by Leon Rooke
You reap what you sow, Babel and Maupassant thought.
“He’s been alone too long,” the woman said.
Babel and Maupassant regarded her warmly. Her voice was honeyed in mystery. She had the attractive tenor of a dog which buries all its bones under the same rose bush. “Sit on my knee,” Babel said, “I’ll tell you a story.” The woman laughed. They were a good sort.
Stories, Babel told her, feasted on his and Maupassant’s brain like butterflies flitting through a field on a summer day. His first reader, he said, other than Monsieur Vadon, was a woman of easy virtue named Vera.
“Veraushka,” he said. “This was in Tiflis, a burg on the Kura River, known for its roses and mutton fat.”
“Ah, Vera,” sighed the woman, as though she and Vera had exchanged intimacies during a soulful migration in the long ago. “You have your Veraushka, while I have a giant who every morning crouches in my ear saying nice things to me. Things only a giant knows a woman must hear.”
She smiled grandly. They could see she was no one’s doormat.
Maupassant spoke up. “Tell her,” he said to Babel, “the story of how you earned God’s wrath.”
God stirred in His slumber at mention of His name, but paid no more attention than He would have if anyone else had summoned Him.
“It was my story, ‘The Sin of Jesus,’” said Babel. “There was this hotel maid from Tverskaya Street being taken advantage of by guests and help alike. She was always finding herself pregnant, ruffians and gentlemen going at her till they were blue in the face. So she went to church one day and gave God a hard time, calling Him egregious names. ‘Old Fatguts’, ‘tub of lard’, ‘lethargic poodle’, and such. God negotiated. He made promises and poor Arina went back to her employment, where she found matters gone from bad to worse. Beatings one minute, pinned to the floor the next. So she went to church again and this time showed His Divinity no mercy. So much so that she won His attention. He told her to go home and He would send her an angel. Which I’ll say He did. But He had warned the woman young Alfred was delicate as a rosebud and she must be careful when sleeping with him or she might crush his wings. They were made of babies’ breath, those wings. Scented with precious powder found only in the back rows of heaven and in embassy gardens along the Quai d’Orsay. That’s exactly what happened. Young Alfred was a corpse before morning. This time the maid hauled off to the church fast as she could go. Her legs were chained, weighted by stones, she was made to run through invisible walls. But she arrived. She truly took a strip off Our Master. So much so that damned if He didn’t prostrate Himself. On His knees He was. That’s why God hates me. He ate humble pie, yet the woman wouldn’t forgive him.”
“That’s a horrible story,” the woman said.
“Yes, but funny. I was pulling old Dostoevsky’s leg.”
“Why does He hate you?” the woman inquired of Maupassant.
Maupassant sighed. He shrugged. He pitched about as though ants were at march under his skin, conveying his heart’s last little pieces to a secret lair.
“I sided with my mother on family issues,” he said. “That was a major sin. Mother smoked, ridiculed the clergy, and wore short skirts. Someone had to pay for that. My mistresses tended to resemble mother and favoured high-priced restaurants over sitting at home with a shawl over their shoulders. I was diseased, which meant I had earned it. I failed at suicide, a calumnious act. I died too young. I didn’t suffer enough.”
He paused, white in the face and panting like a fireman.
“It wasn’t just me. God hated all of Paris. It was more beautiful than heaven and double the size.”
He bent down to tie his shoelaces. Then realized he had no shoes. His shoes were in paradise walking on another man’s feet.
Babel furiously wiped grease from his specs. “God only likes black and white,” he said. “He likes no in-between.”
They sat in silence for a while. A cold wind blew. They tasted salt on their lips and felt its weight in the air. Their thoughts flew one way and another, adrift as homeless birds. A ship in the harbour sounded three long low notes, which bespoke a timeless misery sounding from the sea’s depths.
God gazed upon them with sleepwalker eyes.
