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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  I agreed so quickly that she became suspicious.

  “You sure you have ten rubles?”

  We went through the gates and I handed her my wallet. She opened it and counted twenty-one rubles, narrowing her gray eyes and moving her lips. She rearranged the coins, sorting gold with gold and silver with silver.

  “Give me ten,” Vera said, handing me back my wallet. “Well spend five, and the rest you can keep to get by. When’s your next payday?”

  I told her that I would get paid again in four days. We went back into the street. Vera took me by the arm and leaned her shoulder against mine. We walked up the cooling street. The sidewalk was covered with wilted vegetables.

  “I’d love to be in Borzhom right now in this heat,” she said.

  Vera’s hair was tied with a ribbon. The lightning of the street lamps flashed and bounced off it.

  “So hightail it to Borzhom!”

  That’s what I said—“hightail it.” For some reason, that’s the expression I used.

  “No dough,” Vera answered with a yawn, forgetting all about me. She forgot all about me because her day was over and she had made easy money off me. She knew that I wouldn’t call the police, and that I wasn’t going to steal her money along with her earrings during the night.

  We went to the foot of St. David’s Mountain. There, in a tavern, I ordered some kebabs. Without waiting for our food to be brought, Vera went and sat with a group of old Persian men who were discussing business. They were leaning on propped-up sticks, wagging their olive-colored heads, telling the tavern keeper that it was time for him to expand his trade. Vera barged into their conversation, taking the side of the old men. She was for the idea of moving the tavern to Mikhailovsky Boulevard. The tavern keeper was sighing, paralyzed by uncertainty and caution. I ate my kebabs alone. Veras bare arms poured out of the silk of her sleeves. She banged her fist on the table, her earrings dancing among long, lackluster backs, orange beards, and painted nails. By the time she came back to our table, her kebabs had become cold. Her face was flushed with excitement.

  “There’s no budging that man—he’s such a mule! I swear, he could make a fortune with Eastern cooking on Mikhailovsky Boulevard!”

  Friends of Vera’s passed by our table one after another: princes in Circassian jackets, officers of a certain age, storekeepers in heavy silk coats, and potbellied old men with sunburned faces and little green pimples on their cheeks. It was pushing midnight when we got to the hotel, but there too Vera had countless things to do. An old woman was getting ready to go to her son in Armavir. Vera rushed over to help her, kneeling on her suitcase to force it shut, tying pillows together with cords, and wrapping pies in oilpaper. Clutching her rust-brown handbag, the squat little old woman hurried in her gauze hat from room to room to say good-bye. She shuffled down the hallway in her rubber boots, sobbing and smiling through all her wrinkles. The whole to-do took well over an hour. I waited for Vera in a musty room with three-legged armchairs and a clay oven. The corners of the room were covered with damp splotches.

  I had been tormented and dragged around town for such a long time that even my feeling of love seemed to me an enemy, a dogged enemy.

  Other people’s life bustled in the hallway with peals of sudden laughter. Flies were dying in ajar filled with milky liquid. Each fly was dying in its own way—one in drawn-out agony, its death throes violent, another with a barely visible shudder. A book by Golovin about the life of the Boyars lay on the threadbare tablecloth next to the jar. I opened the book. Letters lined themselves up in a row and then fell into a jumble. In front of me, framed by the window, rose a stony hillside with a crooked Turkish road winding up it. Vera came into the room.

  “We’ve just sent off Fedosya Mavrikevna,” she said. “I swear, she was just like a mother to all of us. The poor old thing has to travel all alone with no one to help her!”

  Vera sat down on the bed with her knees apart. Her eyes had wandered off to immaculate realms of tenderness and friendship. Then she saw me sitting there in my double-breasted jacket. She clasped her hands and stretched.

  “I guess you re tired of waiting. Dont worry, well do it now.”

