Just As I Thought (27 page)

Loneliness, differentness, hunger enabled him to brutally kill the goose. But he was unable to go much further. In the case of Dolgushov (“The Death of Dolgushov”), he could not bring himself to end Dolgushov’s agony, though the Cossack’s belly was pouring his intestines out of its wide wound and Dolgushov begs him to “waste a cartridge” on him. He cannot do it, and he hears words of contempt from the comrade, Afonka, who has pity for Dolgushov and helps him to leave this life.

And later, in “Going into Battle,” caught with an unloaded pistol, he asks “for the simplest of proficiencies, the ability to kill my fellow man.”

*   *   *

In a story from
Red Cavalry,
“Sandy the Christ” (so named for his noticeable mildness) hears his stepfather in his mother’s bed. He calls out to stop him, to remind his stepfather that he is “tainted.” He begs him to consider his mother’s fine white skin, her innocence, then trades them for permission from this man to become the village herdsman. I have read that story many times, and as I come to the last paragraphs, my heart still beats faster. Of course it isn’t the story line alone, which is certainly interesting. It must be the way of telling.

How did he come to that?

When he was quite young he loved French literature, particularly Flaubert and Maupassant. In fact, according to information in
You Must Know Everything,
he wrote his first stories in French. Then he began to think about how to write about war: he came upon
Authentic Stories of the Great War
by the French writer Captain Gaston Vidal. He admired the stories, the facts of the stories. But he had just come back from fighting on the Romanian front and was soon to become Liutov, the war correspondent, the writer, the storyteller for the Red Cavalry, Budenny’s First Cavalry. He began to translate the stories, and in one long moment (all his writing moments were extremely long) he created a language, a style, his brand-new sentences. In
You Must Know Everything
there is an excellent example. By reducing a tendentious twelve-line paragraph from one of those stories to three lines, he produced clarity, presentness, tension, and a model of how always, though with great difficulty, to proceed.

Here is Babel talking about his method of working with Konstantin Paustovsky in his book
Years of Hope:

If you use enough elbow grease even the coarsest wood gets to look like ivory. That’s what we have to do with words and with our Russian language. Warm it and polish it with your hand till it glows like a jewel …

The first version of a story is terrible. All in bits and pieces tied together with boring “like passages” as dry as old rope. You have the first version of “Lyubka” there, you can see for yourself. It yaps at you. It’s clumsy, helpless, toothless. That’s where the real work begins. I go over each sentence time and time again. I start by cutting out all the words I can do without. Words are very sly. The rubbishy ones go into hiding … After that I type the story and let it lie for two or three days. Then I check it again sentence by sentence … I shorten the sentences and break up the paragraphs.

In the end there were twenty-two versions of “Lyubka the Cossack,” a wild story full of smugglers, infants, an old man, contraband, brothels, sailors, traveling salesmen, prostitutes, a baby howling to be nursed. A short story!

To make matters clearer he wrote a story about the French writer he loved. It’s called “Guy de Maupassant.” In it the art of translation, the game of love, and the punctuation of sentences are of equal lively value. After years of love for this master he said one day, startled with the knowledge, “You know Maupassant—he has no heart.”

In the course of Babel’s long conversation with Paustovsky he said, “I’ve got no imagination. All I’ve got is the longing for it.” What could he have done with more imagination? He was a Jew, his childhood spent in the provincial ghetto of a provincial town. Only fifteen years later he became the great chronicler of the Red Cavalry at war, their energy, fidelity, their violent natures. He wrote about a life of physical movement almost totally opposite his own sedentary youth and culture. He had the imagination to be just. It took all his strength, all his longing.

Babel would probably be called a minimalist today, but there’s hardly a maximalist or mediumist who can tell a story, engage and shape a character with so much of the light and darkness of history, with grief
and
humor. The fact is, there’s a larger, more varied population in Babel’s four, five hundred pages of stories than in any three novels of most writers. A bald statement, to be proven another time.

