In Memory of Memory

1. Someone Else’s Diary

Aunt Galya, my father’s sister, died. She was just over eighty. We hadn’t been close — there was an uneasiness between the families and a history of perceived snubs. My parents had what you might call troubled dealings with Aunt Galya, and we almost never saw her. As a result I had little chance to form my own relationship with her. We met infrequently, we had the odd phone call, but toward the end she unplugged her phone, saying “I don’t want to talk to anyone.” Then she disappeared entirely into the world she had built for herself: layered strata of possessions, objects, and trinkets in the cave of her tiny apartment.

Galya lived her life in the pursuit of beauty: the dream of rearranging her possessions into a definitive order, of painting the walls and hanging the curtains. At some point, years ago, she began the process of decluttering her apartment, and this gradually consumed her. She was permanently shaking things out, checking anew what objects were essential. The contents of the apartment constantly needed sorting and systematizing, each and every cup required careful consideration, books and papers stopped existing for themselves and became mere usurpers of space, forming barricades that crossed the apartment in little heaps. The apartment consisted of two rooms, and as one room was overcome by more objects, Galya would move to the other, taking only the absolute essentials with her — but then the tidying and reevaluating would begin again. The home wore its own viscera on the outside, unable to draw it all back into itself again. There was no longer any deciding whether a particular thing was important or not, because everything had significance in some way, especially the yellowing newspapers collected over decades, tottering piles of clippings that propped up the walls and the bed. At a later point the only spare living space was a divan, worn concave, and I remember we were sitting there on one occasion, the two of us, in the middle of a raging sea of postcards and TV guides. She was attempting to feed me the chocolates she kept reserved for special occasions, and I was attempting to turn down these precious offerings with anxious politeness. A newspaper clipping at the top of a pile bore the headline: “Which saint rules your sign of the Zodiac?” and the name of the paper and the publication date were written carefully at the top in her beautifully neat handwriting, blue ink across the dead paper.

We got there about an hour after her caretaker rang. The stairwell was in half darkness and there was a hum in the air. People we didn’t know stood around on the landing and sat on the stairs, they had heard about her death somehow and had rushed round to offer their undertaker services, to help with registering the death, dealing with the paperwork. How on earth did they know? Had the doctor told them? The police? One of them came into the apartment with us, and stood there without taking off his coat.

Aunt Galya died in the early evening on March 8, Women’s Day, that Soviet festival of mimosa and greeting cards festooned with сhicks. Women’s Day had been one of those celebration days in our family, when everyone gathered around a single enormous table and the minerals splashed liberally into ruby-colored wine glasses. On Women’s Day there were always at least four different types of salad on the table: carrot and walnut; cheese; beetroot and garlic; and, of course, the common denominator of all Russian salads, olivye. But all that had ceased thirty years ago, long before my parents had emigrated to Germany. Galya was left behind, fuming, and in the new post-Soviet world her newspapers began publishing unprecedented and titillating things: horoscopes, recipes, homemade herbal remedies.

She desperately didn’t want to end her life in a hospital, and she had her reasons. She’d seen her own parents, my grandparents, die in one, and she’d already had some sobering experiences of state medical care. But still the moment came for summoning an ambulance, and we might well have done so if it hadn’t been a holiday weekend. It was decided to wait for Monday and the working week, and in this way Galya was given her chance to turn onto her side and die in her sleep.

In the other room, where her caretaker slept, photographs and sketches by my father Misha hung like squares on a chessboard, covering the whole wall. By the door was a black-and-white photograph taken in the 1960s, one from my favorite series of “pictures taken at the vets,” a beautiful picture: a boy and his dog waiting their turn, sitting against a wall, the boy a sullen fourteen-year-old, and the dog, a boxer, leaning into him with its shoulder.

Her apartment now stood silent, stunned and cowering, filled with suddenly devalued objects. In the bigger room television stands squatted grimly in each corner. A huge new fridge was stuffed to the gills with icy cauliflower and frozen loaves of bread (“Misha loves his bread, get me a couple of loaves in case he comes over”). The same books stood in lines, the ones I used to greet like family members whenever I went around. To Kill a Mockingbird, the black Salinger with the boy on the cover, the blue binding of the Library of Poets series, a gray-bound Chekhov set, the green Complete Works of Dickens. My old acquaintances on the shelves: a wooden dog, a yellow plastic dog, and a carved bear with a flag on a thread. All of them crouched, as if preparing themselves for a journey, their own stolid usefulness in sudden doubt.

A few days later when I sat down to sort through papers, I noticed that in the piles of photographs and postcards there was hardly anything written. There were hoards of thermal vests and leggings; new and beautiful jackets and skirts, set aside for some great sallying forth and so never worn and still smelling of Soviet emporia; an embroidered men’s shirt from before the war; and tiny ivory brooches, delicate and girlish: a rose, another rose, a crane with wings outstretched. These had belonged to Galya’s mother, my grandmother, and no one had worn them for at least forty years. All these objects were inextricably bound together, everything had its meaning only in the whole, in the accumulation, within the frame of a continuing life, and now it was all turning to dust before me.

In a book about the working of the mind, I once read that the important factor in discerning the human face was not the combination of features, but the oval shape. Life itself, while it continues, can be that same oval, or after death, the thread of life running through the tale of what has been. The meek contents of her apartment, feeling themselves to be redundant, immediately began to lose their human qualities and, in doing so, ceased to remember or to mean anything.

I stood before the remnants of her home, doing the necessary tasks. Bemused at how little had been written down in this house of readers, I began to tease out a melody from the few words and scrappy phrases I could remember her saying: a story she had told me; endless questions about how the boy, my growing son, was doing; and anecdotes from the far-off past — country rambles in the 1930s. The woven fabric of language decomposes instantly, never again to be felt between the fingers: “I would never say ‘lovely,’ it sounds so terribly common,” Galya admonished me once. And there were other prohibited words I can’t recall, her talk of one’s people, gossip about old friends, the neighbors, little reports from a lonely and self-consuming life.

I soon found that there was in fact much evidence of the written word in the apartment. Among the possessions she kept till her dying day, the possessions she often asked for, sometimes just to touch with her hand, were countless used notebooks and diaries. She’d kept a diary for years, not a day passed without her scribbling a note, as much a part of her routine as getting out of bed or washing. These diaries were stored in a wooden box by her headboard and there were a lot of them, two full bag loads, which I carried home to Banny Pereulok. There I sat down at once to read them, in search of stories, explanations: the oval shape of her life.

For the interested reader, diaries and notebooks can be placed in two categories: in the first the text is intended to be official, manifest, aimed at a readership. The notebook becomes a training ground for the outward self, and, as in the case of the nineteenth-century artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, an open declaration, an unending monologue, addressed to an invisible but sympathetic ear.

Still I’m fascinated by the other sort of diary, the working tool, the sort the writer-as-craftsperson keeps close at hand, of little apparent use to the outsider. Susan Sontag, who practiced this art form for decades, said of her diary that it was “an instrument, a tool” — I’m not sure this is entirely apt. Sontag’s notebooks (and the notebooks of other writers) are not just for the storage of ideas, like nuts in squirrels’ cheeks, to be consumed later. Nor are they filled with quick outlines of events, to be recollected when needed. Notebooks are an essential daily activity for a certain type of person, loose-woven mesh on which they hang their clinging faith in reality and its continuing nature. Such texts have only one reader in mind, but this reader is utterly implicated. Break open a notebook at any point and be reminded of your own reality, because a notebook is a series of proofs that life has continuity and history, and (this is most important) that any point in your own past is still within your reach.

Sontag’s notebooks are filled with such proofs: lists of films she has seen, books she has read, words that have charmed her, the dried husks of completed endeavors — and these are largely limited to the notebooks; they almost never feed into her books or films or articles, they are neither the starting point, nor the underpinning for her public work. They are not intended as explanations for another reader (perhaps for the self, although they are scribbled down at such a pace that sometimes it’s hard to make out what is meant). Like a fridge, or as it was once called, an icehouse, a place where the fast-corrupting memory-product can be stored, a space for witness accounts and affirmations, or the material and outward signs of immaterial and elusive relations, to paraphrase Goncharov.

There is something faintly displeasing, if only in the excess of material, and I say this precisely because I am of the same disposition, and far too often my working notes seem to me to be heaped deadweight: ballast I would dearly love to be rid of, but what would be left of me then? In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm describes an interior that is, in some ways, the image of my own notebook (and this was a horrible realization). It is littered with newspapers, books, overflowing ashtrays, dusty Peruvian tat, unwashed dishes, empty pizza boxes, cans, flyers, books along the lines of Who’s Who, attempting to pass as real knowledge, and other objects passing as nothing at all, because they lost all resemblance to anything years ago. For Malcolm this living space is Borges’s Aleph, a “monstrous allegory of truth,” a gristly mass of crude fact and versions that never attained the clean order of history.

My Aunt Galya’s diaries were completely peculiar, and their strangely woven texture, which reminded me above all of chain-link fencing, intrigued me more and more as I read them.

At any of the big art exhibitions I visited as a child, there were always a few viewers who stood out to me, and they were usually, and inexplicably, women. These women went from one picture to another, bending over the captions and making notes on pieces of paper or in exercise books. It dawned on me at some point that they were simply copying down the names of all the pictures, making for themselves a sort of homemade catalog — a shadow copy of what they’d seen. And I wondered why they were doing it, and hadn’t yet realized that a list creates the illusion of possession: the exhibition would pass and dissolve in the air, but the piece of paper held the order of sculptures and pictures, as freshly as when they first saw them, long after the actual images had faded.

Galya’s diaries were just such lists, but of daily occurrences, recorded with astonishing exactness, and with astonishing opacity. The diaries documented the time she got up and when she went to sleep, the television programs she’d watched, the number of phone conversations she’d had, who they’d been with, what she’d eaten, whatever else she’d done. There was a minute and virtuosic avoidance of content — how she’d actually filled her hours. It might say “read,” for example, but with no mention of what the reading material had been or what it had meant to her — in fact everything in her long and exhaustively documented life was the same. Nothing indicated what this life had been for, there was nothing about herself, nothing about other people, only the fastidious details, the fixing of the passing of time with the exactitude of a medieval chronicler.

I kept thinking that surely life would rear its head, if only once, and reveal itself in all its color. Hadn’t she spent her life reading — wouldn’t that alone have provoked intense reflection? There were also the constant slights and grievances that my aunt clung to, and only reluctantly relinquished. Surely something of this would be preserved and laid out in a final furious paragraph, in which Galya would tell the world, and us, its representatives, what she thought of us — the unexpurgated truth.

But there was nothing of the sort in the diaries. There were hints and semitones of meaning, folds in the weave that denoted emotion, “hurray” written in the margin against the note of a phone call with my father or with me, a few opaquely bitter comments on her parents’ anniversaries. And that was it. It was as if the main task of each and every note, each completed year’s diary, was a faithful witnessing of the exterior, and a concealment of the authentic and interior. Show everything. Hide everything. Preserve it forever.

What was it she held to be of such value in these diaries? Why did she keep them by her bedside until her dying day, frightened they would be lost, often asking for them to be moved closer to her? Perhaps the written text as it stood — and it was the tale of a life of loneliness and the imperceptible slide toward nonexistence — still had the force of an indictment. The world needed to read all this, to realize just how shoddily we had dealt with her.

Or, strange as it seems, for her these pinched records might have contained the substance of joy, which she needed to immortalize, to add to the pile of manuscripts that, as Bulgakov wrote, don’t burn, and which speak without any intention toward the future. If that’s the case then she succeeded.

But there was one note, quite different from the rest. On July 17, 2005 she wrote:

Months passed, maybe years. Galya’s diaries lay around the place, caught up in piles of other papers, the sort of papers you leave out, thinking they will come in handy, and instead they discolor and age like old kitchenware. I suddenly and involuntarily remembered them when I arrived in the town of Pochinky.

Pochinky had a dubious claim to fame in our household. This one-horse, dead-end little town, over two hundred kilometers from Nizhny Novgorod, was the place we’d all come from and no one had ever returned to. No one had even made an attempt to return there in the last seventy-odd years. Nabokov writes about existence as “but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness” — well, this quiet little provincial town, of little interest to anyone, became over the years that first dark eternity in the collective memory of our family.

Ours was a large family back then. I dimly remember accounts of dozens of brothers and sisters, photographs of carts and horses and wooden buildings. But these accounts were eclipsed by the tales of the wild adventures of my great-grandmother, Sarra Ginzburg, a native of Pochinky. She had been in prison in Tsarist times and had even lived in Paris, and trained as a doctor and then treated Soviet children, including my mother and me, and everything I was told about her had the laurel-leaf taste of legend. There was no one left to verify all these fantastic tales and no one would have wanted to.

We had a relative, Leonid, who was constantly on the brink of visiting the shrunken husk of this nineteenth-century town. He talked about it as one might an imaginary polar expedition. He spent his days attempting to instill this enthusiasm in others, his near and distant relatives (I was one of his last converts). He had striking pale eyes, almost transparent, and his enthusiasm was a constantly running motor. On the rare occasions when he found himself in Moscow he would visit to discuss his plans with my parents. Then one day he arrived unexpectedly and found my parents gone, they’d emigrated to Germany. I was the family’s sole remaining representative in Moscow. I’d never considered a sentimental journey like this, and I was intoxicated: for the first time it seemed as if our family’s native home was within reach, and therefore a real place. The more Leonid insisted on the hardships we would face, the distances we would travel, and the elaborate preparations that would need to be made, the more the journey seemed quite against the odds — and the more promise it held for me. In the end this Leonid, who spent so many years planning a trip with the whole extended family, a sort of return of the Tribes of Israel, died without ever realizing his dream. Pochinky remained as fantastical and unknown to us all as the fairy-tale city of Kitezh.

And here I was, just that little bit closer to Pochinky. Why I went I can’t say, and I can’t remember what I hoped to discover there, but before I left I spent a long time online, turning up facts. Pochinky was at the outer limits of the known world, I found it on an ancient map: beyond Arzamas, tucked in the wilds beyond Pushkin’s estate at Boldino, surrounded by villages with doomsday names. There were no railway lines in these parts, the nearest station was three hours’ drive. I decided to cut my losses and hired a driver in Nizhny Novgorod.

We left Nizhny Novgorod early in the morning along wide, pink, still-wintery streets. The town slipped into valleys and then reappeared in the car windows with its peculiar, not-quite-heedless clutter of industrial sites and picket-fenced wooden houses, conceding nothing to the modern world. When we reached the road out of town the car seemed to move by itself, racing along with unnecessary speed: the driver, father of a three-month-old baby, kept his hands on the wheel and was disdainfully silent. The road flexed up and down in tight little waves, frail remains of snow clung to the ground under the fir trees. The world grew poorer with every kilometer. In the blackened villages new churches gleamed like china, white as new crowns on old teeth. I had a guidebook extolling the beauty of Arzamas, now long behind us, and a little book on Pochinky, published twenty years before: it mentioned a shop owned by the Jew Ginzburg, who traded in sewing machines, and that was all. There was no mention of the legendary Sarra.

We traveled for long hours. At last the hills began, a dusky ridge of them, Umbrian hills, the color of dark copper, rising and falling as evenly as breath. Sometimes a brief flash of water. After we passed the exit for Pushkin’s Boldino estate there was a series of Pushkin memorials along the road. According to legend his local mistress had lived in the village of Lukoyanov. Little groups of trees like herds of animals.

Pochinky was built along a long main street: little side streets departed from the high street at tidy right angles. An attractive church in a classical style stood on the far side of the road. I learned from the guidebook that this was the Cathedral of the Nativity, where a certain Orfanov had once been priest. I knew the name, Valya Orfanova often sent us greetings when I was a child, and once she had asked my mother to buy me a book from her, so Masha will have something to remember me by. Mother picked out a poetry collection by the Symbolist poet Fyodor Sologub at the secondhand bookshop, but unfortunately it turned out to be a late work, The Great Good News Herald, a book of Communist poems published in 1923, filled with proletarians with flaming ideals. Useless to me, as I judged it then, not yet able to appreciate the exquisite soundplay underlying the hackneyed sentiments:

I had a strong desire to abandon the deserted main square in search of a place where there was something I could see and touch, but Maria Fufayeva, a local historian, was waiting for us there. It was a Sunday but they’d opened up the town library just for us. An exhibition of watercolors of Pochinky’s streets hung in the library; painted a hundred years before, they’d been sent from Germany for the exhibition. A German family had lived in Pochinky toward the end of the nineteenth century, and I had a sudden memory of the painter’s name, Gethling, being mentioned when I was a child.

The pictures were gemütlich, cheery: a pretty house with a chemist’s sign and some flowering mallow, the house of Augusta Gethling, the painter’s sister, who had tutored my great-grandmother for her school entrance exam. The house was still standing, but its little porch was gone, the facade had been concreted over and the mallow and the carved window frames had disappeared. No one could tell me anything about the house with the large yard and the horse and cart, the home of Sarra and her family at the beginning of the twentieth century.

And that was all. Much like the diaries of Aunt Galya, the reader had to content herself with shopping lists, notes of television programs, descriptions of the weather. Whatever stood behind this, swaying and rustling, was in no hurry to show itself, and perhaps didn’t intend to show itself at all. We were offered tea; we were taken for a guided tour of the town. I searched the ground beneath my feet constantly as if hoping to find a dropped kopeck.

The village had the shrunken feel of a vanished town, a once bustling center which had sprung up around the largest horse fair in the whole region. We crossed a vast market square, a vacant space now overgrown with trees, somewhere in its center a lead-gray statue of Lenin, but otherwise a place abandoned by people, too large to be useful in any new reincarnation. It was fringed by pretty little wooden houses, like the ones in the watercolors, some showing the signs of hasty, ugly renovation. And we were shown another square, a little asphalted space where Solomon Ginzburg, Sarra’s brother, had owned a shop in the 1920s. Here we stood a while and took photos, a group of us, surly women in coats and hats. The wind was too icy for smiles. On a curb by the main road another monument glittered in the grass, dedicated to Kapral, a mighty stallion and a stud horse for a full twenty years.

A little drive beyond the bridge over the river Rudnya was a derelict complex of buildings, the size of a small town, used for horse breeding. They had been built at the beginning of the nineteenth century and had once belonged to the cavalry regiment of the Imperial Guard. But even before this, horses had been bred here: kabarda and Nogay, stallions, horses, geldings and Nogay mares, and Russian colts and herding horses.

Catherine the Great built up the business to an industrial scale. The resulting huge square building with its classical lines and peeling whitewashed walls, its subsiding central tower and the arched entrance, symmetrically matched on the far side of the square, was intended to be an outpost of civilization, a little island of Petersburgian refinement. It had fallen into total disrepair relatively recently, in the 1990s, and it now stood surrounded by bare earth, blasted by the long winter. The last horses moved about the open paddocks: heavyset chestnut horses with pale and tufty manes. They lifted their heads and pushed their muzzles into our palms. By now the sky was dazzling, the clouds formed a mountain ridge across the horizon, and a skin-pink light glowed under the crazed white facade of the buildings.

We’d already traveled halfway back when I realized I’d forgotten the most important thing: there must have been a cemetery of some sort, Jewish or otherwise, where my ancestors were buried. The driver had his foot on the accelerator, the names of villages were flashing past: surreal, earthy names. I called Maria Fufayeva on my mobile. There was no cemetery, just as there were no longer any Jews left in Pochinky. Actually, no, in fact there was one Jew left in Pochinky, she even knew his name: Gurevich. Strangely enough it was my mother’s maiden name.

2. On Beginnings

I stopped writing this text for the very first time thirty-something years ago, after filling two or three pages of a lined school exercise book. The size and ambition of the task were simply too much for me. I put it aside, left it to grow into. I comforted myself with the thought that I could leave it be for now.

The history of this book consists of a number of such denials: moments when I managed to escape it in various ways: I put it off for my older, better self to complete, or I made tiny, painless, and deliberately inadequate sacrifices: jotting notes on scraps of paper or on my mobile while on the train or on the phone, a little like notching a stick (to remind me, so that from these two- and three-word distillations the memory would be able to put together a whole viable and elegant construction, a silken tent for the narrative to reside in). In place of a memory I did not have, of an event I did not witness, my memory worked over someone else’s story; it rehydrated the driest little note and made of it a pop-up cherry orchard.

