The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (84 page)
Authors: Peter Constantine Isaac Babel Nathalie Babel
“I was a real idiot again, Kostya,” he said with his childlike smile. “I used up all the fuel!”
Makeyev was sitting sideways on the box, scraps of his fur hat hanging over the yellow, browless arches of his eyes. A Mauser with an unpainted butt was lying on his knees. Without turning around, he fired at Korostelyov, but missed.
“What can I say?” Korostelyov whispered, with wide, shining eyes. “So you re angry with me?” He spread out his thin arms farther. “What can I say?”
Makeyev jumped up, turned around, and fired all the bullets in his Mauser. The shots rang out rapidly. There was something more Korostelyov had wanted to say, but he didn t manage to. He sighed and fell to his knees. He tumbled forward onto the rim of the spoked wheel of a machine gun cart, his face shattering, milky strips of brain bespattering the wheel. Makeyev, bending forward, was trying to yank out the last bullet which was jammed in the cartridge clip.
“They thought it was a good joke!” he said, eyeing the crowd of Red Army men and the rest of us who had gathered by the gangplank.
Lisyei crouched and went sidling over to Korostelyov with a horse blanket in his hands, and covered him as he lay there like a felled tree. Random shots rang from the steamer. Chapayevs soldiers were running over the deck, arresting the crew. The pockmarked woman, her hand pressed to her cheek, stood at the railing, peering at the shore with narrow, unseeing eyes.
“I’ll show you too!” Makeyev yelled up at her. “Ill teach you to waste fuel!”
The sailors were led down one by one. German settlers, trickling from their houses, came out from behind their barns. Karl Biedermayer was standing among his people. The war had come to his doorstep.
We had much work to do that day. The large village of Friedental had come to trade. A chain of camels was lying by the water. In the far distance, windmills were turning on the colorless, metallic horizon.
We loaded the Friedental grain onto our barge until suppertime, and toward evening Malishev sent for me. He was washing on the deck of the Ivan Tupitsin. An invalid with a pinned-up sleeve was pouring water over him from a pitcher. Malishev snorted and chuckled, holding his cheeks under the stream of water. He toweled himself off and said to his assistant, obviously continuing a conversation, “And rightly so! You can be the nicest fellow in the world, have locked yourself up in
monasteries, sailed the White Sea, been a desperado—but, please, whatever you do, dont waste fuel!”
Malishev and I went into the cabin. I laid out the financial records in front of me, and Malishev started dictating to me a telegram to be sent to Ilyich.
“Moscow. The Kremlin. To Comrade Lenin.”
In the telegram we reported the dispatching of the first shipments of wheat to the proletariat of Petersburg and Moscow: two trainloads, each twenty thousand poods of grain.
Mischa Elman, 1891-1967; Efrem Zimbalist, 1890-1985; Ossip Gawrilowitsch, 1878-1936; and Jascha Heifetz, 1901—1987, were among the foremost violinists and conductors of the twentieth century.
t Leopold Auer, 1845-1930, world-famous professor of violin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.
The street had been renamed in honor of Sergei Witte, an Odessan who had been Russia’s Minister of Finance.
Part of the Talmud, the Gemara is a rabbinical commentary on the Mishna, the first codification of ancient Jewish oral laws.
The equivalent of a C-minus. Five was the highest grade, one the lowest, t “Large Fountain” was an elegant beach spa outside Odessa.
It was a custom among Ukrainian villagers to shave their heads except for a forelock.
^ A town southeast of Kiev.
Collective farm.
The actual village that Babel visited in the spring of 1930 and decided to base his novel on. In the novels first chapter, “Gapa Guzhva,” the same village appears as Velikaya Krinitsa. Babel had decided to change the name of the village so as not offend the inhabitants.
Anatoly Lunacharsky, 1875-1933, Marxist critic and playwright, was the USSR’s first Commissar of Education.
t Food that is not kosher, and so is unfit to eat according to Jewish dietary laws.
The medical orderly is confusing Engelss concept of the nation state with nationality, in this case Russian versus Jewish nationality.
^ Zhlobin, Orsha, and Vitebsk are towns, today in Belarus, that the narrator would have passed through on his way north from Kiev to Petersburg. Novosokolniki and Loknya are in Russia on the other side of the Belarus border.
