Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

The building they went to was near-invisible in the night, on a Moscow side street and surrounded by identical, low-eaved two-story buildings. The door swung open and a woman wearing only a slip staggered out in the thin yellow light. There was a room and a bed, and in the bed, in a tangle of bedsheets, lay my grandfather, dead. His naked body was covered in blue bruises. All the lights were switched on, as if it were an operating theater.

He was hardly an old man, only sixty-two. Only a few years before he had moved into his own cooperatively owned apartment with his wife. Grandfather Lyonya had been very active in the block’s community affairs, planting out a strip of land in front of the white facade of the high-rise with lilac and, most importantly (this was his idea), a row of poplar trees. He wanted to plant the same trees in the backyard; my mother said they reminded him of the south — Grandfather was from Odessa . Now the poplars grew up around the tower block, but the box inside, like the chamber in a pyramid, was empty: no one lived there anymore. The little bouquets Lyolya had picked gathered dust. The box where Grandfather kept his savings books was empty and my mother didn’t know what had happened to them. There were phone calls to the authorities, and police promises to get to the bottom of the matter. Eventually my parents received a single terse call. They were advised not to pursue the matter, it would only make things worse. Although, really, what could be worse?

This year was a turning point for my family; a whole generation suddenly gone. My mother, Natasha Gurevich, had lost both parents, and she found herself the shepherd of a strange flock. Apart from me, chattering merrily away, she had under her care two ninety-year-old grandmothers, Betya and Sarra, who had always been politely indifferent to each other and suddenly had to live together. The loss of a single son and a single daughter offered their misaligned lives some insulation, a soft layer between them and the new life with its strange cold drafts. Someone once said that the death of our parents marks the loss of the final boundary between ourselves and nonexistence. The death of their children was a wedge jammed in the inner workings of my great-grandmothers. Now nonexistence washed at their boundaries on either side.

My parents were quite certain that my grandfather had been murdered, but no one knew why or what he’d done, what sinister criminality resided in the place where they had found him, or even how he, a calm, untroubled man, came to end his life there. They could only guess. After Lyolya’s death, when the funeral was over and the family plot at Vostryakovsky Cemetery had opened its mouth for the first time in fifty years to allow a new resident to enter, and then sealed it again, Grandfather called his daughter for a conversation. It turned out he had another woman. He appealed to my mother to react with understanding, to discuss things like adults — the situation might be seen as advantageous for all parties. My mother could go and live in the apartment on Banny Pereulok, where there was more space for a child, and Grandfather and his girlfriend could live in the communal apartment. This was all discussed with a calm businesslike logic, along with the other details: his girlfriend didn’t work and perhaps she could even babysit Masha. She loved children.

I gathered this story slowly, in its constituent parts, many years later. When I asked how Grandmother and Grandfather had died, I always received the same unwavering, darkly symmetrical response: he died of “lung inflammation,” she of a “heart attack.” I couldn’t quite understand either, and so they disproportionately upset and fascinated me. The heart and lungs were magnified in my child’s imagination, I understood that much depended on them, these human parts that could treacherously inflame and attack. Still, I remember my sense of horror as if it were yesterday, of everything being turned on its head, when my parents told me for the first time at the age of seventeen “what really happened.” I heard the story again a few times, each new account fuller, and in more detail. The story was in itself frightening and unclear, offering no answers. Worst of all was the manner of telling, as if my parents, reluctantly and against their will, were attempting to push back a steel door. The door had rusted into place, it stood in front of a black hole, whistling with an otherworldly chill. They had nothing to say in answer to my questions, not even “who was his girlfriend?” — they knew nothing about her. Back then, in August 1974, my mother had angrily refused to have anything to do with her, or to accept that this unwanted woman, eclipsing Lyolya’s memory, even existed. Three months later Lyonya, with his grand plans, his bristling mustache, and his joyless jokes, was gone, too.

Lyonya and Lyolya. They were always a pair in my head, their names matched like snap cards. Their childish correspondence, freckled with exclamation marks, beaded with ellipses, dates from 1934, when life still seemed eternal, a thing of substance, when the summer move out to the dacha was undertaken on a horse and cart, and the line of hired carts stretched through the Moscow morning, laden with goods and chattels, trunks of bedlinen, kerosene stoves and samovars — as if this was the only way to do things. Some of the previous generation’s rituals and formalities were still in place despite the new life , the circus-ring gallop of new friends and lovers. In time Lyonya proposed, and his proposal was gladly accepted, but accompanied by a few clauses and conditions. They didn’t rush to have children, just as they had promised, and life had the faintly lazy feel of a holiday in the warm south. They went to the sea and their photos show a slope of rocks, and the holidaymakers posing against it, the black beetle of a car, and the bright moth wings of dresses. Lyolya completed her medical training, Lyonya graduated from the Construction Institute with very respectable grades and began working. And then there were the things that weren’t ever discussed: both these young Soviet professionals filled in the usual forms, and in the box marked “social background” they, like others, avoided mentioning certain things, or twisted the facts slightly to make them acceptable. Lyolya’s father’s legal title was downgraded to “clerk,” and then hurriedly to the even less objectionable “employee.” “Merchant of the 1st Guild” became “shopkeeper” or “tradesperson.” There was a special box for relatives abroad and that was better left empty. In that box, Lyonya wrote: “My dead aunt’s husband was transferred to London for work. I do not keep up contact with him.”

In 1938 the forms asked whether Lyonya had served in the old Tsarist army, or in any organization connected with the White Government, and if so in what capacity? Did he serve in the Civil War and if so, when, where and in what capacity? Did he suffer persecution as a result of revolutionary activity leading up to the October Revolution? The form also asked how the subject had fared in the last purges in the party . There were even more questions in the 1954 form: Have you been in prison? Fought in a partisan group? Lived in occupied territory? In every box a blue-inked NO is scrawled.

His daughter Natasha never quite forgave him for his lively haste to move on to a new life after his wife’s death, nor for her sudden realization that the old life had had a false bottom. When we spent our evenings together, with the old photographs and memories, this was never mentioned, but later, when I began studying the inexhaustible contents of drawers and boxes, I discovered strange objects, artifacts that fell outside of the “tone” of the household: postcards, notes, little objects that fitted a different shape or order — not ours, but not Soviet, either. A drawing in color, for example, of a very carefully drawn heart, divided in two. The dotted line down the middle was highlighted in red, and at the bottom someone had written: “IT’S HARD FOR BOTH OF US.” Teardrops with light reflections were dripping down on the letters. Or a New Year’s greeting card in a homemade envelope with the inscription: “Open on December 31 at 10:00 p.m.” The woman who wrote the card and sealed it with wax and the impression of a Soviet kopeck had known that the addressee, at his own family celebration, would have no time for her at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Inside was a poem and a letter, signed, “your little friend.” The miniature nature and inexperience of the “little friend” were given rather insistent emphasis by the letter: “I am writing to you and drawing a Christmas tree, my head on one side with the childish effort, I’ll put the clock hands on the picture when it reaches midnight. Happy New Year, Leonid!” And the poem carried this further: “Like your daughter, I’ll find my place too / under the Christmas tree.” And all of this, the picture and even the kopeck imprint, had survived for some reason.