In Memory of Memory

1. You Can’t Escape Your Fate

“…And all this time,” said my mother, in her séance-like story­telling voice, “all this time Misha was waiting for her in Russia, Misha, who was to be her future husband and your future great-grandfather. And when the First World War broke out, she returned to him after all her wanderings and they met at last, and after that they were always together. At their wedding he gave her a little brooch, the one I always wear for special occasions. On one side it has her initials, SGF, for Sarra Ginzburg-Fridman, and on the other, the words you can’t escape your fate.”

This you can’t escape your fate was inscribed on a round gold disc, like a dog tag, which was fastened to the front panel of the dark-blue “best” dress, and for a long time I thought it was awful (because fate chased and chased and finally caught up with them — Misha, who was irresistible and fun, with his high boots and long, long legs, only lived another seven years after the wedding). The “best” dress was always the same, made of a brushed cotton gathered at the bust, and hugging the waist. It was a comforting uniform that only came out on special occasions. In my early childhood my mother had more dresses for going out, and one of them, a brown dress with a white pattern on it, gave me a silent thrill. By the 1980s, when my parents had reached the age I am now, it was the unchanging nature of any special occasion that gave it its appeal. The blue dress came out of the cupboard; the brooch was fastened in its place; the white box of perfume was taken out of the little wooden medicine cabinet, always the same uncomplicated scent, or perhaps the bottle simply never ran out. The perfume was called Signatyur, and it was from Poland; the round crystal bottle with its gold-flecked contents lived in a silken nest on a cardboard pedestal, its cold little scented beak touched my mother and me behind the ears, on the chest, and at the nape of the neck. A few minutes before guests arrived I always took a quick peek at the back of the golden brooch with its blue stone to check the inscription was still there.

“And all this time,” my mother repeated, just to make sure there was no doubt at all who the heroine of the story was, “she was in France.” Your great-grandmother studied at the Sorbonne (this, I surmised, was a sort of medical institution, the most important and famous, that much was clear without any explanation) and she returned to Russia as a qualified doctor. The milk-white certificate from the Sorbonne, with its inked calligraphic tails, its concave little letters, and its seal the size of a barn-door key, was another piece of proof of the seriousness of the deed and the righteousness of the victory. But none of this was important. The mesmeric heart of the story was that great-grandmother spent a biblical seven years in Paris, the length of time Jacob worked for his Rachel — and she returned from there, returned to the future “us,” as if from under the ground, as if her wonderful life over there had meant nothing to her. Working my way through the shelves of French books from the Musketeers to Maupassant, I couldn’t come to terms with how carelessly she had thrown over Paris’s dizzying possibilities (or impossibilities for my mother and me).

I was five when she died, aged ninety, having outlived her beloved daughter by two years. Those two years she spent patiently searching for her daughter in her two rooms in a communal apartment, looking in the cupboard, then the sideboard: “Lyolya?” Gradually she began calling her granddaughter by her daughter’s name, as if the various nesting dolls in the family matryoshka could be moved around without changing the sense of order. She would sit on the divan at the dacha in a stripy housecoat: a tiny little woman, shrunken to a husk. In the jasmine-white light she looked almost transparent, but her gaze had a spiky, insect-like tenacity, you could see that whatever was coming for her would have a tough job of swallowing her down. Oh, she’s a rock, Lyolya had said, forty years before, and even now, in her minute and weightless state, she was a monument to her own past strength.

“Surely we won’t turn into old people like them. The very thought horrifies me. I’ll never allow it! It must be that in old age we think differently and want different things — otherwise life would be unbearable.” In February 1914 something made her send her future husband a few postcards with pencil sketches of old women, together with this note, and a few weeks later she wrote to ask him if the old women had arrived. She still had her university exams ahead of her — and then two wars, the birth of a child, revolution, evacuation, her daughter’s and granddaughter’s illnesses. Then the Jewish Doctors’ Plot, which didn’t quite reach our family, and the milky skin of poststroke life, simply termed “senility” back then. The deft precision of her youth didn’t leave her, but it seemed to stand out more sharply, like her ribs, her mandibles, her wing cases, or the heavy line of brow over the little, almost childlike face.

A little earlier, at the beginning of the 1960s, Rufa, one of my mother’s distant cousins, came to Moscow from Saratov and stayed with us. She came home one evening to find Sarra sitting on her own in a rocking chair in a dark room: “Why on earth didn’t you turn the light on? You could have been reading a nice story!”

“Oh I just have to shut my eyes and I see such stories, my sweet girl.”

In her old age, or so I was told, she used to sing. There was always music in the house (on the title page of one very old romance published in 1934 there was an inscription by the author, who went to the same Moscow holiday camp as Sarra: For you to sing). An old Blüthner piano with yellowing keys stood neglected in the corner of the apartment. Occasionally Rufa’s husband, Alik, a professional pianist, visited from Saratov to play in Moscow’s concert halls, and in the mornings he would slide his hands into the Blüthner’s mouth and the piano would growl and lisp obediently. But Great-Grandmother remained indifferent to hers or anyone else’s musical accomplishments — she saw music as a trivial occupation, something to fill an idle hour. I remember tales of her calling the guests, who had just gathered at the piano, to the dinner table, saying, “Alik will play along as we eat.”

Her return to singing, just before her death, was of a different order, as if the songs of her youth had returned and settled in her throat, releasing their long-forgotten words, shorn of meaning, dim and terrible: “You Fell, The Victim of a Fateful Battle,” composed in the 1870s and sung at the graveside, the basis for the funeral march in Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony. Or the “Song of Warsaw,” the revolutionary song from the Barricades in 1905, with its “March, march ye toilers and the world shall be free.” And all the repertoire of underground songs sung by the kids of 1900, which formed the living language of their battle and their slightly postponed victory. Fifteen-year-old Mayakovsky in Butyrka prison, schoolboy Mandelstam with his Erfurt Program, thirteen-year-old Tsvetaeva at revolutionary gatherings in Yalta — all of this was infused with historical necessity, and hovering overhead, the gramophone buzz of the relentless “Worker’s Marseillaise”: “Let Us Denounce the Old World.”

The memoirs of the revolutionary movement at the turn of the century make it sound as if they were always singing, even rather demonstratively replacing speech with song. The stories of strikes and the secret meetings of conspirators were punctuated by musical interludes: “we set off up the river singing revolutionary songs,” “we returned by boat singing revolutionary songs again and waving red flags,” “after his speech we ended the meeting with songs.” “The Marseillaise” is seamlessly replaced by “The Internationale.”

Somewhere among the students and girls, the Mayday meetings and leaflets, is the indistinct shadow of seventeen-year-old Sarra Ginzburg, marching, clutching hands with another, as the letter describes. The gymnasium she studied at in Nizhny Novgorod was only a few houses away from the Sverdlovs’ Engraving Workshop. It was noisy and busy in the workshop and this is where she met all of the comrades of her best friend Sarra’s brother, Yakov Sverdlov. In the darkly mysterious memoirs written collectively by three Sverdlov siblings many years later, there’s a story about one brother going for a boat trip with their sister and her friend (the waves were rough and threatened to overturn the boat, but the girls didn’t cry because they were more afraid of the brother than the water); Sancho Pancho moves through the work silently like a shadow; long lines of schoolboys engage officer cadets in fisticuffs; prison visitors bring sweets to the prisoners. A strange combination of comfort and horror dyes the eggshell of their youth, as if with onion skins. “Between 1901 and 1903 she [Sarra Sverdlova] often passed on notes, carried proclamations, printed leaflets on the hectograph, and did other tasks that were illegal.” Her friend must have done much the same: in 1906 Sarra Ginzburg is predictably arrested for distributing leaflets at the barracks.

When I was fourteen, in 1986, my mother decided to take me to Leningrad — she had long promised to show me her favorite city. It was summer, the time of the “White Nights,” when the sun hardly sets, and we sat together, first on one damp bench, and then another. She got quickly tired, so all the walks we took were short, and ended with us resting on benches, the mass of pigeons pecking at the cracked paving stones around us.

Occasionally I would badger her for presents, as if a new place was hardly worth visiting without a little souvenir of some sort that I could carry home as a memento, to console myself when the adventure was over. I grieved over a completely useless piece of tat being sold for the outrageous price of three and a half rubles in the theater shop Maska on Nevsky Prospect. It was a theatrical prop, a “historical” ash-colored lock of hair that fastened at the temple and fell as a long curly braid down to the lady’s soft neck. The braid felt completely plastic to the touch, it was impossible to think of an ordinary nontheatrical situation in which it could have been worn, but with my mop of black curls I only yearned all the more to keep it treasured in my desk drawer.

On the first evening in Leningrad we went walking toward the stretch of river and, beyond it, the dark walls and glinting golden spire. “That, Masha, is the Peter and Paul Fortress,” said my mother, “where Great-Grandmother Sarra was imprisoned.” And we both made a goose-like movement with our necks, stretching and leaning down at the same time, as if we were both bowing to Sarra, and attempting to escape our own skins.

We gave the Peter and Paul Fortress our minute attention, as we did the fountains of Peterhof, the side rooms and staircases of the Hermitage, and even the Chinoiserie of Oranienbaum. It beggars belief how much we managed to see on that trip. The Fortress that June was as bare as a parade ground, hollow as a Christmas decoration. It bore no resemblance to anything. Everything that had happened there was long over, my Sarra had been blinked away, like a mote in the eye.

Whenever I have visited Petersburg since, I have always gone out to the banks of the Neva to face the granite wall of the Fortress, the angel at the top of the spire and the narrow river beach below — and I’ve made the same goose-like bow, my neck stretched forward, bowing either to my great-grandmother or to the place that held her and then spat her out, as the whale did to Jonah.

The Trubetskoy Bastion Prison was built in the early 1870s. It had sixty or so cells and two solitary confinement cells, allowing for a constant flow of hundreds of “political prisoners.” Sarra’s stay in the Fortress was sure to have been in here: dirty-white ceiling, gray walls, prison issue sheets, round-toed prison shoes. The corridors have a life of their own, twisting abruptly like elbows; the cells breathe their underground chill on you as you approach the doors, and the iron bed frames cast their cross-shaped shadow on the stone wall. The beds and the iron tables, bolted to the walls and floor, resemble the furniture in sleeping cars on a train: a white mattress, two pillows, a coarse blanket. Every possession had to kept in plain sight, books, mug, comb, tobacco. The archivists in the Fortress could not help me with my inquiries. It was too late, there was no trace of Sarra Ginzburg in the papers left in the Bastion — the place would not acknowledge her existence.

And now where to look for her? There were so many like her. It isn’t easy, after everything that has happened, to picture the wholeheartedness with which those young people threw themselves into battle, yet it still rises, like steam from bread, from the memoirs, documents, the crudely typed police spy reports: “They unrolled a red scarf with ‘Down With Autocracy’ written on it in ink”; “Propaganda classes take place one-to-one or in small groups on boats”; “In the Passazh Inn we caught a group of new recruits singing ‘The Marseillaise’ among a very different crowd: ‘Arise, arise, working class!’” And over all this the constant refrain: “Participants were singing revolutionary songs.” In the soft-gray fortress corridor, carefully researched panels of information about past prisoners hang on the walls: “sentenced by military court and executed in 1908”; “committed suicide in her cell”; “killed in Mexico by an NKVD agent”; “died in Moscow in 1944.”

Alongside the panels hang photographs of the graffiti found on the walls. The photographs were taken in the mid-1920s, when the Bastion was no longer a prison. In one photograph, there’s a drawing of a woman in a light blouse with puffed sleeves. The picture has a frame drawn around it, as if to pretend that it’s a proper picture, or even a window we are looking through. The woman sits at a table, on which there is a tall vase of flowers, a silver butter dish and a samovar on little iron feet. She’s ugly, and it feels as if this is because she has been drawn from real life. Her simple face has an expression that combines both concentration and surprise, she has just brought a match up close to her cigarette and is now taking the first drag, smiling all the while. Her hair is drawn into a bun. Through the window the play of summer shadows and light. It is terrible to consider the degree to which we are absent from this picture.

The letter from Platon with its Pushkin quotes was sent to Sarra “in her fortress” in February 1907. Ten years later, in Autumn 1917, in the general collapse and confusion, something strange happened to the Fortress archives — they disappeared in murky circumstances and less than half of them were saved. Any trace of Sarra might have been wiped out then, which worked to her advantage. She never once, on any paper or form, mentions her revolutionary past or her prison stay. “In Russia, as a Jewish woman, I couldn’t study in higher education and I was forced to study abroad,” she wrote about her French sojourn. Although, in fact, as a daughter of a merchant belonging to the 1st Guild, she could have lived and studied in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and in any of the cities’ universities. The story handed down through the family is different: efforts were made on behalf of this girl with her revolutionary past. Connections were used, levers pressed. And it worked: she was offered the choice of exile to somewhere in the remote east, or departure in the opposite direction, to Europe, to study, recover her health — to get her out of the way, in short. Her next postcards were sent from Montpellier.

In her declining years, on her way home from a walk with her old friend Sarra Sverdlova, the two of them in their weighty coats, fur hats and ancient fur muffs, Great-Grandmother spoke of herself as a “Bolshevik without a party ticket” — another cliché of a time when phrases were minted like postage stamps. But it was true, she never did join the party, not in forty years of living in Soviet Russia and knowing all the right (and wrong) people, and coming from antediluvian Nizhny Novgorod, with its exhortative speakers, assemblies, tea parties with Maxim Gorky. Sarra Ginzburg worked in managerial roles, she survived purges, and attended party gatherings — but she never signed up. There were plenty of opportunities, but she didn’t take them. Her departure for Paris, like crawling up on dry land after flailing in the deep, symbolized some deep and irreversible break: for her the revolution was over. Something else had begun.

Many years later she went back to Nizhny Novgorod from Moscow for the first and last time. The Soviet town was now named Gorky. She was taken to the local museum, which stood high above the town on a promontory over the river. The museum guide gave a detailed account of the heroic lives of the Nizhny Bolsheviks, moving between one photograph and the next. On one photograph, which looked dirty because of the grainy snow whirling down, a group of young people stood by a low fence. There were four of them. One young woman’s face was covered in an absurd black bandage, her bonnet was in disarray, wedged on the side of her head, and bits stuck out from it like rabbit’s tails. The museum guide commented that this was on the barricades in December. “We know very little about these people,” she said, “it seems most likely they are all long dead.”

“Most likely,” agreed Great-Grandmother Sarra, and turned away to view the next picture.

Pochinky’s main square is empty in this old picture. A cart is being pulled by two horses, a factory worker stands in a shop doorway where some bold chickens have gathered expectantly. It looks like a quiet backwater, a place at the far corner of the earth. The horse fair, when people gathered in the town, was a huge event and the town’s main source of entertainment. Pochinky was built of wood, it stood waist-deep in orchards and gardens. Everything was small in scale but designed to impress: the little local hills were respectfully referred to as “mountains”; a one-and-a-half-yard-long prehistoric tooth was once dredged out of the local river; the cathedral was tastefully built; and the town could boast a notary’s office and mutual savings association, part of a growing bureaucratic presence that also regulated army recruitment, drink, and tax collection. Abram Osipovich Ginzburg brought his sizable family up here, very far from the center of things, in the hinterlands.

I found no traces of his life in this little town, which is now only a hamlet. A handful of memories of his son Solomon, Uncle Solya, who sold Singer sewing machines, the reluctant heir in the place of the cursed prodigal son, Iosif. Great-Great-Grandfather Abram, with his baobab tree of a beard, had sixteen children, garnered a good deal of wealth, saved Sarra from prison and exile, and died on June 22 in 1909. He has been forgotten by Pochinky.

The merchants of the 1st Guild were not subject to corporal punishment. Among their other privileges was the permission to deal wholesale in Russian and foreign goods within Russia and abroad; to own shipping and to send their trading ships to foreign lands; to own factories and production plants, with the exception of distilleries and vineyards; to own shops, storage and cellars; to provide insurance; to carry out transfers of money and much else. There was one special provision for Jewish merchants: after 1857 membership of the 1st Guild meant the merchant’s whole family and even a servant were guaranteed permission to live in Russia outside of the Western Pale of Settlement in any town in the Russian Empire, including (with some conditions) the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Membership was an expensive matter: annual fees were never less than 500 rubles (one percent of declared capital over 50,000 rubles). The Jewish community in Nizhny Novgorod was still small at the end of the nineteenth century and in the tiny town of Pochinky Jews were downright exotic. Statistics compiled in 1881, four years before Sarra’s birth, show that in the whole district there were eleven people of the Jewish faith — I have a suspicion they all shared the surname Ginzburg.

