The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  Drawn on a small sheet of paper with a red pencil, a pencil red and soft like clay, was Pani Brayna’s laughing face, surrounded by a mass of copper curls.

  “My money!” Shmerel shouted when he saw his wifes portrait. He grabbed a stick and started running after the two men. But as he ran, Shmerel remembered Apoleks pink body with water splashing all over it, the sun in his little courtyard, and the soft sound of the concertina. The taverner s soul drooped, and, putting the stick down, he went back home.

  The following morning, Apolek showed the priest of Novograd his diploma from the Munich Academy, and laid out before him twelve paintings with biblical motifs. They had been painted with oil on boards of thin cypress wood. On his table the Pater saw the burning purple of cloaks, the emerald sparkle of fields, and blossoming blankets of flowers flung over the plains of Palestine.

  Pan Apoleks saints, a multitude of simple, jubilating elders with gray beards and red faces, were encircled by streams of silk and potent evening skies.

  That same day, Pan Apolek was commissioned to do paintings for the new church. And over Benedictine wine, the Pater said to the artist: “Sancta Maria! My dear Pan Apollinarius, from what wondrous realms has your joyous grace descended upon us?”

  Apolek worked with great zeal, and within a month the new church was filled with the bleating of herds, the dusty gold of setting suns, and straw-colored cow udders. Buffaloes with worn hides struggled under their yokes, dogs with pink muzzles trotted in front of the large flocks of sheep, and plump infants rocked in cradles that hung from the trunks of tall palm trees. The tattered brown habits of Franciscan monks crowded around a cradle. The group of wise men stood out with their shining bald heads and their wrinkles red like wounds. The small, wrinkled old face of Pope Leo XIII twinkled with its fox-like smile from the group of wise men, and even the priest of Novograd was there, running the fingers of one hand through the carved beads of a Chinese rosary while with his other, free hand, he blessed the infant Jesus.

  For five months Apolek inched along the walls, the cupola, and the choir stalls, fastened to the wooden scaffolding.

  “You have a predilection for familiar faces, my dear Pan Apolek,” the priest once said, recognizing himself among the wise men and Pan Romuald in the severed head of John the Baptist. The old Pater smiled, and sent a tumbler of cognac up to the artist working beneath the cupola.

  Apolek finished the Last Supper and the Stoning of Mary Magdalene. Then one Sunday he unveiled the walls. The distinguished citizens the priest had invited recognized Janek the lame convert in the Apostle Paul, and in Mary Magdalene Elka, a Jewish girl of unknown parentage and mother of many of the urchins roaming the streets. The distinguished citizens demanded that the blasphemous images be painted over. The priest showered threats over the blasphemer, but Apolek refused to paint over the walls.

  And so an unprecedented war broke out, with the powerful body of the Catholic Church on one side, and the unconcerned icon painter on the other. The war lasted for three decades. The situation almost turned the gentle idler into the founder of a new heresy; in which case he would have been the most whimsical and ludicrous fighter among the many in the slippery and stormy history of the Church of Rome, a fighter roaming the earth in blessed tipsiness with two white mice under his shirt and with a collection of the finest little brushes in his pocket.

  “Fifteen zloty for the Virgin Mary, twenty-five zloty for the Holy Family, and fifty zloty for the Last Supper portraying all the client s family. The client s enemy can be portrayed as Judas Iscariot, for which an extra ten zloty will be added to the bill,” Pan Apolek informed the peasants after he had been thrown out of the Novograd church.

  There was no shortage of commissions. And when a year later the

  archbishop of Zhitomir sent a delegation in response to the frenzied epistles of the Novograd priest, they found the monstrous family portraits, sacrilegious, naive, and flamboyant, in the most impoverished, foul-smelling hovels. Josephs with gray hair neatly parted in the middle, pomaded Jesuses, many-childed village Marys with parted knees. The pictures hung in the icon corners, wreathed with garlands of paper flowers.

  “He has bestowed sainthood upon you people during your lifetime!” the bishop of Dubno and Novokonstantinov shouted at the crowd that had come to defend Apolek. “He has endowed you with the ineffable attributes of the saints, you, thrice fallen into the sin of disobedience, furtive moonshiners, ruthless moneylenders, makers of counterfeit weights, and sellers of your daughters’ innocence!”