*   *   *

Red Cavalry
is about men and what they expect of one another in the way of honor, physical courage, love of horses, abuse of women and Jews. It’s about a young man, a Russian, too, but to them a foreigner, who is falling in love with their bravery and suffering. At the same time, he is trying to give us the facts of the case. When women appear, it’s because of what men need to do
to
them as the men demand food and sex. The women are usually pregnant, which makes very little difference in the men’s demands. The young man Babel doesn’t shirk
his
honorable duty, which is to tell the story whole, as beautifully, that is as truthfully, as he can.

In the Odessa stories and others, some of which were written later, the women are able to … well, fly. Lyubka (called the Cossack, a Jewish woman) is wild and irascible, “a monstrous mother,” and is in many ways more interesting than Benya Krik (the King). And this literary and historical and unbrutalized entrance of women allows for all kinds of humor and imagery (“Meanwhile misfortune lurked under the window like a pauper at daybreak”). Which must have been a relief, because Babel liked to laugh.

“The Jewess” is a profound figure, forced with strong familial love out of her place and time by her son—into his. This story, had Babel had the time the times did not allow, might have become a novel.

Claudia in “Oil” is the head of the Oil Syndicate. She’s a modern woman. We know her, her closeness to women friends, her great sense of humor, her political interest and brains. Was she a woman like Antonina Pirozhkova, an engineer who had a great deal to do with the building of the Moscow subway as well as assorted tunnels and bridges? In any case, it’s good to have met these women. They must still be there, old and tough—I would like to meet them again.

But some stories, I must admit, you simply can’t read more than once every couple of years, because in reading them, sorrow grips you so. An example would be the first story of
Red Cavalry,
“Crossing Over to Poland.” Perhaps I feel this because it is so close to my parents’ story of their own town’s drowning in the 1905 manufactured waves of pogroms. The murder of my seventeen-year-old uncle Russya in that pogrom; the picture given to me many times of my grandmother, alone, bringing the wagon to his place of slaughter to lift his body, take him home. Within a few months she sent my young father and mother away with their Russian language to become Americans. There are only a few others, also wonderful, where the air of his normal hopefulness cannot raise the story out of heartsick sadness.

I see I have been a bit solemn, even in describing “Awakening,” a story made famous by its humor—the large size of the violin cases, the small boys carrying them, the international hopes of the fathers, the narrow streets of the ghettos. Why is it that with the best intentions in the world, disparate size is comical except to the people involved, the unrequited lover of the disinterested and beautiful woman is a joke, at least until someone says, What’s so funny about that? Heifetz and Zimbalist and Gabrilowitsch
did
come from Odessa. That’s where they studied the violin. Any loving parent would think, My son is also smart, maybe even gifted. Why do you laugh?

*   *   *

There is a kind of subgenre (in which I have been implicated) called short shorts, which probably couldn’t have happened without Babel’s work. But what is missed much of the time is the density of that work. They are not pieces of life. They are each one
all
of life. Each one, even the shortest, is the story of a story.

Among other intentions, I think Babel hoped to tell two kinds of stories—the first about lives absolutely unlike his own, in order to understand, or at least know and maybe even become like the “others.”

But a second need was to say, Look, that life is like mine. I am after all like him and he like me. What a relief! This happened from time to time. Here are two examples: In “The Story of the Horse,” Klebnikov, the commander of the first squadron, has been deprived of his white stallion by Savitsky, the divisional commander. He writes a letter of resignation from the Communist Party, beginning: “The Communist Party was founded, as I understand it, for joy and sound justice without limit, and it ought to consider small fry also. Now I will come to the question of the white stallion…” And Babel ends: “He was a quiet fellow whose character was rather like mine. He was the only man in the squadron to possess a samovar … We used to drink scalding tea together. We were shaken by the same passions. Both of us looked on the world as a meadow in May—a meadow traversed by women and horses.”

