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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  When they are brought in, the premature babies weigh a pound, a pound and a half. A chart hangs on each tub—the infant’s life curve. These days it isnt really a curve. The lines are leveled out. Life in the one-pound bodies flickers spectrally and despondently.

  Another imperceptible facet of our decline: the women who breastfeed the children keep giving them less and less milk.

  There aren’t many wet nurses. Five for thirty infants. Each wet nurse feeds her own infant and four others. There is even a saying in the wards: “Four others to one of your own.”

  They have to be breast-fed every three hours. There are no holidays. You can sleep two hours in a row, not more.

  The women, whose breasts are sucked seven times every twenty-four hours by five thin blue mouths, are given three-eighths of a loaf of bread every day.

  They are standing around me, five of them, in their monastic attire, big-breasted but thin, telling me: “The doctor says were not giving the children enough milk, that they’re not growing!”—“We’d gladly give them more, but they’re sucking our blood dry!”—“If only we were granted the same rations as carters!”—“The authorities told us we’re not laborers!”—“Two of us went down to the store, we set off, our knees kept giving way, we stopped, we looked at each other, we just wanted to collapse, we could hardly walk!”

  They beg me for ration cards, extra food; they implore, stand along the walls, their faces redden and become strained and pitiful, like petitioners at a government office.

  I leave. The supervisor comes running after me. “They’re just a little overwrought,” she whispers. “Open your mouth and they start crying! What we do is look the other way, cover things up. There’s a soldier who comes to see one of them—we turn a blind eye!”

  She tells me the story of the woman who is visited by the soldier. She came to the ward a year ago—a tiny, efficient woman. The only large things about her were her heavy, milk-filled breasts. She had more milk than any of the other wet nurses in the ward. A year went by, a year of ration cards, salty smelts, and more and more crooked little bodies expelled one after the other by the faceless, soulless women of Petrograd. Now the tiny, efficient woman has no more milk. They taunt her and she cries, venomously squeezing her empty breast and turning her head away when she breast-feeds.

  If only the tiny woman were to be given another three-eighths of a loaf, if only she were granted the same rations as a carter, if only something were done. One really has to give this some thought, it’s a pity about these children. If they don’t die they will become young men and women. They have to build up a life for themselves—what if they only build up three-eighths of one? That would be a stunted life. And we have seen enough stunted life.

  THE DEAD

  A week ago I spent a whole morning walking through Petrograd, I through the town of poverty and death. The fog, thin but all-powerful, swirled above the murk of the stone streets. Dirty snow turned into dim, glowing black puddles.

  The markets were bare. The women crowded around peddlers who were selling things that nobody needed. The peddlers still had taut pink cheeks puffed up with chilled fat. Their eyes, selfish and blue, skimmed over the helpless crowd of women, soldiers in civilian trousers, and old men wearing leather galoshes.

  Carts rolled past the market. The carters’ faces, absurd and gray, their curses heated and stale from habit. Their horses were gigantic, their loads consisting of broken plush sofas and black barrels. The horses had heavy, shaggy hooves and thick, long manes. But their scrawny ribs stuck out, their legs sliding with feebleness, their tense muzzles hanging low.

  I walked on and read about the executions, about how this city of ours spent yet another of its nights. I went to the place where the dead are counted every morning.

  In the chapel next to the mortuary a service was being held.

  The service is for a soldier.

  Three relatives are standing around him. Two workmen and a woman. Thin faces.

  The priest prays badly, without grandeur or sorrow. The relatives sense this. They glare at the priest with dull, staring eyes.

  I start talking to the watchman.

  “At least they’re burying this one,” he tells me. “We’ve got a good thirty of them lying in there. They’ve lain there for three weeks, and every day more come piling in.”

  Every day the bodies of the executed and the murdered are brought to the mortuary. They bring them on wooden sledges, dump them by the gates, and then leave.