  “Your holiness!” lame-footed Witold, the towns cemetery watchman and procurer of stolen goods, then said to the bishop. “Where does our all-forgiving Lord God see truth, and who will explain it to these ignorant villagers? Is there not more truth in the paintings of Pan Apolek, who raises our pride, than in your words that are filled with abuse and tyrannical anger?”

  The shouts of the crowd sent the bishop running. The agitation in the villages threatened the safety of the clerics. The painter who had taken Apoleks place could not work up the courage to paint over Elka and lame Janek. They can still be seen today above a side altar of the Novograd church: Janek, as Saint Paul, a timorous cripple with the shaggy black beard of a village apostate, and Elka as the whore from Magdala, decrepit and crazed, with dancing body and fallen cheeks.

  The battle with the priest lasted three decades. Then the Cossack flood chased the old monk out of his aromatic stone nest, and Apolek— O fickle fortune!—settled into Pani Elizas kitchen. And here I am, a passing guest, imbibing the wine of his conversation in the evenings.

  What do we converse about? About the romantic days of the Polish nobility, the fanatical frenzy of women, the art of Luca della Robbia,8 and the family of the Bethlehem carpenter.

  “There is something I have to tell you, Mr. Clerk,” Apolek tells me secretively before supper.

  “Yes,” I answer. “Go ahead, Apolek, Im listening.”

  But Pan Robacki, the lay brother of the church—stern, gray, bony, and with large ears—is sitting too close. He unfolds a faded screen of silence and animosity before us.

  “I have to tell you, Pan” Apolek whispers, taking me aside, “that Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, was married to Deborah, a Jerusalem girl of low birth—”

  “O, ten czlowiek!”9 Pan Robacki shouts in despair. “This man not dies in his bed! This man the peoples will be killing!”

  “After supper,” Apolek murmurs in a gloomy voice. “After supper, if that will suit you, Mr. Clerk.”

  It suits me. Inflamed by the beginning of Apoleks story, I pace up and down the kitchen waiting for the appointed time. And outside the window night stands like a black column. Outside the window the bristling, dark garden has fallen still. The road to the church flows beneath the moon in a sparkling, milky stream. The earth is covered with a dismal sheen, a necklace of shining berries is draped over the bushes. The aroma of lilacs is clean and strong as alcohol. The seething oily breath of the stove drinks in this fresh poison, killing the stuffy resinous heat of the spruce wood lying about the kitchen floor.

  Apolek is wearing a pink bow tie and threadbare pink trousers, and is puttering about in his corner like a friendly graceful animal. His table is smeared with glue and paint. He is working in quick small movements. A hushed, melodic drumming comes drifting from his corner: it is old Gottfried tapping with his trembling fingers. The blind man is sitting rigidly in the greasy yellow lamplight. His bald head is drooping as he listens to the incessant music of his blindness and the muttering of Apolek, his eternal friend.

  “... And what the priests and the Evangelist Mark and the Evangelist Matthew are telling you, Pan Clerk, is not truth. But truth can be revealed to you, Pan, for I am prepared for fifty marks to paint your portrait in the form of Saint Francis on a background of green and sky. He was a very simple saint, Pan Francis was. And if you have a bride in Russia, Pan Clerk, women love Saint Francis, although not all women, Pan”

  And from his spruce-
wood-scented corner he began telling me the tale of the marriage of Jesus to Deborah. According to Apolek, Deborah already had a bridegroom, a young Israelite who traded in ivory. But Deborahs wedding night ended in bewilderment and tears. The woman was grabbed by fear when she saw her husband approach her bed. Hiccups bulged in her throat and she vomited all the food she had eaten at the wedding table. Shame fell upon Deborah, on her father, her mother, and on all her kin. The bridegroom abandoned her with words of ridicule, and called all the guests together. And Jesus, filled with pity at seeing the anguish of the woman who was thirsting for her husband but also fearing him, donned the robes of the newlywed man and united himself with Deborah as she lay in her vomit. Afterward she went out to the wedding guests, loudly exulting like a woman proud of her fall. And only Jesus stood to the side. His body was drenched with mortal sweat, for the bee of sorrow had stung his heart. He left the banquet hall unnoticed, and went into the desert east of Judea, where John the Baptist awaited him. And Deborah gave birth to her first son. . . .”

