The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (105 page)

ANDREI:

“Man doesn't die because he's infirm He dies because he's served his term.''

And the general had served his term.

[Enter AGASHA, SAFONOV—a bony, young, taciturn worker—and his pregnant wife ELENA, a tall woman, not more than twenty, with a small\ brightface. She is in the final stages of her pregnancy. They are loaded with household goods: stools, mattresses, a little paraffin stove.\

ANDREI: Wait a second, wait a second—let me spread something on the floor!

AGASHA: Come in, Safonov, dont be afraid! This is where you are going to live!

ELENA: This is so fancy, couldnt we get a place thats less . . .

AGASHA: Its time you got used to better things.

ANDREI: Youll be surprised how fast youll get used to better things. AGASHA: The kitchens to the left, and the bath where you can wash is over there. Come on, young man, lets go get the rest of the stuff. You stay here, Elena, and don’t walk around—youll lose your baby.

[AGASHA and SAFONOV exit. ANDREI is gathering up his things— brushes, buckets. ELENA sits down on a stool.\

ANDREI: Well, good luck in your new home.

ELENA: It doesn’t really look all that comfortable—it’s so big.

ANDREI: When are you due?

ELENA: I’m going in tomorrow.

ANDREI: It’ll be easy enough for you. You’ll be going to the palace on the Moika Canal, right?

ELENA: That’s right, the Moika Canal.

ANDREI: That palace is now called “Mother and Child”—a Czarina had it built for a shepherd, now women go there to give birth. Everything’s nicely fixed up, it’ll be no hassle.

ELENA: I have to go in tomorrow. One minute I’m frightened, the next I’m not.

ANDREI: Whats there to be frightened of—you’re going in to give birth, one hiccup and it’ll be out. You squeeze all your insides, you give birth, then youll be as good as new.

ELENA: Its just that I have such narrow hips.

ANDREI: When push comes to shove, they 11 widen. You should see some of those pretty little women, tiny, with lots of nice hair, the prettiest little hands and feet, and they give birth to large roughnecks who can drink vodka by the bucket and fell a bull with a single punch. Giving birth is what women are here for. [He swings his sack onto his shoulder,;] You want a girl or a boy?

ELENA: I don’t mind either way.

ANDREI: You’re right, both are fine. What I say is that all kids born today have a good life to look forward to. That’s a sure thing nowadays! [He picks up the rest of his tools. ] Let’s go, Kuzma! [To ELENA.] One hiccup and it’ll be out.

[The floor polishers exit. ELENA opens the windows, and the sun and the noise of the street come pouring in.

Sticking out her belly, she carefully walks along the walls, touching them, peeks into adjacent rooms, turns on the chandelier, and turns it off again. NYUSHA, an enormous crimson-faced girl, comes in carrying a bucket and a rag to wash the windows.

She climbs up onto the windowsill and tucks in her skirt above her knees. She is bathed in sunlight. She stands against the background of the springtime sky like a statue holding up an arch.]

ELENA: Will you come to our housewarming party, Nyusha?

NYUSHA [In a bass voice.]: You ask me—111 come. What re you going to serve?

ELENA: Not much, whatever I can get my hands on.

NYUSHA: What I want is some red wine, nice and sweet. [She suddenly bursts into song with a loud, piercing voice.]

“A Cossack galloped through valleys unseen Into cold and distant Manchurian lands,

He galloped through gardens and orchards green,

A precious ring clasped in his powerful hands.

The precious ring was from his sweetheart true:

‘Think of me as you ride through those distant lands, And in a year forever I shall belong to you.'

Alas, a year had come and gone. . . ”

[Curtain]

1

A town to the south of Petersburg.

t Today the city of Pushkin, fourteen miles south of Petersburg.

2

“The way things are now.”

3

“so overly Russian.”

^ “is a thing of the past.”

4

“The circus is continuing, I have a toothache tonight.”

^ A quotation from Lermontov s poem Mtsyri.

5

The croupier’s call when bets are closed at the roulette table.

The “Extraordinary Commission” set up in 1917 to investigate counterrevolutionary activities. The Cheka later became the KGB.

6

The Petrograd Council, the seat of Lenins government, situated in the former Smolny

Institute for Girls of the Nobility.

^ Alexei Alekseyevich Brusilov, 1853-1926, was a Soviet general who was also of aristocratic

birth.