  In the past, questions were asked: who was killed, when, by whom. Now they don’t bother. “Unidentified male” is written on a slip of paper, and the body is taken to the morgue.

  The bodies are brought in by Red Army soldiers, policemen, and all kinds of other people. These deliveries, every morning and night, have been going on for a whole year without a breather, without a break. Recently, the quality of the corpses has risen dramatically. When, out of sheer boredom, someone asks the policemen questions, they simply answer, “Killed in a robbery.”

  I go into the mortuary accompanied by the watchman. He lifts the sheets and shows me the faces, covered in black blood, of the people killed three weeks ago. They are all young and have sturdy bodies. Their feet are bare and waxen, or stick out in boots or foot wrappings. Yellowish bellies are visible, hair caked with blood. A note is lying on one of the bodies:

  “Prince Constantine Eboli de Tricoli.”

  The watchman pulls back the sheet. I see a lean, well-proportioned body, and a small, grinning, impudent, terrible face. The prince is wearing an English suit and lacquered shoes with black suede tops. He is the only nobleman within these silent walls.

  On another table I find his aristocratic friend, Francisca Britti. She survived for two hours in the hospital after she was shot. Her well-pro-portioned, purple body is bandaged. She is also thin and tall, like the prince. Her mouth is open. Her head is raised in quick, frenzied yearning. Her long white teeth sparkle voraciously. In death she keeps a stamp of beauty and impudence. She sobs and laughs disdainfully at her murderers.

  I find out the most important thing: the bodies are not being buried because there is no money to bury them. The hospital does not want to waste money on burials. There are no relatives. The

  Commissariat does not pay any attention to the petitions, and replies with pretexts and formalities. The administration will turn to Smolny.10 Of course.

  Well all end up there.

  “For now, all this is no problem!” the watchman says. “Let them lie where they are! But when the heat kicks in youll have to run as far away from that hospital as you can!”

  The unclaimed corpses are a burning issue at the hospital. Who will deal with them? Its a matter of principle.

  “They killed them—let them come take them away!” the medical assistant says bitterly. “They’re clever enough, though, to come and dump them here! We get dozens a day, some executed, some killed in robberies. You wouldn’t believe the petitions we’ve already sent!”

  I leave the place where the dead are counted.

  It is depressing.

  THE PALACE OF MOTHERHOOD

  Legend has it that it was built by Rastrelli. A dark red facade, enlivened by slim columns—those true, silent, and refined monuments to Imperial Petropol11—less solemn in its delicate and simple structure than the magnificent palaces of the Yusupovs and the Stroganovs.

  The palace belonged to Razumovsky.^ Later, girls of noble birth were educated there, orphan girls. These noble orphans had a headmistress. The headmistress lived in twenty-two high-ceilinged, light-blue rooms.

  Now there is no Razumovsky, no headmistress. Eight women in bedroom slippers shuffle with the heavy tread of the pregnant through the Rastrellian halls, their large bellies sticking out.

  There are only eight. But the palace belongs to them. And this is why it is called the Palace of Motherhood.

  Eight women of Petrograd with gray faces and legs swollen from too much walking. Their past: mon
ths of standing in lines outside provision stores, factory whistles calling their husbands to the defense of the Revolution, the hard anxiety of war and the upheaval of the Revolution scattering people all over the place.

  The recklessness of our destruction is already dispassionately handing us its invoice of unemployment and hunger. There are no jobs for the men returning from the front, their wives have no money to give birth, factories raise their frozen chimneys to the skies. A paper fog— paper money and paper of every other kind—flashes eerily past our stunned eyes and vanishes. And the earth keeps turning. People die, people are born.

  I enjoy talking about the flickering flame of creation kindled in our empty little rooms. It is good that the buildings of the institute have not been snatched up by requisition and confiscation committees. It is good that oily cabbage soup is not poured from these white tables, and that no discussions of arrests, so common now, are to be heard.

  This building will be called the Building of Motherhood. The decree says: “It will assist women in their great and strenuous duty.”

