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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  “There!” Larson said curtly, flinging the bony body to the side. “And theres more where that came from!”

  The captain propped himself up on his hands and got on all fours like a dog. Blood was flowing from his nostrils, and his eyes were crossed, darting about. Suddenly he flung himself up and hurled himself with a howl under the table.

  “Russia!” he mumbled from under the table, and started kicking and flailing. “Russia!”

  The shovels of his bare feet thrashed about. Only one whistling, moaning word could be heard in his screeching.

  “Russia!” he moaned, stretching out his hands, beating his head against the floor.

  Redheaded Lisyei was still sitting on the velvet sofa.

  “This has been going on since noon,” he said, turning to Seletsky and me. “Fighting for Russia, feeling sorry for Russia.”

  “Vodka!” Korostelyov said harshly from under the table. He crawled out and stood up. His hair, dripping with blood, hung down on his cheeks.

  “Where’s the vodka, Lisyei?”

  “The vodka, my friend, is forty versts away, in Voznesenskoe—forty versts by water or by land. There’s a church there now, so there must be home brew to be had. Whatever you do, the Germans don’t have none!”16

  Captain Korostelyov turned around and walked out on rigid heron’s legs.

  “We’re Kalugans!” Larson yelled out unexpectedly.

  “He has no respect for Kaluga,” Lisyei sighed, “whichever way you look at it. But me, I’ve been there in Kaluga! Proper folk live there, famous—”

  Outside, someone yelled an order, and the clanking of the anchor was heard—the anchor was being weighed. Lisyei raised his eyebrows.

  “We’re not off to Voznesenskoe, are we?”

  Larson burst out laughing, throwing his head back. I ran out of the cabin. Korostelyov stood barefoot on the bridge. The copper rays of the moon lay on his gashed face. The gangplanks fell onto the riverbank. Whirling sailors unwound the moorings.

  “Dimitri Alekseyevich,” Seletsky shouted up to Korostelyov. “At least let us get off] What do you need us along for?”

  The engines erupted into erratic hammering. The paddlewheel dug into the river. A rotten plank on the pier creaked softly. The Ivan and Maria swung its bow around.

  “So we’re off,” Lisyei said, coming out of the cabin. “So we’re off to Voznesenskoe to get some home brew.”

  The Ivan and Marias uncoiling paddlewheel was gaining speed. The engine’s oily clanking, rustling, and whistling grew. We flew through the darkness, forging straight ahead, plowing through buoys, beacons, and red signals. The water foamed beneath the paddles and went flashing back like the golden wings of a bird. The moon plunged into swirls of black water. “The Volga’s waterway is full of bends” was a phrase I remembered from a schoolbook. “It abounds in sandbanks.” Captain Korostelyov was shuffling about on the bridge. Blue shining skin stretched over his cheekbones.

  “Full steam ahead!” he said into the tube.

  “Full steam ahead it is!” a muffled invisible voice answered.

  “I want even more steam!”

  There was silence from the engine room.

  “The engine will blow,” the voice said, after a moment of silence. The signal torch toppled off the mast and streamed over the rolling waves. The steamer rocked. An explosion shuddered through the hull. We flew through the darkness, straight ahead. A rocket went soaring up from the riverbank, a three-inch gun started pounding us. A shell went whistling between the masts. The galley boy, dragging a samovar across the deck, raised his head. The samovar went skidding out of his hands and rolled down the stairs, split open, and a glittering stream poured down the dirty steps. The galley boy snarled, tottered over to the stairs, and fell asleep. The deadly aroma of home-brewed vodka came pouring from his mouth. Belowdecks, among the oily cylinders, the stokers, stripped to the waist, were roaring, waving their arms, and rolling on the floor. Their twisted faces shone in the pearly gleam of the pistons. The crew of the Ivan and Maria was drunk. Only the helmsman stood firmly at his wheel. He turned and looked at me.

  “Hey, Yid!” he called out to me. “Whats going to become of the children?”

  “What children?”

  “The children aren’t going to school,” the helmsman shouted, turning the wheel. “The children will turn into thieves!”

  He brought his leaden, blue cheekbones close to my face and gnashed his teeth. His jaws grated like millstones. It was as if his teeth were being ground to sand.

  “I’ll rip you to pieces!”