Early twentieth-century Russian memoirs sometimes mention an amusement for children that consisted of placing yellow discs in the bottom of a teacup and then filling the cup with water. Under water the discs began to glow with the extraordinary, exotic, and otherworldly intensity of Japanese and Chinese paints. I’ve never seen these discs — where did all that go? But in the family treasure trove of Christmas decorations handed down from my grandmother, there was a little incense burner, the height of a match, in the shape of a swarthy-faced boy smoking microscopic white cigarettes, and the smoke kept rising and the pinpoint of light endlessly disintegrated to ash, until our tiny cigarette supplies ended for good. Now all I can do is describe its workings, and perhaps this is a happy end of sorts? Paradise for the disappearing objects and everyday diversions of the past might simply exist in being remembered and mentioned.

I began writing this book when I was ten, in the apartment on Banny Pereulok in Moscow, where I am typing the first lines of this chapter now. In the 1980s there was a battered desk by the window with an orange desk lamp, I would stick my favorite transfers to its white plastic base: a plush mama bear, pulling a sleigh with a Christmas tree, a sack of gifts, and her baby bear sitting sideways on it under a snowy sky. On each sheet of transfers there were usually five or six drab pictures, gleaming with a sticky finish. Each one was cut out separately and wetted in a bowl of warm water. Then the transparent colored image had to be peeled free of the backing with a practiced movement, placed on a flat surface, and smoothed out, all the creases removed. I remember the little cat boy wearing a raincoat and a carnival mask on the door of the kitchen cupboard, and the penguin couple on a background of pink-green wheeling Northern Lights. Still the bears were my very favorite.

It is as if it brings some relief to share all these scraps from the past as I remember them, half-wryly, the transfers dirty and rubbed away a good twenty years even before the kitchen was redecorated, and only now reanimated, illuminated again — fat little boy in a sombrero and yellow-green domino mask but with no face behind the mask, a mass of gold curlicues around his head… As if, like a vanquished wizard, I could disappear, becoming a thousand ancient, neglected, blackening objects. As if my life’s work was to catalog them all. As if that is what I grew up to do.

The second time I started to write this book without even realizing it, I was sixteen, wild, errant, in the afterglow of a love affair that felt as if it had defined everything in my life. With the passing of years this love has dissipated and paled to such an extent that I can no longer conjure up the sensation of “everything beginning” that I felt while I was in its grip. But I remember one thing with absolute clarity — when it became clear that the relationship was over, to all intents and purposes even if not in my head, I decided it was of vital importance to record a sort of “selected impressions”: details, assemblage points, the turns our conversations took, the phrases we used. I wanted to fix them in my mind, to prepare for future writing-up. A linear narrative made no sense for this: the line itself was so shakily drawn. I simply noted down everything that seemed important not to forget; on each square of paper a single word or a few words, which straightaway reconstructed a location and happening in my memory; a conversation, street corner, a joke, or a promise. Every incident struggled desperately against my attempt to contain it, to give it order and sequence — alphabetical or chronological — and so I set on the idea of one day putting all these little twists of paper into a hat (my father’s hat, he had a wonderful gray hat that he never wore) and of pulling them out one by one, and then, one by one, noting them down, point by point, until I was able to leave alone this chartered land of tenderness: a memorial to my own self. After a while these forty or so bits of paper ended up in various drawers of a table we had, and then dissolved somehow, lost in a procession of moves and spring cleans.

Do I need to mention that I don’t remember a single one of the forty words I was so frightened I would forget all those years ago?

And yet I am still smitten with the idea of blindly retrieving and reliving scraps from my life, or from a collective life, rescued from the shadows of the known and accepted histories. The first step of this salvaging is my habitual working process: notes on the back of an envelope, scrawls during a phone call, three words in a notebook, invisible library cards piling up in a hasty and unsystematic manner, never to be reread. All this is the continuing mounting up of my life to date. Only there are ever fewer people with whom I can still discuss how things were.

I always knew I would someday write a book about my family, and there were even periods when this seemed to be my life’s purpose (summarizing lives, collecting them into one narrative) because it was simply the case that I was the first and only person in the family who had a reason to speak facing outward, peering out from intimate family conversations as if from under a fur cap, and addressing the railway station concourse of collective experience. None of these people, not those still alive, nor those already dead, were ever seen. Life gave them no opportunity to be remembered or to remain in view, to stand briefly in the spotlight; their ordinariness put them beyond the usual human interest and this seemed unfair. There was, it felt to me, an urgency in speaking about them and on their behalf, and the endeavor frightened me. To start writing was to cease to be a curious listener, an addressee, and to become instead the horizon point of the family line, the destination for the many-eyed, many-decked ship of family history. I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.

It struck me that my grandparents’ efforts in life were largely dedicated to remaining invisible, to achieving a desired inconspicuousness, to hiding in the dim household light and keeping themselves apart from the wide current of history, with its extragrand narratives and its margins of error: the deaths of millions. Perhaps this was a conscious choice, perhaps not — who knows. In Autumn 1914, when my great-grandmother was a young woman, she returned to Russia from war-torn France, taking a detour to stay clear of the war. She might have gone back to her old ways, her revolutionary activity; she might have had her name in school history books or, just as likely, in the lists of the executed. But she remained well beyond the reach of the textbooks and their footnotes, in a place where all we can see is swirly-patterned wallpaper and an ugly old yellow butter dish, which survived its owner and the old world, and even the twentieth century.

Earlier in my life this gave me cause for some embarrassment, although the reason for this is hard to put into words and shameful to admit. I suppose the embarrassment had something to do with the “narrative drive.” I felt bound to notice that my ancestors had hardly made any attempt to make our family history interesting. This was particularly clear to me when we commemorated the war each year at school. The war had happened forty odd years before. Other peoples’ grandfathers came into school with their medals and bouquets of flowers, they never said much (because what had happened to them hardly bore being salami-sliced into episodes of derring-do), but they stood very upright by the blackboard, and even if they gave no witness accounts, they were in themselves pieces of evidence. My grandfather Lyonya did not fight: he was an engineer in the rear guard. I pinned more hope on Kolya, my other grandfather, with his officer ranking and his Order of the Red Star. But it turned out he had served in the Far East during the war, and I could never quite establish whether or not he did any fighting.

When I conducted further research, it began to look like he hadn’t fought after all. He had been under suspicion, something had happened — and the shadowy tale hung untold, like a dark cloud, over that side of the family. This story had a title — “When father was an enemy of the people” — and it took place in 1938–39, during an “unspoken” Beria amnesty, when some were suddenly set free and others, like my grandfather, escaped imprisonment. It was only when I compared dates that I realized that my grandmother was pregnant with her second child during those dark days: my father was born on August 1, 1939, exactly a month before the outbreak of the Second World War, and the composition of Auden’s poem:

Lord knows by what miracle he survived and even grew up in an intact family with a mother and a father and a sister. I know two versions of the story. The one they told me in my childhood now seems a confection and apocryphal — I’ll write of it later. But the image of my grandfather the warrior didn’t really stick: in the story told at home he was a mere splinter in a whirlpool — hardly the hero of a stirring tale of war and victory.

Everyone else’s ancestors had taken part in history, but mine seemed to have been mere lodgers in history’s house. None of them had fought or been repressed or executed (there were dark rumors of arrest and interrogation surrounding the other grandfather, but it seems the affair died down and he escaped persecution), none had lived under German occupation or fought in the battles of the century. One story stood like an obelisk in all this: the life of my great-great-aunt’s twenty-year-old son, who died defending Leningrad. This was a tale of the unfairness of life, and no amount of icy anesthetic running through the veins could dull its horror. Wasn’t it impossible for the little boy in the photos in his round-toed felt boots to die? The news of his death is so inconceivable that sometimes just the mention of the boy’s name is enough to make me go dark before the eyes, as my mother used to say — both the story and my response to it, learned from her.

It’s hardly worth saying, but there were no famous people among my relatives; they seemed almost to insist on their inconspicuousness. They were doctors, engineers, architects (but not of dreaming spires and facades, only of workaday constructions like roads and bridges). They were accountants and librarians. They led very quiet lives, appearing to live utterly apart from the grinding mills of the era. Almost no one belonged to the Communist Party, but at the same time there was nothing demonstrative in this — it was simply that their lives ran deep under the skin, that nothing was acted out on the surface, where every little movement is scaled up, noticed, and has consequences. Now that they have departed into permanent darkness and their personal histories are concluded, I can examine these lives, talk about them, and hold them up to the light for inspection. And, at the end of the day, there is a sort of inevitability to being seen — would this one last time really harm them?

From time to time, always in the evening, and usually on a school holiday, or a day when I was recuperating from sickness, my mother would call me to look at the photo albums. We’d prize open the cupboard door — the cupboard was jammed up against the divan so it took some skill to open it — and before we got out the albums we’d pull out a drawer filled with boxes (this extra diversion was the icing on the cake). The boxes contained all sorts of objects that were very dear to me, passport photos and pictures from different generations, prewar pebbles collected from Crimean beaches, an antediluvian baby’s rattle, grandfather’s drawing instruments (you can have these when you’re old enough), other odds and ends. The photo albums themselves were kept in the main cupboard, and there were a lot of them. Some of them were stuffed so tight with photographs that the leather binding was stretched thin. Others were nearly empty, but we still took them out. The most impressive album was bound in orange leather and had silver buckles and straps; another was black patent leather with the emblem of a yellow castle on a hill on the front, and “Lausanne” printed slantwise. There was an art nouveau album, decorated in metallic curls and the image of a Japanese geisha, which would have looked dated even a hundred years ago. There were thinner albums and thicker ones, larger and smaller ones. The pages had a certain old-fashioned weight to them, with wide silver edges and slits for the corners of photographs. There was a touch of melancholy in the fact that our modern glossy, slippery photos didn’t fit in the albums. They were either too narrow for the slots, or they bulged between the slits, and they were always too lightweight. The old photographs had an abiding quality, they were intended for a different life span, they cast into doubt all my efforts to fit my own image into a neighboring slot in the album.

And then the photographs themselves, each with a story attached. Men with thick beards and men in glasses with thin gold frames, who were directly related to us, our great-grandfathers, or great-great-grandfathers (and sometimes I added another “great” in my head quietly just because it gave them an air of grandeur), their friends and acquaintances. Young girls, who turned out to be grandmothers or aunties, with interchangeably dull names. Auntie Sanya, Auntie Sonya, Auntie Soka, a long line of them, swapping ages with ease, their expressions unchanging; standing, sitting, against a backdrop of dim interiors or staged landscapes. We began looking from the beginning, from the very first beards and collars, and somewhere toward the middle of the evening everything began to swim out of focus, except my sense of the enormity of it all. The geographical reach alone was huge: these people and their sepia-faded children lived in Khabarovsk, Gorky, Saratov, Leningrad. But no sense of family history attached itself to the city names, family history was merely made more distant and foreign by their roll call. At last, and with a sense of contentment, we reached a small album that contained photos of my mother as a child: looking gloomy in wartime evacuation in Yalutorovsk; standing holding a doll in a pioneer camp; wearing a sailor suit and holding flags in her nursery school. I could understand this scale, it was proportional to me. In some ways the whole evening’s activity culminated in this: to see the child who was my mother, sullen, frightened, running as fast as she could along some long-forgotten dirt track, was to enter into a new territory of anticipated closeness, a place in which I was older than her and could look after her and feel sorry for her. When I look back at this now, I realize that the sting of pity and equality I felt back then came too early in my life. But at least it came. I had no other chance to feel older than her, or to pity her.

Only much later I noticed that all the bound albums, the stories and the golden-edged photographs (for they all had milled and gilded edges and monograms and the name of the photographer and the place the photograph was taken on the back) were of my mother’s family. There were in the whole house only two or three photos of my father’s family standing out on a bookshelf. In these pictures my grandmother Dora as a young woman looked surprisingly like my own young mother, and stern-faced grandfather Kolya looked for all the world like Pasternak in his old age. They were silently present, like icons in the corner of a room, almost as if they stood outside the wide current of family history, its river source, its jetties and shallows.

There were also albums of postcards (these later turned out to be the remains of great-grandmother Sarra’s correspondence, dashed-off lines from Paris, Nizhny Novgorod, Venice, Montpellier), a whole miniature library of a disappeared visual aesthetic: beautiful full-cheeked women, mustachioed men, children in little Russian high-necked jackets, Symbolist death-and-the-maidens, gargoyles, and beggar girls. And other cards without scribbles on the back: vedute of the even brown walls of Italian, French, and German cities.

I loved best of all a series of postcards with night views of cities, parks at dusk, a bright streetcar turning a tight corner, an empty carousel, a lost child standing by a flower bed and clutching a useless hoop, tall houses, windows so impossibly red they could have been lipsticked in, and behind them the old world lived on. This dark-blue world with its lit lamps radiated the purest sense of yearning and was doubly and triply unattainable. Unattainable because the impossibility of foreign travel was a constant ungainsayable presence in our everyday lives — people in our world didn’t travel. (Our two or three acquaintances who had been given permission to travel abroad seemed to glow in the golden light of a rare fortune — it happened so infrequently and to so few people.) And modern Paris, as described in André Maurois’s Paris, had nothing in common with that dark-blue-and-black Paris, which seemed to prove conclusively that it had disappeared long ago, with no hope of ever returning. The postcards, like the visiting cards and the pale envelopes with their raspberry-colored paper lining, were all just waiting to be used in some way, but we couldn’t imagine how to make use of them in this very different era. So we closed up the albums again and put them back on their shelf and placed the postcards back in their boxes and the evening came to a close as all evenings do.

Some of the objects from this old world (and our home was full of them, even seeming to rest on them, like hen’s legs) had made a place for themselves in the new world. Yellowing lace was sewn onto the cuffs of a musketeer’s greatcoat for a school carnival, a black hat from Paris with an ostrich feather of insane length and curliness came in handy over and over again. I couldn’t pull the kid gloves over my hands (they had shrunk with time, but it looked as if they were simply too small for me, and I felt shamed by the breadth of my hands, like a wicked stepsister trying on a glass slipper). We drank tea from hundred-year-old cups once or twice a year when guests came over. Everything came out for high days and holidays, those days that were mismatched to the everyday, like two odd boots; those days when all the rules slipped sideways and you were permitted the impermissible. On other days the albums lay on the shelf and time merely passed.

I need to make it very clear at this point that our family was quite ordinary. After the Soviet Union disappeared, everything began rising up to the surface, objects regained little by little their primary function, and our accumulated and preserved past became once again what it was to begin with: a museum of cultured life at the beginning of the twentieth century, complete with battered bentwood furniture, a pair of oak armchairs, and a black leather-bound Complete Works of Tolstoy. It genuinely was buried treasure, but in a different sense from the usual. The clock struck the hour, the barometer indicated stormy weather, and the owl paperweight did nothing in particular. Remaining together was the sole purpose of these mild-mannered, uncomplicated objects, and they achieved it.

Strange really to think that this task — of committing everything to memory — has hung over me all my life. I didn’t feel ready for it, not then, not now.

I couldn’t get it all off by heart, however often I went over the same ground — and every dive down to the underwater caves of the past meant doing just that: the recounting of the same old names and circumstances, nothing gained, no new slant on things. Some things leaped into my memory ticketless, like a kid on a streetcar, usually a legend or a curiosity, the narrative equivalent of Barthes’s punctum. Among these were the stories that could more easily be retold. And how much did it matter anyway if one starch-collared ancestor became a lawyer in the retelling, rather than a doctor? But guilt at the missing details hampered my ability to remember, forced me to put off asking more detailed questions. It was already clear that I would one day (when I became that better version of myself) open a special notebook and sit down with my mother, and she would start at the very beginning, and then there would be some meaning to it all — and a system, a family tree, and every cousin and nephew would be in their rightful place, and at the end of it there would be a book. I never once doubted that this moment of setting things straight would be essential to the process.

But I never did ask those questions or set things straight in that way, despite my ability to retain inessential facts and my chimp’s memory for anything to do with words. The puzzle was never completed; I was left with the tongue twister of my aunt’s names, Sanya, Sonya, Soka, a lot of photographs of the nameless and the noteless, some ethereal and unattached anecdotes, and the familiar faces of unfamiliar people.

To some extent this resembled a mah-jongg set that was kept at the dacha. The dacha (a little one-room place with a tiny kitchen, a terrace, and a scrap of boggy ground where some stubborn apple trees clung to life) was just outside Moscow, and for decades my family had been taking anything worn or shabby out there to assume its rightful place and live out its second life. Nothing was ever thrown away, and these elderly objects made the world more densely present, less ethereal. The former furniture aged with its summer’s hard labor: harvesting, storing, the seasonal tasks. Ink stands kept pointlessly in the shed, drawers full of hundred-year-old nightshirts, and, on a shelf behind the mirror, a mah-jongg set in a little canvas bag. For years I was intrigued by this mah-jongg set, and every summer holiday I nursed the forlorn hope that I would set it all out, work out what to do with it, and return it to useful service. It never happened.

We knew that my great-grandmother had brought the set back from her travels abroad (and as we possessed two kimonos in the house, a large one and my smaller one, both gossamer-light with age, I had no doubt that abroad in this case meant Japan). The little bag contained lots of ivory pieces, brown with age, each with a white front covered in hieroglyphics, which I was never able to decipher or match to another piece, domino-fashion: a sailing boat to a sailing boat, a flourish of leaves to a flourish of leaves. There were simply too many different images, and alarmingly few common elements. And then I had the sudden thought that probably over the years some of the pieces had gone astray, and that made me feel completely lost. I could see there was a clear system, but just as clearly I knew I couldn’t work out what it was, or even design a simpler version for myself. I couldn’t even keep a piece in my pocket, because I didn’t want to take a part from the whole.

When I began to think seriously about my memories I had the startling realization that I had nothing left. Almost nothing from those evenings looking at old photographs in the lamplight: no dates, no details, not even the skeleton of a family tree. Who was whose brother or nephew? The little boy with the sticking-out ears, in a short jacket with gold buttons, and the man with his sticking-out ears, wearing an officer’s woolen coat were clearly the same person — but who was he? I had the faint stirring of a recollection that his name was Grigory, but it didn’t help me much. The people who had once populated that other world with all its valencies, family connections, and warm embraces across the miles had all gone: they were dead, or displaced, lost. The history of a family that I had at the outset learned at the speed of a straight line was now fragmenting in my head into tesserae, into notes indicating textual omissions, into hypotheses there was no one left to prove.

Perhaps, for this reason, a number of unverifiable stories hovered around the edges of my mother’s recollections. The sort of tales that add piquancy to the usual movement between generations but exist as apocrypha, the friable appendices to firm facts. Such fables are mostly like sprouting twigs, still to unfurl and grow to their life’s proportions, and they take the form of half-spoken phrases in the margins of the story: “I’ve heard he lived in…”; “She must have been this or that…”; “There’s a story about him…” It’s the sweetest part of the tale-telling, the fairy-tale element. These are the embryos of a novel, what we remember forever, over and above the boring circumstances of time and place. I want to take them and blow life into them, tell them anew, stuff them with details I have prepared myself. I remember these stories so much more easily. The pity is that even they become meaningless without a subject to hang them on; they cannot be verified, and over the years they lose their individual quality and are incorporated into the memory as part of the wide current of the everyday, the typical. It is hard to say now what actually exists of the stories I have retained. By that I don’t even mean what actually happened, but rather: was it passed down from mother to daughter, or simply a product of my imagination, invented without me even realizing?

Although sometimes I did realize. I remember once, a terrible teenager with a desire to fascinate, I told someone the family story of a curse. “And so, passionately in love” (I intoned) “with an impoverished Polish aristocrat, he converted to Christianity and married her, and his father cursed him and never spoke to him again, and so they lived in poverty and soon they died of consumption.”

