The indisputable and incriminating proof, the proof of Hella’s existence, however, was provided not only by the two-piece box approximately twenty centimetres wide, less than thirty centimetres long and about five centimetres high, filled with letters full of Hella’s words, but also by the six black and white photographs, which had now become my exclusive property.
„The photograph will be my icon,“ I recalled the words with a vocative intonation, which were written rather beseechingly by an unfortunate hero of Andrei Platonov in a letter to his beloved when he begged for her long-promised portrait.
According to Susan Sontag, collecting photographs means collecting the world itself. Starting with those six cramped up images, I began to carefully, indeed obsessively, collect Hella’s world out of them. Even after many years, I still barely possess scraps and fragments of it, and even those are more like mere crumbs, dirt and dust. Along with the amateur photographs from the domestic archive, it’s as if I was also seizing the unattainable past. Not only did they suspend it and show me Hella as she was then and there. What is more, they made her present to me. It was as if she were sitting here in that armchair, on a chair by the table, in the next room at most, behind a closed door. And at any moment, I expected to hear a heavy exhale, a stifled clearing of the throat, the creak of a backrest, the shuffling of worn slippers. The door flying open.
Unlike so many of the pages filled with text, the photographs could be „read“ quickly, almost instantly. I could take them all in, arranged side by side, from a very small height, with a single glance. And then, of course, one could slide endlessly from one image to the next, zooming in and out in an attempt to discern something essential in the print, in the posthumous mask – even in the knowledge that, strictly speaking, it is impossible to understand anything with the help of a photograph, as Sontag warns. Photographs as such do not clarify anything, they merely confirm the captured reality. However, for me at that moment, confirmation was absolutely sufficient. To see Hella in photographs from the 1970s and 1980s was to know that she had not been executed in the 1930s. To know this with absolute certainty and to be able to triumphantly declare, „No. They were not both executed.“
Hella was in her seventies in all those donated pictures. Her light grey wavy hair, varying in length from year to year, flowed softly along her wrinkled, age-stretched and sharply cut face. What remained of Tamara Petkevich’s memory from their first meeting by the burning stove in the camp barrack in 1945? Of that woman with thick black curls who, by her striking appearance alone, belonged to a completely different culture and era? Of the woman in whose remarkable black eyes blazed untamedness? It was those eyes that remained. Black. Riveting. Blazing. In five photographs. In the sixth one, a snapshot with the children’s author Nina Gernet and the granddaughter of her prison camp friend Natalia Korec, Hella was hiding those eyes – casting them down wearily, sadly and absent-mindedly. In the five other portraits, however, she is staring intently, even defiantly, into the lens. Their striking gaze pierces me like ten shots as I carefully spread the images on my desk around my computer – on the left two older ones, each from a different time, a different place, both from the early seventies, on the right three latter ones, from a single day at the beginning of the next decade, Hella’s last decade. Those remarkable black eyes are still distinctly ablaze. In all of them. Though they may be getting lighter with age. But it’s no longer untamedness that burns within them but rather some persistent question. And a desperate desire for an answer. And a reproach that none is coming. And a dread of the potential answer. With each photograph it seemed to grow more and more urgent. It seemed most intense in the photo with the slightly frayed edge, with the right part obviously torn away. Torn off with a ruler. How big a part was it? What was in it? For a maximum concentration of horror, I declare this photo to be the last – I will probably never know the actual order of the pictures, their exact date, because even those who took them don’t know. In it, Hella is sitting at the side of a desk. She’s leaning on it with her right hand. Her left hand, bony and veined with her fingers a little bent, is resting tensely in her lap. On the desk in front of her is a lined school notebook. It is open to the first page. The page is titled. Something is written on the first line. There’s a pencil on the notebook. The notebook is shaded by a vase of dahlias, which stands blurred in the left foreground – but the focus is at the back, on the right, on petite Hella. She is wearing a black unbuttoned cardigan and a dark collared dress, with a light abstract pattern – the thin lines on it circling in numerous ovals that intersect, with tiny patches of acacia-like petals scattered between them here and there. Hella is said to have inherited the festive dress from a camp friend who died in 1978. Hella sits there stiffly, slightly hunched over, folding into herself. She is holding her breath, as if she were sitting for an X-ray and not an ordinary photograph that only captures the surface. And the camera does indeed seem to see right through her, catching the congealed horror inside – a kind of clot, a lump. And in her eyes, in those black, curious eyes, beneath the furrowed brow and the zigzagging raised eyebrows, there burns a question full of pain. As if the image had been still long before the camera froze it. The completeness of the scene is only disrupted by pieces of countless objects – a lamp, a wooden bowl, a wicker basket, a cup, a multi plug adapter with two cords. They accidentally got caught in the frame. The photographer didn’t think to put them away. Maybe he had no idea what kind of scene he was going to capture. Maybe there were more distractions the photographer saw. Is that why a part was missing? But the alien fragments still fail to provide distraction from Hella’s ear-splitting silent scream.
