The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (9 page)

In Odessa there are sweet and oppressive spring evenings, the spicy aroma of acacias, and a moon filled with an unwavering, irresistible light shining over a dark sea.

In Odessa the fat and funny bourgeois lie in the evenings in their white socks on couches in front of their funny, philistine dachas, digesting their meals beneath a dark and velvety sky, while their powdered wives, plump with idleness and naively corseted, are passionately squeezed behind bushes by fervent students of medicine or law.

In Odessa the destitute “luftmenshen roam through coffeehouses trying to make a ruble or two to feed their families, but there is no money to be made, and why should anyone give work to a useless person—a “luftmensh”?

In Odessa there is a port, and in the port there are ships that have come from Newcastle, Cardiff, Marseilles, and Port Said; Negroes, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans. Odessa had its moment in the sun, but now it is fading—a poetic, slow, lighthearted, helpless fading.

“But Odessa is just a town like any other,” the reader will argue. “The problem is that you are extremely biased, thats all.”

Well, fine. So I am biased, I admit it. Maybe Im even extremely biased, but parole d'honneur; there is something to this place! And this something can be sensed by a person with mettle who agrees that life is sad, monotonous—this is all very true—but still, quand meme et malgre tout, it is exceedingly, exceedingly interesting.

And now my thoughts move on from my Odessan discourse to higher matters. If you think about it, doesn’t it strike you that in Russian literature there haven’t been so far any real, clear, cheerful descriptions of the sun?

Turgenev poeticized the dewy morning, the calm night. With Dostoyevsky you feel the uneven, gray high road along which Karamazov walks to the tavern, the mysterious and heavy fog of Petersburg. The gray roads and the shrouds of fog that stifle people and, stifling them, distorts them in the most amusing and terrible way, giving birth to the fumes and stench of passions, making people rush around frenetically in the hectic humdrum pace. Do you remember the life-giving, bright sun in Gogol, a man who, by the way, was from the Ukraine? But such descriptions are few and far between. What you always get is “The Nose,” “The Overcoat,” “The Portrait,” and “Notes of a Madman.” Petersburg defeated Poltava. Akaki Akakiyevich, modestly enough but with terrible competence, finished off Gritsko, and

Father Matvei finished off what Taras began.
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The first person to talk about the sun in a Russian book, to talk about it with excitement and passion, was Gorky. But precisely because he talks about it with excitement and passion, it still isn’t quite the real thing.

Gorky is a forerunner, and the most powerful forerunner of our times. Yet he is not a minstrel of the sun, but a herald of the truth. If anything is worth singing the praises of, then you know what it is: the sun! There is something cerebral in Gorky’s love for the sun. It is only by way of his enormous talent that he manages to overcome this obstacle.

He loves the sun because Russia is rotten and twisted, because in Nizhny, Pskov, and Kazan, the people are pudgy, heavy, at times incomprehensible, at times touching, at times excessive, and at times boring to the point of distraction. Gorky knows why he loves the sun, why the sun must be loved. It is this very awareness that hides the reason why Gorky is a forerunner, often magnificent and powerful, but still a forerunner.

And on this point Maupassant is perhaps off the mark, or right on the mark. A stagecoach rumbles along a road scorched by the heat, and in it, in this stagecoach, sits a fat, crafty young man by the name of Polyte, and a coarse, healthy peasant girl. What they are doing there and why, is their business. The sky is hot, the earth is hot. Polyte and the girl are dripping with sweat, and the stagecoach rumbles along the road scorched by the bright heat. And that’s all there is to it.

In recent times there has been a growing trend of writing about how people live, love, kill, and how representatives are elected in the provinces of Olonetsk, or Vologodsk, not to mention Arkhangelsk. All this is written with total authenticity, verbatim, the way people speak in Olonetsk and Vologodsk. Life there, as it turns out, is cold, extremely wild. It is an old story. And the time is approaching where we will have had more than enough of this old story. In fact, we have already had enough. And I think to myself: the Russians will finally be drawn to the south, to the sea, to the sun! “Will be drawn,” by the way, is wrong. They already have been drawn, for many centuries. Russia’s most important path has been her inexhaustible striving toward the southern steppes, perhaps even her striving for “the Cross of Hagia Sophia.”
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It is high time for new blood. We are being stifled. Literatures Messiah, so long awaited, will issue from there—from the sundrenched steppes washed by the sea.