This wasn’t exactly true — no one died of consumption. In the photo albums there are pictures of the cast-out son, looking happy in his prodigal state, wearing glasses, with grandchildren, all against an ordinary Soviet backdrop. But what about the Polish aristocrat? Did she exist or did I add her merely to embroider the story? Polish, to add the “exotic,” an aristocrat to add spice to the line of merchants, doctors, and lawyers? I don’t know. I can’t remember. There was something in my mother’s story, the faintest lighting of the way forward for my imagination. But there’s no way back: fantasy can’t be placed under the microscope to discover its kernel of truth. So my story continues to feature an unreliable Polish aristocrat — the doubtful cause of real and doubtless hardship. There was a curse, and there was genuine poverty, and my great-great-grandfather never did set eyes on his firstborn son again, and then they did all die, so in one way or another it is true.

I inherited one other thing that bears on the construction of this story, on how it was told and by whom. It’s the sense of our family as a matriarchy, a tribe of strong, individual women standing like milestones spanning the century. Their fates loomed large in my life, here they are in the front row — holding on to each other, merging into each other — of the many-headed family photograph. Strange when you consider that they all had husbands. The men in this family are barely illuminated, as if history consisted only of heroines, and couldn’t quite stretch to heroic men. There is truth to this, though it’s hardly the men’s fault. Women kept the family line going — one husband died young, another died even younger, a third was busy with other out-of-frame matters. In my head, and perhaps in my mother’s too, the line of transmission (that part of the story left, once the cheerful bustle of life has been tidied neatly into prehistory) was a staircase leading steadily toward me, consisting entirely of women. Sarra begat Lyolya, Lyolya begat Natasha, and Natasha begat me. The matryoshka (nesting) doll insisted on the preeminence of single daughters, each emerging from the one before and inheriting, with everything else, the gift and the opportunity to be the single teller of the tale.

What did I think I was up to all those years? I clearly wanted to build a monument to those people, making sure they didn’t simply dissipate into the air, unremembered and unremarked upon. But in fact it seemed I didn’t even remember them myself. My family history was a confection of anecdotes, barely attached to names or faces, unrecognizable figures in photographs, questions I couldn’t quite formulate because they had no starting point and, in any case, there was no one to ask. Despite all this, I had to write the book and here is why.

Jacques Rancière’s essay Figures of History makes many arguments that seem urgent for our times. He says, for example, that the artist’s duty is to show “what can’t be seen, what lies beneath the visible.” This pleases me, because the late Russian poet Grigory Dashevsky always saw this as the role of poetry, to bring the invisible to the point of visibility. Rancière’s most important point is this: in his writing about history, he contrasts “document” and “monument.” A “document,” for him, is any record of an event that aims to be exhaustive, to tell history, to make “a memory official.” A “monument” is the opposite of “document,” in “the primary sense of the term”:

With this in mind, I began to see that the monument-memorial I’d hoped to raise was in fact built long ago. It seemed I even lived in its pyramid chambers, between the piano and the armchair, in a space marked out by photographs and objects, which were mine and not mine, which belonged simply to the continuing and disappearing thread of life. Those boxes of our domestic archive hardly spoke directly, but they were the silent witnesses, those piles of greetings cards and trade union cards were the epidermal cells of the lived and unspoken past, and, as storytellers, they were hardly worse than the documents that could speak for themselves. A list was all that was needed, a simple list of objects.

Perhaps I hoped to reassemble and reanimate from all these objects the corpse of Osiris, the collective family body, which had disappeared from the home. All these fragments of memory and pieces of the old world did create a whole, a unity of a particular sort. A whole vessel, but flawed and empty, consisting mostly of cracks and gaps, no better and no worse than any single person who has lived her term and survived — or, more accurately, that person’s final and unmoving corpus.

And of this twisted body, no longer capable of connecting its memories into a sequence — would it want to be seen? Even supposing it wants nothing, am I right to make it the subject of my story, a museum exhibit, like the pink stocking of Empress Sisi, or the rusty file with traces of blood that brought her story to its end? Putting my family on general view, even if I do it with as much love as I can muster and with the best words in the best order, is, after all, something of a Ham’s deed, exposing the vulnerable and naked body of the family, its dark armpits, its pale belly.

And most likely I would learn nothing new in writing it, and just knowing this made the act of writing even more fraught. Yes, free of scandalous revelation, far from the hell of Péter Esterházy, who found out that his beloved father had worked for the secret police, but also far from the bliss of having always known everything about your people, and bearing this knowledge with pride. Neither of these outcomes were mine. This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.

In late spring 2011 a colleague visited me in Moscow to invite me to Saratov to give a talk about the internet journal where I was working. Our conversation very quickly turned to Saratov itself, a city I had never visited, and the birthplace of my great-grandfather. My colleague pulled out a tablet. He had a wondrous digital haul of scanned prerevolutionary postcards with views of Saratov: predominantly green-white vistas with trees and churches. As I flicked through, the lines faded into each other, and now I can only remember the wide expanse of river, dotted with ships. The tablet contained other wonders, a downloaded directory for 1908: gray lists of names and streets. “I’ve tried looking for my family,” said the colleague. “Hopeless task, really. There are ten pages of my surname.”

My great-grandfather was called Mikhail Davidovich Fridman, and this gave us a head start. We found him easily — he was the only one of that name in Saratov, and a hundred years before he had lived on Moscow Street, clearly an important street in the town back then. I asked if the street was still there, and it was.

So I set off for Saratov. The Volga river basin was as bare as an empty soup dish, and the narrow streets descended toward it like tourniquets. Where there were once just spaces of green and white, now shopping centers and Japanese restaurants vied for space. The steppe pressed in: mannequins stood outside the open doors of dress shops, wearing lavish wedding dresses with fluttering ruched skirts, soiled yellow by the dusty steppe wind. I went to Moscow Street the next morning, after checking the address again.

The house was unrecognizable, but then I’d never seen it before to recognize it. The wide gray facade had been smeared with a layer of cement and shop windows cut into its front. A shoe shop. But it was still possible to pass through an archway into the yard.

I spent a good while in the yard just running my hands over the rough Saratov brickwork. Everything was as I’d hoped, perhaps even more so than I’d hoped. I recognized my great-grandfather’s yard unhesitatingly. There was no doubt in my mind, even though I’d never seen it or had it described to me. The wooden slatted palisade with the Rudbeckia growing up against it, the crooked walls with their bricks and wood, and a useless old chair with a broken frame standing by a fence — all of it was mine, all of it instantly part of my family. It seemed to speak to me, saying: here, you needed to come here. There was a strong smell of cat, but a stronger smell of plants and greenery, and there was absolutely nothing I could pick up to take with me. But I didn’t need souvenirs, I remembered everything beneath the high windows with such a sense of heightened native precision that I seemed to know how it had all been, in this, our, place, how we had lived and why we had left. The yard put its arms around me in an embrace — that’s what it was. I hung around another ten minutes or so, making huge efforts to commit it all to memory, to extract the picture, as you might a mirror from its frame, and fix it for once and for all in the memory’s grooves. Then I left. And it worked. From the train window I saw long, bright drainage ditches running alongside the tracks, and once a little tornado of dust, twisting over a deserted crossroads.

About a week later my colleague from Saratov rang me sheepishly. He’d mixed up the address. That street all right, but a different house. God, I’m so sorry, Masha.

And that is just about everything I know about memory.

3. A Handful of Photographs

1.

A large hospital ward with a black-and-white checkered floor. The sun beats down through the tall arched windows and the right-hand side of the picture is bleached white by the light. There is altogether plenty of white in the picture; the beds stand feet-forward, their metal frames covered in canvas and on them high-stacked pillows, the heads of the patients. Men with whiskers stare toward the camera, one has propped himself up on his elbow and a nurse is making a quick adjustment to something at his shoulder. Only one woman in the whole huge room. In the left-hand corner of the picture a swarthy man in a hospital gown sits by a table, leaning on crutches, his face creased into a toothy beaming smile. This table is covered with paper, doctor’s notes, discharge papers. Two men are sitting at the table, radiating the untroubled contentment of the hospital visitor — they are the focus of the composition, the event, the reason for the photographer’s visit. One sits back in his bentwood chair; he wears a black suit, his shoes shine, his collar is brilliant white. The other wears gray and a flash of starched collar beneath his transparent mustache. A row of auxiliaries stand farther back, their arms crossed over their chests and stomachs, as if waiting for orders. The iron bed legs and the ribs of columns run in parallel; someone peeps out from behind a column as if everyone is obliged to be present in this picture. The fronds of an institutional potted palm wave from a corner. The window is a pool of light, and the picture is most interesting where the light washes out the detail of the window frame and even eats away at the nurse and her patient.

2.

If you didn’t know you might never guess that this is a body. It looks like a pile of rags on a low marble table, and some attentive students sit behind it. Anatomy class. Closer to the camera there’s another little table with something indistinct on it, a sack or a bundle or some such, I can’t quite make it out. Six women crowd around the table, white lab coats over their dark everyday dresses. The only man stands a little apart, he has turned away and is deciding whether to smile or frown while the others are occupied. He wears a comic pince-nez, behind him a school blackboard covered in chalk scrawlings, and if you look closely you can see a mass of information: a diagram of the vegetative nervous system left on the board after a lecture; the profile of a soldier in a high peaked cap; another profile of a beautiful woman with a cigarette in her mouth and a determined jaw; a smiling round face, presented straight on with a huge pair of ears added on each side. The blackboard is to the side of the picture, and at the table we see a restaging of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp but with an all-female cast: a black-haired girl with a stethoscope around her neck is reading from a book and her listeners are sitting absolutely still. Their faces are as impassive as the faces of watchmen on duty, only one has allowed a smile to soften her features. But if you thought at first that they were all listening attentively then you would have been wrong: one is stretched out on her chair and her gaze is remote, another is sitting up with a sudden start as if her name had been called. One student in glasses hasn’t managed to put on her doctor’s coat, and is attempting to pass off her heavy embroidered bodice as a medical robe. The woman sitting with a book, her hair gathered into a bun at the nape of her neck, is my great-grandmother, Sarra. The women direct their gazes in different directions, like a bundle of badly behaved twigs, anywhere except at the articulated pile of rags that is the corpse in front of them.

3.

All the French doctors are whiskered and their whiskers point skyward like wings; all the women are in white with their sleeves pushed up; an electric light hangs down from the ceiling. You can tell the nurses from the students by the huge cornettes they wear. Constant collective activity like a spindle turning, faces peeking out from behind backs, glances over the shoulder at a point in the picture where there is a mound under sheets, and the gray-bearded head doctor is holding a clamp or a lancet: this is the dead zone, the static center of the composition and the operation, so silent you can hear the ticking in your own head, and the women, who are standing so close to the hands and what is under them, are turned away to look at the camera, and seem to be frowning.

4.

The picture is the color of wood, and even seems to be wood-paneled, everything in it is planked, the walls, the fence, the shed, a little lean-to at the side of the house. There’s a cat nearby, but the chickens are maintaining their dignity. A girl, wearing a new school dress, you can tell that the wide sleeves are newly stitched. Her whole being says that she is resigned to being photographed but doesn’t quite see the need. A bentwood chair has been brought outside for the occasion and she is seated in it and the camera readied, and there she is, her smile both proud and ironic.

5.

There’s no note on this one, but it’s Switzerland, around 1910. Wedges of pine forest to the left and right and cone-shaped white mountains in the gap between. A few pine trees are visible, higher up in the whiteness, a couple of different-sized trees on the edges of the plantations, and beyond them the regular spikes of saplings growing under the trees. Above, the indistinct Alpine cloudscape, and just below the top edge of the picture a fringe of greenery, from which we, Russian travelers, have only just emerged.

6.

A little photograph, old, and it looks even older than it is, because it’s so faded. On the lower edge, printed in pink: Cherson and B. Wineert. It looks like the mid-1870s, a bride stands, immovable as an upturned cup on a tablecloth, her wedding dress falls in a triangle of thick material around her, a cliff of fabric descending from her stomach to the ground, buttons all aligned. Her wide face is fringed by lace. She stands, calm and steadfast, and beside her the groom seems barely to exist, leaning against her, as he might against a gate. Not unequal in the crude and obvious sense of an unequal marriage, but almost as if they presented to us the union of a triangle and an exclamation mark. He is thin-faced, long-boned, like a taper, or the last splinter of soap, and stretched to attenuation, even appears to be growing still in his frock coat with its lapels drawn on, his wife holding on to his elbow. The frock coat is almost too straight, the top hat unexpected, like a rabbit in a conjurer’s hand. My great-great-grandfather’s particular beauty seems so ephemeral that it’s hard to imagine him twenty or thirty years later, an established man, a paterfamilias. As a child I used to think that the other great-great-grandfather with his bushy beard was the same man, except much older, and the difference between them horrified me. But there are only two photos of Leonty Liberman, and in both he looks the same: as if he might disappear into the background before he even reached adulthood.

7.

Children are playing croquet on a lawn in a Moscow suburb. The adults are sitting on a bench, or standing, leaning against a tall pine. An old timbered dacha with a mansard roof and little onion domes continues out of the frame. The windows are wide open. The game has been broken off and everyone there has turned to face the photographer: little girls in knee-high socks and white dresses that are short like little smocks; barefooted little boys from next door’s dacha; the croquet mallets are still, the balls lie motionless. Only the girl on the right is still intent on the game, she is bent over and her bare shoulders are crookedly but determinedly curled over the mallet, her right foot is extended, her face in profile. Her pageboy haircut exposes her long, soft neck. She looks like an ancient Greek boy, she radiates a dark concentration and is entirely focused inwardly, in the emblematic manner of a bas-relief. All the others stand and sit in little groups and pairs, but she is alone in the foreground. She is not far from the others, but all the same she seems to be at the edge of the photograph, like the far wing of a large house.

8.

A floor-length black skirt and a light blouse: an unknown woman standing in front of a fence. An ivy-clad brick house, the painted shutters open. Two children, of about two and five, flicker at her shoulders like wings. She is holding their hands, and her hands are crossed over her chest. Two men stand to each side, slightly closer to us. One is taller and he stands with his legs crossed, his hands thrust in his pockets — his shirt is belted, not tucked in, his curls are ruffled. This is Sashka, or Sancho Pancho, a friend and an admirer of my great-grandmother Sarra. The other man is older. He is wearing a pince-nez and a blouse made of coarse material. He has a gloomy expression and I suddenly realize that I recognize his face. Yakov Sverdlov. Ten years later in 1917 he becomes the Chairman of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee and signs a decree beginning the Red Terror and “the turning of the Soviet Republic into a single military camp.”

9.

A dim yellow rectangle, a little brighter in the left-hand corner, but you can just about make out a table, a shoulder, a woman in profile. On the back, a note: “Don’t let it put you off that the picture is so dark, it’s not too bad if you take a good look.” A little lower in the corner, same handwriting: “Paris.”

10.

The first thing you notice are the words on a banner against a backdrop of endless birch trees:

The lower part of the picture is such a tangle of women’s bodies that the eye directs itself involuntarily to a point above their heads, to the regular white letters and tree trunks. The composition of women’s bodies looks like a complex chemical equation. The upper row is standing tall and each subsequent row is squatting a little lower than the last, the final row lying spread out like mermaids in a sea of arms, PE knickers and identical PE shirts. About ninety women in all, but all their faces look surprisingly similar, or perhaps they all wear the same blankness, the same refusal to allow any expression to cross their faces. For this very reason I look at each individual face, and as I move between one woman and the next, I appear to see the different phases of a single mimetic movement. This is the Raiki Holiday Camp where Great-Grandmother Sarra worked as a doctor in around 1926. Her ten-year-old daughter Lyolya is lying in the front row, a long plait extending from her head and an absurd-looking fringed shawl on her shoulders. To make her easy to find, our Lyolya, someone’s added a blue-inked cross over her head. But you could just as easily tell her apart by her estrangement from the scene, how she looks away and to one side.

11.

Heavy card, a golden surround, a backdrop with a misty landscape — against it, the fat-pawed iron bench with its fancy wrought armrests looks particularly squat and solid. David Fridman, a doctor and the father of my great-grandfather, sits on the bench, his hand rests on the collar of an Irish red setter (the breed standard for this type of setter had been set only twenty years before the picture was taken, in Dublin, in 1886). The clothes he wears are almost unnoticeable, begging not to be scrutinized: a good overcoat with an astrakhan collar, a matching black astrakhan hat, unremarkable trousers, even more unremarkable shoes, a pince-nez on a long chain, which only serves to focus attention on his troubled eyes. But perhaps it is not the eyes that give the impression of a troubled man, but rather the legs, held close together, as if he was just about to get up and leave. In our family we keep the common custom of sitting down briefly before the road, half a minute’s respite to allow the journey to assume its proper proportions. The dog is nervy, it stirs. Both dog and man die in 1907, on the same day, or so my mother told me.

12.

A portrait photograph, just a face and nothing else — but my goodness, what a face: a long beard spreads into two points on the chest; the nostrils are flared wide; brows drawn together, and above them a head that appears bald despite its gray fuzz. There’s no backdrop, just absence. This is Abram Osipovich Ginzburg, my other great-great-grandfather, the father of fourteen children, a merchant of the 1st Guild, the highest rank a merchant could achieve. He started his business in Pochinky, although he is not mentioned in the local archives, and in this picture he resembles “a God-Sent Tempest.” The eyes are the first thing you notice in an old picture: they seem lost because their gaze is searching for a person who is no longer there, a person who once recognized them. But his gaze in this photograph is directed to the side — it’s not a searching gaze, he has already fixed someone or something in his sights. You are drawn almost against your will to put yourself in their place, out of frame, in a space where nothing has been visible for a long time. The actual composition of the photograph, where your attention had been hitherto wandering, seems suddenly a cramped little triangle, and everything in it is regulated by that fiercely unbending gaze.

13.

A beautiful woman, wearing white, and a little boy in a sailor suit who looks like her. She is sitting and he is standing by her armchair. The white is a class signifier, a sign of affluence, of the creak of starched cloth and unlimited leisure. The boy is about six, his father will die two years later, in another three years he and his mother will find themselves in Moscow, who knows how, perhaps washed up in a basket of reeds, like Moses. I have on my shelf an old typewriter, a heavy Mercedes with the prosthetic jaw of a second keyboard. Betya took on any job she could find when she first came to Moscow, mostly typing work.

14.

A large copy (approx. 20cm by 30cm) of an old photograph, on the back: “1905. Left to right: Ginzburg, Baranov, Galper, Sverdlova. The original is in the Gorky Memorial Museum No. 11 281. Research Associate Gladinina (?) A round blue stamp above the number.”

It’s winter and the snow under their feet is trampled. Dark, shaggy fur coats and hats with a spotting of white — the usual smudging you get on an old photograph, the dots and lines that obscure the picture. Great-Grandmother Sarra, first on the left, looks older than her seventeen years. Her hat, the sort that’s fastened with pins, has slipped to the back of her head, a strand of hair has escaped and her round-cheeked face is red raw, you can see how cold she is. One of her hands is tucked into her coat’s cuffs, another is balled into a fist. Her right eye, injured on the barricades, is covered with a black bandage, like a pirate’s patch. This was in Nizhny Novgorod, the barricades were built during the uprising that began on December 12, 1905, and was put down by artillery after three days of street fighting.

In our family folklore this photograph is actually called “Babushka on the Barricades,” although of course you can’t see the barricades, just a white brick wall and to the side a little fence engulfed by a pile of snow. When you look carefully you can see how young they all are: the handsome young mustache in his gray fur cap, and Galper, with the prominent ears, whom I do not know, and her friend, with the childish face and high cheekbones. Sixty years later only the women have survived in the archival memory: Sarra Ginzburg and Sarra Sverdlova (“little Sarra”), the sister of Yakov Sverdlov, sitting on the bench outside the “Home for Old Bolsheviks,” two gray-haired old ladies in thick coats, warming themselves in the winter sun, pressing old-fashioned muffs to their stomachs.

15.

