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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  In the tavern where we ate kebabs she became flushed with excitement, trying to talk the tavern keeper into expanding his trade by moving to Mikhailovsky Boulevard. From the tavern we went to a shoemaker to get some shoes, and then Vera went off to a girlfriend s for a christening. Toward midnight we arrived at the hotel, but there too Vera had things to do. An old woman was getting ready to go to her son in Armavir. Vera knelt on her suitcase to force it shut, and wrapped pies in oilpaper. Clutching her rust-brown handbag, the little old woman hurried from room to room in her gauze hat to say good-bye. She shuffled down the hallway in her rubber boots, sobbing and smiling through all her wrinkles.

  I waited for Vera in a room with three-legged armchairs and a clay oven. The corners of the room were covered with damp splotches. Flies were dying in a jar filled with milky liquid, each fly dying in its own way. Other peoples life bustled in the hallway, with peals of sudden laughter. It was an eternity before Vera came back into the room.

  “We’ll do it now,” she said, closing the door behind her. Her preparations resembled those of a surgeon preparing for an operation. She lit the kerosene burner, put a pot of water on it, and poured the water into an enema bag that had a white tube hanging from it. She threw a red crystal into the enema bag, and began undressing.

  “We’ve just sent Fedosya Mavrikevna off,” Vera 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!”

  A large woman with sloping shoulders lay in the bed, her flaccid nipples blindly pointing at me.

  “Why are you sitting there so glum?” Vera asked, pulling me toward her. “Or are you sorry you gave me the money?”

  “I don’t care about the money.”

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

  “I’m not a thief, I’m a boy.”

  “Well, I can see you’re not a cow,” Vera said with a yawn. Her eyes were falling shut.

  “I’m a boy,” I repeated, and went cold at the suddenness of my invention.

  There was no going back, so I told my chance companion the following story:

  “We lived in Alyoshki in the district of Kherson”—is what I came up with as a beginning. “My father worked as a draftsman, and tried to give us children an education. But we took after our mother, who was only interested in cards and good 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 an old man. His name was Stepan Ivanovich. I became friends with him, and we lived together for four years.

  “How old were you then?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Vera was expecting to hear about the evil deeds of the man who had corrupted me.

  “We lived together for four years,” I continued, “and Stepan Ivanovich turned out to be an extremely trusting man—he trusted everyone. I should have learned a trade during those years, but I only had one thing on my mind—billiards. Stepan Ivanovich s friends ruined him. He gave them bronze promissory notes, and they cashed them in right away.”

  I have no idea how I came up with bronze promissory notes, but it was a very good idea. The woman believed everything once I mentioned these promissory notes. She wrapped herself in her red shawl, and it trembled 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 lazy mind. To regain ground, I squeezed asthma into the old mans yellow chest—asthma attacks and hoarse whistling as he gasped for breath. The old man would jump up in the middle of the night and, moaning, breathe in the kerosene-colored night of Baku. He died soon after. My relatives would have nothing to do with me, so here I was, in Tiflis, with twenty rubles to my name. The waiter at the hotel where I was staying promised to send me rich clients, but up to now had only sent me tavern keepers.

  And I started jabbering about low-down tavern keepers and their coarse, mercenary ways, bits of information I had picked up somewhere. Self-pity tore my heart to pieces; I had been completely ruined. I fell silent. My story had come to an end. The kerosene burner had died out. The water had boiled and cooled down again. The woman walked silently through the room, her back fleshy and sad.

  “The things men do,” Vera whispered, opening the shutters. “My God, the things men do!”

  A stony hillside framed by the window rose with a crooked Turkish road winding up it. The cooling flagstones on the street hissed. The smell of water and dust came rolling up the carriageway.

  “So, have you ever been with a woman?” Vera asked, turning to me.

  “How could I have? Who would have wanted me?”

  “The things men do,” Vera said. “My God, the things men do!”

