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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  2.

  The relatives, remnants of a large and ancient clan, arrived the following morning. There had been merchants in the family, adventurers, and timid, poetic revolutionaries from the days of the Peoples Will Party.3 Boris’s aunt, a medical orderly who had studied in Paris while living on twenty rubles a month, had heard the speeches ofJaures and Guesde.^ His uncle was a pitiful, luckless shtetl philosopher. Other uncles had been grain merchants, traveling salesmen, and storekeepers, their livelihoods knocked out from under them, a herd of confused, pathetic men, a herd of men wearing long brown overcoats. Boris had to hear all over again how his fathers legs had become bloated, where he had developed bedsores, and who had run to the pharmacy to get oxygen. The grain merchant, once a rich man, had been driven out of his house, and now wrapped his old, thin legs in military leggings. 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 strayed from the [one word illegible] family), that he had never expected that his father would manage to keep his body so smooth and clean. They had looked at him while he was being washed, and he was as well built and smooth as a young man. . . . And to think that some valve somewhere in his heart, some tiny one-millimeter vein . . . His uncle spoke these words probably thinking that as both he and the dead man were born of the same mother, he probably had exactly the same heart valve as his brother who had died a week ago.

  The following day Boris’s uncles asked him, first timidly, then with the shudder of long suppressed-despair, if he could give them a recommendation so that they could join the trade union. Because of their former prosperity, none of the Erlichs were now accorded membership in the trade union.

  Their lives were indescribably sad. Their houses were collapsing with leaks everywhere, they had sold everything, even their cupboards, and nobody would hire them. On top of that, they had to pay rent and water bills at much higher rates than members of the trade union. And they were old and suffering from terrible illnesses, harbingers of cancer and fatal disease, as were all members of ancient and dwindling Jewish families. Boris had long ago formed a theory about mankind—that people on their last legs should be put out of their misery as quickly as possible. But his mother was standing right next to him, her face resembling his face, her body like his was going to be in two or three decades, and through the closeness of his mother arose a feeling of fate, a feeling of their common fate, the fate of the bodies of all the Erlichs (in some respect all the same). He overcame his reservations and went to see the chairman of the Local Executive Committee. The chairman, a Petersburg worker, seemed to have been waiting all his life to tell someone how dismal it was to work on an Executive Committee in this damned former Jewish Pale of settlement, how difficult it was to resurrect these shtetls of the western provinces and lay the foundation for a new prosperity in these damned Jewish shtetls (of the damned southwest region) that were dying in misery (and like dogs).

  For several days Boris kept seeing before him the cemetery of his native shtetl and the imploring eyes of his uncles, the former (devil-may-care?) traveling salesmen, who now dreamed of joining the trade union or the Labor Exchange. A few days passed. The Indian summer changed into autumn. A (slushy) shtetl rain was falling. Mud from the mountain, mud with rolling stones (like concrete) came flowing down from the mountain. The front room of the house was filled with water. Rusty bowls and Passover saucepans were put under the cracks in the roof. As they walked through the room they had to be careful where they stepped so they wouldn’t trip over a bowl.

  “Lets go,” Boris said to his mother.

  “Where to?”

  “To Moscow, Mama.”

  “Aren’t there enough Jews in Moscow?”

  “Nonsense,” Boris said. “Who cares what people say!”

