The museums in Vienna all reflected my own preoccupations, albeit each in their own way. In the Museum of Applied Art, I wandered into a Valhalla for furniture, a room filled with ghosts, the long shadows of Thonet chairs in bentwood cast across a white screen. In the same room you could read a list of the names of rocking chairs and armchairs and they sounded like human names: Heinrich and Max, whose wicker forms reminded me of our three-legged basketwork chair, which had hobbled its way into the twenty-first century. Nearby, an ancient forest of feathery, spidery lace lay draped on black velvet, composed of tiny holes and tears, just as my story is composed of silences and rents in the fabric.
Blinds were drawn over the windows of the Natural History Museum and I looked out at Vienna as if through a layer of ash. Lamarck’s spiral staircase of evolution twisted backward through the reassuringly old-fashioned twilight of the museum’s rooms. All the subjects of nature’s experiments were on display: bears, both large and small; a host of spotted cats; a game park with deer and antelope, all necks and antlers; giraffes and the rest of the beasts, some of them surprisingly like cultural artifacts, speckled like clay pots. Even less life remained in the shrunken stuffed birds, despite their still-bright plumage. Beyond them the dreadful serried ranks of glass jars with a collection of bony parts connected with the production of sound, taken from the voice boxes of birds. Somewhere among the parrots and the corvidae was a small gray bird, round and fluffed up with a strange red brow and splashes of red around its tail, aegintha temporalis, and I nodded to it as if we were family, as I myself am temporalis, on my way to the barnacles and the segmented worms, and the fish in methylated spirits, standing on their tails.
Karl Kraus wrote “Immer passt alles zu allem” (“Everything fits with everything else”) — or, in Tsvetaeva’s words: “Everything rhymes.” Every exhibit in the long suite of rooms provided another metaphor, explained another element in my history. It preoccupied me, but didn’t change anything, since I knew that the real aleph of my story lay in my pocket already.
This aleph was a tiny white china figurine, about three centimeters tall. A very approximately molded naked little boy with curly hair, who could have passed for Cupid if it hadn’t been for his long socks. I bought him from a stall in a Moscow flea market, where one or two things could still be picked up very cheaply, and in a tray of paste jewelery I found a box containing a heap of these little white boys. It seemed strange to me that not a single one was intact, each differently mutilated, missing a leg or a face, and all the faces were scarred and chipped. I spent a while sorting through, looking for the most presentable, and eventually found him: nearly whole, he still had his curls and dimples, his ribbed socks, and he shone with a winsome gift-gleam — even the dark stain on his back and his lack of arms didn’t spoil my admiration.
I asked the shop owner, just in case, if she had any figures in a better state, and she told me such an odd story I felt the need to find out more. The little figures were made in a German town from the 1880s onward, she said. They were sold everywhere, in groceries and hardware stores, but actually their main function was as packaging — dirt cheap, they were heaped up as loose fill around goods, so that heavy things didn’t rub together or dent each other in the darkness. The little figures were in fact made to be chipped. Just before the war the factory closed and warehouses, filled to the roof with boxes of the tiny figures, stood locked until they were bombed. A few years later, when the boxes were opened, all that remained were splinters of china.
I bought my little china boy without noting the name of the factory or the stallholder’s telephone number, although I already knew that I was carrying the end of my book in my pocket, the hidden answer to a riddle in a puzzle book. My china boy seemed to embody the way no story reaches us without having its heels chipped off or its face scratched away. And how lacunae and gaps are the constant companions of survival, its hidden engine, fueling its acceleration. How only trauma makes individuals — singly and unambiguously us — from the mass product. And yes, finally, the way in which I am the little boy, the product of mass manufacturing and also of the collective catastrophe of the last century, the survivor and unwitting beneficiary, here by some miracle.
The china figure I chose was not the unluckiest: the headless ones remained in their box. In some contexts, or so the Vienna School of Art History proclaimed a hundred years ago, only the “new” and the “unimpaired” can be considered beautiful, whereas the pale, faded, and fragmentary can only be considered “ugly.” An object’s dignity, its starched collar, comes from its state of preservation. The poorly preserved object loses its right to human interaction.
And so it was: although I was thinking about the fragmentary and flawed state of any surviving witness, all the same in my soul I craved the whole, the inviolate. The little china boy’s wounds could not be too extreme, to put it bluntly — I wanted him pleasant to look at. Half-destroyed a century ago, he nevertheless had to look new.
I remembered, as I took my purchase home, that I had read about these figurines in My Pushkin, a memoir of childhood by the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. She remembers her strolls as a child along the Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow toward the Pushkin Memoriaclass="underline"
There was another special game I played with the Pushkin Memorial, it was my game, and it was this: I’d place a tiny white china doll, the size of a little finger, a child’s little finger, on the pedestal. You could buy these dolls in the china shops that appeared in Moscow at the end of the century, little gnomes under mushrooms and children holding umbrellas. I’d place a tiny figure on the gigantic pedestal and slowly lift my gaze up the sheer granite face until I thought my head would fall off comparing the sizes. […] The Pushkin Memorial, with me under it, and with the tiny figure under me, was my first proper lesson in hierarchy, too. I was a giant next to the china figure, but next to Pushkin, I was — myself. A little girl. But one who would grow bigger. And I was the same for the tiny figure as the Pushkin Memorial was for me. But then what was the Pushkin Memorial for the tiny figure? And after some hard thinking it suddenly dawned upon me: The Memorial was so enormous that the figure simply couldn’t see it. I thought it was a big house, or a rumble of thunder. And the china figure was so tiny that the Pushkin Memorial couldn’t see it either. It thought it was just a flea. But it saw me! Because I was big and plump. And I would soon grow bigger.
Over the years the little figure didn’t stop giving lessons (Tsvetaeva counts these lessons in numbers, in scale and materials, in numbers and hierarchy, and in thinking). It’s hardly surprising that the subject of her studies changed. I thought about it as I carried the little china boy in my pocket along this or that strasse, stroking his invisible back with my finger and imagining how he would look on the cover of a book about memory. His lack of arms made him look taller than he was, he looked straight ahead like a curly-haired figurehead, he wore old-fashioned knee-high socks, and he gleamed white. One rainy evening he fell out of my pocket and smashed on the tiled floor of the old house.
The boy broke into three pieces: his stockinged feet slipped under the bath’s deep belly, his body lay severed from his head. What had struggled to symbolize wholeness in my own and my family’s history had, in one fell swoop, become an allegory: the impossibility of telling these histories, the impossibility of saving anything at all, and my inability to gather myself up from the splinters of someone else’s past, or even to take it on as my own convincingly. I picked up what I could from the ground and placed the pieces on the desk like jigsaw pieces. It was beyond repair.