“frightened of meeting him”: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, 15.
“Kolya darling, I earnestly beg you”: Evgenia Yezhova, in Radzinsky, 417.
“There isn’t a single”: Conquest, 300.
“Again and again”: Isaac Babel, The Lonely Years, 334.
Budenny doesn’t believe her: Radzinsky, 387.
“and the slightest indiscretion”: Nathalie Babel, in Isaac Babel, You Must Know Everything, 205.
“I aim at a reader”: Isaac Babel, in ibid., 220.
“I feel like a living corpse”: Yezhova, in Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, 170.
“Everything that Maupassant”: Isaac Babel, in Pirozhkova, 161.
“The worst part of this”: Isaac Babel, in ibid., 113.
“of an important Chekist”: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 5.
“If you are fundamentally flawed”: Isaac Babel, in Shentalinsky, 51.
“Salvation came to me”: Isaac Babel, in ibid., 61.
“bottomless grave number 1”: Radzinsky, 345.
“Tell Stalin that I shall die”: Nikolai Yezhov, in ibid., 418.
“Even in death she is here”: Shentalinsky, 70.
And Budenny, on his white horse: Radzinsky, 468.
BABEL’S BRIDE
“I told him that my mother”: Nathalie Babel, afterword to The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 1027.
“We were homeless”: Ibid., 1034.
“It has remained”: Ibid., 1035.
“He was a clever performer”: Shentalinsky, 35.
“Soviet writers when they arrived”: Isaac Babel, in ibid., 41.
“It was not only in his”: Ehrenburg, “The Wise Rabbi,” 74–75.
“Yezhov is only the instrument”: Isaac Babel, You Must Know Everything, 232.
“and was now living”: Nathalie Babel, afterword to The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 1036.
“Soviet plants”: Ibid., 1040.
“had been divorced”: Ibid., 1041.
“What I do know”: Ibid.
“In spite of my reluctance”: Ibid., 1051.
“I saw a woman”: Nathalie Babel, introduction to The Lonely Years, xxii.
“Ehrenburg undoubtedly considered”: Nathalie Babel, afterword to The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 1048.
“He understood the Revolution”: Ehrenburg, “The Wise Rabbi,” 75.
“Creativity does not dwell”: Isaac Babel, The Lonely Years, xxiv.
AFTERWARD
“with a pugnacious nose”: Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel, 66.
“Like a rocket”: Ibid., 80.
“It is to books”: Gorky, in ibid., 190.
“culture’s psalm-singer”: Leon Trotsky, in ibid., 190.
“The bourgeoisie kill”: Grigori Zinoviev, in ibid., 198.
“but its excrement”: Lenin, in Shentalinsky, 229.
“would not bite”: Levin, 205.
“There is something frightening”: Gorky, in Shentalinsky, 229.
“Alexey Maximovich”: Lenin, in Levin, 208.
“dining on diamonds”: Gorky, in Shentalinsky, 229.
“Mary Pickford”: Ibid., 244.
“We are engaged in trifles”: Ibid., 273.
“His laconism is”: Gorky, in Carden, 191.
“After every story”: Hallett, 21.
BABEL’S BRIDE: A LAST LOOK
1.
IN BABEL’S COMPLETE WORKS, on page 1025, the reader will fall upon a photograph of “Makhno” and the master in Paris, circa 1932. There’s no question of pedigree—father and daughter have the same face, the same frown, the same gentle surliness, the same truculence against the world, as if they composed a colossal band of two, complete as Makhno’s guerrillas or the Red Cavalry. Babel is wearing a homburg of sorts, glasses glued to his nose; Nathalie has some kind of cloche, white gloves, white socks, white shoes, and a little coat with a cape. She’s sitting on the fence of a garden or square, with Babel holding her, while she’s holding what looks like a checkered bag. . . .
It was this melodic line that I wanted to revive when I went looking for Makhno in Washington, D.C. I was like some crazy picador preparing to prod Nathalie’s memory, obliging her to be little Natasha again, posing with her dad, to recall the frowns below the tilted line of her cloche. I expected something miraculous from Makhno, so that I could describe that tiny guerrilla waltzing with the master in some public garden. She was barely three when Babel arrived like a Russian Yankee Doodle prepared to conquer Paris. She remembered nothing at all. I panicked. I begged for one little detail, a ghostly remembrance spun out of some magic tissue of the past. But I wasn’t dealing with a sentimental idiot. She still had the frown that Babel would wear his entire life—that mark of the born intelligence man. And why the hell was I so severe? I couldn’t summon up a single memory from the time I was three. It would be no different if Isaac Babel had been my dad. . . .