  She sat in the leaking room in her corner by the window from which she could see the pockmarked carriageway and her neighbor’s collapsing house—and thirty years of her life. Sitting by the window and (sharing) her souls tears and her old-womans compassion for her sisters, brothers-in-law, and nephews, to whom fate had not granted a son like hers. Esther knew that sooner or later he would talk of going to Moscow and that she would give in. But before she did, she wanted to (torment herself and infuse her surrender with the sorrow of the shtetl...). She said that it pained her to death to leave without her husband, who had dreamed of Moscow as he had dreamed of leaving this godforsaken place to live (the rest of his life) more happily, from which you expect nothing more than peace and the happiness of others, to live with his son in this new (Promised) land. And now he lay in his grave, beneath the rain that had lashed down all night, while she was preparing to go to Moscow, where, word had it, people were happy, cheerful, spirited, full of plans (doing all kinds of special things). Esther said that it was hard for her to leave all her graves behind—of her fathers and her grandfathers, rabbis, tsaddiks, and Talmudists who lay under the gray (traditional) stones. She would never see them again. And how would he, her son, answer for her when her time came to die on foreign soil, among people who were so very foreign. . . . And then, how could she forgive herself if life in Moscow turned out to be pleasant? Her hands with their long (gout-ridden, twisted, soft, swollen) fingers trembled when Esther considered how unbearable it would be for her to be happy at such a time. Her damp, twisted fingers trembled, the veins on her yellow chest swelled and throbbed, the (shtetl) rain drummed on the iron roof. . . . For the second time since her son had come home, the little old Jewess in her galoshes wept. She agreed to go to Moscow because there was nowhere else for her to go, and because her son looked so (terribly) like her husband that she could not be parted from him, even though her husband, like everyone else, had had faults and pitiful little secrets, which a wife knows but never tells.

  3.

  Most of their arguments centered around what to take with them. Esther wanted to take everything, while Boris wanted to have done with it all and sell it off. But there was nobody in Kremenets to whom one could sell anything. The last thing the townsfolk needed was furniture. The dealers, angry men who had sprung up from God knows where, and who looked like undertakers, like visitors from the beyond, were only prepared to pay small change. They could only resell the mer-

  chandise to peasants. But Esther’s relatives were quick to lend a helping hand. No sooner had they gotten over (the first doleful stirrings of soul) than they began to cart off whatever they could lay their hands on. And as, deep down, they were honest people, and not petty (pettily mercenary), the sight of this furtive (secretive) carting off was particularly sad (unbearable). Esther was taken aback. A sickly flush on her face, she tried to grab a snatching hand, but the quaking hand was covered in such pitiful sweat, and was so wrinkled, so old (edged with broken nails), that she (staggered back and in a flash) understood everything. She was horrified that anyone would have to stop someone in such a tormenting (offense), and that the people she had grown up with had gone out of their minds, trying to carry off cupboards and sheets.

  Everything was sent to Moscow by train. Her relatives cried as they helped her tie her bundles. Sitting on the packed bales, they had come to their senses (their hearts were touched), and they said that they themselves would stay (in Kremenets)—they would never leave. The old woman [one word illegible] packed a kitchen trestle and a tub for boiling clothes. “You’ll see, well need all this in Moscow!” she told her son. “After sixty years of life, am I supposed to remain with nothing but ashes in my soul and the kind of tears that flow even when you don’t want to cry?” As their belongings were taken to the station, the old womans hollow cheeks flushed, and a blind, urgent, passionate sparkle glittered in her eyes. She hurried through the besmirched, ransacked house, a force dragging her quaking shoulders along the wall from which torn strips of wallpaper hung.

  The next morning, the day of their departure, Esther took her son and daughter to the cemetery, where, among oak trees that were centuries old,
rabbis who had been killed by the Cossacks of Gonta and Khmelnitsky4 lay buried under Talmudic gravestones. Esther went to her husbands grave, shuddered, and drew herself up. “Marius,” she said (in a gasping voice), “your son is taking me to Moscow. Your son does not want me to be laid to rest at your side.” Her eyes were fixed on the reddish mound, its earth spongy and crumbling. Her eyes grew wider and wider. Her son and daughter held her hands tightly. The old

  woman swayed, stumbled forward, and half closed her eyes. Her haggard hands, relinquished to her children, tensed, were covered in sweat, and grew limp. Her eyes grew wider and wider and blazed with light. She tore herself free, fell onto the grave in her silken dress, and began thrashing about. Her whole body was quaking, and her hand stroked the yellow earth and the withered flowers with greedy tenderness. “Your son, Marius, is taking me to Moscow!” she shouted, her shrill voice tearing through the Jewish cemetery. “Pray for him, that he will be happy!” She dragged her fingers, hooked and twisted as if she were knitting, over the earth that covered the dead man. Her son gave her his hand and she got up submissively. They walked along the path shaded by oak branches, and Boris’s whole beinp; blazed and surged as his tears pressed against his eyes and throat like rocks. He experienced the taste of tears that cannot break free and so must remain (inside a man). The old woman stopped by the gate. She freed her hand (pierced, drenched), on which sweat surged impetuously, like a subterranean spring, alternately boiling hot and deadly cold (frozen through), and waved to the cemetery and the grave as if she and her children were on a ship leaving port.