Great-Great-Grandfather didn’t live to see a time of mixed marriages and integration, when the children of the Priest Orfanov from the Cathedral of the Nativity of Christ would marry descendants of the Ginzburg family. His estate was divided equally between his children and Sarra’s inheritance was spent on her studies in Paris. She returned without a penny to her name, with “nothing more than a hatbox.” I close my eyes and I see her standing on the platform of the Brest Station in Moscow, holding her hatbox, a little independent woman who would walk alone all her life. If I screw up my eyes and really focus I can see the black Paris hat, with its long curling ostrich feather. The hat outlived its owner. It appears now and again in photos from my childhood.

No matter how hard I concentrate, in my mind’s eye I can never see the texture and the sound of everyday life back then: tea in the Gethlings’ garden; her sister Vera clutching a book of Nadson’s poetry; the endless hours on the coach to Nizhny Novgorod; skirts damp with the dew and catching on the burdock; the little river; smoking a secret cigarette in the attic. Pochinky was home: where she came to rest, to cry her eyes out, to be fed up. Her little sister Rakhil once wrote in a letter that she’d just come back from the theater, they’d staged Ostrovsky, and then about forty people had come for dinner — but where did that happen? Surely not in child-size Pochinky, which never had a theater? Then again, it was the age of the amateur performance, home theater, Hamlet strutting the boards of the dacha terrace in black hose. The fine dust of the friendships and flirtations has settled for good, nothing can be made out now. All that is left is what Balzac calls the ruins of the bourgeoisie: “An ignoble detritus of pasteboard, plaster, and coloring.”

In all this pasteboard detritus there is one other photograph I’ve loved since I was a child, although it makes a comic impression more than anything: the Ginzburg women are standing in a line, from the oldest to the youngest, one behind another, looking sidelong at the camera. In front are the powerful matriarchs with their wide behinds, heavy busts, helmets of hair, and the calm faces of heroines. Then, in order of decreasing magnitude, a series of ladies with a more ordinary appearance, in bustles and puffed sleeves, and at the end of the tail, erect, frowning, and dressed in a simple, dark dress, the almost fragile figure of Sarra behind her more majestic sisters. Lastly the miniature Rakhil, and she and Sarra radiate a misleading warmth: it feels to me as if I understand them better than the others.

The medical report of Sarra’s childbirth, written up in 1916, offers a range of exhaustive detail — the process of acquiring information is almost unnaturally easy. Only I, in the whole world, now know that this was her first pregnancy, that she went into labor in the evening, that contractions lasted nineteen hours and forty minutes, that her tiny and still nameless baby girl weighed only 2,420 grams and was healthy the whole week they stayed in hospital.

There is nothing more distancing than the documents of a dead person with their contradictions and lacunae, their dated habit of apparently meaning something. On the identity documents issued to Sarra Ginzburg in 1924, her birthplace is given as Saratov, but in later autobiographical writing it is Pochinky. There is no discrepancy in the dates — on both it is January 10, 1885 (January 22 in the new calendar). In her autobiography she calls her father a “minor” merchant, but her marriage certificate says he was in the 1st Guild. Perhaps these discrepancies are due to her fear that in a new Communist era it would be all too easy to find traces of her “inappropriate” bourgeois background in tiny Pochinky.

She graduated from school at twenty-one, in 1906, and by 1907 she was in prison. She was in France from 1908 to 1914. She returned to Russia, took the state exams, which allowed her to practice medicine with her foreign diploma, and made the “Medical Faculty Promise,” with its delightful phrasing:

This is 1915, the year of her marriage. Her daughter Lyolya is born in 1916 in Saratov, the same year Sarra opens her medical practice.

I have the bronze name plaque with its stout prerevolutionary lettering: ДОКТОРЪ С.А. ГИНЗБУРГЪ-ФРИДМАНЪ (Doctor S. A. Ginzburg-Fridman). It didn’t stay in place long: a year later there were spelling reforms and it became redundant. Then all normal life was turned upside down in the revolution. The plaque and a full box of unusable visiting cards were kept and brought to Moscow, like unfulfilled but unforgotten promises. So much back then was begun but never finished. In March 1917 Mikhael Fridman, Sarra’s husband, finally became a solicitor. It is hard to grasp just how much work that would have entailed. As well as an education in law, a solicitor in state practice had to go through an apprenticeship scheme and work for at least five years as a solicitor’s assistant, traveling many miles on state business, spending hours on the minutiae of regulatory law. The pages in Great-Grandfather’s passport, where they put stamps for any overnight stay in a place away from your registered home, are bright with the names of Russian towns.

This passport was issued by the Saratov Police Department (no expiry date, price 15 kopecks) on May 23, 1912. The owner is named: Mikhel Davidovich Fridman, the language of the document did not indulge any attempts at assimilation or the desire to be like everyone else. He was born on December 15, 1880, of medium height, Jewish faith. In the section about military service he is listed as having military training. He has black hair and no distinguishing features. A few pages later there is the registration of a marriage with the spinster Ginzburg by the “government” Rabbi, Arii Shulman, and later it is noted that “The Fridman couple have a daughter by the name of Olga.” Lower still on the same page, a note to the effect that the Board of Court Officials accepts him into their ranks. The next document referring to my great-grandfather’s affairs, in a similarly minimal style, is his death certificate.

How large and intense and decorated their lives seem before events caught up with them. How very full they were of other events: of post-horses, telegrams, and plans opening out before them like a gift box. There’s a bright, clear period of about ten years from 1907 to 1917, but if you attempt to go back further than 1907, a torpid darkness falls and nothing can be made out. Misha’s father, David Yankelevich Fridman, was a doctor, or so my mother thought, but he appears nowhere in the Saratov or Nizhny archives. A David Fridman (tradesperson) appears once in a list of members of the Jewish community in Nizhny Novgorod, complied by the Rabbi Borukh Zakhoder in 1877. This Fridman is not significant enough to be counted as a full member of the community and is listed under: “Those who can’t be named either because they don’t give money for prayers, or because they are illiterate and not in trade, or because some of them are soldiers on leave who can be sent away from the town by the town administration, or those who are under age.” The unnamed David Yakovlevich could easily be the father of Mikhel. We are told nothing else about him. I have lots of photographs of David Fridman in his golden pince-nez, slowly aging and imperceptibly thinning about the face. The last picture, taken with a dog, is a studio shot from 1906, shortly before he died.

He, too, like everyone else, had several children, scattering like berries across the roads of the new age: his sons Misha and Borya used to tell stories of their beloved nanny, who was round and quick to grumble, and they would tease by lifting her up on a high cupboard to quieten her. One of the many uncles married the young wet nurse, fascinated by her embonpoint and the blinding white of her uniform — women in this useful profession usually wore a smock robe decorated with rows of red beads. Then there were ferry trips along the Volga river, and a samovar heated with pine cones. Mikhel was not a particularly good student, but he passed the exams to become an apothecary’s apprentice. He had wanted to become a lawyer and in 1903 he resigned from the Association of Tradesmen “to gain a place in an institution of higher education and continue his education.” The document confirming his resignation is decorated with an official stamp: a pensive reindeer lifts its right leg as if it can’t quite decide whether to take a step forward.

Mikhael Davidovich Fridman, who told his nephew to “live an interesting life,” died on November 11, 1923, of severe appendicitis in Botkin’s Hospital. His death certificate gives his profession as “employee.” In Sarra’s autobiography, which she wrote in the far too interesting year of 1938, she carefully avoids naming his legal work: her husband “worked as an economist in Central Mining Management.” He was only forty-three. Lyolya was barely seven. Just the year before they had moved to Moscow from Saratov, but there is no way of knowing when exactly, or why. At almost the same time, as if driven by some invisible gust of wind, another family moved to Moscow: the boy Lyonya, who will one day marry Lyolya, and his still young mother.

The ability to skip large chunks of time might be useful in the writing of novels, but it starts to frighten me when I realize I am doing it in life, and with real living people — that is, with dead people, of course, although there isn’t really any difference. Great-Grandmother Sarra’s youth, before Lyolya is born, feels like the beginning. Everything is ahead of her, anything could happen. After 1916 time begins folding itself up, tightening into the felt roll of collective fate. A hundred years later I began following in her footsteps, visiting her St. Petersburg addresses, buildings with rebuilt facades, missing apartments, and whole missing wings in poor areas of the city, lit by the setting sun and inhabited by flocks of Sunday soldiers. It always seemed that if I took just another turn to the right, then that would be enough, I could transform her life, restore it, make it fit to be seen again.

In my own family history, I am interested more than anything in the period of ten to fifteen years after the revolution, when a way of life suddenly slowed, convulsed, and belly-flopped onto a new set of rails. These were the purblind years, the years when my great-grandparents died, or left the country or moved — that period of their lives is barely documented. They preferred not to keep diaries, and all the photographs that had been preserved are only partial, the tiny corners of a much larger picture, and something is going on in this unseen bigger picture that I don’t understand. Here’s a photograph of croquet at the log-built dacha; here are some hefty women doing exercises under banners with rhymes on; Sarra with her daughter Lyolya, who is looking sad and pinched, standing on a little hill by a stream, and by them some faces from the past, family whose names I don’t know. As her daughter grows up (school class group pictures, the little girls pressing themselves against their teacher; postcards from friends; the La Bayadère sheet music), the mother slowly fades out. She works in numerous medical institutions, there’s a tired love affair with a relative of her dead husband who owns a photo studio, postcards from her travels, pictures of holiday resorts where the gray sea rushes up to meet a gray skirt and then squirms back like a dog at a command.

Sarra never disappeared altogether, and that was her great achievement. She sank into the comfortable life of a qualified medical professional, doing the rounds of sanatoriums and women’s clinics. Her daughter, too, was drawn into a constant purposeful activity. She had long decided to become a doctor like her mother, and the permanent bustle radiated a sprightly sense of inclusion, everyone working together. I can’t even attempt to guess what they thought about what was happening around them. There is no evidence, no basis for such guesswork. There are no preserved letters, and there never were any such letters, nor books from the home library (the usual Tolstoy, Chekhov “ex libris M. Fridman, Court Solicitor,” some early twentieth-century poetry) that might allow me to put together a collage of Soviet or anti-Soviet inclinations. When eighteen-year-old Lyolya decided to get married in 1934 her mother gave permission on the single condition that she first graduate from medical school. They could get married and they could live with Sarra, but they weren’t even allowed to think about having a family until Lyolya had her diploma in medicine. This white-hot near-religious belief in higher education was handed down through the generations and I remember it in my own childhood. We are Jews, I heard this at the age of seven. You cannot allow yourself the luxury of not having an education.

Lyolya, pink-cheeked and responsible, complied obediently: according to the agreement, Lyonya and Lyolya’s child was to be born at the beginning of August 1941. But in early August they and Sarra were part of a convoy evacuated east, toward Siberia. The child sat tight in the womb, as if she understood this was not the time. After a few weeks of changing trains, dragging belongings, the fear of being left behind or being lost, they finally reached Yalutorovsk, the furthest point on the map of our family’s wanderings. This tiny town with its wooden duckboard pavements and blackened little buildings had barely ever changed, and even now is probably much the same. It had always been a place of Siberian exile: the Decembrists settled there in the 1820s after their failed uprising against the Tsar. My mother was born there on the third or fourth day after their arrival, on September 12, 1941. Her very earliest memories were of the neighbors chopping the head off their cockerel, and when the head fell on the grass the bird suddenly took to its wings and flew across the astounded yard.

Yalutorovsk, in snow and in steam, with its milk production plants and nurseries, needed an experienced doctor, and it was one of Sarra’s finest moments (Oh, she’s a rock!) — she found her feet straightaway. In the general panic in Moscow in the first weeks of war no one knew what to do or where to go. Marina Tsvetaeva’s sixteen-year-old son Mur kept a terrifyingly detailed diary recording the daily changing shades of hope and despair: the hope it might be possible to sit it out, the fear of being buried in the rubble, the fear of flight, the fear of staying put, the endlessly torturous discussion of all the possible outcomes. It’s hard to believe now, but in the middle of July 1941 Tsvetaeva went off to a dacha with friends “to rest.” The dacha was outside Moscow, on the Kazan road, and the three middle-aged women and one lonely boy stayed out there, filling the time between lunch and dinner with discussion, waiting for news from town, like a scene from a Chekhov story. This sojourn turned out to be their last chance to catch breath. When mother and son briefly returned to Moscow they were caught up in the whirlpool of fleeing crowds trying to get on the last train or the last ferry, and they were the lucky ones. They left Moscow by themselves with no help from the Literary Fund, no money, almost no baggage, nothing that could be exchanged for food. We know how the story ends.

Moscow wasn’t prepared for war or siege. In Spring 1941 a commission was set up to research the evacuation of Moscow’s population in case of war. They discussed possible ways to evacuate a million residents away from the front line. Stalin sent an angry riposte to their suggestions:

This memo is dated June 5, 1941.

The city was in a state of frenzy for several months. People fled precipitously as you might dive through a hole cut in the ice. All the government ministries and offices evacuated their staff, and those who didn’t go were simply left to their own devices. Some fled on foot. On October 16, when the German army was very close to Moscow’s outskirts, the literary critic Emma Gerstein missed the evacuation train she’d been promised a place on. “I walked through the streets and wept. All around scraps of shredded documents and Marxist political brochures whirled about me in the air, carried by the wind. The hairdressers were all full and ‘ladies’ were lining up on the streets. The Germans were coming, they needed to get their hair done.”

They returned to Moscow in 1944. On May 9, 1945, Lyolya’s birthday, the high windows of the apartment on the boulevard were thrown open. Spring was everywhere, its green streaming like tears, and all the residents in the communal apartment were gathered around a table laden with food: the family, friends, chance passersby brought in from the street, and young Viktoria Ivanova, a singer whose name reminded them of Victory, who wore a blue dress, and sang for them in her divine voice: “The Blue Scarf” and “Come Buy My Violets,” and anything else they asked her to sing. Then they went out to the Ustinsky Bridge to watch the fireworks blooming over the Moscow River.

After this evening Sarra’s light begins to dim, to disappear into the darkness that will last for nearly thirty years. I remember my mother linked Sarra’s stroke with the “Doctors’ Plot,” which should by rights have consumed her, and Lyolya as well. Her little gray “record of work” book, filled out up to 1949, shows that even before the “Doctors’ Plot” there was no dearth of terrifying events. The whole country was at war with “cosmopolitanism,” a code word for Jewishness. The Jewish Antifascist Committee was disbanded, there were arrests, books by Jewish authors were removed from libraries, all publication in Yiddish ceased, and there was the usual wave of sackings across the city. I don’t know what would have been more dangerous for Doctor Sarra Abramovna Ginzburg: her native Jewishness or her assumed Europeanness. I wonder, did she ever discuss what was going on with her close family, was she scared that it would also affect those around her, her very successful son-in-law, daughter, and grandchild? Her stroke, and the resulting “senility” — that long-awaited inability to be responsible, make decisions, take steps — removed her from the group at risk, and placed her in a cool, safe place, where she could sort through her photographs, make little notes on them, and put her hand out and touch any beckoning memory.

I remember listening to a school talk on Byzantine architecture in the darkened auditorium of the Pushkin Museum when I was ten. The powerful shoulders of the Hagia Sophia and the sky above the minarets appeared on the projector screen. You could say that this was a later invention, or a stereotype I have retrospectively revived, but I remember all too well the moment when I looked at the bright screen and thought to myself: I will probably never see this in real life. People with our lives, engineers and lowly scientists, the unexceptional Moscow intelligentsia at the beginning of the eighties, simply never went abroad.

