Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

I devour all these books, one after another, hardly pausing to marvel at my own unsated appetite as each new text requires me to seek out and devour the next. Pointless knowledge expands at an unstoppable rate: not like a building, which grows with the slow addition of floors, more like that terrifying wartime spring thaw when the bodies were slowly exposed by the melting snow. Perhaps I might have preferred to stand alone in the chalk circle of my obsession, but the circle is as crowded as a waiting room at the doctors where everyone is pronouncing gloomily on each other’s afflictions. It matters to all of us. When I meet someone new I hardly notice the moment when we begin talking about our grandparents and ancestors, comparing names and dates as happily as animals who have finally reached their watering spot and drink, shuddering with the delicious cold of the water. It usually happens about half an hour into the conversation.

One thing saddens me. This search for the past, like the search for the Holy Grail, separates the successful from the failures, and I belong to the latter: assiduous, but unlucky. I have never lost my hope of discovering the kernel at the center of the mystery, a key of some sort that opens the door to a secret corridor in our old apartment, where a shaft of sunlight falls on a host of other unseen doors. Not since I was taken, aged seven, to the green meadow where the Battle of Kulikovo had been fought. I knew about the battle, of course: the bloody encounter between a Moscow Prince and a Tatar Khan had taken place not far from Moscow, a few hours by car. I’d read and reread the Pushkin poem, where the hero, sometimes a knight at arms, sometimes a Russian warrior, wanders onto the site of the ancient battle, the valley of death . There, under the bright sun, he sees something along the lines of a vast educational installation: a heap of yellowing bones, armor and shields, arrows stuck into the ground, heads rotting in their helmets. All of it overgrown with ivy, the organic and inorganic piled up, as if that’s how it had always been. The hero grieves a little, then chooses himself some armor, and knows it will serve him faithfully and true.

I knew exactly what to expect. The excitement of this dramatic and possibly terrifying sight was augmented by the promise of booty: I’d find myself a souvenir, a little thing to remember it by, sure to be such a thing among the skulls and shields, rusting under the sky. A few arrow tips to carry in my pocket would be nice, although an elegant little dagger would be best of all.

The field was quiet and empty, and the wind blew waves over the bare green grass. Our dog ran about madly but found nothing; there was a little obelisk at the side of the field, nothing else. The main quality of an ancient battlefield turned out to be how transitory it was — all the interesting stuff had been dragged home by others well before I got there.

I once heard that “a small bag of Marina Tsvetaeva’s possessions” was kept in the drawer of a table at a certain literary museum (which is after all a place where the words and possessions of writers come, if not for immortality, then at least for a rest). The bag had been brought back from the place of her death, Yelabuga, by her sixteen-year-old son Mur after her suicide. Despite its survival, nothing had been written about it, and it hadn’t been exhibited — turn Proust’s overcoats, jackets, and all the other items inside out and this is what you get: objects that disappear, slipping easily through a tear in the lining into absolute oblivion, the deep pocket of nonexistence.

The bag’s contents hadn’t been cataloged, and so might be considered not-quite-existing. There was no way of guessing from the museum catalog that the single unit of the bag in fact held many items. It contained objects that have been passed over, despite the last forty years of passionate attention to Tsvetaeva’s every word; objects that were too damaged or homely to merit a museum cabinet. Tsvetaeva took them with her into evacuation, packing hastily what could be sold (anything French), things to remember others by (mustn’t be lost), and other unnecessary bits and pieces that found themselves in the pile almost by chance. No one knows why Mur thought these things important enough to gather up and bring back to Moscow from his mother’s dark hut in Yelabuga. Was he trying to save and preserve them — or was he in a blind haste, as his mother had been, simply seizing everything? Battered little tins, their contents unknown, beads, a pen, locks of children’s hair, some other nameless bits and bobs, which might have just been stuffed in the bag. But perhaps they were the dearest things, things that reminded her of her mother, her husband, daughter: a special stone, china fragments of an unforgettable cup. There was no one to tell. Objects no one knows anything about are instantly orphaned, they seem to protrude more, like the nose of a dead man. They join the ranks of those who are no longer permitted to enter.

Among the books, papers, chairs, dickeys that I inherited, there are far too many things life forgot to label — or to leave a reminder for, even a hint of where they came from and how they are connected to me. In the family album, Dobrowen’s portrait is next to a good quality reproduction of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow. On the back my great-grandmother has written in her big handwriting: “Who gave you this picture of Nadezhda Krupskaya? I saw quite a different picture of her in a big portrait at Moisey Abramovich’s. S. Ginzburg, July 2, 1956.” It seems likely that Sarra’s companion took this picture. He had a photographic studio nearby in Moscow and his stamp is on this image. But I will never know the details. These huge and terrifying people who strode the century, Krupskaya, Sverdlov, Gorky, have slipped out of the family memory as if they were never there, and I will never be able to confirm their presence.

Once when I was fifteen my mother showed me something I’d never seen despite my endless rummaging in search of curiosities. It was a tiny, delicate lace purse, half the size of my palm. Inside, folded into four, the paper beginning to tear at the folds, was a piece of paper, and on it, written in a clear hand, the name Victor Pavlovich Nelidov. My grandmother Lyolya, Sarra’s daughter, had kept this little purse in the pocket of her bag, which she carried pressed to her side. I began asking about it, but my mother didn’t know who it was. I persisted, I wanted to know what to make of it. “Make of it what you will,” said my mother, and ended the conversation.

Do I need to say that I’ve tried more than once to find a trail to the invisible Nelidov? Who was he? A doctor? Why a doctor? I have had no success, only the usual feeling of walking into yet another empty green field and realizing once again that the absence of an answer was the answer, and if that upset me, I just had to get over it. As soon as I appeared, the past immediately declined to make anything useful of itself, or to weave itself into a narrative of seeking and finding, of breakthroughs and revelations. The division between what was mine and what belonged to others was the first to break down. Everything around me belonged in one way or another to the world of my dead. I was no longer really surprised to discover paper strips with French on them in the drawers of an old writing desk I had bought: tickets to a cinema in Paris to see two prewar films. One of the films was named after a poem by Victor Hugo “Lorsque l’enfant paraît.” If Great-Grandmother Sarra had been to the cinema in Paris one hundred years ago, then she might well have seen this film, even though the writing desk had nothing to do with her. Perhaps she didn’t see it, perhaps she saw other films (so of course I then rushed off to immerse myself in the chronicles of cinema, as if the names of films would reveal something to me). She must have gone to the cinema, to cafes and exhibitions, and met up with Russian and French friends — she must have had some interests. I’ve always felt that the popular device of making your fictional hero meet Gertrude Stein or Picasso or Tsvetaeva on the Paris streets was a rather shameful example of a sort of coercive literary logic, but in my head I did this constantly, chasing after any coincidences and proximities that might have helped my independently minded great-grandmother feel less lonely.