The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (13 page)

He left without saying a word. The angelic power was already taking effect.

Arina cooked a meal fit for a merchant—ha, she was devilishly proud, she was! A quart of vodka, and even some wine, Danube herring with potatoes, a samovar filled with tea. No sooner had Alfred eaten this earthly abundance than he keeled over into a deep sleep. Arina managed to snatch his wings off their hinges just in time. She wrapped them up, and then carried Alfred to her bed.

Lying on her fluffy eiderdown, on her frayed, sin-ridden bed, is a snow-white wonder, an otherworldly brilliance radiating from him. Shafts of moonlight mix with red rays and dart about the room, trip-pling over their feet. And Arina weeps, rejoices, sings, and prays. The unheard of, O Arina, has befallen you in this shattered world, blessed art thou among women!

They had drunk down the whole quart of vodka. And it was pretty obvious, too. As they fell asleep, Arina rolled over onto Alfred with the hot, six-month gut that Sergei had saddled her with. You can imagine the weight! It wasn’t enough that she was sleeping next to an angel, it wasn’t enough that the man next to her wasnt spitting on the wall, or snoring, or snorting—no it wasnt enough for this lusty, crazed wench! She had to warm her bloated, combustible belly even more. And so she crushed the Lord s angel, crushed him in her drunken bliss, crushed him in her rapture like a week-old infant, mangled him beneath her, and he came to a fatal end, and from his wings, wrapped in the sheet, pale tears flowed.

Dawn came, the trees bowed down low. In the distant northern woods, every fir tree turned into a priest, every fir tree genuflected.

The woman comes again before the throne of the Savior. She is strong, her shoulders wide, her red hands carrying the young corpse.

“Behold, Lord!”

This was too much for Jesus’ gentle soul, and he cursed the woman from the bottom of his heart.

“As it is in the world, Arina, so it shall be with you!”

“But Lord!” the woman said to him in a low voice. “Was it I who made my body heavy, who brewed the vodka, who made a womans soul lonely and stupid?”

“I do not wish to have anything further to do with you,” Lord Jesus exclaimed. “You have crushed my angel, you trollop, you!” And Arina was hurled back down to earth on a purulent wind, to Tverskaya Street, to her sentence at the Madrid & Louvre. There all caution had been thrown to the winds. Sergei was carousing away the last few days before he had to report as a recruit. Trofimich, the contractor, who had just come back from Kolomna, saw how healthy and red-cheeked she was.

“Ooh what a nice little gut!” he said, among other things.

Isai Abramich, the little old man, came wheezing over when he heard about the little gut.

“After all that has happened,” he said, “I cannot settle down with you lawfully, but I can definitely still lie with you.”

Six feet under, that’s where he should be lying, and not spitting into her soul like everyone else! It was as if they had all broken loose from their chains—dishwashers, peddlers, foreigners. A tradesman likes to have some fun.

And here ends my tale.

Before she gave birth—the remaining three months flew by quickly—Arina went out into the backyard behind the janitors room, raised her horribly large belly to the silken skies, and idiotically uttered, “Here you are, Lord, here is my gut! They bang on it as if it were a drum. Why, I don’t know! And then, Lord, I end up like this again! IVe had enough!”

Jesus drenched Arina with his tears. The Savior fell to his knees.

“Forgive me, my Arinushka, sinful God that I am, that I have done this to you!”

“I will not forgive you, Jesus Christ!” Arina replied. “I will not!”

Siberian salmon caviar and a pound of bread in my pocket. Nowhere to go. I am standing on Anichkov Bridge, huddling against Klodt’s horses. A heavy evening is descending from Morskaya. Orange lights wrapped in gauze roam along the Nevsky Prospekt. I need shelter. Hunger is plucking at me the way a clumsy brat plucks at the strings of a violin. My mind skims over all the apartments abandoned by the bourgeoisie. The Anichkov Palace shimmers into view in all its squat splendor. Theres my shelter!

It isn’t hard to slip into the entrance hall unnoticed. The palace is empty. An unhurried mouse is scratching away in one of the chambers. I am in the library of the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna.
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 [
 
Empress Maria Fyodorovnas daughter-in-law, Empress Alexandra, 1872-1918, wife of Czar Nicholas II
.] An old German is standing in the middle of the room, stuffing cotton wool in his ears. He is about to leave. Luck kisses me on the lips! I know this German! I once typed a report for him, free of charge, about the loss of his passport. This German belongs to me, from his puffy head to his good-natured toes. We decide that I have an appointment with Lunacharsky [
Anatoly Lunacharsky, 1875-1933, Marxist critic and playwright, was USSR's first commissar of Education
] in the library, and that I am waiting for him.