  But I simply couldn’t figure out what exactly it was that Vera was intending to do. Her preparations resembled those of a surgeon preparing for an operation. She lit the kerosene burner and put a pot of water on it. She placed a clean towel over the bed frame and hung an enema bag over the headboard, a bag with a white tube dangling against the wall. When the water was hot, Vera poured it into the enema bag, threw in a red crystal, and pulled her dress off over her head. A large woman with sloping shoulders and rumpled stomach stood in front of me. Her flaccid nipples hung blindly to the sides.

  “Come over here, you little rabbit, while the water’s getting ready,” my beloved said.

  I didnt move. Despair froze within me. Why had I exchanged my loneliness for this den filled with poverty-stricken anguish, for these dying flies and furniture with legs missing?

  O Gods of my youth! How different this dreary jumble was from my neighbors’ love with its rolling, drawn-out moans.

  Vera put her hands under her breasts and jiggled them.

  “Why do you sit half dead, hanging your head?” she sang. “Come over here!”

  1 didn’t move. Vera pressed her shirt to her stomach and sat down again on the bed.

  “Or are you sorry you gave me the money?”

  “I don’t care about the money.”

  I said this in a cracking voice.

  “What do you mean, you don’t care? You a thief or something?”

  “I’m not a thief.”

  “You work for thieves?”

  “I’m a boy.”

  “Well, I can see you’re not a cow,” Vera mumbled. Her eyes were falling shut. She lay down and, pulling me over to her, started rubbing my body.

  “A boy!” I shouted. “You understand what I’m saying? An Armenians boy!”

  O Gods of my youth! Five out of the twenty years I’d lived had gone into thinking up stories, thousands of stories, sucking my brain dry. These stories lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. One of these stories, pried loose by the power of loneliness, fell onto the ground. It was to be my fate, it seems, that a Tiflis prostitute was to be my first reader. I went cold at the suddenness of my invention, and told her the story about the boy and the Armenian. Had I been lazier and given less thought to my craft, I would have made up a drab story about a son thrown out by his rich official of a father—the father a despot, the mother a martyr. I didn’t make such a mistake. A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story. And for this reason, and also because it was necessary for my listener, I had it that I was born in the town of Alyoshki in the district of Kherson. My father worked as a draftsman in the office of a river steamship company. He toiled night and day over his drawing board so that he could give us children an education, but we took after our mother, who was fond of fun and food. When I was ten I began stealing money from my father, and a few years later ran away to Baku to live with some relatives on my mother’s side. They introduced me to Stepan Ivanovich, an Armenian. I became friends with him, and we lived together for four years.

  “How old were you then?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Vera was waiting to hear about the evil deeds of the Armenian who had corrupted me.

  “We lived together for four years,” I continued, “and Stepan Ivanovich turned out to be the most generous and trusting man I had ever met—the most conscientious and honorable man. He trusted every single friend of his to the fullest. I should have learned a trade in those four years, but I didn’t lift a finger. The only thing on my mind was billiards. Stepan Ivanovich’s friends ruined him. He gave them bronze promissory notes, and his friends went and cashed them right away.”

  Bronze promissory notes! I myself had no idea how I came up with that. But it was a very good id
ea. Vera believed everything once she

  heard “bronze promissory notes.” She wrapped herself in her shawl and her shawl shuddered on her shoulders.

  “They ruined Stepan Ivanovich. He was thrown out of his apartment and his furniture was auctioned off. He became a traveling salesman. When he lost all his money I left him and went to live with a rich old man, a church warden.”

  Church warden! I stole the idea from some novel, but it was the invention of a mind too lazy to create a real character.

  I said church warden, and Veras eyes blinked and slipped out from under my spell. To regain my ground, I squeezed asthma into the old mans yellow chest.

  “Asthma attacks whistled hoarsely inside his yellow chest. The old man would jump up from his bed in the middle of the night and, moaning, breath in the kerosene-colored night of Baku. He died soon after. The asthma suffocated him.” I told her that my relatives would have nothing to do with me and that here I was, in Tiflis, with twenty rubles to my name, the very rubles she had counted in that entrance on Golovinsky Boulevard. The waiter at the hotel where I was staying promised to send me rich clients, but up to now had only sent me taproom keepers with tumbling bellies, men who love their country, their songs, and their wine and who dont think twice about trampling on a foreign soul or a foreign woman, like a village thief will trample on his neighbor’s garden.