  This palace breaks with the old jaillike traditions of the Foundling Home, where children died or, at best, were sent on to “foster parents.” Children must live. They must be born for “the building of a better life.”

  That is the idea. But it has to be carried through to the end. We have to make a revolution at some point.

  It could be argued that shouldering rifles and firing at each other might occasionally have its good points. But that is hardly a complete revolution. Who knows, it might not even be a revolution at all.

  It is important to bear children well. And this, I am fully convinced, is the true revolution.

  The Palace of Motherhood opened three days ago. The regional councils sent their first patients. The first step has been taken. Now we must forge ahead.

  A school for motherhood is also in the offing. Anyone who wants to attend will be able to. They will teach hygiene, and how to safeguard the lives of infants and mothers. This has to be taught. At the beginning of our century the death rate in our maternity wards reached forty percent. This figure has never dropped below fifteen to twenty percent. Now, due to malnutrition and anemia, the number of deaths is on the rise again.

  Women will enter the palace in the eighth month of their pregnancy. They will spend the month and a half before they give birth under peaceful conditions, with enough to eat and reasonable amounts of work. It is free of charge. The bearing of children is a tribute to the state. The state will pay for it.

  After giving birth, the mothers stay in the palace for ten, twenty, forty-two days, until they have recovered completely. In the past, they used to leave the wards after three days: “No one to take care of the household, the children have to be fed.”

  There are also plans to build a school for substitute housewives. The substitutes will look after the homes of the women who are in the palace.

  A special museum/exhibition center is also being considered. There, a mother can view a nice simple bed, linen, diagrams of appropriate nutrition, she can view models of syphilitic and variolar sores, read through statistical charts showing the all-too-familiar, and yet the first actual numbers of infant mortality. At the exhibition, a mother will be able to buy linen, swaddling clothes, and medicine at low prices.

  This is the embryo of the idea, the revolutionary idea of the “socialization of women.”

  The first eight wives of workers and sailors have come to these spacious halls. The halls belong to them. The halls must be maintained and expanded.

  EVACUEES

  There once was a factory, and in this factory untruth reigned.And yet, despite the reign of untruth, smoke rose from the chimneys, the flywheels rolled noiselessly, steel sparkled, the factory’s whole body was shaken by the buzzing drone of work.

  Then came truth. But truth was badly organized. Steel production died. People were being laid off. Cars dragged them in apathetic bewilderment to the railway station.

  According to some immutable law, working people are drifting without purpose, like dust, over the face of the earth.

  A few days ago they “evacuated” a Baltic factory. Four working families were dumped in a railroad car. The railroad car was put on a ferry and left there. I don’t know if the car was fastened properly or poorly to the ferry. They say it was hardly fastened at all.

  Yesterday I saw those four “evacuated” families. They are lying, one next to the other, in the morgue. Twenty-five corpses. Fifteen of them children. Their surnames befit such a mundane catastrophe: Kuzmin, Kulikov, Ivanov. None was over forty-five.

  All day in the morgue, women from Vasilevsky and Viborgskaya crowd around the white coffins. Their faces are like those of the drowned—gray.

  They weep frugally. Whoever goes to cemeteries knows that we no longer weep at funerals. People are in a hurry, confused. Petty, sharp thoughts incessantly drill into their brains.

  The women grieve most for the children, and put ten-kopeck bills in their little crossed hands. The breasts of one of the drowned women, who is clutching a suffocated five-month-old infant, are completely covered with money.

  I left. By the wicket gate, in a blind alley, two bent little old women were sitting on a rotting bench. With teary, colorless eyes they watched a burly janitor melting the spongy black snow. Dark streams trickled over the sticky ground.

  The old women whispered their everyday gossip: The cabinetmak-er’s son joined the Red Army and got himself killed. There aren’t any potatoes at the market, nor are there likely to be. A Georgian has settled in the courtyard, trades in candy, led the generals daughter—a student—astray, drinks vodka with the militia, gets money from all sides.12 Then one of the old women explained in dark, old-woman’s words why twenty-five people fell into the Neva.

