The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (21 page)

“You little scoundrel, you!” Froim said to his grandson, peering at him with his single eye.

The old woman came up to him with her furry eyebrow and her mens boots tied with string.

“Froim,” she said. “I tell you these people have not a drop of soul in them. They dont say a word, they just kill us in their cellars like dogs. And they dont give us a chance to open our mouths before we die. We should tear these men to pieces with our teeth, and rip out their hearts! Why are you silent?” the old woman—Misha Yablochko—asked Froim. “Our men are waiting for you to break your silence!”

Misha got up, moved the basket to his other arm, and left, lifting his black eyebrow. He ran into three girls with braided hair walking with their arms around each others waists outside the church on Alekseyevskaya Square.

“Hello girls,” Misha Yablochko said to them. “Sorry I cant invite you for tea and cake.”

He scooped up some sunflower seeds with a little glass mug, poured them into the pockets of their dresses, and walked off, disappearing around the church.

Froim Grach remained alone in his yard. He sat motionless, his single eye staring into the distance. Mules captured from imperialist troops were munching hay in the stables, and fattened mares were grazing with their foals on the meadow. Carters were playing cards in the shade of the chestnut trees and drinking wine from broken cups. Hot gusts of air swept over the whitewashed walls, and the sun in its blue rigidity poured over the yard. Froim got up and went out into the street. He crossed Prokhorovskaya Street, which was blackening the sky with the destitute, melting smoke of its kitchens, and Tolkuchy market, where people laden with curtains and drapes were trying to sell them to each other. He walked up Ekaterininskaya Street, made a turn by the statue of the Empress, and went inside the building of the Cheka.

“I am Froim,” he told the commandant. “I want to see the boss.”

The chairman of the Cheka back then was Vladislav Simen, who had come from Moscow. When he heard that Froim was there to see him, he called in Borovoi, one of his investigators, and asked for information on him.

“A first-rate fellow!” Borovoi told him. “Odessa begins and ends with him!”

And old Froim, in his canvas overalls, red-haired and big as a house, a patch over one eye and his cheek disfigured, was led into the office by the commandant.

“You know who you’re killing off, boss?” he said as he walked into the room. “You’re killing off all the lions! And you know what you’ll be left with if you keep it up? You’ll be left with shit!”

Simen leaned forward and opened his desk drawer.

“Don’t worry, I’m clean,” Froim told him. “Nothing in my hands, nothing in my boots—and I didn’t leave nobody waiting outside neither. Let my boys go, boss! Just name your price!”

Simen had the old man sit down in an armchair, and offered him some cognac. Borovoi left the room and called together all the investigators who had come from Moscow.

Borovoi told them how it was one-eyed Froim and not Benya Krik who was the real boss of the forty thousand Odessa thugs. Froim might never show his hand, but he was the brains behind everything—the looting of the factories and the Odessa Treasury, and the ambushing of both the anti-Bolshevik army and its allies. Borovoi waited for Froim to come out of Simen’s office so he could have a word with him. But Froim did not appear. Tired of waiting, Borovoi went to look for him. He searched through the whole building until he finally looked out into the backyard. Froim Grach was lying there stretched out under a tarpaulin by a wall covered in ivy. Two Red Army men stood by his body, smoking.

“Strong as an ox,” the older of the two said when he saw Borovoi. “Strength like you wouldn’t believe! If you don’t butcher an old man like that, he’ll live forever. He had ten bullets in him and he was still going strong!”

The Red Army mans face reddened, his eyes sparkled, and his cap slipped to the side.

“Youre shooting your mouth off!” the second soldier cut in. “He died just like they all do!”

“No, not like they all do!” the older soldier shouted. “Some holler and beg, some don’t say a word! So what do you mean, like they all do’?”

“To me they’re all the same,” the younger Red Army man repeated obstinately. “They all look the same, I can’t even tell them apart!”

Borovoi bent down and pulled back the tarpaulin. The old man’s face was frozen in a grimace.

Borovoi went back to his office. It was a round chamber with walls covered in satin. A meeting was under way about new rules for prosecuting cases. Simen was reprimanding the staff on the irregularities he had come upon, about the haphazard way verdicts were written up, and the absurd method with which protocols of the investigations were drawn up. The investigators were to split into groups and work with legal experts, so that from now on matters would be conducted according to the codes and statutes instituted by the Cheka headquarters in Moscow.