I started traveling as soon as I had the opportunity and I have never stopped. Perhaps this is why I get an almost physical thrill from being under the glass-and-metal roofs of railway stations. It’s as if the roof’s ribs are mine and the circulation of people is my own body’s vital circulation, filling sixteen platforms, the wide glassy wings, the lofty arcs supported by sunlight. I have the same feeling in airports, with their laundrette fumes, their inhuman cleanliness. I have to cling to every opportunity for travel like a monkey wrapped around a branch. The aerial state, the gaseous state, invisible, elusive, passing across borders and breathing in the air one chooses — yes, for this I strive! When we moved apartments and all the cups and sauce boats, photographs and the books of our home life were put into storage, I started traveling twice as much as usual, as if these possessions had weighted me down to the earth.

My travels had a solid justification: I was writing a book about my people. I moved about from place to place, archive to archive, street to street, places where they had walked. I tried to coincide with them, hoping this would engender a memory of them, however implausible it sounds. I diligently gathered up everything I knew, and entered dates and addresses into the computer’s memory, mapping a route like anyone who embarks on a long journey.

On the corner of a Paris street, in a building where my great-grandmother had once lived, there is now a small hotel. Here I could spend one or two nights under the same roof as the young Sarra, I could quite literally get under the skin of history. I arrived from London on the train, threading itself through the undersea tunnel and appearing suddenly in the midst of green French fields. Looking out of the window, I thought how terribly tired I was of family. I couldn’t look away from it, I saw nothing else. Like the wrought iron fence of the Summer Gardens, I couldn’t see beyond the captivating design and into the space within. Every past and present phenomenon had been tied to my indistinct relatives, I had rhymed it all, emphasized the simultaneity between them and me, or the lack of it. I’d had to learn to put off my own relations with the world for later, just as truffle pigs are trained to ensure they don’t eat their precious findings. My journeys had only the most oblique connection with me, I made my way from town to town like a traveling salesperson, dragging a wheelie bag. It wasn’t that the wheelie bag was out of place or filled with the wrong things — not even when it clattered down the cobbled Parisian streets — no, it was just that wherever I went it insisted on its presence.

There I went with it, weaving along the verges, down the long rue Claude-Bernard in the fifth arrondissement, where only people like Sarra Ginzburg lived, and not because it was near the Sorbonne and the Val-de-Grâce hospital — this was the area of rented rooms and cheap lodgings where sparrowlike students flitted from perch to perch, never going far, huddling together for collegiate warmth. On this very street Sarra had spent a few weeks or months in a green-tinged seven-story building with metal balconies. It was a cheap, fierce neighborhood, the stairwells smelt of smoke and damp face powder. It had been rebuilt in the 1860s, but had become no more respectable for it. As the architect of these changes Baron Haussmann said “Paris belongs to France, and not to the Parisians, who inhabit it by birth or by choice, and definitely not to the flowing population of its rented rooms, who distort the meaning of ‘referendum’ with their unintelligent voice.” A few decades later the Russian Mademoiselle Ginzburg joined this floating population.

Waking one morning in the attic room on the sixth floor, I slowly began groping mentally for what might have been back then: the number of rooms, the crooked ceiling, the old table and the chimney pots, very white against the gray sky. Without even getting up I could see at least ten possibilities. My great-grandmother might have stayed in this very room — why not, the cheapest rooms would have been up in the attics — or she could have lived in any of the other rooms. If I had expected a supernatural happening (paid for in advance and online with my credit card), a dream peopled by Sarra and her student friends, a sudden nighttime revelation, an injection of understanding, no such thing happened. Instead the usual tourist morning, the light, the smell of coffee, the quiet murmur of a vacuum cleaner.

The owner of the hotel was an older man with grief-stricken eyes. He held himself with the dignity of a caryatid. It was clear that he could carry on a conversation with me, and at the same time carry all the weight of his elegant hotel, with its staircases and the starched envelopes of its beds. He bought the building in the 1980s, reconstructed whole floors of tired rooms and sunk a lift shaft through the building, but left untouched the ancient underground passageway leading into the darkness toward the Seine. He knew little about the life of the building before that, except that the designer Kenzō Takada had lived in one of its microscopic rooms during his early days in Paris. There were no memories back to the beginning of the century, but the building had always housed the cramped, narrow, warren-like living quarters of the poor. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” he suddenly said.

Twenty or so years ago I was sitting with my future (now former) husband in the little porch of a Crimean café and waiting for it to open. It was noon, a lazy August day, the holiday season was nearing its end and no one was hurrying anywhere, especially not the ragtag band approaching us across the warm asphalt. A man in dirty trousers with a greasy blond beard was leading an elderly horse, and up high on the saddle, gripping on to the pommel with both hands, sat an unusually pretty curly-haired little boy of about six. Even at that hour of desperate longing for Crimean fortified wine, their appearance seemed unreal, like a shamelessly direct quote from a Soviet film about the White Army during the Civil War. The horse was white, too, but red with dust. The man led the beast right up to the porch and said, without any particular expression: “Excuse me but aren’t you ex nostris?” I was so surprised I didn’t immediately grasp what he was saying.

Ex nostris, jid, as he added in his next phrase, meaning the very same “we are Jews.” He took the coins we offered and went on, him and his child toward Feodosiya, without offering any detail in return, and for this reason I sometimes wonder whether we didn’t just invent it all, sitting there in the shade of the porch. But I couldn’t have invented it, the Latin, the jid — in my assimilated experience the space for such an understanding was absent, along with the reflex for such an exchange of passwords. “Yes, I’m Jewish, too,” said the owner of the hotel, hardly doubting either himself or me. “At the end of the streets there’s a synagogue, a very old one. You can understand why your grandmother would have wanted to live here. It’s very hard here for us again. I give us at best another five years in France. After that it will be worse. Far worse.”

The oldest medical institute in France in Montpellier accepted foreign students with open arms. The diaries of the Swiss physician Thomas Platter the Younger, who studied here at the end of the sixteenth century, describe the area’s reddish and very fertile soil, the local wine, so strong it had to be diluted by two thirds, and the elegant townspeople, adept at trickery and intrigue, fine dancers and sportspeople. Thomas noted the seven courts for ball games in the town: “Where do these people get so much money from, just to fritter it away?” Sarra’s life abroad began here, either under the glassy dome of Gare du Nord, if she had arrived via Berlin, or Gare de l’Est, if she’d come via Vienna.

There were hundreds like her, if not thousands. The medical education in France was the cheapest in Europe. From the end of the 1860s, when universities gradually began accepting women, Russian women began filling the quotas. By 1914 they made up 70 percent and sometimes 80 percent of the women studying medicine. They were treated with disdain, their fellow students needed no encouragement to complain about them, their manners, their slovenliness, their political radicalism — and most of all their desire to be at the top of the class, pushing local students out of the family nest like cuckoos. Even Pyotr Kropotkin described how the professors at Zurich University would without fail and very insultingly hold up the women students as examples to their male counterparts.

One of the women students remembered years later how in the 1870s “the Russian women demanded not just the usual rights, which applied to everyone, but special privileges, always occupying the best spaces and putting themselves first.” They lived in a tight community, in areas where spoken Russian dominated, and they ate a diet of bread, tea, milk, and thin slices of meat. They smoked heedlessly, they walked around unchaperoned. They discussed in all seriousness whether one could eat a plate of plums or raspberries and remain a thinking woman and a comrade. The newspapers in Bern called them the hyenas of the revolution: “unhealthy, half-educated, uncontrollable creatures.” But by the end of the 1880s there were already 698 women doctors in Russia. In 1900 there were only 95 in France and 258 in England.

A huge number of the Russian students were Jewish. This was their chance, their golden ticket — a doctor with a medical diploma could practice anywhere in the Russian Empire, and not just in the Pale of Settlement. By the beginning of the new century more than five thousand foreign medical students had converged on Paris, fighting for places with the locals. In 1896 students in Lyon protested on the streets, claiming that foreign students, in particular women, were crowding French students out of the clinics and lecture halls. In 1905 students in Jena signed a petition against giving student places to Russian Jews with their “pushy behavior.” In 1912, when Sarra was already studying at the Sorbonne, there were student strikes all across Germany and everywhere the demand was the same, to limit the influx of foreign students. In Heidelberg, Russian students made a public appeal to the local student body to understand their position and not to judge them too harshly. Mutual annoyance hung in the air, like smoke. Women, those corrupters of youth, were an easy target, widely caricatured in the tabloid press.

My other great-grandmother, Betya Liberman, also dreamed of becoming a doctor, but nothing came of it, except this family legend: Betya felt she had to test herself — would she cope with seeing a dead body or would she be frightened by it? So as a fifteen-year-old she went alone at dusk to the town morgue, and for a small fee she was allowed to sit there, night after night, until she was sure that she was ready and could cope. She wasn’t able to continue her studies, however — instead of medicine she got the fairy-tale prince she deserved, an early and (I want to hope) easy marriage, the wealth, peace, and sparkle of a vie heureuse. I look at them, like two playing cards in the hand: on one card strong-minded Sarra and her battle for a diploma; her stubbornness and drive, once set into motion an unstoppable force. And on the other tender Betya, who worked as an office accountant her entire prosaic Soviet life, while her son was growing up, and for a long time afterward. What difference is there between them? History is such a strange thing — it canceled all the choices they made before 1917 and quickly reduced both to old women, hardly distinguishable in the grandeur of their last years of life.

Medical students were much noisier than the other students. The memoirs and police reports are filled with accounts of merry rowdiness: in Thomas Platter’s time the lecturers were given the slow stamp: “Students began banging with their fists and feathers, and stamping, and if they felt that the lecturer wasn’t paying any attention they would make such a noise that he couldn’t continue.” In the nineteenth century Platter’s equivalents rivaled this riotousness with snowball fights, and boxing matches in the laboratories, and plans to throw a sentry from a high balustrade. But the First World War changed a great deal, it put an end to the youthful boisterousness, which is quite normal when the young are left to their own devices. The games were over, everyone became more serious and angry. Between 1905 and 1913 there hadn’t been a year when student protests in Paris hadn’t disrupt the medical training for a time. The system had ceased to work.

The university in Paris was the largest in Europe at the time. The huge lecture halls were overflowing. Late in the winter of 1914 Sarra wrote to my future great-grandfather: “best not to even try to predict when you might finish [university studies].” In 1893 three quarters of Paris’s medical students were spending up to six years studying before their final exams. 38 percent of students spent more than eight years on their degree, and many spent as long as eleven years studying. Studies were full time, six or seven days a week, with daily dissections in the big anatomical theater, lab work and compulsory morning shifts in the hospital: examinations, assisting with electrotherapy. By the point when the student took the rigorous final exams, he or she would have racked up many hundreds of mornings in the hospital. The exam season lasted two months and the exams were oral and public. They required knowledge, but also a measure of artistry. In the letters written during Sarra’s last Parisian year (and the last year of the old world) Sarra can’t think of anything else: “Just back from my exam. I’m quite shattered,” “I have another exam tomorrow — on birth and midwifery. If it goes well I can rest a while,” “Still hard at the revision, lots of people have been left behind, they’ll take their finals in autumn,” and so on until her diploma, her long-awaited victory, which happened only a little while before the catastrophe.

Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, who was in Paris in 1913 (like the rest of the world, or so it seems, all enjoying a last stroll along the Seine), wrote in his memoirs: “I recall that on this trip [… ] there was something that surprised me. The hotels I stayed in in Berlin, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Paris — on the day of my arrival I came down to eat in the hotel restaurant, and in each town they were playing versions of the same popular tune of the time, ‘Pupsik.’” This unprecedented “simultaneity” of life, barely noticeable back then, is frightening now when we look with clear eyes at the date and the places. Those few prewar years are a time when the entire future twentieth century, together with a large part of the nineteenth century, swept its skirts along the same boulevards, sat at neighboring café tables and side by side in theater stalls, hardly suspecting the existence of each other. Sometimes you have to die to find out who lived on the same street as you.

My brave, lonely great-grandmother lived in Paris from 1910 onward. In September 1911 Kafka briefly visited Paris. At the beginning of his travels he and Max Brod conceived of a plan to write travel guides. It was a brilliant idea, anticipating the Lonely Planet series, for readers who didn’t mind going third class across Italy, or preferred streetcars to barouches. Brod wrote a business plan, including details of accompanying discounts and free concerts. Two phrases are written in Kafka’s hand — one of them is “exact amounts for tipping.” They also included shopping advice on where one could enjoy pineapple, oysters, and madeleines in Paris — this, less than two years before the publication of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

That same September Rilke was strolling in Paris, having just returned from a trip around Germany. The newspapers were discussing the theft of the Mona Lisa, which the obscure poet Guillaume Apollinaire was suspected of stealing. 1911 was an ordinary sort of year, no better and no worse than any other year. The Ballets Russes premiered Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe was being slowly published, volume by volume, an endless novel that was much loved by the women of my family (and despised by Proust, who was planning an article “Against Romain Rolland”).

In April, Lenin began a successful lecture series on political economy on the avenue des Gobelins (another place where my great-grandmother took lodgings). Gorky came to visit him at the end of the month and they discussed the current situation: “There will be a war. It’s inevitable,” said Lenin. In the Jardin du Luxembourg Akhmatova and Modigliani sat on a bench — they couldn’t afford to pay for chairs. Each of these people hardly suspected the existence of the others, they were quite alone in the transparent sleeve of their own fate. Opera hats unfolded with a familiar click at the Opéra — the interval was just beginning.

A May morning in Paris, close to the Jardin du Luxembourg, with its stone lions and its now free chairs: there’s no question in my mind that Sarra must have strolled here and suddenly — waiting for the place to tell me what I must do — I’m bewildered and lost. The night passed as nights do. The chimneys in the view from the window resembled flowerpots, Kafka said something similar about them. I had no memorable or distinctive dreams or thoughts. I’d spent half the day on a tour around the Sorbonne, gently but firmly led down the usual tourist routes. I’d smiled at the birds, stood motionless looking at shop windows, and checked the museums’ opening hours. The city basked in the sun, showing its pearly innards. People stood, sat, lay in its every fold. I didn’t remember these people from previous visits, they silently stretched out cupped hands from piles of rags and damp newspaper, or approached café tables, one after another with the ancient entreaty. I had nothing left for the last of these, and he shouted hoarse furious words in my face.

Not far from this place were some little specialist shops selling old cameras and camera accessories: on their shelves lenses and filters stood alongside daguerreotypes and equipment for panoramas, dioramas, and night photography. Forbidden images of the buttocks and breasts of the dead were folded in leaves of rolling paper and placed in boxes. There were large amounts of cards for stereoscopes, those wooden, bird-headed instruments, lending every image a capacious depth. The glossy stereoscope cards had two images on them: you inserted them into a special slot in the instrument and twiddled a wooden beak until the doubled imaged gathered itself into something singular, alive, and convincing. There were hundreds of these cards, showing the streets of Rome; a whole ant heap of quartiers and alleyways from San Pietro down to the Tiber that no longer exist because the wide modern Via della Consiliazione has been driven through it all. There were colorized cards of family scenes; train crashes from a hundred years ago. And there was one card that was unlike any of the others.

This card also appeared to be made for a stereoscope, but it was a pair of illustrations, rather than photographs, and the two images, although intended for each other, had nothing in common. They were both black cut-out silhouettes (silhouette profiles enjoyed huge popularity in the past). The left-hand image showed a doorway with a curtain across it, a colonnade of some sort and a tree a little farther off. In the right-hand picture was a detailed but unmatching composition: a hussar in a shako, and a goat with horns. When inserted into the stereoscope the two pictures came together into a suddenly animated tableau: the hussar leans on a column’s capital, the goat grazes under the tree, and we see the scene through the curtained door. Two unrelated images shift and come together to make a story.

The following days and nights I spent in my hotel room. I had flu, a high temperature, and the chimney stacks outside the window multiplied and divided stereoscopically. An endless storm raged outside and it comforted me at first, and then ceased to have any significance. I lay lifelessly on the bed, listening to it crashing overhead and thinking that this wasn’t the worst ending to a pointless sentimental journey. There was nothing for me to do here and I had done nothing in this beautiful foreign city, this large empty bed, under a roof that might or might not remember Sarra Ginzburg, her Russian accent, her French books.

