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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  “Are you going to give birth or not?” I asked her.

  She looked at me with unseeing eyes, her head shaking, and said something, but the words were soundless.

  “I’m all alone with my sorrow, Claudia, as if they’ve just nailed my coffin shut,” she tells me. “How quickly one forgets—I cant even remember how people live without sorrow.”

  That’s what she said to me, her nose turning red and growing even longer, her peasant cheekbones (yes, some aristocrats do have them!) jutting out. I doubt Max-and-Moritz would get all fired up seeing you like that, I think to myself. I started yelling at her, and chased her off to the kitchen to peel potatoes. Don’t laugh—when you come here, I’ll have you peeling potatoes too! We were given such a stringent time frame for designing the Orsky factory that the construction crew and the draftsmen are working night and day, and Vasyona cooks them potatoes and herring and makes them omelets, and off they go to work again.

  So off she went to the kitchen, and a minute later I heard a scream. I run—Zinaida is lying on the floor without a pulse, her eyes rolled up. I cannot even begin to tell you what she put us through—Viktor

  Andreyevich, Vasyona, and me! We called in the doctor. She regained consciousness at night and touched my hand. You know Zinaida, how incredibly tender she can be. I could see that everything inside her had burned out and something new was about to well up. There was no time to lose.

  “Zinusha,” I.tell her, “well call Rosa Mikhailovna (shes still our main specialist in these matters) and tell her that you’ve had second thoughts, that you won’t go and see her. Can I call her?”

  She made a sign—yes go ahead, you can. Viktor Andreyevich was sitting next to her on the sofa, taking her pulse incessantly. I walked away, but listened to what he said to her. “I’m sixty-five, Zinusha,” he told her, “my shadow falls more and more weakly on the ground before me. I am an elderly, learned man, and God (God does have His hand in everything), God willed that the final five years of my life are to coincide with this—well, you know what I mean—this Five-Year Plan. So now I won’t get a chance to have a breather or a quiet moment till the day I die. If my daughter didn’t come to me in the evenings to pat me on the back, if my sons didn’t write me letters, I would be unhap-pier than words could say. Have the baby, Zinusha, and Claudia Pavlovna and I will help raise it.”

  While the old man goes on mumbling, I call Rosa Mikhailovna— well, my dear Rosa Mikhailovna, I tell her, I know Zinaida promised to come see you tomorrow, but she’s reconsidered. And I hear Rosa’s sprightly voice on the phone: “Oh, I’m so happy she’s reconsidered! That’s absolutely marvelous!” Our specialist is always like this. Pink silk blouse, English skirt, hair neatly curled, showers, exercise, admirers.

  We took Zinaida home. I tucked her in bed, made tea. We slept in each other’s arms, we even cried, remembered things best forgotten, talked everything through, our tears mingling, until we fell asleep. All the while my “old devil” was sitting nice and quiet at his desk translating a German technical book. Dasha, you wouldn’t recognize my “old devil”—he’s all shriveled up, has run out of steam and become quiet. It really upsets me. He spends the whole day working himself to death on the Five-Year Plan, and then at night he does translations.

  “Zinaida will have the baby,” I tell him. “What shall we call the boy?” (It’s definitely not going to be a girl.) We decided on Ivan. There are far too many Yuris and Leonids about the place. Hell most proba-

  bly be a beast of a little boy, with sharp teeth, with teeth enough for sixty men. We’ve produced enough fuel for him, he’ll be able to go on drives with young ladies to Yalta, to Batumi, while we’ve had to make do with the Vorobyovi Hills.* Good-bye, Dasha. My “old devil” will write you separately. How are things with you?

  Claudia.

  P.S. I’m scribbling this at work, there’s a great racket overhead, the plaster is falling from the ceiling. Our building still seems strong enough, and we’re adding another four stories to the, four that we have. Moscow is all dug up and full of trenches, pipes and bricks everywhere, a tangle of tram lines, machines imported from abroad are banging, rumbling, swinging their cranes, there’s the stench of pitch, and there’s smoke everywhere, like at a wildfire. Yesterday on Varvarskaya Square I saw a young man with sandals on his bare feet, his red, shaven head shining and his peasant shirt without a belt. He and I went hopping from one little mound to another, from one earth pile to another, climbing out of holes, falling back into them again.

  “This is what it’s like once a battle has begun,” he tells me. “Moscow has now become the front, lady, Moscow is at the heart of the battle!”

