The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (130 page)

My mother, however, had gone through the Civil War, the Revolution, and the implementation of the Soviet regime, and felt otherwise. She was quite distrustful of such a political decree. She considered that having a Soviet passport was already quite enough of a handicap, so she never “declared” us. Neither she nor I ever wore a Yellow Star. It is amazing now to think that we were never denounced, a common enough occurrence in those days.

At that time, we were living in Niort. One of the towns “local glories” was the celebrated writer Ernest Perochon,*[
Ernest Perochon, 1885-1942, French writer, winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1920 for his novel Nine. He lived in Niort from 1921 until his death
]. who had once received the Prix Goncourt, Frances most prestigious literary prize. I mention him because his family owned a large beautiful house, and rented a few of the rooms to an elderly lady who had come from Paris because of the war. Her name was Madame Lazareff. She was the widow of a banker, and therefore had the money to rent space in one of the towns most important residences. We knew that she had a son who had disappeared. But nobody knew, including Madame Lazareff herself, what had become of him. Was he a prisoner? Was he hiding somewhere? No one knew.

When the decree of the Yellow Star came, Madame Lazareff, of course, began to wear hers. I should mention that she was very friendly with my mother, all the more so since she was also of Russian origin.

One spring afternoon—probably in 1942—Madame Lazareff was having tea with us. We were living in a little house at the end of a courtyard, behind a larger house. Someone rang the bell and I went to open the gate. I found myself in front of two French policemen. I was told, “We understand that there is a Madame Babel here.” In those days, whenever you saw the police, especially when they entered your home, your knees started to buckle. And then they said, “We have come for Madame Lazareff. We were told that she is here.” And indeed she was right there. They told her, “You have been reported for not wearing your Yellow Star. And we can see that its true. You aren’t wearing it.” Madame Lazareff, who was smaller than I was as a child, and dressed in her usual mourning black, answered, “Yes, yes. I am wearing it, but its on my coat.”

“Well,” they said, “thats not enough. You’re supposed to have it on every garment.”

They didn’t let her return to her place. They just took her away, and no one ever saw her again. How long did she survive? Did she die on the train? In a concentration camp? Surely, given her frailty, she must have perished very quickly.

Just before the policemen left, I opened my big mouth and told them, “You are really des oiseaux de malheur” (messengers of grief). Then one of them asked my mother, “Is this your daughter? How old is she?”

“She is twelve,” my mother answered.

“You are lucky,” he replied. “If she were a year older, we would take her also.”

And how could they have known that Madame Lazareff was having tea with my mother? That son of hers had a wife and daughter, who occasionally came to visit from Paris. I remember his wifes elegance and beauty, but do not recall whether she was Jewish. The daughter was a few years older than I was, very pretty with copper curls. A spoiled city girl, clearly from a rich family. I remember that she talked about nothing but boys—she was really boy crazy, which seemed completely stupid to me. But then, she really was stupid, or at least very naive. We learned later that she had been the one who had sent the policemen over to our house. It was during one of her visits to Niort to see her grandmother. The policemen arrived at the house of Ernest Perochon and she was the one who answered the door. They demanded, “Where is Madame Lazareff?” In those days, any fifteen-year-old facing that situation would have said, “I really don’t know. Let me find someone else to help you.”

“And who is Madame Babel?” they continued, after she had informed them. “And where is Madame Babel?” And so they came to us.

This incident, so fraught with danger and so common then, still makes me shudder. And I have never felt that the story was quite over. Charles de Gaulle, of course, came back from London in 1944, when Paris was barely liberated. Many political dissidents (resistants) who had fled occupied France soon followed as well. One of them was a journalist named Pierre Lazareff. Born in France of parents of Russian origin, he had spent the war years as the head of the War Information Office in the United States. He returned to Paris in September 1944 and became the publisher of one of the leading postwar newspapers born out of the Resistance movement, called France-Soir.