In the 1960s, quite by chance, a Frenchman visited the family’s Moscow apartment. God only knows where he came from or who he was, but he was royally received, as all guests were, with all the salads known to man, and a homemade Torte Napoleon. All the family joined him at the table, including eighty-year-old Sarra, who had long since disappeared into herself. But when she heard French being spoken she became terribly animated and began speaking in the language of her youth. She sat up talking to the guest until long after midnight — they were both delighted with each other. In the morning she’d switched to speaking French completely and irrevocably, as a person might take vows and vanish into a monastery. When the family spoke to her in Russian she would answer in long French sentences. After a while they learned to understand her.

2. Little Lyonya from the Nursery

It was the middle of the night in November. Telephone calls at that hour were always a cause for fear, especially in the years when a single telephone rang in the deep womb-like corridor of a communal apartment, waiting for someone to run to lift the receiver. The voice at the other end was like nothing else they knew, hoarse and gulping, like a voice emerging from a gutter: “Your old man is dying. You should come.” And they went. I was two years old at the time, and fast asleep in a room. I don’t remember anything. Only four months before, my mother’s mother Lyolya had died, at just fifty-eight.

The building they went to was near-invisible in the night, on a Moscow side street and surrounded by identical, low-eaved two-story buildings. The door swung open and a woman wearing only a slip staggered out in the thin yellow light. There was a room and a bed, and in the bed, in a tangle of bedsheets, lay my grandfather, dead. His naked body was covered in blue bruises. All the lights were switched on, as if it were an operating theater.

He was hardly an old man, only sixty-two. Only a few years before he had moved into his own cooperatively owned apartment with his wife. Grandfather Lyonya had been very active in the block’s community affairs, planting out a strip of land in front of the white facade of the high-rise with lilac and, most importantly (this was his idea), a row of poplar trees. He wanted to plant the same trees in the backyard; my mother said they reminded him of the south — Grandfather was from Odessa. Now the poplars grew up around the tower block, but the box inside, like the chamber in a pyramid, was empty: no one lived there anymore. The little bouquets Lyolya had picked gathered dust. The box where Grandfather kept his savings books was empty and my mother didn’t know what had happened to them. There were phone calls to the authorities, and police promises to get to the bottom of the matter. Eventually my parents received a single terse call. They were advised not to pursue the matter, it would only make things worse. Although, really, what could be worse?

This year was a turning point for my family; a whole generation suddenly gone. My mother, Natasha Gurevich, had lost both parents, and she found herself the shepherd of a strange flock. Apart from me, chattering merrily away, she had under her care two ninety-year-old grandmothers, Betya and Sarra, who had always been politely indifferent to each other and suddenly had to live together. The loss of a single son and a single daughter offered their misaligned lives some insulation, a soft layer between them and the new life with its strange cold drafts. Someone once said that the death of our parents marks the loss of the final boundary between ourselves and nonexistence. The death of their children was a wedge jammed in the inner workings of my great-grandmothers. Now nonexistence washed at their boundaries on either side.

My parents were quite certain that my grandfather had been murdered, but no one knew why or what he’d done, what sinister criminality resided in the place where they had found him, or even how he, a calm, untroubled man, came to end his life there. They could only guess. After Lyolya’s death, when the funeral was over and the family plot at Vostryakovsky Cemetery had opened its mouth for the first time in fifty years to allow a new resident to enter, and then sealed it again, Grandfather called his daughter for a conversation. It turned out he had another woman. He appealed to my mother to react with understanding, to discuss things like adults — the situation might be seen as advantageous for all parties. My mother could go and live in the apartment on Banny Pereulok, where there was more space for a child, and Grandfather and his girlfriend could live in the communal apartment. This was all discussed with a calm businesslike logic, along with the other details: his girlfriend didn’t work and perhaps she could even babysit Masha. She loved children.

I gathered this story slowly, in its constituent parts, many years later. When I asked how Grandmother and Grandfather had died, I always received the same unwavering, darkly symmetrical response: he died of “lung inflammation,” she of a “heart attack.” I couldn’t quite understand either, and so they disproportionately upset and fascinated me. The heart and lungs were magnified in my child’s imagination, I understood that much depended on them, these human parts that could treacherously inflame and attack. Still, I remember my sense of horror as if it were yesterday, of everything being turned on its head, when my parents told me for the first time at the age of seventeen “what really happened.” I heard the story again a few times, each new account fuller, and in more detail. The story was in itself frightening and unclear, offering no answers. Worst of all was the manner of telling, as if my parents, reluctantly and against their will, were attempting to push back a steel door. The door had rusted into place, it stood in front of a black hole, whistling with an otherworldly chill. They had nothing to say in answer to my questions, not even “who was his girlfriend?” — they knew nothing about her. Back then, in August 1974, my mother had angrily refused to have anything to do with her, or to accept that this unwanted woman, eclipsing Lyolya’s memory, even existed. Three months later Lyonya, with his grand plans, his bristling mustache, and his joyless jokes, was gone, too.

Lyonya and Lyolya. They were always a pair in my head, their names matched like snap cards. Their childish correspondence, freckled with exclamation marks, beaded with ellipses, dates from 1934, when life still seemed eternal, a thing of substance, when the summer move out to the dacha was undertaken on a horse and cart, and the line of hired carts stretched through the Moscow morning, laden with goods and chattels, trunks of bedlinen, kerosene stoves and samovars — as if this was the only way to do things. Some of the previous generation’s rituals and formalities were still in place despite the new life, the circus-ring gallop of new friends and lovers. In time Lyonya proposed, and his proposal was gladly accepted, but accompanied by a few clauses and conditions. They didn’t rush to have children, just as they had promised, and life had the faintly lazy feel of a holiday in the warm south. They went to the sea and their photos show a slope of rocks, and the holidaymakers posing against it, the black beetle of a car, and the bright moth wings of dresses. Lyolya completed her medical training, Lyonya graduated from the Construction Institute with very respectable grades and began working. And then there were the things that weren’t ever discussed: both these young Soviet professionals filled in the usual forms, and in the box marked “social background” they, like others, avoided mentioning certain things, or twisted the facts slightly to make them acceptable. Lyolya’s father’s legal title was downgraded to “clerk,” and then hurriedly to the even less objectionable “employee.” “Merchant of the 1st Guild” became “shopkeeper” or “tradesperson.” There was a special box for relatives abroad and that was better left empty. In that box, Lyonya wrote: “My dead aunt’s husband was transferred to London for work. I do not keep up contact with him.”

In 1938 the forms asked whether Lyonya had served in the old Tsarist army, or in any organization connected with the White Government, and if so in what capacity? Did he serve in the Civil War and if so, when, where and in what capacity? Did he suffer persecution as a result of revolutionary activity leading up to the October Revolution? The form also asked how the subject had fared in the last purges in the party. There were even more questions in the 1954 form: Have you been in prison? Fought in a partisan group? Lived in occupied territory? In every box a blue-inked NO is scrawled.

His daughter Natasha never quite forgave him for his lively haste to move on to a new life after his wife’s death, nor for her sudden realization that the old life had had a false bottom. When we spent our evenings together, with the old photographs and memories, this was never mentioned, but later, when I began studying the inexhaustible contents of drawers and boxes, I discovered strange objects, artifacts that fell outside of the “tone” of the household: postcards, notes, little objects that fitted a different shape or order — not ours, but not Soviet, either. A drawing in color, for example, of a very carefully drawn heart, divided in two. The dotted line down the middle was highlighted in red, and at the bottom someone had written: “IT’S HARD FOR BOTH OF US.” Teardrops with light reflections were dripping down on the letters. Or a New Year’s greeting card in a homemade envelope with the inscription: “Open on December 31 at 10:00 p.m.” The woman who wrote the card and sealed it with wax and the impression of a Soviet kopeck had known that the addressee, at his own family celebration, would have no time for her at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Inside was a poem and a letter, signed, “your little friend.” The miniature nature and inexperience of the “little friend” were given rather insistent emphasis by the letter: “I am writing to you and drawing a Christmas tree, my head on one side with the childish effort, I’ll put the clock hands on the picture when it reaches midnight. Happy New Year, Leonid!” And the poem carried this further: “Like your daughter, I’ll find my place too / under the Christmas tree.” And all of this, the picture and even the kopeck imprint, had survived for some reason.

Later, when my parents had left Russia and the flat was empty, I would still find marvelous things from time to time (a whole handful of silver spoons scattering from an overhead cupboard where we kept nails and bottles of turps), but I was beginning to lay its depths bare. I found, among the papers, the most various things: my acquaintance of old, the unknown naked woman on the divan, and another picture, which I have before me right now.

I am touched, not by the “piquant scene” as they might have said back then, but by all the objects indicative of an era. A blonde woman in dark-colored knickers and bra sits with an unlit cigarette. It reminds me of a home movie from the nineties, a genre painting adapted for home and for a single viewer. It’s a stylized shot, a Russian pin-up, done with half an eye on seen or invented examples of the genre, and an attempt to adapt them to a set of completely unsuitable circumstances. It’s a conservative image, most things are strategically covered up, but this doesn’t stop it being reckless and even indecent.

A fresh copy of the Soviet newspaper Pravda makes the photograph dangerous (placing a naked lascivious ass on the party organ could get you a few years in prison), not to mention the packet of Belomor cigarettes (with the emblem of the White Sea Canal, built by slave labor) in her left hand. The country’s main newspaper and its cheapest cigarettes, stubby and potent, are brought together like heraldic symbols, linked by the female body. The body seems indifferent to both. The room looks like a temporary lean-to, an institutional bathhouse dressing room. The high heels resemble cabaret costume, along with the underwear, which is too well cut for Soviet underwear. All this at the end of the 1940s, or the very beginning of the 1950s, the holy winter of Stalin’s rule with its ponderous sensibility, the rows of party cars lined up at theater stage doors, a second wave of terror, the “Doctors’ Plot.” In the corner of the picture, stuck up on a limewashed wall, is a crass caricature of a “capitalist” doffing his hat.

In later, safer years Grandfather Lyonya found himself another occupation to add to his many activities: he began writing and publishing satirical sketches of various kinds. These were mostly funny little anecdotes, short jokey dialogues or paradoxical phrases, sometimes also didactic prose, and some strange little hybrids — work reports in verse, for example. His ease with rhyme — he had a natural virtuosity, he could fit any subject into its neat envelope — did not improve his writing. His anecdotes were funny, though, and were even sometimes published in the top Soviet satirical magazine of the era, Krokodil. He stuck the clippings proudly into special exercise books. I remember some from my childhood: “Never eat on an empty stomach!” was one. A favorite mode of his was writing little stories about “other cultures and customs.” He would write about different, half-invented worlds, peopled by hopelessly bourgeois Frenchmen called Pierre and Antoine, but the satire slid into something stranger, as if the story was about a dream that could never be realized, and all that was left was to make fun of it.

Any anecdote is just a novel compressed down to a point, and it can equally well be reinflated to elephantine proportions. The opposite must also exist, when your intended meaning is too large even to want to try to fit it to a form. My grandfather’s jokes (they were printed anonymously) were based on the belief in another world that bubbled up with attractive possibilities, a world in which erotic excitement hung in the air, a world of live and let live. There was something perennially old-fashioned in them, as if the characters wore bowler hats and cuff links: “At his wife’s funeral Mr. Smiles comforted his wife’s weeping lover: now don’t you take on so, I’ll be married again in a tick!”

I should add here that in contrast to his generation of compatriots who never left the Soviet Union, Lyonya was a lucky exception. He had been abroad — this family story was repeatedly told to me from my earliest childhood. Lyonya was born in 1912 with clubfoot. I couldn’t see anything wrong with his feet in the old photographs, just a baby with such pale eyes they looked white, lying on his stomach. They treated the condition thoroughly, took it all very seriously, and managed to cure him. Every summer Lyonya’s mother took him to the same Swiss sanatorium where there were green hills, and Lyonya learned to walk better and better on the hills until he was ready for the new life, in which all travel would cease. But he remembered Switzerland very well. When he was privy to those classic Soviet intelligentsia conversations about where one would go if one were able, and Paris, Tokyo, and Rome were flung down like hands of playing cards, he would sit without saying a word. If you asked him directly he would answer without hesitation: I would go to Switzerland.

Lyonya, or so I was told, wrote his first academic thesis on a hospital windowsill, during a period of recuperation when he was supposed to be resting, although he couldn’t bear to sit still. He was full of curiosity, he always had a new interest, and the range of these different interests brought its own financial rewards: they always lived well.

Articles, books, lecturing in three different academic institutes didn’t satisfy him. It was as if he sensed that he’d been made for bigger things, or other things, and he threw himself into ever newer pursuits, ticking more and more boxes on some invisible form. I suspect that the shadowy “little friends” were all part of this hunger, if they didn’t fill a hole, then they momentarily satisfied a need that was invisible to everyone else. His cup of life ran over. He designed transport interchanges, he played chess, he invented things, and applied for patents for them — including an object that always fascinated me. I boasted about it in childhood, and I am still proud of it today: a complicated mechanism for testing whether a watermelon is off. The pointlessness of its complication gave it a special thrill because you knew even as you used it that you could tell whether a watermelon was off simply by flicking a finger against it and listening for the tight echoing of its belly.

These displacement activities were joined by the constant rhyme-mongering. His talented nature found expression here too, and the verses came tumbling out whenever there was an occasion for such jokes in verse. Before the war he had enjoyed a reputation as a very witty man, adept at table talk. Nobody I spoke to remembered him from that time, though. My mother’s friends remembered him as a preoccupied and glum man, who would greet them and then disappear off to his own business. Lyolya was the life and soul of the house, everyone loved her and she loved everyone. She baked cake after cake, embroidered table­cloth after tablecloth, knew everyone and remembered everything. She kept a whole huge family of second and third cousins together, held them close to her heart. The Doctors’ Plot left her without work until a contact of Sarra invited her to work with them at a medical inspection point. Offering work to a Jewish doctor was a gesture of extreme nobility, almost a suicidal act at that time, and she remained there for the rest of her working life, either out of gratitude or because she had no more desire to move.

After Lyolya died my mother didn’t mention her to me for a very long time, and then suddenly she asked if I remembered Grandmother. I did. “And what was she like?” “She adored me,” I said with certainty. And I know this of her: she was adored by everyone, near and far, the light of collective adoration is blinding to this day and prevents me from seeing any detail. What was she like? Auntie Sima, my old nanny, who remembered a time when everyone was young, answered my questions brusquely: “She was a happy creature. She’d put on her perfume and her lipstick and run off to a meeting on the boulevard.” What meeting? Who was she meeting — the mysterious Nelidov? My mother’s friend came to see me to tell me more family history, and when I asked for details, she said simply: “She was a… she was a proper lady,” and would say no more.

What she meant by this couldn’t actually be said in the language of a new age. By “proper lady” she perhaps meant a living anachronism, a person of another era with qualities and virtues that had long since disappeared. And this demanded a language that had vanished too, full of “properness” with regard to long-defunct rules and obligations. Lyolya’s good-heartedness made her way of surviving bearable for those around her. The alternating softness and harshness, the uncompromising, and then the suffering, spirit — it is all so familiar, and it can’t begin to be lined up against how we see the world today. I remember I was once stunned by my mother saying, “If I’d done that my mother would have slapped my lips,” Even now I shudder at the thought. Her lips? These were the words and actions of a dead language, and even if you wanted to, there was no one left to speak it with.

Among the various traditions lubricating the family machinery, there was Lyonya’s New Year’s poetry. Lyonya would write a number of funny poems to members of the family: daughter, wife, grandmothers Sarra and Betya, and guests, if guests were expected. These were simple ditties, rhyming “new year” with “cheer,” they radiated the coziness that comes of repetition and settles on the walls like scale in a teapot. But there was one constant motif that always surprised me and I wondered how Lyolya felt about it: the poems addressed to twelve-year-old Natasha recommended she “be like Daddy and not like Mommy.”

