“Did you have any food in the house?” Nathalie asked.
But I wanted to talk about Babel. “Gronfein and his wife couldn’t have blocked the marriage, but were they happy about having Babel as a son-in-law?”
“They were not very enthusiastic.”
And to get even, Babel had manufactured his own fairy tale about grabbing Zhenya away from Gronfein like some mountain chief.
“There were never any clashes,” Nathalie said. “Mother adored her father,” but her own mother was deeply depressed. Zhenya hadn’t been the youngest child. There was another daughter, Marusia, who died at ten, before Babel got to Kiev. And after Marusia disappeared, Berta “sank into a depression that she never came out of.”
She had one solace—her son Lev (Lyova), a “golden boy” and ne’er-do-well who left for the United States in 1919. Gronfein gave him a belt filled with gold coins as his final legacy from a Soviet Union that had stripped him of his means.
The gold coins must have gone to his head. I imagined Lyova squandering millions in Manhattan while he danced cheek to cheek with Zelda Fitzgerald. “He was a ladies’ man,” Nathalie said. “I’m told he was very handsome. He did become wealthy, but he lost everything, started all over again, and at the end of his life he had nothing.”
And it’s much more than a coincidence that “Lyovka” is Benya Krik’s younger brother in Sunset, Babel’s first play. Lyovka is the closest thing to a Cossack, a horse soldier on leave from the tsar’s own cavalry. “A Jew who climbs onto a horse stops being a Jew and becomes a Russian,” Lyovka says at the beginning of the play. And Benya’s father, Mendel Krik, still king of the horse carters at sixty-two, happens to fall in love with a twenty-year-old beauty named Marusia and is willing to run off to Bessarabia and ruin his family over her. It seems as if all of Babel’s fiction is derived from one continuous family, his own. . . .
Zhenya loved to reminisce about her father. Gronfein was fearless. “He would put his passport in his pocket and travel throughout Europe” without ever showing it to a single border guard, “at a time when you needed a visa to go around the corner.”
But he didn’t travel much after the Revolution. “He lost everything and was made the concierge of his own building”—a dvornik. He managed to save a string of pearls—“real pearls. And in those days,” Nathalie reminded me, “duchesses and tsarinas always had pearls down to their knees.”
And Babel’s own pearls, pearls that he hid? He lived inside language, lived inside myth, settled there, a Headless Man whose single desire was to turn his own existence into a wondrous tale.
BABEL WITH LITTLE NATHALIE IN 1932
Chapter Two
THE HEADLESS MAN, PART II
1.
ANOTHER STORYTELLER, Jorge Luis Borges, whose habit of telling stories was as bewildering as Isaac Babel’s, once said: “Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”
And that’s why Babel is so hard to imitate. He must have already been a writer at five or six, or at least recognized that words had their own powerful play. He would soon become a mind traveler, as merciless as myth, sucking in whatever happened to him. But right up to the Revolution this Headless Man had no real language of his own. Just as his juvenilia must have been pastiches of Maupassant, his first stories were pastiches of Gorky, Gogol, and Chekhov. “Mama, Rima, and Alla,” which Gorky published in Letopis, takes place in a Moscow that Babel knew little about. It features a martyred landlady and her two daughters, and seems to be told in several different voices, none of which belongs to Babel.
But it hardly matters, since Babel will later sanctify his first visit to Letopis in a second autobiographical fragment. “I went to see [Gorky] on Bolshaya Monetnaya Street. My heart kept pounding, then stopping dead.”
Gorky agrees to read Babel’s stories, and the Headless Man comes back in three days. “There are small nails [ . . . ] and there are nails as large as a finger,” Gorky says, bringing a “long, powerful, delicately chiseled finger” up to Babel’s eyes. “A writer’s path, dear dreamer [ . . . ] is strewn with nails, mostly of the larger sort. You will have to walk upon them barefoot and they’ll make you bleed. And with each year the blood will flow more freely.”
