The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (122 page)

“That’s exactly what the Central Committee keeps saying,” Murashko cut in, half agreeing, half pondering.

2.

The wooden barracks on the airship construction site. Inside it, sheets of plywood formed a partition for a room with a sign that said: “Director of Airship Construction.”

The long black pipe of a makeshift stove cut through the plywood partition and ran the whole length of the room.

In the director’s “office,” Murashko was sitting in an opera chair inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In front of him stood a rickety table heaped with papers, drafts, and samples. In the office: noise, commotion, and a throng of construction workers.

“They don’t want to, and that’s that!” a foreman with rubber boots, spattered with mortar and lime, announced in a morose bass.

Murashko suddenly looked up at him.

“What do you mean, they don’t want to?”

“And why should they want to?” the foreman continued. “At the Anilin construction site, workers are raking in fourth-level wages, while we here are forced to work for second-level pay! And then our mess hall . . . well... it just isn’t good enough!”

“How’s that?”

“Well, Comrade Murashko, it just isn’t good enough. Take your average ditch digger, for instance: one wants meatballs, and the next wants beef Stroganoff. Its every man for himself!”

Murashko jotted down something in his notebook and turned to another foreman, a pockmarked little man with a metal rule in his hands.

“What do you want?”

The incessant onslaught of construction problems have instilled a somber steeliness in the foreman’s words: “What do I want? In two days things here will grind to a halt.”

“Is it the cement?”

“That’s right. I can scrape together forty barrels, but then it’s curtains!”

Murashko’s secretary, a rosy, hefty, well-built woman, was sitting on a crate serving as a chair on the other side of the partition. On a second, larger crate were papers and a telephone that looked like an army field telephone and smacked of war and frontline action.

“Comrade Murashko,” the secretary said in a placid voice through the partition. “The director of the Fourth Regional Construction Supply Department.”

Murashko picked up the receiver.

“Murashko speaking.”

• • •

The large office of the director of the Fourth Regional Construction Supply Department. The director was a man with a surprisingly milky, porcine face. His deputy, a man with shiny black hair and the inordinately expressive face of a provincial actor, was standing behind his chair. He whispered something into the director’s ear.

The director whined into the telephone in an offended, high-pitched voice.

“All I can say, Comrade Murashko, is that you’re acting as if you come from another planet!”

“Well, I am an airship man, after all.”

The deputy bent forward to his boss’s ear and hissed, “YouVe got to be tougher!”

The director puffed himself up.

“Im telling you this one last time: there is no cement, nor are we anticipating there being any!”

The deputy, in his boss’s ear: “Tougher!”

“For your information ...” Murashko s calm, dispirited voice came streaming out of the receiver, “for your information, according to invoice number 94611, two hundred tons of cement were shipped to you from Novorossisk on the fourteenth. They arrived at your Moscow depot on the twenty-first.” And Murashko hung up.

The director’s porcine face was gripped by an expression of extreme astonishment and offense.

“He said that. . . that it was shipped on the fourteenth,” he stammered in dismay, “and that it arrived at our depot on the twenty-first!”

The deputy with the inordinately expressive face turned beet red and then went pale.

“Um, well, Ivan Semyonovich,” he whispered, quickly looking around, “a little note was sent to us, and so . . .”

• • •

Murashko s “office.” A squat little bookkeeper, with the air of a goose about to bounce into flight, stood in front of Murashko’s desk.

“We figure the general estimate at twenty-eight million,” he said in a sugary voice, preening himself.

A resonant voice outside the window: “Aksinya, give me forty kopecks so I can get myself some tea.”

Murashko looked at the preening bookkeeper.

“That’s too low,” he said. “We have to go with my figure of thirty-five million.”

The bookkeeper recoiled as if he had been lashed with a whip.

“Comrade Murashko, permit me to add—”

The appeasing voice of Murashko’s secretary rang out from the other side of the partition: “Please pick up the telephone. It is the Central Committee of the Komsomol. . .

