The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (77 page)

“I will find my medical record,” Paulina whispered, and her hands slid off the bar.

At that moment a bawling baby was heard. A child was crying and mewling outside the doors.

“You see, Paulina?” the old woman suddenly yelled out in a hoarse voice. “The child hasn’t been fed since this morning! He’s shriveling up with hollering!” Startled Red Army fighters snatched up their rifles. Paulina began to slide lower and lower, her head falling back to the floor. Her arms flew up, flailed, and then tumbled down.

“The court is adjourned!” the public prosecutor shouted.

An uproar erupted in the room. Byelotserkovsky stalked over to his wife with cranelike steps, a green sheen on his hollow cheeks.

“Feed the child!” people were shouting from the back rows, cupping their hands like megaphones around their mouths.

“They’re already feeding him!” a woman’s voice shouted back. “You think they were waiting for you?”

“The daughter’s tangled up in all of this,” said a worker sitting next to me. “The daughter’s got her hand in it.”

“It’s a family thing,” the man sitting next to him said. “One of those dark, nighttime jobs. At night they go tangling up things that in daylight you just can’t untangle.”

The sun cut through the room with its slanting rays. The crowd stirred heavily, breathing fire and sweat. Elbowing my way through, I reached the corridor. The door to the Red Corner*  [
a reading room in public buildings that contained Communist Party literature and the works of Marx and Lenin
] stood ajar. I could hear Karl-Yankel’s mewling and slurping inside. Lenins portrait hung in the Red Corner, the portrait in which he is giving a speech from the armored car on the square in front of the Finland Station. It was surrounded by multicolored production graphs showing the Petrovsky factory’s output. The walls were lined with banners and rifles on wooden mounts. A woman worker with a Kirghiz face, her head bent forward, was feeding Karl-Yankel, a plump little fellow about five months old with knitted socks and a white tuft of hair on his head. Fastened to the Kirghiz woman by his mouth, he gurgled, banging her breast with his little clenched fist.

“What are they shouting for?” the Kirghiz woman said. “There’s always someone who’ll feed a baby.”

There was also a girl of about seventeen puttering about the room in a red kerchief, her cheeks puffed out like pine cones. She was wiping dry Karl-Yankel’s changing-mat.

“He’s going to be a fighter, he is,” the girl said. “Look at those punches he’s throwing!”

The Kirghiz woman gently pulled her nipple out of Karl-Yankel’s mouth. He began growling, and in desperation threw back his head with its white tuft of hair. The woman took out her other breast and gave it to him. He looked at her nipple with dull eyes that suddenly lit up. The Kirghiz woman looked at Karl-Yankel, squinting her black eyes at him.

“Not a fighter, no,” she crooned, fixing the boy’s cap. “He’ll be an aviator. He will fly through the sky, he will.”

In the other room the hearing had resumed.

A battle was now raging between the investigating magistrate and the experts who were giving vague and inconclusive testimony. The public prosecutor got up from his seat and began banging the desk with his fist. I could see the public in the first few rows—Galician tsaddiks
_y
their beaver hats resting on their knees. They had come to the Petrovsky factory, where, according to the Warsaw papers, the Jewish religion was being put on trial. The faces of the rabbis sitting in the first row hovered in the stormy, dusty brightness of the sun.

“Down with them!” shouted a member of the Young Communist League who had managed to fight his way right up to the podium.

The battle raged with growing force.

Karl-Yankel, staring blankly at me, sucked at the Kirghiz womans breast.

The straight streets that my childhood and youth walked unfurled outside the window—Pushkin Street went to the train station, Malo-Arnautskaya Street jutted out into the park by the sea.

I grew up on these streets. Now it was Karl-Yankel’s turn. But nobody had fought over me the way they were fighting over him, nobody had cared much about me.

“I cant believe that you wont be happy, Karl-Yankel,” I whispered to myself. “I cant believe you wont be happier than me.”

1

The “New Economic Policy” of the Soviet government after the Revolution during the transition from capitalism to socialism.

^ The capital city of Abkhazia.

2

The White pro-monarchist forces in the Black Sea region had commandeered many ships of the Russian navy during the Russian Civil War (1918—1922).

^ Turkish: “Sir.”

3

Turkish: “Fine!”

