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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  But as far as the repairing of school buildings is concerned, things couldn’t be worse. Most of the buildings are no more than dilapidated hovels. The local Executive Committees have declared themselves ready to help rebuild the schools in whatever way they can. Compared to last year, when the peasants believed that they were showing immeasurable indulgence toward the government by even sending their children to school, the Executive Committees current readiness to help shows an important change in attitude. But a village can only offer what it has. The villages have no steel, glass, tiles, and no learning materials. Let us hope that the recently renewed staff of the Ajaristan People’s Commissariat of Education will show some persistence in this. Needless to say, there is not much it can do if the central Tbilisi institutions will not help by sending supplies such as textbooks and handicraft manuals.

  TOBACCO

  A weak-eyed little old woman turns to the People’s Commissariat for Social Security for help.

  “There is no tobacco,” the official at the People’s Commissariat for Social Security tells her in consternation. “We’ve run out of it. You can forget tobacco!”

  What role does tobacco play here? Murky waters. But let us continue.

  A schoolmistress goes to the People’s Commissariat of Education.

  “We did have tobacco, but there’s none left,” the comrade from the People’s Commissariat of Education venomously shouts in response to her request. “You can kiss tobacco good-bye! Another month or two and we’ll have seen the very last of it!”

  And finally, the garbage man roughly demands his due from the Department of Municipal Economy.

  “Where are we supposed to find tobacco?” the comrade from the Department of Municipal Economy yells angrily. “Do you think it’s sprouting here on my palms, huh? Or are you perhaps suggesting we start a tobacco plantation in the little garden in front of the building?”

  Amazing Abkhazia! Little old ladies smoke tobacco with the same fervor garbage men do, and the primmest schoolmistress doesn’t lag far behind.

  Murky waters. And how sadly these waters shimmer when a decisive complaint is lodged in the Department of Tobacco Cultivation.

  In 1914, the tobacco harvest in Abkhazia had risen to a million poods. That was a record number, and all the conditions indicated that it would continue to rise steadily. Even before the war, the tobacco from Sukhumi triumphed decisively over the Kuban and Crimean tobaccos. The factories of Petrograd, Rostov-on-Don, and southern Russia worked with the Sukhumi crop. Exports grew with every passing year. The former tobacco monopolists—Macedonia, Turkey, Egypt—had to acknowledge the incomparable quality of their new competitor’s crop. The most delicate assortments, issued by the illustrious factories of Cairo, Alexandria, and London, acquired new status from the Abkhazian tobacco blend. Our product was quick to clinch its reputation as one of the best in the world, and foreign capital headed briskly for the Abkhazian coast, building gigantic storehouses and setting up industrialized tobacco plantations.

  In the years before the war the price of tobacco fluctuated, depending on its quality, from fourteen to thirty rubles a pood. The average yield per hectare was eighty to a hundred poods. The most prevalent size of a peasant plantation was three to four hectares. The pioneers of tobacco culture on the shores of Abkhazia were Greeks and Armenians. Then the inhabitants of the region made successful use of the pioneers’ experiment and turned the cultivation of tobacco into the areas economic mainstay. The Sukhumi farmers’ profits grew, in spite of the thievery of the wholesalers and the Czars imperial administration. Now it is clear why “tobacco comes in all qualities”—because it is embraced by everyone, from frail little old ladies to diligent schoolmistresses.

  After 1914, the war began plying its ruinous trade. Waves of migrants crushed the delicate crop, the first onslaught of the Revolution inevitably deepening the crisis, and then the dire Mensheviks obliterated what was left.

  In the fertile and enchanted garden we call Abkhazia, one quickly learns to vehemently detest the Mensheviks, that species of sluggish wood louse that left its tracks in full manifestation of its creative genius. During the two years that they ruled, they managed to wreck all the vital establishments of the city, opened up Abkhazia’s wealth of timber to the plunder of foreign sharks, and, with the declaration of a tobacco monopoly, finally dealt a fatal blow to the nerve of the region. The monopoly wasn’t half the evil. A government, conducting intelligent economic policies, will resort to measures that are even more drastic, but it will resort to them cleverly. The Menshevik monopoly was calculated to cause the quick demise of the tobacco industry. Parallel to the fact that the low government price did not reflect the manufacturing cost, there was also the problem of prices on the foreign market exceeding the fixed rate by four hundred percent. What recourse did a planter have under such circumstances? None. He gladly extricated himself from this dead-end situation.