What was its source? What paths led Hella to this point?
The perception of the photograph, of „time frozen“, is undoubtedly influenced by our knowledge of what followed once time started running again. Certainly. Later, when I get my hands on the portrait of Hella from her investigation file – a criminal double-portrait of a stern woman in a striped coat with large lapels, a profile that really seems to have descended from a medieval coin, and the en face with an exhausted, distant expression – I will involuntarily search in her black, penetrating eyes for a foreshadowing of the near future, a premonition of personal tragedy. However, looking at the photograph of Hella silently screaming next to the dahlias, I didn’t think about what came next. On the contrary. I was tormented by my ignorance of what had occurred before, what in Hella’s probing eyes burnt so sharply, what had provoked that desperate, voiceless scream.
It was no longer enough for me to have confirmation, I also needed clarification. Words instead of pictures. „Only that which narrates can make us understand,“ claims Sontag.
I read a lot about what preceded the photograph from the end of Hella’s life in the first part of Tamara Petkevich’s memoir. Although it offered barely a few sentences about Hella’s own past – the story of strangers in a country that was no longer a country but merely an abbreviation (as Jiří Weil wrote about the USSR, and I shamelessly steal those apt words from him) seemed canonical, even trite, from the perspective of its citizens. It did not seem necessary to add anything by way of explanation. The memoir was much more about a shared past. A few months together in a labour camp in northern Russia. And also about the other years spent up there after their release – regardless of whether this was forced or involuntary, because of the inability to go anywhere else. Again, it was only an insignificant slice of time – framed by the years 1946 to 1952. Moreover, from what I had read, the horror concentrated in the scream in Hella’s photograph with the dahlias was probably far worse than the sentence to ten years in the penal-labour camps, five more years of civil right deprivation and confiscation of all property. And it was probably also much older than the worst month in the memory of years, than the day of Hella’s arrest – Friday, 19th November, 1937.
Perhaps it is because of the ancientness of that horror that Tamara Petkevich always remembered Hella, the „foreigner with a terrible fate“, both in the book and in private conversation, with extraordinary tenderness – as if her friend with the exotic appearance who was fourteen years her senior was her defenceless ward. She lived, she said, mainly on external stimuli, flying up sharply one moment and then plummeting down again, as if into an abyss. In reality, however, the two women, in spite of the difference in age and dissimilarity of character, protected and saved each other – they were two women, irreparably lonely, without solid ground under their feet, forever flying and falling.
„When I came home, I didn’t find Hella there,“ Tamara Petkevich said of her first years of freedom, when she and Hella stayed in the North. „I knew where she was. I knew she was sitting at the station waiting for the train to Prague. I went there to get her and took her home. And Hella came to the cemetery for me. I buried a very dear person there. She brought me tinned fish so I could eat something. She knew she’d find me at the cemetery. And just the same, I went to the station every night to get her.“
Tamara Petkevich described both scenes, both rescue missions – one to the station, the other to the cemetery – separately in her prose. There was only a fleeting mention of Hella’s nightly escapes: „She was restless and irrepressible, she did not know how to wait or suffer. Her dictatorial and rebellious disposition sometimes took on terrible forms. Sometimes she was difficult. […] I loved Hella more than she loved me. No one was as lonely as she was, my dear Hella. Even her foreign beauty was unappreciated here. No one told her how beautiful she was. Sometimes she disappeared in the evenings. I found her on the platform of our pitiful railway station. […] Hella dreamed of going to Prague.“
However, these testimonies – whether spoken or printed – provided mere hints. Guesses as to what preceded the terror blazing in Hella’s black eyes in the photograph with the dahlias. They explained nothing. It was as if even words only recreated images – extremely impressive but equally silent and motionless as the photographs.
