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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  • • •

  The following morning I brought back the corrected manuscript. Raisa had not lied in speaking of her passion for Maupassant. She sat transfixed as I read to her, her hands clasped together. Her satin arms flowed down toward the ground, her forehead grew pale, and the lace between her struggling breasts swerved and trembled.

  “How did you do this?”

  I spoke to her of style, of an army of words, an army in which every type of weapon is deployed. No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place. She listened with her head inclined and her painted lips apart. A black gleam shone in her lacquered hair, parted and pulled smoothly back. Her stockinged legs, with their strong, delicate calves, were planted apart on the carpet.

  The maid, turning away her eyes in which debauchery had congealed, brought in breakfast on a tray.

  The glass sun of Petersburg reclined on the uneven, faded carpet. Twenty-nine books by Maupassant stood on a shelf above the table. The sun, with its melting fingers, touched the books’ morocco leather bindings—the magnificent crypt of the human heart.

  We were served coffee in little blue cups, and we began to translate “Idyll.” Who can forget the tale of the hungry young carpenter sucking milk from the overflowing breasts of the fat wet-nurse. This took place on a train going from Nice to Marseilles, on a sultry midday in the land of roses, the motherland of roses where flower plantations stretch down to the shores of the sea.

  I left the Benderskys’ with a twenty-five-ruble advance. That evening our commune in Peski got as drunk as a flock of inebriated geese. We scooped up the finest caviar and chased it down with liver-wurst. Heated by liquor, I began ranting against Tolstoy.

  “He got frightened, our count did! He lacked courage! It was fear that made him turn to religion! Frightened of the cold, of old age, the count knitted himself a jersey out of faith!”

  “Go on,” Kazantsev said, wagging his birdlike head.

  We fell asleep on the floor next to our beds. I dreamt of Katya, the forty-year-old washerwoman who lived on the floor beneath us. In the mornings we would go and get boiling water from her. I’d never had a good look at her face, but in my dream Katya and I did God only knows what. We consumed each other with kisses. The following morning I could not resist going down to her for boiling water.

  I came face-to-face with a wilted woman, a shawl tied across her chest, with disheveled ash-gray curls and sodden hands.

  • • •

  From then on I breakfasted every day at the Benderskys’. In our attic we now had a new stove, herring, and chocolate. Twice Raisa drove me out to the islands.2 I couldn’t resist telling her about my childhood. To my own surprise, my tale sounded doleful. Her frightened sparkling eyes peered at me from under her fur hat. The reddish hairs of her eyelashes quivered mournfully.

  I met Raisa’s husband, a yellow-faced Jew with a bald head and a lean, powerful body that always seemed poised to surge up into the air. There were rumors that he was close to Rasputin. The profits he had made from military supplies had given him the look of a madman. His eyes wandered—the fabric of his reality had been rent. Raisa was embarrassed introducing her husband to new people. Because of my youth, it took me a week longer than it should have to realize this.

  After the New Year, Raisas two sisters came up from Kiev. One day I went to her house with the manuscript of “The Confession,” and, not finding her there, dropped by again in the evening. They were in the dining room at the dinner table. I heard silvery neighing and the thunder of excessively jubilant mens voices. Dining is invariably boisterous in wealthy houses that lack pedigree. Their boisterousness was Jewish, with peals of thunder and melodious flourishes. Raisa came out to me in a ball gown, her back bare. Her feet tottered in wavering patent leather shoes.

  “Oh, how drunk I am!” And she stretched out her arms draped in platinum chains and emerald stars.

  Her body swayed like the body of a snake rising to music toward the ceiling. She shook her curly head, her rings tinkled, and suddenly she fell into an armchair with ancient Russian carving. Scars shimmered on her powdered back.