Babel began working for the Soviet cinema in the mid-1920s. He had achieved literary fame with his Odessa and Red Cavalry stories, and was approached by Pyotr Chardynin, the renowned director of such silent film classics as Queen of Spades and House of Kolomna, to write a screenplay version of his Red Cavalry story
⁽ⁱ
Salt ” The Ukrainian State Film Company (VUKFU) produced the movie in 1925. The same year; Babel provided the subtitles for the movie Jewish Luck, based on Shalom Meichems Menachem Mendel stories. Alexander Granovsky of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater; along with Grigori Gricher-Cherikover; directed the movie. The cinematography was by Eduard Tisse\ who was Sergei Eisensteins cinematographer on classics such as Battleship Potemkin, October 1917, and Alexander Nevsky.

Not all BabeVs screenplays have come down to us. In 1925, he began working on the first screenplay in this section, Roaming Stars, loosely based on Shalom Aleichem’s novel of the same name (translated into English as Wandering Star). Grigori Gricher-Cherikover also directed this movie.

In Roaming Stars, Babel kept to the basic technique of silent movie scenario writing, numbering the scene sequences and writing out the subti-ties in capital letters. But unlike other screenwriters of the period, who confined themselves to dry description and technical stage directions, Babel’s scenario writing had literary subtlety and stylistic depth: “She is a gaunt German woman with yellow puffed-up hair and an unblinking glass eye. The telephone rings. She lifts the receiver. Her face uncoils like a long spring, at the end of which is a gush of prefabricated delight.” The movie was a box office success, but the critics were not pleased with the director’s work, accusing him of smoothing out and prettifying Babel. As the movie magazine Sovietskoe Kino wrote, “The movie will do well, and it will bring in the public, but there is nothing, or almost nothing left of Shalom Aleichem or Isaac Babel.”

The second screenplay in this section, Benya Krik, which Babel based on his Odessa stories, was to be filmed by the Soviet Union’s most renowned director, Sergei Eisenstein. Babel, however; transferred the movie from GOSKINO (the State Committee for Cinematography) in Moscow, to the Ukrainian State Film Company (VUKFU), which had just filmed Roaming Stars, and Vilner directed Benya Krik.

Babel’s movie The Chinese Mill, directed by Levshin, was released in 1928. Number 4 Staraya Square is Babel’s only screenplay for a talkie that has come down to us.

Among Babel’s screenplays that have not yet been located are: Jimmy Higgins, adapted from Upton Sinclair’s novel (1928), a movie that Babel coscripted with Tasin, and Pilots (1935). In 1939, Babel worked on the scenario for Mark Donskoi’s famous Gorky trilogy with Ilya Gruzdev, Gorky’s biographer. A few months later Babel was arrested, and when the film came out in 1940 his name was removed from the credits.

Thoughout the early 1920s, Isaac Babel had been involved in promoting the translation and publication of Shalom Aleichems work in Russian. He had written the subtitles for the 1925 silent movie Jewish Luck, based on Shalom Aleichems Menachem Mendel stories, had translated some of his stories from Yiddish, and had put together and edited an extensive selection of translations of Aleichems stories by Solomon Gekht.

The silent movie Roaming Stars premiered in 1926. The screenplay was only loosely based on Shalom Aleichems novel of the same name (translated into English as Wandering Star/ In the novel, Leibel and Reizl (the movie's Lev and Rachel) run away from the "Bessarabian shtetl ofHoleneshti" with a travelingYiddish theater. Leibel proves to be an actor of unprecedented talent who, in Aleichems words,
^fl
can turn snow into lumps of cheese.
ⁿ
His performances make the traveling theater world famous, the theater leaves for New York, and Leibel and Reizl live happily ever after. In Babel's screenplay there is no happy ending. Young Lev becomes a worldfamous violinist who ultimately pays a high price for his fame andfortune in the capitalist West, while Rachel, by a twist of fate, joins the struggle for the Revolution.

fPart One

1. The edge of a double bed. Night. The broad back of old Ratkovich, the rich man of the shtetl. He is asleep. Somebody’s bare arm slithers over his pillow. Old Ratkovich rolls over, and in his sleep traps the thief’s hand, moves again, the hand frees itself, snatches a bundle of keys from under the pillow, and disappears.

2. A well-furnished room (but one smacking of the shtetl) in Ratkovich’s house. It is a summer night. A moonbeam falls on the spotless floor. The door opens slowly. Lev Ratkovich, the rich man’s eighteen-year-old son, enters the room on tiptoe. The

flame of the candle flickers. The young man puts the candle on the table, and goes over to the safe.