  “Farewell, my sweet,” she said (softly), without crying, (or twitching). “Farewell.”

  And so the Erlich family left its native shtetl.

  4.

  Boris took his family to Moscow on the Sebastopol Express. He got tickets for a first-class compartment. They were taken to the station by Boychik, the shtetl comic, once known far and wide for his droll stories and massive black horses. He no longer had the horses, and his rickety cart was now drawn by a gigantic white jade with a drooping pink lip. Boychik himself had grown older, bent with rheumatism.

  “Listen, Boychik, I’ll be back next year,” Esther said to his little bent back as the cart turned and pulled into the station. “You must keep well till then.”

  The hillock on Boychik’s back became even more pointed. The white jade plodded through the mud on her stiff, gouty legs. Boychik turned around, his crimson eyelids raw and inflamed, his sash crooked, dusty tufts of hair growing out of the side of his face.—“(I dont think

  you will, Madame Erlich),” he said, and suddenly shouted to his horse: “The party’s over! Off you go, now!”

  The first-class railway car had been patched together out of several cars from Czarist times [one word illegible]. Through the wide, gleaming window Esther saw for the last time the huddled crowd of her relatives, rust-brown coats, soldiers’ leggings, crooked smocks, her old sisters with their large, useless breasts, her brother-in-law Samuel, a former traveling salesman with his puffy, twisted face, her brother-in-law Efim, a former rich man whose withered, homeless feet were now wrapped in rags. They jostled each other on the platform (like . . .), and shouted words she could not hear as the train pulled out of the station. Her sister Genia went running after the train.

  [One page of the original manuscript missing.]

  [Boris showed] her Russia with so much pride and confidence, as if he, Boris Erlich, had himself created Russia, as if he owned it. And to some extent, he did. There was in everything a drop of his soul or of his blood, the blood of the corps commissar (of the Red Cossacks)— from the international train cars to the newly built sugar factories and refurbished train stations.

  [Half a page in the manuscript crossed out.]

  In the evening he ordered bed linen, and with childish pride showed his mother and sister how to turn on the blue night-light. With a big smile he revealed the secret of the little mahogany closet. Inside the closet there turned out to be a washstand—right there in the compartment! Esther lay beneath the cool sheets. Rocked by the oily bounce of the train’s springs, she stared out into the blue darkness and (with her heart) listened to the breathing of her son. He tossed and called out in his sleep. Somebody, she thought, would definitely have to foot the bill for this palace hurtling through Russia with its lit chandeliers (and heated with sparkling copper tubes). This was a typically Jewish thought—such a thought would never have occurred to Boris. As they approached Moscow, he kept worrying whether Alexei Selivanov had received his telegram and would come to pick them up with the car. Alexei had received the telegram and did come with the

  car. The car was the Red Army headquarters’ new thirty-thousand-ruble Packard, and in it the Erlichs drove to an apartment Boris had set up for them a while back in Moscow’s Ostozhenka district. Alexei had even brought some furniture to the apartment. Esther was overwhelmed by the inexhaustible delight of the two-room apartment, as Boris showed her the kitchen with its gas stove, the bathroom with its own hot water boiler, and the pantry with its icebox. The rooms were beautiful. They were part of a house that had belonged to the deputy governor general of Moscow before the Revolution, and as Boris eagerly dragged his mother through kitchens, bathrooms, and mezzanines of the princely house, he was involuntarily fulfilling the call of his ancient Semitic blood. The cemetery and the grave of his luckless father, who had not lived to see happiness, had awakened in him the powerful passion for family which for so many centuries had sustained his people. At thirty-two, obeying this ancient command, he felt himself to be father, husband, and brother in one—the protector of the women, their breadwinner, their support—and he felt this with a passion, with the tormenting and stubborn tightening of the heart characteristic of his people. Boris was tortured by the thought that his father had not lived to see this, and wanted to make up for his having come too late to his father’s deathbed by having his mother and sister pass from his father’s hands into his own. And if his mother and sister were to fare better in his strong hands, that was simply due to the ruthlessness of life.