  There was another explosion of womens laughter in the room next door. Out of the dining room came her sisters with their little mustaches, just as big-breasted and tall as Raisa. Their breasts were thrust forward, their black hair flowed free. Both were married to Benderskys of their own. The room filled with rambling female vivacity, the vivacity of mature women. The husbands wrapped the sisters in sealskin coats, in Orenburg shawls,3 [Delicate lace shawls, fashionable in Russia at the time, knitted from goat wool by Orenburg Tatars.] shod them in black boots. Peering out from the snowy shields of their shawls were their burning, rouged cheeks, their marble noses, and eyes with a nearsighted Semitic sparkle. After some lively commotion, they left for the theater, where Chaliapin was appearing in Judith [Chaliapin, the renowned opera singer. Judith is an opera by Alexander Nikolayevich Serov, 1820-1871]

  .• • •

  “I want to work,” Raisa jabbered, stretching out her bare arms. “We’ve lost a whole week.”

  She brought a bottle and two glasses from the dining room. Her breasts lay loose in the silken sack of her dress. Her nipples stiffened, the silk impeding them.

  “A cherished vintage,” Raisa said, pouring the wine. “A Muscatel ’83. My husband will kill me when he finds out!”

  I had never had any dealings with a Muscatel ’83 before, and did not hesitate to empty three glasses one after the other. I was immediately wafted off to a little side street where orange flames flickered and music played.

  “Oh, how drunk I am. . . . What are we going to do today?” “Today were doing ‘L’aveu.’ ”

  In other words, “The Confession.” The hero of this tale is the sun, le soleil de France. Incandescent drops of sun, falling on red-haired Celeste, turned into freckles. Wine, apple cider, and the sun with its steep rays had burnished the face of Polyte, the coachman. Twice a week, Celeste drove into town to sell cream, eggs, and chickens. She paid Polyte ten sous for the ride and four to carry her basket. And on every ride Polyte winked at her and asked, “When are we going to have a bit of fun, ma belleT

  “What do you mean by that, Monsieur Polyte?”

  “Having fun means having fun, damn it!” Polyte explained, bouncing on the seat. “A man and a woman, no need for music!”

  “I don’t like such jokes, Monsieur Polyte,” Celeste answered, and swept her skirts, which hung over her powerful, red-stockinged calves, away from the young man.

  But Polyte, the devil, kept guffawing and coughing. “We’ll have fun someday, ma belled And tears of mirth trickled down his face, which was the color of rust-red blood and wine.

  I drank another glass of the cherished Muscatel. Raisa clinked glasses with me.

  The maid with the congealed eyes walked through the room and disappeared.

  Ce diable de Polyte"... Over a period of two years Celeste paid him forty-eight francs. Two francs short of fifty! One day at the end of the second year, when they were alone together in the buggy, Polyte, who had drunk some cider before they set out, asked her as usual, “How about having some fun today, Ma’mselle Celeste?”

  “I’m at your service, M’sieur Polyte.”

  Raisa laughed out loud, slumping over the table. Ce diable de Polyte!

  The buggy was harnessed to a white nag. The white nag, its lips pink with age, walked a slow walk. The joyful sun of France embraced the buggy, shut off from the world by a faded brown cover. The young man and the girl—they needed no music.

  • • •

  Raisa handed me a glass. It was the fifth.

  “To Maupassant, mon vieuxl”

  “Aren’t we going to have some fun today, ma belleT

  I reached over to Raisa and kissed her on the lips. They trembled and bulged.

  “You’re so funny,” Raisa muttered through her teeth, tottering backward.

  She pressed herself against the wall
, spreading her bare arms. Blotches flared up on her arms and shoulders. Of all the gods ever crucified, she was the most captivating.

  “Be so kind as to seat yourself, M’sieur Polyte.”

  She pointed to the reclining blue Slavic armchair. Its back was made of interlaced carved wood on which tails were painted. I stumbled toward it.

  Night obstructed my youth with a bottle of Muscatel ’83 and twenty-nine books, twenty-nine petards crammed with pity, genius, and passion. I jumped up, knocking over the armchair and bumping into the shelf. Twenty-nine volumes came tumbling onto the carpet, falling onto their spines, their pages flying wild . . . and the white nag of my fate walked a slow walk.

  “You’re so funny,” Raisa growled.