Morning on the open terrace of a dacha: someone is sitting in a wicker chair but all you can see are legs and the corner of a striped dress. An oilcloth over the table, and on it a cornucopia of china dishes, cups, sugar bowls, the old yellow butter dish, a tall vase filled with flowers and foliage, and beyond that a saucepan, but the contents aren’t visible. A girl in a summer dress is eating breakfast fastidiously. Her elbows are resting on the corner of the tablecloth, her right hand holds the knife, and in her left hand, the fork. Her feet, in fashionable shoes (rounded toes and little ankle straps), rest on the bar of the chair. The second girl, sitting opposite her, is bent over her teacup, stirring in sugar. Her suntanned knees stick out from under her skirt, her bare arms reflect the light, her hair is drawn up under a hairnet. An older woman in an apron, encased in a blinding white scarf, is watching Lyolya from afar to make sure she gets a good breakfast. This is Nanny Mikhailovna, who attached herself to the family and never left. It must be about 1930. There’s a pile of papers and on the top a copy of the weekly Ogoniok, with a faint outline of a woman on the cover. You can’t quite tell what the woman is doing.

16.

A gravel-tinted picture, you almost expect to feel granular dust when you touch its surface. Everything is gray: the face, the dress, the coarse woolen stockings, the brick wall, the wooden door, the twisting branch of a shrub. An older woman is sitting on a bentwood chair, her hands half-resting in front of her, she looks like she had started to move and then forgot what she was doing, and simply froze in that position, one hand half-covering her stomach. Her smile hasn’t quite reached her whole face yet and her expression is serene, as if the clock had stopped at midday, that quiet hour of moderate approval. Everything in the picture is underpinned by a sense of abject poverty, it is the unspoken language of the image: the heavy hands, unadorned by rings, the only dress of canvas, it is all kith and kin with the sparse weeds under her feet, they share the same root. She has made no attempt to clothe herself for eternity, to allow her workaday appearance a moment’s Sunday best. But this is as it is, because she has nothing else to choose from. This is my great-grandmother Sofia Akselrod, who used to read Sholem Aleichem in her village not far from Rzhev. This could be any year: 1916, 1926, 1936, it isn’t as if anything changed with the passing of time.

17.

A five-year-old girl holding a huge doll that isn’t hers. It’s a sumptuous doll, dressed in folk costume, an embroidered skirt and ornate headpiece, with a thick braid of hair and rosy cheeks. The mysterious thrill of the object! The little girl can’t even bring herself to look at the doll, and instead she directs her delighted gaze at the camera: Look at her! Look at us! So many contrasts: the little girl is frail and thin, and the doll is disproportionately large and plump; the little girl is dark-haired, her curls stick out in all directions, and the doll has a smooth flaxen plait. The lover and the beloved. The childish little hands hold the doll with a fervent tenderness: one palm cups the waist with care, the other hand encircles the doll’s porcelain fingers with the lightest of touches. The image is black-and-white, and so I can’t tell the color of the dress, with its embroidered сherries, or the color of the extravagant bow on the top of my mother’s head.

18.

A tiny picture, the epaulets are faded and impossible to read, but I know my grandfather reached the rank of major and was only demobilized in 1944. This is clearly a picture taken before all that. The face is as closed as a fist, it expresses nothing but strength: the arched brows, the ears close to the head, the whites of his eyes, the mouth. All of it molded to form a single billiard ball: a single typical portrait of the military officer at the end of the 1930s. A collective image of a face, one portrait standing for everyone, like the faces of the heroes in Aleksei German’s film My Friend Ivan Lapshin. I watched it when I was fifteen and I’d hardly seen any proper films, and I couldn’t be sure of what was happening, or who the main character was, who was in love with whom — all the characters seemed interchangeable to me, all cut from the same piece of boiled army wool. There was something familiar about them, their speech and posture all seemed vaguely familiar, as if I’d known it for a long time, and only years later I realized that every one of them was in some sense my grandfather, his antique courtesy and eau de cologne, his sternness, his shaved cheeks and bald head.

19.

Somewhere by a stream in the mid- to late 1930s two young women are posing for a photograph and they can’t stop laughing. One has let her hair loose, she leans down and is about to lay her white knitted shawl in the grass. The other is holding her hat to her head in the invisible breeze. They wear short, lightweight dresses. Their bags are already lying on the ground and their underclothes are crumpled at their feet.

20.

It’s raining and people are wandering through the wet meadow like lost souls. A whole crowd of people, about twenty in all, the men in straw boaters, the women in long skirts, the hems brushing the damp grass, above their heads the hopeless domes of parasols. A long way off, on the horizon, there is a wall, but who knows what was behind it. To the right is the glimmer of gray water. They stand in groups of twos and threes, some apart, some closer, some farther away, and the longer you stare at them, the clearer it becomes that this might resemble the landscape of the afterlife, its shoreline, where each of us is quite alone.

On the back of the photograph is a note written in French. Handsomely written, all curlicues and flourishes. I translate it as I read: “Montpellier, 22 of the VI month, 1909. To remind us of our zoological excursion to Palavas. How sad it was… The weather let us down. D. K. Genchev. For Mademoiselle S. Ginzburg, Pochinky.” Palavas-Les-Flots is a small resort south of Montpellier where a long spit of dunes divides the Mediterranean from inland freshwater lakes. The flat beaches are covered with gray sand, and there are colonies of pink flamingos not so far away, which perhaps in part explains the zoological nature of the trip. Nowadays, Palavas is a busy and inexpensive holiday destination, but one hundred years ago there was nothing there, the hotels had not yet appeared, only the newly built church of St. Peter.

Among the wanderers in the meadow there is one woman who holds herself very erect. She stands on her own, turned away from the camera, her slender back in a light summer jacket is the axis of the image, she is the central pole of the stopped carousel wheel. She wears a stiff-brimmed hat and her head is thrown back, she is carrying a ragged bunch of flowers. I like to think it is my great-grandmother Sarra.

4. Sex and the Dead

I must have been about twelve. I was hunting around for something interesting to look at. There was plenty of interesting stuff: with every death a pile of new objects appeared in our apartment, deposited just as they were, trapped in a sudden end state, because their previous owner, the only person who could have freed them, was no longer among the living. The contents of Grandmother’s last handbag, her bookshelves, buttons in a box, everything had simply stopped, like a clock, on a particular hour of a particular day. So many objects like this in our house. And then one day I found an old leather wallet in a far drawer. It contained a single photograph.

I could see right away what sort of a picture it was. Not a picture, or a postcard or, say, a picture calendar. A naked woman lay on a divan, looking at the camera. It was an amateur shot, taken long ago, already yellowing with age, but the feelings it aroused in me were utterly unlike the way great-grandmother’s Paris letters or grandfather’s jokey poems had made me feel. This picture added nothing to the throat-tightening feeling of family collectivity, to the black-and-white many-headed chorus of unknown relatives, always happening just behind my back, or to the hunger I felt when I saw something unknown and foreign: The promenade at Nice by night, on a prerevolutionary postcard. There was something clearly illicit about the photograph, although that could hardly have bothered me, quietly avoiding my parents, and on my own private search for the forbidden. There was a faint licentiousness in it, too, although the woman’s nakedness was open, straightforward, and full to the camera. Strangest of all, the photograph had no relationship to me at all. It belonged to someone else. The fact that the wallet had lost its owner long before did not change this feeling of strangeness.

The woman lying on the leather sofa was not beautiful. My sense of aesthetics had been formed by the cast gallery in the Pushkin Museum and a book on ancient Greek myth, I was affronted by her many bodily defects. Her legs were shorter than they were supposed to be and her breasts smaller, but her bottom was much larger and her tummy pudgy in a way that was very unlike marble. All these defects made her look lively, as anything living in ignorance of perfection looks lively. She was grown-up, in her thirties, as I now realize, and not a “nude,” simply a completely naked woman, although that wasn’t the most striking thing. The woman was looking straight at the viewer — that is, at the camera, that is, at me. Her stare had such intensity: it was utterly unlike the radiantly unfocused gaze of a goddess, or a model in an artist’s studio.

Her gaze had a very direct purpose to it: between the woman and her witness something was happening, or was going to happen. Strictly speaking, her stare was already that happening: it was the conduit or the corridor; the black hole. Her face was wide, flat, with slits for eyes, and there was nothing else in it apart from the intensity of the stare. Her communication was intended for the bearer of the photo, but I had somehow taken his place, and this made the situation both tragic and absurd. It was so very obvious that The Lady On The Leather Sofa (unlike the whole of art and the whole of history, which was definitely intended for me and took me into account) didn’t have me in mind as a viewer, didn’t want me, and I knew with certainty that someone else should have been in my place, someone with a name and a surname, and possibly even a mustache.

The absence of this other viewer made the whole thing feel indecent, coitus interruptus in its most basic sense, and I was the one interrupting. I’d turned up at the wrong time, and in the wrong place, and I’d witnessed what I shouldn’t have witnessed: sex. The sex was not in the body or the pose, or even the surroundings (although I remember them well) — it was in the directness of the gaze, its lack of ambiguity, the way it paid no attention to anything beyond the scene. Strange when you think that even thirty years ago both participants were probably dead and most certainly are now. They have died and left the sex act orphaned in an empty room.

What do I have against images? Perhaps it is that they all have the same flaw: euphoric amnesia. They no longer remember what they signify, where they came from, who they are related to, and yet none of this bothers them. For the beholder (I no longer know whether to call her a reader or a viewer) the picture seems to do more, to serve better. It delivers its message quicker, without wasting words, never tiring of actively engaging with the message: to stun us, to grasp hold of us, to occupy our thoughts. The picture seduces with its illusion of economy: as text begins to unwind its first phrases, a photograph has already come, confounded, conquered — and then it graciously condescends to allow the text to speak, to add the inessentials of what happened, and where.

For a whole century now the overproduction of visual material has been called the problem of the age, and its defining sign: heavy carts of descriptive text, loaded with meaning, have been overtaken by the image’s swift sleighs. It’s doubtless true, even if the sleighs only appear swifter to begin with. It’s not just the dead who disappear in the mirrored corridor of reproduction — the living do, too. Siegfried Kracauer describes the process with photographic precision in his essay on photography: we can break down what our attention does to a photo of our grandmother into its various phases, how she literally disappears before us, vanishes into the folds of her crinoline, leaving only a collar, a chignon, and a skirt bustle on the surface of the image.

The same thing happens to us. With every new selfie we take, every group shot or passport photo, our lives become arranged into a chain of images, a history that is quite different from the one we tell ourselves and want others to believe. The line of was-and-will-be, a compendium of single moments, poses, mouths open to speak, blurry chins, none of which we chose ourselves. Balzac foresaw some of this and refused to have his photograph taken, reflecting that each new picture removed a layer of balzac, pared it away, and if you let it happen, soon nothing would be left of you (or what would be left was only a puff of smoke, the vegetable heart, and the very last layer, the thickness of a death mask).

The mechanics of photography never intended to preserve the essence. The project of photography better resembles those time capsules intended for our descendants, or for aliens from outer space, filled with evidence of humanity: an anthology of our greatest moments an attempt to define ourselves through our civilization’s crowning achievements — Shakespeare/Mona Lisa/cigar, or penicillin/iPhone/Kalashnikov. They remind me of Egyptian burial sites, expanding suitcases stuffed with life’s essentials. If we imagine our descendants or the aliens to be curious, and this curiosity to be unlimited by time, then it will only be satisfied by a bank of infinite images, a cupboard where everything is packed away, every last person’s every last moment. And if this terrifying documentary mass could be gathered and kept ready for use, it would hardly be different from the incomplete but ever-increasing mass of data kept somewhere in the shapeless pockets of the atmosphere and called into being by the twitch of a computer mouse.

Photography observes change first and foremost — and always the same change: growth becoming dissolution and disappearance. I’ve seen a few photography projects that have documented change over decades, they flash up on social media now and again, giving rise to a bittersweet tenderness, and the almost improper curiosity with which young, healthy people regard a future that hasn’t even dawned for them yet. A young Japanese man takes a photograph of himself with his young son. Time passes, the boy is one, four, then twelve years old, then twenty: it’s like speeded-up film — we watch one being fill with life, as a balloon fills with air, while the other being diminishes and creases; its light gutters. Or another: Australian sisters who take a picture of themselves every year over a period of forty years in the same room, same spot, and in every picture they age a little more, slowly resigning themselves to aging and to those tiny visible signals of their eventual demise. In this sense at least, art’s endeavor is diametrically opposed to photography: any successful body of text is a chronicle of growth, a thing that is not completely in line with the parallel chronology of the appearance of wrinkles and pigmentation spots. Photography is less compromising: knowing none of this will survive, it makes its best attempt at preservation.

I’m talking about a particular kind of photography here. It’s no coincidence that it’s the most widespread, tracing its chalk circle around both professional photojournalists, amateurs with their mobile phones, and much that lies between these extremes. These photographers (and their viewers) are united by an unwavering belief in the photograph as document, witnessing reality, grasping it as it really is, without any kind of literary ornamentation: a rose is a rose is a rose. Art photography, in its aim to bend and reconstruct the visible world in the name of individual perception, interests me only at those points when reality unintentionally overcomes intent, flattering the viewer who notices the seam: the rough boots peering out from underneath the carnival silk.

The claims, if not the actual possibilities, of documentary photography are extraordinary: to see and hold the existing and what has existed — a task perhaps reserved for the Being who conservat omnia, as it says on the gates of Fontanny Dom in St. Petersburg. Still technology makes its best efforts; it shaves off time’s natural build-up of lint — and there are many mansions in its virtual house.

Many of the qualities of the camera induce a sense of dumbfoundedness. You might say it gives us a reason to quote a person, an animal, or an object as a single entity, as a unit of text — stripping reality of its little halo of signifiers, and at the same time ignoring the signified entirely. The camera places an equals sign between person and image for the first time — all that’s needed is enough images to complete the outline.

A century or so ago, the portrait was exhaustive proof of a person’s life, and with a few exceptions, the only thing you left behind. The portrait was the event of a lifetime, its focal point, and the very nature of the craft demanded the participation of both artist and sitter. The phrase “everyone has the face they deserve” was a literal truth in the age of painting; and for those whom class gave the right to be remembered as a singular face, that was the face of their portrait.

Or perhaps, even more importantly, the face on their correspondence. The greatest part of any legacy was textual: diaries, letters, memoirs, and the balance between the textual and the visual shifted only from the mid-nineteenth century onward, as the pile of photographs accumulated. These presented themselves to the memory not as “me, as I am,” but “me on Saturday in my black riding habit.” The number of photographs a family owned depended solely on their financial means and their social position, but even my grandmother’s nanny, Mikhailovna, had three photos in her keeping.

The old lady of painting (for brevity’s sake that’s what I’ve named the ability to depict the living, by one’s own hand, in any medium) is haunted by the impossibility of resemblance, and yet she becomes increasingly obsessed by the task of producing an exhaustive image, but a single image; an exact image, but an image that does not resemble the sitter; to present to the sitter in his concentrated form, not him-now, but him-forever, a bouillon cube of his vital parts. This is what lies behind the stories about Gertrude Stein becoming with the years more and more like her portrait by Picasso, or the story about Oskar Kokoschka’s subject, who (it is said) subsequently went mad and came to look exactly like his image.

We are the permanent subject of the old lady’s interest, and we know all too well that in place of resemblance she sells us a horoscope: a template interpretation, and we can either agree with it — the mirror flatters me — or refuse it. Once the photographic image appears, Madame Bovary is free to say c’est moi for the first time, as she picks out the most attractive of the thirty-six negatives. Life offers her a new mirror and it reflects fervently, demanding nothing, insisting on nothing.

Painting and photography go their separate ways at this point. One rushes to its inevitable end, its dispersal, and the other toward its vast proliferation. When the inheritance is divided up, one gets the house and garden, the other gets a pig in a poke. Martha takes reality, Mary is left to talk in the language of abstraction and installations.

With the invention of digital photography, yesterday and today have coexisted with unprecedented intensity. It’s as if the waste chute in a building has been blocked off and all the trash just keeps piling up forever. There’s no need to save film, just press the shutter release, even the deleted pictures remain in the computer’s long memory. Oblivion, the copycat of nonexistence, has a new twin brother: the dead memory of the collector. We look through a family album with a sense of affection — it contains a little, perhaps just what remains. But what should we do with an album containing everything, without exception, the whole disproportionate volume of the past? Photography is directed at an endpoint, where the volume of life fixed in images is equal to the actual length of life. The printing press keeps turning, but there are no readers left.

I imagine the piles of images. Huge diggers shovel at them, scooping all the waste into their buckets: the underexposed pictures, the duplicates and triplicates, the tail of an out-of-frame dog, a picture of a café ceiling taken by mistake. We get a vague sense of the vast mass from social media, where thousands of mediocre pictures are posted, pinned like butterflies with “tags.” For these images the future is just one more cemetery, a huge archive of human bodies we know nothing about for the most part, except that they existed.

This immortality is terrifying, but even more terrifying is the fact that it is imposed on you. What photography now registers is nothing other than the body of death: the part of me that has no personal will or choice, which anyone can claim, which is fixed and preserved without effort. It is the part that dies, and not the part that remains.

In the past immortality was a matter of choice, though you could reject it and choose what everyone was offered as a matter of course: “to be laid in a narrow cell forever.” Now that forever narrow cell of “Gray’s Elegy” has been withdrawn and we have accepted the impossibility of simply disappearing. Whether you want it or not, you are facing the strange extension of your existence, your outward form preserved for all time. All that disappears is what made you yourself.

It is a luxury permitted to very few to vanish entirely, to disappear from the radar.

You step into another photograph, it is as inevitable as stepping out into sudden summer rain. Who will actually look at all these images and when will they do it? Our outward form is scratched from us by a thousand CCTV cameras at stations, streetcar stops, in shops and underpasses — like the fingerprints left everywhere by humanity before forensics were invented. It has no alphabet, only the new (old) multitudinous nature of leaves in a forest.

Since we began recording and archiving sound, the unreproducible has disappeared from life. How Mademoiselle George acted on the stage and how Angiolina Bosio sang was described to us, and demanded time and passion of the curious: you had to imagine, flesh it out, recreate something in your head. Now there is nothing between you and what has been. The longer we keep recording the more people will fall into the zone of the undead. Their physical form keeps on walking and talking, their earthly voice resounds whenever you want it to. They still have it within their power to charm, to arouse desire, or to disgust (the body and the name separate, like film credits). The culmination of this is pornography from the distant past, nameless dead bodies performing their mechanical duties long after their owners are ashes and dust.

Still, the physical body cannot be handed down in this way — it carries no caption with its name and description. It has no distinguishing features. It is divested of all memory retrospectively, of any trace of what has happened to it: its history, its biography, its death. This divestment makes it obscenely contemporary. The more naked it is, the nearer it is to us, and the further from human memory. We know only two things about these people: that they are dead and that they had no interest in bequeathing their bodies to eternity. What once had a basic function, like the sparkwheel of a cigarette lighter, rotating between desire and satisfaction without any wish to become yet another memento mori, continues to function like a mechanism. But on this occasion, for me at least, it is a mechanism for compassion.

All the laws laid out by Barthes and Kracauer are in operation here. The punctum (a reproduction hanging over the bed, long black socks drawn up the skinny calves of a man) wants to be an alphabet, wants to turn events into a history — in this case to recount how time is constructed, its tastes and its sensitivity. But in fact all we see is the nakedness, which unexpectedly proved to be their last nakedness: these people, their thighs and potbellies, the mustaches and hair fringes of a time when they were contemporary, are left to the mercy of the viewer. They have no names, no future. All of it came to an end in the twenties-thirties-forties, those decades that still lie ahead of them. We can stop them in their tracks, speed them up, make them start over with their simple activities, again and again they’ll lift their former legs and arms, and lock the door as if they were all alone and still alive.