A young schoolboy appeared in the doorway, dressed in the stiff black uniform of Odessa Commercial School. The starched collar buckled high on the neck. The shoes were new but the trousers had grassy stains over the knees. The horsehair bow held in the left hand looked as though it had been used to whip the violin carried in the right. His lips were puckered tight, as by a string. A military cap, smacked onto his head, perched just short of a stubby nose. His cheeks were puffed full. His face was turning cherry red. Miserable, he eyed the company. His stance widened and suddenly he let out his breath. The fat cheeks collapsed. “Auntie made me come,” a pinched voice said. “She commands I should play for the gentlemen ethereal tones.”
He tucked a napkin embroidered with red geese under his chin.
Scowling at everyone, he struck the fabled Heifetz pose.
The bow began a tortuous grind.
Babel wheezed. As a child he had succumbed to the charms peculiar to a sickly boy. It had been a means for avoiding such performances as this. Every parent in the Moldavanka had driven their sons to the violin with scoldings first, whippings next – the promise of ice cream in other worlds. Thanks to Maestro Heifetz and other galaxy stars, sons of Odessa who had cast the city’s eminence beyond the moons, the Moldavanka boasted snotnose prodigies by the cartload.
Babel rubbed his eyes. He opened them and the boy’s grin stretched ear to ear. The thirty-second concert was done. The boy had routed the Czar’s pygmy army, heated his sword with the blood of swarming anti-Semitic hordes, with Yiddling words had swooned crocodile Poles into eternal sleep, and now could dash to Okhtinskaya Square for Marseilles cookies and a hero’s tea.
“Asthma is salutary in a writer,” Babel said. “It makes for short sentences.” Maupassant smiled. The woman refilled their glasses. “I’m not respected,” she confessed to them. “Men want to lure me up back streets where they can talk dirty to me. They hover like crows in a dead tree.”
“That’s sad,” lamented Babel.
“Appalling,” Maupassant agreed.
Her eyes moistened. Tears rolled down the tinted cheeks.
“I collect my tears in a Venetian bottle and empty them nightly into the sea.”
She extracted a delicately blown azure bottle from her clothing and pressed the bottle’s lip to each cheek. The glass was so thin it barely existed. Tears inside the bottle flashed like tiny jewels, each one distinct. “Sometimes I’m convinced it’s these that incite shipwrecks.” All were silent, contemplating the image which failed to materialize exactly in their minds. “In my dreams these tears become small children on yellow tricycles circling the globe.”
Perhaps sentimental, Babel and Maupassant thought. But you can’t say she isn’t literatured in the faith.
She extracted a delicately blown azure bottle from her clothing and pressed the bottle’s lip to each cheek. The glass was so thin it barely existed. Tears inside the bottle flashed like tiny jewels, each one distinct. “Sometimes I’m convinced it’s these that incite shipwrecks.” All were silent, contemplating the image which failed to materialize exactly in their minds. “In my dreams these tears become small children on yellow tricycles circling the globe.”
Perhaps sentimental, Babel and Maupassant thought. But you can’t say she isn’t literatured in the faith.
More words fell from her mouth. They fell onto the table like knots in an endless rope.
They comforted her. They clasped shoulders and embraced. For a long time they sat as three heads consigned to a single neck.
Babel told her of a people who believed stars in the heavens talked to each other.
When one of the stars said something really funny the others would let loose blinding light. They’d flit about like crazed fireflies.
Maupassant told her falling stars are stars dying from a broken heart. Their hearts are broken because no one has said anything funny for such a long time.
Stars are dumber than fence posts, Babel said. They see themselves reflected in our oceans and swear our earth is a place where humour enlivens every minute.
They don’t know what to make of our daylight, Maupassant said. It spooks them. They spend their days wrapped in gloom, sorrowful as spiders, asking where night went. Then night returns and they dash about like dogs at a picnic.
The woman was calm again. She was becoming more calm with each passing second. She was becoming cold to the touch. Colour was oozing out of her. Her eyes were sealing. Her chest did not rise and fall.
She lapsed into rigidity.
A moment later, she was again posed perfectly still in the dark vestibule where she had been when they entered. Only now did they notice a marble pedestal dignified her presence. She had chips in the kneecap, they noticed. The nose was broken. A chopped ear. She carried a pitcher that would never hold water. An obscenity had been scribbled across the fine bosom.