A bright northern night. A deserted train station. An abandoned platform with a wooden bench. Hella sitting on the bench. Lost. Confused. Distraught. She’s waiting for the train. The train to Prague. The train that isn’t coming. The train that will never come.
A cemetery. A grave. A cross on the grave. A fence around the grave. Flowers sat on a mound of dirt inside the enclosure. Next to it, a wooden bench. Tamara is sitting on the bench. Hella is leaning over Tamara. In one hand she holds a fork, a tin can in the other. She’s feeding Tamara fish.
In her book, Tamara Petkevich attached Hella’s unexpectedly insistent speech to the picture from the cemetery. An order interspersed with an imploringly hopeless question. She made the mute and static scene ring and set it in motion. „Eat… eat! Or I’ll lie down here and die. You don’t want that, do you, my Tomika? I’ll do it in no time. My son and my sister are in another country. And I’ll never see them again. My husband was executed. And it’s my fault. How will we live, Tomika? Is it even necessary?“
Perhaps it was here, in the stark directness of the speech, in the urgent words about loved ones lost forever – son, sister, husband – that the explanation for the voiceless scream and the horror blazing in Hella’s black, strange eyes in the photograph with the dahlias seemed to lie. Perhaps the words Tamara Petkevich had put into Hella’s mouth sounded quite different in reality. They probably did. For it seems that Hella never had a son, that she knew nothing of her husband’s tragic fate at that time, so shortly after her release, when she was not allowed to go to any of the thirty-nine major Soviet cities and had to stay in the North. However, the details were not important yet. The words put in quotation marks, in Hella’s mouth, led me to start looking into her actual direct speech. Words that she spoke about herself.
And there was such a speech. A woman who had hitherto existed only through the words of others, in other people’s literary works – whether as the inspiration for Weil’s heroine or as a character in Tamara Petkevich’s memoir – this woman was herself a writer, a Russian writer.
„A Russian pisatelnitsa“ Hella is said to have ironically quipped, mercilessly mangling Russian words in a thick Czech accent while laughing in a hoarse voice. That was back in the camp. Back then, she wrote down poems on all sorts of scraps of paper. In free verse, in German. And because of this material that didn’t hold together, scattered all over the place, she casually called them notes – in German, lose Blätter, loose-leaf notes.
She spoke directly – in a foreign, Russian language – about herself in her own memoir, which she began to write in the second half of the 1950s, after she could definitively leave exile, after she was rehabilitated, after she was allowed to return to Moscow, to a twelve-square-metre room in a communal apartment she was given on Pervaya Cheryomushkinskaya Street (later Dmitry Ulyanov Street) on top of her cleared name. She began to write at the instigation of her acquaintances, two St Petersburg women writers. It was meant to be a type of therapy – a treatment for the illness that had taken root in Hella’s mind from the day of her arrest, and perhaps much earlier, and which remained with her for life despite repeated stays in the psychiatric hospital (in Solovyovka, as is mentioned many times in her letters). She was to write herself out of everything she had gone through, out of all her traumas. She was to write about interwar Czechoslovakia, about how she had fallen for the communist ideals, about red Moscow full of propaganda, about the Moscow of strangers and favoured experts, about the haze of foreign goods and self-importance, about the Comintern, which Stalin decided to gradually dismantle in 1937, about how the violent whirlwind also swept her and her husband away, about how she tried to drown herself in the northern Vychegda river during the transport to the camp, about how her fellow prisoners – otherwise indifferent and numb, the same prisoners as herself – saved her from death in the icy water and from the subsequent bullet for this attempted „escape.“ She should have written about all of it. She should have written about so much more. But with the exception of the last incident, the jump from the freight tugboat, she had disregarded it all, pushed it out of her mind, letting it resound as a very distant, barely audible echo, at most. She had failed in her therapeutic task. Instead of a healing memoir, she wrote heart-wrenching prose.
Translated by Alžběta Belánová