The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (87 page)

“Voila qui nestpasgai,” I said as I went in. “Quel malheurf
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“C’est I’amour, monsieur. . . . Elle Taimait
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Madame Truffaut’s lilac breasts tumbled in her lace blouse, her elephantine legs strode through the room, her eyes flashed.

“UamoreP Signora Rocca, who ran a restaurant on Rue Dante, called out from behind her like an echo. “Dio castiga quelli> chi non conoscono Vamoref
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The old women huddled together, all muttering at the same time. A variolar flame lit their cheeks, their eyes bulging out of their sockets.

“Vamour
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' Madame Truffaut repeated, hobbling toward me. “C’est une grosse affaire, Pamour

A siren sounded in the street. Skillful hands dragged the murdered man downstairs and out to the ambulance. My friend Bienalle had turned into a mere number, losing his name in the rolling waves of Paris. Signora Rocca went over to the window and looked out at the corpse. She was pregnant, her belly jutting out threateningly. Silk lay on her protruding hips, and the sun washed over her yellow, puffy face and soft yellow hair.

“Dio
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Signora Rocca said. “Tu non perdoni quelli, chi non amanoP
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Dusk descended on the tattered net of the Latin quarter, the squat crowd scuttling into its crevices, a hot breath of garlic pouring from its yards. Darkness covered the house of Madame Truffaut, its gothic facade with its two windows, and the remnants of turrets and volutes, ivy turned to stone.

Danton had lived here a century and a half ago. From his window he had seen the Conciergerie, the bridges strewn across the Seine, and the same cluster of little blind hovels huddling by the river. The same breath had wafted up to him. Rusty beams and signs of wayside inns had creaked, rattled by the wind.

I wasas fourteen years old. I belonged to the fearless battalion of theater ticket scalpers. My boss was a shark with an eye that always squinted and a large, silky mustache. His name was Kolya Shvarts. I fell in with him that dark year when the Italian Opera went bust. The impresario, swayed by the theater critics, had not signed up Anselmi and Tito Ruffo as guest stars, concentrating instead on a strong ensemble. He was punished for this, went broke, and so did we. To set things right, we were promised Chaliapin, but Chaliapin wanted three thousand a performance. So Di Grasso, the Sicilian tragic actor, came with his troupe instead. They were taken to their hotel in carts loaded with children, cats, and cages in which Italian birds fluttered.

“We cant push this merchandise!” Kolya Shvarts said when he saw the motley procession rolling in.

The moment the actor arrived, he went down to the bazaar with his bag. In the evening, carrying a different bag, he turned up at the theater. Barely fifty people came to the premiere. We hawked tickets at half price, but could find no buyers.

That evening Di Grasso s troupe performed a Sicilian folk drama, with a plot as humdrum as night and day. The daughter of a rich peasant became engaged to a shepherd. She was true to him, until one day the squires son came visiting from town in a velvet vest. The girl chatted with the visitor, tongue-tied and giggling at all the wrong moments. Listening to them, the shepherd darted his head about like a startled bird. Throughout the whole first act he crept along walls, went off somewhere in his fluttering trousers, and then came back again, looking around shiftily.

“We have a turkey on our hands!” Kolya Shvarts said during the intermission. “This is merchandise for Kremenchug, not Odessa!”

The intermission gave the girl time to prime herself for the betrayal. In the second act she was unrecognizable. She became intolerant and dreamy, and eagerly gave back the engagement ring to the shepherd. The shepherd led her to a tawdry painted statue of the Holy Virgin.

“Signorina! It is the Holy Virgins will that you hear me out!” he said in a bass voice in Sicilian dialect, turning away from her. “The Holy Virgin will give Giovanni, the visitor from town, as many women as he wills. But I, Signorina, need nobody but you! The Virgin Mary, our Immaculate Protectress, will tell you the same thing if you ask her.”

The girl stood with her back to the painted wooden statue. As the shepherd talked, she tapped her foot impatiently. On this earth—oh, woe to us!—there isnt a woman who is not gripped by folly at the very moment when her fate is being decided. A woman is alone at such moments, with no Holy Virgin she can appeal to.

