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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  During his Odessa performances, Di Grasso was to play King Lear, Othello, Civil Death, and Turgenevs Parasite, convincing us with every word and movement that there was more justice and hope in the frenzy of noble passion than in the joyless rules of the world.

  The tickets for these performances sold at five times their price. The public in its frantic quest for tickets ran to the taverns, where they found howling, red-faced scalpers spouting innocent blasphemies.

  A stream of dusty pink heat poured into Theater Alley. Storekeepers in felt slippers brought green bottles of wine and casks of olives out onto the street. Macaroni was boiling in foaming water in cauldrons in front of stores, the steam melting into the distant skies. Old women in mens boots sold cockleshells and souvenirs, chasing wavering customers with their loud yells. Rich Jews, their beards combed and parted, rode in carriages to the Hotel Severnaya, and knocked discreetly at the doors of fat, black-haired women with mustaches—the actresses of Di Grassos troupe. Everyone in Theater Alley was happy, except for one person, and that person was me. Disaster was hovering over me. It was only a matter of time before my father would realize that I had taken his watch and pawned it with Kolya Shvarts. Kolya had had enough time now to get used to the idea that the gold watch was his, and as he was a man who drank Bessarabian wine instead of tea at breakfast, he could not bring himself to return the watch, even though I had paid him back his money. That was the kind of person he was. His personality was exactly like my fathers. Caught between these two men, I watched the hoops of other people’s happiness roll past me. I had no choice but to escape to Constantinople. Everything had already been arranged with the second engineer of a steamer, The Duke of Kent, but before setting out to sea, I decided to bid Di Grasso farewell. He was to appear one last time in the role of the shepherd whisked into the air by an otherworldly force. Odessa’s whole Italian colony had come to the theater, led by the trim, bald-headed consul, followed by fidgety Greeks and bearded externs staring fanatically at a point invisible to all. Long-armed Utochkin* was also there.

  * Sergei Isayevich Utochkin, 1874-1916, an aviation pioneer, was a prominent and dashing Odessan figure.

  Kolya Shvarts even brought his wife in her fringed, violet shawl, a woman as robust as a grenadier and as drawn-out as a steppe, with a crinkled, sleepy face peeking out at its borderland. Her face was drenched with tears as the curtain fell.

  “You no-good wretch!” she shouted at Kolya as they left the theater. “Now you know what real love is!”

  With mannish steps Madame Shvarts plodded heavily down Langeron Street, tears trickling from her fishlike eyes, her fringed shawl shuddering on her fat shoulders. Her head shaking, she yelled out for the whole street to hear a list of women who lived happily with their husbands. “Sugar puff—that’s what those husbands call their wives! Sweetie pie! Baby cakes!”

  Kolya walked meekly next to his wife, quietly blowing into his silky mustache. Out of habit, I walked behind them. I was sobbing. Catching her breath for a second, Madame Shvarts heard me crying and turned around.

  “You no-good wretch!” she shouted at her husband, her fishlike eyes widening. “May I not live to see another happy hour if you dont give that boy back his watch!”

  Kolya froze, his mouth falling open, but then he came to his senses, and, pinching me hard, shoved the watch into my hands.

  “What does he give me?” Madame Shvarts’s rough, tearful voice lamented, as it receded into the distance. “Low-down tricks today, low-down tricks tomorrow! I ask you, you no-good wretch, how long can a woman wait?”

  They walked to the corner and turned onto Pushkin Street. I stayed back, clutching my watch, and suddenly, with a clarity I had never before experienced, I saw the soaring columns of the Town Council, the illuminated leaves on the boulevard, and Pushkin’s bronze head with the moon’s pale reflection on it. For the first time I saw everything around me as it really was—hushed and beautiful beyond description.

