The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (88 page)

Chernishov stood guard. I ran to fetch the chairman. We took the dead man away that same night. Sulaks sons walked next to Chernishov along the wet, dimly shimmering road. The dead man’s feet in Polish shoes with reinforced soles jutted out from the back of the cart. The dwarf sat stiffly by her husbands head. Her face, distorted by little bones, looked metallic in the dimming light of the moon. The baby slept on her tiny knees.

“Full of milk!” Chernishov suddenly said, as he marched down the road. “Ill show you milk!”

Madame Blanchard, a sixty-one-year-old woman, met Ivan Nedachin, a former lieutenant colonel, in a cafe on the Boulevard des Italiens. They fell in love. Their love was more a matter of sensuality than common sense. Within three months the lieutenant colonel had disappeared with Madame Blanchards stocks and the jewelry she had given him to be appraised by a jeweler on the Rue de la Paix.

“Acces de folie passagere”
¹³
the doctor diagnosed Madame Blanchards ensuing fit.

Regaining consciousness, the old woman confessed everything to her daughter-in-law. Her daughter-in-law went to the police. Nedachin was arrested in a wine cellar in Montparnasse where Moscow gypsies sang. In prison Nedachin turned yellow and flabby. He was tried in chamber number fourteen of the criminal court. First there was a case involving an automobile matter, followed by the case of sixteen-year-old Raymond Lepique, who had shot his girlfriend out of jealousy. The lieutenant colonel came after the boy. The gendarme pushed him out into the light, as a bear is pushed into a circus arena. Frenchmen in badly sewn jackets were shouting loudly at each other, and submissively rouged women fanned their teary faces. In front of them, on the podium beneath the republics marble coat of arms, sat a red-cheeked man with a Gallic mustache, wearing a toga and a little hat.

“Eh bien, Nedachin,” he said, on seeing the accused man, “eh bien, And his fast burred speech washed over the shuddering lieutenant colonel.

“As a descendant of the noble line of the Nedachins,” the presiding judge loudly proclaimed, “you, my friend, are listed in the heraldic books of the province of Tambov. An officer of the Czars army, you immigrated with Wrangel
¹⁴
and became a policeman in Zagreb. Discrepancies in the question of what was government property and what was private property,” the presiding judge continued sonorously, the tips of his patent leather shoes darting in and out under the hem of his gown. “These discrepancies, my friend, forced you to bid the hospitable kingdom of Yugoslavia farewell and set your sights on Paris.”

“In Paris,”—here the judge ran his eyes over some papers lying before him—“in Paris, my friend, the taxi driver test proved a fortress you could not conquer, at which point you concentrated all the powers left to you on Madame Blanchard, who is absent from this hearing.”

The foreign words poured over Nedachin like a summer shower. He towered over the crowd—helpless, large, with dangling arms—like an animal from another world.

“Voyons,”^ the presiding judge said unexpectedly. “From where I am sitting, I can see the daughter-in-law of the esteemed Madame Blanchard.

A fat, neckless woman, looking like a fish jammed into a frock coat, hurried with lowered head over to the witness box. Panting, lifting her short little arms to heaven, she began listing the stocks stolen from Madame Blanchard.

“Thank you very much, madame,” the presiding judge interrupted her, nodding to a gaunt man with a well-bred, sunken face, who was sitting next to him.

The public prosecutor, rising slightly, muttered a few words and sat down again, clasping his hands. He was followed by the defense attorney, a naturalized Kiev Jew, who ranted about the Golgotha of the Russian military officers in an offended tone, as if he were in the middle of an argument. Incomprehensibly pronounced French words came sputtering out of his mouth, sounding increasingly Yiddish toward the end of his speech. The presiding judge peered blankly at the attorney for a few moments without saying a word, and then suddenly lunged to the side—toward the gaunt old man in the toga and the little hat—then lunged to the other side, to another old man just like the first.

“Ten years, my friend,” the presiding judge said meekly, nodding his head at Nedachin, and hurriedly grabbed the papers for the next case, which his secretary slid over to him.

Nedachin stood rigidly to attention. His colorless eyes blinked, his small forehead was covered with sweat.