Paul Vaillant-Couturier, 1892-1937, renowned Communist politician, author, and journalist, had been editor in chief of VHumanite\ France’s Communist newspaper, since 1926. He met Babel at the conference in Paris, where both were speakers.

4

L’Ecole Karl Marx, built by the French architect Andre Lur£at, 1894-1970, had been inaugurated July 9, 1933, two years before Babels visit to Villejuif. The school had aroused international attention because of its avant-garde architecture and Marxist curriculum.

5

The Efrussi family was one of the oldest and wealthiest Jewish merchant families in Odessa.

6

Vlasov mispronounces Staro-Ver (“Old Believer”) as Stalo-Ver (“Started-Believing”), and comically identifies the Old Believers with the Jews. The Old Believers were an archconservative Christian sect that had split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century.

7

Odessa’s eastern suburb by the harbor.

8

Vitaly Markovich Primakov, 1897-1937, a Red Commander who had taken part in the storming of the Winter Palace. In 1918, he had formed the first Red Cossack Regiment, and was later both commander and military commissar of the Eighth Cavalry Division.

^ One of the largest agricultural machinery factories of the time.

The highest court of the ancient Jewish nation.

All the people of our circle—middlemen, storekeepers, clerks in banks and steamship offices—sent their children to music lessons. Our fathers, seeing they had no prospects of their own, set up a lottery for themselves. They built this lottery on the bones of their little children. Odessa was in the grip of this craze more than any other town. And sure enough, over the last few decades our town had sent a number of child prodigies onto the stages of the world. Mischa Elman, Zimbalist, Gawrilowitsch all came from Odessa—-Jascha Heifetz started out with us.
¹

When a boy turned four or five, his mother took the tiny, frail creature to Mr. Zagursky. Zargursky ran a factory that churned out child prodigies, a factory of Jewish dwarfs in lace collars and patent leather shoes. He went hunting for them in the Moldavanka slums and the reeking courtyards of the old bazaar. Zagursky gave them the first push, then the children were sent off to Professor Auer^ in Petersburg. There was powerful harmony in the souls of these little creatures with their swollen blue heads. They became acclaimed virtuosi. And so—my father decided to keep up with them. I had passed the age of child prodigies—I was almost fourteen—but because of my height and frailness I could be mistaken for an eight-year-old. Therein lay all our hopes.

I was brought to Zagursky. Out of respect for my grandfather, he agreed to take me at a ruble a lesson—a low fee. My grandfather was the laughingstock of the town, but also its ornament. He walked the streets in a top hat and tattered shoes, and provided answers to the murkiest questions. People asked him what a Gobelin was, why the Jacobins had betrayed Robespierre, how synthetic silk was made, what a cesarean section was. My grandfather knew the answers to all these questions. It was out of respect for his knowledge and madness that Zagursky charged us only a ruble a lesson. And he put a lot of effort into me, fearing Grandfather, though putting any effort into me was pointless. Sounds scraped out of my violin like iron filings. These sounds cut even into my own heart, but my father would not give up. All anyone talked about at home was Mischa Elman; the Czar himself had absolved him from military service. Zimbalist, from what my father had heard, had been presented to the King of England and had played at Buckingham Palace. Gawrilowitschs parents had bought two houses in Petersburg. The child prodigies brought wealth to their parents. My father was prepared to resign himself to a life of poverty, but he needed fame.

“It’s unthinkable,” people who went out dining with my father at his expense assured him, “absolutely unthinkable, that the grandson of a grandfather like his wouldn’t become . . .”

But I had other things in my head. Whenever I practiced my violin I placed books by Turgenev or Dumas on my music stand, and, as I scraped away, devoured one page after another. During the day I told stories to the neighborhood boys, at night I put them down on paper. Writing was a hereditary occupation in our family. Grandpa Levy-Itskhok, who had gone mad in his old age, had spent his life writing a novel with the title The Headless Man. I followed in his footsteps.

Laden with violin case and music scores, I dragged myself over to Zagursky’s on Witte Street, formerly Dvoryanskaya Street.
²
There, along the walls, Jewesses sat, waiting flushed and hysterical for their turn. They pressed to their weak knees violins more magnificent than those destined to play at Buckingham Palace.