  I edged away from him. Lisyei came walking across the deck.

  “What’s going on here, Lisyei!”

  “I guess he’ll get us there,” the redheaded muzhik said, and sat down on a bench.

  When we got to Voznesenskoe, we sent him ashore. There was no “church” to be found, no lights, no carousel. The sloping riverbank was dark, covered by a low-hanging sky. Lisyei sank into darkness. He had been away for more than an hour when he resurfaced right by the water, hauling some large cans. A pockmarked woman, as well built as a horse, was following him. The child’s blouse she was wearing was much too small and stretched tightly over her breasts. A dwarf in a pointed hat and tiny little boots was standing nearby, openmouthed, watching us haul the cans on deck.

  “Plum liquor,” Lisyei said, putting the cans on the table. “The plummiest home brew!”

  And the race of our spectral ship began once more. We arrived in Baronsk toward daybreak. The river spread out boundlessly. Water trickled off the riverbanks, leaving a blue satin shadow. A pink ray struck the mist hanging on the ragged bushes. The bleak, painted walls of the barns and their thin steeples slowly turned and floated toward us. We steamed toward Baronsk among peals of song. Seletsky had cleared his throat with a bottle of the plummiest home brew, and was singing his heart out. Mussorgsky’s Flea was in his song, Mephistopheles’ booming laughter, and the aria of the crazed miller, “I am a raven, no miller am I.”

  The barefoot captain lay slumped over the railing of the bridge. His head was lolling, his eyelids shut tight, and his gashed face, a vague childish smile wandering over it, was flung up toward the sky. He regained consciousness when the boat began slowing down.

  “Alyosha!” he shouted into the tube. “Full steam ahead!”

  And we went charging toward the pier at full steam ahead. The gangplank we had mangled as we pulled out the night before went flying into the air. The engines stopped just in time.

  “You see, he brought us back,” Lisyei said, turning up beside me. “And there you were, all worried.”

  Chapayev’s machine gun carts were already lining up on the river-bank.17 Rainbow stripes darkened and cooled on the bank from which the tidewaters had just ebbed. In a heap next to the pier were boxes of cartridges left by boats that had come and gone. Makeyev, the commander of one of Chapayev’s squadrons, was sitting beltless on a box in a peasant shirt and a tall fur hat. Captain Korostelyov went up to him with outspread arms.

  “I was a real idiot again, Kostya,” he said with his childlike smile. “I used up all the fuel!”

  Makeyev was sitting sideways on the box, scraps of his fur hat hanging over the yellow, browless arches of his eyes. A Mauser with an unpainted butt was lying on his knees. Without turning around, he fired at Korostelyov, but missed.

  “What can I say?” Korostelyov whispered, with wide, shining eyes. “So you re angry with me?” He spread out his thin arms farther. “What can I say?”

  Makeyev jumped up, turned around, and fired all the bullets in his Mauser. The shots rang out rapidly. There was something more Korostelyov had wanted to say, but he didn t manage to. He sighed and fell to his knees. He tumbled forward onto the rim of the spoked wheel of a machine gun cart, his face shattering, milky strips of brain bespattering the wheel. Makeyev, bending forward, was trying to yank out the last bullet which was jammed in the cartridge clip.

  “They thought it was a g
ood joke!” he said, eyeing the crowd of Red Army men and the rest of us who had gathered by the gangplank.

  Lisyei crouched and went sidling over to Korostelyov with a horse blanket in his hands, and covered him as he lay there like a felled tree. Random shots rang from the steamer. Chapayevs soldiers were running over the deck, arresting the crew. The pockmarked woman, her hand pressed to her cheek, stood at the railing, peering at the shore with narrow, unseeing eyes.

  “I’ll show you too!” Makeyev yelled up at her. “Ill teach you to waste fuel!”

  The sailors were led down one by one. German settlers, trickling from their houses, came out from behind their barns. Karl Biedermayer was standing among his people. The war had come to his doorstep.

  We had much work to do that day. The large village of Friedental had come to trade. A chain of camels was lying by the water. In the far distance, windmills were turning on the colorless, metallic horizon.