All right, I’d accept a short novel from Nathalie about Babel’s final trip to Paris, a Proustian feast with madeleines and all, something I could dip into the tea that Nathalie served in Russian cups. But there were no madeleines in her memory; Babel only danced around a bit like the ghost that he was, danced in and out of Nathalie’s dreams. It was 1935. “I remember the excitement of my mother, how agitated she was. She was telling me a lot about it [her father’s imminent arrival]. I was both shy and aggressive. . . . I had never seen a man in my mother’s bed. [Of] that I have an image quite clear.”
And she recalled Babel’s departure through the prism of her mother. “As excited and happy as she was before, she was very downcast after [he left].” I probed and probed like a picador, and Makhno came up with one more memory. “My mother is at the sink, in our apartment, my father is sitting at the table with me. All of a sudden she starts to cry. The knife she was using went through her hand. She was opening oysters. I remember him jumping, grabbing her arm. I must have been very shocked. . . . I remember her with a bandaged hand. That moment when she cried and he jumped. I was petrified.”
And Nathalie played with her own reminiscences. “Why was she opening the oysters? She probably assumed all the household functions. She did all the shlepping.”
Nathalie could not recollect any other man in her mother’s bed. “She spoke about him all my life.” Nathalie kept asking: “Why isn’t my father with us?” And Zhenya’s usual answer: he couldn’t leave Russia and his writing. It must have angered such a little girl: Issya was too busy with his writing to be with her. And she would resist her father’s writing for a long, long time. After she arrived in America (to teach French at Barnard in 1961), and Babel had become a magical name in New York, a man happened to stare at her during a dinner party and say, “ ‘I’m sitting next to an historical monument.’ It was one of the things that hurt me. I didn’t want to hear about my father. I was rebelling.”
And Nathalie recalled the saddest day in her mother’s life. It was in the summer of 1940. “She burned Isaac’s letters as the Germans were crossing the Maginot line. She knew what revolution and occupation meant” and what the Germans might do to Nathalie if they ever found Babel’s letters, the same Babel whose books had been burnt by Nazis in Berlin. “We lived in a pavillon, a little house [with a fireplace in one of the rooms]. I walked into the room and saw my mother crying and feeding the letters into the fireplace. I stood rooted to the ground. I knew something important was happening. That was imprinted in my brain. I remember the position of the fireplace in the room. I remember the drops of water on the windowpanes [in the summer heat].”
In 1941, Nathalie and her mother found themselves in the west of France, in the provincial city of Niort. And Zhenya was arrested a few months before Nathalie’s twelfth birthday. The local French police had rounded up all the Russian women in Niort (a dozen or so) and deposited them in the local jail, since Russians in occupied France were considered “politically dangerous” after the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The other wo
men were freed, but not Zhenya—the wife of a celebrated Soviet writer who was also a youpin, a Yid. Nathalie could talk to her mother only across a ditch. “If you don’t get me out right away, I will perish,” Zhenya said to her daughter in Russian, her words floating across a ditch that belonged in a surreal movie set.
Nathalie’s life had become surreal. She was also alone. She went to the mayor, she went to the police. No one could help her. Finally she went to the German Kommandant of Niort, who was married to an Englishwoman and was himself of French ancestry. The Kommandant welcomed Nathalie into his office, dismissed his only aide, and had a tête-à-tête with his little petitioner, who had all the pluck in the world. “I told him that my mother was innocent, that I had no one else, and that he had to let her go.”
Zhenya was released in two days, and mother and daughter spent four years in Niort like a pair of lost birds. “We were homeless, penniless, and displaced.” Nathalie never went back to Niort. “It has remained for me a place out of time, out of space, out of tangible reality.” Yet without her realizing it, Niort would give Nathalie a certain strength—it was a kind of zero degree where all writers start, an undressed landscape where she could not pretend to hide, a black well that would free her to write about her father and herself, a reverse Moldavanka, a strange dark void where the imagination sometimes dwells. . . .