I am wandering between tables, making my way through the crowd, catching snippets of conversation. S., a female impersonator, walks past me. In his pale youthful face, in his tousled soft yellow hair, in his distant, shameless, weak-spirited smile is the stamp of his peculiar trade, the trade of being a woman. He has an ingratiating, leisurely, sinuous way of walking. His hips sway, but barely. Women, real women, love him. He sits silently among them, his face that of a pale youth and his hair soft and yellow. He smiles faintly at something, and the women smile faintly and secretively back—what they are smiling at only S. and the women know.

On the other side of the cafe a man in a blue caftan and a peasant shirt tied with a strap hurries past in patent-leather boots. They call him the “Bard of Russian Song.” On the bards nose is a pince-nez, and in his soul the petty anxiety of a petty man. The bards face is that of a worldly pharmacist. Why even mention his name.

I make my way between tables where retired colonels with bril-liantined mustaches have found a haven for their shamed Czarist uniforms and play lotto with Jewish boys. Fat, serene wives of movie-theater owners, thin cash-register girls (“true union members”), and fleshy, flabby, sagacious cafe-chantant agents, currently unemployed, also sit with the colonels.

Our times have knocked these people off their feet, misfortune has driven them to the Palais Royal, and to Paraskeva and other Greek cafes to make a quick ruble trading in turquoise rings. At the club you can learn a lot about their desires and ideals, and who their idols are. Go to the reading room, where portraits of Gorky, Vinaver, and Linovsky
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hang on the walls. On the table you will find an old issue of Divertissement. Take it from me, a very interesting magazine! A life filled with mirth, wine, love, and death will open out before you. You can read about the clever and beautiful Jenny Molten, who came to Russia in the bloom of her youth. You can read about her successes and her admirers, of the papas boys who love her body, and the little men, downtrodden by life, who love her soul. You can read of her nomadic life, of the barrels of wine she has drunk, the crates of oranges she has eaten, of her husband, the husband of a cafe-chantant diva, and of her death. About the death of Jenny Molten you will read at the end. Someone else besides Jenny Molten who has died is Naumenko or Karasulenko, our passionate, trusting, drunk, kindhearted, hysterical Russian chanteuse. She died on a bed strewn with flowers and doused in perfume. Telegrams were found in her room from officials, warrant officers, and second lieutenants. According to these telegrams the second lieutenants were about to rush to her side, to kiss her. They were indignant about something, even threatening.

But in Divertissement you will also find serious articles with advice on professional matters and portraits of the editor, a handsome man with a black mustache and languid eyes. His mustache, his eyes, his noble demeanor point unmistakably to one thing: the editor was loved, and never squandered his money on little chanteuses. There are also stories in Divertissement about wrestling champions, of their first victories, the arenas bathed in light, the Parisian crowds, the Parisian women applauding ecstatically, the crowd carrying the smooth, powerful body of the wrestler on its shoulders. In every issue of Divertissement there are also jokes about Odessa Jews, about Cafe Fankoni,^ about brokers taking dance classes and Jewesses riding trams.

Divertissement smells of Odessa and Odessa’s hot, homegrown lingo. The whole club on Preobrazhenskaya Street smells of Odessa, and that might well be the only reason I began talking about it. These days the aroma of one’s native town is very important. This is the fourth year that warriors from afar have flooded it without respite. The horns of large ocean liners no longer roar, fine coal dust no longer wafts over the harbor. The brilliant sun lights the quiet, untroubled waters. There is no Bavaria pulling into port, there are no money changers, no tall, strong German and American sailors roaming through the town in packs, there are no taverns in the port where through waves of tobacco smoke one can see the drunk drooping heads of Englishmen, while a gramophone, rasping and proud, plays “Rule Britannia.” During the war, ruined people have flocked to our town, strange Jews who are foreign to us—refugees from Latvia and Poland. Serbs and Rumanians have come. But nobody who loves Odessa can say a word against these Rumanians. They have brought life back to Odessa. They remind us of the days when the streets were full of trade, when we had Greeks trading in coffee and spices, German sausage makers, French book peddlers, and Englishmen in steamship offices. The Rumanians have opened restaurants, play music with cymbals, fill taverns with their fast, foreign speech. They have sent us handsome officers with yellow boots and tall, elegant women with red lips. These people fit the style of our town.

