Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

There’s no one left to tell the rest of the story. A family of local gentry took Nadya on and treated her as their own, paying for her school books and school aprons, but they didn’t help the others; poverty swallowed them like a black hole.

I remember how my grandfather Nikolai used to sit for hours by the silent piano and recount his story to my mother. Some small fragments I can remember to this day, not because I was listening particularly carefully, but simply because it was always the same story, repeated countless times — only my mother’s courteous attentiveness shielded him from the realization that everyone knew the story already. Once my grandfather began to lose his memory, nothing between his destitute childhood and the death of his wife interested him anymore: the sense of being abandoned returned as if it’d never been gone, and he was quite alone again.

He often returned to the same part of the story, the lowest ebb of their fortunes, the year when he and his mother were forced to go begging for alms. They sewed a canvas bag to put offerings in, and went hand in hand in the sunshine from one house to the next, knocking at the low windows. They stood at the cathedral’s entrance at one o’clock when mass was over and the churchgoers thrust bronze coins into the outstretched palms. The utter disgrace of this changed his life for good, and at this point his story began to break apart into strings of confused phrases. He ran away from home and lived rough, slept in railway sheds, derelict houses, in foundation pits (I still don’t know what he meant by this). Then he went home, because the family couldn’t manage without him. He was working by the age of fourteen, minding the community herd of cattle, weaving their cumbersome way down the Bezhetsk streets in the evenings. His mother considered returning to their native village, but there was no one left to help them.

When I was twelve I was inexplicably occupied by the fate of runaway children and juvenile criminals. I drank in the books of the Soviet educationalist Anton Makarenko, who had run a juvenile detention center in the 1920s, where hard-nosed young villains were recast as exemplary young Communists (obviously I preferred these heroes in their former guise, it fitted with my own longing for a more exciting life). I kept bothering my grandfather with questions but I could see that he had nothing more to tell me. He didn’t want to recall those years of sleeping rough for a reason I couldn’t then comprehend. He shook off my pleading with an expression of morose revulsion. Only once, in response to my endless questioning, he agreed to sing “Lost and Forgotten,” a song you could hear back then in every railway carriage and at every flyblown little country halt.

I will never forget it. Grandfather Nikolai began to sing in a quavering tenor, closing his eyes and rocking slightly, as if he was using his body to inch his way down into a dark and seemingly bottomless well. He no longer saw me, he’d forgotten my request. In his stumbled phrasing, and shorn of its upbeat, romantic qualities, the simple song was a horrifying spatter of sound. It sounded like nothing I’d ever heard, as if something very ancient had fought its way back to life and stood in the middle of our room, twitching and blinking. The original song was a sentimental thing, about a boy in a foreign country and his lonely little tomb, all of it very lovingly described, but there was nothing human in that performance, neither in the words, nor the voice of the singer — it was as if he was singing from the afterlife, already indifferent to the fate of humankind. A deadly chill touched the room.

Back in the mid-1970s my grandfather suddenly decided to visit the town of his birth, to see whether it was still standing. What happened then resembles a film from my youth: my father and my seventy-year-old grandfather, shaved and smartly dressed, set off after lunch on a motorbike, the older man holding tightly to the younger. The pair traveled for 300 kilometers along broken roads, staying over somewhere when it got dark, and reaching the town the next morning. They wasted no time looking around, but drove down one street and then another, my grandfather pointing the way, until they reached a featureless low house, identical to those around it. The ground floor was uninhabited, and they climbed up to the first floor. The owner answered the door. She didn’t want to let them in — what did they want with the house, she’d been there since the war — but Grandfather said in the terse voice of a military officer that he hadn’t come to claim the place back. The woman wasn’t convinced, but it shut her up. Grandfather stood under the low ceiling for a few moments, looking about him, and then said they could go. They got on the motorbike and set off back to Moscow.

Bezhetsk was once part of the lands owned by Tsarevich Dmitry, Ivan the Terrible’s son, who died aged nine in May 1591. The bell tower with its tented roof was built ten years before his death. When we visited the town it was untouched, as if time was just beginning. A four-cornered pool encased in pondweed lay behind the tower, right under its tiny square window; the window had been blocked up because drunken locals used to climb in hoping to steal things. The church the bell tower had once belonged to was gone — it had been razed to the ground.

“Those thieves who climbed in the window after the icons, they all came to a bad end,” reported the old woman who looked after the box of candles in the chapel in the former bell tower. “They drove off in two cars and the cars crashed and no one survived.” Only three or four of the original twenty or so churches in the town were still standing, although the half-destroyed, half-reconstructed outlines of some of the others could just about be made out in garage and warehouse buildings. The weeds had been given free rein: every gap and space was occupied by growth, proliferating and swelling with the sense of its own importance, dock leaves the size of sheets of newspaper, and cheery pink and blue lupins lighting the town. The main square, once named Nativity Square after the cathedral where my grandfather had been christened, was now named Victory Square, and a puddle, fringed by grass, ran the length of it. The cathedral itself was huge, with eight radiating chapels. Built in the eighteenth century, it boasted “a ciborium of rare beauty,” supported by sixteen columns, and oval icons. It was entirely destroyed in the revolution, when the building was turned into a sewing factory. When we visited it was bare, its windows yawned, its domes had been lopped off; it belonged to the realm of the lupins and the towering cow parsley.

We walked down a street that had already had three names, the last the name of a Bolshevik: the little town had got used to each in turn. On the corner was a building that had not changed very much. In the 1920s another little boy had lived there, Lev Gumilev, the son of two poets. His father, Nikolai Gumilev, was executed in 1921, when the little boy was only seven; his mother, Anna Akhmatova, lived in Saint Petersburg. Lev was brought up by his grandmother in Bezhetsk; his mother visited the town only twice. It was a two-story house, like most of the houses there, still residential, with a vegetable plot in the garden behind a fence. My family lived only a few hundred meters away — any of the overgrown buildings nearby could have been ours. In the same year, 1921, Nikolai Stepanov, a blacksmith’s apprentice, had just started work. Lev Gumilev went to a Soviet school, where, as he later said, he was beaten half to death.

The two boys barely shared a world, apart from the dust and the burdock on the walk they must both have taken toward the market square and the library, which Lev Gumilev remembered in old age: “complete collections of Mayne Reid, Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and many other exciting books.” The library was free and open to all; anyone could come and borrow those books beloved of boys of all ages: Dumas, Conan Doyle, Walter Scott. There, without knowing each other, two boys reached for books from the same shelves: a teenage boy whose childhood had been drawn into the whirlpool of history, and my grandfather, who might have been delighted to have been drawn into the whirlpool, but was luckily saved.