“T’a encaisse dix ans,” the gendarme behind him said. “C’est fini, mon vieux.”* And, quietly pushing the crowd out of the way, the gendarme led the convicted man toward the exit.

To be in Tiflis in spring, to be twenty years old, and not to be loved—that is a misfortune. Such a misfortune befell me. I was working as a proofreader for the printing press of the Caucasus Military District. The Kura River bubbled beneath the windows of my attic. The sun in the morning, rising from behind the mountains, lit up the rivers murky knots. I was renting a room in the attic from a newlywed Georgian couple. My landlord was a butcher at the Eastern Bazaar. In the room next door, the butcher and his wife, in the grip of love, thrashed about like two large fish trapped in a jar. The tails of these crazed fish thumped against the partition, rocking the whole attic, which was blackened by the piercing sun, ripping it from its rafters and whisking it off to eternity. They could not part their teeth, clenched in the obstinate fury of passion. In the mornings, Milyet, the young bride, went out to get bread. She was so weak that she had to hold on to the banister. Her delicate little foot searched for each step, and there was a vague blind smile on her lips, like that of a woman recovering from a long illness. Laying her palm on her small breasts, she bowed to everyone she met in the street—the Assyrian grown green with age, the kerosene seller, and the market shrews with faces gashed by fiery wrinkles, who were selling hanks of sheeps wool. At night the thumping and babbling of my neighbors was followed by a silence as piercing as the whistle of a cannonball.

To be twenty years old, to live in Tiflis, and to listen at night to the tempests of other peoples silence—that is a misfortune. To escape it, I ran out of the house and down to the Kura River, where I was overpowered by the bathhouse steam of Tiflis springtime. It swept over me, sapping my strength. I roamed through the hunchbacked streets, my throat parched. A fog of springtime sultriness chased me back to my attic, to that forest of blackened stumps lit by the moon. I had no choice but to look for love. Needless to say, I found it. For better or worse, the woman I chose turned out to be a prostitute. Her name was Vera. Every evening I went creeping after her along Golovinsky Boulevard, unable to work up the courage to talk to her. I had neither money for her nor words—those dull and ceaselessly burrowing words of love. Since childhood, I had invested every drop of my strength in creating tales, plays, and thousands of stories. They lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. Possessed by demonic pride, I did not want to write them down too soon. I felt that it was pointless to write worse than Tolstoy. My stories were destined to survive oblivion. Dauntless thought and grueling passion are only worth the effort spent on them when they are draped in beautiful raiment. But how does one sew such raiment?

A man who is caught in the noose of an idea and lulled by its serpentine gaze finds it difficult to bubble over with meaningless, burrowing words of love. Such a man is ashamed of shedding tears of sadness. He is not quick-witted enough to be able to laugh with happiness. I was a dreamer, and did not have the knack for the thoughtless art of happiness. Therefore I was going to have to give Vera ten rubles of my meager earnings.

I made up my mind and went to stand watch outside the doors of the Simpatia tavern. Georgian princes in blue Circassian jackets and soft leather boots sauntered past in casual parade. They picked their teeth with silver toothpicks and eyed the carmine-painted Georgian women with large feet and slim hips. There was a shimmer of turquoise in the twilight. The blossoming acacias howled along the streets in their petal-shedding bass voices. Waves of officials in white coats rolled along the boulevard. Balsamic streams of air came flowing toward them from the Karzbek Mountains.

Vera came later, as darkness was falling. Tall, her face a radiant white, she hovered before the apish crowd, as the Mother of God hovers before the prow of a fishing boat. She came up to the doors of the Simpatia. I hesitated, then followed her.

“Off to Palestine?”

Veras wide, pink back was moving in front of me. She turned around.

“What?”

She frowned, but her eyes were laughing.

“Where does your path take you?”

The words crackled in my mouth like dry firewood. Vera came over and walked in step with me.

“A tenner—would that be fine with you?”

I agreed so quickly that she became suspicious.

“You sure you have ten rubles?”

We went through the gates and I handed her my wallet. She opened it and counted twenty-one rubles, narrowing her gray eyes and moving her lips. She rearranged the coins, sorting gold with gold and silver with silver.

“Give me ten,” Vera said, handing me back my wallet. “Well spend five, and the rest you can keep to get by. When’s your next payday?”

