The bandits board a special train; some wear helmets and machine-gun belts; others march around in bare feet—Benya’s ragtag army, closer to the wildness and pleasures of the imagination than to Soviet ritual and propaganda.
While Benya cavorts in a former first-class car, a gilded bathtub with the tsar’s own eagles fixed to the floor, Red Army fighters climb onto the roof like angels of death.
The train arrives in a field, uncoupled from the other cars; all we have left is the locomotive and that lonesome first-class car with its gilded eagles as a reminder of the Old World. The angels of death creep down from the roof. One of Benya’s bandits tries to escape. Kochetkov shoots him in the head. Then he choreographs the King’s own execution. He takes Benya’s hand, and like a partner in some slow dance he spins Benya around, so that the King faces him. And someone shoots, either a soldier or Kochetkov himself. A spot appears on the back of Benya’s shaved neck, “a gaping wound with blood spurting in all directions.”
But the story doesn’t end there; we learn that the orders to isolate Benya and execute him came from the chairman of the Odessa Executive Committee, just as a similar chairman from the same committee had “lent” Isaac Babel to the Red Cavalry as Kiril Lyutov; Babel himself is embedded in the screenplay like some unfortunate ghost and pilgrim.
4.
BENYA KRIK WAS released in 1927 and the Party apparatus soon plucked it out of circulation. An old-world gangster wasn’t a suitable subject in a Soviet Union that believed in garage mechanics and baker-commissars like Kochetkov. . . .
Babel continues to wander. He talks of a novel he’s writing about the Cheka—he goes deeper and deeper into the Devil’s mouth. There are tales and rumors of Babel sitting down with the secret police, prying, pressing, as inquisitive as ever. He will brag to Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam how he “spent all his time meeting militiamen”—Chekists—and drinking with them. Osip asks him why he’s so drawn to these militiamen. “[W]as it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise is death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? ‘No,’ Babel replied, ‘I don’t want to touch it with my fingers—I just want to have a sniff and see what it smells like.’ ”
He visits France in ’27, boasts about his former service with the Cheka and about the novel he is writing, but Zhenya will later tell Nathalie that there was no such novel—or, at least, he hadn’t confided in her. And even if he had envisioned such a novel, would it have concerned the adventures of Kiril Lyutov inside the Lubyanka? Babel himself had become the Jewish giant in the photograph, powerless and puffed up.
He grows listless in Paris, as if he were living in some strange swamp. In March 1928 he writes to I. Livshits, a boyhood friend: “What I am going through must be called by its proper name—it’s an illness, neurasthenia, like the one in the days of my youth.”
But he didn’t have a dovecote to comfort him, or that mysterious rot of the Moldavanka, a Moldavanka where his grandmother lived and where he could watch those magnificent draymen, who must have been as exotic as Jewish acrobats for a sickly boy. . . .
He lingers in France, visits Marseilles, which reminds him of the Moldavanka, and the longer he’s away, the more other Soviet writers begin to carp—Babel has abandoned the Soviets; Babel is a slave of the West. He returns in October 1928, with little to show for his fifteen months abroad. But he’s come back to a much different Soviet Union. That Russian Wild West is gone. Stalin has strangled Lenin’s “breather,” and will introduce the “great breaking point,” where all Soviet citizens have to become udarniki—shock troops—on that sacrificial highway called socialism.
A born battler, Budenny senses that it’s the opportune moment to revive his attack on Babel. And Gorky has given him the occasion. In an article about the craft of writing, Gorky declares: “Comrade Budenny has pounced upon Babel’s Red Cavalry and I don’t believe he should have, because Budenny himself likes to embellish the outside not only of his men, but of his horses too.” Budenny counterattacks; in an open letter to the grand old man of Soviet literature, he starts to complain: Babel was never an active soldier, Babel “hung around with some unit deep in the rear.”
Babel is “an erotomanic author” who observed the Cossacks through his own morbid prism, concentrating on bare breasts in field kitchens and in the forest. His book should be called In the Backwaters of the Red Cavalry.
But Gorky is as much a battler as Budenny and even more beloved. He publishes an open letter in Pravda. Red Cavalry, he says, “has no parallel in Russian literature.” He appeals to Stalin, asks the Boss to end the quarrel, and the Boss obliges. “Red Cavalry is not so bad as all that. It is a very good book.”
