The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (15 page)

“My Comrades and Brothers!”

The
Halifax
pulled into Odessa’s port. It had come from London for a cargo of Russian wheat.

On the twentieth-seventh of January, the day of Lenin’s funeral, the ship’s colored crew—three Chinese, two Negroes, and a Malay— called the captain to the deck. In town orchestras were thundering and a blizzard howled.

“Captain 0’Nearn!
"
 the Negroes said. “As there’s no loading to do today, can we go ashore this evening?”

“You will stay where you are!” O’Nearn told them. “A wind-force-nine gale is blowing right now, and it’s getting stronger. The Beaconsfield has gotten stuck in the ice at Sanzheyka, and the barometer is pointing to where I wish it weren’t! In weather like this, the crew has to stay with the vessel. Stay where you are!”

And Captain O’Nearn went off to see the first mate. The two had a good laugh, lit cigars, and pointed at the city, where the blizzard and the orchestras writhed and howled in abject grief.

The two Negroes and the three Chinese loitered about the deck. They blew on their frozen palms, stamped their rubber boots, and peered into the captain’s cabin, the door of which stood ajar. The velvet of the sofas, the heated cognac, and the soft tobacco fumes came wafting out into the wind-force-nine gale.

“Boatswain!” O’Nearn yelled, seeing the sailors. “Our deck is not a boulevard! Throw them in the hold!”

“Yes, sir!” shouted the boatswain, a pillar of red meat covered with red hair. “Yes, sir!” And he grabbed the Malay by the scruff of his neck. He dragged him to the side of the deck facing the open sea, and shoved him onto a rope ladder. The Malay jumped down and went scampering over the ice. The three Chinese and the two Negroes followed close at his heels.

“Did you throw them in the hold?” the captain yelled from his cabin, which was warmed by cognac and delicate smoke.

“I threw them, sir!” shouted the boatswain, a pillar of red meat, standing in the storm by the gangway like a sentinel.

The wind blew in from the sea at force nine, like nine rounds of fire discharged by the frozen batteries of the sea. White snow raged above the mounds of ice. And over the hardened waves five contorted commas with singed faces and flapping jackets frantically scampered toward the shore, toward the piers. They clambered onto the icy embankments with scraping hands, and ran through the port and into the town, which was quaking in the wind.

A detachment of stevedores with black flags was marching over the square to the pedestal where Lenins monument was to be raised. The two Negroes and the Chinese marched beside the stevedores, panting, shaking hands with people, overcome with the joy of escaped convicts.

That very minute in Moscow, on Red Square, Lenins body was being lowered into his tomb. Back in Odessa, sirens wailed, the blizzard howled, and the crowds marched in columns. And on board the Halifax the impermeable boatswain was standing alone in the storm by the gangway like a sentinel. Under his equivocal guard, Captain O’Nearn drank cognac in his smoky cabin.

He had relied on his boatswain, Captain O’Nearn had, and so the captain had missed the boat.

Yesterday I was at the St. Hypatius Monastery, and Father Hillarion, the last of the resident monks, showed me the abode of the Romanov boyars.

The Muscovites had come here in 1613 to ask Mikhail Fyodorovich
⁵
to ascend the throne.

I saw the worn corner where Sister Martha, the Czars mother, used to pray, her gloomy bedchamber, and the turret from which she watched the wolf hunts in the Kostroma forests.

Father Hillarion and I crossed the ancient little bridges on which the snow was piled high, and startled the ravens that had nested in the boyars’ tower. We went up to the church, which was indescribably beautiful.

The church, painted carmine and azure, encircled by a wreath of snows, stood out against the smoke-blackened northern sky like a peasant womans motley kerchief with its design of Russian flowers.

The lines of the modest cupolas were chaste, the blue side buildings potbellied, and the patterned transom of the windows sparkled in the sun with a needless brilliance.

In this deserted church I found the iron gates that had been a gift of Ivan the Terrible, and looked at the ancient icons, the dank decay of ruthless holiness.

The saints—possessed, naked muzhiks with withered thighs— writhed on the flaking walls, and next to them the Russian Holy Virgin was portrayed, a thin peasant woman with parted knees and sagging breasts that looked like two extra green arms.