Borovoi sat in his corner, listening. He sat alone, far away from the rest. Simen came up to him after the meeting and took him by the hand.

“I know you’re angry at me, Sasha,” Simen said to him, “but you mustn’t forget that now we are the power, the state power! You must remember that!”

“I’m not angry at you,” Borovoi said, turning away. “It’s just that you’re not an Odessan, you can’t understand what the old man represented.”

They sat side by side, the chairman of the Cheka, who had just turned twenty-three, and his subordinate. Simen was holding Borovoi’s hand in his and pressing it.

“Tell me one thing as a Chekist, as a revolutionary,” Simen said to him after a moment of silence.
^iC
What use would that man have been to the society we are building?”

“I don’t know,” Borovoi said, staring motionlessly in front of him. “I suppose no use at all.”

He pulled himself together and chased away his memories. Then, livening up, he continued telling the Chekists who had come from Moscow about the life of Froim Grach, about his ingenuity, his elusiveness, his contempt for his fellow men, all the amazing tales that were now a thing of the past.

1

Bolshoi Fontan, an elegant resort spa outside Odessa.

2

Slobodka was a rough shantytown neighborhood on the outskirts of Odessa.

3

Sergei Isayevich Utochkin, 1874-1916, aviation pioneer, was the first man in Odessa to own a car and had a reputation for devil-may-care driving.

4

A poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Odessa.

5

The counterrevolutionary army (the Whites) fighting the Bolshevik forces in southern Russia and Ukraine from 1918-1920 under generals Kornilov, Denikin, and Wrangel. resort area outside Odessa by the sea.

6

The Odessa branch of the “Extraordinary Commission’ set up in 1917 to investigate counterrevolutionary activities. The Cheka later became the KGB.

 In the days of the famine, no one lived better in all Odessa than the almsfolk of the Second Jewish Cemetery. Kofman, the cloth merchant, had built an almshouse for old people by the wall of the cemetery in memory of his wife Isabella, a fact that became the butt of many a joke at Cafe Fankoni.
¹
But Kofman turned out to be right in the end. After the Revolution, the old men and women who found refuge by the cemetery immediately grabbed positions as gravediggers, cantors, and body washers. They got their hands on an oak coffin with a silver-tasseled pall, and rented it out to the poor.

There were no planks to be found anywhere in Odessa in those days. The rental coffin did not stand idle. The dead would lie in the oak coffin at home and at the funeral service—but then they were pitched into their graves wrapped in a shroud. This was a forgotten Jewish custom.

Wise men had taught that one is not to hinder the union of worm and carrion—carrion is unclean. “For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Because of the revival of the forgotten custom, the rations of the old folk grew in ways which in those days no one could even dream of. In the evenings they got drunk in Zalman Krivoruchka’s cellar, and threw their leftover scraps to poorer companions.

Their prosperity remained undisturbed until the rebellion in the

German settlements. The Germans killed Garrison Commander Gersh Lugovoy.

He was buried with honors. The troops marched to the cemetery with bands, field kitchens, and machine guns on tachankas. Speeches were given and vows made over his open grave.

“Comrade Gersh joined the Revolutionary Social Democratic Workers Party of the Bolsheviks in 1911, where he held the position of propagandist and liaison agent!” Lenka Broytman, the division commander, yelled at the top of his lungs. “Comrade Gersh was arrested along with Sonya Yanovskaya, Ivan Sokolov, and Monozon in the town of Nikolayev in 1913. . . .”

Arye-Leib, the elder of the almshouse, lay in waiting with his comrades. Lenka hadn’t yet finished his farewell speech over the grave when the old men heaved up the coffin in order to tip it onto its side so that the deceased, covered with a flag, would come tumbling out. Lenka discreetly jabbed Arye-Leib with his boot spur.

“Beat it!” he hissed. “Go on, beat it! . . . Gersh served the Republic . . .”

Before the eyes of the horrified old folk, Lugovoy was buried along with the oak coffin, the tassels, and the black pall onto which the Star of David and verses from an ancient Hebrew prayer for the dead had been woven in silver.

