Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

My ancestor’s name slowly fades out. The archive has a few more papers, tax notifications sent to him by the authorities in 1919. In March 1920, when the Kherson Revolutionary Committee is wondering who to tax for the land and assets of the factory, they received a declaration back from the factory’s own revolutionary committee, refusing to pay since the factory already belonged to the state. By then Isaak Gurevich has disappeared: he can’t be found in March or April, nor even when they begin selling factory assets, or when the factory begins working again. There are no more traces of him; no shadows, no photographs, nothing human I could grasp on to and consider my own, apart from a few ink markings and a single iron object.

This object occupies nearly an entire hall in the local museum, which is otherwise stuffed with amphorae and embroidered blouses. It’s huge and lumbering, balanced on iron paws, with a long, outstretched neck and wheels hanging to the sides of its carapace: a “Bunker Plow for shallow plowing.” It wore the sign of its provenance — both our provenance — like a birthmark, embossed in unambiguous Cyrillic lettering: ЗАВОДЪ ГУРЕВИЧА КАХОВКА (Gurevich factory, Kakhovka).

Isaak Gurevich Street had been given its new name only a few months beforehand, and had not quite inhabited it. It was in fact simply the space between the gates and fences that lined it on both sides, and seemed narrow as a result, but it was hardly used anyway. On the corner hung a plaque with the old name: Bauman Street. The place had no particular link with my great-great-grandfather but I was still grateful to Kherson for its act of remembrance. The house with the Atlases was now painted a chestnut-brown color, with a boarded-up basement and a little shop selling souvenirs. It gave me no sense of familiarity, although I walked through to the yard and even stuck my head in to see the creaking staircase to a veranda, where the colored glass windows looked out onto trees.

A corridor led into the depths of the building, and I followed it as far as the bright square at its furthest point — no one ever locks a door in the south. Washing hung on a line, a cat leaped out of our way, I was momentarily blinded by the light as I came out onto the veranda and saw the sky above it. All this was alien, belonging to the woman who shouted cross words at our trespassing, and I had no sense of sadness or loss.

Neither my grandfather Lyonya, with a mustache just like his father’s on his babyish face, nor his severe mother Betya, ever came back here, and I could see why. Apparently Grandfather had gone back to Odessa in later years, and even visited someone he knew. But Kherson and Kakhovka slowly faded, sank to the deep seabed of memory, as out of reach as Switzerland. There was nothing left to find here. Still, for the sake of propriety, I did have one more place I needed to visit.

The New Jewish Cemetery, as it was once called, was founded in the nineteenth century. We’d arranged to meet a local historian in a café on the day before, and when I’d told him we were planning to visit the cemetery he’d politely commented that it wasn’t in the best state. Natural enough, we supposed, as there were very few Jews left in the town to tend it. We took a taxi to the cemetery; the afternoon heat had settled like a lid and my skirt stuck to my legs. The town had petered out, its remains lay scattered over the scrub, half-built houses on large plots of land, looking for all the world as if someone had taken a bite out of them and then left them half-eaten. Everything was sky blue and yellow flax. We drove past a space of wild grassland behind a wire mesh fence and the driver suddenly said that this was it, but he wasn’t sure where the entrance was. A little way ahead were some garages or storage units and we walked for ages along the perimeter fence until we came across a locked gate. Beyond it was what looked like an empty kennel and then the tombstones. We could have scrambled over the low fence, but the lock gave way and the door opened. I went in. My husband waited outside on the road.

I had no real idea what I was looking for. The tombs of my unknown relatives could have been anywhere, and it was instantly clear that the cemetery had given up the ghost, had allowed the land to consume it — and this had happened not recently, but many years ago. A little farther off were tombstones, obelisks, and what might have been a crypt but looked more like a ruined military dugout. These seemed to have lost all purpose, they had collapsed into the ground, and between them patches of spiky scrub sprouted like mangy fur. The place was quite overgrown, it was an effort to reach them, and I felt a rising fury — at my husband who had left me on my own, at the spikes and thorns catching on my skirt, at this senseless search, which had never once brought me closer to my goal. The fury kept me struggling forward, I walked three hundred meters without even noticing, and only then did I hitch up my skirt to examine my legs, which were striped with scratches like a cuneiform tablet, and I gasped with the realization of pain.

From here, wherever I looked I found myself surrounded by pale-colored scrub, like a mess of untidy hair. From a distance it looked like high grasses, but in fact it was a mat of thorns, burned by the sun to transparency and covered in tiny shell-like growths. I had walked farther and farther in, and I now stood waist-deep in the thorny plant and it clutched at me. The tombstones were not far off now, but there was no way to reach them. I could make out yawning holes around their bases, and I could see that some of the older stones had name plaques that couldn’t have been from before the 1950s or 1960s. I could see the stumps of old railings around the tombstones, one little fence still shone with a flame-blue paint. The fallen tombstones were hidden by wild flowers, burdocks, and snail shells, and their surfaces resembled burned skin. There was no reason to go farther, nowhere to go, but it was equally beyond me to retrace my hundred or so steps across this merciless landscape. It was perfectly clear to me that even if there were some Gurevichs buried here, I wasn’t going to find them, and I didn’t even want to anymore. The past had bitten me, but it was only a warning nip, and it was still prepared to let me go. Slowly, very slowly, step by step and bawling gently at the effort, I made my way back to what had once been the beginning of the path through the cemetery.

A mother and her son and two daughters once lived in the district town of Bezhetsk. By their village standards it was practically a capital city, with houses made of stone and even a cathedral and monastery. They’d come from Zharki, their native village. The father, Grigory Stepanov, did seasonal work in a St. Petersburg factory and traveled back and forth. There is no record of what he did there. They lived as people generally do, causing no trouble to anyone; they were not poor, the children could all read and write and the oldest, Nadya, who was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, wanted to study in a school. There was a girl’s gymnasium in the town and her parents were just considering this. Nikolai was born in 1906, his sister Masha was a year younger. Nikolai later remembered them sitting together in the summer heat on the riverbank, reading the exciting Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton, and Walter Scott.

There was an accident at the factory: their father was dragged into the machine and the machine, like a living creature, bit off his right arm, his working arm. So he returned to Bezhetsk for good. The factory owners paid him a huge amount in compensation, as he was a qualified worker who was no longer able to work. No one knows how much, but it was enough to buy a house built partly of stone, and a cow called Zorka, and to send Nadya to the girl’s school. In the aftermath, in the suddenly empty life of an invalid, Grigory took to drink and his drinking killed him. It happened terrifyingly fast. By the time they buried him, a few years later, they’d lost both cow and house.