The melodic ticking of the clock erases the German from the room. I am alone. Balls of crystal blaze above me in the silky yellow

light. A warmth beyond description rises from the steam pipes of the central heating. The deep divans wrap my frozen body in calm.

A quick inspection yields results. I discover a potato pie in the fireplace, a saucepan, a pinch of tea and sugar. And behold! The spirit stove just stuck its bluish little tongue out.

That evening I ate like a human being. I spread the most delicate of napkins on an ornate little Chinese table glittering with ancient lacquer. I washed down each piece of my brown ration bread with a sip of sweet, steaming tea, its coral stars dancing on the faceted sides of the glass. The bulging velvet palms of the cushion beneath me caressed my bony hips. Outside the windows, fluffy snow crystals fell on the Petersburg granite deadened by the hard frost.

Light streamed down the warm walls in glittering lemon torrents, touching book spines that responded with a bluish gold twinkle.

The books, their pages molding and fragrant, carried me to faraway Denmark. Over half a century ago they had been given to the young princess as she left her small, chaste country for savage Russia. On the austere title pages, the ladies of the court who had raised her bade her farewell in three slanting lines, in fading ink, as did her friends from Copenhagen, the daughters of state councilors, her tutors, parchment professors from the Lycee, and her father, the King, and her mother, the Queen, her weeping mother. Long shelves of small plump books with blackened gilt edges, childrens Bibles speckled with timid ink splotches, clumsy little prayers written to Lord Jesus, morocco-leather volumes of Lamartine and Chenier containing dried flowers crumbling to dust. I leaf through the gossamer pages that have survived oblivion, and the image of a mysterious country, a thread of exotic days, unfurls before me: low walls encircling the royal gardens, dew on the trimmed lawns, the drowsy emerald canals, the tall King with chocolate sideburns, the calm ringing of the bell above the palace cathedral and, maybe, love—a young girl s love, a fleeting whisper in the heavy halls. Empress Maria Fyodorovna, a small woman with a tightly powdered face, a consummate schemer with an indefatigable passion for power, a fierce female among the Preobrazhensky Grenadiers, a ruthless but attentive mother, crushed by the German woman,* unfurls the scroll of her long, somber life before me.

It was very late that night when I tore myself from this sorrowful and touching chronicle, from the specters with their blood-drenched skulls. The balls of crystal covered in swirls of dust were still blazing peacefully above me on the ornate brown ceiling. Next to my tattered shoes, leaden rivulets had crystallized on the blue carpet. Exhausted by my thoughts and the silent heat, I fell asleep.

In the depths of the night I made my way toward the exit over the dully glinting parquet of the corridors. Alexander Ills study was a high-ceilinged box with boarded-up windows facing the Nevsky Prospekt. Mikhail Alexandrovichs
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rooms were the lively apartment of a cultivated officer who likes his exercise. The walls were decorated with bright, pink-patterned wallpaper. Little porcelain bibelots, of the naive and redundantly fleshy genre of the seventeenth century, lined the low mantelpieces.

Pressed against a column, I waited for a long time for the last court lackey to fall asleep. He dropped his wrinkled jowls, clean-shaven out of age-old habit, the lantern weakly gilding his high, lolling forehead.

At one in the morning I was out in the street. The Nevsky Prospekt welcomed me into its sleepless womb. I went to the Nikolayevsky Station to sleep. Let those who have fled this city know that there is still a place in Petersburg where a homeless poet can spend the night.

A vicious night. Slashing wind. A dead mans fingers pluck at the y I frozen entrails of Petersburg. The crimson pharmacies on street corners freeze over. A pharmacist’s prim head lolls to the side. The frost grips the pharmacy by its purple heart. And the pharmacy’s heart dies.

The Nevsky Prospekt is empty. Ink vials shatter in the sky. It is two in the morning. The end. A vicious night.

A young girl and a gentleman are sitting by the railing of the Cafe Bristol. Two whimpering backs. Two freezing ravens by a leafless bush.