3. A large pier glass cabinet, a family heirloom, stands against the wall. In it flicker the moonbeams and the candle s flame.

4. Lev opens the safe. He takes out his fathers silken money pouch. A wad of banknotes falls out of the pouch and onto the floor. A thud is heard. The young man drops the pouch and throws himself in terror on the floor, covering the money with his body.

5. Old Ratkovichs black-fringed silk pouch is lying on the floor in the moonlight.

6. The young man is still lying on the floor. The mirror reflects his distorted, terrified face. Behind him a white apparition begins swaying. It sways more and more, moves toward him, is about to grab him. Lev cowers as close to the floor as possible.

7. A cat, sleeping in a deep armchair, wakes up, stretches, jumps onto a hanging lamp draped in a white sheet. The lamp sways. This is the white apparition that has frightened Lev.

8. The reflection of the swaying lamp in the mirror.

9. The cat jumps from the lamp onto the back of the young man lying on the floor. He squirms, lifts his head, comes to his senses. He grabs the money and rushes out of the room.

10. The candle has burned itself down. It goes out. The cat curls itself into a ball, and dozes off.

11. Old Ratkovichs bedroom. He is asleep next to his wife in a very large featherbed. Both of them are wearing nightcaps. Lev tiptoes through the room. He is barefoot, as before, his shoes hanging over his shoulder. He is holding a violin and a bow wrapped in cloth. He carefully opens the door to the next room, where his brothers and sisters are asleep.

12. AND YOUR DESCENDANTS, O ISRAEL, WILL BE MORE ABUNDANT THAN THE GRAINS OF SAND BY THE OCEAN.

13. The room where the Ratkovich children sleep looks more like a boarding-school dormitory than a bedroom. A multitude of beds of every shape and size. A multitude of children of different ages and proportions. The fugitive makes his way among the beds, kisses his youngest sister on the forehead, and climbs out the window.

14. A maze of rooftops of small shacks stretches out in front of the window that Lev has climbed out of. The shacks are huddled close together. Their roofs are slanting, covered with slippery moss, and are reminiscent of Indian pagodas. Young Ratkovich jumps from the window onto the first roof.

15. The earth illuminated by moonlight. The roofs cast shadows. The shadow of Ratkovich s jump.

16. Ratkovich jumps from roof to roof. He jumps like a gymnast on a flying trapeze. Finally—he reaches the ground.

17. The deserted street of a little Ukrainian border shtetl. The bewitching lights of the night flood the crooked little alleys and the tightly packed hovels; the streets look as if they are from a stage set of a fairy-tale play. Staggering through the mud, holding his violin tightly, young Ratkovich runs in zigzags down the street, as if he were running for his life.

18. He comes across two drunken peasants. Holding on to each other, the peasants are standing with their legs apart and their foreheads together, like two crossed rifles. They separate with extreme difficulty, grope for the gates of their houses, which are God knows where. Their drunken faces are forlorn.

19. “THERE WAS A DOOR LATCH HERE THIS MORNING, BUT NOW IT’S GONE ... JESUS-MARY-AND-JOSEPH!”

20. The drunken peasants, giving up the idea of finding their houses, slowly kiss each other and sink to their knees. They kiss each others beards with utmost tenderness, scrupulousness, and care. Unable to stop kissing, they tumble, holding on to each other, into the torpid shtetl mud, and fall asleep.

21. In the distance, young Ratkovich s slender figure flashes through dark back streets. He creeps toward a rickety two-story house of strange Ukrainian-Polish architecture, with cellars, sheds, and a pen for animals on the ground floor.

22. The drunkards lie there kissing each other from time to time as they sink deeper and deeper into the mud. Their hair is disheveled. Their mud-caked boots stick out like sunken stakes in a flooded field. Their beards are tousled. There is a deeply pensive expression on their faces.

23. Ratkovich enters a dark, reeking corridor, which lies below the

living quarters of the two-story house. Deep in the back—in the shed—a cows muzzle.

24. A woman wrapped in a cloak is crouching in the dark corner of the cowshed, which is filled with barrels, buckets, and paints.

25. Ratkovich approaches the shed, bangs the roof with a pole.

26. The figure in the corner shudders, jumps up, tips over a pail. A thick, white stream of milk flows onto the floor from the pail.