• • •

The office of the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol. The secretary, a young blond woman with braids coiled into a crown over her head, was sitting in a chair. She looked through the papers lying on the table, and said with an energy filled with youth, cheerfulness, enthusiasm, and competence, “Let me see, Comrade Murashko. Are you the one who needs ... just a minute .. .’’The young woman quickly ran her eyes over the papers again. “Are you the one who needs an airship construction crew, hangars, mooring masts, airship navigators, gas purification unit mechanics . . . just a minute . . .” She turned the page and continued reading out the roster with even more energy. “As well as both engineers and draftsmen with airship expertise.”

* The Communist Youth Organization of the Soviet Union. Its members were sent to work on construction projects throughout the country.

“Yes, Im the one!” Murashko answered, won over by the womans unbridled cheerfulness and youth.

She put away the papers.

“What well provide you with, Comrade, is nice strong boys and girls from the ranks of the Komsomol, but with no expertise.”

“But what am I supposed to do with them?” Murashko asked her defiantly.

“Exactly what everyone else does,” the secretary said, looking out the window to where Moscow lay. “Youll simply have to reshuffle them to fit your bill.”

“And what about all that highfalutin help you were going to give me?” Murashko asked.

“Were going to give you a Komsomol team leader,” the young woman answered. “A tried-and-tested construction foreman from an electrical power plant.”

Murashko put the receiver back on the hook. There was still a residue of animation in his face.

“All I can say is that, notwithstanding instruction 380, they re finishing us off with their budget restrictions, plain and simple,” the bookkeeper said suddenly, hopping from foot to foot in front of Murashko s desk.

A feisty little woman of about eighteen, with an unruly mop of flaxen curls and an unyieldingly obstinate face, came bursting into Murashkos office.

“I’d like to make it clear here and now that IVe never seen one before!” she announced, standing by the door.

“Seen what?” Murashko asked, unperturbed.

“An airship!”

“And what would you have needed to see one for?”

“Well, I like that!” the young woman snapped. “Here I am, the Komsomol team leader sent by the Central Committee to run the airship construction team, and Im asked what I need to have seen an airship for!”

“You are the Komosomol team leader the Central Committee sent?”

“Yep,” the girl answered. “Pleased to meet you!”

She shook Murashko s hand, and then headed for the door.

Til go take a look at the workers’ dormitory—the place looks like a real dump to me!” she said, scuttling out of the office.

“That ones a troublemaker!” the chief bookkeeper said, watching her disappear.

“A ticking time bomb!” the foreman added, making space for the bookkeeper, who was hopping about more and more agitatedly.

Til have you know, Comrade Murashko, the government s position is crystal-clear to me. As for the budget restrictions, you’ll simply have to—”

Tut in for thirty-five million,” Murashko interrupted him in a tone that allowed for no discussion.

The secretary opened the door and admitted a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked old man.

“This is Professor Polibin,” she said, with a streak of fear and respect in her face.

Murashko chased all the other people out of his office. He and the professor remained alone. Murashko pushed the opera chair with the inlaid mother-of-pearl, the only chair in his office, toward the professor, and sat down on some parquet planks tied into a bundle.

Professor Polibin looked first out the window, then around the office, and said in a mellifluous voice, “I think one could go so far as to say that you have already launched your project.”

• • •

The bookkeeper, about to bounce into flight, was pouring his heart out to the secretary on the other side of the partition.

Til have you know that Im fully aware of the government’s point of view. . . .”

In the “office,” Professor Polibin, running his blue eyes over Murashko, was holding forth in his sugary voice: “In my view, my dear Alexei Kuzmich, the problem of who is to occupy the post of chief airship builder is a tricky question indeed. Who would be the top specialist in this field in the Soviet Union?”

Murashko slid closer on the bundle of parquet planks.

“Well, there is always Ivan Platonovich Tolmazov,” Professor Polibin continued, peering at Murashko even more intently. “He’s a renowned scientist and theoretician of the highest quality.”

“I wouldn’t even dare consider asking a man of his standing!” “Well, as for Tolmazov’s students,” Polibins tenor flowed on, “I would single out Vasilyev. Though I must say ... he is young, so intolerably young!”

