The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (7 page)

“Fll take some classes, learn stenography, right now the demand—” “Right now stenographers are crawling out of the woodwork! You think the jobs will come running—”

“I wont come to you for help, Mama!” Rimma said shrilly. “I wont come to you for help. Set me free!”

“Fine,” Barbara Stepanovna said again. “Fm not holding you back.” “I want you to give me my passport.”

Tm not giving you your passport.”

The conversation had been unexpectedly restrained. Now Rimma felt that the passport matter gave her a reason to start yelling.

“Well, thats marvelous!” she shouted, with a sarcastic laugh. “I cant go anywhere without my passport!”

Tm not giving you your passport!”

“Ill go turn myself into a kept woman!” Rimma yelled hysterically. “I shall give myself to a policeman!”

“Who do you think will want you?” Barbara Stepanovna answered, critically eyeing her daughters shivering little body and flushed face. “You think a policeman cant find a better—”

Til go to Tverskaya Street!” Rimma shouted. “Ill find myself some old man—I don t want to live with her, with this stupid, stupid, stupid—”

“Ah, so this is how you speak to your mother,” Barbara Stepanovna said, standing up with dignity. “We cant make ends meet, everything is falling apart around us, we re short of everything, all I ask is for a few minutes of peace and quiet, but you ... Wait till your father hears about this!” Tm going to write him myself, to Kamchatka!” Rimma shouted in a frenzy. Til get my passport from him!”

Barbara Stepanovna walked out of the room. Rimma, small and disheveled, paced excitedly up and down the room. Angry, isolated phrases from her future letter to her father tore through her brain.

“Dear Papa!” she would write. “You are busy, I know, but I have to tell you everything. May the allegation that Stanny dozed on my breast lie heavy on Mamas conscience! It was an embroidered cushion that he was dozing on, but the center of gravity lies elsewhere. As Mama is your wife, you will doubtless side with her, but I cant stay here any longer, she is a difficult person! If you want, Papa, I can come to you in Kamchatka, but I will need my passport!”

Rimma paced up and down, while Alla sat on the sofa and watched her. Quiet and mournful thoughts lay heavily on her soul.

“Rimma is fussing about,” she thought, “while I am completely desolate! Everything is painful, nothing makes sense!”

She went to her room and lay down. Barbara Stepanovna came in wearing a corset. She was thickly and naively powdered, flushed, perplexed, and pitiful.

“I just remembered that the Rastokhins are leaving today. I have to give them back their sixty rubles. They threatened to take me to court. There are some eggs in the cupboard. Make some for yourself—I’m going down to the pawnbroker.

• • •

When Marchotski came home from his classes at around six in the evening, he found the entrance hall filled with packed suitcases. There was noise coming from the Rastokhins’ rooms—they were obviously arguing. Right there in the entrance hall Barbara Stepanovna, somehow, with lightning speed and desperate resolution, managed to borrow ten rubles from Marchotski. It was only when he got back to his room that he realized how stupid he had been.

His room was different from all the other rooms in Barbara Stepanovnas apartment. It was neat, filled with bibelots, and covered with carpets. Drawing utensils, foppish pipes, English tobacco, ivory paper knives were carefully laid out on the tables.

Before Stanislaw even managed to change into his dressing gown, Rimma quietly slipped into his room. He gave her a chilly reception.

“Are you angry, Stanny?” the girl asked.

“I am not angry,” the Pole answered. “It is just that in the future I would prefer not to be encumbered with having to bear witness to your mothers excesses.”

“It’ll all be over very soon,” Rimma said. “Stanny, I’m going to be free!”

She sat down next to him on the sofa and embraced him.

“I am a man,” Stanny began. “This platonic business is not for me, I have a career before me.”

He gruffly told her the things that men more or less say to certain women when they’ve had enough. There’s nothing to talk to them about, and flirting with them is pointless, as it is quite obvious they are not prepared to get down to business.

Stanny said that he was consumed by desire; it was hampering his work, making him nervous. The matter had to be settled one way or the other—he didn’t care in the least which, as long as it was settled.

“Why are you saying such things to me?” Rimma asked him pensively. “What is all this ‘I am a man’ about, and what do you mean by ‘the matter has to be settlecT? Why is your face so cold and nasty? And why can we talk about nothing else but that one thing? This is so sad, Stanny! Spring is in the streets, its so beautiful, and we are in such an ugly mood.”

