The narrator refuses to become a clerk: “[B]etter starve, go to jail, or become a bum than spend ten hours a day behind a desk in an office.” And this credo feeds Babel’s own mythology, testifies to his acumen as the barefoot boy who rushes from one adventure to the next. “This wisdom of my ancestors was firmly lodged in my head: we are born to enjoy our work, our fights, and our love: we are born for that and for nothing else.”
But his ancestors were locked within the ghetto wall, a pale that would have broken his ancestors’ back, and that delivered little love or joy. Yet our picaro rushes out to collect whatever he can. Bendersky, the Jewish banker-lawyer who owns a publishing house, has decided to republish all of Maupassant, with his wife, Raïsa, as translator. Raïsa can’t make her translations work, and Kasantsev recommends the narrator.
He arrives at the Benderskys’ in a borrowed coat. They live in a mansion near the Moyka River. A high-breasted maid greets him at the door. “In her open gray eyes one saw a petrified lewdness. She moved slowly. I thought: when she makes love she must move with unheard-of agility.”
The maid’s imagined acrobatics are like the flights of power in Babel’s art—that movement from inertia into an acrobat of image and sound. . . .
But it’s Raïsa who occupies our mind, and not the maid. “Maupassant,” she tells the boy, “is the only passion of my life,” and Babel might well have been looking at his own face in the mirror—she’s the erotic monstrosity of his lifelong passion for Maupassant.
But there’s little of Maupassant in Raïsa’s translations—all she has is “something loose and lifeless, the way Jews wrote Russian in the old days,” before Isaac Babel.
The boy brings Raïsa’s translations home to Kasantsev’s attic and cuts his way through “the tangled undergrowth of her prose.” And it’s Babel who’s speaking here, not the picaro. “A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.”
All his life, Babel worked at that “almost invisible twist.” Raïsa and the boy are the twin demons that haunted Babel, one pulling toward access and jungle growth, and the other toward a surgical pinch of every line.
The boy returns to Raïsa with the corrected manuscript. Raïsa is overwhelmed: “the lace between her constricted breasts danced and heaved,” like language itself. One evening he finds the Benderskys at dinner. He listens to their “neighing laughter,” which serves as a marvelous counter to the dignified Russian he studied at school. What he hears is “a Jewish noise, rolling and tripping and ending up on a melodious, singsong note,” like the noise of the Moldavanka. . . .
Raïsa comes to him drunk. “I want to work,” she says, while “the nipples rose beneath the clinging silk” of her sacklike gown. They drink her husband’s most expensive wine. And they start on Raïsa’s translation of “L’Aveu” (“The Confession”), about a coachman, Hippolyte, and a farmer girl with “mighty calves”— always an aphrodisiac for Babel—and all the cat-and-mouse of seduction. After two years the girl gives in; the coachman sleeps with her right inside his carriage, under “the gay sun of France,” with a sick old nag leading them along. . . .
The boy takes his courage from the story. He kisses Raïsa on the lips. She presses herself against the wall. “Of all the gods ever put on the crucifix, this was the most ravishing.”
Does the narrator make love to her or not? He leaves that mansion on the Moyka before Raïsa’s husband returns from the theater. But the language of his little walk seems to support the notion that he hasn’t been quite as lucky as Hippolyte. “Monsters roamed behind the boiling walls. The roads amputated the legs of those walking on them,” as all godlike, gorgeous women with a pink layer of fat on their bellies amputate husbands and suitors who are frightened of their sex.
Frustrated, the narrator returns to the attic and starts to read a book on Maupassant’s life and work. Attacked by congenital syphilis at twenty-five. Incredible creativity and joie de vivre. His sight weakens. He suffers from headaches and fits of hypochondria. Suspicious of everyone, he dashes about the Mediterranean in a yacht, runs to Morocco. Famous at an early age, he cuts his throat at forty, survives, is locked in a madhouse. He crawls about on his hands and knees, “devouring his own excrement.” Monsieur de Maupassant is turning into an animal, reads his hospital report. He dies at forty-two, his mother surviving him. And once again Babel goes into his little act of trying to grasp something prescient in the last line of a story: “My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.”