Today the city of Pushkin, fourteen miles south of St. Petersburg.
^ The “Extraordinary Commission,” formed in 1917 to investigate counterrevolutionary activities.
Yehuda Halevi, 1075-1141, was a Jewish poet and religious philosopher from Toledo, who embarked on a pilgrimage to Palestine at the end of his life. He died in Egypt, slain, according to legend, by a hostile Muslim on the threshold of Palestine.
^ A sculpture of a group of horses by Peter Karlovich Klodt, 1805-1867.
Abdul Hamid II, 1842-1918, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
Later Empress Maria Fyodorovna, wife of Czar Alexander III.
^ Alphonse de Lamartine, 1790-1869, was a French Romantic poet and statesman.
Mikhail (Mosey) Solomonovich Uritsky, 1873-1918, the son of a Jewish merchant, was the commissar of internal affairs for the northern district and the chairman of the Petrograd (Petersburg) Cheka.
Sergei Vasilevich Malishev, 1877-1938, nicknamed “The Red Merchant,” was one of the chief trade administrators during the early years of Soviet rule.
^ Saratov, a city in western Russia, lies along the middle course of the Volga River.
Renamed Marks (Marx).
^ Today Zaanstadt.
Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin, 1873-1938, a legendary bass, one of the most renowned opera singers of the early twentieth century.
t Alexander Tichonovich Grechaninov, 1864-1956, Russian composer and songwriter, noted for his religious works and childrens music.
Lisyei is saying that the Volga German settlement of Wosnesenka, called Voznesenskoe by the Russians, now has a Russian community—hence the Orthodox church. And where there are Russians, there is home-brewed vodka, which one could not get from the Germans, who were mainly Mennonites.
Vasili Ivanovich Chapayev, 1887-1919, was commander of the Pugachov Brigade that was fighting the counterrevolutionary troops in the area.
In the winter of 1916 I found myself in Petersburg with forged papers and without a kopeck to my name. Aleksei Kazantsev, a teacher of Russian philology, gave me shelter.
He lived on a frozen, reeking, yellow street in Peski.*[
A poor suburb of Petersburg.
] To increase his meager income, he did Spanish translations—in those days the fame of Blasco Ibanez was on the rise. [
Vicente Blasco Ibanez, 1867-1928, was a Spanish novelist and anti-monarchist politician. His novels, with their themes of war and social injustice, were particularly popular in Soviet Russia
.]
Kazantsev had never been to Spain, not even once, but his whole being was flooded with love for the country—he knew every Spanish castle, park, and river. Besides myself, a large number of men and women who had fallen through the cracks of life flocked to him. We lived in dire poverty. From time to time our pieces on current events appeared in small print in the popular press.
In the mornings I lounged about in morgues and police stations.
But the happiest of us all was Kazantsev. He had a motherland— Spain.
In November I was offered the position of clerk at the Obukhovsky Factory,*[
Steelworks founded in 1863. Its almost twelve thousand workers were to play an important role in the Revolution
.] not a bad job, bringing with it an exemption from conscription.
I refused to become a clerk.
Even in those days, at the age of twenty, I said to myself: Better to suffer hunger, prison, and homelessness than to sit at a clerks desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in making such a pledge, but I haven’t broken it to this day, nor will I. The wisdom of my forefathers was ingrained in me: we have been born to delight in labor, fighting, and love. That is what we have been born for, and nothing else.
Kazantsev patted the short yellow down on his head as he listened to my sermon. The horror in his eyes was mixed with rapture.
At Christmas, fortune smiled upon us. Bendersky, a lawyer who owned the Halcyon Publishing House, had decided to bring out a new edition of Maupassant’s works. His wife, Raisa, was going to do the translation. But nothing had yet come of the grand enterprise.
Kazantsev, as a Spanish translator, was asked if he knew anyone who might be able to help Raisa Mikhailovna. Kazantsev suggested me.
The following day, donning another man’s jacket, I set out to the Benderskys’. They lived at the corner of the Nevsky Prospekt by the Moika River, in a house built of Finnish granite trimmed with pink columns, embrasures, and stone coats of arms. Before the war, bankers without family or breeding—-Jewish converts to Christianity who grew rich through trade—had built a large number of such spuriously majestic, vulgar castles in Petersburg.
