Мария Степанова: In Memory of Memory

It is as if it brings some relief to share all these scraps from the past as I remember them, half-wryly, the transfers dirty and rubbed away a good twenty years even before the kitchen was redecorated, and only now reanimated, illuminated again — fat little boy in a sombrero and yellow-green domino mask but with no face behind the mask, a mass of gold curlicues around his head… As if, like a vanquished wizard, I could disappear, becoming a thousand ancient, neglected, blackening objects. As if my life’s work was to catalog them all. As if that is what I grew up to do.

The second time I started to write this book without even realizing it, I was sixteen, wild, errant, in the afterglow of a love affair that felt as if it had defined everything in my life. With the passing of years this love has dissipated and paled to such an extent that I can no longer conjure up the sensation of “everything beginning” that I felt while I was in its grip. But I remember one thing with absolute clarity — when it became clear that the relationship was over, to all intents and purposes even if not in my head, I decided it was of vital importance to record a sort of “selected impressions”: details, assemblage points, the turns our conversations took, the phrases we used. I wanted to fix them in my mind, to prepare for future writing-up. A linear narrative made no sense for this: the line itself was so shakily drawn. I simply noted down everything that seemed important not to forget; on each square of paper a single word or a few words, which straightaway reconstructed a location and happening in my memory; a conversation, street corner, a joke, or a promise. Every incident struggled desperately against my attempt to contain it, to give it order and sequence — alphabetical or chronological — and so I set on the idea of one day putting all these little twists of paper into a hat (my father’s hat, he had a wonderful gray hat that he never wore) and of pulling them out one by one, and then, one by one, noting them down, point by point, until I was able to leave alone this chartered land of tenderness: a memorial to my own self. After a while these forty or so bits of paper ended up in various drawers of a table we had, and then dissolved somehow, lost in a procession of moves and spring cleans.

Do I need to mention that I don’t remember a single one of the forty words I was so frightened I would forget all those years ago?

And yet I am still smitten with the idea of blindly retrieving and reliving scraps from my life, or from a collective life, rescued from the shadows of the known and accepted histories. The first step of this salvaging is my habitual working process: notes on the back of an envelope, scrawls during a phone call, three words in a notebook, invisible library cards piling up in a hasty and unsystematic manner, never to be reread. All this is the continuing mounting up of my life to date. Only there are ever fewer people with whom I can still discuss how things were .

I always knew I would someday write a book about my family, and there were even periods when this seemed to be my life’s purpose (summarizing lives, collecting them into one narrative) because it was simply the case that I was the first and only person in the family who had a reason to speak facing outward, peering out from intimate family conversations as if from under a fur cap, and addressing the railway station concourse of collective experience. None of these people, not those still alive, nor those already dead, were ever seen . Life gave them no opportunity to be remembered or to remain in view, to stand briefly in the spotlight; their ordinariness put them beyond the usual human interest and this seemed unfair. There was, it felt to me, an urgency in speaking about them and on their behalf, and the endeavor frightened me. To start writing was to cease to be a curious listener, an addressee, and to become instead the horizon point of the family line, the destination for the many-eyed, many-decked ship of family history. I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.

It struck me that my grandparents’ efforts in life were largely dedicated to remaining invisible, to achieving a desired inconspicuousness, to hiding in the dim household light and keeping themselves apart from the wide current of history, with its extragrand narratives and its margins of error: the deaths of millions. Perhaps this was a conscious choice, perhaps not — who knows. In Autumn 1914, when my great-grandmother was a young woman, she returned to Russia from war-torn France, taking a detour to stay clear of the war. She might have gone back to her old ways, her revolutionary activity; she might have had her name in school history books or, just as likely, in the lists of the executed. But she remained well beyond the reach of the textbooks and their footnotes, in a place where all we can see is swirly-patterned wallpaper and an ugly old yellow butter dish, which survived its owner and the old world, and even the twentieth century.

Earlier in my life this gave me cause for some embarrassment, although the reason for this is hard to put into words and shameful to admit. I suppose the embarrassment had something to do with the “narrative drive.” I felt bound to notice that my ancestors had hardly made any attempt to make our family history interesting. This was particularly clear to me when we commemorated the war each year at school. The war had happened forty odd years before. Other peoples’ grandfathers came into school with their medals and bouquets of flowers, they never said much (because what had happened to them hardly bore being salami-sliced into episodes of derring-do), but they stood very upright by the blackboard, and even if they gave no witness accounts, they were in themselves pieces of evidence. My grandfather Lyonya did not fight: he was an engineer in the rear guard. I pinned more hope on Kolya, my other grandfather, with his officer ranking and his Order of the Red Star. But it turned out he had served in the Far East during the war, and I could never quite establish whether or not he did any fighting.

When I conducted further research, it began to look like he hadn’t fought after all. He had been under suspicion, something had happened — and the shadowy tale hung untold, like a dark cloud, over that side of the family. This story had a title — “When father was an enemy of the people” — and it took place in 1938–39, during an “unspoken” Beria amnesty, when some were suddenly set free and others, like my grandfather, escaped imprisonment. It was only when I compared dates that I realized that my grandmother was pregnant with her second child during those dark days: my father was born on August 1, 1939, exactly a month before the outbreak of the Second World War, and the composition of Auden’s poem:

Lord knows by what miracle he survived and even grew up in an intact family with a mother and a father and a sister. I know two versions of the story. The one they told me in my childhood now seems a confection and apocryphal — I’ll write of it later. But the image of my grandfather the warrior didn’t really stick: in the story told at home he was a mere splinter in a whirlpool — hardly the hero of a stirring tale of war and victory.

Everyone else’s ancestors had taken part in history, but mine seemed to have been mere lodgers in history’s house. None of them had fought or been repressed or executed (there were dark rumors of arrest and interrogation surrounding the other grandfather, but it seems the affair died down and he escaped persecution), none had lived under German occupation or fought in the battles of the century. One story stood like an obelisk in all this: the life of my great-great-aunt’s twenty-year-old son, who died defending Leningrad. This was a tale of the unfairness of life, and no amount of icy anesthetic running through the veins could dull its horror. Wasn’t it impossible for the little boy in the photos in his round-toed felt boots to die? The news of his death is so inconceivable that sometimes just the mention of the boy’s name is enough to make me go dark before the eyes , as my mother used to say — both the story and my response to it, learned from her.