  I left the granite house on the Moika Canal after eleven, just before her husband and sisters came back from the theater. I was sober and could have walked a thin plank, but stumbling was far better, and I swayed from side to side, singing in a language I had just invented.

  Mists of fog rolled in waves through the tunnels of streets girded with a chain of street lamps. Monsters roared behind seething walls. The carriageways cut the legs that walked over them.

  Back at home Kazantsev was asleep. He slept sitting up, his haggard legs stretched out in felt boots. The canary down was fluffed up on his head. He had fallen asleep by the stove, hunched over a 1624 edition of Don Quixote. There was a dedication on the title page to the Duke de Broglio. I lay down quietly so as not to wake Kazantsev, pulled the lamp toward me, and began to read Edouard de Maynial s book The Life and Works of Guy de Maupassant.4

  Kazantsevs lips moved, his head lolled forward.

  • • •

  That night I learned from Edouard de Maynial that Maupassant was born in 1850 to a Norman nobleman and Laure Le Poittevin, Flauberts cousin. At twenty-five, he had his first attack of congenital syphilis. He fought the disease with all the potency and vitality he had. In the beginning, he suffered from headaches and bouts of hypochondria. Then the phantom of blindness loomed before him. His eyesight grew weaker. Paranoia, unsociability, and belligerence enveloped. He struggled with passion, rushed about the Mediterranean on his yacht, fled to Tunis, Morocco, and central Africa, and wrote unceasingly. Having achieved fame, he cut his throat at the age of forty, bled profusely, but lived. They locked him in a madhouse. He crawled about on all fours and ate his own excrement. The last entry in his sorrowful medical report announces: “Monsieur de Maupassant va s’animaliser (Monsieur de Maupassant is degenerating to an animal state).” He died at the age of forty-two. His mother outlived him.

  I read the book through to the end and got up from my bed. The fog had come to the window, hiding the universe. My heart constricted. I was touched by a premonition of truth.

  PETROLEUM

  I have a lot of news to tell you, as always. Sabsovich was given a prize at the oil refinery, walks about decked out in flashy “foreign” clothes, and has been given a promotion. When people heard about this promotion, they finally saw the light: the boy is moving up the ladder. This is the reason I stopped going out with him. “Now that he has moved up the ladder,” the boy feels that he knows the truth hidden from us lesser mortals and has turned into “Comrade Perfect,” so orthodox (“orthobox,” as Kharchenko calls it) that you cant even talk to him anymore. When we ran into each other two days ago, he asked me why I hadn’t congratulated him. I asked him whom I should congratulate, him or the Soviet government. He understood my point right away, hemmed and hawed, and said, “Well, call me sometime.” But his wife was quick to pick up the scent. Yesterday I got a call. “Claudia, darling, if you need any underwear, we now have great connections at the Restricted Access Store.” I told her that I was hoping to get by with my own underwear ration coupons till the outbreak of the World Revolution.

  Now a few words about myself. You 11 have heard by now that I am the section head at the Petroleum Syndicate. They dangled the position before me for the longest time, but I kept turning them down. My argument: no aptitude for office work, and then I also wanted to enroll at the Industrial Academy. Four times at Bureau Meetings they asked me to accept the position, so finally I had to accept. And I must say I dont regret it. From where I am I have a clear picture of the whole enterprise, and I’ve managed to get a thing or two done. I organized an expedition to our part of Sakhalin, stepped up the prospecting, and I deal a lot with the Petroleum Institute. Zinaida is with me. Shes well. Shell be giving birth soon, and has been through quite a lot. She didn’t tell her Max Alexandrovich (I call him Max-and-Moritz)5 about the pregnancy until she was already in her third month. He put on a show of enthusiasm, planted an icy kiss on her forehead, and then gave her to understand that he was on the brink of a great scientific discovery, that his thoughts were far from everyday life, and that one could not imagine anyone less suited to family life than he, Max Alexandrovich Solomovich, but, needless to say, he wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice everything, etc., etc. Zinaida, being a woman of the twentieth century, burst into tears but kept her aplomb. She didn’t sleep all night, gasping, her head thrashing about. The moment it was light, she put on a tattered old dress and rushed off to the Research Institute, looking dreadful, her hair in tangles. There she made a scene, begging him to forget what had happened the previous night, saying that she would destroy the child, but that she would never forgive the world—all this in the halls of the Research Institute, teeming with people! Max-and-Moritz goes bright red, then pale. “Let’s discuss it on the phone, we’ll get together for a chat,” he mutters.