  He had a kind face, smiling like a child. I can still picture him before me.

  DANTE STREET

  The Hotel Danton, where I was staying, was rattled to its foundations by moans of love from five until seven in the evening. Experts were at work in the rooms. Having arrived in France with the conviction that its people had lost their spark, I was somewhat taken aback by their vigor. In our country, we do not bring women to such a boiling pitch. Nowhere near it.

  “Mon vieux” Monsieur Bienalle, my neighbor, once told me, “in our thousand years of history we have created woman, food, and literature. No one can deny this.”

  Jean Bienalle, a secondhand car dealer, did more for my knowledge of France than all the books I had read and all the French towns I had seen. The first time we met he asked me which restaurant I ate at, what cafe I went to, and which brothel I frequented. My answer appalled him.

  “On va refaire votre vieF6

  And the changes were undertaken. We ate lunch at a tavern across the street from the Hailes aux vins, frequented by cattle dealers and wine merchants.

  Village girls in slippers served us lobster in red sauce, roast rabbit stuffed with garlic and truffles, and wine you could find nowhere else. Bienalle ordered, I paid, but I only paid as much as the French paid. It wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t the foreigners price. And I also paid the

  Frenchmans price at the brothel funded by a group of senators next to the Gare St. Lazare. Bienalle had to put more effort into introducing me to the inmates of that house than if he had attempted to introduce me to a session of Parliament while a cabinet is being overthrown. We capped off the evening at the Porte Maillot at a cafe where boxing promoters and race car drivers gathered. My tutor belonged to the half of the nation that sells cars. The other half buys them. He was an agent for Renault and did most of his trade with the Balkans, those most ambiguous of countries, and with Rumanian speculators, the dirtiest of speculators. In his free time Bienalle taught me the art of buying a used car. According to him, one had to go down to the Riviera toward the end of the season, when the English were leaving for home, abandoning in local garages cars they had only used for two or three months. Bienalle himself drove a dilapidated Renault, which he drove the way a Siberian tribesman drives his sled dogs. On Sundays we drove 120 kilometers to Rouen in his bouncing vehicle to eat duck, which the locals there roast in its own blood. We were accompanied by Germaine, who sold gloves on Rue Royale. She spent every Wednesday and Sunday with Bienalle. She always came at five o’clock. Within seconds their room echoed with growls, the thud of tumbling bodies, frightened gasps, after which the womans tender death throes began: “Oh, Jean . . .”

  I added it all up: Germaine went into his room, closed the door behind her, they gave each other a kiss, she took off her hat and gloves, laid them on the table, and, according to my calculations, that was all there was time for. He wouldn’t even have had time to undress. Not uttering a word, they bounced about like rabbits between the sheets. They moaned for a while, and then burst out laughing and chatted about everyday things. I knew as much as any neighbor living on the other side of a thin board partition. Germaine was having trouble with Monsieur Heinrich, the store manager. Her parents lived in Tours, where she visited them. On one Saturday she bought herself a fur wrap, on another she went to see La B
oheme at the opera. Monsieur Heinrich had his saleswomen wear tailored dress suits. Monsieur Heinrich anglicized Germaine, turning her into one of those brisk, flat-chested, curly-haired businesswomen painted with flaming, brownish rouge. But her fine chunky ankles, her low, nimble laugh, the sharp gaze of her sparkling eyes, and that death-throe moan— “Oh, Jean!”—were all left untouched for Bienalle.

  Germaines powerful, lithe body moved before us in the smoke and gold of the Paris evening. She laughed, throwing back her head and pressing her delicate pink fingers to her breasts. My heart glowed during these hours. There is no solitude more desperate than solitude in Paris. This town is a form of exile for all who come to it from far away, and I realized that Germaine was more important to me than she was to Bienalle. I left for Marseilles with this thought in mind.

  After a month in Marseilles, I returned to Paris. I waited for Wednesday to hear Germaines voice.

  Wednesday came and went, but nobody disturbed the silence of the room next door. Bienalle had changed his day. A womans voice rang out on Thursday, at five o’clock as always. Bienalle gave his visitor time to take off her hat and gloves. Germaine had not only changed her day, she had also changed her voice. It was no longer the gasping, imploring “Oh, Jean!” followed by silence, the harsh silence of another persons happiness; it had turned into a hoarse domestic clamor with guttural exclamations. The new Germaine gnashed her teeth, flung herself heavily onto the sofa, and during the interludes pontificated in her thick, dragging voice. She said nothing about Monsieur Heinrich, growled until seven o’clock, and then got ready to go. I opened the door a crack to say hello to her, but saw a mulatto woman in the corridor with a cockscomb of horselike hair and large, dangling, hoisted-up breasts. She was coming down the corridor, her feet shuffling in worn-out shoes with no heels. I knocked on Bienalle’s door. He was lolling about in bed in his shirt and washed-out socks, ashen and crumpled. “So, mon vieuXy you’ve pensioned off Germaine?”