The door of the inner sanctum opened. Large-headed, freckled children came bustling out of Zagursky s chamber, their necks thin as flower stalks, a convulsive flush on their cheeks. Then the door closed, swallowing up the next dwarf. In the adjacent room Zagursky, with his red curls, bow tie, and thin legs, sang and conducted in ecstasy. The founder of this freakish lottery filled the Moldavanka and the back alleys of the old bazaar with specters of pizzicato and cantilena. This incantation of his was then fine-tuned to a diabolical brilliancy by old Professor Auer.

I had no business being a member of his sect. I too was a dwarf just as they were, but I heard a different calling in the voice of my ancestors.

This was an arduous apprenticeship for me. One day I set out from home, laden with my music, my violin, its case, and the sum of twelve rubles, the fee for a month of lessons. I walked down Nezhinskaya Street, and should have turned into Dvoryanskaya Street to get to Zagurskys place. Yet I walked downTiraspolskaya and ended up in the port. My allotted three hours flew past in the Prakticheskaya harbor. That was the beginning of my liberation. Zagursky s waiting room was never to see me again. More important things were occupying my mind. My classmate Nemanov and I got in the habit of going on board the Kensington to visit an old sailor called Mr. Trottyburn. Nemanov was a year younger than I, but from the time he was eight years old he had engaged in the most complex trading you could imagine. He was a genius at anything having to do with trade, and always delivered what he promised. Now he is a millionaire in New York, the general manager of General Motors, a company as powerful as Ford. Nemanov took me along because I obeyed his every command. He bought smuggled tobacco pipes from Mr. Trottyburn. These pipes had been carved by the old sailor s brother in Lincoln.

“Mark my words, gentlemen,” Mr. Trottyburn said to us. “You have to make your children with your own hands. Smoking a factory-made pipe is like sticking an enema tube in your mouth. Do you know who Benvenuto Cellini was? He was a master! My brother in Lincoln could tell you about him. My brother lives and lets live. The one thing he believes in is that you have to make your children with your own hands, you cant leave that sort of thing to others. And he is right, gentlemen!”

Nemanov sold Trottyburn’s pipes to bank managers, foreign consuls, and rich Greeks. He made a hundred percent profit.

The pipes of the Lincoln master exuded poetry. Each and every one of them contained a thought, a drop of eternity. A little yellow eye twinkled from their mouthpieces. Their cases were lined with satin. I tried to imagine how Matthew Trottyburn, the last of the pipe-carving masters, lived in an England of old, defying the winds of change.

“He is right, gentlemen, you have to make your children with your own hands!”

The heavy waves by the harbor wall separated me more and more from a home reeking of onions and Jewish fate. From the Prakticheskaya harbor I moved on to the breakwater. There, on a stretch of sandbar, the boys of Primorskaya Street hung out. They went without pants from morning till night, they dove under fishing boats, stole coconuts for food, and waited for the time when carts carrying watermelons rolled in from Kherson and Kamenki, and they could split these watermelons open on the moorings of the dock.

My dream now was to learn how to swim. I was ashamed of admitting to those bronzed boys that I, though born in Odessa, had not even seen the sea until I was ten, and that I still could not swim at fourteen.

How late I learned the essential things in life! In my childhood, nailed to the Gemara,
³
I led the life of a sage, and it was only later, when I was older, that I began to climb trees.

It turned out that the ability to swim was beyond my reach. The hydrophobia of my ancestors, the Spanish rabbis and Frankfurt money changers, dragged me to the bottom. Water would not carry me. Battered, doused in salt water, I went back to the shore, to my violin and my music scores. I was attached to my instruments of crime, and dragged them along with me. The battle of the rabbis with the sea lasted until the local water god—Efim Nikitich Smolich, a proofreader for the Odessa News—took pity on me. In that athletic chest of his there was a warmth for Jewish boys. Nikitich led crowds of frail little crea-

tures, gathering them up from the bedbug-ridden hovels of the Moldavanka. He took them to the beach, built sand castles with them, exercised and dived with them, taught them songs, and, baking in the hard rays of the sun, told them tales of fishermen and animals. To grown-ups, Nikitich explained that he was simply a devotee of natural philosophy. Nikitichs stories made the Jewish children collapse with laughter. They squealed and frolicked like puppies. The sun spattered them with creeping freckles, freckles the color of lizards.