  I shall interrupt my story at this point to ask you, my dear friends, if you have 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 experienced a love full of patience and heard womens words that only other women hear.

  It was morning when we fell asleep. We were awakened by the heat of our bodies. We drank tea in the bazaar of the old quarter. A placid Turk carrying a samovar wrapped in a towel poured tea, crimson as a brick, steaming like blood freshly spilled on the earth. 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 drawn-out braying of donkeys mingled with the hammering of blacksmiths. The Turk poured tea and kept count of the rolls we ate.

  Covered in beads of sweat, I turned my glass upside down 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.

  Manuscripts

  THREE IN THE AFTERNOON

  hree in the afternoon. Heat and silence. Outside the railroad

  J car window silent, burned fields. Father Ivan is sitting by the window, drinking tea and wiping the sweat off his fat neck. A small group has gathered around him.

  “Exploitation,” Father Ivan says. “We moan, we groan. Bloodsucking spiders have trapped us in their webs! Think about it! The doctor is a Jew, the merchant dealing with trade and industry is a Jew, your young sons science teacher is a Jew—”

  “A clever people,” someone says from the corner.

  “Yids!” a student with a hard face and a pale blond mustache says

  angrily.

  “Take me, for instance,” Father Ivan continues. “I have a little plot of land, a vegetable garden, a cow or two. And yet I cant turn a profit from my simple little farm. Why, I ask you, cant I turn a profit, while my tenant Yankel Rosenshrayr is managing quite nicely?”

  “Because he s a Yankel,” someone guffaws.

  “The reasons are social and economic,” another answers more

  slowly.

  “So feast your eyes, gentlemen!” Father Ivan says, pointing at a skinny Jew in big galoshes. “My tenant lives like a pig in clover, feeds himself without the slightest effort, while I have to feed—”

  Rosenshrayr, realizing that he has become the object of attention, carefully wraps the paper around his dried sausage, wipes his lips, brushes away the crumbs from his shiny suit, and knits his brow.

  “Oy, even listening to your talk is disgusting to a mans ears!” he says.

  He spreads out his red blanket and lies down, clasping his hands over his belly.

  “We cant get by without Yids!” Father Ivan p
ronounces. “That is the tragic contradiction. A drunkard fell down the stairs into my cellar last month and passed away. Now my son has been arrested, because they say it was a punch in the face that sent the drunk man falling. Thats why IVe brought along the hooknose, for the defense.”

  “Oy, hes starting again!” Yankel mumbles. “What an amazement! How much this man can speak!”

  The train nears the station. “Vinnitsa Station!” the conductor shouts. Yankel gets up, puts on his white cloak that reaches all the way down to his toes, and his chocolate-colored bowler hat that keeps slipping down to his nose. He picks up the priest s suitcases.

  “Oy gevalty these are not suitcases, they are lions!” he says, barely able to lift them.

  They get off the train. From the train window Yankel is still visible for a long time, shuffling in his winter galoshes, barely managing to keep up with the majestic figure of the priest, who is heatedly pontificating about something.

  “The devil and a babe in the woods, arm in arm!” someone in the railway car says, and guffaws.

  In town the investigator informed Father Ivan that his son had been arrested for assault and battery and the murder of Vasili Kuzmichev, who had walked past the cellar door in a state of intoxication, and so on and so forth.

  “Lord Almighty!” the priest said, his lips ashen, and sat down. “Jesus Christ in heaven, what are you saying!”

  “Your Worship,” Yankel said, moving toward the investigator. “Your Worship, this, if you will pardon me, is too terrible to even hear! He is a priest, if you will please look closely! He is at the end of his rope. That Vasili was, if you will pardon me, a drunkard—a feeble man!”

  The investigator lifted his hands in resignation. Yankel, propping up the tottering priest, led him out into the waiting room.

  “Yankel,” Father Ivan said. “Yankel, I beg you—”

  “Father,” Yankel answered, “there is no need to grieve this way! I cant see you like this! Wait for me here a moment—a hog wont come running if you dont dangle no turnip.”