“A shortcoming that a few years will put right,” Murashko pointed out. “Who else besides Tolmazov’s students might we consider?”

Polibins eyes gazed into the distance as if he were plumbing the depths of his consciousness.

“Pyotr Nikolayevich Zhukov. He is a perpetuum mobile,, a visionary, a maniac, I should say. And then there’s Yastrezhemsky, but I don’t really think he’d be the right man . . . he’s not a Party man.”

“No, he’s not one of us,” Murashko agreed.

A pause.

“What would you say, my dear professor, if we tried twisting your arm into accepting the position?”

An expression of intense beatitude washed over Professor Polibin s rosy face. He opened his mouth, but at that very moment a battle broke out on the other side of the partition. Murashko’s docile secretary was being accosted by a middle-aged woman with a beret on her head and a tattered fur boa around her neck.

“Professor Polibin might well be a great man!” the woman with the boa yelled, waving her handbag at the secretary. “But I, Comrade, I am a mother! Yes, before you stands a mother!”

In Murashko’s office the courtship was winding down.

“In conclusion, I would like to stress”—a ripple of intense emotion ruffled the balm in Polibins voice—“to stress my twenty-eight years of experience as a scientist, my extensive volunteer work, and my status as a Party sympathizer since the year 1927.”

Murashko tapped his finger on his knee and got up.

“Yes, my dear professor, we’ll take all of that into account. I promise. We’ll discuss it further at a later date.”

Polibin bowed, stretched out his thin palm to shake Murashko’s broad hand, and, still bowing, backed out of the office. By the door he collided with the middle-aged woman wearing the boa. She made way for him, and then, her body blocking the door, launched her attack. “Comrade Director!”

Murashko slapped his cap onto his head.

“Come back in two days. Im leaving now.”

But under the circumstances, leaving was not a simple matter. The woman blocking the door was triumphantly roused and ready for battle.

“When a mother comes to you in deep sorrow, then your little trip can wait!” And she pulled a letter out of her bag. “This isn’t a letter from just anyone! It is a letter from Eliseyev!”

Murashko glanced at the letter and looked at the woman with interest.

“So, you are Friedmans mother?”

“Im the mother of one of those damn daredevils, thats who I am!” the woman answered mournfully.

Murashko grabbed some papers and stuffed them into his briefcase.

“Comrade Friedman . . . Raisa Lvovna, is it?”

“Yes, Raisa Lvovna.”

“Its all been taken care of. We will hire your son as a pilot, its all been settled. But the whole thing will start a year from now, not before. And then, your son is up in the substratosphere, while were down here building an airship.”

But Raisa Friedman did not move.

“I have one question, and do you know what it is? My question is: doesn’t a mother have the right to want her one and only son to open his parachute three hundred meters up instead of fifty?” Raisa Friedman sobbed. “If I were Comrade Voroshilov,* I would rip the men who order our boys to do such things into little pieces, but as a mother I have no choice but to endure it all!”

Murashko picked up his briefcase brusquely.

“Raisa Lvovna, I am late as it is, I really am!”

The woman blew her nose and wiped her eyes. “I suppose you must have a mama too, no? I’m sure your mama would understand me. . . . Oy, what I went through to raise him!” she suddenly shrieked unexpectedly. “Why don’t you ask me what I had to go through to raise him? I fed him nothing but the creamiest butter, the nicest chicken patties, everything bursting with vitamins! I poured my soul into those patties, I poured everything I had into them, so they would not, God forbid, end up overcooked, or, God forbid, undercooked! And what do I end up with? Today my boy is free-falling out of the sky, tomorrow he’ll be free-falling from the moon!”

“You know what, Raisa Lvovna?” Murashko suddenly interrupted

her.

“What?” Friedmans mother sobbed.

“You know what?” Murashko repeated, his eyes twinkling, and he came up very close to her. “What you should do is run our kitchen. And when your Lev gets stationed here, you can make chicken patties bursting with good vitamins for him and all the other boys.”

Friedmans mother staggered back in astonishment.

“I see you’re just as devil-may-care as everyone else, Comrade Director. I came to you with my sorrow—”