They were by all accounts happy, and they got on, Lyolya the beauty, with her cameo brooch at her throat, her Dickens (she’d made marks around her favorite passages with her fingernail), her embroidery and her sullen, busy husband. She baked and cooked and had people round, grew jasmine and went, as before, on holiday as a couple with Lyonya. Natasha was sent with her nanny for “feeding up” in Svyatogorsk, where she waited, desperately missing her parents, growing her hair into a thick long black braid down to her waist. By the time it reached her knees she had quite grown up. Like her father she wrote poems with ease, and wanted to be a poet: she wanted to be Pushkin, as she said as a child.

At the time poets were produced in industrial quantities, in a special production plant called the Literary Institute, based in an old building on the Moscow Boulevard behind a wrought-iron fence and surrounded by trees. It was a complicated place with its own heritage and an ability to attract those who needed to be there. In earlier Soviet times both the writer Platonov and Mandelstam managed to survive there briefly and unhappily, and at the end of the 1950s it was considered to be, and perhaps even was, “the place to be.” Natasha dreamed of studying there, but her father, who’d never denied her anything in her life, unexpectedly said no. He forbade her to apply to the Literary Institute with absolute and unbending resolve, reminding her of the age-old, We are Jews. You need a profession. So she obediently went to study in a Construction Institute, graduating with an excellent degree (everything she did was excellent) and receiving as her reward the title of “Pile Foundation Engineer.” Then she actually worked under the ground, in a little basement in a research institute, spending half the day in the underworld, like Persephone. Around her, women in black lab coats stared into microscopes, swapping slides with their friable contents, and the most enormous range of weights was laid out by the old weighing scale; they gleamed and had a pleasant heft in the hand. I dreamed of stealing one.

The subject of Lyolya’s icy and near-nonexistent relationship with her mother-in-law, Betya, was off-limits in the family (and this silence was just one of the expressions of Lyolya’s famed obstinacy). They weren’t good at hiding their mutual dislike, in both women a sense of dignity demanded the highest standards of behavior. At celebrations and gatherings, the lifeblood of a big and welcoming family, where everyone was loved and everything remembered, they watched each other closely and suspiciously. Natasha was dragged into all of this, and she made valiant attempts to love everyone, but sometimes it was just too hard. Her mother was the most important person in her life: her mother’s shape and her content were the story she had learned off by heart. Even years later, in her own stories of family life, although she never judged Betya, she pushed her away, held her at a distance, at the very margins of the family’s history.

Betya Gurevich, born Berta Liberman, lived quietly and independent on the fringes, cherishing and saving every line of poetry written by her son and granddaughter; all the children’s pictures, little poems, telegrams. She spent fifty years working as an accountant for various state institutions with unpronounceable acronyms for names, and in her free time she led a spartan life, never permitting herself any form of excess, especially of words. She left behind no letters, no diaries; she was the odd one out in our family, everyone else was constantly occupied with noting everything down, rhyming it, putting it on a postcard. Inscrutable Betya preferred to say nothing about herself, she was cloaked in silence. I don’t think anyone ever asked her any questions about herself, and that is how I know very little about her — apart from the air of disapproval that I breathed in my childhood. I remember that my mother was wounded when someone commented that I looked like my great-grandmother Betya. She didn’t respond but her silence spoke volumes. I remember the ring Betya left my mother, which my mother never wore. The ring had a chunky setting and a large opaque stone and my mother thought it “too ornate.” All in all, hardly any space was left for Betya, the bête noire, in the family’s accounts of itself.

I have her school photographs and I can see her, curly-haired, among the lines of girls with their heads held high. There are a few photos from her girlhood and youth, though not many. Her childhood was spent on the edge of poverty; with eight children in the family, and no hope of a decent education, she was forced to give up her dreams of becoming a doctor. Both she and her sister were reputed to be real beauties, fair-haired, fine-boned, with dark eyes and a melancholy gaze. Family legend has it that she married young and well, to the son of a man who manufactured agricultural machinery in Kherson. They were wealthy (among my parents’ papers I found the plans for a large house), and took their son to Switzerland for treatment. And then one day they appeared in Moscow, where everyone appears, sooner or later. This is how I imagined it, and in some details at least I was correct.

My grandfather was from the southern port city of Odessa. He was an Odessan — this little description stands for a million words. In a well-known Soviet wartime film a girl asks a soldier, “Are you an artiste?” “No, an Odessan,” answers the soldier. Heroes like him became artistes by birth, not by calling — it was an inevitable outcome of being born in Odessa. The soldier in the film then sits down at a grand piano and plays a blithe little song, nothing to do with the war, all chestnut trees and boats and the love between a fisherman and a girl. I can’t entirely explain the charm of the song, but it’s still weaving a spell on me.

By 1925 Odessa was known as a special place, its uniqueness agreed upon by all; not wholly Soviet, but definitely not quite Russian either: a strange anomaly, cherished by the entire population of this vast land. The nineteenth-century writer Ivan Aksakov called it “foreignized,” tied neither in body nor in soul to the rest of the huge imperial carcass. And it was true: rules and customs that applied across the rest of the Russian territory had no sway here, simply weren’t taken seriously. A German traveler who found himself in Odessa in the mid-nineteenth century wrote: “They say whatever they want about politics, when they speak about Russia it’s as if it’s a foreign country.” Currency exchange signs were in Greek, Odessan writers wrote in French and Italian, high society spoke in French, and the theaters produced plays in five languages. The dark figures of Moldovans, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Germans, Englishmen, Armenians, Crimean Karaites all walked its blinding-white streets like shades. As another witness at the time put it: “If Odessa had to put up a flag that represented its dominating nationalities, it would probably be a Jewish or Greco-Jewish flag.”

In fact Orthodox Jews didn’t have an especially comfortable time of it in Odessa. According to a local proverb, “The fires of Gehenna burned for seven miles around Odessa” (“zibn mayl arum Odess brent dos gehenem”). The profound indifference to officialdom crossed all borders of nation and faith — both churches and synagogues were less frequented here than in other places, and more than a third of couples with children were unmarried. But the opera was very good. The poet Batyuskkov thought it better than the Moscow opera. Everyone went to the opera, including religious Jews in their sidelocks and hats who were mocked in the stalls for their loud and excessive enthusiasm. The cab drivers sang opera arias as if they were gondoliers. The Odessan way of things was unusually tolerant of difference; it demanded of Odessa’s citizens not so much a readiness to assimilate, as a readiness to hop from one language to another, one idea to the next.

Odessa resembled one of the ancient Mediterranean towns, in that it belonged to no single culture or nation. Laws ceased to have effect here, its mafia was immortal, its cuisine had no equals. But unlike Naples (for example), Odessa only rose from the sand and the foam two hundred years ago, and at beginning of its history it barely had time to invent a mythology of its own. The mythology was gradually invented around it, and it fitted surprisingly well. A Russian officer wrote that

This is confirmed by an anonymous Jew from Lithuania, quoted in Steven Zipperstein’s The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History praising the “dignity and stateliness of the community, the calm way they walked along the streets, conversed in the Café Richelieu, enjoyed music at the Italian Opera House, and conducted religious services showed how at ease they felt.”

A particular way of being, and a particular language: by the beginning of the twentieth century Odessa was becoming known as a preserve of the grotesque, and for its distinct style of humor, jokes peppered with Yiddish phrases. This is the warm south, where everything is more theatrical and histrionic, where street runs seamlessly into street, and house into house. The sea and the port were the ideal backdrop in a town where everything followed the comedic principle that the scaffold of the joke existed only to deliver the punchline. Lightness of touch, tethered to the ground but always pulling at those tethers (like a hot air balloon) — these were the necessary conditions of life in Odessa. Their flair for criminality stemmed from these conditions, and they cultivated it, enjoying their Wild West image — young hotheads, indulging in hotblooded violence as a natural process and therefore somehow an acceptable one. The gangsters of Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories gave generations of readers a warm fond feeling: this was humanity before it could be civilized by reading, and in its natural habitat: exotic beasts in a brightly colored zoo. Occasionally this happy-go-lucky sunlit life came undone, revealing its own ugly stuffing — and this began to happen more and more until it became an equal part of the bubbling pot of daily life. Violence racked the city like an involuntary convulsion. The port was full of arms and early in its history you didn’t even need permission to own a gun. Street fights crackled like Roman candles; striking workers and bombers were newspaper heroes. In the period February 1905–May 1906 alone, 1273 people died as a result of “terrorist activity” in the Odessa District: policemen, civil servants, factory owners, and bankers. Politically motivated requisitions were hardly any different from gangster heists. Expropriation became a popular cross-cultural sport. Everyone was at it, from Anarchists to Communists and groups of Jewish vigilantes in black shirts. Suicides were also in vogue — the number of suicides had dramatically increased in the years before 1900, and though the number of those who took their lives in little Odessa was hardly less than in Moscow or St. Petersburg, in Odessa it was done with theatricality: the victims shot themselves on balconies with a sea view, or on the smartest street in town, Deribasovsky. Other approaches included the following: “An actress from a minor theater had her hair done at the best hairdressers, put on perfume, a specially chosen dress and white satin shoes, and holding a ready prepared bouquet of flowers she climbed into a warm bath and opened her veins.”

All this happened in what you might call the public domain, spaces in this cosmopolitan metropolis that were set aside for theater; when you approached its white-hot nucleus, the town began dividing into tribes: “one’s people” and “strangers.” In Vladimir Jabotinsky’s novel The Five, there is a passage in which the narrator describes this phenomenon:

Jabotinsky also remembers that despite his secular upbringing he had no close childhood friends who weren’t Jewish. Pogroms and rumors about pogroms, the terrified chatter about what was coming and the much quieter conversations about what had happened, were everyday matters from 1882 onward (and up to 1905, when Odessa seemed even to frighten itself with the violence, and finally put a stop to it).

News of pogroms spread like wildfire around Southern Ukraine. It traveled on trains with the railwaymen, down the Dniepr with the ferrymen, jostled at hiring fairs, and served as a model for new outbursts of pointless cruelty: “Let’s do it the Kievan way!” All the towns with a connection to my well-heeled predecessors bore the traces of this violence. My grandfather Lyonya was born in Kakhovka in 1912, and could well have witnessed the pogrom there in 1915, initiated by retreating Cossack forces. Kherson, where the family owned a fine house with figures on the facade, saw its own pogrom in 1905. Death could come at any moment, it had not a shred of dignity, it was coupled with shame and horror. None of my relatives ever mentioned the pogroms. Were members of my family killed in Odessa in 1905? Were they among the dead, laid out in the streets, barely covered with sheets, their chins jutting out? Or among the ones who hid in attics, in basements and dog kennels, or sheltered by Samaritans? I will never know.

I do know other things now. In one of Lyodik Gimmelfarb’s letters from the front he adds, “I expect you know that Grandfather stayed in Odessa. I am very worried about what will happen to him.” Both Lyodik’s grandfathers were in Odessa and both were Jews. Israel Gimmelfarb, Lyodik’s paternal grandfather, was shot in October 1941, immediately after Romanian forces occupied the town. The other grandfather, father of Betya and Verochka, was called Leonty, or Leib. I only now realize that although I know the year and the day, and almost the hour of the deaths of my other great-grandfathers, I have never found out anything about him — he vanished, quite as if he had never existed. In youth he was incredibly beautiful with a waxen pallor; in pictures taken in the 1870s he looks as dapper an advert for a tailor. His daughters had no pictures of him in later life.

Lyodik’s note is perhaps the last time this man’s life floats to the surface. On the Yad Vashem database eighty-one people come up when I type in “Liberman, Odessa,” and only a few of these have first names. A few are listed with initials or short forms of their first name, Busya, Basya, Besya. Some of them crop up in lists of the evacuated, but most were killed: shot or hanged during the October roundups; burned to death in the munitions depot at Lustdorf or sleeping side by side in the ghetto at Slobodya; slaughtered in Domanevka, Akmechetka, Bogdanovka. By the end of the war Odessa, with its Polish, Greek, Italian, and Jewish streets, had no more than six hundred Jewish residents, and none of my family were among them.

As a child I was always very disappointed by the professions and activities of my family. Engineers and librarians, doctors and accountants, my relatives represented the full range of the ordinary and humdrum; nothing special or exciting, nothing adventurous. Although one of my great-great-grandfathers did sell ice cream in a shtetl near Nevel, and that was far more interesting to me as a child than the agricultural machinery sold by the other. The black-and-white television at the time showed endless newsreels of combine harvesters chewing through the thick corn and I could not have predicted that anything of interest would ever come of those fields.

At the beginning of the 1990s, when food was scarce, my father traveled to the south of Ukraine with a friend to see whether he couldn’t sell something in return for food. He came back from Kherson with some photographs, and he and my mother spent ages looking at them before bringing a set of old architectural plans down from a top cupboard. Grandfather Lyonya’s family house in Kherson was a fine-looking building with a wide balcony supported by two bearded Atlases in loincloths. It was odd and pleasant to imagine all those rooms and windows occupied by just one family, but it seemed outlandish in comparison with my day-to-day life at the time: ration books were being reintroduced, we had coupons for cigarettes. Very well-to-do people, my mother said, repeating someone else’s words from long before, and for some reason their well-to-do-ness seemed even more tedious than their agricultural machinery.

There are so many stories in which a person turns out to be not what they seem at first sight. The frog prince, for example, or the superhero masquerading as a bespectacled boy. When I began my blind groping for family history over the last hundred years, what had seemed initially to be well-documented and interesting momentarily evaporated as I reached for it, crumbling like ancient fabric. My guesses were confounded, my witnesses slow to step forward, but there was one exception to this. When I entered “Gurevich, Kherson” into the search engine, the answers came tumbling out as if I’d won on a slot machine.

A side street in Kherson now bears the name of my great-great-grandfather — it had once borne the name of a Communist, but Ukraine was removing traces of its Soviet heritage. The Gurevich concern had included a number of factories (so many I couldn’t immediately distinguish them all) with substantial income — a Soviet brochure described with disgust the more than four million rubles of total profit he made in 1913. By current standards this amounts to about fifty million dollars, which explains the provenance of the Atlases on the facade. On a history website I found an image of a blue-and-white bond issued in December 1911 in Basel. The Société Anonyme des Usines Mécaniques I. Hourevitch was attracting new investors, and in the oval medallions on the bonds you could see, as if through an arrow slit, two model factories, surrounded by what look like poplars, smoke issuing through the chimneys and ponies-and-traps driving through the front gates.

This predecessor of ours was a famous man. A telegraph addressed to him read simply: KHERSON, GUREVICH. He appeared in the area at the beginning of 1880s and began with a workshop repairing carts, and then an iron foundry. Over twenty-five years he achieved a great deal. There were a few big factories in the southern town of Kherson (kerosene streetlamps, parks, five chemist shops, six libraries, 227 hansom cabs) — and Great-Great-Grandfather’s were the largest, employing five hundred people. I was even able to track down wages at the factories: nine and a half rubles a day for a qualified worker, forty kopecks for an apprentice.

I was vaguely bothered that I hadn’t found anything “living” in all the array of documentation I had unearthed, anything that wasn’t simply an illustration of the history of capitalism in Russia. The internet was happy to tell me about Isaak Gurevich’s income and expenditure, but there wasn’t one photograph of him online. I found a catalog of produced goods, printed in good taste, with curlicues at the corners and attractive diagrams of plows and seed drills, resembling large insects. The implements had fashionable names from the era, vaguely reminiscent of racing horses: “Universe” and “Dactyl” and “Phryne” and even the unlikely English word “Dentist.”

“One may always choose a layer of earth moist enough for the successful growing of seed,” the sales brochure says. But I found nothing at all about Isaak Gurevich’s seed, as if neither he, nor I (by extension) existed. Even the website of the Jewish cemetery only promised to show the monuments “to the family of the founder and owner of the agricultural machinery factory Israel Zelmanovich Gurevich” — it seemed the man himself wasn’t buried there.

There was a dissonance between the excess of information about one aspect of his life and the absence of information about the man himself, and it began to gnaw at me as if something invisible was pulling at my sleeve or twitching my collar. In my home, where nothing of sentimental value was ever thrown away, and lace collars and dickeys lay moldering in suitcases for decades, there was absolutely nothing from the wealthy Kherson household. This in itself was strange. I made a mental list of all the old furniture I had grown up with, the worn bentwood chairs and the ancient crockery, and I realized that my assumptions were right: everything came from that short period when Sarra and Misha were married, working, and setting up house. There was nothing from the Gurevichs, apart from the ring my mother refused to wear. Then, for the first time, I asked myself what I really knew about my great-grandfather, the son of Isaak / Israel.