  Under the aegis of enlightened seafarers, Abkhazia’s tobacco industry came to a peaceful end. To put it in starker terms: not even a pound of newly harvested tobacco ended up on the markets between 1918 and 1920. The plantations were given over to maize, a situation accelerated by a suspension of grain imports from Soviet Russia. The gaping wound began oozing and has remained open.

  Such was the legacy of the Mensheviks. And here—when one considers how the present Soviet government is going about liquidating this sad legacy—one frankly has to admit that there is neither enough know-how nor a systematic rigor. It is true that the new Soviet government abolished the monopoly—but this only to make room for official mayhem. Petitions lodged by the tobacco industry are looked at every two weeks, at which point the most contradictory responses rain down upon the bewildered heads of the planters. All kinds of institutions have a hand in running the tobacco industry, but none of them are putting much effort into it. There is right now an unsettled dispute between the Committee of Exports and the People s Commissariat of Abkhazia about who will dispose of the rest of the tobacco funds left over after the Menshevik tenure. During the year and a half of Soviet rule, about half a million poods of tobacco was disposed of without a plan and at minimal prices, in order to cover ongoing government expenses. As for the future, the yield of 1922 will barely reach ten thousand poods of fresh tobacco. The dwindling plantations are not being restored. Vague permissions, vague prohibitions, cumbersome footnotes to bulky paragraphs, have resulted in the complete bewilderment of the planters, who, as it is, have been uncertain of what the future has in store for them. Without that certainty there will be no revival. And therefore the farmer is planting maize on his hectare of land, which can bring him at best a wholesale revenue of ten, fifteen million. Tobacco, an average yield of which can bring him a revenue of seventy-five to a hundred million, is neglected. The material conditions of the Abkhazian peasant have drastically worsened. His clothes are tattered and he lives in a dilapidated house, which he cannot renovate for lack of money.

  The eagerness to plant tobacco is universal. The only thing the planter is appealing for is a strict law regulating the tobacco industry. Whether this will be in the form of taxes paid in produce or in the form of trade regulations, the economic institutions must decide what is best for the country and the workers. But clarity is vital. It is high time boundaries were laid on the confusion of understanding and the unbalancing of minds. Otherwise the hands of the tobacco gold mines are threatening to grow rigid for a long time to come. This will not serve the federation well.

  GAGRY

  By the will of the reigning despot, the city was raised on the cliff. Palaces were built for the chosen few, and huts for those who would serve the chosen few. Lights danced on the remote shore, and bursting moneybags with decaying lungs dragged themselves to the resplendent despots cliff.*

  Life flowed as it was meant to flow. The palaces blossomed, the huts rotted. The decaying lungs of the select few grew strong, the strong lungs of those who served them declined and withered away, but the wayward
old prince untiringly chased swans over his ponds, laid out flower beds, and clambered up steep slopes to erect more palaces and huts on inaccessible peaks, nothing but palaces and huts. In St. Petersburg they thought of declaring the prince insane and putting him under guard. Then war broke out. The prince was declared a genius and appointed head of the Medical Department. History reports with amazement how Prince Oldenburg healed five million sick and wounded, but as for Gagry, the brainchild of his stubborn and idle fantasy, who will tell about Gagry?

  First came the war, followed immediately by the Revolution. The ebb and flow of red banners. Fashionable sanatoriums lost their patients, nurses lo?t their bread and butter. The thunder of battle on the high roads, and heavy silence crouching in distant corners. A wild thunderstorm descended upon the whole of Russia, hurling its unneed-

  * In the early 1900s, Prince Alexander Oldenburg, who was married to a niece of Czar Nicholas II, began to develop the town of Gagry in northwestern Georgia as a resort for the rich.

  ed ballast onto its faraway shores, the bodies of rats fleeing from ships. And moribund Gagry, this stately absurdity, fell apart on its devastated hill, forgotten by everyone, not producing anything.