  Zinaida didn’t even let him finish, but rushed out and came running to me.

  “I’m not coming to work tomorrow!” she told me.

  I blew up, and, seeing no reason to control myself, bawled her out. Just think—she’s over thirty, has no looks worth mentioning, no man worth his salt would even wipe his nose with her, and then this Max-and-Moritz fellow turns up (not that he’s hot for her, he’s hot for the fact that she’s not Jewish and has aristocratic ancestors), she gets herself knocked up, so she might as well keep the baby and raise it. As we all know, Jewish half-castes come out quite well—just look at the specimen Ala produced. And when if not now does she intend to have a child, now when her gut muscles are still working and her breasts can still make milk? But she has only one answer to whatever I say: “I cannot bear the idea of my child growing up without a father.” She tells me it’s still like in the nineteenth century, “and my papa, the general, will come stalking out of his study carrying an icon and lay a curse on me (or maybe without an icon—I dont know how they used to curse back then), after which the women will take the baby to a foundling home or send it to a wet nurse in the countryside.”

  “Nonsense, Zinaida!” I tell her. “Times have changed, well make do without Max-and-Moritz!”

  I was still in midsentence when I was called to a meeting. At that time the matter of Viktor Andreyevich had to be dealt with immediately. The Central Committee had decided to revoke the former Five-Year Plan and raise petroleum extraction in 1932 to forty million tons. The figures for analysis were handed to the planners, in other words to Viktor Andreyevich. He locks himself in his office, then calls me over and shows me his letter. Addressed to the Presidium of the Supreme National Economic Council. Contents: I hereby renounce all responsibility for the planning department. I consider the figure of forty million tons to be wholly unjustified. We re supposed to get more than a third of it from unprospected regions, which is like selling a bearskin not only before you’ve actually killed the bear, but even before you’ve tracked it down! Furthermore, from three oil refineries functioning today the new plan expects us to have a hundred and twenty up and running by the end of the Five-Year Plan. And all this with a shortage of metal and the fact that we have not yet mastered the extremely complex refinery system. And this is how he ended the letter: Like all mortals, I prefer to support accelerated production quotas, but my sense of duty, and so on and so forth. I read his letter to the e
nd.

  So then he asks me: “Should I send it, or not?”

  And I tell him: “Viktor Andreyevich! I find your arguments and attitude completely unacceptable, but I do not see myself as having the right to advise you to hide your views.”

  So he sent the letter. The Supreme National Economic Council’s hair stood on end. They called a meeting. Bagrinovsky himself came from the council. They hung a map of the Soviet Union on the wall, pinpointing new deposits and pipelines for crude and refined oil. “A country with fresh blood in its veins,” Bagrinovsky called it.

  At the meeting the young engineers of the “omnivore” type wanted to make a meal of Viktor Andreyevich. I stepped forward and gave a forty-five-minute speech: “Though I do not doubt the knowledge and good will of Professor Klossovsky, and even have the utmost respect for him, I spurn the fetishism of numbers that is holding him captive!” That was the gist of my argument.

  “We must reject our multiplication tables as guidelines for governmental wisdom. Would it have been possible to foretell on the basis of mere figures that we were going to manage to fulfill our five-year crude-oil quarrying quota within just two and a half years? Would it have been possible to foretell on the basis of mere figures that by 1931 we would have increased the bulk of our oil export by nine times, putting us in second place after the United States?”

  Muradyan got up and spoke after me, attacking the route of the oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Moscow. Viktor Andreyevich sat in silence, taking notes. His cheeks were covered with an old mans flush, a flush of venous blood. I felt sorry for him. I didn’t stay to the end and went back to my office. Zinaida was still sitting there with clasped hands.