In the third act, Giovanni, the visitor from town, met his fate. The village barber was shaving Giovanni as he sat with his powerful masculine legs sprawled out over the proscenium. The pleats of his vest shone beneath the Sicilian sun. The stage set portrayed a village fair. The shepherd stood in the far corner. He stood there silently, among the carefree crowd. He hung his head, then raised it, and under the weight of his burning, fixed gaze, Giovanni began to fidget and squirm in his chair. He jumped up and pushed the barber away. In a cracking voice Giovanni demanded that the policeman remove all shady and suspicious-looking people from the village square. The shepherd— played by Di Grasso—hesitated for a moment, then smiled, soared into the air, flew over the stage of the Odessa City Theater, alighted on Giovannis shoulders, and sunk his teeth into his neck. Muttering and squinting at the audience, he sucked the blood from the wound. Giovanni fell to the ground and the curtain came down in menacing silence, hiding the murderer and the murdered man. Not wasting a single moment, we rushed off to Theater Alley, Kolya Shvarts leading the pack. The box office was already selling tickets for the following day. Next morning the Odessa News informed the few people who had been at the performance that they had seen the most incredible actor of the century.

During his Odessa performances, Di Grasso was to play King Lear, Othello, Civil Death, and Turgenevs Parasite, convincing us with every word and movement that there was more justice and hope in the frenzy of noble passion than in the joyless rules of the world.

The tickets for these performances sold at five times their price. The public in its frantic quest for tickets ran to the taverns, where they found howling, red-faced scalpers spouting innocent blasphemies.

A stream of dusty pink heat poured into Theater Alley. Storekeepers in felt slippers brought green bottles of wine and casks of olives out onto the street. Macaroni was boiling in foaming water in cauldrons in front of stores, the steam melting into the distant skies. Old women in mens boots sold cockleshells and souvenirs, chasing wavering customers with their loud yells. Rich Jews, their beards combed and parted, rode in carriages to the Hotel Severnaya, and knocked discreetly at the doors of fat, black-haired women with mustaches—the actresses of Di Grassos troupe. Everyone in Theater Alley was happy, except for one person, and that person was me. Disaster was hovering over me. It was only a matter of time before my father would realize that I had taken his watch and pawned it with Kolya Shvarts. Kolya had had enough time now to get used to the idea that the gold watch was his, and as he was a man who drank Bessarabian wine instead of tea at breakfast, he could not bring himself to return the watch, even though I had paid him back his money. That was the kind of person he was. His personality was exactly like my fathers. Caught between these two men, I watched the hoops of other people’s happiness roll past me. I had no choice but to escape to Constantinople. Everything had already been arranged with the second engineer of a steamer, The Duke of Kent, but before setting out to sea, I decided to bid Di Grasso farewell. He was to appear one last time in the role of the shepherd whisked into the air by an otherworldly force. Odessa’s whole Italian colony had come to the theater, led by the trim, bald-headed consul, followed by fidgety Greeks and bearded externs staring fanatically at a point invisible to all. Long-armed Utochkin* was also there.

* Sergei Isayevich Utochkin, 1874-1916, an aviation pioneer, was a prominent and dashing Odessan figure.

Kolya Shvarts even brought his wife in her fringed, violet shawl, a woman as robust as a grenadier and as drawn-out as a steppe, with a crinkled, sleepy face peeking out at its borderland. Her face was drenched with tears as the curtain fell.

“You no-good wretch!” she shouted at Kolya as they left the theater. “Now you know what real love is!”

With mannish steps Madame Shvarts plodded heavily down Langeron Street, tears trickling from her fishlike eyes, her fringed shawl shuddering on her fat shoulders. Her head shaking, she yelled out for the whole street to hear a list of women who lived happily with their husbands. “Sugar puff—that’s what those husbands call their wives! Sweetie pie! Baby cakes!”

Kolya walked meekly next to his wife, quietly blowing into his silky mustache. Out of habit, I walked behind them. I was sobbing. Catching her breath for a second, Madame Shvarts heard me crying and turned around.

“You no-good wretch!” she shouted at her husband, her fishlike eyes widening. “May I not live to see another happy hour if you dont give that boy back his watch!”

Kolya froze, his mouth falling open, but then he came to his senses, and, pinching me hard, shoved the watch into my hands.

“What does he give me?” Madame Shvarts’s rough, tearful voice lamented, as it receded into the distance. “Low-down tricks today, low-down tricks tomorrow! I ask you, you no-good wretch, how long can a woman wait?”