I told her that I would get paid again in four days. We went back into the street. Vera took me by the arm and leaned her shoulder against mine. We walked up the cooling street. The sidewalk was covered with wilted vegetables.

“I’d love to be in Borzhom right now in this heat,” she said.

Vera’s hair was tied with a ribbon. The lightning of the street lamps flashed and bounced off it.

“So hightail it to Borzhom!”

That’s what I said—“hightail it.” For some reason, that’s the expression I used.

“No dough,” Vera answered with a yawn, forgetting all about me. She forgot all about me because her day was over and she had made easy money off me. She knew that I wouldn’t call the police, and that I wasn’t going to steal her money along with her earrings during the night.

We went to the foot of St. David’s Mountain. There, in a tavern, I ordered some kebabs. Without waiting for our food to be brought, Vera went and sat with a group of old Persian men who were discussing business. They were leaning on propped-up sticks, wagging their olive-colored heads, telling the tavern keeper that it was time for him to expand his trade. Vera barged into their conversation, taking the side of the old men. She was for the idea of moving the tavern to Mikhailovsky Boulevard. The tavern keeper was sighing, paralyzed by uncertainty and caution. I ate my kebabs alone. Veras bare arms poured out of the silk of her sleeves. She banged her fist on the table, her earrings dancing among long, lackluster backs, orange beards, and painted nails. By the time she came back to our table, her kebabs had become cold. Her face was flushed with excitement.

“There’s no budging that man—he’s such a mule! I swear, he could make a fortune with Eastern cooking on Mikhailovsky Boulevard!”

Friends of Vera’s passed by our table one after another: princes in Circassian jackets, officers of a certain age, storekeepers in heavy silk coats, and potbellied old men with sunburned faces and little green pimples on their cheeks. It was pushing midnight when we got to the hotel, but there too Vera had countless things to do. An old woman was getting ready to go to her son in Armavir. Vera rushed over to help her, kneeling on her suitcase to force it shut, tying pillows together with cords, and wrapping pies in oilpaper. Clutching her rust-brown handbag, the squat little old woman hurried in her gauze hat from room to room to say good-bye. She shuffled down the hallway in her rubber boots, sobbing and smiling through all her wrinkles. The whole to-do took well over an hour. I waited for Vera in a musty room with three-legged armchairs and a clay oven. The corners of the room were covered with damp splotches.

I had been tormented and dragged around town for such a long time that even my feeling of love seemed to me an enemy, a dogged enemy.

Other people’s life bustled in the hallway with peals of sudden laughter. Flies were dying in ajar filled with milky liquid. Each fly was dying in its own way—one in drawn-out agony, its death throes violent, another with a barely visible shudder. A book by Golovin about the life of the Boyars lay on the threadbare tablecloth next to the jar. I opened the book. Letters lined themselves up in a row and then fell into a jumble. In front of me, framed by the window, rose a stony hillside with a crooked Turkish road winding up it. Vera came into the room.

“We’ve just sent off Fedosya Mavrikevna,” she said. “I swear, she was just like a mother to all of us. The poor old thing has to travel all alone with no one to help her!”

Vera sat down on the bed with her knees apart. Her eyes had wandered off to immaculate realms of tenderness and friendship. Then she saw me sitting there in my double-breasted jacket. She clasped her hands and stretched.

“I guess you re tired of waiting. Dont worry, well do it now.”

But I simply couldn’t figure out what exactly it was that Vera was intending to do. Her preparations resembled those of a surgeon preparing for an operation. She lit the kerosene burner and put a pot of water on it. She placed a clean towel over the bed frame and hung an enema bag over the headboard, a bag with a white tube dangling against the wall. When the water was hot, Vera poured it into the enema bag, threw in a red crystal, and pulled her dress off over her head. A large woman with sloping shoulders and rumpled stomach stood in front of me. Her flaccid nipples hung blindly to the sides.

“Come over here, you little rabbit, while the water’s getting ready,” my beloved said.

I didnt move. Despair froze within me. Why had I exchanged my loneliness for this den filled with poverty-stricken anguish, for these dying flies and furniture with legs missing?

O Gods of my youth! How different this dreary jumble was from my neighbors’ love with its rolling, drawn-out moans.