I had two documents. The first was on thick card, pleasant to the touch, with a tiny ribbon attaching a second card to the first. It was an invitation to the circumcision of the tiny Lyonya. The second was a death certificate for my great-grandfather Vladimir Gurevich (“Moisey Vulf” in brackets) who died in Odessa of brain inflammation at the age of thirty-three on June 25, 1920. At the beginning of February that year the very last refugee boats from the Civil War left the Odessa harbor. An eyewitness remembers the crowd on the pier, a woman with a pram desperately searching for her husband and child, and another woman dragging a gold-framed mirror behind her. The Red Army entered Odessa soon after and set up their infamous secret police. News of my great-grandfather’s death only reached the family two years later in 1922.

My taciturn great-grandmother Betya did have one story about the past she loved to tell. When guests once came to see her little son Lyonya they made a joke of asking him, “And who are you?” The little boy shied away at first since he didn’t know them. Then he answered in a deep voice: “I’m little Lyonya from the nursery.” In the same year, 1922, Betya and her son appeared in Moscow, quite alone: no one knew them and they knew no one. They had nothing from the old life with them, apart from a few photographs: white dresses, stripy pajamas, and the cheerful mustachioed Vladimir sitting on a bench with friends. On all the Soviet forms Vladimir is described as an “employee,” as was customary. Betya worked at home to begin with, typing with two fingers on a heavy Mercedes typewriter. Then she eventually found work. Lyonya went to school. They began to settle in Moscow.

I found one other thing, almost by chance: Grandfather Lyonya’s brown wallet lying in a drawer all these years. It had nothing in it, just a colorized photo of my mother, the dark square of a negative with the young smiling Lyolya, and a postcard cut around its edge for some reason. It was sent from Kakhovka to the city of Kharkov in 1916 and it read: Dear Lyonya, Daddy is missing you very much and wants you to come home very soon. Tomochka hasn’t been round since you left, and won’t come back until you do. Much love to you, Lyonya. From Daddy

I couldn’t get to sleep on the first night I spent in Kherson. The night was streaked with early morning light, the remote pools of yellow streetlamps dimmed, but the dogs never once stopped their noise, the whole district rang out with the deep bass of their barks, passing between one dog and the next. Then the cockerels began their crowing. From my lace-framed window I could see lonely roofs and boarded fences stretching to the horizon. My great-great-grandfather’s factory was next to the station and the yellow building hadn’t changed in a century: it was built in 1907 right on the edge of the steppe. That year there were huge celebrations to mark the arrival of the railway, with an orchestra playing. The new railway meant you could get to nearby Nikolaev in only two hours, and a third-class ticket to Odessa cost just over seven rubles — a first-class ticket cost an impossible eighteen rubles fifty kopecks. A strange and frustratingly vague account describes Isaak Gurevich in the crowds on the square as the “gentleman in a black frock coat standing by the only car of the English ‘Vauxhall’ make in the whole area.” The gentleman is offering the train driver a cigarette from his golden cigarette case.

We got off the train from Odessa at midday, when the leatherette of the train seats was beginning to stick to the thighs, and the white steppe was tired of loping alongside the train. The town was deserted; it was just because of the midday heat, but it felt terrifying, like the whole town had been left in 1919 just as it was, and the newer concrete buildings were simply the scar tissue that had grown over the burned flesh. In the town center, where Suvorov Street and Potemkin Street crossed, stood the family’s former house, the “House with Atlases” as the guidebook called it, although it mentioned neither Isaak, nor his heir, Vladimir. I began my research at the town archives, where I was treated with great kindness, and given access to a wealth of material.

Our predecessor, Isaak Gurevich, seems to have come to Kherson from the Urals, where few Jews had ever lived — he was described as a “Chelyabinsk merchant” until at least 1905 in the town’s documents. There were heaps of papers documenting his many and various occupations: steel and iron foundries; machine building works; all managed with a very steady hand. The machinery in the workshops cost around a hundred thousand rubles; production increased incrementally. He fought a legal battle with someone over a patch of land on the edge of town and then built another factory on this land. I was brought the blueprint of the buildings, white lines on a storm-cloud blue paper. The table at the archive wasn’t large enough for us to unfold the plans — they hung over the edges. The archive also held lists of Gurevich correspondence, probably mostly written by his secretary; in vain I listened out for the tone of his voice in the dictated letters, “I urgently need money right now, and I have the honor of asking you to transfer the requested amount if possible.” But his signature was real, and I followed it across the page with my fingernail when no one was watching.

I really wanted to know only one thing: when he had died and how. I’d amassed a few scraps of half-plausible information from various websites, including an article with the following anecdote: in his old age the former factory owner Gurevich, sitting in the warm sun, said laughingly that he remembered the war and the revolution, but he couldn’t recall making a present of his factory to the Communist Petrovsky. I tried to imagine what was meant by this “warm sun”: a park bench of pensioners and pigeons at their feet? That seemed profoundly unlikely. The article gave no clues. I wrote to the author, but never received a reply. In the period from 1917 to 1920 there were about twenty changes of power in Kherson: the Bolsheviks, then the Austrians, the Greeks, Grigoriev’s army, and then the Red Army again, who immediately took hostages from among the wealthier citizens and demanded payment. No one had any money left by then and lists of the executed appeared in the newspapers. The last information I found was just before my visit to Kherson, in the minutes of a factory board meeting from February 28, 1918:

Before transferring the factory to the workers in February 1918 the factory board made it clear to the owner that he was to blame for the factory stopping production after the revolution, when there was neither money nor raw materials to be had.

The sequence of subsequent events is hard to reconstruct. Life in the town was in constant flux, time was measured by a new calendar. The factory fell silent. The merchants, landowners, homeowners, landlords, and self-employed had until February 23 to gather 23 million rubles for the Red Army, and those who didn’t pay were arrested. And yet the pianist Mogilevsky gave a series of successful piano concerts — he played Scriabin, with the intention of giving the public an understanding “of his last masterpieces.” Outside the concert hall the anarchists were having a street battle with the police and the trees in the park were being chopped down for firewood.

When the Austrian army entered the town, they restored a flimsy semblance of order. Local government was conducted in Ukrainian; the weather got warmer and the townspeople played football and lawn tennis at the sports ground. They opened a conscription office for Denikin’s Army for “officers, land­owners and students.” A head of local government, Boris Bonch-Osmolovsky, was elected, and died of typhus in 1920. They held a charity day in Kherson to raise money for those suffering from TB, and set up an Esperanto Club. This was at the same time as bands of peasants moved across the steppe, murdering land­owners and attacking Jewish communities. In July a local newspaper announced that the “The Gurevich agricultural machinery factory has resumed production after a deal was struck between the owner Gurevich, the local authorities and the Austro-Hungarian army.”

And that is all. News of arrests, burglaries, and deaths are woven together with football matches and charity bazaars in the newspapers, much as they are in real life. For a while the town resembled the sun-warmed seaside shallows: masses of brightly colored crowds from Moscow and St. Petersburg passed through, drawn along by an invisible current. There was a popular series of lectures in the town on the theme of “Theater and the Scaffold.” Spanish flu replaced typhus. On December 11 the Austro-Hungarian army left Kherson. It was then occupied by volunteer armies, Petlyura’s Ukrainian army, Grigoriev’s army again, Greeks and French, Red Army, White Army, Red Army… Sometimes the bodies of the executed were returned to their families. At the beginning they were even given proper funerals.

My ancestor’s name slowly fades out. The archive has a few more papers, tax notifications sent to him by the authorities in 1919. In March 1920, when the Kherson Revolutionary Committee is wondering who to tax for the land and assets of the factory, they received a declaration back from the factory’s own revolutionary committee, refusing to pay since the factory already belonged to the state. By then Isaak Gurevich has disappeared: he can’t be found in March or April, nor even when they begin selling factory assets, or when the factory begins working again. There are no more traces of him; no shadows, no photographs, nothing human I could grasp on to and consider my own, apart from a few ink markings and a single iron object.

This object occupies nearly an entire hall in the local museum, which is otherwise stuffed with amphorae and embroidered blouses. It’s huge and lumbering, balanced on iron paws, with a long, outstretched neck and wheels hanging to the sides of its carapace: a “Bunker Plow for shallow plowing.” It wore the sign of its provenance — both our provenance — like a birthmark, embossed in unambiguous Cyrillic lettering: ЗАВОДЪ ГУРЕВИЧА КАХОВКА (Gurevich factory, Kakhovka).

Isaak Gurevich Street had been given its new name only a few months beforehand, and had not quite inhabited it. It was in fact simply the space between the gates and fences that lined it on both sides, and seemed narrow as a result, but it was hardly used anyway. On the corner hung a plaque with the old name: Bauman Street. The place had no particular link with my great-great-grandfather but I was still grateful to Kherson for its act of remembrance. The house with the Atlases was now painted a chestnut-brown color, with a boarded-up basement and a little shop selling souvenirs. It gave me no sense of familiarity, although I walked through to the yard and even stuck my head in to see the creaking staircase to a veranda, where the colored glass windows looked out onto trees.

A corridor led into the depths of the building, and I followed it as far as the bright square at its furthest point — no one ever locks a door in the south. Washing hung on a line, a cat leaped out of our way, I was momentarily blinded by the light as I came out onto the veranda and saw the sky above it. All this was alien, belonging to the woman who shouted cross words at our trespassing, and I had no sense of sadness or loss.

Neither my grandfather Lyonya, with a mustache just like his father’s on his babyish face, nor his severe mother Betya, ever came back here, and I could see why. Apparently Grandfather had gone back to Odessa in later years, and even visited someone he knew. But Kherson and Kakhovka slowly faded, sank to the deep seabed of memory, as out of reach as Switzerland. There was nothing left to find here. Still, for the sake of propriety, I did have one more place I needed to visit.

The New Jewish Cemetery, as it was once called, was founded in the nineteenth century. We’d arranged to meet a local historian in a café on the day before, and when I’d told him we were planning to visit the cemetery he’d politely commented that it wasn’t in the best state. Natural enough, we supposed, as there were very few Jews left in the town to tend it. We took a taxi to the cemetery; the afternoon heat had settled like a lid and my skirt stuck to my legs. The town had petered out, its remains lay scattered over the scrub, half-built houses on large plots of land, looking for all the world as if someone had taken a bite out of them and then left them half-eaten. Everything was sky blue and yellow flax. We drove past a space of wild grassland behind a wire mesh fence and the driver suddenly said that this was it, but he wasn’t sure where the entrance was. A little way ahead were some garages or storage units and we walked for ages along the perimeter fence until we came across a locked gate. Beyond it was what looked like an empty kennel and then the tombstones. We could have scrambled over the low fence, but the lock gave way and the door opened. I went in. My husband waited outside on the road.

I had no real idea what I was looking for. The tombs of my unknown relatives could have been anywhere, and it was instantly clear that the cemetery had given up the ghost, had allowed the land to consume it — and this had happened not recently, but many years ago. A little farther off were tombstones, obelisks, and what might have been a crypt but looked more like a ruined military dugout. These seemed to have lost all purpose, they had collapsed into the ground, and between them patches of spiky scrub sprouted like mangy fur. The place was quite overgrown, it was an effort to reach them, and I felt a rising fury — at my husband who had left me on my own, at the spikes and thorns catching on my skirt, at this senseless search, which had never once brought me closer to my goal. The fury kept me struggling forward, I walked three hundred meters without even noticing, and only then did I hitch up my skirt to examine my legs, which were striped with scratches like a cuneiform tablet, and I gasped with the realization of pain.

From here, wherever I looked I found myself surrounded by pale-colored scrub, like a mess of untidy hair. From a distance it looked like high grasses, but in fact it was a mat of thorns, burned by the sun to transparency and covered in tiny shell-like growths. I had walked farther and farther in, and I now stood waist-deep in the thorny plant and it clutched at me. The tombstones were not far off now, but there was no way to reach them. I could make out yawning holes around their bases, and I could see that some of the older stones had name plaques that couldn’t have been from before the 1950s or 1960s. I could see the stumps of old railings around the tombstones, one little fence still shone with a flame-blue paint. The fallen tombstones were hidden by wild flowers, burdocks, and snail shells, and their surfaces resembled burned skin. There was no reason to go farther, nowhere to go, but it was equally beyond me to retrace my hundred or so steps across this merciless landscape. It was perfectly clear to me that even if there were some Gurevichs buried here, I wasn’t going to find them, and I didn’t even want to anymore. The past had bitten me, but it was only a warning nip, and it was still prepared to let me go. Slowly, very slowly, step by step and bawling gently at the effort, I made my way back to what had once been the beginning of the path through the cemetery.

3. Boys and Girls

A mother and her son and two daughters once lived in the district town of Bezhetsk. By their village standards it was practically a capital city, with houses made of stone and even a cathedral and monastery. They’d come from Zharki, their native village. The father, Grigory Stepanov, did seasonal work in a St. Petersburg factory and traveled back and forth. There is no record of what he did there. They lived as people generally do, causing no trouble to anyone; they were not poor, the children could all read and write and the oldest, Nadya, who was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, wanted to study in a school. There was a girl’s gymnasium in the town and her parents were just considering this. Nikolai was born in 1906, his sister Masha was a year younger. Nikolai later remembered them sitting together in the summer heat on the riverbank, reading the exciting Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton, and Walter Scott.

There was an accident at the factory: their father was dragged into the machine and the machine, like a living creature, bit off his right arm, his working arm. So he returned to Bezhetsk for good. The factory owners paid him a huge amount in compensation, as he was a qualified worker who was no longer able to work. No one knows how much, but it was enough to buy a house built partly of stone, and a cow called Zorka, and to send Nadya to the girl’s school. In the aftermath, in the suddenly empty life of an invalid, Grigory took to drink and his drinking killed him. It happened terrifyingly fast. By the time they buried him, a few years later, they’d lost both cow and house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have to reassemble his life from its constituent parts, from various accounts, breaking off and beginning again from the same place, from records of employment, military ID and photographs. The most detailed of these is the “record of employment,” which begins in 1927 and gives Nikolai Stepanov’s nationality (Russian), his employment (joiner), education (three years at a village school, elsewhere it is recorded as four years), first employment (cowherd in Bezhetsk and Zharki). At sixteen he found work at a privately owned forge, but only lasted a couple of months there. From November 1922 he was employed as a joiner’s apprentice in the Bezhetsk Mechanics Works. It is there that he joins the Komsomol, the Communist youth movement created in 1918 as a first step to joining the party. At eighteen he is the secretary to the workers’ committee in the same factory, and at nineteen he moves to Tver as a cadet in the local party school.

To try to imagine this journey, I had to wind the film back to its beginning, to its very source, where there is nothing, just the midday heat, and him walking behind his mother, moving from yard to yard, and when they open the gate to her and she mutters “for the sake of Christ,” he can only focus mutely on the cracks in the loam. My paternal grandfather was the only person in my family for whom the revolution was like rain in July, like the emptying of a full load of grain onto the waiting earth. His life began just as all hope was over; all of a sudden everything was made good and filled with meaning. The injustices could be set straight like a broken arm, and the world made better for people like Nikolai Stepanov. Each and every person had a birthright to land and work; working class young people could finally access learning, it was there for them to reach for, like library books on freshly scrubbed shelves.

This new and more caring reality spoke in the language of newspaper headlines and party decrees, and all its promises were directed at him and his interests. It was now possible to gain an important set of masculine skills without leaving work, like handling arms properly, and learning to shoot and to command the groups of fighters the factory workers were producing munitions for. The Bezhetsk Mechanics Works was also called a Munitions and Firearms Works, and it ceaselessly strove to provide the young republic with what it needed more than bread: revolvers, rifles, mortars, and machine guns. In time, their grim production was watered down with the needs of a nation at peace — plows and coffee grinders — but it was clear that the workers in the factory were intent on defending what they had won in battle, holding onto the gains of the revolution. Nikolai was the secretary of the factory committee, an organization combining management and union, which dealt with everything from purchasing raw materials to paying workers. This committee was also responsible for forming battalions of armed workers who were familiar with the tactics of street fighting and conventional combat.