  “So where is that son?” I yelled.

  “The priests have hidden him,” Apolek said with gravity, raising his thin, cold finger to his drunkards nose.

  “Pan Artist!” Robacki suddenly shouted, stepping out of the shadows, his gray ears quaking. “What you saying? But this is outrage!” “Tak, tak” Apolek said, cringing and grabbing hold of Gottfried. “Tak,tak,panie.”10

  Apolek pulled the blind man toward the door, but stopped by the doorpost and beckoned me with his finger.

  “Saint Francis with a bird on your sleeve,” he whispered, winking at me. “A dove or a goldfinch, you can choose, Pan Clerk!”

  And he disappeared with his blind eternal friend.

  “Oh, what foolishness!” Robacki, the church lay brother, said. “This man not dies in his bed!”

  Pan Robacki opened his mouth wide and yawned like a cat. I wished him a good night, and went home, to my plundered Jews, to sleep.

  The vagrant moon trailed through the town and I tagged along, nurturing within me unfulfillable dreams and dissonant songs.

  ITALIAN SUN

  Yesterday I was sitting once more under a heated garland of green spruce twigs in Pani Eliza,s servants’ quarters. I sat by the warm, lively, crackling stove, and then returned to my lodgings late at night. Below, in the ravine, the silent Zbrucz rolled its glassy, dark waves.

  The burned-out town—broken columns and the hooks of evil old womens fingers dug into the earth—seemed to me raised into the air, comfortable and unreal like a dream. The naked shine of the moon poured over the town with unquenchable strength. The damp mold of the ruins blossomed like a marble bench on the opera stage. And I waited with anxious soul for Romeo to descend from the clouds, a satin Romeo singing of love, while backstage a dejected electrician waits with his finger on the button to turn off the moon.

  Blue roads flowed past me like rivulets of milk trickling from many breasts. On my way back, I had been dreading running into Sidorov, with whom I shared my room, and who at night brought his hairy paw of dejection down upon me. That night, luckily, harrowed by the milk of the moon, Sidorov did not say a single word to me. I found him writing, surrounded by books. On the table a hunchbacked candle was smoking—the sinister bonfire of dreamers. I sat to the side, dozed, dreams pouncing around me like kittens. And it wasn’t until late that night that I was awakened by an orderly who had come to take Sidorov to headquarters. They left together. I immediately hurried over to the table where Sidorov had been writing, and leafed through his books.

  There was an Italian primer, a print of the Roman Forum, and a street map of Rome. The map was completely marked up with crosses. I leaned over the sheet of paper covered with writing and, with clenched fingers and an expiring heart, read another mans letter. Sidorov, the dejected murderer, tore the pink cotton wool of my imagination to shreds and dragged me into the halls of his judicious insanity. I began reading on the second page, as I did not dare look for the first one:

  • • •

  . . . shot through the lungs, and am a little off my head, or, as Sergey always says, flying mad. Well, when you go mad, idiotically mad, you don’t go, you fly. Anyway, let’s put the horsetail to one side and the jokes to the other. Back to the events of the day, Victoria, my dear friend.

  I took part in a three-month Makhno campaign11—the whole thing a grueling swindle, nothing more! Only Volin is still there. Volin is wearing apostolic raiment and clamoring to be the Lenin of anarchism. Terrible. And Makhno listens to him, runs his fingers through his dusty wire curls, and lets the snake of his peasant grin slither across his rotten teeth. And I’m not all that sure anymore if there isn’t a seed of anarchy in all this, and if we won’t wipe your prosperous noses for you, you self-proclaimed Tsekists from your self-proclaimed Tsekhs,t “made in Kharkov,” your self-proclaimed capital.12 Your strapping heroes prefer not to remember the sins of their anarchist youth, and now laugh at them from the heights of their governmental wisdom! To hell with them!

  Then I ended up in Moscow. How did I end up in Moscow? The boys had treated someone unjustly, something to do with requisitions or something. Well, fool that I am, I defended him. So they let me have it, and rightly so. My wound was not even worth mentioning, but in Moscow, O Victoria, in Moscow I was struck dumb by the misery all around. Every day the hospital nurses would bring me a nibble of kasha. Bridled with reverence, they brought it in on a large tray, and I despised this shock-brigade kasha, this unregimented treatment in regimented Moscow. Then, in the Soviet Council, I ran into a handful of anarchists. All fops and dithering old men! I managed to get all the way to the Kremlin with my plan for some real work. But they patted me on the back and promised to give me a nice deputy position if I changed my ways. I did not change my ways. And what came next? Next came the front, the Red Cavalry, and the damn soldiers stinking of blood and corpses.