2.
I WAS ATTACHED to Zhenya, felt she had formed Babel in some crucial way, spent her whole life mourning a husband she had lost to another country (Soviet Russia), to another woman (first Tamara and then Antonina), and to the hidden language of his own craft. Nathalie had given interview after interview, but nobody had bothered to ask about her mother. “To me she belongs to that generation of people who came just before or after the Revolution and whose life was a tragedy. . . . My feelings for my mother are overshadowed by her death. Her death is devastating to me. I mourned for years. Her influence was very strong, even after she was gone.”
I wanted to know what she was like, to feel her through Natasha’s eyes. “Her friends called her Countess—my mother was extremely dignified. She obviously had a great appeal to people. She was also very intransigent, moralistic, probably a little prudish. But when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I was jealous [of her].” The boys Nathalie brought home “were quickly more interested in my mother than in me.”
But she’d come to Paris in 1925 as a painter, and I didn’t hear one peep about her paintings—we have photos of Zhenya and Babel at a beach in Belgium, photos of Babel and Maria, who’s wearing a white cloche, photos of Babel at Molodenovo, with a beautiful black horse behind him, but not one image of Zhenya’s art. “She never had enough money to buy paint.” Much of Zhenya’s work was lost when she and Nathalie had to leave their pavillon in Plessis Robinson (a suburb south of Paris), and move to Niort, but Nathalie did have a painting and a drawing that her mother had done after the war. The drawing was of Nathalie’s first love, a boy named Emmanuel, who was seven or eight years older than she. I smiled my own novelist’s smile—Nathalie, hiding from a father who had hid himself from her, had chosen as her first love a boy with her father’s patronymic (Emmanuelovich). “She [Zhenya] and Emmanuel had a very nice relation, except when it came to sex” (that is, Nathalie’s own sexuality). But the portrait of Emmanuel startled me. He had a delicate, androgynous face, with a curl over one eye. And I wondered if Zhenya had softened his features on purpose, to minimize him in a magical way, remove any male hook he might have had. . . .
The painting was even more mysterious. It was the portrait of a woman and child, done before the war. The woman’s eyes are nearly closed; the child is wearing a red scarf, leaning against the woman; both have brown hair; we can see only one of the child’s eyes. The sex of the child is vague—could be a boy or a girl. The child seems troubled; the woman has a hand near her heart. The background is blue-white, but the painting has its own treasure—a secret painting on its backside, a pentimento from an earlier period. It looks like a Russian village. Was it a glimpse of Zhenya’s own childhood in the Ukraine? Nathalie didn’t have a clue. . . .
We got onto the subject of Ilya Ehrenburg, who had been courageous in resurrecting Babel’s work during the 1950s, when Babel was still a no-no of Russian literature. Ehrenburg’s own career was deeply ambiguous. He’d survived the Yezhovshchina and Stalin’s other purges, and should have been shot for having lived among foreigners so long—Stalin distrusted anyone who’d been abroad, even prisoners of war—but Ilya would become the Boss’s favorite columnist during World War II, and his dispatches about the fall of France put Soviet readers under his spell. Ehrenburg had walked a much simpler tightrope than Isaac Babel. Or as Vasily Shentalinsky says: “He was a clever performer” who managed to “outlive all his friends.” He was Izvestia’s man in Paris, its window onto the West, and could champion writers such as Hemingway and Malraux without threat of punishment. He was a kind of court jester who considered himself “Cultural Ambassador of the Soviet Union.” And as Babel observed to his inquisitors at the Lubyanka: “Soviet writers when they arrived in Paris always visited Ehrenburg first of all. Acquainting them with the city, he would ‘instruct’ them as he thought best,” like a handmaiden . . . or a watchdog.
But he was always devoted to Babel, loved his idiosyncrasies: “It was not only in his appearance that Babel was unlike a writer, he also lived differently. He did not have mahogany furniture, or bookcases, or a secretaire. He even did without a desk and wrote on a kitchen table; at Molodenovo, where he rented a room with the village cobbler Ivan Karpovich, he used a joiner’s bench.”