  Yankel went back to the investigator and sat down unhurriedly in an armchair opposite him.

  “Him, the priest, hes a rich man. He needs all this nonsense here like you need to dance polkas on tabletops! So the drunkard came in and the priests son says, ‘You bastard, why are you drunk?’ Someone had been eating a watermelon, the drunkard slipped on it and fell, and now we got to make a big song and dance of it? Your Worship—its not like these people are some Yids or something! Hes a priest, a rich man!

  Yankel took five ten-ruble notes out of his pocket and, peering at them, placed them under the inkwell.

  “Get out of here, you lowlife!” the investigator said. “Go to hell!”

  Yankel took back the notes and, treading softly, left the room.

  “Father, these are not people!” he said to Father Ivan. “They are animals! Let’s go home!”

  By evening, all the worrying had given Father Ivan a bad stomachache, and his back hurt.

  “Oy, that I should have to fear the hooligans as little as you have to fear all this here!” Yankel said, sitting on the priest and massaging his massive stomach. “There is no evidence, even if they stand on their heads twenty times. Tomorrow, with Gods help, we will go to the lawyer and wipe the floor with their ugly mugs!”

  “Yankel,” Father Ivan said in a quiet voice, “so the drunkard came in, so Kostya yelled at him, he flew into a rage ... where is justice in all of this?”

  “Justice,” Yankel said, sliding off the priest’s stomach, “justice will win! If only everyone should have the kind of sweet life that you will have!”

  He lay down on the sofa, curled up, and quietly fell asleep.

  “Yankel!” Father Ivan called out to him. “I cant sleep, I am so unhappy. Quick, take me to the outhouse!”

  Yankel awoke, swung his legs to the floor, and, disheveled, led the priest outside.

  “Its his personality,” he muttered, yawning. “The strangest personality. My brother has a wife, Cecilia, whos just the same. At the drop of a hat her stomach acts up. Yankel, she always tells me, when you die, Yankel, I wont be around no more to see you off!”

  The following day Yankel started rushing around from the lawyer s office to the jail, from the jail to the government bureau, from the government bureau to the investigator’s office. Father Ivan remained listless, depressed, and quiet.

  Then came the day of the trial.

  [...]1

  THE JEWESS

  “The Jewess” is an unfinished manuscript of a novel that was found among the papers of Babel's friend Lev Ilich Slonim, in whose apartment in Leningrad Babel often stayed between 1927 and 1934. It is particularly interesting to follow Babels creative process in this work-in-progress. Some passages read like notes that will be developed: “He took Boris aside, and peering at him with his blinking eyes (blinded from within), told him (he did this in an attempt to bond with his nephew who had strayedfrom the family) ...” Much of the writing, however already possesses a mature stylistic finish. “The Jewess” was never published in Russia, except for a Yiddish translation that appeared in the 1980s. Phrases in parentheses are Babel's.

  1.

  In observance of custom, the old woman sat on the floor for seven days. On the eighth day, she rose and went out onto the shtetl street. The weather was beautiful. A chestnut tree, drenched in sunlight, stood in front of the house, the candles on it already lit. When you think about the recently deceased on a beautiful day, the calamities of life seem even more cruel and inescapable. The old woman was wearing an old-fashioned black silk dress with a black floral print, and a silk kerchief. She had dressed up as she would have for her husband, who was now dead, so that the neighbors would not think that he and she were wretched in the face of death.

  Old Esther Erlich headed to the cemetery. The withering petals of the flowers strewn across the burial mound had begun to curl. She touched them with her fingertips, and they crumbled and fell apart. Reb Alter, an old cemetery fixture, came hurrying up to her.

  “Madame Erlich! For my prayers for the dead!”

  She opened her bag, slowly counted out some silver coins, and handed them to Reb Alter in solemn silence.