It was a time of confusion and uncertainty. The peasants in the surrounding villages — in the family’s native Zharki, for example — weren’t so keen on giving up their grain for the new state. It was quite as if they hadn’t realized that it was in their own interests, and they hid the grain wherever they could, and when asked for it directly they were sullen and hostile. Rumors circulated around the villages that there would be a war soon, or certainly an uprising, and that the Bolsheviks were about to bring in new taxes: five rubles for a dog, thirty kopecks for a cat. Waves of peasant uprisings moved across the area, thousands joined in. Tiny Bezhetsk District saw at least twenty-eight riots over three years. Newly formed detachments of Red Army soldiers were sent to put the rebellions down. Both sides had meetings, passed resolutions, beat up offenders, executed them, buried them alive. After the war, the natural fear of killing another human had gone. It was easier to pull the trigger, and there were more arms “lying around” — the piles of requisitioned rifles had multiplied. The political “agitators,” who were in charge of convincing the peasants to cooperate with the Soviets, set off for the villages as if they were heading into battle: “A revolver hanging at his waist, sometimes two, grenades stuffed into his pockets.”

There are moments in time that seem characterized by blindness; or rather by darkness, like the inside of a sack in which people are thrown together, hardly distinguishable from one another, and yet all agitated by a sense of their own righteousness. The great animosity between the new Bolshevik government and the rural peasantry — reviled, strange, uncooperative; twitching and turning in its unwieldy and unchanging twilit world — could have ended differently. But the villages gave in first, and this was the beginning of the end for Russia’s rural communities.

Tax collection was undertaken by special detachments, whose arrival in the villages was feared like the Day of Judgment. These visitors dug up supplies that were being saved, turned over the houses, looked in underground stores, took the last of the provisions. Unused to this practice, communities at first tried to resist, everyone playing their part: sometimes firing warning shots from the rooftops, and sometimes unexpectedly killing someone. There were also attempts to steal from the collection points where precious grain was stored: the peasants went in groups with pikes and axes to demand their portion. Red Army soldiers were set loose on them like guard dogs let off the chain, and the crowds slowly dispersed.

There were not enough people who understood combat and military discipline and they needed people just like Nikolai, people who were warmed by the sun of the new regime, who saw it as the beginning of a new time of justice and were ready to die for it. Aged sixteen (not even old enough to order a drink now), he joined a special task unit. There are no documents or photographs in the family album to prove this, but they are hardly needed: the terrible scars on his stomach and back, traces of something that pierced him through, are proof enough.

The advantage of these special task units was that they were somewhat like volunteer militia groups, but together they made up a huge militarized organization (600,000 soldiers in 1922), well-armed, with weapons they kept with them at all times (hidden behind the stove, or under the bed). Three-quarters of them had no professional military training. They were flying squads, ready for action, and a living manifestation of the idea of the Soviet Union as one big military community, where every person could leap from his or her job at the lathe or the kitchen sink to fight for socialist justice. The units had their own uniform and motto, and they were sent to tackle flare-ups as if they were proper military units, but all the same they had a kind of tangential relationship with the Red Army itself, as if they were considered by the army to be so much dross and sawdust. You could join a special task unit from a young age: they recruited at sixteen, and you were handed your Mauser as soon as you enlisted.

At the margins of the country, where everything still hurt and smoke was still rising, the special task units fought in straight combat. In the central areas it was a different matter. Here the class enemy had learned to hide, to mask himself and pretend to be the old man fetching water at the well, or your mother’s brother, or even you yourself. The stories of what these units did, sometimes in their own villages and communities, flit like ghosts in the communal memory. My grandfather joined up in 1922, when the work of the units was coming to an end. In April 1924 the organization was officially closed. Nikolai had not turned eighteen. What he did in those two years, he never revealed. When he went to wash in the bathhouse his scars were visible, and he always said that he had been jabbed with a pitchfork when collecting taxes from the peasantry — and immediately changed the subject. What he had in his memory, I will never know. In the box marked “social background” on the ubiquitous form, he, the son and grandson of peasants, stubbornly wrote “factory worker.”

In childhood, when my father woke up in the morning he could see his own father in the blue and ever paler light, already awake, doing push-ups or lifting his dumbbells, or bent over the washbowl splashing water, or in front of the mirror, soaping his jaw. His boots shone like lamps, and his officer’s shirt was pressed, and he was so very tall and so very dear to my father.

Among the very ordinary faces of my relatives there is this one very handsome man, handsome in the way Marina Tsvetaeva defines as: “war heroic, seafaring, savage, most real and unbearable male beauty,” the sort that sends three villages wild with desire. There are no photos of Nikolai Stepanov as a child, and there probably never were; he must be about twenty in the earliest picture I’ve seen, and wearing a cap and tie. This is before the shaved head, his later impressive stature, the military uniform, but it’s clear he already belonged to that generation of Soviet dreamers with their fury-fueled desire to carry out anything the country demanded of them: to get on with the job of building the future’s garden cities — and then to get on with the job of strolling about in them. Their generation had disappeared by the end of the 1940s, but I still see them in photo portraits (some in caps and leather jackets, others in overcoats, but all cut from the same cloth, with the same weary expression on their faces, as if they’d seen too much). I see them, too, in later films made by the children of these men, who never tire of the subject of their fathers.

We choose to remember them as young men, birthed by the revolution, as if their youth, or their enthusiasm, gives us permission to think of everything that happened as a children’s game. Those they killed, and the ones who murdered them, will get to their feet again; stand up from the dusty roadside or the communal pit; they’ll push back the cement slab; run a hand through their hair and set off about their business again. Secretaries, representatives, commissars, policemen, army officers, they all walked with their heads held high, as if the renewed world had made them a promise. Every man’s job was a fine job and even the long-held contempt for the police went away briefly. In my family archive there are a few pictures of librarians in Tver posing in front of the camera with their crushes: drivers from a convoy, a detachment guarding prisoners. These young girls are so very serious, they are kneeling on one knee and holding rifles, pressing them against their chests and pointing them into the white light, taking aim. One of them is my grandmother Dora, who had just arrived in this big town to study.

Dora’s parents, Zalman and Sofya Akselrod, were from a village near Nevel in the North West. All I know about Zalman is that he made soap, and delicious ice cream, and his ice cream was in great demand in another town called Rzhev. They had six children who all lived happily together and were all members of the local Communist youth movement. Their father, who was a religious Jew, and was not a man to welcome in the new, used to lock all the doors at eight o’clock, so the young ones couldn’t leave the house, and then he would go to bed. The children would wait for an hour or so at the attic window, then one by one, they would drop down a ladder and run to the Komsomol meeting. At one such meeting they were told that the country urgently needed librarians, so Dora set off to Tver to train as a librarian.

The story goes that a local school needed a book fund, and Dora was sent to see the newly appointed head teacher. He wasn’t in the staff room so she went to the empty history classroom and stopped at the door. Dora was a little woman and at her eye level all she could see was a pair of gleaming high boots — a tall man was standing on a desk and screwing in a light bulb. This is how my grandparents met and they were never ever to be parted. He was teaching history (after his four years of education in a village school, and two years in a party school) and political knowledge, until he left to join the Red Army.

You might think he’d have found his fulfillment in the Red Army; that, deep at the heart of the embodiment of “people’s power,” his life would be given meaning and purpose. But even here there was no sense of connection; it was as if the proletarian Nikolai, with his tragic longing for order, was once again on the margins, not needed by his country, never quite fitting in. He read constantly, he had a wife and a young daughter, he was an officer in a Far Eastern garrison, but none of this could quite disperse the somber clouds; the Stepanovs lived among other garrison families, but were not of them. The War Commissar rarely bothered to drop in.

It bears repeating what a handsome man he was. Upright, never a word in the wrong place, with careful movements and terse, measured speech, and a dimpled chin. He had a chivalrousness, inculcated by reading Walter Scott, which had no practical application in a garrison town with ten thousand newly imported inhabitants. Time passed peacefully enough for the first while, when the only changes were in the various libraries that fell under Dora’s management. Then, in the seventh year, misfortune befell them.

In our family there has always been a tendency to link the terrifying tectonic shifts of the external world to smaller human-size explanations, and so it was always said that grandfather’s eldest sister Nadya was to blame for everything. By this time, Nadya had already worked for the representative of the young Soviet Republic in Berlin, and she sent back from there a brand-new bike for her brother. Now she was climbing the greasy pole of the party, in charge of a whole swathe of land in the Urals, or perhaps Siberia. From this posting she sent her brother the dangerous present of a service pistol, and for some reason my grandfather accepted it. One of the accusations leveled against him in 1938 was that he had owned an illegal weapon. His daughter, my aunt Galya, remembered the last happy summer, walking across a huge field of rye to fetch the newspapers, and one of her father’s comrades insistently asking her, a tiny girl, whether her father possessed the tenth volume of Lenin’s writings.

In 1938, in what was later known as the Great Terror, the country’s punitive capacity was strained to the utmost: the Gulag could no longer cope with the quantity of prisoners. Production, so to speak, ground to a halt. Annihilation was the solution and army officers found themselves at the front of this grim line: hundreds and thousands of foreign spies were suddenly found among their ranks. So when people suddenly stopped talking to Nikolai, and his colleagues began looking at him as if from the far bank of a wide river, and then at a party meeting someone openly called him an enemy of the people, he went home and told Dora to pack her bags and go back to her parents. Dora refused: if they were going to die, they would die together.

He was never arrested, although he did have to hand in all his weapons nearly straight away. It was as if they were waiting for an order that was never given. All the same, in the small garrison town where everyone knew everyone else, the Stepanov family was very visible; if they went to the only shop people kept their distance, as if they were infectious. My grandfather was quite certain he had nothing to be ashamed of, and he began mentally preparing for interrogation. His preparations were suddenly cut short: he was told that an investigation had shown him to be innocent, and he was doing important work. He should wait for further orders. These orders arrived at the end of October and the Stepanovs were transferred to Sverdlovsk in the Urals. It was all completely mystifying.

The “unspoken” Beria amnesty lasted for a short time, during which a few of those who had been accused of crimes were pardoned, and some who were already in the camps were released and sent home. It confounded all logic and people sought out their own reasoning, if only for their private family stories. Our family was accustomed to believe that the mysterious Nadya had saved her brother by sending judicious word from her eastern realm. This was her very last gift before all contact lapsed. This version of events is not inherently less likely than any other, but given the unexpected shifts in policy, it feels more embroidered than the probable truth: two thirds and more of those who were under investigation on January 1, 1939, were freed, cases were closed and defendants, against all odds, were found not guilty. The amnesty didn’t last very long, but it gave Nikolai Stepanov his chance: this “reassessment” of political cases began with army officers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are both long dead. Viktoria died first, barely outliving her daughter, who had needed constant nursing for the last years of her life. Galka was chatting brightly to me from her bed, when she suddenly said, very clearly and distinctly: It’s time I went back to Mother. But Viktoria Ivanova’s whole singing repertoire is stored in the deep silos of the internet, all the lighthearted tunes from the fifties, as well as the Schumann and Mahler she sang in later years. There’s something macabre in the very youthfulness of the recorded voice, which floats above both their tombs, above the heaps of paper and the concert programs, as if nothing had happened; all being is inviolate, immutable, immortal.

When my son was only a few months old I developed an unexpected talent (it opened in me like a drawer, and then later slammed shut again). It was at its height in the metro on my way to work. I only had to glance at the faces of the people standing and sitting opposite me, and something would shift, as if a shroud had fallen from them, or a curtain opened. A woman with carrier bags coming home from the dacha; an office worker in a suit with too-short trousers; an old woman; a soldier; a student carrying a folder — I could suddenly see them all as they would have been at the age of two or three, with rounded cheeks and serious expressions. This sudden skill was akin to an artist’s ability to note the clear structure of the skull beneath the skin: in my case it was a forgotten defenselessness that began to shine through the worn faces. The whole carriage looked to me like a nursery. I could have loved them all.

On our way back from Bezhetsk we passed the town of Kalyazin, which was flooded by the Volga river and now lies deep beneath its waters, with only the monument of a lonely church spire to show where the town once stood. We sped on to Sergiev Posad, where there is an ancient and much-loved Toy Museum. It was opened in 1931 and the collection of rag dolls, dolls made of clay and wood, lead soldiers and ice skates has been gathered lovingly over the years. It includes Christmas tree decorations, the close relatives of the baubles and figures my grandmother and mother hung on our tree: children holding snowballs, little rabbits on parachutes, skiers, cats, stars, a jaunty troika, with a line of terrifying women, impassive as a frieze of korai, riding in the sleigh. The poorer children of Bezhetsk might have played with some of the simple toys on display: swaddling their baby dolls, or blowing on whistles that hadn’t changed their design since the twelfth century. I gazed longest of all at a glass case containing a simple piece of canvas folded to resemble a baby, fabric twisted into a bonnet shape where its head should be: the most basic doll shape. It had something approaching human features, but you could see these were unnecessary, the unknown owner of the doll needed nothing more than its little babyish bulk to wrap her arms around and love.

The museum had two new spaces for an exhibition of toys belonging to a single famous family. The exhibits: dolls, Indian canoes, drums, and tiny sentry boxes with sentries in, were on display for the very first time, although they had lain in museum stores for nearly a century. They’d been brought there from the royal palaces at Tsarskoe Selo, Livadia, and Gatchina, and had belonged to the Romanov children, who were all killed in Ekaterinburg on the night of July 16, 1918. The four girls and the boy had names: Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, Maria, Aleksei — he was the youngest child, aged fourteen — and they had probably outgrown the games of Lotto and the tiny suitcases for dolls’ clothes, and the mechanical theater with its single play: A Life for the Tsar, but they wouldn’t have been able to take these games with them into captivity anyway. It seems unlikely they would have played with the huge rocking horse with its dashing profile and foolish expression — that had come from a different palace and had belonged to another little boy, Pavel. He grew up and became the Emperor of Russia and was assassinated one March night in 1801. The horse, in its fine crimson saddlecloth, was left waiting for a new rider.

All old things are the property of the dead, and the simple wooden toys in the neighboring rooms were no exception to this. Here I knew exactly who the owners had been and what had happened to them, and even their little lead cannons seemed orphaned, let alone the mechanical parrot in its gilded cage. Most of the toys from the royal household were given to children’s homes in the early thirties but these had survived, lying in storage, and now behind glass, like forgotten memories, suddenly rearing their heads and blocking out the light. I can’t remember what I was thinking about when I stood and regarded them. Perhaps I thought of the little boy Yakov Sverdlov, who loved to suck on caramels and, later in life, according to popular opinion, gave the order to shoot the Romanov family. Or perhaps little Misha Stepanov with his woolly rabbit soldier who took bites out of the gingerbread on the Christmas tree. My own little boy hadn’t wanted to go to the cemetery in Bezhetsk and sat cross and lonely on the baked earth while I strolled the paths between brightly colored tomb railings, reading the names of the countless former residents of the town. Then he changed his mind and announced he still didn’t like cemeteries, but he’d like to photograph all the monuments in this one. “I’d put them on Instagram,” he said, “and then no one would ever forget anything.”

Soft, plump Grandmother Dora died in 1980. My grandfather never did learn to live without her. Right at the end of his life, in autumn 1985, he moved in with us, and he would wander from room to room, waiting for my mother to come home after work. Then he’d take her by the hand and they’d sit down and chat. He desperately wanted to talk, there was so much that needed to be said, over and over: the death of his father, his fear of adult life, his first shame, first hurt, running away, work, loneliness. My mother listened as if she were hearing it all for the first time. His forgetfulness grew and grew, I used to come home from school to find him sitting in the hall as if about to go out, in a coat and cap, shoes polished to a high shine, clean-shaven, his shirt ironed, a string bag with a few books by his feet. He wanted to go home, to Dora. He had two months to live.

I have one of the little notes he used to write while he was waiting for my parents to come home:

4. The Daughter of a Photographer

Let’s suppose for a moment that we are dealing with a love story.

