Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

She thinks of herself as a product of the family, the imperfect output — but actually she is the one in charge. Her family are dependent on her charity as the storyteller. How she tells it is how it will be. They are her hostages.

She feels frightened: she doesn’t know what to take from the sack of stories and names, or whether she can trust herself, her desire to reveal some things and hide others.

She is deceiving herself, pretending her obsession is a duty to her family, her mother’s hopes, her grandmother’s letters. This is all about her and not about them.

Others might call this an infatuation, but she can’t see herself through other peoples’ eyes.

The character does as she wishes, but she comforts herself by thinking that she has no other choice.

If she’s asked how she came to the idea of writing a book, she immediately tells one of her family’s stories. If she’s asked what it’s all for, she tells another one.

She can’t seem to be able to, or doesn’t want to speak in the first person. Although when she refers to herself in the third person it horrifies her.

This character is playing a double role: trying to behave just as her people have always behaved, and disappear into the shadows. But the author can’t disappear into the shadows — she can’t get away from the fact that this book is about her.

There’s an old joke about two Jews. One says to the other, “You say you’re going to Kovno, and that means you want me to think you’re going to Lemburg. But I happen to know that you really are going to Kovno. So — why are you trying to trick me?”

In Autumn 1991 my parents suddenly began to think about emigrating. I didn’t think they should. They were only just in their fifties, and the Soviet regime had finally fallen — they’d waited so long for this moment. It seemed to me that now was the time to be in Russia. Magazines were openly printing the poems and prose we had known only from typewritten copies passed around. Colorful things were being sold right on the street, nothing like the boring stuff we’d had before. With my first ever wage I bought blue eyeshadow, patterned tights, and lacy knickers as red as the Soviet flag. My parents wanted me to go with them, but I held my peace and hoped they’d change their minds.

This lasted a good while, longer than anyone could have predicted. Permission to move to Germany came only four years later, and even then I couldn’t believe our inseparable life together would come to an end. But they were in a rush and wanted me to decide. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. Apart from anything, this new life fascinated me, it stood half-open, constantly inviting me in. I simply couldn’t see what was so clear to my parents: they had lived through enough history. They wanted to get out.

A process began, and it was somewhat like a divorce: they left, I stayed, everyone knew what was happening, no one spoke about it. The guts of the apartment had been ripped out, papers and objects were divided up, the Faulkner and Pushkin Letters disappeared, the boxes of books stood ready-packed and waiting to be dispatched.

My mother spent more time thinking about the family archive than anything else. Under the Soviet rules still in place, all old objects, whether they belonged to the family or not, could only be taken out of Russia if you had a certificate stating they had no value. The country had sold priceless paintings from the Hermitage, but it wanted to make sure that other people’s property didn’t escape its grasp. Grandmother’s cups and rings were sent away to be certified, along with the old postcards and the photographs I loved so much. Their old order was disrupted; my mother, not trusting my memory, wrote down names on the backs of photographs and placed them in piles. She stuck the pictures she’d selected into an album with a once-fashionable Japanese patterned cover. On the first page a crooked line of writing read: For Sarra. To remember me by, Mitya.

Now everything was in this album: everyone she remembered by name, everyone she felt compelled to take with her on this freshly provisioned ark. Grandmother’s school friends rubbed shoulders with mustachioed men and the pink-cheeked children of the London aunt, who, it’s said, became close to the exiled Alexander Kerensky. Lyolya and Betya shared the same page, I was there in my school photographs, and Grandfather Nikolai sat glumly on a hill. Our dogs, Karikha and Lina, and then me again, grown up, aged twenty, stuck on one of the last pages, in grand company, squeezed between two newspaper portraits of the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov and the priest Alexander Men. We were all listed, even Sakharov, in my father’s hand: “Friends, Relatives, Family Members from 1880 to 1991.”

They left on the train. It was during the hot month of April in 1995, and the weather was celebratory: the sky above Belorussky Station, formerly Brest Station, in Moscow, was a giddy blue. As the train’s tail lamp zigzagged into the distance, we who were left behind turned and wandered back along the platform. It was Sunday, quiet, and I was just considering whether I should be crying when a man holding a can of beer glanced at me from out of a train door and said: “Kill the yids and save Russia.” It’s all too neat, but that is how it happened.

Later, I went to Germany to visit them and stayed a month, not convinced I could build a new life there or elsewhere. In the huge hostel in Nuremberg where ethnic Germans from Russia occupied ten of the twelve floors, the top two floors had been allocated to Jews, and they were half-empty. I spent two days there, all on my own like a Queen in my enormous empty room with ten bunk beds fixed in two lines like a sleeping car. No one else was put in the room with me. I was given food tokens to buy food with, a little like green postage stamps (Germans were given orange tokens). When I first arrived I made myself a cup of tea and sat down to watch the European night: in the distance, surrounded by black trees, I could see the twinkling lights of an amusement park and the shape of a stadium. I could hear the sound of someone playing the guitar from the floor beneath.

My parents came back to Moscow once, six months before my mother had her operation. The coronary artery bypass she needed was not an operation undertaken very frequently in the 1990s, but we were sure that they’d be good at that sort of thing in Germany. Anyway there wasn’t much choice, the congenital heart defect first diagnosed in wartime Yalutorovsk had deteriorated and now needed urgent treatment. I was twenty-three, and I felt quite grown up. We’d lived with my mother’s condition for as long as I could remember. At the age of ten I used to wake up and stand in the hall outside her bedroom to check that she was still breathing. But the sun always rose and the morning came, and all was fine. I slowly got used to it and never asked any questions as if I was afraid of upsetting the already delicate balance. We never properly spoke about the operation itself, perhaps just the insignificant details of her hospital care. So it was not to us, but to her friend that she said wearily: “What’s to be done? I don’t have any other option.”

Although I tried very hard to ignore all the signs that this was her last visit to Moscow, I wondered at her unwillingness to enjoy old memories. It was a carefree summer, and Moscow smelt of dust and dried up ponds. I was sure she would want to visit our old home and sit on a bench outside on the boulevard, or go and have a look at the school where her mother, she and I had studied. I’d also planned a long conversation about “the olden days” just as we’d always had in my childhood, and I was going to make notes this time, so not a drop of precious information would be lost. After all I was going to write this book about our family. But my mother resisted the idea of a nostalgic stroll, at first with her usual gentleness, and then she simply refused point blank: I’m not interested. She started cleaning the apartment instead and immediately threw away some old bowls with chipped edges we’d had since the seventies. I would never have attempted such blasphemy and I looked at her with a mixture of shock and excitement. The apartment was cleaned and polished until it shone. Her school friends and relations visited, but no one spoke the truth aloud: that they were all saying goodbye. And then my parents left.