5.
There’s no note on this one, but it’s Switzerland, around 1910. Wedges of pine forest to the left and right and cone-shaped white mountains in the gap between. A few pine trees are visible, higher up in the whiteness, a couple of different-sized trees on the edges of the plantations, and beyond them the regular spikes of saplings growing under the trees. Above, the indistinct Alpine cloudscape, and just below the top edge of the picture a fringe of greenery, from which we, Russian travelers, have only just emerged.
6.
A little photograph, old, and it looks even older than it is, because it’s so faded. On the lower edge, printed in pink: Cherson and B. Wineert. It looks like the mid-1870s, a bride stands, immovable as an upturned cup on a tablecloth, her wedding dress falls in a triangle of thick material around her, a cliff of fabric descending from her stomach to the ground, buttons all aligned. Her wide face is fringed by lace. She stands, calm and steadfast, and beside her the groom seems barely to exist, leaning against her, as he might against a gate. Not unequal in the crude and obvious sense of an unequal marriage, but almost as if they presented to us the union of a triangle and an exclamation mark. He is thin-faced, long-boned, like a taper, or the last splinter of soap, and stretched to attenuation, even appears to be growing still in his frock coat with its lapels drawn on, his wife holding on to his elbow. The frock coat is almost too straight, the top hat unexpected, like a rabbit in a conjurer’s hand. My great-great-grandfather’s particular beauty seems so ephemeral that it’s hard to imagine him twenty or thirty years later, an established man, a paterfamilias. As a child I used to think that the other great-great-grandfather with his bushy beard was the same man, except much older, and the difference between them horrified me. But there are only two photos of Leonty Liberman, and in both he looks the same: as if he might disappear into the background before he even reached adulthood.
7.
Children are playing croquet on a lawn in a Moscow suburb. The adults are sitting on a bench, or standing, leaning against a tall pine. An old timbered dacha with a mansard roof and little onion domes continues out of the frame. The windows are wide open. The game has been broken off and everyone there has turned to face the photographer: little girls in knee-high socks and white dresses that are short like little smocks; barefooted little boys from next door’s dacha; the croquet mallets are still, the balls lie motionless. Only the girl on the right is still intent on the game, she is bent over and her bare shoulders are crookedly but determinedly curled over the mallet, her right foot is extended, her face in profile. Her pageboy haircut exposes her long, soft neck. She looks like an ancient Greek boy, she radiates a dark concentration and is entirely focused inwardly, in the emblematic manner of a bas-relief. All the others stand and sit in little groups and pairs, but she is alone in the foreground. She is not far from the others, but all the same she seems to be at the edge of the photograph, like the far wing of a large house.
8.
A floor-length black skirt and a light blouse: an unknown woman standing in front of a fence. An ivy-clad brick house, the painted shutters open. Two children, of about two and five, flicker at her shoulders like wings. She is holding their hands, and her hands are crossed over her chest. Two men stand to each side, slightly closer to us. One is taller and he stands with his legs crossed, his hands thrust in his pockets — his shirt is belted, not tucked in, his curls are ruffled. This is Sashka, or Sancho Pancho, a friend and an admirer of my great-grandmother Sarra. The other man is older. He is wearing a pince-nez and a blouse made of coarse material. He has a gloomy expression and I suddenly realize that I recognize his face. Yakov Sverdlov. Ten years later in 1917 he becomes the Chairman of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee and signs a decree beginning the Red Terror and “the turning of the Soviet Republic into a single military camp.”
9.
A dim yellow rectangle, a little brighter in the left-hand corner, but you can just about make out a table, a shoulder, a woman in profile. On the back, a note: “Don’t let it put you off that the picture is so dark, it’s not too bad if you take a good look.” A little lower in the corner, same handwriting: “Paris.”
10.
The first thing you notice are the words on a banner against a backdrop of endless birch trees:
The lower part of the picture is such a tangle of women’s bodies that the eye directs itself involuntarily to a point above their heads, to the regular white letters and tree trunks. The composition of women’s bodies looks like a complex chemical equation. The upper row is standing tall and each subsequent row is squatting a little lower than the last, the final row lying spread out like mermaids in a sea of arms, PE knickers and identical PE shirts. About ninety women in all, but all their faces look surprisingly similar, or perhaps they all wear the same blankness, the same refusal to allow any expression to cross their faces. For this very reason I look at each individual face, and as I move between one woman and the next, I appear to see the different phases of a single mimetic movement. This is the Raiki Holiday Camp where Great-Grandmother Sarra worked as a doctor in around 1926. Her ten-year-old daughter Lyolya is lying in the front row, a long plait extending from her head and an absurd-looking fringed shawl on her shoulders. To make her easy to find, our Lyolya, someone’s added a blue-inked cross over her head. But you could just as easily tell her apart by her estrangement from the scene, how she looks away and to one side.
11.
Heavy card, a golden surround, a backdrop with a misty landscape — against it, the fat-pawed iron bench with its fancy wrought armrests looks particularly squat and solid. David Fridman, a doctor and the father of my great-grandfather, sits on the bench, his hand rests on the collar of an Irish red setter (the breed standard for this type of setter had been set only twenty years before the picture was taken, in Dublin, in 1886). The clothes he wears are almost unnoticeable, begging not to be scrutinized: a good overcoat with an astrakhan collar, a matching black astrakhan hat, unremarkable trousers, even more unremarkable shoes, a pince-nez on a long chain, which only serves to focus attention on his troubled eyes. But perhaps it is not the eyes that give the impression of a troubled man, but rather the legs, held close together, as if he was just about to get up and leave. In our family we keep the common custom of sitting down briefly before the road, half a minute’s respite to allow the journey to assume its proper proportions. The dog is nervy, it stirs. Both dog and man die in 1907, on the same day, or so my mother told me.
12.
A portrait photograph, just a face and nothing else — but my goodness, what a face: a long beard spreads into two points on the chest; the nostrils are flared wide; brows drawn together, and above them a head that appears bald despite its gray fuzz. There’s no backdrop, just absence. This is Abram Osipovich Ginzburg, my other great-great-grandfather, the father of fourteen children, a merchant of the 1st Guild, the highest rank a merchant could achieve. He started his business in Pochinky, although he is not mentioned in the local archives, and in this picture he resembles “a God-Sent Tempest.” The eyes are the first thing you notice in an old picture: they seem lost because their gaze is searching for a person who is no longer there, a person who once recognized them. But his gaze in this photograph is directed to the side — it’s not a searching gaze, he has already fixed someone or something in his sights. You are drawn almost against your will to put yourself in their place, out of frame, in a space where nothing has been visible for a long time. The actual composition of the photograph, where your attention had been hitherto wandering, seems suddenly a cramped little triangle, and everything in it is regulated by that fiercely unbending gaze.