  Save me, Victoria! Governmental wisdom is driving me insane, boredom is inebriating me. If you wont help me I will die like a dog without a five-year plan! And who wants a worker to die unplanned? Surely not you, Victoria, my bride who will never be my wife. See, I’m becoming maudlin again, damn it to hell!

  But lets get to the point now. The army bores me. I cannot ride because of my wound, which means I cannot fight. Use your connections, Victoria, have them send me to Italy! I am studying the language, and Til be speaking it within two months. The land down there is smoldering, things there are almost ready. All they need is a few shots. One of these shots I shall fire. It is high time that their King be sent to join his ancestors. That is very important. He is a nice old fellow who plays for popularity and has himself photographed with the tamer socialists for family magazines.

  But don’t say anything about shots or kings at the Tseka or the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. They will pat you on the head and coo: “What a romantic he is!” Just tell them plain and simple: “He’s sick, he’s angry, he’s drunk with depression, he wants some Italian sun and he wants some bananas! Does he deserve it, or doesn’t he? He’ll recuperate, and basta And if not, then send him to the Odessa Cheka.13 They’re very sensible there!”

  The things I am writing you are so foolish, so unfairly foolish, Victoria, my dear friend.

  Italy has seeped into my heart like an obsession. Thinking about that country that I have never seen is as sweet to me as a woman’s name, as your name, Victoria. . . .

  I read the letter through and then went to lie down on my dirty, crumpled bed, but sleep would not come. On the other side of the wall the pregnant Jewess was crying heartfelt tears, her lanky husband answering with mumbling groans. They were lamenting the things that had been stolen, and blaming each other for their bad luck. Then, before daybreak, Sidorov came back. The dwindling candle was expiring on the table. He pulled another candle end out of his boot and pressed it with unusual pensiveness onto the drowned wick. Our room was dark, gloomy, everything in it breathed a damp, nocturnal stench, and only th
e window, lit up by the fire of the moon, shone like salvation.

  He came over, my agonizing neighbor, and hid the letter. Bending forward, he sat down at the table and opened the picture album of Rome. The magnificent book with its gilt-edged pages stood opposite his expressionless, olive-green face. The jagged ruins of the Capitol and the Coliseum, lit by the setting sun, glittered over his hunched back. The photograph of the royal family was also there. He had inserted it between the large, glossy pages. On a piece of paper torn from a calendar was the picture of the pleasant, frail King Victor Emmanuel with his black-haired wife, Crown Prince Umberto, and a whole brood of princesses.

  It is night, a night full of distant and painful sounds, with a square of light in the damp darkness, and in this square is Sidorovs deathly face, a lifeless mask hovering over the yellow flame of the candle.

  GEDALI

  Onn the eve of the Sabbath I am always tormented by the dense sorrow of memory. In the past on these evenings, my grandfather's yellow beard caressed the volumes of Ibn Ezra. My old grandmother, in her lace bonnet, waved spells over the Sabbath candle with her gnarled fingers, and sobbed sweetly. On those evenings my child’s heart was gently rocked, like a little boat on enchanted waves.

  I wander through Zhitomir looking for the timid star.14 Beside the ancient synagogue, beside its indifferent yellow walls, old Jews, Jews with the beards of prophets, passionate rags hanging from their sunken chests, are selling chalk, bluing, and candle wicks.

  Here before me lies the bazaar, and the death of the bazaar. Slaughtered is the fat soul of abundance. Mute padlocks hang on the stores, and the granite of the streets is as clean as a corpses bald head. The timid star blinks and expires.

  Success came to me later, I found the star just before the setting of the sun. Gedalis store lay hidden among the tightly shut market stalls. Dickens, where was your shadow that evening?^ In this old junk store you would have found gilded slippers and ships ropes, an antique compass and a stuffed eagle, a Winchester hunting rifle with the date “1810” engraved on it, and a broken stewpot.