Stanny didnt answer. They both remained silent.

A fiery sunset was sinking over the horizon, flooding the distant sky with a scarlet glow. On the opposite horizon a volatile, slowly thickening darkness was descending. The room was illuminated by the last glowing light. On the sofa, Rimma leaned more and more tenderly toward the student. They were doing what they always did at this exquisite hour of the day.

Stanislaw kissed the girl. She rested her head on the pillow and closed her eyes. They both burst into flame. Within a few minutes, Stanislaw was kissing her incessantly, and in a fit of malicious, unquenchable passion began shoving her thin, burning body about the room. He tore her blouse and her bodice. Rimma, with parched mouth and rings under her eyes, offered her lips to be kissed, while with a distorted, mournful grin she defended her virginity. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Rimma began rushing about the room, clutching the hanging strips of her torn blouse to her breast.

They eventually opened the door. It turned out to be a friend of Stanislaws. He eyed Rimma with ill-concealed derision as she rushed past him. She slipped into her room furtively, changed into another blouse, and went to stand by the chilly windowpane to cool down.

• • •

The pawnbroker only gave Barbara Stepanovna forty rubles for the family silver. Ten rubles she had borrowed from Marchotski, and the rest of the money she got from the Tikhonovs, walking all the way from Strastny Boulevard to Pokrovka. In her dismay, she forgot that she could have taken a tram.

At home, besides the raging Rastokhins, she found Mirlits, a bar-risters assistant, waiting for her. He was a tall young man with decaying stumps for teeth, and foolish, moist gray eyes.

Not too long ago, the shortage of money had driven Barbara Stepanovna to consider mortgaging a cottage her husband owned in Kolomna. Mirlits had brought over a draft of the mortgage. Barbara

Stepanovna felt that something was wrong with the draft, and that she ought to get some more advice before signing. But she told herself that she was being beset by altogether too many problems of every kind. To hell with everything—boarders, daughters, rudeness.

After the business discussion, Mirlits uncorked a bottle of Crimean Muscat-Lunelle that he had brought with him—he knew Barbara Stepanovnas weakness. They drank a glass each and right away had another. Their voices rang louder, Barbara Stepanovnas fleshy nose grew red, and the stays of her corset expanded and bulged out. Mirlits was telling a jovial story and burst out laughing. Rimma sat silently in the corner, wearing the blouse into which she had changed.

After Barbara Stepanovna and Mirlits finished the Muscat-Lunelle, they went for a walk. Barbara Stepanovna felt that she was just a tiny bit tipsy She was a little ashamed about this, but at the same time couldn’t care less because there was simply too much hardship in life, so everything could go to hell.

Barbara Stepanovna came back earlier than she had anticipated, because the Boikos, whom she had intended to visit, had not been home. She was taken aback by the silence that lay over the apartment. Usually at this time of the day the girls were always fooling around with the students, giggling, running about. The only noise came from the bathroom. Barbara Stepanovna went to the kitchen. There was a little window there from which one could see what was going on in the bathroom.

She went to the little window and saw a strange and most unusual scene.

The stove for boiling the bathwater was red-hot. The bath was filled with steaming water. Rimma was kneeling next to the stove. In her hands she held a pair of curling irons. She was heating them over the fire. Alla was standing naked next to the bath. Her long braids were undone. Tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“Come here,” Alla told Rimma. “Listen, can you maybe hear its heart beating?”

Rimma laid her head on Allas soft, slightly swollen belly.

“It s not beating,” she answered. “Anyway theres no doubt about it.”

Tm going to die,” Alla whispered. Tm going to get scalded by the water! I wont be able to bear it! Not the curling irons! You don’t know how to do it!”

“Everyone does it this way,” Rimma told her. “Stop whimpering, Alla. You cant have that baby.”

Alla was about to climb into the tub, but she didnt manage to, because at that very moment she heard the unforgettable, quiet, wheezing voice of her mother call out. “What are you doing in there, girls?” Two or three hours later, Alla was lying on Barbara Stepanovnas wide bed, tucked in, caressed, and wept over. She had told her mother everything. She felt relieved. She felt like a little girl who had overcome a silly childish fear.

