Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

The ability to skip large chunks of time might be useful in the writing of novels, but it starts to frighten me when I realize I am doing it in life, and with real living people — that is, with dead people, of course, although there isn’t really any difference. Great-Grandmother Sarra’s youth, before Lyolya is born, feels like the beginning. Everything is ahead of her, anything could happen. After 1916 time begins folding itself up, tightening into the felt roll of collective fate. A hundred years later I began following in her footsteps, visiting her St. Petersburg addresses, buildings with rebuilt facades, missing apartments, and whole missing wings in poor areas of the city, lit by the setting sun and inhabited by flocks of Sunday soldiers. It always seemed that if I took just another turn to the right, then that would be enough, I could transform her life, restore it, make it fit to be seen again.

In my own family history, I am interested more than anything in the period of ten to fifteen years after the revolution, when a way of life suddenly slowed, convulsed, and belly-flopped onto a new set of rails. These were the purblind years, the years when my great-grandparents died, or left the country or moved — that period of their lives is barely documented. They preferred not to keep diaries, and all the photographs that had been preserved are only partial, the tiny corners of a much larger picture, and something is going on in this unseen bigger picture that I don’t understand. Here’s a photograph of croquet at the log-built dacha; here are some hefty women doing exercises under banners with rhymes on; Sarra with her daughter Lyolya, who is looking sad and pinched, standing on a little hill by a stream, and by them some faces from the past, family whose names I don’t know. As her daughter grows up (school class group pictures, the little girls pressing themselves against their teacher; postcards from friends; the La Bayadère sheet music), the mother slowly fades out. She works in numerous medical institutions, there’s a tired love affair with a relative of her dead husband who owns a photo studio, postcards from her travels, pictures of holiday resorts where the gray sea rushes up to meet a gray skirt and then squirms back like a dog at a command.

Sarra never disappeared altogether, and that was her great achievement. She sank into the comfortable life of a qualified medical professional, doing the rounds of sanatoriums and women’s clinics. Her daughter, too, was drawn into a constant purposeful activity. She had long decided to become a doctor like her mother, and the permanent bustle radiated a sprightly sense of inclusion, everyone working together. I can’t even attempt to guess what they thought about what was happening around them. There is no evidence, no basis for such guesswork. There are no preserved letters, and there never were any such letters, nor books from the home library (the usual Tolstoy, Chekhov “ex libris M. Fridman, Court Solicitor,” some early twentieth-century poetry) that might allow me to put together a collage of Soviet or anti-Soviet inclinations. When eighteen-year-old Lyolya decided to get married in 1934 her mother gave permission on the single condition that she first graduate from medical school. They could get married and they could live with Sarra, but they weren’t even allowed to think about having a family until Lyolya had her diploma in medicine. This white-hot near-religious belief in higher education was handed down through the generations and I remember it in my own childhood. We are Jews , I heard this at the age of seven. You cannot allow yourself the luxury of not having an education.

Lyolya, pink-cheeked and responsible, complied obediently: according to the agreement, Lyonya and Lyolya’s child was to be born at the beginning of August 1941. But in early August they and Sarra were part of a convoy evacuated east, toward Siberia. The child sat tight in the womb, as if she understood this was not the time. After a few weeks of changing trains, dragging belongings, the fear of being left behind or being lost, they finally reached Yalutorovsk, the furthest point on the map of our family’s wanderings. This tiny town with its wooden duckboard pavements and blackened little buildings had barely ever changed, and even now is probably much the same. It had always been a place of Siberian exile: the Decembrists settled there in the 1820s after their failed uprising against the Tsar. My mother was born there on the third or fourth day after their arrival, on September 12, 1941. Her very earliest memories were of the neighbors chopping the head off their cockerel, and when the head fell on the grass the bird suddenly took to its wings and flew across the astounded yard.

Yalutorovsk, in snow and in steam, with its milk production plants and nurseries, needed an experienced doctor, and it was one of Sarra’s finest moments ( Oh, she’s a rock !) — she found her feet straightaway. In the general panic in Moscow in the first weeks of war no one knew what to do or where to go. Marina Tsvetaeva’s sixteen-year-old son Mur kept a terrifyingly detailed diary recording the daily changing shades of hope and despair: the hope it might be possible to sit it out, the fear of being buried in the rubble, the fear of flight, the fear of staying put, the endlessly torturous discussion of all the possible outcomes. It’s hard to believe now, but in the middle of July 1941 Tsvetaeva went off to a dacha with friends “to rest.” The dacha was outside Moscow, on the Kazan road, and the three middle-aged women and one lonely boy stayed out there, filling the time between lunch and dinner with discussion, waiting for news from town, like a scene from a Chekhov story. This sojourn turned out to be their last chance to catch breath. When mother and son briefly returned to Moscow they were caught up in the whirlpool of fleeing crowds trying to get on the last train or the last ferry, and they were the lucky ones . They left Moscow by themselves with no help from the Literary Fund, no money, almost no baggage, nothing that could be exchanged for food. We know how the story ends.

Moscow wasn’t prepared for war or siege. In Spring 1941 a commission was set up to research the evacuation of Moscow’s population in case of war. They discussed possible ways to evacuate a million residents away from the front line. Stalin sent an angry riposte to their suggestions:

I consider your suggestions on the “partial” evacuation of the population of Moscow in “a time of war” untimely. I want the commission for evacuation liquidated and all discussion of evacuation ceased. If and when it is necessary to prepare a plan for evacuation the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of People’s Commissars will inform you.

This memo is dated June 5, 1941.

The city was in a state of frenzy for several months. People fled precipitously as you might dive through a hole cut in the ice. All the government ministries and offices evacuated their staff, and those who didn’t go were simply left to their own devices. Some fled on foot. On October 16, when the German army was very close to Moscow’s outskirts, the literary critic Emma Gerstein missed the evacuation train she’d been promised a place on. “I walked through the streets and wept. All around scraps of shredded documents and Marxist political brochures whirled about me in the air, carried by the wind. The hairdressers were all full and ‘ladies’ were lining up on the streets. The Germans were coming, they needed to get their hair done.”

They returned to Moscow in 1944. On May 9, 1945, Lyolya’s birthday, the high windows of the apartment on the boulevard were thrown open. Spring was everywhere, its green streaming like tears, and all the residents in the communal apartment were gathered around a table laden with food: the family, friends, chance passersby brought in from the street, and young Viktoria Ivanova, a singer whose name reminded them of Victory, who wore a blue dress, and sang for them in her divine voice: “The Blue Scarf” and “Come Buy My Violets,” and anything else they asked her to sing. Then they went out to the Ustinsky Bridge to watch the fireworks blooming over the Moscow River.