And the carping stops. Russia’s chief literary critic has spoken. The case against Red Cavalry is closed, as long as Stalin needs Gorky, and Gorky can stay alive. . . .
5.
CALL IT 1930. There’s more and more pressure on Babel to find a Soviet subject that will recapture the romance of Benya Krik. A writer who can’t produce is nothing but a parasite. Babel plans to resurrect Benya as Kolya Topuz, another bandit, but one who is much more pliable, like a tamed bear with a ring in its nose. He starts a novella about a reformed Odessa gangster, calls it Kolya Topuz in honor of his new hero. “I want to show how this sort of man adapts to Soviet reality.” Kolya works on a collective farm, but “since he has the mentality of a gangster, he’s constantly breaking out of the limits of ordinary life, which leads to numerous funny situations.”
But not into myth. We don’t have a line of Babel’s novella. He may have been working on Kolya at the time of his arrest. Kolya could be one of his lost manuscripts. But somehow I don’t believe it. Babel would visit collective farm after collective farm, would even write about kolkhozniks, but the only kolkhozniks who really interest him are hunchbacks and whores, and whores had no place on a collective farm. . . .
In “Gapa Guzhva,” an acrobatic widow who drinks vodka on a roof and has tumbled into bed with every single male in her village is the scourge of all the village wives. A judge in a shabby coat has come to Velikaya Krinitsa to examine its little crimes and misdemeanors—“all the wounds, visible and invisible,” including Gapa Guzhva. The village elders won’t let her join the collective farm. “Judge,” she asks, “what’s going to happen to the whores?”
“They will no longer exist.”
That judge in his shabby little coat could have been sentencing Babel himself. There was no room for gargoyles in Stalin’s big collective farm, only for shock troops with a bullet-headed devotion to the State.
—They will no longer exist.
The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), ruled by Leopold Leopoldovich Averbakh, was sick of “fellow travelers” like Isaac Babel who could not commit to the Party and the virtues of “proletarian” literature. Averbakh was a madman, a militant, and a conniving hack, but he’d become a dictator, right under Stalin himself. It was Averbakh’s brainstorm to send writers into factories and collective farms to uncover and unleash the talent buried within the proletariat. Babel had to acquiesce, fulfill his duties as a “soldier” from RAPP; not a single proletarian writer was ever discovered by Averbakh and his mission of madmen. . . .
Meanwhile, Babel shuffled along, making friends with “engineers, jockeys, cavalrymen, architects, bee-keepers, cymbalists.” He grew more secretive—“his days were like the tunnelings of a mole”—and silent. And, for the first time since his apprentice year in Petersburg, he wrote stories that were being refused by Soviet editors.
But at least he was able to articulate his own dilemma. “As long as I don’t publish I am merely accused of laziness. If, on the other hand, I publish, then a veritable avalanche of weighty and dangerous accusations will descend upon my head. I feel like a beautiful girl at a ball, with whom everyone wishes to dance. If I were to let myself be persuaded, however, the entire gathering, like a single person, would instantly turn against me. . . . To dance at th
is ball as I do—this is surely a provocative impropriety, a wild and dangerous example.”
And Babel was slowly silenced, like that beauty at the ball. He’d danced like an amazing dervish for a little while, obliging us to follow him with our own blind faith. And then he stopped in front of Stalin’s wall. The little commissars of the Revolution had plucked off all his plumage, until he was one more Jewish giant, lantern-jawed and weak within a terrifying enfeeblement of language that strangled an entire country and left Babel a “dead soul” long before the Cheka came to collect him.
ZHENYA AT A SUMMER RESORT IN BELGIUM, CIRCA 1928
Chapter Six
MAKHNO AND MAUPASSANT
1.
IN JULY 2003 I went on a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., to interview Nathalie Babel. I didn’t know what to expect when I knocked on Nathalie’s door. Should I call her “Natasha,” the name under which Babel had known his little Russian daughter who happened to have been born in France? I admired her fierce devotion. She’d become Babel’s “editor” in the United States, had gathered his stories and letters . . . like a cunning cadet.
