The Russian Jerusalem (6 page)

It is 16 May 1939, a warm spring day with birdsong. There are green trees and plum blossoms. Isaac Babel is asleep in his dacha. He is a child running along streets he does not recognise. His face is wet and salty. The streets are empty, the shops boarded up. At a distance, he makes out gunfire, then silence. It is a lonely dream, a dream of loneliness.

As he rises towards waking, he feels for his wife, then remembers she is in Moscow at his apartment on the Lane of Great Nicola and the Sparrows. Nina. He thinks of her sturdy body, her calm intelligence, her beauty. He is lucky. Women like him. They always have, even though he has glasses and a growing paunch. He makes them laugh. Even when they are angry they like to sleep with him.

He remembers the plot of land he bought on a steep embankment overlooking the sea in Odessa. As he thinks of Odessa, he is homesick. ‘One day,' he tells Nina in his dream, ‘we will build on it. We shall drink tea with apples, and shop for bagels. Moscow is cold and sunless most of the year, but in Odessa you can throw off your clothes and swim in the sea.'

The covers are light, and we can make out the weight of Babel's shoulders. He is a powerful man. In his dream, he is a horseman riding over a world of grass in July heat. He is riding with Kuban Cossacks, reckless men, who loot the little Jewish towns they pass, help themselves to potatoes, meat, recently baked cakes. The Ukraine is in flames. There are streets of blazing shacks. Old men. Screaming women. The wounded in bandages with bare bellies. Bewildered
Jews dishevelled in waistcoats and without socks. Fear.

Then there is a bang on the bedroom door. He is suddenly altogether awake. He can taste his own sweat as he licks his lips.

‘Who's there?'

Who else would it be? He has been waiting for them.

Nina is with two men. They allow Babel to dress but, as he emerges from the bedroom, they order him to put up his hands as if they were all part of an American gangster film. They go through his pockets. There is loose money, not much, a pencil, a few scraps of paper. Nina comes to sit next to him, and takes his hands. They huddle together. He breathes in her presence gratefully. She smells sweetly familiar.

The men work quickly. All his papers and files are tied into bundles and taken away. Nina tells him the NKVD have already raided his Moscow flat. They were there before daybreak.

‘You don't get much sleep in your line of work, do you?' Babel teases one of the men.

Nobody laughs. Humour is not encouraged in the NKVD.

Nina squeezes his fingers. She does not want him to antagonise these officers of the law. He smiles at her innocence, her credulity. She imagines a few words or a wry smile are relevant to men who have their orders and have not asked to understand them. She does not yet believe there is torture in Soviet prisons.

The men allow Nina to travel with him in the car on the way to Moscow. Babel kisses her ear, and whispers into her hair.

‘See my daughter grows up happy. Let André know what has happened.'

He means Malraux. Perhaps he can help? He knows he will need all the help he can muster.

‘You will be all right,' he reassures Nina, nevertheless. ‘A brilliant engineer? Always useful. Who needs writers, especially if they don't write?'

She is very strong. She does not cry, but she does not laugh either. When they say goodbye, with a long hard kiss, he knows it is over.

Except for the pain.

Inside the Lubianka, he gives up his passport, the keys to his flat and laces from his shoes. His fingerprints are taken. He is escorted to a cell in a yellow building within the Lubianka's inner courtyard. He knows his interrogators will be men who left school at eleven, who have never read a book, who do not know or care who he is, only that he has been designated an enemy.

He is not allowed soap, shaving material, braces or garters. They want him to grow filthy and unshaven until they are ready to question him. One of them snaps his glasses and then grinds them under his feet on the floor. Babel peers round blindly. Helpless. He remembers Yagoda's advice about what to do if arrested:
Admit nothing
.
Then our interrogators are powerless
. Not reliable advice evidently, since Yagoda himself is already dead, taken out and shot in 1938 after a year in a cell and some part in the show trials.

Babel knows about the ‘conveyor belt'. Teams of fresh interrogators allow a prisoner no respite. They will beat the soles of his feet and the base of his spine and deprive him of sleep. They will threaten his family. Everyone confesses. The brave leaders of the Revolution, Stalin's comrades –
Zinoviev, Kamenev – all confessed their treachery. Publicly. And his own friend and long-time protector, Bukharin? Stalin insisted Ehrenburg watch Bukharin's trial. He obeyed and was almost destroyed by what he saw. He never wrote about it. Never spoke of what he had seen.
There are some things a decent man does not report
.

Babel tells himself: I was always a loyal Bolshevik. I believed in the Revolution. In Lenin. In the Red Army. That's why I rode alongside the Cossacks. We were going to overturn the injustice of the Tsars. On which other side should I fight? He stares at the ceiling as he waits.

In the
stetl
, people spoke of going to live like a god in Odessa. We escaped from the
stetl
, cut off our sidelocks and turned to Revolution and Poetry. And it has come to this. Nothing has changed since they first destroyed the Temple. Misha Yaponchik, the model for Benya Krik, helped defend Odessa Jews from the Whites in the Civil War. He was murdered by the Reds.

They have taken away Babel's watch, and he does not know how much time has passed. His voice goes on in his head, in the long silence. Several days' silence. He is not a
shtarker
, a tough guy, for all his solidity. His body is middle-aged, over-indulged, out of condition. Not that it makes any difference to his situation.

He does not wonder why the NKVD have come for him. They have taken away so many of his friends. He had been one of the privileged of the Writers' Union. They gave him a big Ford, a chauffeur, allowed him to eat at ‘closed' restaurants and travel wherever he wanted inside the Soviet Union. This was remarkably good fortune for an inventor of fairytales, an impudent trickster who has fallen silent. His bluff has been called. What else could he expect?

