Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, who was in Paris in 1913 (like the rest of the world, or so it seems, all enjoying a last stroll along the Seine), wrote in his memoirs: “I recall that on this trip [… ] there was something that surprised me. The hotels I stayed in in Berlin, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Paris — on the day of my arrival I came down to eat in the hotel restaurant, and in each town they were playing versions of the same popular tune of the time, ‘Pupsik.’” This unprecedented “simultaneity” of life, barely noticeable back then, is frightening now when we look with clear eyes at the date and the places. Those few prewar years are a time when the entire future twentieth century, together with a large part of the nineteenth century, swept its skirts along the same boulevards, sat at neighboring café tables and side by side in theater stalls, hardly suspecting the existence of each other. Sometimes you have to die to find out who lived on the same street as you.

My brave, lonely great-grandmother lived in Paris from 1910 onward. In September 1911 Kafka briefly visited Paris. At the beginning of his travels he and Max Brod conceived of a plan to write travel guides. It was a brilliant idea, anticipating the Lonely Planet series, for readers who didn’t mind going third class across Italy, or preferred streetcars to barouches. Brod wrote a business plan, including details of accompanying discounts and free concerts. Two phrases are written in Kafka’s hand — one of them is “exact amounts for tipping.” They also included shopping advice on where one could enjoy pineapple, oysters, and madeleines in Paris — this, less than two years before the publication of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time .

That same September Rilke was strolling in Paris, having just returned from a trip around Germany. The newspapers were discussing the theft of the Mona Lisa , which the obscure poet Guillaume Apollinaire was suspected of stealing. 1911 was an ordinary sort of year, no better and no worse than any other year. The Ballets Russes premiered Stravinsky’s Petrushka . Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe was being slowly published, volume by volume, an endless novel that was much loved by the women of my family (and despised by Proust, who was planning an article “Against Romain Rolland”).

In April, Lenin began a successful lecture series on political economy on the avenue des Gobelins (another place where my great-grandmother took lodgings). Gorky came to visit him at the end of the month and they discussed the current situation: “There will be a war. It’s inevitable,” said Lenin. In the Jardin du Luxembourg Akhmatova and Modigliani sat on a bench — they couldn’t afford to pay for chairs. Each of these people hardly suspected the existence of the others, they were quite alone in the transparent sleeve of their own fate. Opera hats unfolded with a familiar click at the Opéra — the interval was just beginning.

A May morning in Paris, close to the Jardin du Luxembourg, with its stone lions and its now free chairs: there’s no question in my mind that Sarra must have strolled here and suddenly — waiting for the place to tell me what I must do — I’m bewildered and lost. The night passed as nights do. The chimneys in the view from the window resembled flowerpots, Kafka said something similar about them. I had no memorable or distinctive dreams or thoughts. I’d spent half the day on a tour around the Sorbonne, gently but firmly led down the usual tourist routes. I’d smiled at the birds, stood motionless looking at shop windows, and checked the museums’ opening hours. The city basked in the sun, showing its pearly innards. People stood, sat, lay in its every fold. I didn’t remember these people from previous visits, they silently stretched out cupped hands from piles of rags and damp newspaper, or approached café tables, one after another with the ancient entreaty. I had nothing left for the last of these, and he shouted hoarse furious words in my face.

Not far from this place were some little specialist shops selling old cameras and camera accessories: on their shelves lenses and filters stood alongside daguerreotypes and equipment for panoramas, dioramas, and night photography. Forbidden images of the buttocks and breasts of the dead were folded in leaves of rolling paper and placed in boxes. There were large amounts of cards for stereoscopes, those wooden, bird-headed instruments, lending every image a capacious depth. The glossy stereoscope cards had two images on them: you inserted them into a special slot in the instrument and twiddled a wooden beak until the doubled imaged gathered itself into something singular, alive, and convincing. There were hundreds of these cards, showing the streets of Rome; a whole ant heap of quartiers and alleyways from San Pietro down to the Tiber that no longer exist because the wide modern Via della Consiliazione has been driven through it all. There were colorized cards of family scenes; train crashes from a hundred years ago. And there was one card that was unlike any of the others.

This card also appeared to be made for a stereoscope, but it was a pair of illustrations, rather than photographs, and the two images, although intended for each other, had nothing in common. They were both black cut-out silhouettes (silhouette profiles enjoyed huge popularity in the past). The left-hand image showed a doorway with a curtain across it, a colonnade of some sort and a tree a little farther off. In the right-hand picture was a detailed but unmatching composition: a hussar in a shako, and a goat with horns. When inserted into the stereoscope the two pictures came together into a suddenly animated tableau: the hussar leans on a column’s capital, the goat grazes under the tree, and we see the scene through the curtained door. Two unrelated images shift and come together to make a story.

The following days and nights I spent in my hotel room. I had flu, a high temperature, and the chimney stacks outside the window multiplied and divided stereoscopically. An endless storm raged outside and it comforted me at first, and then ceased to have any significance. I lay lifelessly on the bed, listening to it crashing overhead and thinking that this wasn’t the worst ending to a pointless sentimental journey. There was nothing for me to do here and I had done nothing in this beautiful foreign city, this large empty bed, under a roof that might or might not remember Sarra Ginzburg, her Russian accent, her French books.

In the 1960s, quite by chance, a Frenchman visited the family’s Moscow apartment. God only knows where he came from or who he was, but he was royally received, as all guests were, with all the salads known to man, and a homemade Torte Napoleon. All the family joined him at the table, including eighty-year-old Sarra, who had long since disappeared into herself. But when she heard French being spoken she became terribly animated and began speaking in the language of her youth. She sat up talking to the guest until long after midnight — they were both delighted with each other. In the morning she’d switched to speaking French completely and irrevocably, as a person might take vows and vanish into a monastery. When the family spoke to her in Russian she would answer in long French sentences. After a while they learned to understand her.

It was the middle of the night in November. Telephone calls at that hour were always a cause for fear, especially in the years when a single telephone rang in the deep womb-like corridor of a communal apartment, waiting for someone to run to lift the receiver. The voice at the other end was like nothing else they knew, hoarse and gulping, like a voice emerging from a gutter: “Your old man is dying. You should come.” And they went. I was two years old at the time, and fast asleep in a room. I don’t remember anything. Only four months before, my mother’s mother Lyolya had died, at just fifty-eight.