The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (79 page)

On Sunday morning, Bobka put on her brown, raw-cloth dress. Her fat, kindly breasts bounced in all directions. She tied on her kerchief with the black floral print, the kind of kerchief worn in the synagogue on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. Bobka arranged the pies, jam, and pretzels on the table and waited. We lived in the basement. Borgman raised his eyebrows as he walked over the corridors crooked floor. A barrel of water stood by the entrance. The instant Borgman was inside, I began entertaining him with every conceivable marvel. I showed him the alarm clock which my grandfather had constructed down to the last screw—a lamp was hooked up to the clock, and every time the clock reached a full or half hour, the lamp would light up. I also showed him our little keg of shoe wax. Grandpa Levy-Itskhok had invented that shoe wax recipe, and he would not reveal it to anyone. Then Borgman and I read a few pages from my grandfathers manuscript. He wrote in Yiddish, on square sheets of yellow paper large as maps. The manuscript was called The Headless Man. In it was a description of all Levy-Itskhoks neighbors over a period of sixty years—first in Skvira and Belaya Tserkov, then in Odessa. Undertakers, cantors, Jewish drunks, cooks at bris feasts, and the charlatans who performed the ritual operation—these were Levy-Itskhoks characters. They were all loud and offensive people, with crude speech and fleshy noses, pimply faces, and twisted backsides.

As we were reading, Bobka appeared in her brown dress. She came floating in, engulfed by her fat, kindly breasts, carrying a tray on which stood a samovar. I introduced them. “Pleased to meet you,” Bobka said, reaching out her sweaty, stiff fingers and doing a little scraping bow. I couldnt have wished for things to go better. Our neighbors the Apelkhots wouldn’t let Grandfather leave their place. I dragged out all his treasures one by one: grammars of every language you could imagine, and sixty-six volumes of the Talmud. Borgman was dazzled by the keg of shoe wax, the wondrous alarm clock, and the mountain of Talmuds—all things one would never see in any other home.

We each drank two glasses of tea with our strudel. Bobka left, bowing her head and shuffling backward out of the room. I fell into a joyful state of mind, struck a pose, and began declaiming the verses that I loved more than anything in the world. Antony, bending over Caesar s dead body, speaks to the people of Rome.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar.; not to praise him.

That is how Antony begins his performance. I gasped and pressed my hand to my heart.

He was my friend, faithful andjust to me:

But Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man.

Brutus’s face hovered before my eyes, in the mists of the universe. His face turned whiter than chalk. The people of Rome began closing in on me menacingly. I raised my arm—Borgman’s eyes obediently followed it—my clenched fist was quaking, I raised my arm, and through the window saw Uncle Simon-Volf walk through the yard with Leykakh the junk dealer. They were carrying a rack made of antlers, and a red trunk with handles in the form of lions’jaws. Bobka also saw them from the window. Forgetting my guest, she came running into the room and grabbed hold of me with trembling hands.

“Oy, Bubele! He’s been buying furniture again!”

Borgman rose in his school uniform, and bowed to Auntie Bobka in bewilderment. They were pounding on the door. The thud of boots and the clatter of the trunk being dragged across the floor came rumbling from the corridor. The thundering voices of Simon-Volf and redheaded Leykakh were deafening. Both were tipsy.

“Bobka!” Simon-Volf yelled. “Guess how much I paid for these horns!”

He blared like a trumpet, but there was a hint of uncertainty in his voice. Drunk though he was, he knew how much we hated redheaded Leykakh, who spurred him on to keep buying things, flooding our place with useless and ridiculous furniture.

Bobka stood there in silence. Leykakh said something to Simon-Volf in his wheezing voice. To drown out his snakelike hissing and my anxiety, I started shouting Anthony’s words.

But yesterday the word of Caesar might

Have stood against the world; now lies he there.

And none so poor to do him reverence.

O masters, if I were disposed to stir

Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage,

I should do Brutus wrong, and Cassius wrong,

Who, you all know, are honorable men . . .

Suddenly there was a thud. Bobka had fallen down, knocked off her feet by her husband s blow. She must have made a sharp remark about the antlers. The daily ritual began. Simon-Volfs brassy voice thundered to high heaven.