Let’s suppose it has a main character.

This character has been thinking of writing a book about her family since the age of ten. And not just about her mother and father, but her grandparents and great-grandparents whom she hardly knew, but knew they existed.

She promises herself she will write this book, but keeps putting it off, because in order to write such a book she needs to grow up, and to know more.

The years pass and she doesn’t grow up. She knows hardly anything, and she’s even forgotten what she knew to begin with.

Sometimes she even startles herself with her unrelenting desire to say something, anything, about these barely seen people who withdrew to the shadowy side of history and settled there.

She feels as if it is her duty to write about them. But why is it a duty? And to whom does she owe this duty, when those people chose to stay in the shadows?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remembered all of this many years later when I tried to read the old family correspondence to my father. He sat and listened for ten minutes with an increasingly downcast expression, and then he said that was enough, everything he needed to remember was in his head anyway. Now I understand him almost too well: over the last few months my state of mind has likened looking at photos to reading an obituary. All of us, both the living and the dead, seemed equally to belong to the past, and the only possible caption: “This too will pass.” My father’s old and new photographs in his Würzburg apartment were the only things I could look at without feeling shaken: the empty leaf-scattered riverbank with a black boat, a yellow field without a single human figure, or a meadow of a thousand forget-me-nots, no human touch, no selectiveness, just purity and emptiness. None of this was painful to look at, and for the first time in my life I preferred landscape to portrait photography. The Japanese album with the grandparents lay in a drawer somewhere and neither of us wanted to let it out.

One spring I had the pleasure of spending a few weeks in Queen’s College, Oxford, where my book and I were received with open arms, as if my occupation were reasonable and respectable, rather than some embarrassing obsession, a sticky flypaper spotted with quivering, half-dead associations. My college lodgings had white walls lined with bookshelves, but I had nothing to put on them. In the dining halls and libraries memory had a different meaning, one that had so far been alien to me. It was no longer the endpoint of a wearisome hike, but the natural result of duration: life generated memory, secreted it, and it deepened with time, disturbing no one and causing no one anxiety.

I’d come to Oxford to work, but I found it hard to get down to writing because life there was tranquil and it made me feel stupefied, as if I’d been placed back into a cradle that had never in fact existed. Every morning I touched my bare feet to the old wooden floorboards with the same feeling of gratitude. The gardens were vessels of trembling greenery, and the nightingale rattled its empty tin above them; even the way the delicious rain dispensed itself on the perfect facades and stone follies filled me with tender delight. I sat at my desk every day with my pile of pages and stared straight ahead.

The road outside the college was called the High, and it loomed very large in my life. The right-hand side of the window was turned toward the interior of the college, and its cool shade. The left-hand side faced the High that in sun or rain drew my gaze like a television screen; it stubbornly refused to disappear into the horizon as a road should and instead tilted upward like a ship’s deck, higher and higher, so the people and buses seemed to become more visible as they moved away from me and no figure, however tiny, ever quite disappeared. Against all probability they seemed to move closer and become more distinct — even the mosquito cyclist, the slant line of his wheels — and this trick of perspective preoccupied me, halted my already intermittent progress.

The endlessly fascinating life of the street moved in intricate patterns like a puppet theater, to the hourly ringing of bells. The long-distance coaches thundered down the street, eclipsing the light, and at the bus stop the drivers changed places; people appeared from a distance and moved closer, while remaining always in view, and sometimes deliberately standing out, like the long-legged lanky girl who came out into the middle of the road, performing a circus-style leap. In short, my idleness could not be justified, but like a character from a Jane Austen novel I sat for hours at the window watching passersby who did not fade into oblivion, but became larger and more recognizable with every passing day. I was continually amazed that I could look out of the window and count the buses at the top of the street where it twisted away, and I became obsessed by the way people, with their tiny jackets and even tinier sneakers, remained forever in focus. It was like watching the mechanism of a clock that had moving figures to mark the hours. A large and glossy black car turned the corner as if this was the deepest past, when even the smallest detail gained the aura of a witness. Only there was nothing to witness, it grew warmer and lilac shadows brushed the opposite pavement.

Then one day Sasha took me to the Ashmolean Museum, to see a picture by Piero di Cosimo called “The Forest Fire.” The long horizontal picture resembled a multiplex wide screen showing a disaster movie. It occupied a prime position in the museum, but in the shop there wasn’t a single postcard or coaster with an image from the painting. Perhaps that’s understandable, as the painting is far from any notion of comfort. It was painted in the early sixteenth century and is supposed to make reference to Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura and contemporary controversies over Heraclitus’s doctrines. If that is the case, then Piero agreed with Heraclitus, who said fire coming on would “discern and catch up with all things.” Something similar is depicted on the wood panels of the painting: Doomsday on the scale of a single island, overgrown with bushes and trees and inhabited by all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

The painting resembles a firework going off, as if a carnival were taking place in the forest: flashes of red, yellow, and white streak the panels to an inaudible and deafening crack. The fire is not only the center of the picture, but the omphalos of their universe, and from it the dozens of stunned beasts canter, crawl, and fly in dotted lines, not knowing what has happened, or who they are now. My sense of it is that this is an image of the Big Bang, although the painter wasn’t yet aware of such a name.

Animals, like the newly created galaxies, scatter from a central point — you can’t look away from it, it’s like the open door of a stove, or the mouth of a volcano. Like lava they have not yet ceased their flowing, to the extent that some of them have human faces. There were doubtless also people in this world, at least there were before the fire. They have a wooden well on an outcrop. And there are a few people, just sketched lines, like frescoes in Pompeii. They are definitely humanoid, although alongside the beasts with their warm corporeality, they look like shadows, like the outlines of humans on a wall lit by an explosion. There is one survivor, a cowherd, clearly drawn, standing half-turned toward us, as bewildered as his lumbering cattle, ready to lower his head and charge with them. His face is not visible, just the stick, the implement he uses because he knows, like Heraclitus, that “beasts are driven by blows.”

The beasts cross the painting in pairs, like the inhabitants of the ark, and the fact that some are partly human causes neither distress nor affront. The human faces grew on the beasts as they ran — on the domestic pig and the deer — and they are notable for their expression of gentle thoughtfulness. It’s said that the artist added the faces at a late stage, when the picture was nearly finished: one theory is that they are caricatures done at the patron’s request. Yet there is not a shadow of comedy about these wreathed hybrids, they look more like students of philosophy who have gathered to stroll under the oaks. Still, even this I can’t quite comprehend — a transformation is taking place, but its logic is hard to grasp: is man becoming animal before our eyes, or is animal becoming man, growing a human face, just as it might grow horns or wings? Did Daphne become a laurel, or did the bear become its human hunter?

It would seem that in a postapocalyptic world the beasts are the remaining humans; and all hope resides in these animate creatures. There they are, the family of bears bowing fearfully before the lion’s fury; the unbending golden eagle; the melancholic stork — all the carriers of distinct qualities, ready to emerge as egos, as “I”s. In contrast we, the humans, are barely distinct, we seem no more than raw material, or rough drafts for a future that might or might not come to pass. The rest were saved and they inherited the earth, and walked upon it, live and blocklike like the figures in paintings by Pirosmani or Henri Rousseau.

It’s surprising that the focus of the picture falls not on the predator, the King of Beasts, but on the harmless ruminant. A bull with the powerful brow of a thinker stands dead center, aligned with the tree of knowledge, which divides the picture into two equal parts, and the furnace mouth of the fire. His expression of tortured reflection makes him look a little like the sinner in Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment,” mouth opened in incomprehension, furrowed face. But here the creature is without original sin and it has a choice: the bull is free to decide whether or not it becomes a human.

In the dark days of 1937 the German-Jewish art historian Erwin Panofsky described Piero di Cosimo’s pictures as the “emotional atavisms” of a “primitive who happened to live in a period of sophisticated civilization.” Rather than a civilized sense of nostalgia, Piero is in the grip of a desperate longing for the disappeared past. In my view this interpretation stems from the age-old desire to see the artist as “other,” as a transported creature, an Indigenous person at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, a Martian on a foreign planet. It might be worth arguing but he is right in one important way: the state of mind he describes is also a sort of metamorphosis, the result of a terrible disaster that has thrown the world out of joint.

In “The Forest Fire” we see the moment of exposure, the flash, when light burns out the image and replaces it with the blinding white of nonexistence. The point at which everything shifts into its final shape is beyond memory and impossible to convey. It’s the moment we first open our eyes.

Piero di Cosimo’s picture is for me a close equivalent of Courbet’s “L’origine du monde” — its exact rhythm, even the way it shocks and spellbinds, is the same. This equivalence is due in part to the directness of the message, the documentary scale of the narrative of the formation of the universe, how it casts off new detail, forcing life to roll ever onward down the eternally angled slope. Is catastrophe then simply the starting point of genesis? The kiln for firing small clay figures? The crucible for transmutation? This is how creation happens in a post-Promethean world, and this is how the fall from heaven must have looked in an age of aerial warfare and chemical weapons — the flaming sword of the forest fire, and partridges swooping in the skies, triangular as jet fighters.

In one of the exercise books where my mother wrote down all my childish phrases and conversations, right at the top of a lined page filled with notes about summer and dandelions and cows, she has written: My mother died today. And we didn’t know.

I remember that day well. I can see in my mind’s eye the morning light in an unfamiliar building; a huge dog coming out from under the table, which was too high for me; the strange window frames; and then later that day, a vast stretch of water, as far as the edge of the world, and bobbing and flickering in it, my mother’s head, for my mother had decided to swim out into this waste of water, and had near vanished. I was certain she was gone — a new and strange life had just begun and I was completely alone. I didn’t even cry, I stood on the bank of the river Oka, where it meets the Volga, and there was no one to hear me. When the adults swam back, laughing, something had changed irrevocably.

I don’t really think life can begin with a catastrophe, especially not one that happened a long time before us. Misfortune, sweeping low and fierce overhead like an Orthodox banner, crackling with burning twigs and tongues of white flame — maybe it’s simply a condition of our existence, the maternal womb from which we emerge screaming with pain. Maybe it isn’t even worthy of the name Misfortune. When we got home that August and went out to our dacha, grandmother’s bouquets of dried flowers decorated the walls, and her bag still held her purse and season ticket; it smelt of phlox; and our life was already arranged for years to come, like a song with a repeating refrain. Grandmother Lyolya was only fifty-eight, she died of a heart attack before we could come home to her. And now my mother’s life had been given its shape, its model for imitation. If up till then she had just been wandering along, following her heart, now she had an impossible standard to meet. She never spoke it aloud, but she seemed to want to become someone different, for herself, for us: she wanted to become Lyolya, with her easy hospitality, her radiating joy, her cakes and hugs. She couldn’t do it, no one could.

The story of our home, as I heard it, began not a hundred years ago, but in August 1974. Grandmother reluctantly let my mother and me go off on holiday, away from summer at the dacha with its curtains, patterned with red and green apples. When we returned it was to an empty house, and we were alone. My mother blamed herself, and I sat by her. I remembered the terrifying story of the little girl who was slow to bring water to her sick mother and by the time she got to her mother, it was too late. Birds flew overhead, and one of them was her mother, and it sang: too late too late I won’t come back. Somehow this story seemed to be about us, although no one had precisely said this. I just knew it, and I wept over the untouched water like an accomplice.

All my later knowledge was in light of this story: my mother spoke, and I fearfully tried to remember everything although I still forgot. I ran away, like the child in the story, to play, to grow up and live a little. I think that must be how she felt too, a young woman, younger than I am now, with her exercise book of recipes written out in pencil, and her dependents: a two-year-old daughter and two old people who no longer recognized themselves or each other. Later she began wearing Sarra’s wedding ring; on the inside it had the name Misha, which was my father’s name as well. Nothing ever comes to an end.

Squares of glinting photographic paper floated in ribbed trays in the red light of the bathroom, which served as my father’s darkroom. I was allowed to watch as shapes appeared: the complete blankness was suddenly roiled with lines and angles and they slowly became a coherent whole. I loved the contact sheets best of all, covered in miniature images that could potentially be enlarged to any size, just like me at that age. The tiny portraits of my parents fitted in my pocket and made the evenings spent at nursery school more bearable. I remember my parents realizing I’d torn the picture of my father out of his passport so I could keep it with me.

My own first camera was a little plastic Soviet 35mm, a Smena-8, with dials to change the aperture and shutter speed. I was given it as a present when I was ten, and I immediately set about saving and preserving: the graying pines, the sleepers at the railway halt, someone my parents knew, water running over the stones — all industriously rescued from oblivion. The images, lifted from the fixing tray with tongs, dried on a line, but didn’t regain their former vitality. I soon gave it up, but I didn’t learn my lesson.

This book is coming to an end. Everything I wasn’t able to save is scattering in all directions, like the dumpy birds in “The Forest Fire.” I have no one to tell that Abram Ginzburg’s wife was called Rosa, I’ll never write about Sarra’s joke, in the middle of the war, that mold was good because it produced penicillin. Or how grandfather Lyonya demanded that Solzhenitsyn’s dissident masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago (despite strenuous efforts to get hold of it) be removed from the apartment after only one night as it would “kill us all.” Not even how all the women in the Moscow communal apartment would gather in the kitchen with tubs and towels to chatter through the weekly ritual of a pedicure. Or even that a squirrel lived on the balcony of a Moscow apartment seventy years ago. The squirrel had a wheel and it would run round and round, watched by a little girl.

In the 1890s the family in Pochinky sat down at the table for dinner every evening and waited silently for their meal. The soup was brought it. Amid the silence Father took the lid off the tureen and a cloud of fragrant steam rose. He would sniff the soup and then make a pronouncement: “I doubt it’s any good” — only after this the soup could be served. The terrifying paterfamilias always drank down all of his soup and asked for more.

Before Mikhailovna became Lyolya’s nanny, she was married to a soldier. In the drawers of the archive where everything has settled like sediment, there are three photographs and an icon. The icon shows the Virgin Mary appearing to Russian troops somewhere in the Galician marshes. The three photographs told the story of Mikhailovna’s life: here she is as a young woman standing head-to-head with a dour and innately weary man in a worker’s smock. And here she is holding a pitifully skinny little baby. The last picture shows the man in the cap and thick greatcoat of a soldier. Her husband was killed, the baby died; her entire earthly estate consisted of the paper icon, depicting a Pre-Raphaelitish Madonna, and once framed by a heavy silver surround that my great-grandfather gave her. When life got hard again after the revolution, she secretly took the silver surround off the icon, sold it, and brought the money back to the household she stayed with for the rest of her life. In all later photographs Mikhailovna is in her own icon-surround of pale gray, her cone-shaped black headscarf covering everything except her face. All that is left of her are a few cheap religious images and a Psalter that she read every evening.

Aunt Galya made me a present of a colorful Indian dress not long before her death, saying that she’d only worn it once, “for half an hour, when I had a dog come in here.” I knew of her secret and unrequited love for her neighbor who walked his dog in the yard and who died without ever guessing why she used to come out every evening to see him.

Sometimes it seems like it is only possible to love the past if you know it is definitely never going to return. If I had expected a small box of secrets to be hidden at my journey’s end, something like one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, then I would have been disappointed. Those places where the people of my family walked, sat, kissed, went down to the river’s edge, or jumped onto streetcars, the towns where they were known by face and name — none of them revealed themselves to me. The green and indifferent battlefield was overgrown with grass. Like a computer game I hadn’t mastered, all the prompts lead to the wrong gates, the secret doors were just blank walls, and nobody remembered anything. And this is for the best: the poet Alexander Blok tells us that no one comes back. The poet Mikhail Gronas replies that “living comes of oblivion.”

The parcel had been packed with all possible care, the box was lined with cigarette paper and each of the items was wrapped in the same thin, opaque stuff. I freed each one from its swaddling, and they lay on the dining table in a line so you could see all their dents, all their cracks, the earth ingrained in the china, the absences where feet, legs, hands should have been. Most of them still had heads, and some even had their little socks, the only item of toilet they were permitted. But on the whole they were naked and white, as if they had just been born, with all their dents and flaws. Frozen Charlottes, representatives of the population of survivors; they seem like family to me — and the less I can say about them, the closer they come.