  “Cette femme est follehe said with a shudder. “Mademoiselle Germaine does not care that on this earth there is winter and summer, a beginning and an end, and that after winter comes summer and then the opposite. She heaves a heavy burden on you and demands that you carry it—but where to, nobody but Mademoiselle Germaine knows!” Bienalle sat up in bed. His trousers stretched over his thin legs. His pale scalp shimmered through his matted hair, and his triangular mustache twitched. A bottle of Macon, four francs a liter, lifted my friend’s spirits again. As we waited for our dessert, he shrugged his shoulders

  and said as if in answer to my thoughts, “Theres more than everlasting love in this world—there are Rumanians, promissory notes, men who go bankrupt, cars with broken chassis. Oh, fen aiplein le dos!”7

  He grew more cheerful over a cognac at the Cafe de Paris.* We sat on the terrace under a white awning with wide stripes running down it. The crowd streamed past over the sidewalk, blending with the electric stars. A car, long as a torpedo, stopped across the street from us. From it emerged an Englishman with a woman in a sable wrap. She sailed past in a cloud of perfume and fur, inhumanly long with a small, shining head of porcelain. Bienalle sat up when he saw her, stretched out his leg in his tattered trousers, and winked at her the way one winks at the girls on the rue de la Gaite. The woman smiled with the corner of her carmine mouth, gave a barely visible nod with her tightly wrapped pink head, and, swinging and swaying her serpentine body, disappeared, with the stiff, crackling Englishman in tow.

  “Ah, canaille!”^ Bienalle said after them. “Two years ago anyone could have had her for an aperitif.”

  The two of us parted late. I had decided that I would go see Germaine that Saturday, take her to the theater, go to Chartres with her if she was in the mood. But as things turned out, I was to see Bienalle and his former girlfriend before then. The following evening, all the doors of the Hotel Danton were cordoned off by the police, their blue capes swirling through our vestibule. They let me go up after they verified that I was one of Madame Truffauts lodgers. I found policemen standing outside my room. The door to Bienalle s room stood open. He was lying on the floor in a pool of blood, his lusterless eyes half closed. The stamp of street death was upon him. My friend Bienalle had been stabbed, stabbed to death. Germaine was sitting at the table in her tailored dress suit and her delicate, close-fitting hat. She greeted me and hung her head, and with it the feather on her hat hung too.

  All this took place at six in the evening, the hour of love. There was a woman in every room. They hastily applied rouge and drew black lines along the edges of their lips before leaving half dressed, with stockings up to their thighs like pageboys. Doors opened and men with untied shoes lined up in the corridor. In the room of a wrinkled Italian racing cyclist a barefoot little girl was crying into the pillow. I went downstairs to tell Madame Truffaut. The girls mother sold newspapers on the Rue St. Michel. All the old women of our street, the Rue Dante, misshapen piles of goiterous meat, whiskered, wheezing, with cataracts and purple blotches, had already gathered in the little office: market women, concierges, sellers of roasted chestnuts and potatoes.

  “Voila qui nestpasgai,” I said as I went in. “Quel malheurf8

  “C’est I’amour, monsieur. . . . Elle Taimait99^

  Madame Truffaut’s lilac breasts tumbled in her lace blouse, her elephantine legs strode through the room, her eyes flashed.

  “UamoreP Signora Rocca, who ran a restaurant on Rue Dante, called out from behind her like an echo. “Dio castiga quelli> chi non conoscono Vamoref99

  The old women huddled together, all muttering at the same time. A variolar flame lit their cheeks, their eyes bulging out of their sockets.

  “Vamour9' Madame Truffaut repeated, hobbling toward me. “C’est une grosse affaire, Pamour

  A siren sounded in the street. Skillful hands dragged the murdered man downstairs and out to the ambulance. My friend Bienalle had turned into a mere number, losing his name in the rolling waves of Paris. Signora Rocca went over to the window and looked out at the corpse. She was pregnant, her belly jutting out threateningly. Silk lay on her protruding hips, and the sun washed over her yellow, puffy face and soft yellow hair.