“If, with the help of Satan, you manage to succeed the deceased Czar, then see if the masses will follow you, you mother-killers! Just you try! The Latvians will back them, and those Latvians are Mongols, Glafira!”

The mans jowls hang on both sides of his face like a rag peddler’s sacks. In the mans reddish brown pupils wounded cats prowl.

“I beg you, for the love of Christ, Aristarkh Terentich! Please go to Nadezhinskaya Street! Who will walk up to me if I’m sitting with a man?”

A Chinese in a leather jacket walks past. He lifts a loaf of bread above his head. With his blue fingernail he draws a line across the crust. One pound. Glafira raises two fingers. Two pounds.

A thousand saws moan in the ossified snow of the side streets. A star twinkles in the hard, inky firmament.

The Chinese man stops and mumbles to her through clenched teeth, “You a dirty one? Huh?”

“Im a nice clean girl, comrade!”

“Pound.”

On Nadezhinskaya Street, Aristarkh looks back with sparks in his eyes.

“Darling,” the girl says to the Chinese man in a hoarse voice, “IVe got my godfather with me. Will you let him sleep in a corner?”

The Chinese man slowly nods his head. O great wisdom of the East!

“Aristarkh Terentich,” the girl yells casually, leaning against the smooth leather shoulder. “My acquaintance is inviting you to join us for company!”

Aristarkh Terentich immediately livens up.

“For reasons beyond the control of management, he is currently not employed,” she whispers, wriggling her shoulders. “But he had a past with meat and potatoes in it!”

“Definitely. I am pleased to make your acquaintance. Aristarkh Terentich Sheremetsev.”

At the hotel they were served Chinese liquor and weren’t even asked to pay.

Late at night, the Chinese man slipped out of bed into the darkness of the room.

“Where are you going?” Glafira asked gruffly, twisting her legs. There was a large sweat stain under her back.

The Chinese man went over to Aristarkh, who was sleeping on the floor by the washstand. He shook the old mans shoulders and pointed to Glafira.

“Oh, yes, yes, pal!” Aristarkh prattled from the floor, “A definite yes!” And with quick little steps he hobbled over to the bed.

“Get away from me, you dog!” Glafira shouted. “Your Chinamans finished me off already!”

“She wont do it, pal!” Aristarkh hissed quickly. “You ordered her to, but she isn’t obeying!”

“He friend!” the Chinese man said. “He do! Big harlot!”

“You are an elderly gentleman, Aristarkh Terentich,” the girl whispered, letting the old man climb into bed with her. “What’s got into your head?”

Period.

Once upon a time there was a woman, her name was Xenia. Large bosom, round shoulders, blue eyes. That was the kind of woman she was. If only you and I had such a woman!

Her husband was killed on the battlefield. Three years she lived without a husband, working in the house of a rich family. The rich family wanted a hot meal three times a day. Wood they never burned, nothing but coal. The heat from the coals was unbearable—in coals fiery roses glow.

For three years the woman cooked for the rich family, and she was virtuous with the menfolk. But where do you hide a gigantic bosom like that? Can you tell me?

The fourth year she goes to the doctor. “My head feels all heavy,” she says to him. “One minute Im ablaze with fire, the next Fm all weak.”

And this, believe it or not, is what the doctor tells her: “Is there no menfolk running around in your courtyard? Oy, woman!”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Xenia said, bursting into tears. “Fm a delicate girl!”

And indeed she was a delicate girl. Xenias bitter tears made her eyes bluer.

Old mother Morozikha took matters in hand.

Old mother Morozikha was the midwife and potion-maker for the whole street. The likes of her are ruthless with a woman’s insides. Give her half a chance to steam them out, and you’ll be lucky if even a blade of grass will ever grow there again.

“Xenia,” she says, “I'll fix things for you! A dryness has cracked the soil. All it needs is some God-sent rain. A mushroom needs to sprout up in a woman, all soggy and rank.”

And she brought him. Valentin Ivanovich was his name. Not much to look at, but quite a joker, and he could make up nice ditties. He didn’t have a body worth mentioning, his hair was long, and he was covered with a rainbow scattering of pimples. But did Xenia need a bull? He was a man, and could make up nice ditties. Could you find anything better in the world? Xenia cooked a hundred blini and raisin pies. Three eiderdowns were laid on her bed, and six pillows, all nice and fluffy— all for you to roll around in, Valentin!