“You are squeezing the last drop out of me!” my uncle roared. “You are squeezing out of me the last drop so you can stuff those damn pig snouts of yours! My souls been crushed by work, I’ve nothing left to work with, no hands, no legs, nothing! You’ve hung a millstone around my neck, a goddamn millstone!”

He heaped Yiddish curses on Bobka and me, he wished that our eyes would fall out, that our children would rot and wither in their mothers’ wombs, that we would not live to bury each other, and that we would be dragged by our hair to a pauper’s grave.

Little Borgman stood up. He looked around the room, his face pale. He did not understand the ins and outs of Jewish blasphemy, but he was familiar enough with Russian swearing. And Simon-Volf did not refrain from slipping into Russian. The bank director’s son stood there kneading his cap. My eyes saw him double as I struggled to shout away all the evil in the world. My mortal agony and Caesar’s death became one. I was dead and I was shouting. A wheeze rose from the depths of my being.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

You all do know this mantle: I remember

The first time ever Caesar put it on;

Twas on a summers evening, in his tent,

That day he overcame the Nervii:

Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through:

See what a rent the envious Casca made:

Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbd;

And as he pluckd his cursed steel away,

Mark how the blood of Caesar followd it. ..

No one would have had the power to drown out Simon-Volf. Bobka sat on the floor, sobbing and blowing her nose. Leykakh, unruffled, was dragging the trunk along behind the partition. And it was at this very moment that my crazed grandfather got it into his head to come to my rescue. He tore himself loose from the Apelkhots next door, crawled over to the window, and began sawing away at his violin, most probably so that people wouldn’t hear Simon-Volf’s cursing. Borgman looked out the window, which was at ground level, and stumbled back in horror. My poor grandfather was twisting his rigid blue mouth into wild grimaces. He had on his crooked top hat and his black quilted cloak with its bone buttons; the remnants of what had been shoes clung to his elephantine feet. His sooty beard hung in tatters and blew into the window. Borgman ran for the door.

“Please dont worry,” he muttered, as he ran for freedom. “Please don’t worry.”

His uniform and his cap with the raised brim flashed through the yard.

With Borgman’s departure my agitation began to subside. I waited for evening to come. After Grandfather lay down in his cot and went to sleep, having filled a sheet of paper with Yiddish scribbles (describing the Apelkhots, at whose house, through my ministrations, he had spent the whole day), I went out into the corridor. It had a dirt floor. I moved through the darkness, barefoot, in my long, patched-up nightshirt. The cobblestones shimmered like blades of light through the cracks in the boards. The barrel of water stood as always in the corner. I lowered myself into it. The water cut me in two. I plunged my head under, choked, and came up for air. Our cat gazed at me sleepily from high up on a shelf. The second time I held out longer. The water swished around me, swallowing my moan. I opened my eyes and saw my billowing shirt and my legs pressed against each other. Again I didn’t have enough strength. I came up. My grandfather was standing next to the barrel in his nightshirt. His single tooth jiggled in his mouth.

“My grandson.” He spoke these words distinctly and with contempt. “I shall go and drink some castor oil so that I will have something to dump on your grave.”

I started shouting and thrashing, plunging into the water with all my might. I was pulled up by my grandfather’s weak hand. I cried for the first time that day, and the world of tears was so immense and beautiful that everything except my tears disappeared from before my eyes.

When I regained consciousness, I was lying wrapped in blankets in my bed. Grandfather was pacing up and down the room, whistling. Fat Bobka was warming my hands on her breasts.

“Oy, how he is shivering, our silly little boy!” Bobka said. “And how does he have the strength to shiver like that?”

Grandfather tugged at his beard, whistled, and began walking up and down the room again. In the next room Simon-Volf was snoring with tormented breath. He always yelled himself out during the day, and so never woke in the night.

Gapa Guzhva is the first chapter of the novel Velikaya Krinitsa that Babel worked on in the early 1930s. Althoughfriends of Babel's reported that they knew of subsequent chapters that he had completed, only two chapters, this and 'Kolyvushka,"have survived. Both this story and “Kolyvushka” (which was unpublished during Babel's lifetime) dealt with the devastating effects of Stalins enforced collectivization—a dangerous subject matter for a novel at the time.

