Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

After this evening Sarra’s light begins to dim, to disappear into the darkness that will last for nearly thirty years. I remember my mother linked Sarra’s stroke with the “Doctors’ Plot,” which should by rights have consumed her, and Lyolya as well. Her little gray “record of work” book, filled out up to 1949, shows that even before the “Doctors’ Plot” there was no dearth of terrifying events. The whole country was at war with “cosmopolitanism,” a code word for Jewishness. The Jewish Antifascist Committee was disbanded, there were arrests, books by Jewish authors were removed from libraries, all publication in Yiddish ceased, and there was the usual wave of sackings across the city. I don’t know what would have been more dangerous for Doctor Sarra Abramovna Ginzburg: her native Jewishness or her assumed Europeanness. I wonder, did she ever discuss what was going on with her close family, was she scared that it would also affect those around her, her very successful son-in-law, daughter, and grandchild? Her stroke, and the resulting “senility” — that long-awaited inability to be responsible, make decisions, take steps — removed her from the group at risk, and placed her in a cool, safe place, where she could sort through her photographs, make little notes on them, and put her hand out and touch any beckoning memory.

I remember listening to a school talk on Byzantine architecture in the darkened auditorium of the Pushkin Museum when I was ten. The powerful shoulders of the Hagia Sophia and the sky above the minarets appeared on the projector screen. You could say that this was a later invention, or a stereotype I have retrospectively revived, but I remember all too well the moment when I looked at the bright screen and thought to myself: I will probably never see this in real life. People with our lives, engineers and lowly scientists, the unexceptional Moscow intelligentsia at the beginning of the eighties, simply never went abroad.

I started traveling as soon as I had the opportunity and I have never stopped. Perhaps this is why I get an almost physical thrill from being under the glass-and-metal roofs of railway stations. It’s as if the roof’s ribs are mine and the circulation of people is my own body’s vital circulation, filling sixteen platforms, the wide glassy wings, the lofty arcs supported by sunlight. I have the same feeling in airports, with their laundrette fumes, their inhuman cleanliness. I have to cling to every opportunity for travel like a monkey wrapped around a branch. The aerial state, the gaseous state, invisible, elusive, passing across borders and breathing in the air one chooses — yes, for this I strive! When we moved apartments and all the cups and sauce boats, photographs and the books of our home life were put into storage, I started traveling twice as much as usual, as if these possessions had weighted me down to the earth.

My travels had a solid justification: I was writing a book about my people . I moved about from place to place, archive to archive, street to street, places where they had walked. I tried to coincide with them, hoping this would engender a memory of them, however implausible it sounds. I diligently gathered up everything I knew, and entered dates and addresses into the computer’s memory, mapping a route like anyone who embarks on a long journey.

On the corner of a Paris street, in a building where my great-grandmother had once lived, there is now a small hotel. Here I could spend one or two nights under the same roof as the young Sarra, I could quite literally get under the skin of history. I arrived from London on the train, threading itself through the undersea tunnel and appearing suddenly in the midst of green French fields. Looking out of the window, I thought how terribly tired I was of family. I couldn’t look away from it, I saw nothing else. Like the wrought iron fence of the Summer Gardens, I couldn’t see beyond the captivating design and into the space within. Every past and present phenomenon had been tied to my indistinct relatives, I had rhymed it all , emphasized the simultaneity between them and me, or the lack of it. I’d had to learn to put off my own relations with the world for later, just as truffle pigs are trained to ensure they don’t eat their precious findings. My journeys had only the most oblique connection with me, I made my way from town to town like a traveling salesperson, dragging a wheelie bag. It wasn’t that the wheelie bag was out of place or filled with the wrong things — not even when it clattered down the cobbled Parisian streets — no, it was just that wherever I went it insisted on its presence.

There I went with it, weaving along the verges, down the long rue Claude-Bernard in the fifth arrondissement, where only people like Sarra Ginzburg lived, and not because it was near the Sorbonne and the Val-de-Grâce hospital — this was the area of rented rooms and cheap lodgings where sparrowlike students flitted from perch to perch, never going far, huddling together for collegiate warmth. On this very street Sarra had spent a few weeks or months in a green-tinged seven-story building with metal balconies. It was a cheap, fierce neighborhood, the stairwells smelt of smoke and damp face powder. It had been rebuilt in the 1860s, but had become no more respectable for it. As the architect of these changes Baron Haussmann said “Paris belongs to France, and not to the Parisians, who inhabit it by birth or by choice, and definitely not to the flowing population of its rented rooms, who distort the meaning of ‘referendum’ with their unintelligent voice.” A few decades later the Russian Mademoiselle Ginzburg joined this floating population.

Waking one morning in the attic room on the sixth floor, I slowly began groping mentally for what might have been back then: the number of rooms, the crooked ceiling, the old table and the chimney pots, very white against the gray sky. Without even getting up I could see at least ten possibilities. My great-grandmother might have stayed in this very room — why not, the cheapest rooms would have been up in the attics — or she could have lived in any of the other rooms. If I had expected a supernatural happening (paid for in advance and online with my credit card), a dream peopled by Sarra and her student friends, a sudden nighttime revelation, an injection of understanding, no such thing happened. Instead the usual tourist morning, the light, the smell of coffee, the quiet murmur of a vacuum cleaner.

The owner of the hotel was an older man with grief-stricken eyes. He held himself with the dignity of a caryatid. It was clear that he could carry on a conversation with me, and at the same time carry all the weight of his elegant hotel, with its staircases and the starched envelopes of its beds. He bought the building in the 1980s, reconstructed whole floors of tired rooms and sunk a lift shaft through the building, but left untouched the ancient underground passageway leading into the darkness toward the Seine. He knew little about the life of the building before that, except that the designer Kenzō Takada had lived in one of its microscopic rooms during his early days in Paris. There were no memories back to the beginning of the century, but the building had always housed the cramped, narrow, warren-like living quarters of the poor. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” he suddenly said.

Twenty or so years ago I was sitting with my future (now former) husband in the little porch of a Crimean café and waiting for it to open. It was noon, a lazy August day, the holiday season was nearing its end and no one was hurrying anywhere, especially not the ragtag band approaching us across the warm asphalt. A man in dirty trousers with a greasy blond beard was leading an elderly horse, and up high on the saddle, gripping on to the pommel with both hands, sat an unusually pretty curly-haired little boy of about six. Even at that hour of desperate longing for Crimean fortified wine, their appearance seemed unreal, like a shamelessly direct quote from a Soviet film about the White Army during the Civil War. The horse was white, too, but red with dust. The man led the beast right up to the porch and said, without any particular expression: “Excuse me but aren’t you ex nostris ?” I was so surprised I didn’t immediately grasp what he was saying.