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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  Father fell silent.

  “Rakhel,” he said timorously, “I cannot tell you how unhappy I am about Shoyl.”

  Aba went to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water.

  “Drink, you little shlemazl,” he said, coming over to me. “Drink this water, which will help you as much as incense helps a dead man!”

  And sure enough, the water did not help me in the least. My hiccups became stronger and stronger. A growl tore out of my chest. A swelling, pleasant to the touch, expanded in my throat. The swelling breathed, widened, covered my gullet, and came bulging out over my collar. Within the swelling gurgled my torn breath. It gurgled like boiling water. By nightfall I was no longer the silly little boy I had been all my life, but had turned into a writhing heap. My mother, now taller and shapelier, wrapped herself in her shawl and went to Galina, who stood watching stiffly.

  “My dear Galina,” my mother said in a strong, melodious voice. “We are imposing on you and dear Nadyezhda Ivanovna, and all your family so much. My dear Galina, I am so embarrassed!”

  With fiery cheeks my mother jostled Galina toward the door, and then came hurrying over to me, stuffing her shawl into my mouth to smother my groans.

  “Hold on, my little darling,” mother whispered. “Hold on for Mama.”

  But even if I could have held on, I wouldn’t have, because I no longer felt any shame at all.

  That was how my illness began. I was ten years old at the time. The following morning I was taken to the doctor. The pogrom continued, but no one touched us. The doctor, a fat man, diagnosed an illness of the nerves.

  He told us to go to Odessa as quickly as we could, to the specialists, and to wait there for the warm weather and bathing in the sea.

  And that is what we did. A few days later I left for Odessa with my mother to stay with Grandfather Levy-Itskhok and Uncle Simon. We left in the morning on a ship, and by midday the churning waters of the Bug changed to the heavy green waves of the sea. This was the beginning of my life in the house of my crazed Grandfather Levy-Itskhok. And I bade farewell forever to Nikolayev, where I had lived the first ten years of my childhood.

  KARL-YANKEL

  In the days of my childhood there was a smithy in Peresyp7 *[ One of the largest steelworks of the time. Its more than eight thousand workers had played a key role in the Revolution.] Holding this trial at the Petrovsky factory indicated that the new Soviet government wanted to make a landmark case out of it. that belonged to Jonas Brutman. Horse dealers, carters—known as bindyuzhniks in Odessa—and butchers from the town slaughterhouses gathered in this smithy. It was on the Balta Road, and it was quite handy as a lookout post for intercepting muzhiks carting oats and Bessarabian wine into town. Jonas was a small, timid man, but he knew his way around wine. In him dwelled the soul of an Odessa Jew.

  In my day he had three growing sons. He only came up to their waists. It was on the beach of Peresyp that I first reflected on the power of the forces in nature. The boys, three fattened bulls with crimson shoulders and feet big as shovels, carried shriveled-up little Jonas to the water the way one carries an infant. And yet it had been he, and no one else, who had sired them. There was no doubt about that. The blacksmiths wife went to the synagogue twice a week, on Friday evenings and on the morning of the Sabbath. It was a Hasidic synagogue, where on Passover they whirled themselves into an ecstasy like dervishes. Jonas’s wife paid tribute to the emissaries sent by the Galician tsaddiks to our southern provinces. The blacksmith did not interfere in his wife’s relationship with God. After work, he went to a wine shop next to the slaughterhouses, and there, sipping his cheap pink wine, listened meekly to what people Vrere talking about—politics and the price of cattle.

  His sons resembled their mother in strength and build. As soon as they came of age, two of the boys went and joined the partisans. The elder was killed at Voznesensk, the other, Semyon, went over to Primakov8 [A French emigre nobleman, governor general of Odessa from 1803-1814, on whom Lord Byron modeled his Don Juan. The famous bronze statue of him was sculpted by Ivan Martos] and joined a Red Cossack division. He was chosen to be commander of a Cossack regiment. He and a few other shtetl youths were the first in this unexpected breed of Jewish fighters, horsemen, and partisans.

  The third son became a blacksmith like his father. He works at the Ghen plow factory.^ He has not married and has not sired anyone.