  And I started jabbering about low-down taproom keepers, bits of information I had picked up somewhere. Self-pity tore my heart to pieces; I had been completely ruined. I quaked with sorrow and inspiration. Streams of icy sweat trickled down my face like snakes winding through grass warmed by the sun. I fell silent, began to cry, and turned away. My story had come to an end. The kerosene burner had died out a long time ago. The water had boiled and cooled down again. The enema tube was dangling against the wall. Vera walked silently over to the window. Her back, dazzling and sad, moved in front of me. Outside the window the sun was beginning to light the mountain crevices.

  “The things men do,” Vera whispered, without turning around. “My God, the things men do!”

  She stretched out her bare arms and opened the shutters all the

  way. The cooling flagstones on the street hissed. The smell of water and dust came rolling up the carriageway. Veras head drooped.

  “In other words, you’re a whore. One of us—a bitch,” she said.

  I hung my head.

  “Yes, Im one of you—a bitch.”

  Vera turned around to face me. Her shirt hung in twisted tatters from her body.

  “The things men do,” she repeated more loudly. “My God, the things men do. So . . . have you ever been with a woman?”

  I pressed my icy lips to her hand.

  “No. . . . How could I have? Who would have wanted me?”

  My head shook beneath her breasts, which rose freely above me. Her stretched nipples bounced against my cheeks, opening their moist eyelids and cavorting like calves. Vera looked at me from above.

  “My little sister,” she whispered, settling down on the floor next to me. “My little whorelet sister.”

  Now tell me, dear reader, I would like to ask you something: have you ever watched a village carpenter helping a fellow carpenter build a hut for himself and seen how vigorous, strong, and cheerful the shavings fly as they plane the wooden planks? That night a thirty-year-old woman taught me her trade. That night I learned secrets that you will never learn, experienced love that you will never experience, heard womens words that only other women hear. I have forgotten them. We are not supposed to remember them.

  It was morning when we fell asleep. We were awakened by the heat of our bodies, a heat that weighed the bed down like a stone. When we awoke we laughed together. That day I didnt go to the printing press. We drank tea in the bazaar of the old quarters. A placid Turk carrying a samovar wrapped in a towel poured tea, crimson as a brick, steaming like blood freshly spilled on the earth. The smoking fire of the sun blazed on the walls of our glasses. The drawn-out braying of donkeys mingled with the hammering of blacksmiths. Copper pots were lined up under canopies, on faded carpets. Dogs were burrowing their muzzles into ox entrails. A caravan of dust flew toward Tiflis, the town of roses and mutton fat. The dust carried off the crimson fire of the sun. The Turk poured tea and kept count of the rolls we ate. The world was beautiful just for our sake. Covered in beads of sweat, I turned my glass upside down. I paid the Turk and pushed two golden five-ruble coins over to Vera. Her chunky leg was lying over mine. She pushed the money away and pulled in her leg.

  “Do you want us to quarrel, my little sister?”

  No, I didn’t want to quarrel. We agreed to meet again in the evening, and I slipped back into my wallet the two golden fivers—my first fee.

  Since that day many years have passed, and I have often been given money by editors, men of letters, and Jews selling books. For victories that were defeats, for defeats that turned into victories, for life and death, they paid me a trivial fee, much lower than the fee I was paid in my youth by my first reader. But I am not bitter. I am not bitter because I know that I will not die until I snatch one more gold ruble (and definitely not the last one!) from love’s hands.

  1

  Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich, 1874-1947, was a Russian painter and popular mystic who gained international fame for the sets he designed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

  2

  Islands of the Neva and the Bay of Finland, on which St. Petersburg was built.

  3

  “That devil Polyte.”

  4

  La vie et Voeuvre de Guy de Maupassant was published by Societe du Mercure de France in 1906.

  5

  Two boys who terrorize the neighborhood with their funny practical jokes in the story in verse, Max and Moritz, by the German humorist Wilhelm Busch.