  Even now this doleful, wild little town makes a terrible impression. It resembles a beautiful woman bespattered with rain and mud, or a group of Spanish dancers appearing in a starving Volga village. The ponds that were laid out around the palace have turned into swamps, and their poisonous breath saps the last strength from the pitiful, spectral population. Unimaginable people with saffron faces, on crutches and in civil service uniforms, wander among the gloomy fairground booths that huddle by the granite walls of the multistoried giants. Goyas madness and Gogols hatred could not have invented anything more horrifying. Prereform officialdom—ruined debris, mindless visions of the past, scorched by poverty and malaria and somehow trapped among the living—still roams about here as a desolate symbol of the dead city.

  For five years Gagry did nothing, because there was nothing it could do or was able to do. All it knows how to do is to consume—it is a town of nurses, restaurateurs, bellhops, and bathhouse attendants, who learned the science of spa tips and lackey chic from their old master.

  And so this year the new owner is reopening the season in Gagry for the first time. The sanatoriums are being cleaned and prepared. They are awaiting sick comrades from Soviet Russia and the Transcaucasia. The sanatoriums are scheduled to accommodate 150 to 200 beds. The possibilities for Gagry are great. Only the question of food, still a big problem, casts a dark shadow on the situation, but the buildings of the resort and the former Oldenburg Palace, though their contents have become markedly depleted,* are still beautiful. The Department of Spas, as is well known, has not been exactly overworking these days, but it has begun to show some signs of life.

  There is now a timid smile of anticipation on the towns sagging cheeks. Gagry is hoping for new birds and new songs. These exhausted, ill, but indefatigable birds that have reinvigorated the limitless expanses of our country—may they add a particle of their vital energy in order to bring back to life the healing resort, which until now has been badly run and has gone to seed, but still has the right to exist.

  * “Depleted” as a result of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. The palace that Prince Oldenburg built for himself in 1907 is today the Chaika (Seagull) Hotel.

  IN CHAKVA

  Tea. Picking tea: here, all effort, hope, and attention is aimed at these two words as at a target. The ancient slopes of Chakva15 are covered by orderly rows of carefully tended bushes. In their simple greenness you will not see fruits, flowers, or pods. An eye thirsting for the moist fields of Ceylon, expecting the yellow plains of China, will flit indifferently over the green shoots, looking for “tea.” And who will recognize tea in the tiny, lilac bud crowning the dwarfish tip of the bush, or in the fresh leaf hiding beneath the bud, looking just like millions upon millions of other ordinary little leaves? They will be recognized, found, and plucked by the inhumanly deft machine lodged in the hands of the local Greeks, and in the small, red, perforated fingers of their ten-year-old daughters.

  All these Achillideses, Ambarzakises, and Theotokises have come down to Chakva from their Ajarian ravines covered in the blue clouds of the eternal mists to pick tea. Their untiring cooperative associations, made up of children, crawl slowly over the eroded terraces. Elusive hands fly over the bushes like a swarm of fleeting birds. Their experienced unwavering eyes seek out the two little leaves in the inexhaustible labyrinth of green, and let him who does not believe in the unattainable know that there are girls who, in a single working day, manage to bring in a harvest of a hundred and fifty pounds of these weightless buds and stems.

  Red-bearded horsemen trot on mangy nags along the rosy paths of Chakva. Gentle buffaloes, their yokes creaking, drag bullock carts with freshly plucked leaves into the valley. Olive-skinned Greeks, the elders of the cooperative association, clamber over the hills, flick open their notebooks, unhurriedly shout at the workers, and suddenly break into rollicking song as wild as the tunes of Balaklava fishermen. But the horsemen, the buffaloes, and the olive-skinned Greeks are all drawn toward the valley, to that flat piece of land shackled in cement, where lies the inalienable estate belonging to Zhen Lao—his tea factory.