  We loaded the Friedental grain onto our barge until suppertime, and toward evening Malishev sent for me. He was washing on the deck of the Ivan Tupitsin. An invalid with a pinned-up sleeve was pouring water over him from a pitcher. Malishev snorted and chuckled, holding his cheeks under the stream of water. He toweled himself off and said to his assistant, obviously continuing a conversation, “And rightly so! You can be the nicest fellow in the world, have locked yourself up in

  monasteries, sailed the White Sea, been a desperado—but, please, whatever you do, dont waste fuel!”

  Malishev and I went into the cabin. I laid out the financial records in front of me, and Malishev started dictating to me a telegram to be sent to Ilyich.

  “Moscow. The Kremlin. To Comrade Lenin.”

  In the telegram we reported the dispatching of the first shipments of wheat to the proletariat of Petersburg and Moscow: two trainloads, each twenty thousand poods of grain.

  1

  Mischa Elman, 1891-1967; Efrem Zimbalist, 1890-1985; Ossip Gawrilowitsch, 1878-1936; and Jascha Heifetz, 1901—1987, were among the foremost violinists and conductors of the twentieth century.

  t Leopold Auer, 1845-1930, world-famous professor of violin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

  2

  The street had been renamed in honor of Sergei Witte, an Odessan who had been Russia’s Minister of Finance.

  3

  Part of the Talmud, the Gemara is a rabbinical commentary on the Mishna, the first codification of ancient Jewish oral laws.

  4

  The equivalent of a C-minus. Five was the highest grade, one the lowest, t “Large Fountain” was an elegant beach spa outside Odessa.

  5

  It was a custom among Ukrainian villagers to shave their heads except for a forelock.

  ^ A town southeast of Kiev.

  Collective farm.

  6

  The actual village that Babel visited in the spring of 1930 and decided to base his novel on. In the novels first chapter, “Gapa Guzhva,” the same village appears as Velikaya Krinitsa. Babel had decided to change the name of the village so as not offend the inhabitants.

  7

  Anatoly Lunacharsky, 1875-1933, Marxist critic and playwright, was the USSR’s first Commissar of Education.

  t Food that is not kosher, and so is unfit to eat according to Jewish dietary laws.

  8

  The medical orderly is confusing Engelss concept of the nation state with nationality, in this case Russian versus Jewish nationality.

  ^ Zhlobin, Orsha, and Vitebsk are towns, today in Belarus, that the narrator would have passed through on his way north from Kiev to Petersburg. Novosokolniki and Loknya are in Russia on the other side of the Belarus border.

  9

  Today the city of Pushkin, fourteen miles south of St. Petersburg.

  ^ The “Extraordinary Commission,” formed in 1917 to investigate counterrevolutionary activities.

  10

  Yehuda Halevi, 1075-1141, was a Jewish poet and religious philosopher from Toledo, who embarked on a pilgrimage to Palestine at the end of his life. He died in Egypt, slain, according to legend, by a hostile Muslim on the threshold of Palestine.

  ^ A sculpture of a group of horses by Peter Karlovich Klodt, 1805-1867.

  11

  Abdul Hamid II, 1842-1918, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

  Later Empress Maria Fyodorovna, wife of Czar Alexander III.

  ^ Alphonse de Lamartine, 1790-1869, was a French Romantic poet and statesman.

  12

  Mikhail (Mosey) Solomonovich Uritsky, 1873-1918, the son of a Jewish merchant, was the commissar of internal affairs for the northern district and the chairman of the Petrograd (Petersburg) Cheka.

  13

  Sergei Vasilevich Malishev, 1877-1938, nicknamed “The Red Merchant,” was one of the chief trade administrators during the early years of Soviet rule.

  ^ Saratov, a city in western Russia, lies along the middle course of the Volga River.

  14

  Renamed Marks (Marx).

  ^ Today Zaanstadt.

  15

  Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin, 1873-1938, a legendary bass, one of the most renowned opera singers of the early twentieth century.

  t Alexander Tichonovich Grechaninov, 1864-1956, Russian composer and songwriter, noted for his religious works and childrens music.

  16

  Lisyei is saying that the Volga German settlement of Wosnesenka, called Voznesenskoe by the Russians, now has a Russian community—hence the Orthodox church. And where there are Russians, there is home-brewed vodka, which one could not get from the Germans, who were mainly Mennonites.