  SULAK

  Gulays outfit had been crushed in the province of Vinnitsa in 1922.11 His chief of staff was Adrian Sulak, a village schoolmaster. Sulak managed to cross the border into Galicia, and shortly thereafter the newspapers reported his death. Six years later, we found out that Sulak was alive, hiding in the Ukraine. Chernishov and I were commissioned to track him down. We set out for Khoshchevatoye, Sulaks village, with papers in our pockets saying that we were livestock specialists. The chairman of the village council turned out to be a demobilized Red Army man, a good, straightforward fellow.

  “You’ll be lucky if you can get your hands on a jug of milk in this place,” he told us. “Here in Khoshchevatoye they chew people up, skin and bone!”

  Chernishov asked him where we could spend the night, bringing the conversation around to Sulaks hut.

  “Yes, thats an idea,” the chairman said. “His widows living there now.”

  He took us over to the edge of the village, to a house with a corrugated iron roof. Inside we found a dwarf in a loose white blouse sitting in front of a pile of sackcloth. Two boys in orphanage jackets sat with their heads bowed over books. A baby with a bloated white head lay asleep in a cradle. A cold monastic cleanliness lay over everything.

  “KharitinaTerentevna,” the chairman said hesitantly. “I want to put these good people up with you.”

  The woman showed us the room and went back to her pile of sackcloth.

  “This widow wont turn you away,” the chairman told us when we were outside. “Shes in a bind.”

  Looking around, he confided to us that Sulak had served with the Ukrainian nationalists, but had now gone over to the Pope of Rome.12 “What? The husband’s with the Pope of Rome and the wife has a child a year?”

  “That's life,” the chairman said. He saw a horseshoe on the road and picked it up. “Don’t be fooled just because the widow is a dwarf— she’s got milk enough for five. Even other women come over for her milk.”

  At home the chairman fried some eggs with lard, and brought out some vodka. He got drunk, and climbed up onto the bench above the stove to go to sleep. We heard whispering and a child crying.

  “Hannochka, I promise I will,” our host whispered. “I promise I’ll go see the schoolmistress tomorrow.”

  “Quiet up there!” shouted Chernishov, lying next to me. “We want to get some sleep!”

  The bedraggled chairman peered over the edge of the stove bench. His shirt collar was unbuttoned and his bare feet hung down.

  “The schoolmistress handed out some bunnies for breeding at school,” he said apologetically. “She gave us a she-bunny, but no he-bunny. So there was the she-bunny, and then come spring, that’s life, she hops off to the woods!”

  “Hannochka!” the chairman suddenly shouted, turning to the girl. “I’ll go to the schoolmistress tomorrow and I’ll bring you a pair, and we’ll make a cage for them!”

  Father and daughter went on talking for a long time on the stove bench, and he kept shouting, “Hannochka!” Then he fell asleep. Next to me, Chernishov was tossing and turning in the hay.

  “Let’s go there now,” he said.

  We got up. The moon shone in the clean, cloudless sky. The puddles were covered by spring ice. Bare cornstalks stood in Sulaks garden, which was overgrown with weeds and filled with scrap iron. A stable stood next to the garden. We heard a rustling noise coming from it, and a light shimmered through the cracks in the boards. Chernishov crept to the stable door, rammed it with his shoulder, and the lock gave way. We went inside and saw an open pit in the middle of the stable, with a man sitting at the bottom. At the edge of the pit stood the dwarf in her white blouse, a bowl of borscht in her hands.

  “Hello, Adrian,” Chernishov said. “Getting a bite to eat, are you?”

  The dwarf dropped the bowl and hurled herself onto me, biting my hand. Her teeth were locked and she moaned and shook. A gunshot came from the pit.

  “Adrian!” Chernishov shouted, jumping back. “We want to take you alive!”

&n
bsp; Sulak struggled with the bolt of his gun at the bottom of the pit. The bolt clicked.

  “I've been talking to you as a person,” Chernishov said, and fired.

  Sulak fell against the yellow, planed wall, scraping at it, blood flowing from his mouth and ears, and collapsed.

