The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (91 page)

with pimples, shivering with impatience and muttering bookishly, “Oh, how I want you! Give yourself to me!”

Recently something very unpleasant happened. I was standing on the ladder. Marusya had a client. Luckily they hadn’t turned off the light. (They often do, which is bothersome.) Her guest was a fine fellow, cheerful, unassuming, with one of those large, harmless mustaches. He undressed in a funny way, very prim and proper: he took off his collar, looked in the mirror, noticed a pimple under his mustache, went closer to the mirror, studied the pimple, pressed it out, and then quite cheerfully made a few faces. He took off his boots and again rushed to the mirror—might there be a scratch? They lay down, kissed, tickled one another. All very ordinary. I was about to climb down, when I slipped. The ladder fell with a crash, and there I was, dangling in the air. The apartment was suddenly full of commotion. A hysterical screech came from Marusyas room. Everyone came running, Fanya Osipovna, Tamara, some official in a Ministry of Education uniform. They helped me down. My situation was pitiful. Marusya ran in half dressed, her lanky client in tow, his clothes thrown on hastily. Marusya guessed what had happened, and froze. She looked at me long and hard, and said quietly, and with surprise, “What a bastard, oh, what a bastard!”

She fell silent, stared at all of us, went over to the lanky man, and for some reason kissed his hand and started to cry softly.

“My dear, oh, God, my dear!” she said, between kisses and sobs, caressing him.

The lanky man stood there like a total idiot. My soul turned inside out. I went over to Madam Kebchik.

Within half an hour, Marusya knew the secret. All was forgiven and forgotten. But I was still wondering why Marusya had kissed the lanky fellow.

“Madam Kebchik,” I said. ‘Til give you ten rubles if you let me look again.”

Madam Kebchik assured me that I was out of my mind, but ten rubles is ten rubles. So I stood again on top of the ladder, looked into the room, and saw Marusya, her thin white arms wrapped around her client, kissing him with long, slow kisses.

Tears were flowing from her eyes.

“My darling!” she whispered. “Oh, God, my sweet darling!” And she gave herself to him with all the passion of a woman in love.

She looked at him as if he, the lanky fellow, were the only man in the world.

And the lanky fellow wallowed in businesslike bliss.

INFORMATION

This story is an earlier version of "My First Fee."

^ on my literary career early in life, when I was about twenty. I was drawn to writing by a natural affinity, and also by my love for a woman named Vera. She was a prostitute from Tiflis, and among her friends she had the reputation of being a woman with a good head for business. People came to pawn things with her, she helped young women launch their careers, and on occasion traded alongside Persians at the Eastern Bazaar. She went out on the Golovinsky Boulevard every evening, hovering before the crowds—tall, her face a radiant white—as the Mother of God hovers before the prow of a fishing boat. I saved up some money, crept after her silently, and finally mustered the courage to approach her. Vera asked me for ten rubles, leaned against me with her soft, large shoulders, and forgot all about me.

In the tavern where we ate kebabs she became flushed with excitement, trying to talk the tavern keeper into expanding his trade by moving to Mikhailovsky Boulevard. From the tavern we went to a shoemaker to get some shoes, and then Vera went off to a girlfriend s for a christening. Toward midnight we arrived at the hotel, but there too Vera had things to do. An old woman was getting ready to go to her son in Armavir. Vera knelt on her suitcase to force it shut, and wrapped pies in oilpaper. Clutching her rust-brown handbag, the little old woman hurried from room to room in her gauze hat to say good-bye. She shuffled down the hallway in her rubber boots, sobbing and smiling through all her wrinkles.

I waited for Vera in a room with three-legged armchairs and a clay oven. The corners of the room were covered with damp splotches. Flies were dying in a jar filled with milky liquid, each fly dying in its own way. Other peoples life bustled in the hallway, with peals of sudden laughter. It was an eternity before Vera came back into the room.

“We’ll do it now,” she said, closing the door behind her. Her preparations resembled those of a surgeon preparing for an operation. She lit the kerosene burner, put a pot of water on it, and poured the water into an enema bag that had a white tube hanging from it. She threw a red crystal into the enema bag, and began undressing.

