Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Alongside the panels hang photographs of the graffiti found on the walls. The photographs were taken in the mid-1920s, when the Bastion was no longer a prison. In one photograph, there’s a drawing of a woman in a light blouse with puffed sleeves. The picture has a frame drawn around it, as if to pretend that it’s a proper picture, or even a window we are looking through. The woman sits at a table, on which there is a tall vase of flowers, a silver butter dish and a samovar on little iron feet. She’s ugly, and it feels as if this is because she has been drawn from real life. Her simple face has an expression that combines both concentration and surprise, she has just brought a match up close to her cigarette and is now taking the first drag, smiling all the while. Her hair is drawn into a bun. Through the window the play of summer shadows and light. It is terrible to consider the degree to which we are absent from this picture.

The letter from Platon with its Pushkin quotes was sent to Sarra “in her fortress” in February 1907. Ten years later, in Autumn 1917, in the general collapse and confusion, something strange happened to the Fortress archives — they disappeared in murky circumstances and less than half of them were saved. Any trace of Sarra might have been wiped out then, which worked to her advantage. She never once, on any paper or form, mentions her revolutionary past or her prison stay. “In Russia, as a Jewish woman, I couldn’t study in higher education and I was forced to study abroad,” she wrote about her French sojourn. Although, in fact, as a daughter of a merchant belonging to the 1st Guild, she could have lived and studied in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and in any of the cities’ universities. The story handed down through the family is different: efforts were made on behalf of this girl with her revolutionary past. Connections were used, levers pressed. And it worked: she was offered the choice of exile to somewhere in the remote east, or departure in the opposite direction, to Europe, to study, recover her health — to get her out of the way, in short. Her next postcards were sent from Montpellier.

In her declining years, on her way home from a walk with her old friend Sarra Sverdlova, the two of them in their weighty coats, fur hats and ancient fur muffs, Great-Grandmother spoke of herself as a “Bolshevik without a party ticket” — another cliché of a time when phrases were minted like postage stamps. But it was true, she never did join the party, not in forty years of living in Soviet Russia and knowing all the right (and wrong) people, and coming from antediluvian Nizhny Novgorod, with its exhortative speakers, assemblies, tea parties with Maxim Gorky. Sarra Ginzburg worked in managerial roles, she survived purges, and attended party gatherings — but she never signed up. There were plenty of opportunities, but she didn’t take them. Her departure for Paris, like crawling up on dry land after flailing in the deep, symbolized some deep and irreversible break: for her the revolution was over. Something else had begun.

Many years later she went back to Nizhny Novgorod from Moscow for the first and last time. The Soviet town was now named Gorky. She was taken to the local museum, which stood high above the town on a promontory over the river. The museum guide gave a detailed account of the heroic lives of the Nizhny Bolsheviks, moving between one photograph and the next. On one photograph, which looked dirty because of the grainy snow whirling down, a group of young people stood by a low fence. There were four of them. One young woman’s face was covered in an absurd black bandage, her bonnet was in disarray, wedged on the side of her head, and bits stuck out from it like rabbit’s tails. The museum guide commented that this was on the barricades in December. “We know very little about these people,” she said, “it seems most likely they are all long dead.”

“Most likely,” agreed Great-Grandmother Sarra, and turned away to view the next picture.

Pochinky’s main square is empty in this old picture. A cart is being pulled by two horses, a factory worker stands in a shop doorway where some bold chickens have gathered expectantly. It looks like a quiet backwater, a place at the far corner of the earth. The horse fair, when people gathered in the town, was a huge event and the town’s main source of entertainment. Pochinky was built of wood, it stood waist-deep in orchards and gardens. Everything was small in scale but designed to impress: the little local hills were respectfully referred to as “mountains”; a one-and-a-half-yard-long prehistoric tooth was once dredged out of the local river; the cathedral was tastefully built; and the town could boast a notary’s office and mutual savings association, part of a growing bureaucratic presence that also regulated army recruitment, drink, and tax collection. Abram Osipovich Ginzburg brought his sizable family up here, very far from the center of things, in the hinterlands.

I found no traces of his life in this little town, which is now only a hamlet. A handful of memories of his son Solomon, Uncle Solya, who sold Singer sewing machines, the reluctant heir in the place of the cursed prodigal son, Iosif. Great-Great-Grandfather Abram, with his baobab tree of a beard, had sixteen children, garnered a good deal of wealth, saved Sarra from prison and exile, and died on June 22 in 1909. He has been forgotten by Pochinky.

The merchants of the 1st Guild were not subject to corporal punishment. Among their other privileges was the permission to deal wholesale in Russian and foreign goods within Russia and abroad; to own shipping and to send their trading ships to foreign lands; to own factories and production plants, with the exception of distilleries and vineyards; to own shops, storage and cellars; to provide insurance; to carry out transfers of money and much else. There was one special provision for Jewish merchants: after 1857 membership of the 1st Guild meant the merchant’s whole family and even a servant were guaranteed permission to live in Russia outside of the Western Pale of Settlement in any town in the Russian Empire, including (with some conditions) the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Membership was an expensive matter: annual fees were never less than 500 rubles (one percent of declared capital over 50,000 rubles). The Jewish community in Nizhny Novgorod was still small at the end of the nineteenth century and in the tiny town of Pochinky Jews were downright exotic. Statistics compiled in 1881, four years before Sarra’s birth, show that in the whole district there were eleven people of the Jewish faith — I have a suspicion they all shared the surname Ginzburg.

Great-Great-Grandfather didn’t live to see a time of mixed marriages and integration, when the children of the Priest Orfanov from the Cathedral of the Nativity of Christ would marry descendants of the Ginzburg family. His estate was divided equally between his children and Sarra’s inheritance was spent on her studies in Paris. She returned without a penny to her name, with “nothing more than a hatbox.” I close my eyes and I see her standing on the platform of the Brest Station in Moscow, holding her hatbox, a little independent woman who would walk alone all her life. If I screw up my eyes and really focus I can see the black Paris hat, with its long curling ostrich feather. The hat outlived its owner. It appears now and again in photos from my childhood.

No matter how hard I concentrate, in my mind’s eye I can never see the texture and the sound of everyday life back then: tea in the Gethlings’ garden; her sister Vera clutching a book of Nadson’s poetry; the endless hours on the coach to Nizhny Novgorod; skirts damp with the dew and catching on the burdock; the little river; smoking a secret cigarette in the attic. Pochinky was home: where she came to rest, to cry her eyes out, to be fed up . Her little sister Rakhil once wrote in a letter that she’d just come back from the theater, they’d staged Ostrovsky, and then about forty people had come for dinner — but where did that happen? Surely not in child-size Pochinky, which never had a theater? Then again, it was the age of the amateur performance, home theater, Hamlet strutting the boards of the dacha terrace in black hose. The fine dust of the friendships and flirtations has settled for good, nothing can be made out now. All that is left is what Balzac calls the ruins of the bourgeoisie: “An ignoble detritus of pasteboard, plaster, and coloring.”