  Chernishov stood guard. I ran to fetch the chairman. We took the dead man away that same night. Sulaks sons walked next to Chernishov along the wet, dimly shimmering road. The dead man’s feet in Polish shoes with reinforced soles jutted out from the back of the cart. The dwarf sat stiffly by her husbands head. Her face, distorted by little bones, looked metallic in the dimming light of the moon. The baby slept on her tiny knees.

  “Full of milk!” Chernishov suddenly said, as he marched down the road. “Ill show you milk!”

  THE TRIAL

  Madame Blanchard, a sixty-one-year-old woman, met Ivan Nedachin, a former lieutenant colonel, in a cafe on the Boulevard des Italiens. They fell in love. Their love was more a matter of sensuality than common sense. Within three months the lieutenant colonel had disappeared with Madame Blanchards stocks and the jewelry she had given him to be appraised by a jeweler on the Rue de la Paix.

  “Acces de folie passagere”13 the doctor diagnosed Madame Blanchards ensuing fit.

  Regaining consciousness, the old woman confessed everything to her daughter-in-law. Her daughter-in-law went to the police. Nedachin was arrested in a wine cellar in Montparnasse where Moscow gypsies sang. In prison Nedachin turned yellow and flabby. He was tried in chamber number fourteen of the criminal court. First there was a case involving an automobile matter, followed by the case of sixteen-year-old Raymond Lepique, who had shot his girlfriend out of jealousy. The lieutenant colonel came after the boy. The gendarme pushed him out into the light, as a bear is pushed into a circus arena. Frenchmen in badly sewn jackets were shouting loudly at each other, and submissively rouged women fanned their teary faces. In front of them, on the podium beneath the republics marble coat of arms, sat a red-cheeked man with a Gallic mustache, wearing a toga and a little hat.

  “Eh bien, Nedachin,” he said, on seeing the accused man, “eh bien, And his fast burred speech washed over the shuddering lieutenant colonel.

  “As a descendant of the noble line of the Nedachins,” the presiding judge loudly proclaimed, “you, my friend, are listed in the heraldic books of the province of Tambov. An officer of the Czars army, you immigrated with Wrangel14 and became a policeman in Zagreb. Discrepancies in the question of what was government property and what was private property,” the presiding judge continued sonorously, the tips of his patent leather shoes darting in and out under the hem of his gown. “These discrepancies, my friend, forced you to bid the hospitable kingdom of Yugoslavia farewell and set your sights on Paris.”

  “In Paris,”—here the judge ran his eyes over some papers lying before him—“in Paris, my friend, the taxi driver test proved a fortress you could not conquer, at which point you concentrated all the powers left to you on Madame Blanchard, who is absent from this hearing.”

  The foreign words poured over Nedachin like a summer shower. He towered over the crowd—helpless, large, with dangling arms—like an animal from another world.

  “Voyons,”^ the presiding judge said unexpectedly. “From where I am sitting, I can see the daughter-in-law of the esteemed Madame Blanchard.

  A fat, neckless woman, looking like a fish jammed into a frock coat, hurried with lowered head over to the witness box. Panting, lifting her short little arms to heaven, she began listing the stocks stolen from Madame Blanchard.

  “Thank you very much, madame,” the presiding judge interrupted her, nodding to a gaunt man with a well-bred, sunken face, who was sitting next to him.

  The public prosecutor, rising slightly, muttered a few words and sat down again, clasping his hands. He was followed by the defense attorney, a naturalized Kiev Jew, who ranted about the Golgotha of the Russian military officers in an offended tone, as if he were in the middle of an argument. Incomprehensibly pronounced French words came sputtering out of his mouth, sounding increasingly Yiddish toward the end of his speech. The presiding judge peered blankly at the attorney for a few moments without saying a word, and then suddenly lunged to the side—toward the gaunt old man in the toga and the little hat—then lunged to the other side, to another old man just like the first.

  “Ten years, my friend,” the presiding judge said meekly, nodding his head at Nedachin, and hurriedly grabbed the papers for the next case, which his secretary slid over to him.

  Nedachin stood rigidly to attention. His colorless eyes blinked, his small forehead was covered with sweat.

