Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

What she meant by this couldn’t actually be said in the language of a new age. By “proper lady” she perhaps meant a living anachronism, a person of another era with qualities and virtues that had long since disappeared. And this demanded a language that had vanished too, full of “properness” with regard to long-defunct rules and obligations. Lyolya’s good-heartedness made her way of surviving bearable for those around her. The alternating softness and harshness, the uncompromising, and then the suffering, spirit — it is all so familiar, and it can’t begin to be lined up against how we see the world today. I remember I was once stunned by my mother saying, “If I’d done that my mother would have slapped my lips,” Even now I shudder at the thought. Her lips? These were the words and actions of a dead language, and even if you wanted to, there was no one left to speak it with.

Among the various traditions lubricating the family machinery, there was Lyonya’s New Year’s poetry. Lyonya would write a number of funny poems to members of the family: daughter, wife, grandmothers Sarra and Betya, and guests, if guests were expected. These were simple ditties, rhyming “new year” with “cheer,” they radiated the coziness that comes of repetition and settles on the walls like scale in a teapot. But there was one constant motif that always surprised me and I wondered how Lyolya felt about it: the poems addressed to twelve-year-old Natasha recommended she “be like Daddy and not like Mommy.”

They were by all accounts happy, and they got on, Lyolya the beauty, with her cameo brooch at her throat, her Dickens (she’d made marks around her favorite passages with her fingernail), her embroidery and her sullen, busy husband. She baked and cooked and had people round, grew jasmine and went, as before, on holiday as a couple with Lyonya. Natasha was sent with her nanny for “feeding up” in Svyatogorsk, where she waited, desperately missing her parents, growing her hair into a thick long black braid down to her waist. By the time it reached her knees she had quite grown up. Like her father she wrote poems with ease, and wanted to be a poet: she wanted to be Pushkin, as she said as a child.

At the time poets were produced in industrial quantities, in a special production plant called the Literary Institute, based in an old building on the Moscow Boulevard behind a wrought-iron fence and surrounded by trees. It was a complicated place with its own heritage and an ability to attract those who needed to be there. In earlier Soviet times both the writer Platonov and Mandelstam managed to survive there briefly and unhappily, and at the end of the 1950s it was considered to be, and perhaps even was, “the place to be.” Natasha dreamed of studying there, but her father, who’d never denied her anything in her life, unexpectedly said no. He forbade her to apply to the Literary Institute with absolute and unbending resolve, reminding her of the age-old, We are Jews . You need a profession . So she obediently went to study in a Construction Institute, graduating with an excellent degree (everything she did was excellent) and receiving as her reward the title of “Pile Foundation Engineer.” Then she actually worked under the ground, in a little basement in a research institute, spending half the day in the underworld, like Persephone. Around her, women in black lab coats stared into microscopes, swapping slides with their friable contents, and the most enormous range of weights was laid out by the old weighing scale; they gleamed and had a pleasant heft in the hand. I dreamed of stealing one.

The subject of Lyolya’s icy and near-nonexistent relationship with her mother-in-law, Betya, was off-limits in the family (and this silence was just one of the expressions of Lyolya’s famed obstinacy). They weren’t good at hiding their mutual dislike, in both women a sense of dignity demanded the highest standards of behavior. At celebrations and gatherings, the lifeblood of a big and welcoming family, where everyone was loved and everything remembered, they watched each other closely and suspiciously. Natasha was dragged into all of this, and she made valiant attempts to love everyone, but sometimes it was just too hard. Her mother was the most important person in her life: her mother’s shape and her content were the story she had learned off by heart. Even years later, in her own stories of family life, although she never judged Betya, she pushed her away, held her at a distance, at the very margins of the family’s history.

Betya Gurevich, born Berta Liberman, lived quietly and independent on the fringes, cherishing and saving every line of poetry written by her son and granddaughter; all the children’s pictures, little poems, telegrams. She spent fifty years working as an accountant for various state institutions with unpronounceable acronyms for names, and in her free time she led a spartan life, never permitting herself any form of excess, especially of words. She left behind no letters, no diaries; she was the odd one out in our family, everyone else was constantly occupied with noting everything down, rhyming it, putting it on a postcard. Inscrutable Betya preferred to say nothing about herself, she was cloaked in silence. I don’t think anyone ever asked her any questions about herself, and that is how I know very little about her — apart from the air of disapproval that I breathed in my childhood. I remember that my mother was wounded when someone commented that I looked like my great-grandmother Betya. She didn’t respond but her silence spoke volumes. I remember the ring Betya left my mother, which my mother never wore. The ring had a chunky setting and a large opaque stone and my mother thought it “too ornate.” All in all, hardly any space was left for Betya, the bête noire, in the family’s accounts of itself.

I have her school photographs and I can see her, curly-haired, among the lines of girls with their heads held high. There are a few photos from her girlhood and youth, though not many. Her childhood was spent on the edge of poverty; with eight children in the family, and no hope of a decent education, she was forced to give up her dreams of becoming a doctor. Both she and her sister were reputed to be real beauties, fair-haired, fine-boned, with dark eyes and a melancholy gaze. Family legend has it that she married young and well, to the son of a man who manufactured agricultural machinery in Kherson. They were wealthy (among my parents’ papers I found the plans for a large house), and took their son to Switzerland for treatment. And then one day they appeared in Moscow, where everyone appears, sooner or later. This is how I imagined it, and in some details at least I was correct.

My grandfather was from the southern port city of Odessa. He was an Odessan — this little description stands for a million words. In a well-known Soviet wartime film a girl asks a soldier, “Are you an artiste?” “No, an Odessan ,” answers the soldier. Heroes like him became artistes by birth, not by calling — it was an inevitable outcome of being born in Odessa. The soldier in the film then sits down at a grand piano and plays a blithe little song, nothing to do with the war, all chestnut trees and boats and the love between a fisherman and a girl. I can’t entirely explain the charm of the song, but it’s still weaving a spell on me.

By 1925 Odessa was known as a special place, its uniqueness agreed upon by all; not wholly Soviet, but definitely not quite Russian either: a strange anomaly, cherished by the entire population of this vast land. The nineteenth-century writer Ivan Aksakov called it “foreignized,” tied neither in body nor in soul to the rest of the huge imperial carcass. And it was true: rules and customs that applied across the rest of the Russian territory had no sway here, simply weren’t taken seriously. A German traveler who found himself in Odessa in the mid-nineteenth century wrote: “They say whatever they want about politics, when they speak about Russia it’s as if it’s a foreign country.” Currency exchange signs were in Greek, Odessan writers wrote in French and Italian, high society spoke in French, and the theaters produced plays in five languages. The dark figures of Moldovans, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Germans, Englishmen, Armenians, Crimean Karaites all walked its blinding-white streets like shades. As another witness at the time put it: “If Odessa had to put up a flag that represented its dominating nationalities, it would probably be a Jewish or Greco-Jewish flag.”