And so the Headless Man walked on nails for Maxim Gorky. But nothing happened. And though he would insist upon the image of Gorky as his ultimate master, the bard and barefoot boy of Nizhni Novgorod had very little to teach him. Gorky’s own rude style was good for Maxim Gorky, but his writing was humorless and without a single mask. Babel had a better teacher— himself.
It’s 1920. He’s living in Odessa with his bride and serving in the Gubkon (Provisional Party Committee). Sergei Ingulov, secretary of the Party Committee, enlists him as a war correspondent with the news service that would later turn into TASS. To blunt his Jewishness, Babel conspires with Ingulov to “wear” a Russian name, Kiril Vassilevich Lyutov. It’s under this pseudonym that Babel is assigned to the Sixth Division of General Budenny’s First Cavalry, with its Cossack warriors, as a writer for Krasny Kavalerist (“Red Cavalryman”), “our merciless newspaper [ . . . ], which every fighting man in the front lines wants to read, and after that with heroic spirit he hews down the Poles” (“A Letter”).
Hiding within his Russian mask, he writes about Polish atrocities that have to be avenged by the Kavalerists. “Beat them, Red Fighters, clobber them to death, if it is the last thing you do! Right away! This minute! Now!” (“The Knights of Civilization”).
In “Murderers Who Have Yet to Be Clubbed to Death,” he tells us of the renegade Cossack captain Yakovlev, who sells himself to the Poles and pillages one little town after the other, leaving behind the corpses of “commissars, Yids, and Red Army soldiers [ . . . ] The horror of the Middle Ages pales in comparison to the bestiality of the Yakovlev bandits.”
Lyutov is like a cut-rate Homer who loves to harangue. The horrors he describes don’t even have the resonance of a good battle report. Kiril is a propagandist, put there to demonize the enemy. His sentences are overloaded, crowded with detail, and there isn’t the least bit of space where the reader can dream on his own. But Kavalerists aren’t meant to imagine. And Kiril embellishes every detail.
I don’t blame Babel. He’s writing for a military paper and has to fire up the troops, get them to fight. He has to dwarf his own sensibilities, become K. Lyutov, who rides on the propaganda train like a privileged character when he isn’t out in the field taking notes as he bumps along on his nag, or has his own tachanka—“a buggy with a machine gun mounted on its back.”
But there were two Babels riding on that tachanka, in the saddle, or on the propaganda train—one was that man bearing the documents of Kiril Lyutov, member of a mythic army on horseback that was prepared to free Poland from its Christ-loving, feudal oppressors as the first campaign to “export” Communism, and the other was a secretive writer keeping a diary in which he could shed the mask of Kiril. Nathalie Babel says that her father’s persona, so elusive in his fiction, “is very clear” in the diary. But I’m not convinced. She claims that Babel, who’d never been on a horse, rode fifty miles on his first day with the Kavalerists, and that he scribbled the diary from the vantage point of his saddle. But the diary was as fictive as anything Babel wrote, whether he composed it on the back of a horse or not; it was, in fact, Babel’s real beginning as a writer, the discovery of a voice that was for the first time Babelesque— with leaps of syntax, lyrical disconnections, as if he were tearing at language itself with a machine gun mounted on a murderous yet playful tachanka that could swallow up whole paragraphs and spit back sentences with missing pieces that cohered into a new design. It was no simple baptism under fire, with Babel studying the cruelty of war and catching the colors of war; rather, it was the diary of a writer forced to l
ive in the present tense and finding his own savage shorthand that could seize the moment, render its maddening simultaneity, the ugliness and beauty that whirled in front of his eyes.
Babel’s telegraphic style didn’t come from the expediency of a man with saddle sores, who was writing on the run. It was the imaginative stop-and-go of someone who was learning to see in another way, where feelings had to be locked into the images that were spinning in his head. The little cavalryman from Odessa found himself with a split in his psyche—editorializing, gathering clichés aboard the propaganda train as Kiril Lyutov, and this same Kiril, who had to hide his Jewish identity from his Cossack “cousins” on the train and in the field, learning to tuck the almost melodic slaughter of Cossacks, Jews, and Poles into his own private landscape with a concise, brutal poetry, as he wore his Kavalerist uniform among the starving Jews of the shtetl, played at being Kiril when he didn’t really have to play. . . .