Without glasses, his face looks meek and vulnerable, as if he were once again a shy, myopic child, with asthma. A sensitive boy who wanted to own a pair of doves. He misses his little French daughter Natasha. He would have liked to walk with her up Deribasovskaya in the sunshine, but he knows that will not happen now. For a moment, he thinks of his first wife, who has never forgiven his infidelity, or the son he had with another woman.

What has he believed in? He remembers the rabbis of his childhood, their instructions, their myths. No comfort there. Has he lived a wicked life? They would say so. But he has been kind and cheerful. Mine is an animal nature, he reflects. Plump women. Fine horses. Ice cream on a hot day. Laughter.

The walls of the unheated cell are damp, and he shivers. There will be no merriment here. In a moment they will bring some swill, and he will eat it. He knows what it is to fight for breath, to be afraid, to be humiliated. What happens in this cellar will be far worse. They are leaving him here alone so that he will understand as much.

In the silence, his thoughts drift and focus.

People will say I am here because I was once the lover of Yezhov's wife. It may be so. Yezhov, that evil dwarf, master of the Terror. Yes, I saw the hatred in his eyes when I visited his flat. Even though my love affair with Yevgenia was long over, and I went to those literary salons of hers as rarely as possible. Last winter she poisoned herself. Who knows why? Even Stalin was puzzled. Or so they say. Yezhov was removed from his post in January 1939. He is already dead, but words can damage from beyond the grave.

Babel falls asleep sitting up, and dreams of the French writer André Malraux with dark blond hair, and a lock falling over his forehead. Malraux seems to shake his head sorrowfully. Babel tells him: ‘When Gorky died, I knew they were not going to let me live.'

What seems most bitter when he wakes is remembering that he has begun to work again. The quiet of the dacha in Peredelkino suited him. There were no close neighbours. His rooms were almost unfurnished. He slept on a simple wooden plank with a mattress. He had low bookcases without ornaments, and a leather-seated chair bought from a junk shop. All he needed. Every morning he has been getting up early, eager to write. Short stories. He spent the last few evenings in his dacha translating Sholem Aleichem from Yiddish. In Moscow there were too many disturbances. The telephone rang too frequently: he sometimes put his little daughter Lidia on the line to say he was not home. Or imitated a female voice himself. His house had always been full of visitors; many writers he was too kind to discourage; now the wives of those arrested came to him for help. He soothed them as well as he could. Sometimes he invented stories to give them hope. Even at the end of 1938, it was not yet certain that ‘ten years without benefit of correspondence' was a euphemism for execution.

‘They didn't let me finish,' Babel says aloud in the empty cell. It is not clear whether he is talking about the stories he was working on or his own life. Probably no one is listening.

How can he declare himself a traitor to the Soviet Union?

The human body is vulnerable to many kinds of pain. You can put a man's head in a bucket of water and watch him
gasp for breath; hang him from tied arms until his shoulders crack; whip the soles of his feet. Attach electrodes to his genitals. If you don't care whether he survives, you can kick him with your heavy boots until his spleen ruptures and his spine breaks.

The torturers know: anyone can be broken.

When he has confessed, they take him back to his cellar.

Then the door is kicked open and his heart bangs. Have they come for him again? But no, they are bringing him new trousers and a shirt. In the pocket is a
handkerchief
heavily perfumed with Nina's favourite scent. He inhales deeply with closed eyes. Happiness. Gaiety. Another world.

When they bring him to Lavrenti Beria's office, the trial takes less than ten minutes.

It is a small room. Tsvetaeva and I are there, pressed against the wall, but no one is aware of our presence. Babel is brought in, filthy and unshaven. Without his glasses, he can barely make out the man behind the desk. Since he cannot see, his balance is impaired. He blinks and staggers. No one helps him.

‘Why do you think you have been brought here?'

‘It is my inability to write.'

‘What, you think you are arrested as an author? Think again.'

‘Perhaps because I went abroad?'

‘Surely you realise we want to learn about your activity as a spy? You and Yevgenia Yezhova worked together. We want to know about the rest of your network.'

‘There is no network. Neither of us were spies.'

‘Understand me. We want the details. We shall have them soon enough. Why do you force us to hurt you?'

As he is taken away, he lifts his head as if his blindness has strengthened some other sense. As if he felt there were spectres present from another age.

The guard pushes him out of the door. We do not follow him to his cell. Instead, we walk in the sunshine.

We are in another, darker room. Babel is much thinner. His face is bruised, a blow has closed his right eye, his front teeth are broken. One of his legs trails behind him awkwardly as he peers at his interrogator. But when he speaks, his voice is firm.

‘I want to confess a crime, committed while I was in prison.'

The interrogator looks surprised. Babel holds on to the back of a chair.

‘In prison? Strange. Don't worry about it. You have already admitted your guilt.'

‘I do not consider myself guilty. Except for this – during the interrogation I made up everything I said about the theatre director Solomon Mikhoels, the great film director Sergei Eisenstein. And Ilya Ehrenburg.'

‘Why would you lie? About such serious matters?'

‘Out of cowardice. To please my questioners. The Court must decide. The point is, there is no truth in what I said. They are all loyal Soviet citizens. I have no hope now for myself but I cannot bear to bring trouble on my friends.'

‘The Court will make up its own mind about that. And do you also deny your foreign ties?'

‘My ties, as you call them, were never more than writers' friendships.'

‘We know better. You set up a monthly journal. With André Gide, whose anti-Soviet views are well known. You worked as a French spy for Malraux, giving him information about our aviation. Didn't you?'