  “T’a encaisse dix ans,” the gendarme behind him said. “C’est fini, mon vieux.”* And, quietly pushing the crowd out of the way, the gendarme led the convicted man toward the exit.

  MY FIRST FEE

  To be in Tiflis in spring, to be twenty years old, and not to be loved—that is a misfortune. Such a misfortune befell me. I was working as a proofreader for the printing press of the Caucasus Military District. The Kura River bubbled beneath the windows of my attic. The sun in the morning, rising from behind the mountains, lit up the rivers murky knots. I was renting a room in the attic from a newlywed Georgian couple. My landlord was a butcher at the Eastern Bazaar. In the room next door, the butcher and his wife, in the grip of love, thrashed about like two large fish trapped in a jar. The tails of these crazed fish thumped against the partition, rocking the whole attic, which was blackened by the piercing sun, ripping it from its rafters and whisking it off to eternity. They could not part their teeth, clenched in the obstinate fury of passion. In the mornings, Milyet, the young bride, went out to get bread. She was so weak that she had to hold on to the banister. Her delicate little foot searched for each step, and there was a vague blind smile on her lips, like that of a woman recovering from a long illness. Laying her palm on her small breasts, she bowed to everyone she met in the street—the Assyrian grown green with age, the kerosene seller, and the market shrews with faces gashed by fiery wrinkles, who were selling hanks of sheeps wool. At night the thumping and babbling of my neighbors was followed by a silence as piercing as the whistle of a cannonball.

  To be twenty years old, to live in Tiflis, and to listen at night to the tempests of other peoples silence—that is a misfortune. To escape it, I ran out of the house and down to the Kura River, where I was overpowered by the bathhouse steam of Tiflis springtime. It swept over me, sapping my strength. I roamed through the hunchbacked streets, my throat parched. A fog of springtime sultriness chased me back to my attic, to that forest of blackened stumps lit by the moon. I had no choice but to look for love. Needless to say, I found it. For better or worse, the woman I chose turned out to be a prostitute. Her name was Vera. Every evening I went creeping after her along Golovinsky Boulevard, unable to work up the courage to talk to her. I had neither money for her nor words—those dull and ceaselessly burrowing words of love. Since childhood, I had invested every drop of my strength in creating tales, plays, and thousands of stories. They lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. Possessed by demonic pride, I did not want to write them down too soon. I felt that it was pointless to write worse than Tolstoy. My stories were destined to survive oblivion. Dauntless thought and grueling passion are only worth the effort spent on them when they are draped in beautiful raiment. But how does one sew such raiment?

  A man who is caught in the noose of an idea and lulled by its serpentine gaze finds it difficult to bubble over with meaningless, burrowing words of love. Such a man is ashamed of shedding tears of sadness. He is not quick-witted enough to be able to laugh with happiness. I was a dreamer, and did not have the knack for the thoughtless art of happiness. Therefore I was going to have to give Vera ten rubles of my meager earnings.

  I made up my mind and went to stand watch outside the doors of the Simpatia tavern. Georgian princes in blue Circassian jackets and soft leather boots sauntered past in casual parade. They pi
cked their teeth with silver toothpicks and eyed the carmine-painted Georgian women with large feet and slim hips. There was a shimmer of turquoise in the twilight. The blossoming acacias howled along the streets in their petal-shedding bass voices. Waves of officials in white coats rolled along the boulevard. Balsamic streams of air came flowing toward them from the Karzbek Mountains.

  Vera came later, as darkness was falling. Tall, her face a radiant white, she hovered before the apish crowd, as the Mother of God hovers before the prow of a fishing boat. She came up to the doors of the Simpatia. I hesitated, then followed her.

  “Off to Palestine?”

  Veras wide, pink back was moving in front of me. She turned around.

  “What?”

  She frowned, but her eyes were laughing.

  “Where does your path take you?”

  The words crackled in my mouth like dry firewood. Vera came over and walked in step with me.

  “A tenner—would that be fine with you?”