“We’ve just sent Fedosya Mavrikevna off,” Vera 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!”

A large woman with sloping shoulders lay in the bed, her flaccid nipples blindly pointing at me.

“Why are you sitting there so glum?” Vera asked, pulling me toward her. “Or are you sorry you gave me the money?”

“I don’t care about the money.”

“What do you mean, you don’t care? You a thief or something?”

“I’m not a thief, I’m a boy.”

“Well, I can see you’re not a cow,” Vera said with a yawn. Her eyes were falling shut.

“I’m a boy,” I repeated, and went cold at the suddenness of my invention.

There was no going back, so I told my chance companion the following story:

“We lived in Alyoshki in the district of Kherson”—is what I came up with as a beginning. “My father worked as a draftsman, and tried to give us children an education. But we took after our mother, who was only interested in cards and good food. When I was ten I began stealing money from my father, and a few years later ran away to Baku to live with some relatives on my mother’s side. They introduced me to an old man. His name was Stepan Ivanovich. I became friends with him, and we lived together for four years.

“How old were you then?”

“Fifteen.”

Vera was expecting to hear about the evil deeds of the man who had corrupted me.

“We lived together for four years,” I continued, “and Stepan Ivanovich turned out to be an extremely trusting man—he trusted everyone. I should have learned a trade during those years, but I only had one thing on my mind—billiards. Stepan Ivanovich s friends ruined him. He gave them bronze promissory notes, and they cashed them in right away.”

I have no idea how I came up with bronze promissory notes, but it was a very good idea. The woman believed everything once I mentioned these promissory notes. She wrapped herself in her red shawl, and it trembled on her shoulders.

“They ruined Stepan Ivanovich. He was thrown out of his apartment and his furniture was auctioned off. He became a traveling salesman. When he lost all his money, I left him and went to live with a rich old man, a church warden.”

Church warden! I stole the idea from some novel, but it was the invention of a lazy mind. To regain ground, I squeezed asthma into the old mans yellow chest—asthma attacks and hoarse whistling as he gasped for breath. The old man would jump up in the middle of the night and, moaning, breathe in the kerosene-colored night of Baku. He died soon after. My relatives would have nothing to do with me, so here I was, in Tiflis, with twenty rubles to my name. The waiter at the hotel where I was staying promised to send me rich clients, but up to now had only sent me tavern keepers.

And I started jabbering about low-down tavern keepers and their coarse, mercenary ways, bits of information I had picked up somewhere. Self-pity tore my heart to pieces; I had been completely ruined. I fell silent. My story had come to an end. The kerosene burner had died out. The water had boiled and cooled down again. The woman walked silently through the room, her back fleshy and sad.

“The things men do,” Vera whispered, opening the shutters. “My God, the things men do!”

A stony hillside framed by the window rose with a crooked Turkish road winding up it. The cooling flagstones on the street hissed. The smell of water and dust came rolling up the carriageway.

“So, have you ever been with a woman?” Vera asked, turning to me.

“How could I have? Who would have wanted me?”

“The things men do,” Vera said. “My God, the things men do!”

I shall interrupt my story at this point to ask you, my dear friends, if you have ever watched a village carpenter helping a fellow carpenter build a hut for himself and seen how vigorous, strong, and cheerful the shavings fly as they plane the wooden planks.

That night a thirty-year-old woman taught me her trade. That night I experienced a love full of patience and heard womens words that only other women hear.

It was morning when we fell asleep. We were awakened by the heat of our bodies. We drank tea in the bazaar of the old quarter. A placid Turk carrying a samovar wrapped in a towel poured tea, crimson as a brick, steaming like blood freshly spilled on the earth. A caravan of dust flew toward Tiflis, the town of roses and mutton fat. The dust carried off the crimson fire of the sun. The drawn-out braying of donkeys mingled with the hammering of blacksmiths. The Turk poured tea and kept count of the rolls we ate.

Covered in beads of sweat, I turned my glass upside down and pushed two golden five-ruble coins over to Vera. Her chunky leg was lying over mine. She pushed the money away and pulled in her leg. “Do you want us to quarrel, my little sister?”