The ancient icons wrapped my cheerful heart in the chill of their deathly passions, and I barely managed to escape them and their sepulchral saints.

Their God lay in the church, cleansed and ossified, like a cadaver that has been washed on its deathbed but left unburied.

Father Hillarion wandered alone among his corpses. His left foot had a limp; he tended to doze off, kept scratching his dirty beard, and soon began to bore me.

I threw open Ivan the Terrible s gates and ran under the black arches out onto the square, where the Volga, shackled in ice, twinkled at me.

Kostroma’s smoke rose high, cutting through the snow. Muzhiks clothed in a yellow halo of frost were dragging flour on sledges, and their dray-horses slammed their iron hooves into the ice.

On the river the chestnut dray-horses, covered with hoarfrost and steam, breathed noisily, the rosy lightning flashes of the north darted into the pines, and the crowds, the faceless crowds, crawled over the frozen slopes.

A fiery wind blew on them from the Volga. Many of the women tumbled into the snowdrifts, but they kept climbing higher, heading for the monastery like invading columns.

Women's laughter thundered over the mountain, samovar pots and tubs traveled up the slope, impish sleighs groaned as they veered.

Ancient crones were hauling great loads up the high mountain, the mountain of St. Hypatius, and dragged goats on leashes and infants sleeping in little sledges.

“Damn you all!” I shouted when I saw them, and stepped back from the outrageous invasion. “You’re all going to Sister Martha to ask her son, Mikhail Romanov, to ascend the throne!”

“Get out of our way!” one of the women yelled, stepping forward. “Stop wasting our time! We re not here to have babies with you!” And, harnessing herself again to her sleigh, she hauled it into the courtyard of the monastery, practically knocking the confused monk off his feet. She dragged her washtubs, her geese, and her hornless gramophone into the cradle of the Muscovite Czars, declaring that her name was

Savicheva, and demanding that she be allotted apartment number nineteen in the archbishops chambers.

To my amazement, Savicheva was allotted an apartment, as were all the others behind her. I was told that the Union of Textile Workers had constructed forty apartments in the burned-out building for the workers of the Kostroma United Flax Mills, and that today was the day they were moving into the monastery.

Father Hillarion stood at the gates counting goats and women. Then he invited me in to drink tea, and silently laid out the table with cups he had stolen in the courtyard when the treasures of the Romanov boyars were being packed off to the museum.

We drank tea from these cups till sweat dripped from our faces, while the womens bare feet trampled on windowsills in front of us: the women were washing the windows of their new apartments.

Then, as if by prearrangement, smoke billowed from all the chimneys, and a cock scampered onto the tomb of Abbot Sioni and began squawking. The accordion of one of the women, having labored its way through a prelude, sang a tender song, and some little old woman in a homespun overcoat poked her head into Father Hillarion’s cell and asked him to lend her a pinch of salt for her cabbage soup.

Evening had already fallen when the little old woman appeared. Purple clouds surged above the Volga, the thermometer on the outside wall registered forty degrees below zero, gigantic fires died out, flashing over the river. A determined young man obstinately climbed a frozen ladder to the iron bar above the gates in order to hang up a flimsy lamp and a sign with a legion of letters on it, “USSR—RSFSR,” along with the emblem of the Textile Union, the hammer and sickle, and the figure of a woman standing at a loom from which rays surged in all directions.

1

“What do you expect, one holes up where one can.”

2

Empress Maria Fyodorovna (Princess Dagmar of Denmark), 1847-1928, wife of Czar Alexander III.

3

Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, 1878-1918, brother of Czar Nicholas II.

4

Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, 1881-1970, served as Minister of Justice, Minister of War, and provisional Prime Minister of Russia after the 1917 Russian Revolution.

t A former name (Swedish) for Helsinki, which until Finland’s declaration of independence in 1917 was Russian.

5

Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov, 1596-1645, was the first Czar of the Romanov dynasty.

In 1921, Babel’s first two Odessa stories“The King” and “Justice in Parenthesis” were published in the Odessa magazines Moryak and Na Pomoshch, beginning a series of stories that was to continue into the 1930s about the city and its strange and colorful Jewish gangster class that were to become some of Babel’s most acclaimed stories. This section contains all these stories.