“Being Russian, French, American, and Jewish has meant that wherever I am, part of me could be somewhere else.” She could also have been writing about her father, who was always “somewhere else,” whether in his own mind or on some crazy gallop from place to place, or about wanderers like myself who’d traveled from their own “Odessa” on some rocking horse of words.
I felt close to Nathalie. Was she really the child of that Headless Man? When she opened the door I didn’t have any doubt. She looked like Babel, had the wondrous truculence of her father’s face, like a little commissar of mind and imagination. I’d been told she was a tough customer. Nathalie herself had said on the phone that she’d scared off another interviewer. He’d come all the way from Montreal and wanted to camp outside her apartment, question her for ten hours at a clip. But his first question was fatal. “Who are the Shapochnikoffs?” he asked. (Shapochnikoff was Maria Babel’s married name.) But I had studied the whole Babel tree, including the Shvevels (his mother’s family), the Gronfeins (his first wife’s family), and the Shapochnikoffs.
I asked Nathalie about her mother, Zhenya Gronfein.
“She’s the one who intrigues me,” I said, the dark lady from Kiev (with reddish brown hair), who’d been dismissed by Ilya Ehrenburg and others as a bourgeois beauty. The entire Soviet Union, it seems, had condemned her because her father happened to be rich before the Revolution. She’d been written out of Babel’s life, expunged. We have Antonina Pirozhkova’s testimony, her years with Babel—the pieces of string, Babel’s fear of forests (was he still haunted by the Red Cavalry campaigns near the end of his life?)—but we have nothing from the first Mrs. Babel, who was so unlike the second. . . .
Nathalie would grow up without the usual children’s stories. She had Isaac Babel. “Mother read the stories to me as a child. She admired them very much.” It wasn’t only Antonina who recalled Babel’s piece of string. Zhenya had told Nathalie about that habit of his. “They were in the Caucasus [it was 1922]. He would work at night, with a piece of string, and every day he would read to her what he was working on.”
Zhenya had fond memories of Batum, where she lived with Babel on the side of a mountain and had to hike for miles on unsafe roads in order to reach the nearest market. There were “hard times” on Babel’s mountain, yet “they were happy together.” An “heiress” from Kiev, “she didn’t have the slightest idea of how to cook. But she decided she had to cook.” And when she made Babel soup for the first time, “he put his knife into it. The knife stood up in the soup.”
Babel worked like a madman on his mountain. And then there was the move to Moscow when his writing began to unravel. Enter Tamara Kashirina, the Russian Delilah who entangled herself with the weak-eyed Samson of Soviet literature. And Babel scrawled his Avtobiographiya that same year: 1924. It begins to make sense why he didn’t include his marriage to Zhenya, a daughter of the Jewish bourgeoisie. He’d had his second birth, as a Soviet writer like Kiril Lyutov, who’d also “lost” a wife. The nom de guerre he used was hardly an accident—lyuty in Russian means “wild, ferocious,” as if Babel were pretending to be “ferocious” as a Cossack, or as “wild” as language itself, or could borrow his persona from the Revolution, cut off the past with some of the same violence. But the man who rode with the Cossacks wore an invisible skullcap. He had a tribe as compelling as the Cossacks themselves. . . .
Zhenya couldn’t forget the string of pearls her father hid from the Bolsheviks. Gronfein “twisted that string of pearls into the electric cord hanging from the ceiling. [And he did it just before the era] of Bolsheviks entering your house and grabbing everything—muzhiks coming in and threatening everybody,” after 1917. Her father “died first and quickly.” Zhenya had already gone to France, where she had neither friends nor family, and she asked Babel to bring her “certain mementos” of her dead father; Babel found “two small ivory cigarette holders— that’s all.”
2.