  5.

  Boris Erlich had been a student at the Institute of Psychology and Neurology (before the Revolution, all the other institutes had a restrictive enrollment quota for Jews). He had spent the summer of 1917 with his parents in the shtetl. He had trudged to all the restless villages nearby, explaining the basics of Bolshevism to the peasants. His propaganda rounds were hampered by his hooked nose, but not too much: back in 1917, people had more than noses on their minds. That same summer Alexei Selivanov, the son of a bookkeeper at the local council, came back from Siberian exile in Verkhoyansk. At home, while Alexei swallowed the cherry dumplings and liqueurs his mother made, he dug into the Selivanov family’s history and found that they were descendants of

  Selikha, a Zaporozhian Cossack commander.5 Among the papers Alexei found there was even a lithograph of his ancestor wearing his Cossack jacket and sitting on a cardboard horse carrying his ceremonial mace. There was a faded inscription in Latin beneath the portrait, and Alexei claimed that he recognized the handwriting of Orlik, the Ukrainian chancellor in the days of Mazepa.^ Alexeis romantic delving into the past coexisted with his membership in the Socialist Revolutionary Party.6 His idols were Zhelyabov, Kibalchich, and Kalyayev.^ At twenty-one, Alexei led a full life. His youthful passion fired up Erlich, the large-nosed student with the strange name. The two young men struck up a friendship, and Alexei became a Bolshevik when he realized that no other party in the world had as much battling, destroying, and rebuilding to do as the Bolshevik Party, filled as it was with mathematical and scientific passion. (Erlich supplied Alexei with books and the Communist Manifesto). After the Revolution, Alexei rounded up his shtetl friends: a nineteen-year-old Jew, who worked as a projectionist at the Chary Movie theater, a blacksmith, also a Jew, a few noncommissioned officers who were sitting around bored, and a few boys from a nearby village who had been discharged from the army. Alexei gave them
horses, and their unit turned into the Insurgent Regiment of Red Ukrainian Cossacks. One of the former noncommissioned officers became the regiment’s chief of staff, and Boris became its commissar. Alexei’s regiment was fighting for a palpably good cause, its fighters lived together in camaraderie and died proudly in action, and each told taller tales than the next. Their ranks grew day by day, and the regiment experienced the fate of all the small rivulets that flowed into the Red Army. The regiment turned into a brigade, the brigade into a division. Alexeis men battled renegade bands, Petlyura,7 the White Army, and the Poles. By now all regiments already had their Political Divisions, Provision Units, Tribunals, and War Spoils Commissions.^ In the campaign against General Wrangels White Army, Alexei became a corps commander. He was twenty-four. Foreign newspapers wrote that Budyonny8 and Alexei had invented new tactics and strategy of cavalry warfare. At the academy they began teaching the lightning raids of Alexei Selivanov. The students at the Military Academy went about solving exercises in strategy by studying the operations of the Ukrainian Cossack Corps. Alexei Selivanov and Boris Erlich, his irreplaceable commissar, were sent to study at the Military Academy, where they ended up studying their own operations along with the other students. In Moscow Alexei and Boris formed a commune with the former projectionist and one of the former noncommissioned officers. In the commune, as in the corps, honor and the spirit of camaraderie was high, and Boris clung to it with tormenting passion. Perhaps it was because his race had for so long been deprived of one of the most important human qualities—friendship, both behind the plow and on the field of battle. Boris experienced a need, a hunger for camaraderie and friendship—(to defend and be loyal to camaraderie)—with such vulnerability that his friendships were marked by fevered passion. But in his fervor, chivalry, and self-sacrifice, there was also something (attractive and) noble, which turned Boris’s shabby room into a club for the “Red Marshals.” This club truly blossomed when, instead of the standard-issue sausage and vodka, gefilte fish was served. The tin kettle was replaced by a samovar brought from Kremenets, and the tea was poured by the comforting hand of his old mother. It was many years