  The children of Semyon, the Cossack commander, tagged along from place to place with his division. But the old woman needed a grandchild to whom she could tell stories about the Baal-Shem. She was expecting a grandchild from her youngest daughter Paulina. Paulina was the only one in the whole family who resembled little old Jonas. She was timid, nearsighted, and had delicate skin. Many came around asking for her hand in marriage. Paulina chose Ofsey Byelotserkovsky. We could not understand why she chose him. Even more surprising was the news that the young couple was happy. A woman runs her household as she wills, an outsider cannot see pots breaking. But in this case it was Ofsey Byelotserkovsky who was to break the pots. A year into their marriage, he dragged Brana Brutman, his mother-in-law, to court. The old woman had taken advantage of Ofsey s being away on a business trip and Paulinas being in the hospital for a breast inflammation to abduct her newborn grandson and take him to the neighborhood charlatan, Naftula Gerchik. And there, in the presence of ten doddering wrecks—ten ancient and impoverished men, denizens of the Hasidic synagogue—the rites of circumcision were performed.

  Ofsey Byelotserkovsky did not find out what had happened until after his return. Ofsey had put himself forward as a candidate to join the Party. He decided to seek the advice of Bychach, the secretary of the local cell of the State Trade Committee.

  “You've been morally bespattered!” Bychach told him. “You must pursue this matter further.”

  Odessa’s public prosecutors office decided to set up a model public trial at the Petrovsky factory.* Naftula Gerchik, the neighborhood charlatan, and Brana Brutman, sixty-two years of age, found themselves on the defendants’ bench.

  Naftula was as much an Odessan fixture as the statue of the Duke of Richelieu.^ Naftula used to walk past our windows on Dalnitskaya Street carrying his tattered, grease-stained midwife’s bag. In that bag he kept his simple instruments. Sometimes he took a little knife out of it, sometimes a bottle of vodka and a piece of honey cake. He’d sniff the honey cake before he drank his vodka, and having drunk it would rattle off some prayers. Naftula was as redheaded as the first redheaded man on earth. When he sliced off what was his due, he did not strain off the blood through a glass funnel, but sucked it with puckered lips. The blood smudged his tousled beard. He appeared tipsy before the guests. His bearlike eyes twinkled cheerfully. Redheaded as the first redheaded man on earth, he whimpered a blessing over the wine. With one hand Naftula pitched his vodka into his mouth’s overgrown, crooked, fire-spitting pit, while in the other he held a plate. On this plate lay the little knife, reddened with the infant’s blood, and some gauze. As he collected his money, Naftula went from guest to guest with his plate, elbowing his way through the women, falling on them, grabbing their breasts. “Fat mamas!” he howled for the whole street to hear, his little coral eyes glittering. “Go churn out some boys for Naftula, thresh some corn on your bellies! Do your best for Naftula! Go churn out some boys, fat mamas!”

  The husbands threw money onto his plate. The women wiped away the blood from his beard. The courtyards of Glukhaya and Gospitalnaya Streets did not lack offspring. They seethed with children, as the mouths of rivers seethe with roe. Naftula went trudging around with his bag, like a tax collector. Orlov, the investigating magistrate, brought Naftula’s rounds to an end.

  The investigating magistrate thundered from the bench, endeavoring to prove that the neighborhood charlatan was a priest in a cult.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asked Naftula.

  “Let him who won two thousand believe in God,” the old man answered.

  “Were you
not surprised when Comrade Brana Brutman came to you at such a late hour in the rain, carrying a newborn in her hands?”

  “I am surprised when a person does something reasonable,” Naftula said. “When a person does idiotic things, then Im not surprised!”

  These answers did not satisfy the investigating magistrate. The matter of the glass funnel came next. He charged that by sucking blood with his lips, the defendant was exposing children to the danger of infection. Naftulas head, that shaggy nut of his, hung almost to the ground. He sighed, closed his eyes, and wiped his drooping mouth with his fist.

  “What are you muttering about, Comrade Gerchik?” the judge asked him.

  Naftula fixed his extinguished eyes on Orlov, the investigating magistrate.