Once, during the Yezhovshchina, while they were sitting in the restaurant of Moscow’s Metropole Hotel, with the band playing and dancers swirling near the tables, Babel leaned over to him and whispered: “Yezhov is only the instrument.” And Ehrenburg, like everyone else in the Soviet Union, shivered inside his pants. But perhaps he had a little less to shiver about. His own writing never lived near the razor’s edge. He wasn’t capable of cutting through the bone, like Babel could. His whole oeuvre was one vast straight line with a couple of bumps. . . .
But Ilya himself was much more complex. He was a Nabokovian character who positioned himself between Isaac and Zhenya and played out his own curious dance. In 1946, while still living in Niort, Zhenya was summoned to Paris: Ilya wanted to see her. She’d known him since her early days in Paris. “When my mother arrived, she lived in a hotel where there were many Russians. Ehrenburg lived in the same hotel.” Nathalie believes that Ehrenburg tried to sleep with her. “Mother wasn’t delicate in turning him down. She probably hurt his feelings—he never forgave her.” And from that point on “they obviously hated each other.” But she met with Ehrenburg. And this is when he began to sin against Zhenya and Babel himself. He told her that Babel was still alive, that he’d spent the war in exile “and was now living under surveillance not far from Moscow.”
Who had instructed him to deliver such a monstrous lie? Was it his Soviet handlers, or the Boss himself? Stalin was always meddling, and the Boss couldn’t afford to appear as the executioner of Isaac Babel, one of the rare Soviet writers with a readership in the West. And let’s suppose that Ehrenburg was also duped, that he was as blind as his own message, but did he really believe that Babel, or his ghost, was coming back?
Ilya wasn’t the only messenger. Total strangers began to stop Zhenya in the street, tell her tales about Babel’s life in some Siberian prison. Zhenya soon realized that there was nothing random about these little strangers, who were probably “Soviet plants.”
Zhenya would meet with Ehrenburg again, in 1956, while she herself was quite ill, suffering from cancer. Ilya told her that Babel had been “rehabilitated,” that he was no longer an enemy of the people, that he could be read in the Soviet Union, that his name would miraculously reappear in encyclopedias and schoolbooks; Ilya wanted Zhenya to sign a paper certifying that she and Babel “had been divorced since before the war.” Whose agent wa
s he this time? The Boss was already dead. And Ilya knew that Zhenya and Isaac had never been divorced. He then told her that Babel had a “second wife” and a daughter.
Zhenya asked for the name of this child, and Ehrenburg answered with incredible cruelty: “Natasha.” He meant to wound her, make her feel that Babel had duplicated her life with another woman, giving him two daughters with an identical name, as if to rob Zhenya of her own existence. Nathalie is kind enough to consider that Ehrenburg might have made a slip of the tongue. “What I do know is that my mother then spat in his face and fainted.”
3.
IN THE EARLY SIXTIES, while she was in New York, Nathalie was approached by an American publisher to edit a collection of letters by Babel to his mother and sister. She was reluctant at first. But no one else could identify all the names mentioned in the letters—no one else could talk about Lyova, the lost uncle in America, or Maria’s husband, or the particulars surrounding Babel’s “crazy” mother-in-law. And in preparation, Nathalie began to reread all of Babel’s stories; she could revisit her own childhood, when Zhenya would sing the stories to her like lullabies. It was pure romance, as if Nathalie had fallen in love with her father again, though the love had always been buried somewhere. And Makhno, the little guerrilla whom Babel had discovered in his daughter, began to devote herself to Babel and all his contradictions. “In spite of my reluctance, and even a pathological resistance, my father simply caught up with me.” And she’s been trying to catch up with him ever since, presenting Babel with his wonders and his warts to each new generation of American readers.
The two long essays she’s written about him (from The Lonely Years and The Complete Works) are marvels of their own, love letters to Isaac (and his readers) that deepen the details of his life—Nathalie introduces Babel’s own father as “a man of imposing physique and impetuous nature”—but still retain the sting of a daughter who had to travel very far to find Isaac. “Makhno” is never sentimental when she writes about Babel or herself—she has lived in silence and secrecy, like her father. And after finishing both essays, we’re left with an almost magical melancholy and the feeling that in order to complete her own journey with Babel, she will have to “return” to Niort again and again, reach into that dark well somewhere in her psyche. . . .
Savage Shorthand Page 15