A red carpet ran up the stairs. Stuffed bears on their hind legs stood on the landings. Crystal lamps shone in their wide-open jaws.
The Benderskys lived on the third floor. The door was opened by a maid in a white cap and pointed breasts. She led me into a living room, decorated in old Slavic style. Blue paintings by Roerich,
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prehistoric rocks and monsters, hung on the walls. Ancient icons stood on little stands in the corners. The maid with the pointed breasts moved ceremoniously about the room. She was well built, nearsighted, haughty. Debauchery had congealed in her gray, wide-open eyes. Her movements were indolent. I thought how she must thrash about with savage agility when she made love. The brocade curtain that hung over the door swayed. A black-haired, pink-eyed woman, bearing her large breasts before her, came into the living room. It took me no more than a moment to see that Benderskaya was one of those ravishing breed of Jewesses from Kiev or Poltava, from the sated towns of the steppes that abounded with acacias and chestnut trees. These women transmute the money of their resourceful husbands into the lush pink fat on their bellies, napes, and round shoulders. Their sleepy smiles, delicate and sly, drive garrison officers out of their minds.
“Maupassant is the one passion of my life,” Raisa told me.
Struggling to restrain the swaying of her large hips, she left the room and came back with her translation of “Miss Harriet.” The translation had no trace of Maupassant’s free-flowing prose with its powerful breath of passion. Benderskaya wrote with laborious and inert correctness and lack of style—the way Jews in the past used to write Russian.
I took the manuscript home with me to Kazantsev s attic, where all night, among his sleeping friends, I cut swaths through Benderskayas translation. This work isnt as bad as it might seem. When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.
• • •
The following morning I brought back the corrected manuscript. Raisa had not lied in speaking of her passion for Maupassant. She sat transfixed as I read to her, her hands clasped together. Her satin arms flowed down toward the ground, her forehead grew pale, and the lace between her struggling breasts swerved and trembled.
“How did you do this?”
I spoke to her of style, of an army of words, an army in which every type of weapon is deployed. No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place. She listened with her head inclined and her painted lips apart. A black gleam shone in her lacquered hair, parted and pulled smoothly back. Her stockinged legs, with their strong, delicate calves, were planted apart on the carpet.
The maid, turning away her eyes in which debauchery had congealed, brought in breakfast on a tray.
The glass sun of Petersburg reclined on the uneven, faded carpet. Twenty-nine books by Maupassant stood on a shelf above the table. The sun, with its melting fingers, touched the books’ morocco leather bindings—the magnificent crypt of the human heart.
We were served coffee in little blue cups, and we began to translate “Idyll.” Who can forget the tale of the hungry young carpenter sucking milk from the overflowing breasts of the fat wet-nurse. This took place on a train going from Nice to Marseilles, on a sultry midday in the land of roses, the motherland of roses where flower plantations stretch down to the shores of the sea.
I left the Benderskys’ with a twenty-five-ruble advance. That evening our commune in Peski got as drunk as a flock of inebriated geese. We scooped up the finest caviar and chased it down with liver-wurst. Heated by liquor, I began ranting against Tolstoy.
“He got frightened, our count did! He lacked courage! It was fear that made him turn to religion! Frightened of the cold, of old age, the count knitted himself a jersey out of faith!”
“Go on,” Kazantsev said, wagging his birdlike head.
We fell asleep on the floor next to our beds. I dreamt of Katya, the forty-year-old washerwoman who lived on the floor beneath us. In the mornings we would go and get boiling water from her. I’d never had a good look at her face, but in my dream Katya and I did God only knows what. We consumed each other with kisses. The following morning I could not resist going down to her for boiling water.
I came face-to-face with a wilted woman, a shawl tied across her chest, with disheveled ash-gray curls and sodden hands.
• • •
From then on I breakfasted every day at the Benderskys’. In our attic we now had a new stove, herring, and chocolate. Twice Raisa drove me out to the islands.
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I couldn’t resist telling her about my childhood. To my own surprise, my tale sounded doleful. Her frightened sparkling eyes peered at me from under her fur hat. The reddish hairs of her eyelashes quivered mournfully.