Babel and Maupassant’s eyes drifted unwillingly towards God. They remembered. He had made that disgusting noise with His mouth, snapped His fingers, and a living woman had come to them.
Was some kind of truce in the offering?
As quickly as that, Babel was crying. Not for his sins, however. He had loved Odessa, he said. Here he had endured the pogroms of the Black Hundred. He had a daughter in Paris who had never seen Odessa and rarely seen him. His papa’s fine house on Ekaterininskaya
Street was not far from here. He had three children by three women, none of whom knew the others, or even knew of the others. Maybe the NKVD had put bullets in all their heads. Maybe the world had ended and this room and Odessa and a woman’s desecrated statue were all that was left.
Drunk already, he thought.
Maupassant has come to the door. Curious events are unfolding down the hill at Odessa Bay. The bay is disappearing. Workers in black coveralls are carting it away piece by piece. Only a smidgen of sky remains, and the water, along with its ships, the docks, warehouses, the strut of people in the far distance, have been sliced in half. Hammers are pounding. Workers shout at each other. “Unplug the master board, for Christ’s sake. Do you want to get us electrocuted?” “Rein it in! Rope the bastard!” “The flats are numbered, numbskull. I thought you knew your business.” “Load it! Not there, you idiot, that’s for the lights!”
Life is theatre, he thinks. If you can tell one from the other, you’re one in a million.
11
RASSKAZY
(STORIES)
Time passes and where has Egi Balduchi got to?
Over recent hours he’s been holed up in one and another washroom.
Embarrassing accidents have befallen him.
“Honey, you can’t bring that wheelbarrow in here.”
“I got no choice.”
“Not in here, sweetheart.”
“A wheelbarrow?”
“You look sick, baby. You sick, honey? I call 911, you say the word. But no wheelbarrow. You bring in wheelbarrows, where I’m going to sit my clients?”
The situation is urgent. Balduchi has veered into Sister Angelique’s Palmistry Den.
“You hear me talking, darling? Where you going? You can’t take no wheelbarrow in there. Honey, that’s my private toilette.”
Ivan Ilyich’s ill health, Balduchi has discovered, began with a queer taste in his mouth and a small pain in his left side.
Balduchi has that taste. The pain too.
Thamn-al-batn, the stomach price.
It comes to him that he may not finish out the day.
“Jesus, honey, you gave me the jitters. I thought you died in there. What’s with the wheelbarrow? What’s them whataya call them? Them ledgers, that board? Hey, I got it. You the Who’s Who man. Am I right? You the Who’s Who man. Baby, you famous. How come you not ask me to be in that book? I’m a Who’s Who too, baby. I’m famous too.”
She sits him at a table. “Hold on,” she says, “I be right back.” She returns with what she announces is ginger tea. On a yellow plate are biscuits containing raisins, jam, butter. “You missing you nourishment,” she says. “This fix you right up. Put zing in you step. What’s that? Money? Honey, I wanted you money I’d been in you pocket the minute you come through the door.”
Her mouth rarely quits. Though a big woman, she moves with the speed of a sleek bird. Her brown back is wide as a hayfield. Watermelon breasts. Her body bulges with the good intentions of a ten-dollar mattress.
“How old are you?” she asks. “Seventy-eight? Hell’s bells, you a spring chicken. My boyfriend older than you. A bull between the sheets he is. Toss me round like a heifer calf.”
In the meantime she’s taken over one of the ledgers – the “L” book. Between gusts of speech, she’s furiously writing in the book: Angelique La Rue’s very own Who’s Who.
“Nothing sordid,” she says. “I got quite enough of that in my real life.”