I HAD TO trace the path of the two ivory pieces. So I’m on a second pilgrimage—to the land of Maupassant, looking for Babel’s first address in Paris: Villa Chauvelot. But Villa Chauvelot has disappeared from the map. And so I wander into some labyrinth at the edge of Paris, in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, right near the périphérique, a sinister road that circles Paris like a hangman’s knot. Babel’s old neighborhood is in a bidonville where boulevards float into nothingness. I find the rue Chauvelot, which must have contained its own cul-de-sac, a blind alley with little houses where Babel had lived at number 15, but the whole “Villa” has been swallowed up by a modern housing development with broken balconies at the corner of the street. I reconnoiter on the rue Chauvelot like a Cossack commander, circle around the street to the impasse du Labrador, another cul-de-sac, which butts into the side wall of the housing project. I want to explore a bit, to uncover traces of Babel’s blind alley, but a wolfhound sits deep within the impasse and stares at me with his Siberian eyes, and I’m obliged to retreat. . . .
Babel left for Paris in July 1927 and didn’t return until October of the following year. Was he seeking some sort of reconciliation with Zhenya? A Headless Man capable of multiple lives (with multiple women), he arrived with his mother-in-law, Berta Davidovna, like a Russian Yankee Doodle prepared to conquer Paris. He lived among the “deaf-mutes,” as the Soviets called capitalists in the West, for fifteen months, a dangerously long time, even for a writer of Babel’s repute, a writer with a wife already in France (since December 1925), and a mother and sister in Belgium. It looked like the intrigue of an exile, someone who was planning to stay among the “deaf-mutes.” And indeed, exile must have been on Babel’s mind. French was his own first love. Hadn’t he announced himself as the new Maupassant? Hadn’t he visited Paris in his psyche long before he arrived, crowing to his writer friends about the frilly pink lampshades of Maupassant’s last flat? He was fluent in French since his days at Nicholas I, when Monsieur Vadon must have made him feel like a little Monte Cristo who had to return to his “homeland.” And he was lonely, often desperate, without his mother and sister near him. He would become crazed whenever letters didn’t arrive. “Write, write, write” is the chronic complaint in his own letters. “You’re knifing me.”
What kind of welcome could he have hoped for in France? He’d been living on and off with Tamara, had a “love child” to legitimize their liaison. Yet Zhenya, the little bourgeoise, as Ilya Ehrenburg called her, did welcome him back. She would tremble before he arrived, with anticipation and anger probably, over his love affairs (there was more than one Tamara) and the birth of the little boy. Zhenya would have known about the child, no matter how evasive Babel was: Moscow was a land of blabbermouths. And Zhenya kept that secret from Nathalie herself. It was only in 1957, when she was dying in a public ward in Paris, that she opened up to Nathalie.
“I left Russia mostly because of an affair your fath
er was having with an actress, a very beautiful woman. She pursued him relentlessly, and didn’t care that he was married. She wanted him and his fame, and had a son by him. Perhaps one day you might meet this man, and you should know he is your half-brother and not someone you could fall in love with.”
Why did she play Cassandra on her deathbed? Zhenya must have been carrying that same wound for thirty years; the reality of little Mischa (or Emmanuel) disturbed her much more than any mistress. And so she obsessed that Nathalie might fall in love with her half brother, as if she imagined parts for Nathalie and Mischa in some Sophoclean drama. But Nathalie wasn’t living in Moscow; there was little chance she would ever meet that anonymous boy. And yet the possibility plagued Zhenya like a little tale of incest. How many times must she have imagined that boy, wished to annihilate him, or steal him from Tamara? And it was into this imbroglio that Babel crept, the infected husband who was already notorious among Russian émigrés as the man who swore he’d served in the Cheka.
We have no diaries or agendas of Babel’s day-to-day existence in Paris. We know that he met Feodor Chaliapin in 1927, and that Chaliapin, the most adored actor-singer of his era, complained to Babel of his own unhappiness and neglect. And Babel felt the same neglect as Chaliapin. He was only a “skeleton” in Paris, one more Soviet writer in a land where writers weren’t treated like national treasures or holy men. No one stopped him in the cafés, demanded his autograph. No one talked like Benya Krik. He would hike to Montparnasse from the Villa Chauvelot, sit in the Dôme or the Coupole with his émigré friends, such as Boris Souvarine, a charter member of the French Communist Party until he was kicked out in 1924, and Yuri Annenkov, a celebrated painter and portraitist, and he would grumble to them about his disenchantment with the Revolution, but everybody grumbled. The Cheka could have been sitting with him at the Coupole. Tsarist generals were kidnapped right off the streets of Paris. . . .
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