The first entry, from June 3, 1920 (fifty-four pages are missing), finds Lyutov on the propaganda train, with its printing press and radio station sitting right near the front lines, so that the Red troopers can have a constant dose of ideology. And this is how Babel describes his fellow reporters on Krasny Kavalerist: “Lanky Zhukov, voracious Topolnik, the whole editorial crew unbelievably dirty people.”
There was little comfort on the train. “Bad tea in borrowed mess cans.” He enters the train’s kitchen and strings together a series of nouns that will become the signature of his diary, the naming of things that have their own finality and force—“kasha, noon, sweat.” The future author of Red Cavalry scribbles a note to himself: “describe the soldiers and women, fat, fed, sleepy.”
Riding with Cossacks, he tells us in his shorthand: “Jewish pogrom, cut off beards, they [the Poles] always do. . . .”
At Zhitomir, in the Ukraine: “Night on the boulevard. The hunt for women.” Babel becomes one more predator in the middle of this curious Cossack crusade. “Stars, night over the shtetl. A tall Cossack with an earring and a cap with a white top.” He haunts the shtetl, repelled by the poverty, the forlorn faces, the smell of excrement, yet drawn to these Ukrainian Jews, so unlike the round and jolly worshipers at the Brodsky Synagogue in Odessa. “Discussion with Jews, my people, they think I’m Russian. . . .”
His truck breaks down during the journey to another town. “Cherries, I sleep, sweat in the sun.” A medical assistant becomes the local celebrity: “In exchange for treatment women offered him their services, roasted chicken, and themselves.”
He’s billeted with a Jewish family, the Khasts, becomes a spy in their house, as “they think I don’t understand Yiddish.” He’s a tin Cossack, one more hollow man. “I drink tea incessantly and sweat like a beast.”
He’s been promised his own tachanka. He borrows a horse and goes riding. “The sturdy huts glitter in the sun, roof tiles, iron, stones, apples, the stone schoolhouse”—objects dance around him with their own lyric pull, as if he’s about to rediscover the world. And he offers the multiplicity of a universe in the shards of a sentence: “A Pole was caught in the rye, they hunted him down like an animal, wide fields, scarlet sun, golden fog, swaying grain . . .”
Rather than describe the destruction of an entire town, he focuses on a single victim: “Next to one of the huts lies a slaughtered cow that has only recently calved. Her bluish teats lying on the ground, just skin. An indescribable pity! A murdered young mother.”
He’s struck again and again by the Cossacks’ grace and allure: “Describe their horses’ garb, sabers in red velvet, curved sabers, vests, carpets over their saddles. Dressed poorly, though each of them has ten service jackets—it’s doubtless a matter of chic.”
Odessa is the underlying backdrop to so much of what he sees as he rides deeper into the Pale: “These Jews are like paintings: lanky, silent, long-bearded, not like ours, fat and jovial.”
The carnage begins to crazy him, fill him with longings and desires: “Two girls are playing in the water, a strange, almost irrepressible urge to talk dirty, rough, slippery words.”
But these “rough, slippery words” will also excite his own writing, empower him like a magician who can control the landscape, reorder it. Here he’s describing a rape like some perverse idyll with which he can mask the pain. A Cossack “throws himself” on the Jewish bride of a one-eyed man’s son “while their cart is being requisitioned, an incredible bout of cursing, the soldiers are eating meat out of pots, she, I will scream, her face, he pushes her against the wall . . .”
Whatever his flights of fancy, with his uniform and his sword, Babel realizes that he has no place among “the Cossacks, the marauding, the vanguard’s vanguard. I don’t belong.” Yet he will make himself belong. Language will wed him to the carpets the Cossacks wear on their saddles; language will bring him closer to their lust: “Late night, red flag, silence, Red Army fighters thirsting for women.”
Language will reveal the incongruity of everything, the sad wonder of what he was able to see: “I’m staying in a poor hut where a son with a big head plays the violin.”