I have always wondered if he was the mysterious son of the old lady that we had known in Niort. For many years afterward, I was tempted

to contact him to find out. But, if my intuition was correct, how could I possibly tell him that his own daughter had been the instrument of his mothers death? Perhaps if Madame Lazareff had been warned, she would have had time to hide somewhere. Such a conversation would only have been terribly upsetting to both of us. And so I never went to see him.

The End of the War

As the liberation of Paris approached in the summer of 1944, clouds of planes passed over our heads with a deafening noise, occasionally dropping a bomb, perhaps on some local railroad. We did not know whether those planes were going toward their destinations or coming back from them. But even after the retreat of the German army from France, the war was still not over for us. Food rationing continued for at least two more years. War was still being fought over large parts of Europe. The chronic shortages, the hunger and disease continued. But the immediate and constant danger and fear were gone, and that changed everything. What began as a trickle turned into an enormous movement of displaced persons—people going home, people looking for people, survivors released from concentration camps or prisoner of war camps wandered in search of their families. Sometimes a person who had disappeared reappeared, amazingly.

My mother and I had little choice except to stay in the provincial town where we had spent over four years and where we had survived the Nazi occupation. We were homeless, penniless, and displaced. We had not yet been able to get into contact with anyone. The few valuables which my mother had taken with us in the fall of 1939 when we fled Paris had been sold—some jewelry, the last gifts from her father which had been saved during the Revolution, a good stamp collection, a fur coat. Some old friends from Paris and Brussels managed to send us some money, when they could figure a way to do so. There were times when we ate very frugally indeed.

We remained in the town of Niort for at least another year, although my memories of this time are vague. I must have gone to school for another year. I do, however, remember the atmosphere of our life at that time. We were living in a kind of limbo. It was a purgatory, as we waited for the door to open for us to return to a normal life. We stayed in the same little house, without a toilet or bathroom—without hot water or heating.

I have often been asked whether I ever went back to Niort. Never. It has remained for me a place out of time, out of space, out of tangible reality. I do not actually remember where that town is on the map— somewhere not too far from the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, I do remember the streets, some specific places, the market, where I stood in line at five in the morning in winter. Like most French towns, Niort had its covered produce market, with separate stalls for the different merchants. In those days, the market was allowed to open for one or two days a week. Peasants and farmers brought whatever victuals they had to sell. But there were too many people and very little to buy. In order to have the chance to buy anything, you had to be right at the head of the line, which began to form in the middle of the night. When the gates opened at seven, you had to race at top speed to your targeted booth. We kids made arrangements among ourselves, since even those at the head of the line could not reach two stalls at the same time. “Look, Til buy the potatoes, if you can get me the eggs. . . .” There was a playful element to this, but if you lost the game, you might not eat at all that day. For years, I was obsessed by these recollections. It took a very long time for those of my generation—who were between the ages of ten and fifteen during the war, the occupation, and the terror—to adapt to a more normal life.

Early in 1946, my mother took a trip to Paris, a journey which was quite an odyssey at the time. The trains were still so overcrowded. I remember pushing her through the window to get a seat in the train. She wanted to find out whether we had anything left there and, above all, to see if she could find out something about the fate of her husband. She did learn that we had lost all claim to our small house in Plessis Robinson, a suburb south of Paris. Another family had occupied it for some time, and there was nothing she could do about it. In addition to the house, we had lost all our furnishings. This included a very good library, which today would be invaluable, as it contained all of my fathers first editions. There was also my mothers art collection, along with her own works of art—paintings, which might now be still on walls somewhere in Europe—a retrospective compliment, perhaps.

