Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

The house in Sverdlovsk amazed them; they weren’t used to such big city glamour. It had a granite-faced plinth, the entrance to the building was tucked away in a yard, and the apartment had two rooms, a large kitchen, and a bright blue bathroom. Their transfer to Sverdlovsk was long awaited and a huge relief. My father was born there in August 1939: a child born to those who had survived.

Once a week Nikolai would take a walk around the bookshops to check whether anything new had appeared. Soviet distribution was organized in such a way that going to a bookshop was an adventure, with all the pleasure of the hunt: every shop had a different selection, and some were notably better than others — there were books that only very rarely appeared, but the hope of a find, and the occasional successes, kept the hunt alive.

My grandfather collected a huge library over his lifetime, and there was never any doubt that he had read it all: it was clear from the pencil markings. He would make notes and even corrections, underlining in blue where he didn’t agree with the author and in red where author and reader were of the same opinion. All the books on his shelves were covered with these red and blue lines. In special instances he took on the heroic task of transcribing a book, a task that seemed slightly ridiculous even then, and now that the internet has made any text accessible, it seems utterly mad. I think he was probably one of the last people in the world to copy books out by hand.

I have a few hand-sewn notebooks, in which my grandfather, in his calligraphic script, embellished by illuminated initial letters, wrote out one of the volumes of Klyuchevsky’s nineteenth-century Histories , chapter by chapter. Why this book? It wasn’t easy to get hold of, especially given Grandfather’s principled refusal to buy on the black market. But then there were many books like that at the time, and the choice of this one is enigmatic. Someone lent him the rare copy and for long months he copied it out, returning Russian history to its original manuscript state. I don’t know if he ever returned to his work as a reader, but this secretive and unfulfilled passion for everything to do with books and art did not begin with Klyuchevsky, nor end with him.

There’s a small brown notebook, made at some point after the war, which fits nicely in the hand; a page from a calendar inserted between the leaves: December 18, 1946, sunrise at 8:56, sunset at 15:57. It was around then that my grandfather began writing in the notebook. Everything about it, from the best handwriting to the colored inks he used to write his name on the endpapers, indicated that this was no working instrument for the quick noting of thoughts and trivia. This was a book, a selection, intended to be read time and time again.

The selection of quotes is eclectic to the point of eccentricity. Alongside the classics, from Voltaire and Goethe to Chekhov and Tolstoy, are folk sayings and “Oriental” anecdotes. The Marxist classics are there of course, the ones every Communist needed to study, Marx and Engels — but no Lenin, for some reason. To make up for Lenin’s absence there is a full set of Soviet writers from the time: Erenburg, Gorky, and the German writer Erich Maria Remarque with his lessons in brave solidarity. There’s a speech by Kirov, who was murdered ten years before, and the obligatory Stalin (“without the ability to overcome… one’s self-love and bow down to the will of the collective — without these qualities — there can be no collective”).

The whole book is an exercise in autodidacticism. The man who put it together and then diligently kept adding to it saw himself as a clever but lazy dog who needed leading, training, pushing toward activity. Life for him, and for his favored authors, is simply an exercise in continual self-improvement: endless heroism, valiant deeds and sacrifices in the white-hot air, with eventual immolation as a natural requisite — for you, my son, are Soviet man ! But none of this was ever demanded of him: in the offices of army bureaucracy and the garrison towns and the little schools and remote libraries, life was humdrum and basic, it was bare existence, waiting for payments, standing in lines. The world was immutable, as if the efforts of Communists were superfluous: the party schools and the factories, with their clear and unchanging rules just didn’t seem to want to make that leap forward .

My grandfather was desperately and carefully preparing himself for the grand finale, and so he fell through time, as if it were a hole in a coat pocket, too big not to catch on the lining, too perceptive not to know himself lost. The brown notebook contained lots of quotes about undying service and higher callings, but it also contained words of loneliness and the unrelieved desire for warmth. Toward the end I found this note: “Never rail against fate. A person’s fate is like that person himself. If the person is bad, then his fate is bad, too. Mongolian folk saying.”

Galya was reminiscing, and I sat by the telephone making notes on little squares of paper: how her father used to sing to her as he put her to bed when they were in the Soviet Far East. He sang Neapolitan songs, one very beautiful song about a fisherman and a girl wearing a gray skirt. I also remembered Grandfather’s songs, but by then his repertoire was different, more grief-stricken, often his voice was on the edge of breaking up entirely. He sang the ballad of a young suicide by the poet Nekrasov: “grievous grief, that wanders the wide world, suddenly came upon us.”

Galya told me the story of my one-year-old father walking around the Christmas tree, which was covered in sweets and gingerbreads, and taking a bite out of everything he could reach. This was in Sverdlovsk, a year before the war; my father’s own first memories were from the same period. He remembers a stuffed shaggy moose being dragged to the very top of a wide staircase in the Officers’ Residence where they lived, and him being lifted up onto its wide woolly back. The announcement of war came during a Sunday excursion in May. The whole military unit had gone on the outing, the officers’ wives were in their best dresses, the children carried baskets of food. They had traveled for an hour or two to the picnic spot, and had already begun laying out picnic cloths on the grass and paddling in the river when the messenger arrived: “All officers report to base immediately, and families to follow on.” The men left straightaway, and the rest is history.

My grandfather spent the whole war in the Urals, right at the back of the rear guard. It seems probable that the suspicions toward him lingered on (“when Grandfather was an enemy of the people” as the family remembered the episode). The frontline was barred to him, and how he must have felt injured by the rejection, this man who had prepared all his life for sacrifice. He was demobilized in 1944, very early, before the war was even over, and he hardly even protested when the door was slammed in his face. Perhaps he hoped there would be a change of heart, and he would be kept on, but this never happened.

The Stepanovs moved to Moscow and saw with their own eyes the huge Victory Day firework display over the Kremlin and the enormous portrait of Stalin, lit up in the sky by salvos. In Moscow they lived in long barracks and my grandfather continued to wear his army uniform, as if the work he was assigned by the party in various offices and factories was simply a continuation of his military service. I absorbed my father’s stories of childhood through my skin, like adventure books of pirates and Indians: how once with a friend, for a dare, he ran down the roof of a moving train, or how they called his enormous mountain of a gym teacher, Tarzan. How after years of boys’ school he suddenly found himself in a mixed classroom — with girls. How a red-haired little boy called Alik was killed when he fell into a quarry one summer. At the end of the summer he bumped into Alik’s mother, and she asked him about his holidays and all his plans, and then she suddenly said, “For Alik all that’s over now.”