They walked to the corner and turned onto Pushkin Street. I stayed back, clutching my watch, and suddenly, with a clarity I had never before experienced, I saw the soaring columns of the Town Council, the illuminated leaves on the boulevard, and Pushkin’s bronze head with the moon’s pale reflection on it. For the first time I saw everything around me as it really was—hushed and beautiful beyond description.

Gulays outfit had been crushed in the province of Vinnitsa in 1922.
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His chief of staff was Adrian Sulak, a village schoolmaster. Sulak managed to cross the border into Galicia, and shortly thereafter the newspapers reported his death. Six years later, we found out that Sulak was alive, hiding in the Ukraine. Chernishov and I were commissioned to track him down. We set out for Khoshchevatoye, Sulaks village, with papers in our pockets saying that we were livestock specialists. The chairman of the village council turned out to be a demobilized Red Army man, a good, straightforward fellow.

“You’ll be lucky if you can get your hands on a jug of milk in this place,” he told us. “Here in Khoshchevatoye they chew people up, skin and bone!”

Chernishov asked him where we could spend the night, bringing the conversation around to Sulaks hut.

“Yes, thats an idea,” the chairman said. “His widows living there now.”

He took us over to the edge of the village, to a house with a corrugated iron roof. Inside we found a dwarf in a loose white blouse sitting in front of a pile of sackcloth. Two boys in orphanage jackets sat with their heads bowed over books. A baby with a bloated white head lay asleep in a cradle. A cold monastic cleanliness lay over everything.

“KharitinaTerentevna,” the chairman said hesitantly. “I want to put these good people up with you.”

The woman showed us the room and went back to her pile of sackcloth.

“This widow wont turn you away,” the chairman told us when we were outside. “Shes in a bind.”

Looking around, he confided to us that Sulak had served with the Ukrainian nationalists, but had now gone over to the Pope of Rome.
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“What? The husband’s with the Pope of Rome and the wife has a child a year?”

“That's life,” the chairman said. He saw a horseshoe on the road and picked it up. “Don’t be fooled just because the widow is a dwarf— she’s got milk enough for five. Even other women come over for her milk.”

At home the chairman fried some eggs with lard, and brought out some vodka. He got drunk, and climbed up onto the bench above the stove to go to sleep. We heard whispering and a child crying.

“Hannochka, I promise I will,” our host whispered. “I promise I’ll go see the schoolmistress tomorrow.”

“Quiet up there!” shouted Chernishov, lying next to me. “We want to get some sleep!”

The bedraggled chairman peered over the edge of the stove bench. His shirt collar was unbuttoned and his bare feet hung down.

“The schoolmistress handed out some bunnies for breeding at school,” he said apologetically. “She gave us a she-bunny, but no he-bunny. So there was the she-bunny, and then come spring, that’s life, she hops off to the woods!”

“Hannochka!” the chairman suddenly shouted, turning to the girl. “I’ll go to the schoolmistress tomorrow and I’ll bring you a pair, and we’ll make a cage for them!”

Father and daughter went on talking for a long time on the stove bench, and he kept shouting, “Hannochka!” Then he fell asleep. Next to me, Chernishov was tossing and turning in the hay.

“Let’s go there now,” he said.

We got up. The moon shone in the clean, cloudless sky. The puddles were covered by spring ice. Bare cornstalks stood in Sulaks garden, which was overgrown with weeds and filled with scrap iron. A stable stood next to the garden. We heard a rustling noise coming from it, and a light shimmered through the cracks in the boards. Chernishov crept to the stable door, rammed it with his shoulder, and the lock gave way. We went inside and saw an open pit in the middle of the stable, with a man sitting at the bottom. At the edge of the pit stood the dwarf in her white blouse, a bowl of borscht in her hands.

“Hello, Adrian,” Chernishov said. “Getting a bite to eat, are you?”

The dwarf dropped the bowl and hurled herself onto me, biting my hand. Her teeth were locked and she moaned and shook. A gunshot came from the pit.

“Adrian!” Chernishov shouted, jumping back. “We want to take you alive!”

Sulak struggled with the bolt of his gun at the bottom of the pit. The bolt clicked.

“I've been talking to you as a person,” Chernishov said, and fired.

Sulak fell against the yellow, planed wall, scraping at it, blood flowing from his mouth and ears, and collapsed.