13.
A beautiful woman, wearing white, and a little boy in a sailor suit who looks like her. She is sitting and he is standing by her armchair. The white is a class signifier, a sign of affluence, of the creak of starched cloth and unlimited leisure. The boy is about six, his father will die two years later, in another three years he and his mother will find themselves in Moscow, who knows how, perhaps washed up in a basket of reeds, like Moses. I have on my shelf an old typewriter, a heavy Mercedes with the prosthetic jaw of a second keyboard. Betya took on any job she could find when she first came to Moscow, mostly typing work.
14.
A large copy (approx. 20cm by 30cm) of an old photograph, on the back: “1905. Left to right: Ginzburg, Baranov, Galper, Sverdlova. The original is in the Gorky Memorial Museum No. 11 281. Research Associate Gladinina (?) A round blue stamp above the number.”
It’s winter and the snow under their feet is trampled. Dark, shaggy fur coats and hats with a spotting of white — the usual smudging you get on an old photograph, the dots and lines that obscure the picture. Great-Grandmother Sarra, first on the left, looks older than her seventeen years. Her hat, the sort that’s fastened with pins, has slipped to the back of her head, a strand of hair has escaped and her round-cheeked face is red raw, you can see how cold she is. One of her hands is tucked into her coat’s cuffs, another is balled into a fist. Her right eye, injured on the barricades, is covered with a black bandage, like a pirate’s patch. This was in Nizhny Novgorod, the barricades were built during the uprising that began on December 12, 1905, and was put down by artillery after three days of street fighting.
In our family folklore this photograph is actually called “Babushka on the Barricades,” although of course you can’t see the barricades, just a white brick wall and to the side a little fence engulfed by a pile of snow. When you look carefully you can see how young they all are: the handsome young mustache in his gray fur cap, and Galper, with the prominent ears, whom I do not know, and her friend, with the childish face and high cheekbones. Sixty years later only the women have survived in the archival memory: Sarra Ginzburg and Sarra Sverdlova (“little Sarra”), the sister of Yakov Sverdlov, sitting on the bench outside the “Home for Old Bolsheviks,” two gray-haired old ladies in thick coats, warming themselves in the winter sun, pressing old-fashioned muffs to their stomachs.
15.
Morning on the open terrace of a dacha: someone is sitting in a wicker chair but all you can see are legs and the corner of a striped dress. An oilcloth over the table, and on it a cornucopia of china dishes, cups, sugar bowls, the old yellow butter dish, a tall vase filled with flowers and foliage, and beyond that a saucepan, but the contents aren’t visible. A girl in a summer dress is eating breakfast fastidiously. Her elbows are resting on the corner of the tablecloth, her right hand holds the knife, and in her left hand, the fork. Her feet, in fashionable shoes (rounded toes and little ankle straps), rest on the bar of the chair. The second girl, sitting opposite her, is bent over her teacup, stirring in sugar. Her suntanned knees stick out from under her skirt, her bare arms reflect the light, her hair is drawn up under a hairnet. An older woman in an apron, encased in a blinding white scarf, is watching Lyolya from afar to make sure she gets a good breakfast. This is Nanny Mikhailovna, who attached herself to the family and never left. It must be about 1930. There’s a pile of papers and on the top a copy of the weekly Ogoniok, with a faint outline of a woman on the cover. You can’t quite tell what the woman is doing.
16.
A gravel-tinted picture, you almost expect to feel granular dust when you touch its surface. Everything is gray: the face, the dress, the coarse woolen stockings, the brick wall, the wooden door, the twisting branch of a shrub. An older woman is sitting on a bentwood chair, her hands half-resting in front of her, she looks like she had started to move and then forgot what she was doing, and simply froze in that position, one hand half-covering her stomach. Her smile hasn’t quite reached her whole face yet and her expression is serene, as if the clock had stopped at midday, that quiet hour of moderate approval. Everything in the picture is underpinned by a sense of abject poverty, it is the unspoken language of the image: the heavy hands, unadorned by rings, the only dress of canvas, it is all kith and kin with the sparse weeds under her feet, they share the same root. She has made no attempt to clothe herself for eternity, to allow her workaday appearance a moment’s Sunday best. But this is as it is, because she has nothing else to choose from. This is my great-grandmother Sofia Akselrod, who used to read Sholem Aleichem in her village not far from Rzhev. This could be any year: 1916, 1926, 1936, it isn’t as if anything changed with the passing of time.
17.
A five-year-old girl holding a huge doll that isn’t hers. It’s a sumptuous doll, dressed in folk costume, an embroidered skirt and ornate headpiece, with a thick braid of hair and rosy cheeks. The mysterious thrill of the object! The little girl can’t even bring herself to look at the doll, and instead she directs her delighted gaze at the camera: Look at her! Look at us! So many contrasts: the little girl is frail and thin, and the doll is disproportionately large and plump; the little girl is dark-haired, her curls stick out in all directions, and the doll has a smooth flaxen plait. The lover and the beloved. The childish little hands hold the doll with a fervent tenderness: one palm cups the waist with care, the other hand encircles the doll’s porcelain fingers with the lightest of touches. The image is black-and-white, and so I can’t tell the color of the dress, with its embroidered сherries, or the color of the extravagant bow on the top of my mother’s head.
18.
A tiny picture, the epaulets are faded and impossible to read, but I know my grandfather reached the rank of major and was only demobilized in 1944. This is clearly a picture taken before all that. The face is as closed as a fist, it expresses nothing but strength: the arched brows, the ears close to the head, the whites of his eyes, the mouth. All of it molded to form a single billiard balclass="underline" a single typical portrait of the military officer at the end of the 1930s. A collective image of a face, one portrait standing for everyone, like the faces of the heroes in Aleksei German’s film My Friend Ivan Lapshin. I watched it when I was fifteen and I’d hardly seen any proper films, and I couldn’t be sure of what was happening, or who the main character was, who was in love with whom — all the characters seemed interchangeable to me, all cut from the same piece of boiled army wool. There was something familiar about them, their speech and posture all seemed vaguely familiar, as if I’d known it for a long time, and only years later I realized that every one of them was in some sense my grandfather, his antique courtesy and eau de cologne, his sternness, his shaved cheeks and bald head.