A Russian collector bought a box of family photographs in Sri Lanka; they impressed her in some way, so much so that a year later she returned to buy the whole archive, and began a search for the vanished family. She even found documentary traces of them, although none of them had lived into the new century. She then did everything she could to give them the strange immortality sometimes possessed by objects that have lost their owners. What was it about the photographs that made them stand out from the common crowd? Perhaps that which sets the museum exhibit apart from its more ordinary siblings, a subtle quality that gives it the right to preferential attention. None of the photographs in the archive (the father Julian Rast was a professional photographer) serve the utilitarian purpose of the mere preservation of existence. A visual perfection gives each image the magnetic and enchanting sheen of an exhibit: a family in the snow under the pine fronds; a child on a sledge with a baby faun; bathers; horse riders; German shepherd dogs. All the pictures look just like film stills and the viewer is drawn in, waiting for the scene to change and new scenes to appear, he needs to find out what happened to the subjects of the photos.

There is such injustice in the way that people and their portraits cannot escape an immediate and basic inequality: the difference between the interesting and the not so interesting, between what draws our attention and what doesn’t. Everything is in silent sympathy with the tyranny of choice, always on the side of the beautiful and the charismatic (to the detriment of everything that has no claim on our attention and so remains on the dark side of this world), especially our bodies with their entirely pragmatic agenda. Our preferences have nothing to do with age or upbringing, even three-month-old babies vote for beauty, health, and symmetry.

And this is unjust. Just as the dictatorship of the viewer or “watcher,” with his unfounded demands on the image, is an unjust one. The word “watcher” in Russian has a second, less obvious meaning. In the language of prisons, camps, and the criminal underworld, known by a significant proportion of all Russian-speakers, the watcher is the one who sets the rules and makes sure the others follow them.

So perhaps we could characterize the relationship between the watcher and the photograph, the reader and the text, and the viewer and the film as small episodes of power, like ticket sellers in the museum halls of random access memory. Both the rules and how they are followed depend on this relationship, but let’s not pretend that the “watcher” is a righteous judge. His rules and his choices are not God-given, they are human. Worse than that, they are criminal. He is intent on the acquisition/absorption of the foreign body: his taste is based on the rights of the strong when surrounded by the weak, or the living when surrounded by the dead (who are deliberately denied all their rights).

Maybe that’s why I love photographs that need no interlocutor and have no desire to engage with me. They are, in their own way, rehearsals for nonexistence, for life without us, for the time when the room is no longer ours to enter. A family is drinking tea, the children are playing chess; the general bends over the map; the baker’s assistant lays out the cakes — and we can satisfy our ancient and enduring desire to gaze into every one of the windows of the house of a thousand windows. The point of this dream is surely to be someone completely different for a short while, to escape ourselves. Most old photographs can’t answer this need — all they can do is insist upon their own integral selves. Their identity is theirs, but this world is ours.

Photographs that failed to live up to the photographer’s hopes are the unrealized scraps from a manufacturing process: a running dog, blurred to an unending streak, someone’s shoes on a wet pavement, a chance passerby in the frame. All this waste was filtered out and destroyed in the age of printing on paper. But now these very pictures have a special attraction because they were not intended for us (or for anyone). They belong to no one and so they belong to me — these moments that survived by accident and are freed from all obligation, stolen from life by life itself. These images of people are utterly impersonal and this is their advantage: they relieve the viewer of the burden of succession, historical memory, bad conscience, and a sense of indebtedness toward the dead. In return they offer a sequence of images of the past and future, the more random the better. These pictures are not of Ivan and Mary, they are of contingent beings, him and her, her and her, light and no one. Freedom from meaning gives us the opportunity to add in our own meaning, freedom from interpretation makes a mirror of the image, a square pool in which we can immerse any version of events we please. “Photos trouvées,” little foundlings, useful in their very readiness to become an object and abandon their past as someone else’s subjectivity. To bury their dead: both the photographer and the photographed. They have no wish to look us in the eyes.

Not-A-Chapter Leonid Gurevich, 1942 or 1943

My grandfather’s letter can be dated by its content to 1942–3. He is thirty and has been sent back from the rear guard to a Moscow hospital for an urgent operation, as a special expert, essential to the war effort. His wife, mother, and baby daughter are all in evacuation in the Siberian town of Yalutorovsk.

On coarse buff paper, in violet ink that has seeped through to the back of the paper:

5. Aleph and Where It Led Me

I am talking far too much about objects, and perhaps it is inevitable. The people I wrote this book for died long before I started writing it, and objects were the only permissible replacements. They are just as dear to me as some strangers in a photo album: a brooch with my great-grandmother’s monogram; my great-grandfather’s prayer shawl; and the armchairs that miraculously survived their owners, two centuries and two homes. Their promise of knowledge is a false one, but all the same they radiate the stove-warmth of uninterrupted time. Here I remember Aunt Galya with the stack of newspapers she couldn’t be parted from, and the piles of diaries, and I have the sudden realization that nothing can be preserved.

Tove Jansson has a story about a Fillyjonk who lives in continual fear of a terrible disaster. She arranges all her furniture and gets out the silver cream jug and the iced cakes, she even washes her best carpet in the sea, and she waits and waits, and is terrified she will lose it all. When the tornado comes (and they always do), it takes with it her house and all her knickknacks: tray cloths and photo frames and tea cozies and grandma’s silver cream jug. All the past is carried off into oblivion, and it leaves a clear space for the future. The Fillyjonk is left playing in the shallows with her carpet, finally happy, “Never in her life had she had such fun.”

I remembered Janet Malcolm and the house with the cluttered interior, the aleph of her book, when I was in Vienna, as there was something like it on every street corner. The building I stayed in was built in 1880 (and in the yard a smaller building, enwombed like a matryoshka doll: a house with white shutters, built in 1905 when the family had grown up). The owner of the house, anywhere between seventy and ninety, had high cheekbones, architectural eyebrows, and a voice of otherworldly depth with which she told me, at the end of our conversation, that she’d always lived there — ever since returning in 1948. To read her history correctly I’d need to have known when she left the house, but our polite conversation didn’t stretch this far. A handsome family genealogy book, published in 1918, lay neglected by the TV remote control. She rented her apartment to me with its two hundred years of tat and old trinkets, with apparently barely a thought for the preservation of these things: porcelain objects crowded the shelves, as tightly packed as books; boxes were bent by their weight of silverware; oil paintings hung on the walls; and ancient matchboxes lay on the tables and coffee tables. Gift messages decorated the albums (a Christmas card from 1941, slipped between the pages of an album, made her family history a little clearer). This white, tall-windowed house with its grand staircases resembled a huge store cupboard where the odd rental tenant might go unnoticed. At night everything in the building creaked and groaned and twitched. I came to the conclusion that the owner had crammed it full with the layers of unwanted history that kept her from sleep — and then emigrated into her own life: the little house on the other side of the lawn, her medical practice and garden chairs.

I found out quite by chance — by flipping open a guidebook to a random page in a museum shop — that the oldest Jewish cemetery in Vienna was close to where I worked. The cemetery was first used in 1540 or thereabouts, and had been razed to the ground by the Nazis. Later, after some time had passed, the decision was taken to restore it. The gravestones hadn’t gone anywhere: they lay under the soil, they’d simply gone underground, so they were brought back to the light and arranged around the wide, grassy garden of an old people’s home that had sprung up in the cemetery’s absence.

There was a chill in the air that day, the sort that catches us unaware, a presentiment of winter. The street slowly narrowed; on its left-hand side the old people’s home: a two-story house of the sort you might see in London, perhaps adorned with a couple of blue plaques. But there were no plaques here, and no people on the street. It grew colder still, a few very frail old men stood in the entrance hall, sheltering from the wind. They must have been at least a hundred years old, I guessed, using my landlady’s appearance as a yardstick, and their emaciated forms gave them the appearance of happy, withered little shrimps. They inched about the hall in wheelchairs or on foot and held on to each other’s sharp elbows with trembling tenderness. When they approached the nurse it was with the same faint smile, looking up into her face to ask or answer a question. I approached her in turn, and she pointed out the way to me.

A long, wide balcony ran the length of the building and faced a walled garden. The ground was a few meters lower here and a fierce wind bent the grass flat. The balcony was kept at the height required for the present to be able to say with certainty that the past was past: it had been tamed, restored, and fenced off. It wasn’t even possible to enter the garden below, where the grass was being whipped by the wind. An unambiguous iron padlock hung on the door to a metal ladder descending from the balcony.

But there was something going on down in the garden. A tentlike awning with long green ramps hid the farthest part of the garden and two people were busying themselves around graves in the corner of the tent. The graves stood facing me, they were nothing like the cozy, almost armchair-like memorials I was used to. These were like gates, portals for transportations to the void — in some of them I could even sense the shape of an archway. In the cemetery in Würzburg, where my mother is buried, you can sometimes detect some little figurative elements, nods to the people left behind: a simple little emblem of a flame or two hands blessing the Star of David. Here, there was nothing of that sort, only letters, text. The cemetery could have been read like a book stitched from scattered sheets. On one stone the script rose in a crescent arc. A single decorative image, a horse that faintly resembled a hare, raced from right to left across the stone.

Meanwhile the old men had disappeared out of the frame of the lit glass, and I could see a girl in white carefully wiping the tables down in the dining hall. There was no one out here on the balcony with me, no one by the ashtray or by the muttering fountain a little farther on, where plastic ducks floated upside down in the black water. I’d read they’d found two or three hundred tombstones but it looked from here as if there were hardly any.

The grass was long, not like grass on city lawns, but the harsh grass of the plain, and the wind blew it into furious waves.

A few days later I was told about a very particular grave in the cemetery. My Viennese friend asked me whether I’d seen the fish: what looked like a heap of cobblestones was in fact a stone fish, coiled into a ring. There was a story attached to the fish: a man named Simeon bought himself a fish for supper and was about to prepare it for cooking when right there on the kitchen table, under the carving knife, the fish opened its mouth and spoke: “Shema Yisrael,” the words a Jew says before death, and it might have said something more, but it was too late, the knife came down and severed the fish’s head. The Rabbi said that the business smacked of a dybbuk, a wandering soul separated from its body, so they buried the fish just as they would a person in the cemetery. Sometimes I feel just like that fish, or the householder hiring men at the eleventh hour, or even like a conscript in the last wave of conscription at the height of war — managing to say and do what must be done, but only just, in the nick of time.

The museums in Vienna all reflected my own preoccupations, albeit each in their own way. In the Museum of Applied Art, I wandered into a Valhalla for furniture, a room filled with ghosts, the long shadows of Thonet chairs in bentwood cast across a white screen. In the same room you could read a list of the names of rocking chairs and armchairs and they sounded like human names: Heinrich and Max, whose wicker forms reminded me of our three-legged basketwork chair, which had hobbled its way into the twenty-first century. Nearby, an ancient forest of feathery, spidery lace lay draped on black velvet, composed of tiny holes and tears, just as my story is composed of silences and rents in the fabric.

Blinds were drawn over the windows of the Natural History Museum and I looked out at Vienna as if through a layer of ash. Lamarck’s spiral staircase of evolution twisted backward through the reassuringly old-fashioned twilight of the museum’s rooms. All the subjects of nature’s experiments were on display: bears, both large and small; a host of spotted cats; a game park with deer and antelope, all necks and antlers; giraffes and the rest of the beasts, some of them surprisingly like cultural artifacts, speckled like clay pots. Even less life remained in the shrunken stuffed birds, despite their still-bright plumage. Beyond them the dreadful serried ranks of glass jars with a collection of bony parts connected with the production of sound, taken from the voice boxes of birds. Somewhere among the parrots and the corvidae was a small gray bird, round and fluffed up with a strange red brow and splashes of red around its tail, aegintha temporalis, and I nodded to it as if we were family, as I myself am temporalis, on my way to the barnacles and the segmented worms, and the fish in methylated spirits, standing on their tails.

Karl Kraus wrote “Immer passt alles zu allem” (“Everything fits with everything else”) — or, in Tsvetaeva’s words: “Everything rhymes.” Every exhibit in the long suite of rooms provided another metaphor, explained another element in my history. It preoccupied me, but didn’t change anything, since I knew that the real aleph of my story lay in my pocket already.

This aleph was a tiny white china figurine, about three centimeters tall. A very approximately molded naked little boy with curly hair, who could have passed for Cupid if it hadn’t been for his long socks. I bought him from a stall in a Moscow flea market, where one or two things could still be picked up very cheaply, and in a tray of paste jewelery I found a box containing a heap of these little white boys. It seemed strange to me that not a single one was intact, each differently mutilated, missing a leg or a face, and all the faces were scarred and chipped. I spent a while sorting through, looking for the most presentable, and eventually found him: nearly whole, he still had his curls and dimples, his ribbed socks, and he shone with a winsome gift-gleam — even the dark stain on his back and his lack of arms didn’t spoil my admiration.

I asked the shop owner, just in case, if she had any figures in a better state, and she told me such an odd story I felt the need to find out more. The little figures were made in a German town from the 1880s onward, she said. They were sold everywhere, in groceries and hardware stores, but actually their main function was as packaging — dirt cheap, they were heaped up as loose fill around goods, so that heavy things didn’t rub together or dent each other in the darkness. The little figures were in fact made to be chipped. Just before the war the factory closed and warehouses, filled to the roof with boxes of the tiny figures, stood locked until they were bombed. A few years later, when the boxes were opened, all that remained were splinters of china.

I bought my little china boy without noting the name of the factory or the stallholder’s telephone number, although I already knew that I was carrying the end of my book in my pocket, the hidden answer to a riddle in a puzzle book. My china boy seemed to embody the way no story reaches us without having its heels chipped off or its face scratched away. And how lacunae and gaps are the constant companions of survival, its hidden engine, fueling its acceleration. How only trauma makes individuals — singly and unambiguously us — from the mass product. And yes, finally, the way in which I am the little boy, the product of mass manufacturing and also of the collective catastrophe of the last century, the survivor and unwitting beneficiary, here by some miracle.

The china figure I chose was not the unluckiest: the headless ones remained in their box. In some contexts, or so the Vienna School of Art History proclaimed a hundred years ago, only the “new” and the “unimpaired” can be considered beautiful, whereas the pale, faded, and fragmentary can only be considered “ugly.” An object’s dignity, its starched collar, comes from its state of preservation. The poorly preserved object loses its right to human interaction.

And so it was: although I was thinking about the fragmentary and flawed state of any surviving witness, all the same in my soul I craved the whole, the inviolate. The little china boy’s wounds could not be too extreme, to put it bluntly — I wanted him pleasant to look at. Half-destroyed a century ago, he nevertheless had to look new.

I remembered, as I took my purchase home, that I had read about these figurines in My Pushkin, a memoir of childhood by the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. She remembers her strolls as a child along the Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow toward the Pushkin Memorial:

Over the years the little figure didn’t stop giving lessons (Tsvetaeva counts these lessons in numbers, in scale and materials, in numbers and hierarchy, and in thinking). It’s hardly surprising that the subject of her studies changed. I thought about it as I carried the little china boy in my pocket along this or that strasse, stroking his invisible back with my finger and imagining how he would look on the cover of a book about memory. His lack of arms made him look taller than he was, he looked straight ahead like a curly-haired figurehead, he wore old-fashioned knee-high socks, and he gleamed white. One rainy evening he fell out of my pocket and smashed on the tiled floor of the old house.

The boy broke into three pieces: his stockinged feet slipped under the bath’s deep belly, his body lay severed from his head. What had struggled to symbolize wholeness in my own and my family’s history had, in one fell swoop, become an allegory: the impossibility of telling these histories, the impossibility of saving anything at all, and my inability to gather myself up from the splinters of someone else’s past, or even to take it on as my own convincingly. I picked up what I could from the ground and placed the pieces on the desk like jigsaw pieces. It was beyond repair.

6. A Love Interest

On my last day in Vienna I went back to two different places, both terribly alike, both models of preservation, storage devices designed for the remnants of human existence, for what will be left when we are no longer.

In the Michaelerkirche’s crypt, human bones were arranged and inventoried in a beautifully clear system. The bones had collected over hundreds of years under the church, and someone had organized them by type and size, tibia to fibula, laid in neat heaps like firewood. Smooth skulls were heaped elsewhere. The guide had the terrifying cheerfulness of a scout leader, she pushed us this way, then that, she made jokes about the transience of earthy existence, she pointed out the fantastically preserved little shoes and the silk corset of a pregnant woman with a dark tuber of a face, exhibited for all to see in a special coffin. Wie hübsch! she exclaimed enthusiastically, really very sweet! And it was true, that there was a kind of hierarchical coziness in her underground realm: whatever hadn’t quite lost its tangibility, and remained more or less undissipated, was laid out for public view. The rest had been dismantled into spare parts and pushed out of sight, to the periphery of oblivion.

My next stop was the Josephinum, a museum of human anatomy, or at least how they conceived of anatomy in the nineteenth century: the body a temple, eager to display its inner sanctum to the enlightened visitor. The Josephinum is a museum of medical science and my visit was by way of a bow to the complicated art of medical science, and also to my great-grandmother Sarra and her Bulgarian lover, who received his medical diploma in Vienna. What was once the gleaming pinnacle of medical knowledge, the last word in technical achievement and the object of professorial pride, looks much like a cabinet of curiosities now, a monument to ancient arts practiced by starched nurses and doctors with mustaches. Pipes and tiny hammers lay idle alongside surgical instruments, clamps and scissors and iron-beaked microscopes — all of it useless. Without their owners the objects took on the air of curios and lay under the glass like the rattles and swaddling of a profession that has long since grown up. The only things that hadn’t grown old were the bodies, so to speak.

The bodies in the Josephinum had not aged like their corruptible counterparts. They were made of pure beeswax to celebrate the Enlightenment, the rational mind, and the benefit of teaching aids — a whole regiment of them, more than a thousand anatomical models, commissioned by Emperor Joseph II and manufactured in Florence under the watchful eye of Paolo Mascagni, philosopher and free thinker and the author of the Treatise of Anatomy. The models were then transported across the Alps on mules, just as France, aroused from Grenoble to Toulouse, tossed and turned on its bed of revolution. Then they were floated down the Danube to be exhibited in the interests of science, and here they all are, alive and proud as athletes on the podium in their boxes of tulipwood and glass.

Rational man is served up like a dish in this museum, his belly sliced open and his waxy organs laid out like a plat du jour: a varnished liver; testicles swinging comically on their little ropes. Some of the waxworks are resting on their elbows, some sprawled out, naked to their skeletons, or, wearing their red flesh in bundles tied with veins, they show off their ribbed muscle fiber, fatty tissue, the nifty combs of bone in foot and hand. Marquesses have their curly heads tipped back so the wriggling pipework of the neck is visible. All of it is haunted by the indifference of immortality: the crotch’s cradle, the pearl on an untouched neck, the body’s workings laid bare like a music box.

The Josephinum felt like another response to the question I had been turning over in my mind. These beautiful inanimate bodies had lost their reason for being (teaching aids, witnesses, explications) and were empty shells, like the carriages and coffee pots in other museums. Objects falling out of currency slowly lose their defining qualities and turn a new nonhuman face toward us. They return to the materials from whence they came, wax, paint, and clay. The past rewilds itself, oblivion springs up out of it like a forest.

Eight years ago a friend was putting together a book of interviews with writers. In these interviews the writers were encouraged to talk about themselves, their childhood, early years, the friendships and conflicts that defined them, their early and not-so-early work. It was a marvelous book. My interview wasn’t included. We made two attempts, with two years in between the attempts, but nothing worked. There was something extraordinary about the recorded interviews, but they were of no use for the book. Both of the recordings were like two peas in the pod: they made the same key points, the conversations climbed a route scattered with the same anecdotes — and they revealed nothing at all about me. It was almost funny how absent I was. Over the many pages of typescript I scrutinized my family legacy, jumped through the branches of the family tree, and made a virtuoso performance of avoiding any mention of myself. I answered direct questions, of course, but my answers were so drab and reluctant: born here, studied there, read and wrote this and that… But what delight I took in somersaulting in midair and diving deep into the free waters of the lives of my unknown ancestors! As a result of this reticence about my own practice, nothing of the interviews could be used. I kept the recordings like the X-rays of a fracture, just in case, and a few years later they actually did come in handy.