He has a sense of the Apocalypse, like some biblical prophet: “All our fighters: velvet caps, rapes, Cossack forelocks, battle, Revolution, and syphilis. The whole of Galicia is infected.”
But he can move from the vast to the minuscule in the blink of an eye, point to the deliverance of a man on a horse. “We fly up the high road to Brody, I rock and sleep.” And he can limit or enlarge a whole country, define Poland as “glittering garments draped over a decrepit body.”
His technique is close to Eisen’s montage: clashing images that multiply and manufacture stories: “I’m an outsider, in long trousers, not one of them, I am lonely, we ride on. . . .”
The shtetl, with its mystery and stink, disturbs him as much as any battle. He scuttles into a synagogue. “I pray, bare walls, some soldier or other is swiping the electric light bulbs.”
2.
EVEN AS HE bares himself, it’s hard to figure Babel out. We begin to realize that “Lyutov” isn’t only a mask. Babel is Lyutov sometimes, even in the privacy of his scribbles. And it’s this curious jumping from persona to persona that makes the diary so evocative and difficult to pin down.
As usual, his Avtobiographiya is all wrong. It wasn’t in 1923 that he taught himself to write. It was during the months when he had his own tachanka and a piebald horse and a seat on the propaganda train, where he not only kept his diary but also prepared sketches for the memoir or tales he intended to write. The sketches are much more mannered, artful, and schematic, the writer looking into his own writerly mirror. “A poem in prose” is one of his headings. “We gallop off—I keep throwing books away—a piece of my soul.”
That kind of preciousness doesn’t enter the diary, where Babel surprises us as much as he surprises himself. The shtetl is a more powerful obsession and motif than the Cossacks themselves. “I roam about the shtetl, there is pitiful, powerful, undying life inside the Jewish hovels, young ladies in white stockings, long coats, so few fat people.”
—so few fat people.
The images haunt him and haunt us. Babel’s ride into the Pale with the Red Cavalry must have dislodged his many masks, educated him more than any summons from Maxim Gorky to go into the world—the shtetl was the closing off of the world, a psychic and cultural imprisonment, a terrible laceration as these hovel dwellers were caught between the Cossacks and the Poles. And Babel couldn’t escape them, not even in his Cossack guise, with a sword clattering between his legs. And it is this lament that informs the diary, the strange religious power of the Pale— young ladies in white stockings—that will mark Babel, make him much, much more than a Headless Man.
Chapter Three
KIRIL LYUTOV
1.
IT’S 2055. We’re in Washington, D.C. I can recognize most of the monuments, but something is amiss: cars don’t move across horizontal highways anymore; they dart along gravitational grids, while choppers that look like gian
t eraser wheels can land anywhere on a dime. It’s practically a perfect world, at least on the outside. The homicide rate has gone down to zero, thanks to the Department of Precrime in D.C. Murders that might have happened in the immediate future can be previsualized by the “Precogs,” oracles who live in a huge round tub called the Temple. There are three of them, male twins, Dash (for Dashiell) and Arthur (for Arthur Conan Doyle), and their “sister,” Agatha (for Agatha Christie, of course), who’s much brighter than the twins and is a kind of super sibyl. Their memory streams—the images they produce in their swollen heads— can be interpreted by detectives, who then ride on their eraser wheels to the precrime scene and catch the “culprit.” But something happens to John Anderton (Tom Cruise), chief of the precrime squad. The oracles name him as the next murderer-to-be. Realizing that he’s been set up, Anderton steals the sibyl from her tub, and tries to unravel the reason for his own preselection. Thus you have the essentials of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), a futuristic film noir that feels frighteningly close to certain premises about crime in the twenty-first century. “We’re more like clergy than cops,” say the members of Anderton’s squad.
But it’s Agatha who interests me most. Played by Samantha Morton with the eerie charm of an actual sibyl, she curls up in Anderton’s car and asks, “Is it now?”
John doesn’t get her, and neither do we. “Is it now?” Agatha asks again. And we begin to realize her dilemma. Bottled up in her tub, with her brain navigating like mad into the near future, she’s lost the present tense.
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