  “All the engineers have run off from those factories. The German says the land is his. The people said this, said that, then they dumped their apartments and set off for home. So the Kulikovs set off for Kaluga. They started building a raft. Three days they banged away. One drank too much, the other goes bitter and sits down, thinks. And there’s no engineers, just dim-witted peasants! They banged the raft together, set sail, all shouting farewells. The river rose, folk and children, women, everyone fell in. But they fixed up everything very nice, they gave eight thousand for the burial, they’re doing a funeral service, the coffins are all brocaded, they’re really showing their respect for the working people!”

  MOSAIC

  On Sunday, a day of springtime celebration, Comrade Shpitsberg gives a speech in the grand hall of the Winter Palace.

  The title of his speech is “The All-forgiving Persona of Christ and the Vomiting Up of the Anathema of Christianity.”

  Comrade Shpitsberg calls God “Mr. God,” the priests “clerics,” “damn clericalists,” and, more often than not, “paunchists” (a term he has coined from the word “paunch”).

  He defines all religions as the “market stalls of charlatans and quacks,” denounces the Pope, bishops, archbishops, Jewish rabbis, and even the Tibetan Dalai Lama, “whose excrement the foolish Tibetan democracy considers a medicinal balm.”

  An attendant is sitting in a niche away from the hall. He is quiet, thin, and clean-shaven. He is surrounded by a horde of people: women, contented workers, unemployed soldiers. The attendant is telling them about Kerensky,* bombs exploding beneath the floors, ministers thrown against the smooth walls of dark, echoing corridors, of the feathers bursting from the pillows of Czar Alexander and Czarina Maria Fyodorovna.

  A little old woman interrupts his tale. “Where are they giving the lecture, dearie?” she asked him.

  “The Antichrist is in the Nikolayevsky Hall,” the attendant answers indifferently.

  * Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, 1881-1970, served as Minister of Justice, Minister of War, and provisional Prime Minister of Russia after the February 1917 Revolution.

  A soldier standing nearby laughs. “The Antichrist is in the hall, a
nd youre chattering away here?”

  “Im not frightened,” the attendant says with the same indifference as before. “I live with him day and night.”

  “So youre living it up, ha—”

  “No,” the attendant says, fixing the soldier with his colorless eyes. “I’m not living it up. Life with him is boring.”

  And the old man despondently tells the smiling crowd that his devil is short and bashful, walks about in galoshes, and ruins schoolgirls when no one is looking.

  The old man doesn’t get to finish his tale. Two of his colleagues come and lead him away, saying that since October13 he has “lost a few of his marbles.”

  I walk off deep in thought. This old man had seen the Czar, the Revolt, blood, death, the feathers of the Imperial pillows. And the Antichrist had come to him—the Devil had nothing better to do on earth than to dream of schoolgirls and dodge the guards of the Admiralty Subdistrict.^

  Our devils are a humdrum bunch.

  • • •

  Shpitsbergs sermon on the killing off of Mr. God does not seem to be going all that well. The crowd listens sluggishly, applauds feebly. Things were very different a week before at a similar discussion, which contained “a few short words, but anti-religious ones.” Four people were noteworthy: a church warden, a frail psalm reader, a retired colonel in a fez, and a stout storekeeper from the Gostiny Dvor Market. They marched up to the platform. Before them stood a crowd of women and taciturn, menacing shopkeepers.

  The psalm reader began in an oily voice: “My friends, let us pray.” And ended in a little whisper: “Not everyone is asleep, my friends. Some of us have taken a solemn oath at the tomb of Father Ioann.14 Set up your parishes once more, my friends!”

  The psalm reader left the platform and, squinting with rage, his scrawny body quaking, added: “The whole thing stinks of rotten fish, my friends. The rabbis-—theyVe come out of this scot-free!”