  17

  Vasili Ivanovich Chapayev, 1887-1919, was commander of the Pugachov Brigade that was fighting the counterrevolutionary troops in the area.

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT

  In the winter of 1916 I found myself in Petersburg with forged papers and without a kopeck to my name. Aleksei Kazantsev, a teacher of Russian philology, gave me shelter.

  He lived on a frozen, reeking, yellow street in Peski.*[A poor suburb of Petersburg.] To increase his meager income, he did Spanish translations—in those days the fame of Blasco Ibanez was on the rise. [Vicente Blasco Ibanez, 1867-1928, was a Spanish novelist and anti-monarchist politician. His novels, with their themes of war and social injustice, were particularly popular in Soviet Russia.]

  Kazantsev had never been to Spain, not even once, but his whole being was flooded with love for the country—he knew every Spanish castle, park, and river. Besides myself, a large number of men and women who had fallen through the cracks of life flocked to him. We lived in dire poverty. From time to time our pieces on current events appeared in small print in the popular press.

  In the mornings I lounged about in morgues and police stations.

  But the happiest of us all was Kazantsev. He had a motherland— Spain.

  In November I was offered the position of clerk at the Obukhovsky Factory,*[Steelworks founded in 1863. Its almost twelve thousand workers were to play an important role in the Revolution.] not a bad job, bringing with it an exemption from conscription.

  I refused to become a clerk.

  Even in those days, at the age of twenty, I said to myself: Better to suffer hunger, prison, and homelessness than to sit at a clerks desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in making such a pledge, but I haven’t broken it to this day, nor will I. The wisdom of my forefathers was ingrained in me: we have been born to delight in labor, fighting, and love. That is what we have been born for, and nothing else.

  Kazantsev patted the short yellow down on his head as he listened to my sermon. The horror in his eyes was mixed with rapture.

  At Christmas, fortune smiled upon us. Bendersky, a lawyer who owned the Halcyon Publishing House, had decided to bring out a new edition of Maupassant’s works. His wife, Raisa, was going to do the translation. But nothing had yet come of the grand enterprise.

  Kazantsev, as a Spanish translator, was asked if he knew anyone who might be ab
le to help Raisa Mikhailovna. Kazantsev suggested me.

  The following day, donning another man’s jacket, I set out to the Benderskys’. They lived at the corner of the Nevsky Prospekt by the Moika River, in a house built of Finnish granite trimmed with pink columns, embrasures, and stone coats of arms. Before the war, bankers without family or breeding—-Jewish converts to Christianity who grew rich through trade—had built a large number of such spuriously majestic, vulgar castles in Petersburg.

  A red carpet ran up the stairs. Stuffed bears on their hind legs stood on the landings. Crystal lamps shone in their wide-open jaws.

  The Benderskys lived on the third floor. The door was opened by a maid in a white cap and pointed breasts. She led me into a living room, decorated in old Slavic style. Blue paintings by Roerich,1 prehistoric rocks and monsters, hung on the walls. Ancient icons stood on little stands in the corners. The maid with the pointed breasts moved ceremoniously about the room. She was well built, nearsighted, haughty. Debauchery had congealed in her gray, wide-open eyes. Her movements were indolent. I thought how she must thrash about with savage agility when she made love. The brocade curtain that hung over the door swayed. A black-haired, pink-eyed woman, bearing her large breasts before her, came into the living room. It took me no more than a moment to see that Benderskaya was one of those ravishing breed of Jewesses from Kiev or Poltava, from the sated towns of the steppes that abounded with acacias and chestnut trees. These women transmute the money of their resourceful husbands into the lush pink fat on their bellies, napes, and round shoulders. Their sleepy smiles, delicate and sly, drive garrison officers out of their minds.

  “Maupassant is the one passion of my life,” Raisa told me.

  Struggling to restrain the swaying of her large hips, she left the room and came back with her translation of “Miss Harriet.” The translation had no trace of Maupassant’s free-flowing prose with its powerful breath of passion. Benderskaya wrote with laborious and inert correctness and lack of style—the way Jews in the past used to write Russian.

  I took the manuscript home with me to Kazantsev s attic, where all night, among his sleeping friends, I cut swaths through Benderskayas translation. This work isnt as bad as it might seem. When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.