I was reading Marianne Hirsch’s classic work, The Generation of Postmemory, as if it were a travel guide to my own head. I knew everything she described immediately and intimately: the ceaseless fascination with one’s family’s past (and, beyond this, with the densely populated human context for these lives, the thick undercoat of sounds and smells, the coincidences and concurrences, the synchronized turning of the wheels of history) and the clinical boredom with which I roll my own contemporary world backward to that past, back to them, and feel quite certain, in-my-gut certain, of how it was back then, the streetcar routes, the stockings that sagged around the knees, the music from the loudspeaker. Any story about myself became a story about my ancestors. There they were behind me like an opera chorus encouraging my aria — only the music was written seventy years ago. The structures that emerged from the black waters of history fought shy of linearity, their natural state was copresence, the simultaneous sounding of voices from the past, contradicting the obvious: time and slow disintegration.

The work of postmemory is an attempt to animate these structures, to give them body and voice, to revitalize them in accordance with one’s own experience and understanding. This is how Odysseus called forth the souls of the dead, and they flew down in clouds, crying out like birds at the smell of sacrificial blood. He chased them off, allowing only the ones he wished to talk with to come near to the fire. The blood was a prerequisite, no conversation could happen without it. Now to make the dead speak we have to give them space in our own bodies and minds, carry them inside us like the unborn. And yet the burden of postmemory is placed on children’s shoulders: the second and third generations of those who survived and who allow themselves to look back.

Hirsch sets the boundaries of postmemory with deliberate rigor. The term itself was invented for and applied within the field of Holocaust studies, the funneling space that was left in the aftermath of catastrophe. The reality she describes is taken directly from her own personal experience, which continually informs her approach. It’s the day-to-day experience of those whose parents and grandparents measured their history from the catastrophe of European Jewry as once history was calculated from the flood. It can’t be reckoned with, or pushed aside, because it will always be the starting point, the inescapable pretext for their existence. The need to constantly bring forth the memory of events (remembrance as the highest form of posthumous justice) has a particular quality. This knowledge, both inexplicable and unbearable, blinds like a flash of light whichever way you turn away from it. In its glare anything that has no direct relationship with then loses its significance: it has failed the test of the ultimate experience of injustice.

From here comes the unrelenting and troubled magnification of the past in the consciousness of those who are still within its grip. Perhaps those who were allowed to escape their fate feel this more acutely, those who did not pass through the extermination camps, but who were, in Hirsch’s words: “survivors of persecution, ghettoization, and displacement.” The survivor’s situation leads to its own ethical quandary. It’s hard not to feel that the place you occupy in this world could be filled by another, and by rights it should be filled by this destroyed and unfulfilled other life. In The Drowned and the Saved Primo Levi tells us with absolute candor: “The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died.”

Those who weren’t “the best,” those who benefited from geographic and biographical chance, the luck of the draw (as far as luck was possible, then or now), are forced to act according to an invisible imperative. This is not only to strive to be better than you were cut out to be, it has something to do with the constant sense of the world as an apartment that has just been abandoned. The owners are gone and we are left sitting on their orphaned divans, under photographs of strangers, learning to call them family without really having the right to do so.

This unchanging angle of vision, whereby the past inhabits the present, is a particular sort of enchanted state. It has such a powerful effect, like a light filter or sunglasses, sometimes obliterating the present day, sometimes tinting it. The impossibility of saving the already perished makes the gaze particularly intense — if not Medusa, whose stare petrified the disappearing world, turning it into a monument, then Orpheus’s arresting gaze, momentary, photographic, tipping inanimate into animate.

Many people are now occupied by attempts to draw memory out from its hiding places, from the womb-like darkness of “personal history,” and to make it seen and heard. Judging by the numbers of films and books appearing, it’s a comprehensive salvaging operation. Even private love stories have become something like a collective project. Its aim is akin to Hannah Arendt’s description of the difference between the warm accumulation of communities cast out of the world into nonexistence, and the lit public space where the world began. Hirsch describes postmemory not as a project or even a particular type of contemporary sensibility, but as something far broader: “It’s not a movement, method or idea; I see it, rather, as a structure of inter- and transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove.”

Postmemory, then, is a kind of internal language, establishing horizontal and vertical lines of transmission (and cutting out those who have no right to speak it). It is, besides this, a petri dish in which reality itself is transformed, changing its colors and its usual affinities. Susan Sontag once described photography in a similar way: “Photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.” Like language, like photography, postmemory is far more than its obvious function. It doesn’t just show us the past, but changes the present, because the past is the key to everything that occurs daily in the present.

The circle of those who are involved in the heat transfer between past and present is much wider than those who feel a link with the history of Europe’s Jews, or with the trauma wound, which makes a tear in time’s matter at the point of no return, the border between then and now. This border, as depicted by familial memory, spoken memory, is too much like the border between the time of innocence and the time of — let’s call it the twilit time. Grandmother’s memories, great-grandmother’s memoirs, great-grandfather’s photographs — all are witnesses of “then,” of the inviolate world, when everything was in its place, and might have remained so if darkness had not descended. In this respect, postmemory is ahistorical, but the very dichotomy of memory and history lives in the air we breathe, and it has become fashionable to prefer one over the other.

Memory is handed down, history is written down; memory is concerned with justice, history with preciseness; memory moralizes, history tallies and corrects; memory is personal, history dreams of objectivity; memory is based not on knowledge, but on experience: compassion with, sympathy for a desperate pain demanding immediate involvement. At the same time the landscape of memory is strewn with projections, fantasies, and misrepresentations — the ghosts of today, with their faces turned to the past. Hirsch writes:

In some senses postmemory treats the past as raw material, destined for editing. “Invariably, archival photographic images appear in postmemorial texts in altered form: they are cropped, enlarged, projected onto other images; they are reframed and de- or recontextualized; they are embedded in new narratives, new texts; they are surrounded by new frames.” (Hirsch). In their original form they are akin to food it would be unthinkable to eat raw, before the necessary, complicated, and careful preparation.

The problem is that the petri dish of postmemory — or new memory — is far larger than the circle of things and phenomena informing Hirsch’s work. Because twentieth-century history spread its cataclysms liberally around the globe, most people alive can consider themselves survivors to some extent, the result of a traumatic shift, its victims and the bearers of its legacy, people with something to remember and to call back to life at the expense of their own today. And perhaps also because the world of the living and the world of the dead coexist in exactly this way: we live in their houses, we eat from their plates, but we forget these previous owners, we throw out their fragile reality, putting our own thoughts and hopes in its place, editing and abridging as we see fit, until time sweeps us into that corner where we ourselves become the past.

Each of us is in fact a witness to and participant of a lasting catastrophe. Our desire to shore up the past against rapid dissolution, and to keep it intact like the gold reserve, can easily become a fetish of sorts, something we can all sign up to, a zone of unspoken consensus. Events of the past hundred years have not made humanity more resilient, but they have made us think of the past like a refugee’s suitcase, in which the dearest items of a life have been lovingly packed away. Its real value means nothing now, it has been multiplied by the consciousness so many times, because it’s all we have left. One of the characters in Nabokov’s novel The Gift describes “a picture of flight during an invasion or an earthquake, when the escapers carry away with them everything that they can lay hands on, someone being sure to burden himself with a large, framed portrait of some long-forgotten relatives” and the general indignation when “somebody suddenly confiscated the portrait.” In the petri dish of memory things and events from the old world have become survivors themselves, saved by a miracle, their presence invaluable simply because they have reached us.

Tsvetan Todorov talks somewhere about how memory is becoming a new cult, an object of mass veneration. The more I consider it, the more I think that the global obsession with memory is simply the foundation, the essential precondition for a different cult: the religion of the past, as we knew it in olden times; a little splinter of the golden age, proof of the fact “that things were better back then.” The subjectivity and selectiveness of the memory means we can fix on a historical “excerpt” that has nothing in common with history itself — there will be people out there for whom the 1930s were a lost paradise of innocence and permanence. Especially during times dominated by the dull fear of the unknown. In comparison with a future we don’t want to inhabit, what has already happened feels domesticated — practically bearable.

This cult has its double, they reflect each other’s symmetry like the points on a horseshoe and between them the self-doubting contemporary world lies unmoving. Childhood is the second object of our guilty love. This love, too, feels doomed, because childhood comes to an end and its supposed innocence should be preserved, cherished, defended at all cost. Both the past and childhood are perceived as stasis, a permanently threatened balance — and both are most venerated by societies in which the past is misrepresented and childhood is abused with impunity.

The whole contemporary world breathes the air of postmemory with its conservative reconstructions: make a country great again, return its former fabulous order. The screen has two sides and it isn’t just those clinging to the sides of the funnel who can project their hopes, fears, and histories onto it — the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the silent majority are also waiting for their moment to resurrect their own version of past events. In Russia, where violence circulated ceaselessly, society passing from one space of tragedy to the next as if it were a suite of rooms, a suite of traumas, from war to revolution, to famine and mass persecution, and on to new wars, new persecutions — the territory for this hybrid memory formed earlier than in other countries: spiraling, multiplying versions of what has happened to us over the last hundred years, dimpled with inconsistencies, like a sheet of opaque paper blocking out the light of the present.

At home we had a file of clippings from that once-fashionable Soviet literary magazine Yunost, and I spent many happy hours in my childhood poring over it. The poems, prose, and caricatures seemed to come from a different reality, similar to one I knew, but somehow removed, illuminated. Today, those clippings I loved look even stranger: the sense of a beginning, everyone looking forward, in love with the future. Everything was about newness. A story about a box of oranges on a Siberian construction site in the Far East, poems that interchanged “heroine” and “heroin,” and a picture of a comic pair of stilyagi (him in a beard, her with a heavy fringe) changing an old table with a lace cover for a modern table on three skinny legs. The point of the image was that they were replacing like with like, the Soviet spirit demanded from its citizens indifference to bourgeois delights. From today’s perspective, sharp with longing for a disappeared world, the caricature looks more depressing than it was intended to be. Those young people were voluntarily casting out the old world with its carved legs and reliable oaken gravitas. And that is how it was. In 1960s and 1970s Moscow the dumps overflowed with antique furniture: our own four-meter-high sideboard with its colored glass was left in the communal apartment when we moved. There was no room for it in the new modern apartment with its low ceilings.

No one would have reproached my parents for this — a complete and utter indifference to this kind of loss reigned. Besides, there was a youthful audacity in their irrational behavior: their readiness to part with intact, robust, and fit-for-purpose furniture thirty years after the war showed their belief in the permanence of their new existence. Other homes kept hold of their block of housemaid’s soap, and grain and sugar and cardboard tubs of tooth powder in case of a rainy day.

7. Injustice and its Different Facets

Many years ago the stepfather of a friend of mine was in the hospital with very little time to live, perhaps no more than a week. He was a war veteran, a mathematician, and a fine man. One morning he asked my friend with some urgency to come back to hospital that evening with her mother. Something had happened to him a long time ago and he’d spent his whole life thinking about it without ever telling a single soul. Although he’d never spoken about it, clearly he had witnessed a miracle, something incredible, something he couldn’t have raised in the normal way. But now he was afraid he was running out of time, and he wanted to tell his closest family. When they got there that evening he didn’t have the strength to speak, and by the next morning he had lost consciousness. He died a few days later, without having told them anything. This story, like the very possibility-impossibility of finding out something important, lifesaving, hung over me like a cloud for many years, constantly shifting in its significance. Often I drew a simple moral from the story, something along the lines of always speaking out, always saying things before it’s too late. At other times it seemed to me that in certain situations life itself enters and turns out the light, to relieve the distress of those left behind.

“How very strange,” I said to my friend, not long ago. “You never did find out what he wanted to say. I often think about what might have happened to him, and when. It would’ve been during the war, I suppose.”

My friend was politely surprised. She asked me what I meant, as if she didn’t quite believe what she’d heard, but didn’t want to doubt my sincerity. Then she said gently that nothing like that had ever happened. Was I sure that it was their family? Perhaps I’d misremembered.

We never spoke of it again.

Memory brings the past and present into confrontation in the search for justice. This passion for justice, like the obsessive scratching of a rash, tears any system from the inside, forcing us to seek and demand retribution, especially on behalf of the dead — for who will defend them, if not us?

Death is the primary injustice and the most extreme manifestation of the system’s (and for “system” read “world order”) disregard for human life. Death dismantles the border (between me and nonexistence), reassigns values and makes judgments without asking for permission, denies me my right to take part in any human gathering (apart from that multitudinous assembly of the disappeared), and reduces existence to nothing. The heart hates injustice, it seeks victory over death, it pushes back against this fundamental injustice. For centuries this pushback was the Christian promise of salvation, both indiscriminate and individual at once: resurrection for all.

Salvation only works when one condition is met: somewhere near us, and beyond us, there must exist another, wiser memory that is able to hold in its cupped hand everyone and everything; those who have already lived and those who are yet to come. The purpose of funeral rites and the hope of all who hear them are drawn together in the Orthodox prayer to God asking for “memory eternal” for the dead. Here, “salvation” and “conservation” mean the same thing.

Secular society takes the idea of salvation out of the equation, and in one stroke the whole construction loses its balance. Without a belief in salvation, “conservation” becomes no more than an institutional archive: a museum, a library, a warehouse, allowing a sort of conditional and limited immortality — a greatly extended single day, the only version of eternal life that is possible in the emancipated new world. Technological revolutions, one after another, have made vast digital warehouses possible, and “possible” in the human tongue means “indispensable.”

Long ago, the memory of a person was passed into the hands of God, and any extra efforts to preserve her memory might have been considered excessive, perhaps pointless. Being long remembered was the preserve of those few who understood how to achieve it, or wanted it very much, and you could quite happily die and be resurrected without this, as the task of remembering everyone had been delegated upward, to the highest level.

Any attempt to fix a memory, to give it body, usually meant a list of wonderful attributes. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, there is contempt for the written memory:

By the nineteenth century and its technological revolutions, remembrance suddenly becomes democratic practice, and archiving a matter of general importance. It’s called something different and it’s thought of differently, but it manifests as an urgent desire to obtain photographs of all one’s family. At first the disembodied voice provokes fear and recoil, then slowly the horned head of the gramophone is domesticated, and Moscow dachas ring to the sound of mezzo-soprano Vyaltseva. Change happens slowly, and at first the whole process seems to fit well within the ancient tradition of collecting the best and most representative things: Caruso’s voice is recorded, a speech by the Kaiser.

Cinema appears — it too has a purely functional use, as another way to retell history. But now from the viewing platform of hindsight, you realize that something else entirely was intended (by whom?), leading directly to the high point of all human progress: the selfie stick. The home movie. Giving everyone the opportunity to retain everything forever. Immortality, as we understand it, is a kind of trick: the complete and total disappearance of any one of us can be hidden, like a grave, under a scattering of little deceptions that give the illusion of presence. And the bigger the pile of tiny deceptions (saved moments, little speeches, photographs), the more bearable the nonexistence of oneself and others. The daily visual and verbal debris is suddenly made respectable, it’s no longer swept under the carpet, but carefully put away for rainier days.

You’d think that in order to become a whole archaeological strata (and lift the ground under our feet a meter or so), the rituals and materials of our life would have to be obsolescent, used up, detritus, like everything created by humans until now. But it’s a strange thing: since the invention of photography and sound recording these rituals and materials have forgotten the art of decomposition, just like today’s plastic waste. They won’t be returned to earth and dust — they pile up higher and higher. They are of no use for the future. Anything that cannot adapt and change is fruitless and surely must be doomed.

In the apartments of the early twentieth century it was still fashionable to display stuffed creatures of various size and shape — from the stags’ and boars’ heads on the wall to the tiny birds, stuffed so delicately with sawdust that they looked alert and alive, frozen in the act of bathing their feathers. We often read of the elderly ladies who had generations of pets stuffed, to the point where any house with heavy curtains and fire screens went to auction with a dozen dusty terriers. There were other, more radical methods of conserving one’s nearest and dearest: at Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villa you can still see the souvenir made from the shell of his beloved tortoise. Fed to giant proportions, it is said the tortoise could barely crawl from room to room or along the avenues of the estate with its victorious-sounding title: “Vittoriale degli Italiana.” When she died from overeating, her body was scooped out of its horned case and the case made into a dish, an elegant tortoise tureen, to decorate the table and remind the poet’s guests of better days.

The difficult, fragile status of the dead in the age of mechanical reproduction made their very existence a task: if we can no longer hope for a new meeting, the joyful dawn of resurrection, then we need to do everything possible to put what remains of the dead to good use. This conviction resulted in a surge of funereal souvenirs: locks of hair with the beloved’s initials bound in, photographs of the dead in which they look far brighter than the living — the long exposure of the studio photographer blurred the twitching features and tiny movements of the grief-stricken to unrecognizable emptiness, so it was immediately clear who, in the decorously dressed group, was the much-missed corpse.

By the middle of the twentieth century the process had been taken to its “logical extreme,” however you want to understand that euphemism: the rouged face of a political leader lying in state in a crystal coffin on a main square, or millions of unknown bodies, seen only as a repository of raw material or spare parts. What began as the Russian “antideath” philosopher Nikolai Fedorov’s obsession to give life to the dead, to drag them from their oak coffins so they walked and talked again; what began as an attempt to resurrect the old world with the power of words — to make a glass of tilleul tea and use it as an elixir of life — hit against a living wall of the drowned and the lost, against the simple impossibility of remembering and calling the dead by their names.

This tidal wave has rolled on for two centuries and is finally at our heels — but instead of the resurrection of the past we have artisans, the production of perfect casts, and taxidermy. The dead have learned to speak with the living: their letters, their voicemails, their posts on social media, all of this can be broken into its tiny elements. There’s even an app that uses the words of dead people to compose answers to questions put to them. For several years now this app, available in the Apple Store, has allowed us the peculiar indulgence of chatting with someone as famous as Prince or as unknown as the unfortunate twenty-six-year-old Roman Mazurenko, who was hit by a car. If you type into the chat box the words, “Where are you now?” Mazurenko answers, “I love New York.” There is no sense of awkwardness in all this. The seams all meet in the middle, the window doesn’t suddenly blow open, there is no cold wind to send a shiver down your spine.

The digital creators of these verbal phantoms (made in the image of a friend) had plenty of material to work from as nothing is ever wiped in the digital age. Instead of one, the only, photograph, there are hundreds. No one, not even the photographer, manages to look at every snap: it would take years. But it doesn’t matter, the important thing is to store all these many moments, to keep them safe for the Great Looking, the Grand Viewer who has all the time and attention in the world, more than would fit in any lifetime, and who will draw all that has happened into one line of events. There is no one else to do it.

Digital storage gives us a whole range of possibilities, and it affects how we see things: history, biography, one’s own or another’s text — nothing is seen as a linear sequence unrolling in time, glued with the wallpaper paste of cause and effect. In one sense this is pleasing, since no one feels unloved in this new world. There is space for everyone in the boundless world of the hoarder. On the other hand, the old world of hierarchies and bardic stories worked on the principle of selection: not quite saying everything; sometimes holding back. In some senses, when the necessity of choice is removed (between good and bad, for example), then the very notion of good and evil disappears. All that is left is a mosaic of facts — and points of view, which are mistaken for facts.

The past is now “pasts”: a coexisting layering of versions, often with only one or two points of contact. Hard facts soften to modeling clay and can be molded into a shape. The desire to remember, to recreate and fix in place, goes hand in hand with incomplete knowledge and partial understanding of events. Units of information can be lined up in any formation, any order, like in a children’s game, and the direction of play will utterly change their significance. My linguist friends, Americans, Germans, Russians, all tell me that their students are brilliant at finding subtexts and hidden meanings, but can’t, or don’t want to, talk about the text as a whole entity. I suggested asking the students to retell a poem, line by line, describing only what was going on. But I was told that this wasn’t possible, they simply weren’t able. The banal debt to the obvious, along with the need to tell a story, has been thrown overboard, lost in the detail, broken into a thousand bite-size quotes.