Not that it is a problem if the other newcomers do not fit Odessa’s style. Odessa stands strong, she hasn’t lost her astonishing knack for assimilating people. A proud, cunning Polish Jew comes to Odessa, and before long we’ve turned him into a loud, gesticulating fellow who is as quick to flare up or calm down as the best of us. We’re still busy grinding them down. Soon the time will come when all the ex-Czarist officers who are used to life in the capital and their regiments in Mezhibozh will leave, and then all the red-bearded Jews, who walk dully down our streets, littering them dully with sunflower-seed shells, will go back to their gray Kozlovs and Tulas. The horns of ocean liners will once more blare in our harbor, and in our taverns old gramophones will once more croak words about Britannia ruling the waves. Our storehouses will be filled with oranges, coconuts, pepper, and Malaga wine, and in our granaries the greenish dust of pouring grain will rise.

I felt sleepy and was in a bad mood. Just then Mishka dropped in to >/ read me the novella he had written. “Lock the door,” he said, and pulled a bottle of wine out of his coat pocket. “This is an evening to celebrate! I have finished my novella! I think this is the real thing. Lets drink to it!”

Mishkas face was pale and clammy.

“Only fools will say that theres no such thing as happiness on earth,” he said. “Happiness is inspiration! Yesterday I wrote the whole night through and didn’t even notice the sun rising. Then I walked through town. Early in the morning it’s striking: dew, silence, and almost nobody out and about. Everything is limpid, and the day begins bluish cold, spectral, and gentle. Lets drink to it! There’s no mistake, this novella is definitely a turning point in my life.”

Mishka poured himself some wine and drank. His fingers trembled. He had remarkably beautiful hands—slim, white, and smooth, with fingers delicately pointed at the tip.

“You know, I have to place this novella,” he continued. “They’ll all want it. They print such rubbish nowadays. Connections are the most important thing. I’ve already put out feelers. Sukhotin will take care of everything.”

“Mishka,” I said to him. “You need to go through your novella again; I don’t see a single correction.”

“Nonsense! There’ll be time enough for that! Back home, everyone’s making fun of me. Rira bien, qui rira le dernier. I’m not going to say anything. Just wait a year, then they’ll all come running!”

The bottle was almost empty.

“You’ve already had enough to drink, Mishka!”

“I need to get myself on a roll,” he answered. “Last night I smoked forty cigarettes.”

He took out his notebook. It was very thick, very thick indeed. I thought of asking him to leave it with me. But then I saw his pale forehead, with a swollen vein protruding, and his dangling tie, crooked and pitiful.

“Well, Mr. Tolstoy,” I said to him. “When you write your memoirs, don’t forget to include me.”

Mishka smiled.

“You bastard!” he said. “You don’t value our friendship at all!”

I made myself comfortable. Mishka leaned over his notebook. The room was quiet and the lights were dim.

“My aim in this novella,” Mishka said, “has been to come up with a new way of writing that is filled with cloudy dreams, subtle shadows and allusions. . . . How I loathe, loathe life’s folly!”

“Enough preamble, start reading!” I said to him.

He began. I listened carefully. It wasn’t easy. The story was clumsy and boring. A clerk had fallen in love with a ballerina and kept lounging around under her window. She left town. The clerk fell ill because his dreams of love had come to nothing.

It wasn’t long before I stopped listening. The words were trite and boring, slippery as polished wood. Nothing was clear—not what the clerk was like, not what she was like.

I looked at Mishka. His eyes were sparkling. He was grinding his dead cigarette butts between his fingers. His dull, gaunt face, horribly distorted with sterile creative ardor, his yellow, fat, protruding nose, and puffy, pale-pink lips, all gradually brightened as he was gripped by the burgeoning power of his creative rapture.

He read with agonizing slowness, and when he finished, he awkwardly put his notebook away and looked at me.

“Well, Mishka,” I said to him slowly. “You see, you need to think it through a little ... The idea is quite original, it is very tender and everything, but, you see, it does need a little work... you see, it sort of needs to be edited down a little.”