And at the end of “Sandy the Christ,” after the son has made his bargain with his stepfather, Babel writes: “It was only recently that I got to know Sandy the Christ, and shifted my little trunk over to his cart. Since then we have often met the dawn and seen the sun set together. And whenever the capricious chance of war has brought us together, we have sat down of an evening on the bench outside a hut, or made tea in the woods in a sooty kettle, or slept side by side in the new-mown fields, the hungry horses tied to his foot or mine.”

*   *   *

In the matter of his small production (for some reason I feel this must be answered), apart from what I’ve said about the weight of its quality against the weight of the paper used by most writers, he had other journalistic and literary responsibilities.

He had to support his wife and child in France—they refused to return, wisely. He traveled with Pirozhkova on writing assignments to mining districts and to collectives—kolkhozes, where beet production was impressive, and to smaller fields where the agricultural leaders had turned to seed production for the whole region. (A few years later, he would learn that many of the working organizers of these successful projects had been arrested, maybe executed.) He also worked on many filmscripts, once with Eisenstein, who was his good friend. He worked as a writer. That was his work.

We know that great boxes of his manuscripts were carted off by the NKVD. Among them, Pirozhkova is sure (and I am, too), was his book to be called “New Stories.” Did “they” fear these stories? He held them up for the usual scrutiny—one day or one year too long. We really don’t know about his production. We do know that we wish we had a lot more of his stories.

Babel and Pirozhkova could not have been blind to events. Early in 1918, Babel must have heard Gorky’s warning: “Lenin, Trotsky, and their supporters have already been poisoned by the corruptive virus of power.”

But they could not understand the confessions made again and again by people they admired. (Nor can anyone to this day quite take in the totality.) Pirozhkova, in her forthright way, asked why they didn’t just stand up for what they believed if they disagreed with the directions taken. But Babel understood something. The Party—maybe they didn’t want to see the Party go down. They had not yet included torture in their calculations; at least Babel said nothing about this to his wife. Still, he must have understood that someone in charge did not love him. There were problems with the publication of stories. He and Pasternak were not included among the Russian writers invited to the important cultural conference in Paris (the Congress for the Defense of Culture and Peace). Only after the French delegation furiously demanded their attendance were they allowed to appear. And again later, when Soviet prizes were given out to scientists and cultural figures, Babel and Pasternak were not honored.

After Gorky died in 1936, Babel said to Pirozhkova, “
Now
they won’t let me live.”

Still, almost to the end, until the moment of his arrest, he was considered influential. The wives and children of people arrested came to him asking that he intervene. He would try, but always returned grim-faced, not wanting to speak about it. He did not like to worry his wife. But he continued to offer care, and in more than one case shelter, to women whose husbands were in prison or had been executed. Many of his friends considered this unwise. When he was finally arrested, very few people called Antonina Pirozhkova or visited her again. Ilya Ehrenburg became the comforting exception.

Babel’s grandmother had admonished: “You Must Know Everything.” He did try. And eventually he knew a great deal. He knew war. He knew work. He knew love. He gave long classical reading lists to Pirozhkova. He didn’t like literary talk. He didn’t want to discuss his work.

Sad for her and sad for us. Maybe, among his other thoughts, he hoped to protect her, a powerful and responsible working woman important in the construction of the new Soviet infrastructure. Was he also trying to save her from the destructive forces of disillusion? When Lion Feuchtwanger visited, she asked Babel what they’d talked about. “He spoke of his impressions of the U.S.S.R. and of Stalin,” he said. “He told me many bitter truths.” Then Babel said no more.

For the most part, I have tried to say something in these few pages about what I feel for Babel’s work. It was the work of a man who, like the Gedali character from
Red Cavalry,
longed for the joy-giving Revolution, thought he would wait as long as he could. He thought he could put his own joyful spirit out like an oar in history’s river and deflect the Revolution’s iron boat by acting in a straightforward way for others. He thought laughter and jokes might work. In fact, Pirozhkova learned that one of his arresters had been asked by the interrogator in charge, “Did he try to make a joke?”