On May 30, 2015, I left my apartment on Banny Pereulok in Moscow, where I had spent a biblical two score years and one, amazed even myself at the length of time I’d spent here. All my friends had moved about from one place to another, and even from one country to another, and only I had stayed put like some ancient Aunt Charlotte on her country estate, living in the rooms my grandmother and mother had inhabited, with empty sky through the window where once there were tall white poplars, like in Odessa, planted by her grandfather. The rooms were repainted, but even the new decor had begun to look shabby. The furniture was long used to standing in a different formation, so when you shut your eyes at night, the rooms of the empty apartment became ghostlike and all the furniture returned to its original places in the darkness: the bed where I lay was itself overlaid with the shape of the writing desk that had once stood there. Its lid covered my head and shoulders, and above me hung the shelf with the three porcelain monkeys refusing to see, hear, or speak, and in the other room the heavy orange curtains were back, and the lamp stand covered in a silk shawl, and the big old photographs.

None of this remained, there wasn’t even a chair to sit on, the apartment had become no more than a series of empty boxes, workboxes of odd buttons or spools of thread. The chairs and divans had departed for different homes, in the farthest room an anxious light burned, even though it was day, and the doors were already thrown back wide as if to welcome new owners. The keys were handed over, dropped from one palm into another, I took a last look at the pale sky over the balcony — and then life suddenly sped up, moving faster than ever before. The book about the past wrote itself while I was traveling from place to place, counting up my memories, just like the children’s poem about the lady and her luggage: “a punnet, a pug, a painting, a jug…” And off I went on my wanderings to Berlin, where the book stopped, held its breath — and so did I.

I found a home in a beautiful old part of Berlin, which had once been considered a Russian area, and had always been associated with literature. The streets seemed familiar, Nabokov had lived in the house opposite, and two houses down, a person who had, by mutual and loving consent, eaten a man alive. In the little square yard a dozen bikes gathered like horses at a watering trough. Everything was underpinned by a feeling of durability and presence, but a strange sort of presence when you remembered that this city had for years been known for its wastelands and its yawning voids, rather than the buildings constructed on these empty spaces. I enjoyed the thought that some of my notes about the impossibility of remembrance would be written within another impossibility: in a city where history is an open wound, no longer able to mend itself with the scar tissue of oblivion.

It was as if the city had unlearned the skill of coziness, and the city’s inhabitants respected this quality of bareness. Here and there construction sites opened the wound further, streets were barred with red-and-white barriers, the asphalt was cut open to reveal its granular earthen heart, and the wind whistled, clearing the space for new wastelands. By every entranceway little bronze plaques in the paving stones told a familiar story, even if you didn’t stop to read the names and count the years to see how old they were when they were taken from these elegant houses with their high ceilings to Theresienstadt or Auschwitz.

I managed nothing of the work I had planned in Berlin, in my cheerful little apartment with its Mettlach-tiled stove. Once I had arranged my life there, laid out my books and photographs, signed up at a library and been given a library card with a grinning stranger’s face on it, I quickly resigned all my energies to a gnawing unending anxiety, which turned its toothed cogs in my stomach. I don’t remember how I spent the days. I think I spent more and more time wandering from room to room until I realized that the only thing I could actually do well was move from place to place. Movement was forgiving, the thought of unachieved work was pushed out of my head by the number of steps taken in a day, the physical shape of my achievements. I had a bike. An old Dutch beast with a bent frame and a yellow lamp on its forehead. Once it had been painted white, and at a good trot it made a snuffling-grinding sound, as if its last ounces of strength were being squeezed out of it by contact with the air. It braked with a ticking noise. An old German novel that my mother had loved featured a car called Karl, “the ghost of the road,” and there was something similar and ghostly in the way my bicycle and I blended in to the hidden underpasses, slipping between people and traffic, leaving no trace of ourselves, not in their memory, and not in mine.

Riding a bike in Berlin was a new and unfamiliar experience. The whole city lived on its wheels, pushing the pedals round diligently but with ease, as if there was nothing untoward in this behavior in a grown-up person. In the evenings a quiet chirruping and a flicker of light were the only trail we left behind us, and it was transparently clear that the city had been built for this constant falling through the absences without noticing, like in that Kafka text where the horseman rides across the steppe, his stirrups gone, his bridle gone, his horse gone, and even he himself no longer there. The streets seemed to give way obligingly when a cyclist came through, offering themselves up as flatness, so the ride cost no energy and the rider hardly realized she was flying somewhere beyond. The lightness of travel allowed a feeling of safety — the shop windows, the passersby and their little dogs were not even beyond a thin glass screen, but speed and the insect rustling of the bike made everything around untouchable, slightly blurred, as if I were as invincible as the air passing through my fingers.

I wondered then if the people who were destined sooner or later to be air and smoke remembered this sense of invisibility and invincibility and longed for it when they were condemned to walk on the ground on May 5, 1936, losing their right to own and ride a bike. In the laws that came later it became clear they would always remain on the unshaded side of the street, never able to slip among the shadows, or allowing themselves the luxury of freewheeling without obstacle. When public transport was forbidden to them it was as if someone had had the explicit task of reminding them that their body was the only property left to them and they should rely on that alone.

On a rainy October evening, when all the passersby walked at an angle better suited to trees in the wind, I turned the corner (from Knesebeck Strasse onto Mommsen Strasse and only from Mommsen Strasse onto Wieland Strasse, as Sebald might have written) onto the street where Charlotte Salomon once lived. Salomon who, for a number of reasons, felt almost like a relative to me. She lived from her birth until 1939 in the house on this street, only leaving when she was fetched and sent to France in haste to be saved from the common fate. The worst stories of flight and salvation are the ones with a twist in the tale, the ones where right after the miraculous escape death pounces anyhow, grown thickly shaggy while waiting. That is what happened to Charlotte. But this Berlin house took a gentle leave of its child, except for perhaps the crowds of protesters she happened to see from the window with their crooked canvas banners. Back then you still could have seen such things through any window, and those fine art nouveau frames with their excellent proportions were simply doing their job. On this evening the rain was getting heavier, and a faint light could be seen inside, not lighting the whole huge apartment, just one of the rooms, and the others in a sort of twilight, so I could only really guess at the height of the ceilings and the stucco. In a scene from a book I hadn’t read since childhood, a painting in a gilded frame hung at an exhibition. In the painting was a snow-covered town, a recognizable street corner, windows lit warmly — the resemblance took my breath away — and then a sudden trick: a horse cab traveling from one side of the picture to the other, a shadow, shape-shifting. There was a movement above me on the dark balcony, a cigarette burnt bright, a wisp of smoke. It startled me, although I don’t know why.

I came to love the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, the over- and underground railways, the orphaned smells of sweet rolls and rubber wheels, the spiderlike map of lines and connections. The glass dovecots of stations with their arched roofs seemed to suggest that you could hide under them but to me they looked temporary, untrustworthy. All the same I always relaxed when the train I was on entered the iron womb of the Hauptbahnhof as if its see-through helmet guaranteed me a moment to catch breath, a sudden eclipse before departing again into the light. There was always a crowd moving on the platform, the carriage filled instantly until no one else could get on: someone carried a bike, someone carried an impossibly huge double bass in a funeral-black case, someone had a little dog that sat so obediently it might have been posing for a black-and-white photograph. Even back then it seemed to me that all of this was happening in a past that had long ago departed, and was only now in reach if you stretched out a hand right out. Sometimes I found myself looking at the lit carriage, and me inside it as if at a distance, as if it were a model railway with tiny plastic figures sitting on the seats. The wet city circled in the window like a Ferris wheel on its side, and in it mostly the bits in between: the wastelands, underexposed scenes, and sometimes something more real and present — a column, a cupola, a cube, or a globe.

During that stagnant period in my life, everything felt close enough to touch, especially when we passed places I had once known, forgotten, and seen anew — these places gave me a brief sense of warmth. In one place I’d spent a few days in a hotel, where the guests were entertained in the oddest manner. The long narrow entrance hall was uplit with turquoise light, it was like walking down a plastic straw. At the end of the hall, where the glum residents congregated, there was a hearth with a fire burning brightly, giving off a visible heat. It was only when you reached the reception desk that you realized it was a deception: the fire burnt across the full width of a TV screen on the wall, crackling and creating an apparition of real coziness. Together with my plastic key card I was given two turquoise boiled sweets like cough drops, and I took them upstairs to the little bed-shaped room, with its basin-in-a-cupboard arrangement. The wall opposite the bed was empty of pictures and photos, there was nothing to distract from the main show: yes, there in the room a smaller but otherwise identical screen with a burning fire. The creaking and champing of the flames could be heard from the door, and, as soon as I entered, I sat down on the turquoise bedspread, as I was clearly meant to do, and looked the fire in the teeth.

In the middle of the night, still unable to find the off switch for the screen, I began to understand the little lesson the hotel’s owners had provided for their guests as a sort of undemanding but compulsory entertainment, like the poems used as decorative inscriptions on soft furnishings, or embroidered proverbs in a frame: “The early bird catches the worm.” The single screen, standing upright like a young conscript, was touched by a tiny flame, a halo at the very edge of the screen first, the forewarning of a future martyrdom. The fire grew stronger, seeming to reach out and touch my face, the flames unfurled, droning and subsiding before reaching the very top of the screen, where the bee whispering grew thicker. Then gradually the intensity dropped and the screen grew darker and then gasped softly and disintegrated into ashes and cinders. A short darkness followed, then the picture momentarily shuddered, straightened, and before me again the quick lithe fire, the resurrected image, as if nothing had ever happened to it. The whole business repeated itself over and over (the recording seemed ever more horrible, the longer it went on), and I followed it more and more attentively, as if I was trying to make out some variation, however small. Again and again the darkness gave way to the wood, repeatedly resurrecting itself from the dead.

Not-A-Chapter Nikolai Stepanov, 1930

Fragile, crumbling gray paper, typed text.

My grandparents’ marriage was only registered in the early 1940s.

8. Rents in the Fabric, and Diversions

Every now and then a friend will send you some startling image of a face on a postcard or via an internet link. To them the face seemed to resemble yours, the features, the expression, hair, eyes, nose. When you put all such pictures side by side they suddenly reveal themselves to have nothing in common, apart from their likeness to you, the common denominator. As they say in film credits, any resemblance is purely coincidental.

But perhaps this is not true? Why do these apparent resemblances excite both sender and recipient of the postcard, as if something really important had been revealed, some secret mechanism? It’s tempting to see them as an expression of another order: a selection based not on family resemblance or proximity, but design, by mirroring a pattern you don’t know. It’s hard to resist evidence of hidden rhythms in the world order, and writers from Nabokov to Sebald have taken pleasure in the ringing of signal bells to mark coincidences: such as finding your birthday is the date of death on a stranger’s gravestone, or wearing a certain color for luck, or when a resemblance with Botticelli’s Zipporah or someone’s great-grandchild becomes the cause of passion. Such coincidences seem to confirm that we aren’t chance presences in the world, that everything is interrelated, woven into a warm nest of twigs, excrement, and fluff: people were here before you and they will still be here after you are gone.

And yet this isn’t the only version of events. The anthropologist Bronisłav Malinowski described the way that classic observations along the lines of “doesn’t he look like his grandmother” were met with unease and horror in societies constructed to a different model. “I was then told by my confidential informants that I had committed a breach of custom,” writes Malinowski of the Trobrianders in Papua New Guinea, “that I had perpetrated what is called “taputaki migila,” a technical expression referring only to this act, which might be translated as “to defile by comparing to a kinsman his face.” Pointing out a family resemblance was seen as an insult: an individual was like no other person, he was without copy, he was the first of his sort to appear on the earth, and he only represented himself. To deny that was to doubt a person’s existence. To quote the poet Mandelstam: “do not compare: the living are beyond comparison.”

There’s a short film by Helga Landauer, made in 2009. I have it on my computer and I watch it again and again, as you might read and reread a book. It’s called Diversions, and the title could refer to many things: an entertainment; a distraction; a turning aside or deviation from the route; or even a tactic designed to draw your enemy’s defense away from the main attack. In place of instructions, I, the viewer, am given a sequence of waymarks, each pointing in a different direction. Not a map or a route — more like a swinging weather vane. Something very similar happens on the screen as well:

People in absurd pith helmets crowding in the shallows, a rowboat is about to set off. The bare-legged sailors carry them out to the boat on their backs, like luggage. Parasols rock over their heads.

Hanging lace sways in a draft.

A dark mass of leaves, a parasol over an artist’s easel, a dim rain-filled light.

Children, like deer, peering out from behind trees.

An oar slices through the shining water, a long ripple runs across it. Sunshine. You can’t see who is rowing.

A woman lifts a fishing rod out of the water, her smile stretches from ear to ear, like a skull’s.

The victorious bustle of ladies’ hats and their fur, feathers, wings, fearsome excess.

A mass of leaves, the wind troubles the leaves, children run across the image from corner to corner like little beasts.

Tall flowers in a white vase standing on a table, almost invisible, like everything that is not important.

The whiskers and biceps of an athlete.

The whiskers and bowler hats of passersby. One sees us and lifts his hat.

Bicycles and boaters, walking sticks and briefcases.

The pine tree bends forward. Someone wearing black wanders along the shoreline, only his back is visible.

People pass by, more and more people.

Funny little miniature trains trundle through parks. The passengers wave.

Children peep through branches like gophers.

Dead trees lie alongside the roads.

A man in a workman’s suit cups water in his hands, and offers it to a small dog to drink.

Pigeons come to rest on a path through a park.

A little girl with a parasol searches for her family in a crowd.

Montgolfier balloons, round, satin-sided, rise into the air.

Two people, one anxious, the other reassuring.

Women in long skirts race little balloons along the ground, waving them on with fans.

An embarrassed, gentle smile beginning in the left-hand corner as if a light had been turned on.

Rowers hurrying down to a pier, carrying long, flipper-like oars.

Water rushes up a beach, then recedes, exposing the loose pebbles.

Picnic chairs cast their shadows across the wet sand.

A pure white sky above a concert and musicians.

Skirts fly out in a dance.

A little boy selling violets.

Glasses of water and newspapers on a table, a packet of Chesterfields on a saucer. A newspaper headline: Buffalo Bill.

A brick wall lit by the sun.

A sign saying Dancing tous les soirs.

Flashing legs of a horse.

Boxes full of grapes, shall I wrap them for you?

Lacemakers bend over their bobbins.

Two hands linked.

A tired, soiled collar at the end of the day.

A hat brim shading the eyes.

A car turns a corner.

Accordion buttons.

The swallows were smaller back then and the roses were larger.

Men in caps watch some men in hats passing by.

A bride’s veil is adjusted.

A spoon lies face down on the edge of a coffee saucer.

People in bathing suits crowding in the gray sea.

Grass and fallen trees behind a garden fence.

Striped beach umbrellas, striped beach tents, and striped summer dresses.

A wheelbarrow, its handles pointing up to the sky.

Flags flutter.

A dog runs across the sand.

The round shadow of a table on wooden floorboards.

It’s easy to see the white blouses and dark skirts, lacemakers at their work, men sitting outside cafes and clinking glasses, as memory’s errand boys, fulfilling one (obvious to me) task. The film is composed of old documentary material, it can be seen as a requiem to the Old World (or one of its sections at least: as far as I remember it covers decades and is barely broken into individual voices). The film’s final credits are a long list of names, finishing with a single line by the film’s writer: “The last scenes were filmed on the coast of Europe in late August of 1939.”

There is so much documentary cinema occupied with this archaeology, that any scene, even any face, looks instantly familiar: crowds brought together at random by the cinecamera, divested of their names, their fates, doomed forever to scatter across the street in front of the oncoming streetcar, and to illustrate any historical situation: “Citizens of Vienna Welcome Anschluss,” “Love and Honor,” “We’ll All Be Dead Soon.” The ancient division between important and unimportant is everywhere: the hero speaks, the girl eats ice cream, the crowd loiters as crowds do. We requisition this found footage as we might the goods in a warehouse: there is so much of it that we can select what we want. The author tells a story, and passersby illustrate that story. It’s never about them, they are cutaway scenes (to use the filmmaking term), they fill the pauses, delight the eye, and don’t distract from the general idea.

It never occurs to anyone to set these people free, to give them one last opportunity to be themselves and not just typical representatives of the 1920s. Yet this is what Helga Landauer does, without taking away a second of their screen time — everyone gets as much time and space as the cameraman originally allotted them. A kind of freedom that is usually inherent to life rather than to art makes Diversions a refuge for the lost and forgotten, a paradise of democracy in which everyone is visible. A long-awaited equality between people, objects, and trees is achieved in the film, with each given its position as a representative of what has been. In some senses the convention established here is the equivalent of emancipating the serfs. The past is relieved of its feudal duties to the present, to us. It can walk freely.

Only now do I notice that every one of these people at some point lifts his or her eyes and looks into the camera, looks at me, at us, and this is one of the extraordinary things about this film: that gaze into the lens never finds its addressee. And this to such an extent that in ten or twelve viewings I have never been aware of meeting any eye: meetings have been replaced by nonmeetings, which may be more important. The people and objects depicted radiate the unbroken peace of a memorial and that makes this fifteen-minute film persuasive: where else (or where still) do they not know about suffering, where still (or where else) is there no place for it? The gaze stares out and through me, without leaving any trace or impression. It has no direction, no aim, no addressee, it is as if a landscape lies before this gaze and it can be entered and exited at will. In the lens’s eye, all causal relationships are gone: they lie beyond judgment or interpretation. Every time I watch it the order of the episodes seems to change, as if they had been given permission to stand up and wander at will.

This is the great gift: to explain nothing, to imply nothing; a woman in polished boots riding a horse, perhaps through the Bois de Boulogne, she’s in a hurry, she lights a cigarette, she poses, she lowers her new jacket with a languid gesture, she likes that jacket, she smiles as a person might smile when someone else is gazing at them appraisingly. In the film’s space she is free of all appraisal, like an animal in a zoo — what is the point in comparing a lion with a toucan, or a walrus with a bear, or me with not-me?

The Russian poet Mikhail Kuzmin has a short story about an English governess who lived in Russia. She hadn’t heard from her brother for a while, and when the First World War started she went to the cinema to watch the news, short reports on how conscripts in uniform were being sent off to the front, and she sat running her eyes over the lines of troops, their faces and sleeves, hoping for the unthinkable. And her faith triumphed — she recognized her brother. The miracle happened. But just like the oldest stories, she didn’t recognize him by his face but by what made him stand out from all the others: a hole in his trousers. I think this may be one of the very first texts of the century in which people find each other through loss and damage: holes, rents in the fabric, participants in a common fate.

There is too much past, and everyone knows it: the excess (which is continually being compared to a flood) oppresses, the force of its surge crashes against the bulwark of any amount of consciousness, it is beyond control and beyond description. So it is driven between banks, simplified, straightened out, chased still-living into the channels of narrative. The quantity and variety of sources, those babbling rivulets to the left and right, bring on a strange queasy feeling, rather like the perplexed anxiety a city dweller has when confronted by nature in its rawest state, free of its straitjacket.

Unlike nature, past lives are endlessly submissive, allowing us to do whatever we may decide to do with them. They reject no interpretation, endure any amount of humiliation, exist outside the rule of law or any notion of fair play. Culture treats the past as a state treats its mineral wealth, mining it for all its worth; this parasitical relationship with the dead is a profitable industry.

The dead agree to everything we do with them, and with such compliance that it provokes the living to do ever more. There is something horrible about the new fashion of purses and notepads decorated with faces staring out from old photographs, whose names and fates are long lost. And there is something offensive about the way “authentic lives” are sent to stroll the pleasure grounds of historical romances, as if the text would be lifeless without a drop of real blood in the mixture. These are all manifestations of some strange perversion, which leads only to the dehumanization of our own ancestors. We attribute our own weaknesses and passions to them, our amusements, our optical instruments, pushing them slowly out of the world, dressing up in their clothes as if they’d been made for us.

The past lies before us, like a huge planet waiting to be colonized: first the raiding parties, and then the slow modification process. It looks like all culture has been mobilized to preserve the little that remains; any effort at memorialization is an excuse for complacency. More and more silences rise up out of the abyss, people forgotten by their own time and discovered like islands: pioneers of street photography, music hall singers, war journalists. How easy it is to be thrilled by the jubilation, the opening of the stores where you can purchase any colonial souvenir from the past and interpret it as you see fit, without even considering what the mask or the rattle meant in its own time and place. The present is so certain that it owns the past, just as once “both th’Indias” were owned. The present knows as much about the past, as Donne did “th’India,” and barely notices the ghosts that float back and forth, ignoring state boundaries.