“ WeVe all just attended our own funeral!” Arye-Leib told his comrades after the burial. “We have fallen into Pharaohs hands!” And he rushed off to see Broydin, the overseer of the cemetery, with a request that planks for a new coffin and cloth for a pall be issued immediately. Broydin made promises, but did nothing. His plans did not include the enrichment of the old folk.

“My heart aches more for the unemployed municipal employees than for these entrepreneurs,” he told the others at the office.

Broydin made promises, but did nothing. In Zalman Krivoruchka’s wine cellar, Talmudic curses rained down on his head and the heads of the Union of Municipal Workers. The old folk cursed Broydin’s bone marrow and that of the members of the union, along with the fresh seed in the wombs of their wives. They called down every kind of paralysis and boil upon each and every one of them.

The old folks income shrank. Their rations now consisted of bluish soup with boiled fish bones, with a second course of barley kasha without a single dab of butter in it.

An aged Odessan is ready enough to eat any kind of soup, regardless what its made of, as long as theres garlic, pepper, and a bay leaf in it. There were none of these in the old folks soup.

The Isabella Kofman Almshouse shared in the common lot. The rage of its famished inmates grew. Their rage rained down upon the head of the person who least expected it. This person was Dr. Judith Shmayser, who had come to the almshouse to administer smallpox vaccinations.

The Provincial Executive Committee had issued an order for mandatory vaccination. Judith Shmayser laid out her instruments on the table and lit a little alcohol burner. Outside the windows stood the emerald walls of the cemetery hedges. The blue tongue of the flame mingled with the June lightning.

Meyer Beskonechny, a haggard old man, stood closest to Judith. He watched her preparations sullenly.

“I'll give you a jab now,” Judith said to him, beckoning him over with her tweezers. She pulled his thin, bluish strap of an arm out of his rags.

“There’s nowhere for you to jab me,” the old man said, jerking back his arm.

“Its not going to hurt,” Judith exclaimed. “It doesn’t hurt when you’re given a jab in the flesh.”

“I don’t have no flesh!” Meyer Beskonechny said. “There’s nowhere for you to jab.”

Muffled sobs came from one of the corners. Doba-Leya, a former cook at circumcision feasts, was sobbing. Meyer twisted his decayed cheeks.

“Life is shit,” he muttered. “The world’s a brothel, everyone’s a swindler!”

The pince-nez on Judith’s nose bounced, her breasts swelled out of her starched coat. She opened her mouth to explain the benefits of vaccination, but Arye-Leib, the elder of the almshouse, stopped her.

“Young lady,” he said. “Our mamas gave birth to us just like your mama gave birth to you! And this woman, our mama, gave birth to us so we would live, not so we would suffer! She wanted for us to live well, and she was as right as a mother can be. A person who is pleased with what Broydin provides him, that person is not worth the material that went into him. Your aim, young lady, is to inoculate smallpox, and with Gods help, you are inoculating it. Our aim is to live out our life, not torture it! But we are not achieving our aim!”

Doba-Leya, a whiskered old woman with a leonine face, started sobbing even louder on hearing these words. She sobbed in a deep bass.

“Life is shit,” Meyer Beskonechny repeated. “Everyones a swindler!”

Paralyzed Simon-Volf, screeching and twisting his hands, clutched at the steering wheel of his invalid cart and went rolling toward the door. His yarmulke slid over his swollen, crimson head. Thirty growling and grimacing old men and women tumbled out onto the cemetery walk behind Simon-Volf. They shook their crutches and brayed like starving donkeys.

When he saw them, the watchman slammed the cemetery gates shut. The amazed gravediggers stopped digging and raised their shovels, clumps of earth and grass roots still clinging to them.

The noise brought out bearded Broydin in his tight little jacket, leggings, and cycling cap.

“You swindler!” Simon-Volf shouted. “There’s nowhere for us to be jabbed! We’ve got no meat on our arms!”

Doba-Leya began snarling and growling. She grabbed Simon-Volf’s invalid cart and tried to ram Broydin with it. Arye-Leib, as always, began spouting allegories and parables that crept up on byways toward an end that was not always clearly apparent.

He began with the parable about Rabbi Osiya, who had given his property to his children, his heart to his wife, his fear to God, and his levy to Caesar, keeping for himself only a place beneath an olive tree where the setting sun shone the longest. From Rabbi Osiya, Arye-Leib moved on to planks for a new coffin, and to rations.