Babel was particularly fascinated by the new Jewish classes emerging from the social upheavals of the early twentieth century. The Red Cavalry stories) published during the same period as the Odessa stories) reveal Babel’s fascination with the new Jewish fighters who have managed to break out of the strictures of the Jewish shtetl culture and transform themselves into wild\ horse-riding Cossack commanders. The Jewish characters of the Odessa stories are just as unconventional and surprising. The carters, peddlers, cantors, and not-so-pious synagogue shamases who “jumped onto the tables and sang out above the din of the seething flourishes” at a gangster wedding, are not the conventional Jewish figures one might expect to find in even the wildest of Jewish shtetls. There is Benya the King with his “refined gangster chic”; his father, Mendel, a carter “known as a ruffian even in carting circlesthe murderous Madam Shneiweis (Snow-white in Yiddish), who is known as Lyubka the Cossack; Yid-and-a-Half, the millionaire; little old Pesya-Mindl, cook and procuress; and Manka, the aged matriarch of the Jewish bandits from the shantytowns beyond the factory districts.

The stories are set in the Moldavanka, a real Odessa neighborhood
"
crowded with suckling babies, drying rags, and conjugal nights filled with big-city chic and soldierly tirelessness."

The wedding ceremony ended, the rabbi sank into a chair, then he left the room and saw tables lined up the whole length of the courtyard. There were so many of them that the end stuck out of the gates onto Gospitalnaya Street. The tables, draped in velvet, coiled through the yard like a snake on whose belly patches of every color had been daubed, and these orange and red velvet patches sang in deep voices.

The rooms had been turned into kitchens. A rich flame, a drunk, plump flame, forced its way through the smoke-blackened doors. Little old womens faces, wobbly womens chins, beslobbered breasts, baked in the flames smoky rays. Sweat, red as blood, pink as the foam of a rabid dog, dripped from these blobs of rampant, sweet-odored human flesh. Three cooks, not counting the scullery maids, prepared the wedding feast, and over them eighty-year-old Reizl reigned, traditional as a Torah scroll, tiny and hunchbacked.

Before the feast began, a young man unknown to the guests wormed his way into the courtyard. He asked for Benya Krik. He took Benya Krik aside.

“Listen, King!” the young man said. “I have a couple of words I need to tell you. Aunt Hannah from Kostetskaya Street, she sent me.” “So?” Benya Krik, nicknamed “the King,” answered. “So what’s these couple of words?”

“Aunt Hannah, she sent me to tell you that a new chief of police took over at the police station yesterday.”

“I’ve known that since the day before yesterday,” Benya Krik answered. “Well?”

“The chief of police called the whole station together and gave a speech ...”

“A new broom is always eager to sweep,” Benya Krik answered. “He wants a raid. So?”

“But when does he want to raid, King, do you know that?” “Tomorrow.”

“King, its going to be today!”

“Who told you that, boy?”

“Aunt Hannah, she said so. You know Aunt Hannah?”

“I know Aunt Hannah. So?”

“The chief called the whole station together and gave them a speech: ‘We must finish off Benya Krik/ he said, ‘because when you have His Majesty the Czar, you cant have a King too. Today, when Krik gives away his sister in marriage, and they will all be there, is when we raid!’ ”

“So?”

“Then the stool pigeons began to get worried. They said, If we raid them today, during his feast, Benya will get angry and a lot of blood will flow/ But the chief said, ‘Our self-respect is more important to me!’” “Good, you can go,” the King said.

“So what do I tell Aunt Hannah about the raid?”

“Tell her Benya he knows from the raid.”

And the young man left. Three or four of Benyas friends followed him. They said they would be back in about half an hour. And they were back in half an hour. That was that.

At the table, the guests did not sit in order of seniority. Foolish old age is just as pitiful as cowardly youth. Nor in order of wealth. The lining of a heavy money bag is sewn with tears.

The bride and groom sat at the tables place of honor. It was their day. Beside them sat Sender Eichbaum, the Kings father-in-law. That was his due. You should know the story of Sender Eichbaum, because it’s a story definitely worth knowing.

How did Benya Krik, gangster and King of gangsters, make himself Eichbaums son-in-law? How did he make himself the son-in-law of a man who owned one milch cow short of sixty? It all had to do with a robbery. A year or so earlier Benya had written a letter to Eichbaum.