  A Moscow neighborhood.

  6

  “We shall change your ways!”

  7

  “That woman is mad.”

  8

  “Well, this isn’t very cheerful. How dreadful!” t “It is love, monsieur. . . .She loved him.”

  9

  “Love! God punishes those who do not know love!”

  ^ “Love is a nasty business!”

  10

  “God, you do not forgive those who do not love!”

  11

  General Diomid Gulay was the leader of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement. Vinnitsa is a province in west-central Ukraine.

  12

  By the Pope of Rome he means the Polish partisans, who were Catholic, unlike the Ukrainian partisans, who were Russian Orthodox.

  13

  “A fit of temporary insanity.”

  14

  Baron Peter Nikolayevich Wrangel, 1878-1928, commander of the White anti-Bolshevik army, was forced to evacuate 150,000 soldiers and civilians by sea from the Crimea to Constantinople in November 1920, which marked the end of the Russian Civil War.

  "f" “Let’s see.”

  “Hes locked you up for ten years. Its over, old boy.”

  XII

  Variations and Manuscripts

  The variations in this section are early versions of pieces that Bahel later revised for further publication. The first piece, “Roaming Stars: A Movie Tale” is a prose variation of Babel's screenplay of the same name; loosely based on Shalom Alechem’s novel Blondznde Shtern ('translated into English as Wandering Star). It is particularly interesting to compare the two variants, as Babel added many nuances, making the prose version an interesting key to the screen version and vice versa. The second piece in this section, ((A story,”published in Zhurnal Zhurnalov in 1911, appeared in a reworked version as ((The Bathroom Window” in the magazine Silueti in 1923, and “Information” is an earlier variant of “My Tirst Tee”

  Babel was apparently intending to develop into novels the two unfinished manuscripts in this section, “Three in the Afternoon” and “The Jewess.”

  Variations

  ROA
MING STARS: A MOVIE TALE

  Briansky Station in Moscow. Night stretches above its glass roof, train from Kiev pulls into the station. Platform jostling, platform love—the porters, transient witnesses of our love. The porters are pushing carts packed high with bundles, dead birds, live birds in cages. A girl who has arrived from the shtetl of Derazhny gets tangled in the grinding stream of carts and blocks their way. The girls name is Rachel Monko. The carts swerve around her, sparks flashing from their wheels.

  “Look whos come to town!” one of the porters yells into Rachels ear, and he rumbles off with his cart. The porter is a short man, his hard face looks like every other face in the world and yet resembles none, but his voice is clear and loud, filled with triumph and rage.

  “Look who’s come to town from the sticks!” the porter yells, and rumbles off with his cart. The thunder machine roars over Rachel’s head as she cowers, surrounded by platform love. All the squadrons of the night are galloping over the glass roof of Moscow’s Briansky Station.

  • • •

  Rachel Monko has come to Moscow to enroll in the Women’s Institute of Higher Education. If that does not work out, she intends to go to a school of dentistry. Rachel’s face is like that of Ruth, wife of Boaz, like that of Bathsheba, concubine of David, King of Israel, or that of Esther, wife of Ataxerxes. Rachel has come to Moscow with a letter of recom-

  mendation from the Derazhny district agronomist to Ivan Potapich Butsenko, the owner of the Rossiya boardinghouse. One can say about Rachel that her love of science is as great as Lenins, Darwins, and Spinoza’s love of truth.

  • • •

  Rachel takes a tram leaving from Briansky Station. She is stunned by the trams glittering lights. It must be remembered that she had not once in her life left Derazhny. Rachel cannot control herself, and laughs with happiness. An old man is sitting next to her, an old man in a uniform cap. He is a police doctor. In his day he was loved by many women, and all the women who had loved him had been hysterical. The doctor has a tender, listless disposition. He looks at Rachel and thinks how she has yet to experience all that is already in his past, and yet how she knows more about life than he, an old man touched by a premonition of death. The girl knows more than he does, otherwise she wouldn’t be laughing.