  Zhen Lao is known far and wide as Ivan Ivanovich. Everyone on both sides of the high road going from Chakva to Batum knows him. This unshakable renown is not great in size, but it is inexhaustible in depth. Twenty-seven years ago, a tea enthusiast and tea magnate, Popov, had brought the twenty-year-old Lao from central China, from the sacred thickets of the East where a Europeans foot had yet to tread. The former slave on the plantation of a Mandarin, the current Ivan Ivanovich was destined to become a pioneer in the tea business in Russia and its incontestable leader. And only on the boundless flat soil of China, where people are as uncountable as the bamboo stems of a tropical forest, only in that mysterious land, fertilized by faceless millions, could the fiery passion, the inexorable activity, the abrupt and deliberate Asiatic temperament of Zhen Lao come into its own.

  All threads lead to him. The buffaloes, descending from the hills, see the terraces of the cement rectangles adjoining the factory. An Australian sun shines above the lacy, rubicund landscape of Chakva. Giant rectangles, strewn with an emerald carpet of drying tea, look like freshly laundered white tablecloths shining beneath a crystalline stream of electric light. But tea-drying in the open is a remnant of old primitive ways, and is only perpetuated because there is not enough covered space for the thirty thousand pounds of fresh leaf picked daily on the plantations.

  After the leaves have been left to wither for twenty-four hours, they are rolled through the presses. Only then do the leaves begin to turn into the black aromatic strands that we recognize. Next comes the process of fermentation. The leaves, touched by the brown, moist poison of decay, are ready to be dried. In a hermetic oven, which looks like a village hut, an endless iron grill revolves, with tea spread over it in an even layer. In this steam hut, which is as complex as an engine and tightly sealed, the tea is exposed to slow and even heating. The drying process is repeated twice. Once the tea is removed from the oven after the second drying, it is ready. It is now dark and tattered, but lacks aroma. The mechanical sifters provide the finishing touch. These machines are simple, their work easy enough to understand, but it is at this stage of production that the key to success lies. The imperceptible properties of tea here reveal their tyranny, their delicate perfidy inaccessible to the uninitiated.

  The mechanical sifter is a mesh drum divided into sectors, each sector having different-sized openings in its mesh netting. The drum rotates quickly, sifts the tea, dropping the smallest and most valuable leaves through the first sectors. The closer we get to the refuse vent, the larger are the openings in the meshes, and the coarser the sifted tea. Beneath each sector is a wooden box into which falls the tea that has been sifted by that part of the drum. This is w
hy each box has its own specific quality of tea. Box number two and three have the best-quality tea because the sorter drops the buds and the upper leaves into them. The other boxes have the lower quality from the sifting of older and coarser leaves.

  After the sorting comes the packing. And thats that. This is the system: on the third or fourth day after the green leaves arrive from the plantation, the tea enters the factory’s storehouses, where it lies for a few months and acquires its specific aroma.

  This is the system, but it is as bare as a human skeleton lacking meat, muscle, and skin. Yet we’re not discussing the system here. The hidden life of material, the seemingly simple but actually elusive transformation of the leaf, the tyrannical inconstancy of its basic properties— all this requires indefatigable, ceaseless attention, and experience refined over decades. The end result can be affected by the slightest change in temperature, a half hour too much withering or drying, intangible aspects of the harvest. And it is no secret that hasty planting, neglect of the plantation, and barbarous indiscriminate sorting to meet wartime needs have lowered the quality of Russian Chakva tea, though it could be raised to a level that would even satisfy the intolerant taste of the planter from central China. Come to the tea factory on any beautiful day on which Chakva looks like the chiseled environs of Melbourne, and have Zhen Lao bring you a sample in a white porcelain teacup. In this fragrant, coral liquid, whose density resembles the density and texture of a Spanish wine, you will experience the sweet and mortal infusion of sacred, faraway grasses.

  Flooded with the lavish gold of an unforgettable sunset, I walk over to the tangerine groves. The low trees are weighed down by fruit in whose deep emerald tones it is difficult to guess the future fiery red copper of ripeness. Scattered workers spray the trees with lime and dig furrows around them.