Isaac Babel
Isaac Babel (1894–1940) was a journalist, playwright and author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Tales, as well as stories of his youth. The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel were published in 2002. Born near Odessa, he moved to Petrograd, met Maxim Gorky and began making a living as a writer. He was shot, having been made to confess to being a Trotskyite spy, aged forty-five, a victim of Stalin’s Great Purge on account of his love for the wife of an NKVD chief. Babel’s last words were “I am innocent … I am asking for only one thing – let me finish my work.” He was exonerated under Krushchev in 1954.
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 river’s 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 sheep’s 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 people’s silence – that is a misfortune. To escape it, I ran out of the house and down to the Kura River, where I was over-powered 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?”
Vera’s 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. “We’ll 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. Vera’s 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 a jar 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. Don’t worry, we’ll 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 didn’t 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.
Vera put her hands under her breasts and jiggled them.
“Why do you sit half dead, hanging your head?” she sang. “Come over here!”
I didn’t move. Vera pressed her shirt to her stomach and sat down again on the bed.
“Or are you sorry you gave me the money?”
“I don’t care about the money.”
I said this in a cracking voice.
“What do you mean, you don’t care? You a thief or something?”
“I’m not a thief.”
“You work for thieves?”
“I’m a boy.”
“Well, I can see you’re not a cow,” Vera mumbled. Her eyes were falling shut. She lay down and, pulling me over to her, started rubbing my body.
“A boy!” I shouted. “You understand what I’m saying? An Armenian’s boy!”
O Gods of my youth! Five out of the twenty years I’d lived had gone into thinking up stories, thousands of stories, sucking my brain dry. These stories lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. One of these stories, pried loose by the power of loneliness, fell onto the ground. It was to be my fate, it seems, that a Tiflis prostitute was to be my first reader. I went cold at the suddenness of my invention, and told her the story about the boy and the Armenian. Had I been lazier and given less thought to my craft, I would have made up a drab story about a son thrown out by his rich official of a father – the father a despot, the mother a martyr. I didn’t make such a mistake. A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story. And for this reason, and also because it was necessary for my listener, I had it that I was born in the town of Alyoshki in the district of Kherson. My father worked as a draftsman in the office of a river steamship company. He toiled night and day over his drawing board so that he could give us children an education, but we took after our mother, who was fond of fun and 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 Stepan Ivanovich, an Armenian. I became friends with him, and we lived together for four years.
“How old were you then?”
“Fifteen.”
Vera was waiting to hear about the evil deeds of the Armenian who had corrupted me.
“We lived together for four years,” I continued, “and Stepan Ivanovich turned out to be the most generous and trusting man I had ever met – the most conscientious and honorable man. He trusted every single friend of his to the fullest. I should have learned a trade in those four years, but I didn’t lift a finger. The only thing on my mind was billiards. Stepan Ivanovich’s friends ruined him. He gave them bronze promissory notes, and his friends went and cashed them right away.”
Bronze promissory notes! I myself had no idea how I came up with that. But it was a very good idea. Vera believed everything once she heard “bronze promissory notes.” She wrapped herself in her shawl and her shawl shuddered 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 mind too lazy to create a real character.
I said church warden, and Vera’s eyes blinked and slipped out from under my spell. To regain my ground, I squeezed asthma into the old man’s yellow chest.
“Asthma attacks whistled hoarsely inside his yellow chest. The old man would jump up from his bed in the middle of the night and, moaning, breath in the kerosene-colored night of Baku. He died soon after. The asthma suffocated him.” I told her that my relatives would have nothing to do with me and that here I was, in Tiflis, with twenty rubles to my name, the very rubles she had counted in that entrance on Golovinsky Boulevard. The waiter at the hotel where I was staying promised to send me rich clients, but up to now had only sent me taproom keepers with tumbling bellies, men who love their country, their songs, and their wine and who don’t think twice about trampling on a foreign soul or a foreign woman, like a village thief will trample on his neighbor’s garden.
And I started jabbering about low-down taproom keepers, bits of information I had picked up somewhere. Self-pity tore my heart to pieces; I had been completely ruined. I quaked with sorrow and inspiration. Streams of icy sweat trickled down my face like snakes winding through grass warmed by the sun. I fell silent, began to cry, and turned away. My story had come to an end. The kerosene burner had died out a long time ago. The water had boiled and cooled down again. The enema tube was dangling against the wall. Vera walked silently over to the window. Her back, dazzling and sad, moved in front of me. Outside the window the sun was beginning to light the mountain crevices.
“The things men do,” Vera whispered, without turning around. “My God, the things men do!”
She stretched out her bare arms and opened the shutters all the way. The cooling flagstones on the street hissed. The smell of water and dust came rolling up the carriageway. Vera’s head drooped.
“In other words, you’re a whore. One of us – a bitch,” she said.
I hung my head.
“Yes, I’m one of you – a bitch.”
Vera turned around to face me. Her shirt hung in twisted tatters from her body.
“The things men do,” she repeated more loudly. “My God, the things men do. So … have you ever been with a woman?”
I pressed my icy lips to her hand.
“No… . How could I have? Who would have wanted me?”
My head shook beneath her breasts, which rose freely above me. Her stretched nipples bounced against my cheeks, opening their moist eyelids and cavorting like calves. Vera looked at me from above.
“My little sister,” she whispered, settling down on the floor next to me. “My little whorelet sister.”
Now tell me, dear reader, I would like to ask you something: have you 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 learned secrets that you will never learn, experienced love that you will never experience, heard women’s words that only other women hear. I have forgotten them. We are not supposed to remember them.
It was morning when we fell asleep. We were awakened by the heat of our bodies, a heat that weighed the bed down like a stone. When we awoke we laughed together. That day I didn’t go to the printing press. We drank tea in the bazaar of the old quarters. A placid Turk carrying a samovar wrapped in a towel poured tea, crimson as a brick, steaming like blood freshly spilled on the earth. The smoking fire of the sun blazed on the walls of our glasses. The drawn-out braying of donkeys mingled with the hammering of blacksmiths. Copper pots were lined up under canopies, on faded carpets. Dogs were burrowing their muzzles into ox entrails. 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 Turk poured tea and kept count of the rolls we ate. The world was beautiful just for our sake. Covered in beads of sweat, I turned my glass upside down. I paid the Turk 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.
Since that day many years have passed, and I have often been given money by editors, men of letters, and Jews selling books. For victories that were defeats, for defeats that turned into victories, for life and death, they paid me a trivial fee, much lower than the fee I was paid in my youth by my first reader. But I am not bitter. I am not bitter because I know that I will not die until I snatch one more gold ruble (and definitely not the last one!) from love’s hands.