Digital storage gives us a whole range of possibilities, and it affects how we see things: history, biography, one’s own or another’s text — nothing is seen as a linear sequence unrolling in time, glued with the wallpaper paste of cause and effect. In one sense this is pleasing, since no one feels unloved in this new world. There is space for everyone in the boundless world of the hoarder. On the other hand, the old world of hierarchies and bardic stories worked on the principle of selection: not quite saying everything; sometimes holding back. In some senses, when the necessity of choice is removed (between good and bad, for example), then the very notion of good and evil disappears. All that is left is a mosaic of facts — and points of view, which are mistaken for facts.
The past is now “pasts”: a coexisting layering of versions, often with only one or two points of contact. Hard facts soften to modeling clay and can be molded into a shape. The desire to remember, to recreate and fix in place, goes hand in hand with incomplete knowledge and partial understanding of events. Units of information can be lined up in any formation, any order, like in a children’s game, and the direction of play will utterly change their significance. My linguist friends, Americans, Germans, Russians, all tell me that their students are brilliant at finding subtexts and hidden meanings, but can’t, or don’t want to, talk about the text as a whole entity. I suggested asking the students to retell a poem, line by line, describing only what was going on. But I was told that this wasn’t possible, they simply weren’t able. The banal debt to the obvious, along with the need to tell a story, has been thrown overboard, lost in the detail, broken into a thousand bite-size quotes.
On May 30, 2015, I left my apartment on Banny Pereulok in Moscow, where I had spent a biblical two score years and one, amazed even myself at the length of time I’d spent here. All my friends had moved about from one place to another, and even from one country to another, and only I had stayed put like some ancient Aunt Charlotte on her country estate, living in the rooms my grandmother and mother had inhabited, with empty sky through the window where once there were tall white poplars, like in Odessa, planted by her grandfather. The rooms were repainted, but even the new decor had begun to look shabby. The furniture was long used to standing in a different formation, so when you shut your eyes at night, the rooms of the empty apartment became ghostlike and all the furniture returned to its original places in the darkness: the bed where I lay was itself overlaid with the shape of the writing desk that had once stood there. Its lid covered my head and shoulders, and above me hung the shelf with the three porcelain monkeys refusing to see, hear, or speak, and in the other room the heavy orange curtains were back, and the lamp stand covered in a silk shawl, and the big old photographs.
None of this remained, there wasn’t even a chair to sit on, the apartment had become no more than a series of empty boxes, workboxes of odd buttons or spools of thread. The chairs and divans had departed for different homes, in the farthest room an anxious light burned, even though it was day, and the doors were already thrown back wide as if to welcome new owners. The keys were handed over, dropped from one palm into another, I took a last look at the pale sky over the balcony — and then life suddenly sped up, moving faster than ever before. The book about the past wrote itself while I was traveling from place to place, counting up my memories, just like the children’s poem about the lady and her luggage: “a punnet, a pug, a painting, a jug…” And off I went on my wanderings to Berlin, where the book stopped, held its breath — and so did I.
I found a home in a beautiful old part of Berlin, which had once been considered a Russian area, and had always been associated with literature. The streets seemed familiar, Nabokov had lived in the house opposite, and two houses down, a person who had, by mutual and loving consent, eaten a man alive. In the little square yard a dozen bikes gathered like horses at a watering trough. Everything was underpinned by a feeling of durability and presence, but a strange sort of presence when you remembered that this city had for years been known for its wastelands and its yawning voids, rather than the buildings constructed on these empty spaces. I enjoyed the thought that some of my notes about the impossibility of remembrance would be written within another impossibility: in a city where history is an open wound, no longer able to mend itself with the scar tissue of oblivion.
It was as if the city had unlearned the skill of coziness, and the city’s inhabitants respected this quality of bareness. Here and there construction sites opened the wound further, streets were barred with red-and-white barriers, the asphalt was cut open to reveal its granular earthen heart, and the wind whistled, clearing the space for new wastelands. By every entranceway little bronze plaques in the paving stones told a familiar story, even if you didn’t stop to read the names and count the years to see how old they were when they were taken from these elegant houses with their high ceilings to Theresienstadt or Auschwitz.
I managed nothing of the work I had planned in Berlin, in my cheerful little apartment with its Mettlach-tiled stove. Once I had arranged my life there, laid out my books and photographs, signed up at a library and been given a library card with a grinning stranger’s face on it, I quickly resigned all my energies to a gnawing unending anxiety, which turned its toothed cogs in my stomach. I don’t remember how I spent the days. I think I spent more and more time wandering from room to room until I realized that the only thing I could actually do well was move from place to place. Movement was forgiving, the thought of unachieved work was pushed out of my head by the number of steps taken in a day, the physical shape of my achievements. I had a bike. An old Dutch beast with a bent frame and a yellow lamp on its forehead. Once it had been painted white, and at a good trot it made a snuffling-grinding sound, as if its last ounces of strength were being squeezed out of it by contact with the air. It braked with a ticking noise. An old German novel that my mother had loved featured a car called Karl, “the ghost of the road,” and there was something similar and ghostly in the way my bicycle and I blended in to the hidden underpasses, slipping between people and traffic, leaving no trace of ourselves, not in their memory, and not in mine.
Riding a bike in Berlin was a new and unfamiliar experience. The whole city lived on its wheels, pushing the pedals round diligently but with ease, as if there was nothing untoward in this behavior in a grown-up person. In the evenings a quiet chirruping and a flicker of light were the only trail we left behind us, and it was transparently clear that the city had been built for this constant falling through the absences without noticing, like in that Kafka text where the horseman rides across the steppe, his stirrups gone, his bridle gone, his horse gone, and even he himself no longer there. The streets seemed to give way obligingly when a cyclist came through, offering themselves up as flatness, so the ride cost no energy and the rider hardly realized she was flying somewhere beyond. The lightness of travel allowed a feeling of safety — the shop windows, the passersby and their little dogs were not even beyond a thin glass screen, but speed and the insect rustling of the bike made everything around untouchable, slightly blurred, as if I were as invincible as the air passing through my fingers.
I wondered then if the people who were destined sooner or later to be air and smoke remembered this sense of invisibility and invincibility and longed for it when they were condemned to walk on the ground on May 5, 1936, losing their right to own and ride a bike. In the laws that came later it became clear they would always remain on the unshaded side of the street, never able to slip among the shadows, or allowing themselves the luxury of freewheeling without obstacle. When public transport was forbidden to them it was as if someone had had the explicit task of reminding them that their body was the only property left to them and they should rely on that alone.