  Reb Alter, disconcerted by her silence, walked off on his crooked legs, holding a hushed conversation with himself. The sun followed his faded, crooked back. She stayed alone by the grave. The wind blew through the treetops, and they bent forward.

  “Fm having a very bad time without you, Marius,” Esther said. “I cant tell you how bad.” She sat by the grave until noon, clutching some wilted flowers in her wrinkled hands. She clenched her fingers until they hurt, trying to dispel the memories. It is terrible for a wife to stand before a burial mound thinking back over thirty-five years of marriage, of the days and nights of marriage. Vanquished by her battle against these memories that were so painful to face, she trudged back home (in her silk dress) through the squalid shtetl.

  Yellow rays filled the marketplace. Misshapen old men and women stood by their hawkers stands selling sunflower oil, withered onions, fish, and toffee for the children. In front of the house, Esther ran into her fifteen-year-old daughter.

  “Mama!” the girl shouted in that particularly Jewish desperate womans voice. “You’re not going to torment us, are you? Boris has come!

  Esthers son stood fidgeting in the doorway in his military uniform, his chest covered with medals. The broken old woman, her damp face flushed and feverish, stopped in front of him.

  “How dare you come too late to your fathers deathbed! How dare you do that to him!”

  Her children led her into the house.

  She sat down on a little stool, the same stool she had sat on for seven days, and, staring into her sons eyes, tortured him with the tale of his father’s death throes. It was an extremely detailed account. She left out nothing: the swelling in his legs, his nose turning blue the morning of the day he died, how she ran to the pharmacy to get oxygen balloons, t
he indifference of the people who stood around his deathbed. She left out nothing—not even how his father had called out for him as he died. She had knelt by his bed, warming his hands in hers. His father had weakly pressed her hand, ceaselessly uttering his sons name. He had stared with shining eyes, had repeated the name clearly, over and over. That one word, “Boris,” had droned through the still room like the droning of a spindle. Then the old man had choked, there was a hoarse rattle in his breath, and he whispered, “Borechka.” His eyes had bulged, and he wailed and moaned, “Borechka.” The old woman had warmed his hands and said, “Here I am, your son is here!” The dying man’s hand had filled with strength and began clutching and scratching the palms that were warming it. He began to shout that one word—“Borechka”—in a changed voice, high-pitched in a way it had never been during his life, and died with that word on his lips.

  “How dare you come too late!” the old woman said to her son, who was sitting turned away from her at the table. They hadn’t lit the lamps.

  Boris sat in the dark, which had flooded the stillness. The old woman sat on the stool breathing heavily (with anger). Boris got up, his revolver rapping against the edge of the table, and left the room.

  Half the night he roamed through the shtetl, his native shtetl. Clear serpentine reflections (of stars) quivered on the river. A stench rose from the hovels that stood along the bank. The three-hundred-year-old walls of the synagogue that had once withstood Khmelnitsky’s hordes2 had been battered with holes.

  His native shtetl was dying. The clock of the centuries chimed the end of its defenseless life. “Is this the end, or is it a rebirth?” Boris asked himself. His heart was filled with so much pain that he didn’t have the strength to answer this question. The school to which he had gone had been destroyed by Hetman Struk in 1919. The house in which Zhenya had once lived was now the labor exchange. He walked past the ruins, past the squat, crooked, sleeping houses, a hazy stench of poverty seeping out of their gates, and bade them farewell. His mother and sister were waiting for him at home. A dirty samovar was boiling on the table. A bluish piece of chicken lay next to it. Esther moved toward him with weak steps, pressed him to her, and wept. Her heart was pounding beneath her blouse, beneath her flabby, clammy skin—as was his heart, for their hearts were one. And the smell of his mother’s shuddering flesh was so bitter, so pitiful, so typical of the Erlichs, that he felt a deep and boundless pity. The old woman cried, the all-embracing [one word illegible in the manuscript], shaking on his chest on which two Red Flag Medals hung. The medals were wet with her tears. That was the beginning of her recovery, and her resignation to loneliness and death.