Six weddings were held in Velikaya Krinitsa on Shrovetide in 1930. They were celebrated with a wild abandon, the likes of which had not been seen for a long time. Old customs were reborn. The father of one of the bridegrooms got drunk and demanded that he be allowed to try out the bride, a custom that had been discontinued some twenty years back. The father-in-law had already taken off his sash and thrown it to the ground. The bride, shaking with laughter, was tugging at the old mans beard. He puffed out his chest closer and closer to her, guffawed, and stamped his boots. And yet there was not much for the old man to be worried about. Of the six sheets that were hung up over the huts after the wedding night, only two were stained with virginal blood. As for the other brides, they had gone on late-night walks and come back soiled. One of the sheets was grabbed by a Red Army soldier who was home on leave, and Gapa Guzhva climbed up for the other one. She jumped onto the roof, kicking away the men behind her, and clambered up the pole, which bent and swayed under her weight. She tore down the reddened rag and came sliding down the pole. A table and a stool stood on the gable of the roof, and on the table was a half liter bottle of vodka and slices of cold meat. Gapa tipped the bottle into her mouth, and with her free hand waved the sheet. The crowd down below roared and danced. The stool slid out from under her, shook, and fell apart. Berezan herdsmen, driving their oxen to Kiev, stared at the woman drinking vodka on the roof under the sky.

“She’s no woman, that one!” the villagers told them. “Our widows the devil, she is!”

Gapa threw bread, twigs, and plates from the roof. She finished the vodka and smashed the bottle against the chimney ledge. The muzhiks who had gathered below roared. The widow jumped off the roof, untied her shaggy-bellied mare who stood dozing by the wooden fence, and rode off to get some wine. She came back weighed down with flasks, as a Circassian tribesman is weighed down with ammunition. Her horse was panting heavily and tossing its muzzle. Its belly, heavy with foal, surged and bulged, and equine madness quivered in its eyes.

At the weddings, the villagers danced holding handkerchiefs, with lowered eyes, their boots shuffling in one spot. Only Gapa whirled around, as they do in the towns. She danced with Grishka Savchenko, her lover. They held each other as if they were wrestling. They tugged at each others shoulders with headstrong anger. They drummed the ground with their boots, and tumbled down as if they had been knocked off their feet.

The third day of the wedding feasts began. The couples’ best men wore their sheepskin coats inside out and ran smeared with soot through the village, banging on oven doors. Bonfires were lit in the streets. People jumped through them, horns painted on their foreheads. Horses were harnessed to troughs that were dragged hurtling through the flames over clods of grass. Men fell to the ground, overpowered by sleep. Housewives threw broken pots and pans into their yards. The newlyweds washed their feet and climbed into tall beds, and only Gapa was still dancing alone in an empty shed. She whirled in circles, holding a tarred boat pole in her hand, her hair untied. She pounded the pole against the walls, leaving sticky black wounds, the thuds jolting the shed.

“We bring fire and death,” Gapa whispered, waving the pole over her head.

Planks and straw rained down on her as the walls caved in.

She danced with loose hair among the ruins, in the din and dust of the crumbling wattle and the flying splinters of the breaking planks. Her delicate red-rimmed boots whirled through the rubble, drumming the ground.

Night fell. The bonfires were dying out in the thawing snow pits.

The shed lay in a tangled heap on the hill. A light began to flicker in the village council hut across the street. Gapa threw away her pole and ran over to the hut.

“Ivashko!” she yelled, as she rushed into the room. “Come have some fun with us, let’s drink our life away!”

Ivashko was the representative of the Regional Commission for Collectivization. For two months now he had been trying to talk the villagers into collectivizing. He was sitting in front of a pile of crumpled, tattered papers, his hands resting on the table. The skin on either side of his forehead was wrinkled, and in his eyes hung the pupils of an ailing cat. Above them bulged the arches of his bare pink eye sockets. “Are you sneering at our peasants?” Gapa yelled, stamping her foot. ‘Tm not sneering,” Ivashko said gloomily. “But it would be inappropriate for me to join you all.”