  “Dio99 Signora Rocca said. “Tu non perdoni quelli, chi non amanoP10 Dusk descended on the tattered net of the Latin quarter, the squat crowd scuttling into its crevices, a hot breath of garlic pouring from its yards. Darkness covered the house of Madame Truffaut, its gothic facade with its two windows, and the remnants of turrets and volutes, ivy turned to stone.

  Danton had lived here a century and a half ago. From his window he had seen the Conciergerie, the bridges strewn across the Seine, and the same cluster of little blind hovels huddling by the river. The same breath had wafted up to him. Rusty beams and signs of wayside inns had creaked, rattled by the wind.

  DI GRASSO

  I wasas fourteen years old. I belonged to the fearless battalion of theater ticket scalpers. My boss was a shark with an eye that always squinted and a large, silky mustache. His name was Kolya Shvarts. I fell in with him that dark year when the Italian Opera went bust. The impresario, swayed by the theater critics, had not signed up Anselmi and Tito Ruffo as guest stars, concentrating instead on a strong ensemble. He was punished for this, went broke, and so did we. To set things right, we were promised Chaliapin, but Chaliapin wanted three thousand a performance. So Di Grasso, the Sicilian tragic actor, came with his troupe instead. They were taken to their hotel in carts loaded with children, cats, and cages in which Italian birds fluttered.

  “We cant push this merchandise!” Kolya Shvarts said when he saw the motley procession rolling in.

  The moment the actor arrived, he went down to the bazaar with his bag. In the evening, carrying a different bag, he turned up at the theater. Barely fifty people came to the premiere. We hawked tickets at half price, but could find no buyers.

  That evening Di Grasso s troupe performed a Sicilian folk drama, with a plot as humdrum as night and day. The daughter of a rich peas
ant became engaged to a shepherd. She was true to him, until one day the squires son came visiting from town in a velvet vest. The girl chatted with the visitor, tongue-tied and giggling at all the wrong moments. Listening to them, the shepherd darted his head about like a startled bird. Throughout the whole first act he crept along walls, went off somewhere in his fluttering trousers, and then came back again, looking around shiftily.

  “We have a turkey on our hands!” Kolya Shvarts said during the intermission. “This is merchandise for Kremenchug, not Odessa!”

  The intermission gave the girl time to prime herself for the betrayal. In the second act she was unrecognizable. She became intolerant and dreamy, and eagerly gave back the engagement ring to the shepherd. The shepherd led her to a tawdry painted statue of the Holy Virgin.

  “Signorina! It is the Holy Virgins will that you hear me out!” he said in a bass voice in Sicilian dialect, turning away from her. “The Holy Virgin will give Giovanni, the visitor from town, as many women as he wills. But I, Signorina, need nobody but you! The Virgin Mary, our Immaculate Protectress, will tell you the same thing if you ask her.”

  The girl stood with her back to the painted wooden statue. As the shepherd talked, she tapped her foot impatiently. On this earth—oh, woe to us!—there isnt a woman who is not gripped by folly at the very moment when her fate is being decided. A woman is alone at such moments, with no Holy Virgin she can appeal to.

  In the third act, Giovanni, the visitor from town, met his fate. The village barber was shaving Giovanni as he sat with his powerful masculine legs sprawled out over the proscenium. The pleats of his vest shone beneath the Sicilian sun. The stage set portrayed a village fair. The shepherd stood in the far corner. He stood there silently, among the carefree crowd. He hung his head, then raised it, and under the weight of his burning, fixed gaze, Giovanni began to fidget and squirm in his chair. He jumped up and pushed the barber away. In a cracking voice Giovanni demanded that the policeman remove all shady and suspicious-looking people from the village square. The shepherd— played by Di Grasso—hesitated for a moment, then smiled, soared into the air, flew over the stage of the Odessa City Theater, alighted on Giovannis shoulders, and sunk his teeth into his neck. Muttering and squinting at the audience, he sucked the blood from the wound. Giovanni fell to the ground and the curtain came down in menacing silence, hiding the murderer and the murdered man. Not wasting a single moment, we rushed off to Theater Alley, Kolya Shvarts leading the pack. The box office was already selling tickets for the following day. Next morning the Odessa News informed the few people who had been at the performance that they had seen the most incredible actor of the century.