What I told my man D who was hot after me was that I was secretly engage to a man who did NOT want to marry me but had in mine a woman to work his fields & do what he want with me when dark come but D was fine with that he said Step over here in the shade & I stept & next I known I was looped into next week I was hot in love & soon walkin the peer to new found freedom in whatever lan would had us which is how I come to lan in this shop with money D claim wasn’t his & was NOT as I later fine to be the case not that I had regrets with acception of my chilren left behine but now with me thank God & even growed up now & my youngest one pregnant by WhoKnowsWho yet doin all right though it was my oldest DeLona I’d been watchiiiin every minute when it was Flora my baby was the wile one but D still on the scene thank God never mine his crankiness his Don’t Know What I Seen in You days the days the shade sit on you doorstep like a three headed dog somehow A WOMAN can live with that if …
“Uh-huh,” she says, breaking off from the scribbling, “Honey, what you saying?”
What Balduchi has been saying, holding himself tight, his eyes on the floor, alert for the sound of leaking juices in his insides, the pitchfork that will make sudden thrusts in his belly and knock him flat, is that money, not health, is his biggest headache. His Prison and Corrections pension doesn’t go far, frankly. Well, frankly, to make no beans about it, what he’s still hoping for is government or private intervention. What they call transitional funding. Bridging money. Surely a foundation ought to be interested.
“Wait, honey, hold you goats, let Angelique throw the cards, see what they come out with, see what my better half wiccam Sister Bleed in the Golden World have to say about you case. You sweatin’ some, some bit pasty-eye, sure now you don’t want to lay down?”
He needs in place a nice travel kitty, he says, since the project, done right, requires that he cover the city. Neighbourhoods he has yet to canvas are pretty far-flung – North York, Toronto Island, the Beaches. His own pocketbook can’t stand the pinch. What he hankers for is a kitty with enough cushion to allow himself a modest per diem, as is the custom in the corporate world. A small truck or van would be advantageous, although of course that would necessitate a driver, and Frannie, Frannie could be a big helep there. Yes a big helep, not that he’s going to ask her. Frannie’s got her own concerns. She’s getting up there, getting along, and ought to be having babies. She’s got a warm spot for the project, though, unlike Ula. Ula was dead set against it, Ula saw the project as a big embarrassment. “The looks I get,” Ula said, “the taunting! Did I marry a crazy man? Have I worked my tail to the bone for this? So you can push your crazy wheelbarrow through every corner of the city?” Not that I blame her, Balduchi said. She was a good woman, Ula was. A fountain of gold, except she wouldn’t helep.
“Honey, who’s Frannie, who’s Ula,” interrupts Angelique. “What’s this helep jive? You got to tell Sister everything.”
“We had a fire.
My daughter suffered smoke… smoke inhalation. Her lungs. And Ula…
Ula died. I don’t mean in the fire. I’m hazy on the details… Forty-six brooms. Such a precise number, I hardly knew what to make of it. Straw brooms with blue sticks, those grey smocks, they were all barefoot. I can’t explain it… Thamn-al-batn. God has put a flag by my name.”
Yesterday, unknown to Frannie, Balduchi had telephoned Ula’s old doctor.
Balduchi was seventy-eight. He had been retired for thirteen years. His wife dead for nine. But when he tried putting his mind to the task he found he could no longer recall what she had died of. She had been in sound health one day, dead the next. He recalled that much. To be of sound mind and body one day and dead the next had raised his suspicions.
“Ula Balduchi,” he said to the doctor. “How did she die?”
“Good God,” said the doctor. “Egi? I haven’t heard your voice in years.”
“Ula. Was it suicide? Did I kill her?”
The doctor kept him waiting a long time. Then said, “Great guns, Egi, are you that old? Maybe you had best pop in for a visit.”
“If she didn’t kill herself,” Balduchi said, “and I didn’t, how did she die?”
Another long pause.
“A streetcar, Balduchi. She was getting off a streetcar, carrying a bag of oranges, bag of mint candy for Frannie – and got nailed flat.”
It was Balduchi who then was silent.
“I doubt that,” he finally said. “I really doubt that. I remember nothing whatsoever of that.”
“Pop in” the doctor said. “You need help.”
Helep.
Balduchi was fairly certain the doctor had given the word an extra flip.
12
EXIT, TWO GHOSTS
“I owe my every success to my old teacher at Odessa Commercial School,” Babel said. “Monsieur Vadon. Did you know him?”
Maupassant reminded his friend that he’d departed this world a year before Babel entered it.