  “The late Monsieur Zusman, your late Papa,” Naftula said to him with a sigh, “he had a head the likes of which you cant find nowhere in the world. And praised be God, that your papa did not have an apoplectic fit when he had me come over to perform your bris. And we can all see plain enough that you grew into a big man in the Soviet government, and that Naftula did not snip off along with that little piece of shmokhtes anything you might have needed later on.”

  He blinked with his bearlike eyes, shook his red-haired nut, and fell silent. There were volleys of laughter, thunderous guffawing salvos. Orlov, ne Zusman, waved his arms in the air and shouted out something that could not be heard in the cannonade. He demanded that the record reflect that . . . Sasha Svetlov, one of the satirists of the Odessa Newsy sent him a note from the press box. “You’re a nincompoop, Syoma,” the note went. “Finish him off with irony, only what is funny will kill! Your Sasha.”

  The room quieted down when they brought Byelotserkovsky to the witness box.

  Byelotserkovsky reiterated what was in his deposition. He was lanky and wore riding breeches and cavalry jackboots. According to Ofsey, the Tiraspol and Balta Party Committees had been fully cooperative in the business of acquiring livestock feed. In the heat of the negotiations he had received a telegram announcing the birth of his son. After discussing the matter with the Balta Party Committees head of operations, he decided not to interrupt the transaction and to restrict himself to dispatching a congratulatory telegram. He did not return home for another two weeks. Sixty-four thousand poods of livestock feed had been gathered throughout the region. No one was at home, except for the witness Kharchenko—a neighbor and laundress by profession—and his infant son. His wife was away at the hospital, and the witness Kharchenko was rocking the cradle and was engaged in the now-obsolete practice of singing a lullaby. Knowing the witness to be an alcoholic, he did not find it necessary to try making out the words of this song, but he was taken aback to hear her call the boy Yankel, when he had expressly given instructions that his son be named Karl, in honor of our esteemed teacher Karl Marx. Unwrapping the child’s swaddling clothes, he came face-to-face with his misfortune.

  The investigating magistrate asked a few questions, the defense did not. The bailiff led in the witness Paulina Byelotserkovskaya. She staggered toward the bar. The bluish tremor of recent motherhood twisted her face, and there were drops of sweat on her forehead. She looked over to her father, the little blacksmith, dressed to the nines in a bow tie and new boots as if for a feast, and to her mothers coppery, gray-mustached face. The witness Paulina Byelotserkovskaya did not answer the question as to what she knew about the matter at hand. She said that her father was a poor man, who had worked in the smithy on the road to Balta for forty years. Her mother had given birth to six children, of whom three had died. One brother was a Red commander, the other worked in the Ghen factory. “My mother is very devout, everyone knows that, and she always suffered because her children were not religious. She could not bear the idea that her grandchildren would not be Jews. You must take into consideration in what kind of a family my mother was raised. Everyone knows the shtetl of Medzhibozh,* [a shtetl in Western Ukraine in the District of Khmelnitsky where the founder of Hasidism, Israel ben Eliezer the “Baal Shem Tov,” was from] the women there are still wearing wigs.”

  “Will the witness please tell us,” a sharp voice interrupted her. Paulina fell silent, the drops of sweat darkening on her forehead as if blood were seeping through her delicate skin. “Will the witness please tell us,” repeated the voice of Samuel Lining, a former barrister. Were the Sanhedrin* to exist nowadays, Lining would have been its head. But the Sanhedrin no longer exists, and Lining, who had learned to read and write Russian at twenty-five, had begun in his fourth decade to write appeals to the government indistinguishable from the treatises of the Talmud. The old man had slept throughout the trial. His jacket was covered in cigarette ash. But he had woken up when Paulina Byelotserkovskaya had appeared. “Will the witness please tell us”—his fishlike rows of bobbing blue teeth were clacking—“if you had been aware of your husband’s decision to name his son Karl?”

  “Yes.”

  “What name did your mother give him?”

  “Yankel.”

  “And what about you, Comrade Witness? What do you call your son?”

  “I call him ‘sweetie/ ”

  “And why ‘sweetie/ of all things?”

