Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

As the dead get more distant, their black-and-white features look ever nobler and finer. When I was younger people still used to say of prerevolutionary photographs: “What wonderful faces, you don’t see faces like that anymore!” Now we say that about the faces of Second World War soldiers, or students in the sixties. And it’s quite true: you don’t see faces like that anymore. We aren’t them. They aren’t us. A picture cunningly replaces this terribly obvious fact with simple parallels. They are holding a child, and we sometimes do that, too. That girl looks just like me apart from her long skirts and squashed hat. Grandmother is drinking from my cup, I am wearing her ring. Them too. Us as well.

However effortlessly convincing the (full and exhaustive) knowledge offered by the pictures seems, the words that accompany them, written back then , relocate us in our own time. The little beak of the punctum taps at the points of similarity; whereas the voice, reminding us of the real extension of time, can barely be heard from the other side of the abyss. Years ago, the vivacious eighty-year-old redhead Antonina Petrovna Gerburt-Geibovich, an older friend of my mothers, admitted shamefacedly that her mother-in-law had reproached her for her “officer’s” tastes: “I love gladioli and champagne!” I was immediately aware that champagne and contemptible officer’s tastes were very far from the world I inhabited, and even the ordinary gladioli couldn’t bridge the gap. But Antonina had no regrets. She had come from a tiny shtetl in the middle of nowhere, was married for her looks and her boldness, could read in eight languages and used to recount, laughing, how her gallant Polish father-in-law said to her before the wedding: “I am so very glad of this infusion of young Jewish blood into our wilting dynastic line.”

The Gerburt coat of arms (an apple on a red background, pierced through by three gold swords, two from the upper corners of the shield, and the third from below) and its dynastic history barely interested her. Jewishness excited her far more, and in her lonely little apartment she would passionately relive the successes and failures of those who shared her “young Jewish blood.” Around the age of twelve I used to visit her and she would treat me with volumes of ancient Greek literature and kovrizhka with nuts. Once, I left her apartment with a feeling of intense embarrassment, hardly able to explain this feeling to myself. On that particular day she had taken out a battered volume of poetry and read an old and sentimental poem. As she finished the poem, I noticed in horror that she was crying.

Only photography shows the flow of time as if it had never existed: just the length of women’s skirts sliding up and down. Text is a different matter: it consists entirely of time, which opens the little windows of vowels and shakes out the mothlike consonants, filling the gaps between paragraphs and haughtily displaying the full range of our differences. When you look at the page of an old newspaper, the first thing you feel is its hopeless remoteness. There is a strange stylistic kinship between texts of the same moment, written in the same cross section of time, but it has nothing to do with authorial intention and can only be seen in hindsight. With a distance of twenty or thirty years it’s hard not to notice the single intonation, the common denominator welding together newspaper, shop sign, poem read from the stage at the all-women college, the conversation on the way home. It is as if every age produces its own particular dust that settles on every surface and in every corner. Even those who behave as if they stood outside the idea of the “typical” suddenly make a linguistic gesture that’s common to their contemporaries, without even noticing it, as if they were unaware of the pull of gravity on them.

There were plenty of other entertainments besides Trilby in the 1890s, many of them relating to science. The century saw itself as enlightened (and in a sense it was): a little hill onto which humanity had climbed and was now happily looking back over the ground traversed. Behind it lay much to learn from: prejudices overcome, wars that could never be repeated, religious extremism, the depths of poverty; all of this, to be sure, had taken watchfulness but it had yielded to rationalism. Civilization had reached into the furthest parts of the globe and was busy gathering its unusual souvenirs. The World Exhibitions and their many clones presented to the public the highest achievements of humanity, but the audience also wanted to hear about its darker corners, remained curious about the strange nations at the earth’s rim, doomed by fate to be the comic sidekick to the victorious and favored children of progress. This natural-historical curiosity needed feeding.

In April 1901 a daily paper in Moscow reported to the educated public that an all-female troupe of Dahomey Amazons, who could be seen in the Manezh, were “more curious than any ‘blacks’ who had come to Moscow before. They demonstrate some interesting dances and military formations.” The Amazons soon transferred to a more appropriate venue. “Yesterday at the Zoological Gardens the Dahomey Amazons began their performances of dancing and military moves. These will take place three times a day on weekdays and five times a day on holidays.”

It hardly raised eyebrows, this idea of adding to the exotic fauna of the zoo with enclosures for rational man in his natural surroundings. What became known as a human zoo — Laplanders, Indians, Nubian villages “with live inhabitants” dressed in traditional costume, holding naked live babies — was an everyday reality in American and European zoos by the mid-1870s. Public morality at the time demanded that “natives” be dressed decently and sometimes public taste demanded quite the opposite: the clothing didn’t seem “revealing” enough, nakedness befitted the savage man. The exhibits wove their mats and smoked their pipes, demonstrated their bows and arrows and the now unnecessary accoutrements of labor. Sometimes they died, sometimes they revolted. Between the exhibits and the millions of spectators there was nearly always a barrier or a fence to illustrate the boundary between humanity’s past and its much-improved present.

In 1878, when the couple in Du Maurier’s drawing were busy inspecting the bottles of stoppered music, the Exposition Universelle in Paris featured alongside the megaphones and phonographs a “Negro Village” with around 400 inhabitants. Twenty-five years later, at an even more visually arresting exhibition, the representatives of the “lesser races” were confined in cages. At the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 the crowds streamed to view the primitive nations. On that occasion, the evolution of man had been illustrated carefully with a line that ran from “primates to pygmies” (“Cannibals Will Dance and Sing!”) to Filipinos, Native Americans, and on, at last, to the happy visitors to the Fair. Racial theories prevalent at the time embodied the competitive system, and white man’s victory was a plain indication of his superiority.

The Amazons came in handy: they were more interesting to look at than the glum Inuits with their shaggy dogs. They offered an almost real threat. These female warriors who had been defending the Dahomey throne for two hundred years still had terrible strength and were the stuff of legend, potboilers, and wet dreams. The war between Dahomey and the French dragged on until the army of Amazons was decisively routed. Their weapons (machetes, and something resembling an ax) were no match for bullets, and long bayonets gave Europeans the advantage in hand-to-hand combat. But even a year before, a troupe of “tame” Amazons had visited Paris to demonstrate their fighting techniques. They were dressed in the wildest of outfits: to survive one has to fit in with other people’s preconceptions.