Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

I could have carried on trying to persuade him, I still had things to say: it’s not about what you are, I thought petulantly. It’s not about you at all: it’s not you writing to your parents and sister, it’s the time itself writing, it’s a thousand Siberian radio programs and a hundred novels about Siberian construction projects and the vanquishing of the virgin earth, and about decent people and conscientious workers. I could have said: in our family’s letters you can see how the language used to describe the everyday experience changes — how the tone changes completely between the 1910s and the 1930s, how newspapers and films form internal speech. Your letters belong in that history, they are templates of the 1960s, not “how it actually was” but written in that concentrated form that gives us a feeling for the age. It’s not a book about what you were , it’s about what we see when we look back.

I said none of this aloud, luckily — we were already saying goodbye, and my sense of self-righteousness was growing — and it grew until I realized exactly what I was really thinking. I was very close to saying “I don’t care what you were,” but happily I didn’t get that far. Blessed are those who destroy all the letters and diaries they don’t want others to see. The written text creates a false impression of its own immortality: a silly billet-doux is set in stone, an irritable exclamation puts down a claim to be the last word. This was the subtext to our conversation: to put it crassly I was prepare to betray my own living father for the dead text, because I believed in it more. It then felt to me as if the letter itself had spoken and said: “Don’t touch me!”

I am afraid to think what Great-Grandmother Sarra might have said if I’d asked her whether I could publish her correspondence. But no one asks the dead.

I understood my father’s objections to be that his reports on life in Kazakhstan were stylizations of a sort, written to please and entertain his family. What I saw as a picaresque novel, adventures against a colonial backdrop, was a memory of dirt, depression, and desperate drunkenness for him; of barracks and sheds at the end of the world, swearing soldiers and constant and interminable thievery. The tone of his letters was faked, but time had preserved only this stylized bravado. Another sobering realization: if these letters, so detailed in themselves, couldn’t be used as witness accounts — those little fragments of bone from which the skeleton of the past can be reconstructed — then what hope was there of building anything from scratch, made of letters and handkerchiefs? It was what a psychoanalyst might dismissively term a “fantasy.” In the place of respectable research, I had been occupied all this time with the Freudian family romance, the sentimentalized past.

That is how it must be. We look at the photographs of our ancestors as we might look at a human zoo, wild beasts whose lives lie out of sight, deep within the enclosure. It reminds me a little of a folder of recipes I have. The recipes are written out by my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother (and I spotted with a sort of shudder my own childish handwriting among them). For a long time the recipes were a call to action — wouldn’t it be marvelous to make all these recipes, to unite them in their culinary succession, to pretend to be each generation of woman in turn, bringing to life their circle of relationships, some known to me, some unknown: Murochka’s recipe for pie, Rosa Markovna’s biscuit recipe, Auntie Raya’s pike. Although in fact each possessive was a reminder to me that all these people with their pikes and pies no longer existed, and all that was left was the folder of paper. And it was unusable: when I sat down to read through the recipes, I immediately knew I would never cook these dishes. They were full of ingredients that had long since disappeared, Soviet-era cereals and grains, Soviet margarine. Mostly desserts and confectionery, each one so calorific it could replace an entire meal; rich creams and heavy sponges, endless biscuit recipes, tortes, pastries, and shortbreads, as if the lack of sweetness in life could be made up by ingestion. The diet of another, lost world. I had no desire to go back there, despite my nostalgia for its black-and-white inhabitants.

One of the strangest things I found in the boxes of papers belonging to the Stepanov family was not really even a “thing.” It was a page from a notebook, folded vertically into four and kept by someone. On it, a single sentence, unaddressed and without date or signature and written in a hand I didn’t recognize — unremarkable handwriting, perhaps Grandfather’s, perhaps Aunt Galya’s. But the sentence was as much of a shock as if it had been addressed to me, although perhaps the shocking part was the fact that it was intended for no one, spoken as if from inside a silent mouth. It read: “There are people who exist on this earth not as objects in themselves, but as extraneous specks or tiny spots on objects.”

I didn’t recognize the quote at first, although I did briefly appreciate the phrase’s beauty and precision. I thought that the sentence was perhaps an attempt to say something about the self, but in a way that didn’t upset or put anyone out. Someone who was known to me and yet quite unknown had secretly come to this phrase, and the fact that the words originally came from Gogol’s Dead Souls didn’t actually make much difference. The writer had altered one word. In the original this word is лица, which can mean both “faces” and “types (of person),” and they had changed it to the unequivocal люди (“people”). This small shift had surprising consequences: ripped from its context and framed by the notepaper the phrase had been transformed into a sort of poem, or a verdict.

Here is how it was:

…It was hard to say definitely who she was, a married lady or a spinster, a relative, the housekeeper, or a woman simply living in the house — something without a cap, about 30, and wearing a multicolored shawl. There are types of people that exist on this earth not as objects in themselves, but as extraneous specks or tiny spots on objects. They sit in the same way, they hold their heads in the same way and you are almost ready to take them for a piece of furniture.

And here’s what it became:

There are people

that exist on this earth

not as objects in themselves,

but as extraneous specks

or tiny spots on objects.

This, I feel, is how I see my family: their fragile, barely noticeable existence is like a speckled bird’s egg, so delicate it is crushed by the least pressure. The fact that they were tested and proved resilient in life only makes them more vulnerable. Against the backdrop of history and its well-constituted heroes, these lodgers with their photo albums and New Year’s greetings cards seem destined for oblivion. I hardly even remembered them myself. But although much was unknown or half-known or under a veil of darkness, I thought I knew a few firm facts about my family:

No one died in the Stalinist purges

No one perished in the Holocaust

No one was murdered

No one was a murderer

Now this seemed doubtful, or even simply untrue.

Once when I was ten or a little older, I asked my mother one of those questions you only ask at that age: “What are you most scared of?” I don’t know what kind of response I expected, probably “war.” In Soviet society at the time Kant’s starry heavens had been replaced by peaceful skies. The country lived in the fearful expectation of a third world war; in school we had military training in how to assemble Kalashnikovs and what to do in the event of a nuclear attack (it seemed clear that a machine gun wouldn’t help much). The abundance of old women arranged on the benches in the yard spoke as if in one voice: “If we can only avoid war…”