious, involuntary as a muscle spasm, to choose from the multitudes the very one , the only one, there is no space for a correct decision. This is a zone of infernal wrongness, run through with one’s own and others’ suffering, warped by a general helplessness, shot through with an electric arc, welding past and present until both are burnt out. Any text, any speech rooted in the impossibility of choice flares up and burns, without answering its own questions. Perhaps it is best not to choose? To reel off names one after another until the pages run out? Or limit oneself to what (who) is closest? Or to find something that answers to a single vaguely formulated principle and pull it loose, like a colored thread running through the fabric of time? Or maybe it is simpler just to close your eyes and fall backward, as if you knew familiar arms would be waiting to catch you?

The Great Hall of the State Archives, with its bright, full-length windows, was packed with readers, and the whisper of page-flicking echoed in the air. The information I needed was scattered throughout the various collections. I had inventory numbers and inscrutable references, but slowly the contour of a possible request took shape, like the spine of a large fish glimpsed in the murk of a lake. The unremarkable names of my relatives, all those Ginzburgs, Stepanovs, and Gurevichs, lengthened the process; I was showered with pellets of time-hardened information, like mothballs from an attic, none of which pertained to my family’s history, but were in their own way peepholes into other lives, wriggling beyond my reach.

There was, for example, an official report written in 1891 concerning a Gurevich, who was not a relative, but who had reached a high rank despite his Jewishness, and had become the Governor of the Odessa Prison Fortress. In Russia’s South that was briefly possible, especially in Odessa, with its magnificent disdain for the thin partition walls of nationality. Close to Odessa, in Kherson, his namesake, my great-grandfather, was building his first factory. But this unknown Gurevich was having troubles, and one hundred and twenty years later I sat reading, line by line, an account of his downfall.

The report was addressed to Mikhail Nikolaevich Galkin-Vrasky, the Head of the recently founded Central Prison Service:

In the past year, during a visit to Odessa, Your Excellency observed the local Prison Fortress and was much pleased with the order found there. He was moved to intercede on behalf of the prison’s management, for their diligence and special efforts. As a result the Prison Governor Court Councillor Gurevich, among others, was, by Royal Assent, granted the Order of St. Anna, Second Class. Unfortunately a few recent occurrences in the prison have shown Gurevich’s lack of competence for this position, which requires, above all, unceasing vigilance, an ability to grasp a situation rapidly, and to take the correct measures. These qualities are especially necessary in the Governor of Odessa’s Prison Fortress, which houses a significant number of hard labor convicts. Without appropriate and careful supervision, these convicts have a deleterious influence on the other prisoners, who become their obedient servants and help them attack the prison systems. Gurevich does nothing to counteract this, and it now appears that he frequently places hardened criminals in the same cells as petty offenders and as a result the latter become quickly demoralized and find it hard to submit to the demands of prison discipline. If that weren’t enough, observation of Gurevich has revealed that he often allows himself to grant indulgences and permits small lapses in discipline for the hardened criminals, simply to curry favor with them. A cowardly man, timid, weak of character, and underhand, Gurevich is not only unable to keep control himself, he also hinders the efforts of his assistants and the prison guards, and prevents them using the prerequisite energy to rein in the prisoners. As a result the smallest upset in prison life becomes a notable event, and any real trouble quickly escalates into serious rioting.

I do not consider it excessive to list the following examples from the life in Odessa Prison Fortress as evidence of the above claims:

1. Prisoner Chubchik, notorious for his brutal murders, burglaries and banditry, and sentenced to indefinite hard labor, boasted more than once that he could escape while incarcerated in Odessa Prison, and despite this he remained almost unsupervised. Chubchik and two of his comrades, also sentenced to hard labor, used the excuse of laundry washing to leave their cells several times a day and spend time in the latrines, where they managed to saw off an iron bar from the window bars using a thin metal file they had on their person, then to tie together sheets and towels to make a rope, and Chubchik even managed to take off the manacles he wears at night and drop down through the hole in the window into the prison yard, where he made his way to the fence. Luckily he was noticed and apprehended in time.

2. […] There are regular roll calls of the prisoners at named hours and senior members of prison staff are often absent at these roll calls, so the prison guards conduct them. Against prison rules bedding rolls are often carried out of the cells, not just by the prisoners on cleaning duty, but by every prisoner, and last year a hard labor prisoner in transit named Kuznetsov carried out his bed with the others and took it to the tower corridor, where he hanged himself with his own belt without being noticed.

3. […] cards, dominoes, bones, tobacco, and various metal objects were found on the men, and this was noted in the prison records. When Prison Inspector Eversman commented on this Gurevich replied with utter naivety that “you can’t do anything with these men, when the guards try to search them they bandy blows!”

In the round of the peephole I can see Chubchik serenely playing dominoes with the other prisoners, but I can’t make out the fate of the timid Gurevich. Other reports from later years are attached to the case file and it is clear that things didn’t change in the Odessa Fortress even under a new governor, who also went on to be sacked. The images proceeding before my eyes as I read these papers are suffused with a peculiar and terrible reality, far more real than my great-grandmother’s yellowing spiderweb-lace dickey. Not intended for the eyes of others, nor for long life, the archived papers are illuminated on a first reading, as if they had been waiting for your attention — the unfortunate Kuznetsov at the moment of his death in the corridor, mentioned only once, but forever before my eyes, as if there were no one else to remember him and call him by his name — and I suppose there isn’t.