No, I didn’t want to quarrel. We agreed to meet again in the evening, and I slipped back into my wallet the two golden fivers—my first fee.

Manuscripts

THREE IN THE AFTERNOON

J car window silent, burned fields. Father Ivan is sitting by the window, drinking tea and wiping the sweat off his fat neck. A small group has gathered around him.

“Exploitation,” Father Ivan says. “We moan, we groan. Bloodsucking spiders have trapped us in their webs! Think about it! The doctor is a Jew, the merchant dealing with trade and industry is a Jew, your young sons science teacher is a Jew—”

“A clever people,” someone says from the corner.

“Yids!” a student with a hard face and a pale blond mustache says

angrily.

“Take me, for instance,” Father Ivan continues. “I have a little plot of land, a vegetable garden, a cow or two. And yet I cant turn a profit from my simple little farm. Why, I ask you, cant I turn a profit, while my tenant Yankel Rosenshrayr is managing quite nicely?”

“Because he s a Yankel,” someone guffaws.

“The reasons are social and economic,” another answers more

slowly.

“So feast your eyes, gentlemen!” Father Ivan says, pointing at a skinny Jew in big galoshes. “My tenant lives like a pig in clover, feeds himself without the slightest effort, while I have to feed—”

Rosenshrayr, realizing that he has become the object of attention, carefully wraps the paper around his dried sausage, wipes his lips, brushes away the crumbs from his shiny suit, and knits his brow.

“Oy, even listening to your talk is disgusting to a mans ears!” he says.

He spreads out his red blanket and lies down, clasping his hands over his belly.

“We cant get by without Yids!” Father Ivan pronounces. “That is the tragic contradiction. A drunkard fell down the stairs into my cellar last month and passed away. Now my son has been arrested, because they say it was a punch in the face that sent the drunk man falling. Thats why IVe brought along the hooknose, for the defense.”

“Oy, hes starting again!” Yankel mumbles. “What an amazement! How much this man can speak!”

The train nears the station. “Vinnitsa Station!” the conductor shouts. Yankel gets up, puts on his white cloak that reaches all the way down to his toes, and his chocolate-colored bowler hat that keeps slipping down to his nose. He picks up the priest s suitcases.

“Oy gevalt
_y
these are not suitcases, they are lions!” he says, barely able to lift them.

They get off the train. From the train window Yankel is still visible for a long time, shuffling in his winter galoshes, barely managing to keep up with the majestic figure of the priest, who is heatedly pontificating about something.

“The devil and a babe in the woods, arm in arm!” someone in the railway car says, and guffaws.

In town the investigator informed Father Ivan that his son had been arrested for assault and battery and the murder of Vasili Kuzmichev, who had walked past the cellar door in a state of intoxication, and so on and so forth.

“Lord Almighty!” the priest said, his lips ashen, and sat down. “Jesus Christ in heaven, what are you saying!”

“Your Worship,” Yankel said, moving toward the investigator. “Your Worship, this, if you will pardon me, is too terrible to even hear! He is a priest, if you will please look closely! He is at the end of his rope. That Vasili was, if you will pardon me, a drunkard—a feeble man!”

The investigator lifted his hands in resignation. Yankel, propping up the tottering priest, led him out into the waiting room.

“Yankel,” Father Ivan said. “Yankel, I beg you—”

“Father,” Yankel answered, “there is no need to grieve this way! I cant see you like this! Wait for me here a moment—a hog wont come running if you dont dangle no turnip.”

Yankel went back to the investigator and sat down unhurriedly in an armchair opposite him.

“Him, the priest, hes a rich man. He needs all this nonsense here like you need to dance polkas on tabletops! So the drunkard came in and the priests son says, ‘You bastard, why are you drunk?’ Someone had been eating a watermelon, the drunkard slipped on it and fell, and now we got to make a big song and dance of it? Your Worship—its not like these people are some Yids or something! Hes a priest, a rich man!

Yankel took five ten-ruble notes out of his pocket and, peering at them, placed them under the inkwell.

“Get out of here, you lowlife!” the investigator said. “Go to hell!”

Yankel took back the notes and, treading softly, left the room.

“Father, these are not people!” he said to Father Ivan. “They are animals! Let’s go home!”