Rimma moved about the bedroom carefully and silently, tidying up, making tea for her mother, forcing her to eat something, seeing to it that the room would be clean. Then she lit the icon lamp in which the oil had not been refilled for at least two weeks, undressed, trying hard not to make any noise, and lay down next to her sister.

Barbara Stepanovna sat at the table. She could see the icon lamp, its even, darkish red flame dimly illuminating the Virgin Mary. Her tipsiness, somehow strange and light, still bubbled in her head. The girls quickly fell asleep. Allas face was broad, white, and peaceful. Rimma nestled up against her, sighed in her sleep, and shuddered.

Around one in the morning, Barbara Stepanovna lit a candle, placed a sheet of paper in front of her, and wrote a letter to her husband:

Dear Nikolai,

Mirlits came by today, a very decent Jew, and tomorrow I’m expecting a gentleman who will give me money for the house. I think I’m doing things right, but I’m getting more and more worried, because I lack confidence.

I know you have your own troubles, your work, and I shouldn’t be bothering you with this, but things at home, Nikolai, are somehow not going all too well. The children are growing up, life nowadays is more demanding—courses, stenography—girls want more freedom. They need their father, they need someone to maybe yell at them, but I simply don’t seem to be able to. I can’t help thinking that your leaving for Kamchatka was a mistake. If you were here, we would have moved to Starokolenny Street, where there is a very bright little apartment available.

Rimma has lost weight and looks rather bad. For a whole month we were ordering cream from the dairy across the street, and the girls started looking much better, but now we have stopped ordering it. At times my liver acts up a little, and at times it doesn’t. Write me more often. After your letters I am a bit more careful, I don’t eat herring and my liver doesn’t bother me. Come and see us, Kolya, we could all unwind. The children send you their greetings. With loving kisses,

Your Barbara.

One feels right away that this is the kingdom of books. People working at the library commune with books, with the life reflected in them, and so become almost reflections of real-life human beings.

Even the cloakroom attendants—not brown-haired, not blond, but something in between—are mysteriously quiet, filled with contemplative composure.

At home on Saturday evenings they might well drink methylated spirits and give their wives long, drawn-out beatings, but at the library their comportment is staid, circumspect, and hazily somber.

And then there is the cloakroom attendant who draws. In his eyes there is a gentle melancholy. Once every two weeks, as he helps a fat man in a black vest out of his coat, he mumbles, “Nikolai Sergeyevich approves of my drawings, and Konstantin Vasilevich also approves of them.... In the first thing I was originating . .. but I have no idea, no idea where to go!”

The fat man listens. He is a reporter, a married man, gluttonous and overworked. Once every two weeks he goes to the library to rest. He reads about court cases, painstakingly copies out onto a piece of paper the plan of the house where the murder took place, is very pleased, and forgets that he is married and overworked.

The reporter listens to the attendant with fearful bewilderment, and wonders how to handle such a man. Do you give him a ten-kopeck coin on your way out? He might be offended—hes an artist. Then again, if you don t he might also be offended—after all, he s a cloakroom attendant.

In the reading room are the more elevated staff members, the librarians. Some, the “conspicuous ones,” possess some starkly pronounced physical defect. One has twisted fingers, another has a head that lolled to the side and stayed there. They are badly dressed, and emaciated in the extreme. They look as if they are fanatically possessed by an idea unknown to the world.

Gogol would have described them well!

The “inconspicuous” librarians show the beginnings of bald patches, wear clean gray suits, have a certain candor in their eyes, and a painful slowness in their movements. They are forever chewing something, moving their jaws, even though they have nothing in their mouths. They talk in a practiced whisper. In short, they have been ruined by books, by being forbidden from enjoying a throaty yawn.

Now that our country is at war, the public has changed. There are fewer students. There are very few students. Once in a blue moon you might see a student painlessly perishing in a corner. He’s a “white-ticketer,” exempt from service. He wears a pince-nez and has a delicate limp. But then there is also the student on state scholarship. This student is pudgy, with a drooping mustache, tired of life, a man prone to contemplation: he reads a bit, thinks about something a bit, studies the patterns on the lampshades, and nods off over a book. He has to finish his studies, join the army, but—why hurry? Everything in good time.