While in Paris, my mother was told through the Montparnasse*
[Montparnasse: favorite Left Bank “quartier of Paris for the bohemian and artistic crowd. Artists, painters, writers, poets, and emigres from all over the world passed their days and nights in its famous cafes—La Rotonde, La Coupole, Le Dome. The Russian crowd i^Les Russes'
), including many famous artists and writers, was especially well known there.  grapevine that Ilya Ehrenburg^ wanted to see her.
[Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg: 1891-1967, famous Soviet novelist, essayist, journalist. Paris correspondent for Izvestia in the 1930s. Author of The Fall of Paris (1941), for which he won the Stalin Prize for Literature. Recipient of the Order of Lenin in 1944 for his efforts as a wartime journalist. Member of the French Legion of Honor. Winner of the Stalin Peace Prize (1953). Author of The Thaw (1954)]
.She had known him since the mid-1920s, when he was living in Paris, and by which time he had already established a significant place for himself in Soviet literature. She disliked him intensely, considering him the ultimate spokesmen for the Soviet regime. Since the beginning of the war, when he returned to Moscow, he was the most famous and widely read journalist in the USSR, read avidly even by Stalin himself. He was one of the few writers to escape the Stalinist purges.

Despite her feelings, she went to see him, hoping for news of her husband. He told her—quite amazingly—that Babel was alive, that he had spent the war in exile, and was now living under surveillance not far from Moscow.

And so she returned to Niort with renewed hope about her husband. It was the first news she had received of him since his last letters in 1939. There were many reasons to believe Ehrenburg, because he was such a prestigious and well-informed person. She harbored these hopes and illusions until 1949 or 1950, since there was never any official announcement of my father s death. Meanwhile, American organizations were also searching for displaced persons. And in 1948, they let us know that no traces of Babel could be found in Russia after 1939.

We left Niort at last in the late spring of 1946. An old family friend let us have what used to be the summer residence of his rich relatives, who had never returned after the war. It was in the small village of Bois-le-Roi, just at the edge of the vast forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris. The house was big, with a large garden full of fruit trees. Everything was abandoned and neglected, yet lovely. We harvested many different varieties of apples, and prepared them in all sorts of ways. I remember that when my mother planted corn, a neighbor asked her if she was planning to raise pigs. The French did not consider corn on the cob fit for human consumption in those days. My mother began to take in paying guests, including her friends and acquaintances. She was an excellent cook, and often fed a dozen people a day. I helped with the cleaning. By that time, I was ready to enter the tenth grade. The fact that I had continued my schooling throughout the war years is astonishing, and sheds another light on my mothers character. She never considered that I could not go to school, even in times when it was dangerous to step outside our home, when anti-Semitism was raging everywhere, even in the elementary school classes. I had to continue my education, no matter what hardship or risk it entailed.

Whenever the school year began, I had to be sent away somewhere, and was put into boarding school. The Lycee de Versailles was the choice, although I do not remember why. I was allowed to return home on the weekends. It was an excellent school, very upscale, and it was very hard to gain admittance. The discipline was extremely strict. The staff consisted mostly of elderly spinsters, not very attuned to the needs of traumatized adolescents. For me, boarding school life was far from easy, like being in a Charles Dickens novel. Everything had to be done according to detailed rules and regulations. You had to get up at a certain time, and had so many minutes to get dressed, then breakfast at an appointed time, and so on, until lights out at nine o’clock. This discipline created the sense of ropes tied around my body. We had to walk to class two by two, as if we were little girls. I do not remember a single thing that I learned or studied there, but I do recall being deeply unhappy. I had been living such a close and protected life with my mother for so long—living in fear during the Nazi occupation, but also in great independence. I longed for the weekends, when I would go home to that big, beautiful, frigid house, where Mother was waiting for me after a week alone. I was becoming emotionally and mentally unbalanced. I think that it was not so much what we now call post-traumatic stress as it was the living trauma of being in that school, and away from my mother and from my first great love. My nerves, already frayed, became live electric wires. Mercifully, this painful episode lasted less than three months. I was expelled before the Christmas break. Expelled for rebellious behavior, bad character, and loose morals.