Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

A communal apartment was home to endless human variety: one family’s rooms were filled with hoarded relics, another family ate extremely well; the pampered resident lapdog had a liaison with the heroic stray dog in the yard and disappeared. My father once found his father’s gun in a drawer and ran out to the yard to play with it, shrieking in excitement. By the evening the police had been called, and there were remonstrations. My father got a hiding. There were plenty of cats, there were the parallel bars the grown-ups used for grunting exercise while curious children watched. There was the only toy they possessed, a much-loved woolen rabbit in army uniform. Grandfather worked at a car factory and left first thing in the morning. My grandmother, their mother, worked in a library, surrounded by her “girls.” She took on staff others wouldn’t employ: a Jewish woman; the daughter of a political prisoner. Yet at home their father reigned and everything revolved around him: his rules, his whims, his periods of unconscious sullenness. No one ever came round to see them.

One day Grandfather came home from work covered in blood, his head cut open. An underground conflict had been simmering away at the car factory, where someone had been stealing goods, and Grandfather, out of principle, had made efforts to stop the thieving. That evening, as he walked through the January snow, two men caught up with him. They attacked him from behind with a piece of metal pipe, but the blow was uneven and Grandfather managed to turn and hit one of his assailants. The man fell to the ground and his hat fell off and was left lying there. The other ran away, covering his face. Grandfather picked up the hat, an expensive, thick fur cap, and took it home. His son, ten-year-old Misha, wore it for ages since he didn’t have one.

It was a simple life: every detail distinct, as when all the tiny stones can be seen through the thin trickle of a stream. Once, my grandparents went on holiday to Kislovodsk in the south and brought back some branches wrapped in newspaper: cypress and larch and a brown hard leaf shaped like a saber or a violin bow. Dora kept these branches until they crumbled away to dust.

Her mother, hooknosed Grandmother Sonya, sometimes came to stay with them; in the old photographs she sits with an ancient weariness on her, her skin the color of tree bark. The family remembers her as a beauty, so it must be so. Grandmother Sonya lived with Dora’s sister in a tiny room, together with a vast gleaming grand piano, which her husband had somehow got hold of. Guests slept on the prized piano’s lid. When Sonya came to stay Nikolai would get down a collection of Sholem Aleichem stories and place it on the table like a cake, so Grandmother Sonya could read it.

They sometimes visited Auntie Masha, Grandfather’s sister in the country. Auntie Masha’s husband had a Mauser pistol and he allowed my father Misha to take it apart and reassemble it, and even once let him fire it. Then he took Misha down to the river and he threw the gun with all his might into the middle of the river, and they silently watched the rings of ripples where it fell. My father remembers that summer well. He remembers lying next to his own father in the hay, warm and sleepy, his father’s cigarette glowing in the darkness, and his father so big and solid and real, his close presence giving the boy such a sense of lasting contentment it felt like it would never leave him. And this sense of contentment lasted and lasted, until one day it was no longer there. Years later, when Dora died, seventy-year-old Auntie Masha wrote in her letter of sympathy to my grandfather: “At last you can get married to a real Russian girl.” And then, shortly afterward, she and my grandfather were dead too, and there was nobody left.

The more I think about our family history, the more it seems like a series of unfulfilled dreams: Betya Liberman and her hope of becoming a doctor; her son Lyonya, spreading himself thin and clutching at straws all his life; Misha Fridman who didn’t make it to forty, and his stubborn widow, who couldn’t quite bring the family ship safe into harbor; my mother Natasha Gurevich, who wrote all her poems without any hope of publication, in faint pencil as if she intended the words to fade almost before they reached the paper. My father’s family were no different: Galya would sing her endless romance songs, written up by hand and bound into a book, but only when no one was listening; Grandfather Nikolai had his drawing — he spent all his childhood painting, producing sketches, and he kept going into adulthood. “He painted even better than your father,” my Aunt Galya told me (and for Galya my father was the highest being on the earth so this was extraordinary praise). The pile of drawings and paintings grew until 1938. She remembered the day when, awaiting arrest, her parents burned all the family papers. All the correspondence and the photographs went into the stove, and last of all Nikolai’s stack of paintings went into the fire: everything he had ever painted, his life’s work. He never picked up a paintbrush again.

There was something in each life that didn’t work out. We did have one distant relative, a singer, whose voice on the radio filled the kitchens and corridors of communal apartments. It was as if she represented an intentionally mute family. She was our triumphant voice — although of course she was never aware of her role in our lives.

Viktoria Ivanova is to my mind one of the most gifted singers of the twentieth century. She was married to Yura, a descendant of one of the Ginzburg clan. Her life, which began as a celebration, filled with Schubert and “The Blue Scarf” and applause and concert halls, ended in tragedy. Her only daughter, Katya, fell ill, and after an unsuccessful operation it became rapidly apparent that Katya’s development would forever be stunted, that she would remain at the mental age of a ten-year-old all her life, although her body would grow and age. Viktoria’s life became much harder, the fans fell away, and the performances dwindled. Only her voice remained the voice of a young woman, strangely at odds with her expanding body. Her voice could fill any space, make it swell with sound, and the chandeliers would tremble, and a shiver would run across the skin.

All this time Viktoria was the subject of an absolute obsession. I am talking now of Aunt Galya, my father’s sister and Nikolai’s daughter, whose name in the family was a byword for headstrong behavior, doing exactly as one pleased: “Let people say what they want, follow your own path,” she often repeated. In the fifties Galya qualified as an engineer and got a job in Kyrgyzstan. There are family legends about this period: how she bought an expensive camera with her first wages and then just abandoned it; how she ordered Muscat wine by the crate from a Southern resort; how she gave princely gifts to her friends, and maintained a princely indifference to her family. When I give some thought to her life, and everything it lacked, then these pathetic efforts to give some panache to her existence seem far more human and understandable. There were rumors about an affair she had as a young woman with a married man, but Grandfather didn’t approve, and that was that . She dressed in expensive clothes, she went to exhibitions and discussed her friends’ children with them.

At the beginning of the seventies Aunt Galya fell ill with cancer. She was operated on and the operation was successful, but the episode had a lasting and severe impact on her mental health. She was hospitalized once, then again. My father took on the role of caring for her, as her own father, who had never experienced anything remotely like this, was paralyzed by shame and horror. Hospitalization was followed by periods of remission, and then hospitalization again. Her condition had a direct link to her unfulfilled dreams, and to the singing voice. When it deteriorated she began desperately trying to attend every concert she could, and this rush of excitement always ended in hospital. Viktoria Ivanova’s angelic voice (or perhaps rather her far-too-human voice) was especially important to her. She was a relative, if a very distant one, and I suspect that made Galya think of her as a more “victorious” version of her own self. I dimly remember my parents’ perennial anxiety if Galya asked them to get hold of tickets for her: every time she attended one of Viktoria’s concerts it ended in another attack.