  “I call all children 'sweetie/ ”

  “Let us proceed,” Lining said. His teeth slipped out, but he caught them with his nether lip and slid them back into his mouth. “Let us proceed. In the evening, when the child was taken over to the defendant Gerchik, you were not at home. You were at the hospital. Is my statement in accordance with the facts?”

  “I was at the hospital.”

  “At what hospital were you being treated?”

  “The one in Nezhinskaya Street, at Dr. Drizo s.”

  “Dr. Drizo was treating you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure of this?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I would like to introduce this here document into evidence.” Linings lifeless face rose over the table. “From this document the court will ascertain that during the period of time in question, Dr. Drizo was away at a congress of pediatricians in Kharkov.”

  The investigating magistrate did not object to the introduction of the document.

  “Let us proceed,” Lining said, his teeth clacking.

  The witness leaned her whole body against the bar. Her whisper was barely audible.

  “Maybe it wasn’t Dr. Drizo,” she said, resting her whole weight against the bar. “I cant remember everything. I am exhausted.”

  Lining raked his pencil through his yellow beard. He rubbed his stooping back against the bench and joggled his false teeth.

  Paulina was asked to produce her official medical report, but she told the court she had misplaced it.

  “Let us proceed,” the old man said.

  Paulina ran her palm over her forehead. Her husband sat at the end of the bench, away from the other witnesses. He sat there stiffly, his long legs in their cavalry boots pulled in under him. The rays of the sun fell on his face, packed with a framework of minute, spiteful bones.

  “I will find my medical record,” Paulina whispered, and her hands slid off the bar.

  At that moment a bawling baby was heard. A child was crying and mewling outside the doors.

  “You see, Paulina?” the old woman suddenly yelled out in a hoarse voice. “The child hasn’t been fed since this morning! He’s shriveling up with hollering!” Startled Red Army fighters snatched up their rifles. Paulina began to slide lower and lower, her head falling back to the floor. Her arms flew up, flailed, and then tumbled down.

  “The court is adjourned!” the public prosecutor shouted.

  An uproar erupted in the room. Byelotserkovsky stalked over to his wife with cranelike steps, a green sheen on his hollow cheeks.

  “Feed the child!” people were shouting from the back rows, cupping their hands like megaphones around their mouths.

  “They’re already feeding him!” a woman’s voice shouted back. “You think they were waiting f
or you?”

  “The daughter’s tangled up in all of this,” said a worker sitting next to me. “The daughter’s got her hand in it.”

  “It’s a family thing,” the man sitting next to him said. “One of those dark, nighttime jobs. At night they go tangling up things that in daylight you just can’t untangle.”

  The sun cut through the room with its slanting rays. The crowd stirred heavily, breathing fire and sweat. Elbowing my way through, I reached the corridor. The door to the Red Corner* [a reading room in public buildings that contained Communist Party literature and the works of Marx and Lenin] stood ajar. I could hear Karl-Yankel’s mewling and slurping inside. Lenins portrait hung in the Red Corner, the portrait in which he is giving a speech from the armored car on the square in front of the Finland Station. It was surrounded by multicolored production graphs showing the Petrovsky factory’s output. The walls were lined with banners and rifles on wooden mounts. A woman worker with a Kirghiz face, her head bent forward, was feeding Karl-Yankel, a plump little fellow about five months old with knitted socks and a white tuft of hair on his head. Fastened to the Kirghiz woman by his mouth, he gurgled, banging her breast with his little clenched fist.

  “What are they shouting for?” the Kirghiz woman said. “There’s always someone who’ll feed a baby.”

  There was also a girl of about seventeen puttering about the room in a red kerchief, her cheeks puffed out like pine cones. She was wiping dry Karl-Yankel’s changing-mat.

  “He’s going to be a fighter, he is,” the girl said. “Look at those punches he’s throwing!”

  The Kirghiz woman gently pulled her nipple out of Karl-Yankel’s mouth. He began growling, and in desperation threw back his head with its white tuft of hair. The woman took out her other breast and gave it to him. He looked at her nipple with dull eyes that suddenly lit up. The Kirghiz woman looked at Karl-Yankel, squinting her black eyes at him.

  “Not a fighter, no,” she crooned, fixing the boy’s cap. “He’ll be an aviator. He will fly through the sky, he will.”