Walking through the Jewish cemetery in Würzburg where my mother is buried, past the gray backs of tombstones and glancing about as I walk, I start to remember her neighbors, those lying beside her, by the emblems which are hidden in their names: rose wood and rose hills, stars, deer, people of love, freedom, Würzburg’s men and women, Swabians, the lonely Miron Isaakovich Sosnovich (the totemic tree of his name — sosna is Russian for pine tree — goes unheard in these parts) from Baku (but born in Białystok, the tombstone adds helpfully), those killed in the First World War, those killed in Theresienstadt, those who died in good time, that is, before anything happened, in 1920, 1880, 1846. They have become my family, because we share the same ground, but their emblem-names are all I know about these new relatives.

There is a room in the Berlin Jewish Museum put aside for what is called family histories: children’s photos, the teacups and violins of those who didn’t manage to escape. On a screen facing me a homemade cinefilm plays on a loop, the sort of thing that everyone produced in the age of early home video, but back then a cinecamera was a signifier of wealth, along with ski lifts and summer evenings at the dacha.

In this film, as in Diversions, the foreign past is given the freedom to speak about what was, and to remain silent about how it ended. In this case we know a few of the circumstances, and we have an eye to the likely outcome. One jolting characteristic of film is very clear: unlike an old text, which goes to lengths to underline and shade in the differences between then and now, video insists on similarities, on the joined-upness of time, on how there is no difference between then and now. Streetcars and trains still clatter past, the S-Bahn above ground, the U-Bahn below, women lean over cots and coo. No hesitations, no moments of awkwardness: someone simply disappears from the frame, and that is all.

And then there is all of this: a dog bounding joyfully in a heap of snow; the dog’s cheery owners, their ski trousers bobbled with snow; an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate the nursery slopes without falling; skis going their separate ways; barn doors, the family porch and the tiled roof of another house, a child, waving its arms from an old-fashioned deep pram, a Sunday morning street, looking much like a street today, filled with people in their Sunday best, cloaks, nuns; pools or lakes, a rowboat, children growing up in front of us, winter again and long-distance skaters are clearing the ice in front of them. 1933 or 1934, the film is now in reverse and a moon-colored little boy flies up out of the black water back-first onto the planks. When I’d watched the montage to the end I waited for the credits to see the family’s name. Their surname was Ascher. I stood by the screen where once again they were checking their skis, the half-transparent family plumping down in the snow. I know how this story ended. The surname spoke for itself. The daughter (who was in the films) had given the museum these films in 2004, but there was no mention of what had happened to her parents, the boat, or the dog.

All war films look the same if you take away their captions: a dead man lies on the ground and it could be Donetsk, Phnom Penh, or Aleppo. We are simply presented with the face of misfortune, which is always the same, a hole that can open up in any place. Children’s photos are also all the same (the smile, the teddy bear, the little dress), as are fashion shots (monochrome backdrop, taken looking up from below, arms outstretched), or old photographs (mustache, buttons, eyes; puffed sleeves, hat, and lips). All that remains of The Iliad is a catalog of ships.

When I watch the homemade cinefilm of the Ascher family, skiing in 1934, the dark ski tracks in the snow and the lit-up window, the film is just a conduit for the preexisting knowledge of what happened back then to people who looked like them. Dust to dust, ashen snow to ashen snow, the collective fate of the unlucky ones: the trajectory is so very clear that any diversion from it shocks, like a divine apparition. Half an hour’s internet research tells me that both parents and children, with their skis and boats, belonged to the small number of those who survived. They left in 1939, settled in Palestine, then moved to America. They managed to escape the common fate. It’s a shame that the people in the film don’t yet know that their film has a happy end. None of the rents in the fabric suggest it.

Not-A-Chapter Lyolya (Olga) Fridman, 1934

My grandmother was barely eighteen. My grandfather Leonid (Lyonya) was older than her by four years. They met at a party of architecture students at a dacha, but they only married after a few years: Lyolya’s mother, Sarra Ginzburg, insisted that she finished her degree in medicine first, and wouldn’t allow Lyolya to drop her studies.

1.

November 25, 1934. On a lined sheet of exercise paper.

2.

Undated.

On the other side of the paper:

Farther down, in my grandfather’s large handwriting:

9. The Problem of Choice

“All the earth is a sacred tomb, the ashes of our fathers and brothers are everywhere” is a line from the Orthodox Burial Service. Since there is only one earth (and we are its only human dwellers), the meeting place between the quick and the dead, traditionally the cemetery, could be in fact any scrap of land under our feet. But the cemetery still works for us, in fact it has even too many functions. In eighteenth-century Venice, monasteries had special reception rooms where the secular and worldly could come to make music, play dominoes, chat among themselves, drink coffee, and (almost incidentally) visit their dead. The monks and novices sat separated from them by an iron grille, nodding at their conversations, but leaving back into their own very different lives. Over the last two or three hundred years the cemetery has become such a zone of one-way conversation, like a visiting room in a monastery or a prison camp, always fragmentary, always partial. But the cemetery has other, far more ancient preoccupations: it is also the place of letters, of inscribed witness.

The cemetery as address book for all humanity sets out everything we need to know with concision. In effect it comes down to names and dates — we don’t need to know any more. We read and remember at most two or three familiar names, for who could fix all its thousands of pages in the mind? But supposing those who lie there have an interest in whether they are remembered? All they can hope for is a chance passerby to stop and read; a stranger, filled with an age-old curiosity about life before he appeared in the world, who will pick out their grave from all others, and stand and remark on it. This belief in the redemptive regard of a stranger — in his eyes, flickering between the stone-carved lines of text, from letter to letter, imbuing each with temporary life and teleological warmth — makes orphans of the tombstones without inscriptions, or the stones with such worn faces they can no longer be read. A tombstone might seem almost pointless, functioning merely as a road sign (Here Lies a Person!). After all, the important stuff is under the tombstone and not on it, and people know their own dead, don’t they? Still, for some reason, the inscription, what the person under the gravestone was called and how old they were, is essential to us. Why it is so is another matter entirely.

This need is very ancient, far older than Christianity and its belief in resurrection for all. In Economy of the Unlost Anne Carson offers a careful and surprising comparison between two bodies of work (by Paul Celan and Simonides of Keos), and maintains that it is on the burial mound, where there is only a stranger’s death, a stone, and the need for a clarifying text, that poetry emerges from its shell of sound and comes into its own as a written art, aimed at the one looking at the tomb, and his ability to do what the words cut into the stone ask of him: to use his memory and its “sense of order.” The epitaph is the first written poetic genre, the subject of the contract between living and dead, a pact of mutual redemption. The living offer the dead a place in their memories, and they believe, to use the poet and songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky’s words, “the dead won’t leave us in our hour of need.”

The poet, whoever he might be, is quite essential: he carries out the task of redemption, makes a life “portable,” decouples the sign from the body and the memory from the place where that body lies. Once read, the epitaph takes wing: a vehicle, a right of passage, giving the dead a new verbal existence, unlimited movement within the internal and external space of memory, in the anthologies of world poetry and the corridors of our minds. Still, what do the dead care for our anthologies?

“The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple,” writes Carson. “It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here — deny them their nothingness — by naming their names. Out of these two wrongs come the writing of epitaphs.” Poetry as an epistolary form, a letter intended for a recipient, begins with the attempt to right the wrong inherent in the idea of choice, which divides the human population into two categories, the interesting and the less interesting, those who are fit for retelling, and those who are only fit for oblivion.

A cemetery doesn’t make that choice: it attempts to remember everyone. That must be why they have been pushed out to the very edges of our towns, to the periphery of vision and consciousness, as if the volume of life lived by others, as well as the quantity of these others, is simply too much to contain in the mind. Our daily lives are surrounded by the displaced peoples of human history, the agitated sea of the dead, who have been crossed off the list and denied every right, except the right to an inscription and the occasional posy of flowers. There are rare times when they become more visible, and at these moments reality distorts, breaks down into its separate layers, and as my little boat makes its way across the black surface of the water, pale faces rise from the depths. I can make out each of them clearly, I regard them, I can put my hand out to them and pull them into the spotlight.

Yet how to choose and whom to choose? Between the clear necessity of saving everyone indiscriminately, and the desire, equally human and obvious, involuntary as a muscle spasm, to choose from the multitudes the very one, the only one, there is no space for a correct decision. This is a zone of infernal wrongness, run through with one’s own and others’ suffering, warped by a general helplessness, shot through with an electric arc, welding past and present until both are burnt out. Any text, any speech rooted in the impossibility of choice flares up and burns, without answering its own questions. Perhaps it is best not to choose? To reel off names one after another until the pages run out? Or limit oneself to what (who) is closest? Or to find something that answers to a single vaguely formulated principle and pull it loose, like a colored thread running through the fabric of time? Or maybe it is simpler just to close your eyes and fall backward, as if you knew familiar arms would be waiting to catch you?

The Great Hall of the State Archives, with its bright, full-length windows, was packed with readers, and the whisper of page-flicking echoed in the air. The information I needed was scattered throughout the various collections. I had inventory numbers and inscrutable references, but slowly the contour of a possible request took shape, like the spine of a large fish glimpsed in the murk of a lake. The unremarkable names of my relatives, all those Ginzburgs, Stepanovs, and Gurevichs, lengthened the process; I was showered with pellets of time-hardened information, like mothballs from an attic, none of which pertained to my family’s history, but were in their own way peepholes into other lives, wriggling beyond my reach.

There was, for example, an official report written in 1891 concerning a Gurevich, who was not a relative, but who had reached a high rank despite his Jewishness, and had become the Governor of the Odessa Prison Fortress. In Russia’s South that was briefly possible, especially in Odessa, with its magnificent disdain for the thin partition walls of nationality. Close to Odessa, in Kherson, his namesake, my great-grandfather, was building his first factory. But this unknown Gurevich was having troubles, and one hundred and twenty years later I sat reading, line by line, an account of his downfall.

The report was addressed to Mikhail Nikolaevich Galkin-Vrasky, the Head of the recently founded Central Prison Service:

In the round of the peephole I can see Chubchik serenely playing dominoes with the other prisoners, but I can’t make out the fate of the timid Gurevich. Other reports from later years are attached to the case file and it is clear that things didn’t change in the Odessa Fortress even under a new governor, who also went on to be sacked. The images proceeding before my eyes as I read these papers are suffused with a peculiar and terrible reality, far more real than my great-grandmother’s yellowing spiderweb-lace dickey. Not intended for the eyes of others, nor for long life, the archived papers are illuminated on a first reading, as if they had been waiting for your attention — the unfortunate Kuznetsov at the moment of his death in the corridor, mentioned only once, but forever before my eyes, as if there were no one else to remember him and call him by his name — and I suppose there isn’t.

In Leningrad in 1930 an intriguing book was published with the title How We Write. Well-known authors, from Gorky to Zoshchenko and Andrei Bely (and a certain number of representatives of Communist Party–approved literature, whose thinking was exactly what you might expect) contributed essays about their writing process, how the cogs of idea and execution meshed together. The writers also included the aristocrat Alexei Tolstoy, a man who had returned to the USSR from emigration to occupy the absurd but privileged position of the acceptable aristocrat, The Red Count. His prose is among the most remarkable in this altogether fascinating book.

Tolstoy writes with unambiguous rapture about the texts that became both templates and sources of inspiration for him: seventeenth-century confessions under torture, extracted with the aid of pincers, clubs, and brands, written up by anonymous functionaries, deacons, and servants, in the presence of the victim. Tolstoy admired their ability to get to the heart of the matter, “preserving the particular nature of the torture victim’s speech,” “exact and concise,” so the reader can see and feel the language, its musculature. “…Here I saw the Russian language in all its purity, not spoiled by the dead form of Church Slavonic, nor translated under duress […] into a fake literary language. Here was the language Russians have spoken for a thousand years, but no one ever wrote down.”

Tolstoy’s text is very talented, arranged (with the help of many tiny literary maneuvers) to give his interest the appearance of respectability, something along the lines of an ethically sprung mattress, allowing the author to recoil from the reader’s enjoyment, and avoid falling into the black hole that yawns before the reader as soon as he even begins to concern himself with what is actually happening (and will continue to happen as long as the text lives) to the person whose Russian language you are tasting in your own mouth. Tolstoy’s taste has an invisible subtext. The political trials, exiling, and sentencing hadn’t yet reached their heights in 1930, but just beyond the world of his writing desk, too close for comfort, were the mass roundups by the OGPU, the Shakhty trial, and the recent execution of fellow writer Sillov. Pasternak wrote about the last of these in a letter to his father, saying “I will never be free of the effect of this act.” The Russian “records of proceedings,” as Tolstoy called them, with their sequence of confessions tortured out of the victims over the centuries, were clearly an invaluable source — but what end did they serve?

What Tolstoy doesn’t say is that the attraction of these testimonies, what makes their syntax so lively and the choice of words so exact, lies in their forcedness. They are not the product of free will — they result from pain. The Russian language of the accused and the tortured is the child of a terrible conjoining, quite literally torn from you by another’s hands. It’s without internal compulsion, it isn’t a drawing, but an imprint, the raw (as meat is raw) tracing of events. The words of the victim are without design, they have no interlocutor, and we can be sure that the victim never wanted them to be voiced. It is the most extreme example of what Rancière called the “monument” — a message that is entirely matched to its reason for being and has no desire for a long life, a listener, or even understanding. Speech is tied up, naked, in the last stages of pain and humiliation, on the brink of collapse.

Like everything that is not intended for the inadvertent gaze, the words of an arrested person under interrogation, the words of an informant and of a witness, have a particular direct quality. We see the prohibited, that is, we see what we shouldn’t see under any circumstances, and it blows a shell hole in the mind, like Arlette Farge’s “tear in the fabric of time.” It happens outside the normal way of things, the usual framework, when the gaze settles on an object it wasn’t expecting.

The language of document circulation and court proceeding is a revelation, but not because it lacks literature’s glossy veneer, the desire to “say it well.” It is perhaps more the case that this speech and its subject have no subjunctive mood. They have no past, they’ve already been torn from it; they have no future, you can’t see any future for them. Archival documents exist entirely in the present, and they see nothing more than themselves, their own process, their own result. This is life buttoned up wrongly; these are the ones who will never exist again, dragged out of the darkness into the sudden random light, and then deposited back into darkness.

In Farge’s book about the poetics and the practice of archival work the light is dimmed, as if we are discussing the negotiation of catacombs. She continually describes the darkness and the difficulty of movement; she talks about the density of archives as one might talk about a rock in which we discern different scattered metals. As I read I imagine how the underground life of data congeals into one collective mass over the centuries, similar in form to the body of the earth itself — the thickening mass of millions of lives, freed of their past significance, lying side by side, without a hope of being recognized or seen for themselves.

History, in contrast to the archive with its “overabundance of life,” has a narrow throat: it only has need of one or two examples, two or three enlarged details. The archive returns us to the single unit, the one-off nature of every unfamiliar event. But strange things happen — the general begins to stratify, to decompose into the constituent particles of individual existences; parts of the whole rise like bread dough; the rules pretend to be exceptions. The darkness of the past becomes a stationary screen, made of nearly transparent film that hangs before the eyes continuously, changing the proportions and the relationships between objects. Paul Celan, in his “Conversation in the Mountains,” speaks of this when he writes: “No sooner does an image go in than it catches a web, and right away there’s a thread spinning there, it spins itself around the image, a thread in the veil; spins around the image and spawns a child with it, half image and half veil.”

It was a July day. The heat was terrible, the city was filled to the brim with sticky warmth, and I was sitting in a small room in the Kherson State Archive reading the documents of the revolutionary committee. On one of the six tables, which looked more like school desks, was spread the blueprint of a factory of agricultural implements. The factory was enormous, and the blueprint barely fit across the table, with its sheds and outhouses, some of which hung down over the sides — I couldn’t inspect them properly. I had just finished reading the local sanitary health commission report, where I learned that in 1905 “the pink sago from Ioffe’s Stores was discovered to be colored with aniline and one and a half pounds were destroyed” and “in all the shops serving beer a jug of water is used to wash glasses. It is suggested that a tap and supply of water is used instead.” Alongside such hygiene measures were the orders issued to residents to clean and tidy their yards, privies, and dumps. Among the offenders the residents of Potemkin Street: Savuskan, Tikhonov, Spivak, Kotlyarsky, Falts-Fein, Gurevich. Whenever I stumble across my great-grandfather’s surname, especially in such unforeseen and even unfavorable associations, I feel the prick of sudden proximity, as if a pointed instrument had pierced a hole in the text of the report, and my eye had peered through and wandered the trash-filled yards in search of food.

But there was nothing more for me in the yards and shops. The Kherson Revolutionary Committee file, swollen with typewritten and handwritten papers, orders, reports, and demands from that terrible civil war year of 1920 had nothing more for me either. There were no more Gurevichs on the lists of those who had made efforts on behalf of relatives, who had been left without housing or employment or who had asked for their requisitioned piano to be returned. I leafed through to the end, and then back to the beginning, I couldn’t stop reading. “I am applying for the advance payment of sixty (60) thousand rubles for the creation and establishment of the Kherson Criminal Investigation Unit, which has been trusted to me.” “I confirm that Citizen Pritzker is the father of Maria Pritzker, a bor’bist who escaped the persecution of the White Army. Citizen Pritzker was arrested and robbed, in place of his daughter. It is essential we provide support.” “Urgent information required as to who was given order to search and requisition property of the former bishop of Troitsky Monastery. This information needed for an urgent report to the Area Military Committee.”

It looked as if no one had held these documents in their hands for seventy years — there were no names on the list of readers, the list of robbed bor’bists (the name for members of the left-wing Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary party) and former bishops was barely discernible against the stationary screen. Editorial staff at the closed local paper Our Land asked to be allowed to continue their work; Comrade Olshvang, dealer and repairer of typewriters, offered the Revolutionary Committee “typewriter ribbon, used, 800 rubles.”

In some places what seemed like a choir was divided into individual voices, and the text expanded with the rising bubbles of literature. “The countless relocations of the Office of Management (four moves in a week) has left its nomadic imprint on staff and visitors to the Office. Everyone is rushing around, moving from office to office, and it’s a waste of energy,” wrote the Assistant Director of the Office, Comrade Fisak, who noted the importance of “girding our loins and finding a permanent location for the Office with enough (eleven) rooms.” And a St. Petersburg theater company, trying to move to the nearby town of Kakhovka, explained their desire to move because there were too many theaters in Kherson, the theater public had had enough, and the company had nothing to live on.

It was as if I was traveling over the turbid dark waters of a lake in a flimsy little vessel, leaning down to the lip of the water, and the waxen rounds of heads were rising up from the depths to meet me. They increased in number, floating up like pelmeni do, bobbing at the edges of the pan of boiling water. I could hardly make out their faces, I had to pull those closest to me with a heavy boat hook, twisting them round, peering at them without recognizing them. Their lips moved, but they made no sound, and none of mine were among them. Almost no space was left in the boat, the hull was piled high with sacks of some nameless ballast. There was no end to this sequence, as there often isn’t in dreams, just the quiet unrelenting motion, the constant inescapable fact that you can never take anyone with you, or perhaps you can take this one, or this one. You can shine a torch into the blackness of a half-opened mouth and try to make out what he or she is saying, but to choose — is it possible to choose?

Perhaps there is no greater lie than the feeling that someone else’s prolonged daylight depends on you, their chance to flounder for a while longer on the surface, to appear briefly once more in the light before yielding to the complete and total darkness. All the same, I sat at the little plywood desk in the archive and wrote down someone else’s words, the captive tongue of our general history, as another might root around in the earth looking for last year’s rotten potatoes, trying not to change a single word.

The same note is written in red pencil above this text, and typed in blue ink below: “By order of the War Committee: Forwarded for information.”