The fingers weren’t light at all. The narrator and the author are terrified. The arc of Maupassant’s life may seem to duplicate Babel’s: early fame and quick decline. But there’s a much stronger parallel than Babel might have been conscious of. Maupassant hadn’t been the only one to devour excrement. Perhaps he had to devour before he could create. Images of excrement overwhelm Red Cavalry: fields are strewn with excrement, and the old man who has his throat cut in “Crossing into Poland” lies in his own filth. Excrement is a strange, vital force of the ghetto itself—part of its magic decay. And rather than the chronicle of a death foretold (Babel’s own), “Guy de Maupassant” is about an author-magician who lent Babel a language and a country and a totemic town—Paris—that would inspire Babel, free him to build his own myths as a writer, even if he couldn’t really live there. Perhaps no town could ever match the dream he had of Maupassant.
Chapter Seven
FINAL FICTION
1.
THE LAST YEARS, the lonely years, as Stalin tightened his noose—what could it have been like for Babel after he came home from France? It was August 1935. He’d lingered for two months with Zhenya and Makhno, while the other Soviet delegates at Malraux’s little congress, who didn’t have a wife and daughter in Paris and were scared to death of Stalin and his phobia of anything foreign, returned as fast as they could. I suspect Babel was a sleepwalker for the remainder of his life, but he was still a minor deity in the Writers Union, part of a privileged caste in a “new Moscow,” where “people were opening up their first bank accounts, buying furniture and writing novels.” Babel had a big Ford, a chauffeur, servants; he could eat at “closed” restaurants and travel wherever he wanted within the Soviet Union; and he would soon have a dacha built for him at Peredelkino— but he was like a great musician being forced to fiddle, and he couldn’t fiddle hard enough or long enough to satisfy his Soviet keepers.
Pirozhkova would have us remember a serene and saintly Babel, “born for merriment.” But there were no more meadows in May, bisected by an angelic band of women and horses. I’m not convinced there ever were, except in Babel’s mind. Georgy Munblit, the editor of a Soviet literary magazine, recalls a writer “about whose protracted silence in the thirties there were newspaper articles and feuilletons, speeches and writers’ conferences, and even, apparently, satirical songs,” but behind the mask of silence “was a man with an almost morbid sense of responsibility”—responsibility toward everyone but himself. As writers began to be arrested, Babel would show concern for their outlawed wives (stopiatnitsas), and had one of them move in with him and Antonina: “I’ll breathe more easily if she lives with us.”
Milton Ehre is convinced that Babel had a program of sorts, that his existence was “guided by a strategy of survival, a way to hold on in a culture gone mad.” Nathalie Babel is even more convinced that her father had a program, even if it wasn’t about survival. “His life centered on writing, and it can be said without exaggeration that he sacrificed everything to his art, including his personal relationships, his family, his liberty, even his life.” Hence, he had to return to the Soviet Union. “I am a Russian writer. If I didn’t live with the Russian people, I would cease being a writer. I would be like a fish out of water.”
But he was a fish out of water wherever he was—Paris, Moscow, e
ven Odessa, with its fairy-tale skies. We cannot tell what was in the notebooks and manuscripts that the Cheka took from him; no one has seen them but Babel himself (and perhaps his inquisitors). Their content remains a mystery. According to Antonina Pirozhkova, the manuscripts included a book of stories that Babel was preparing for publication. “And that’s what I’ll call it—‘New Stories.’ Then we are going to get rich.” There might also have been an excerpt from Kolya Topuz. And in a letter to Lavrenti Beria, chief of the Cheka at the time of his arrest, Babel begs Beria to let him put “the manuscripts confiscated from me in order.... I burn with a desire to work.” He mentions an essay on collectivism, notes for a book on Gorky, several dozen stories, a finished scenario, and a half-finished play—the “fruit” of his last eight years. Anyone with an interest in Babel has mourned this treasure trove, which disappeared when the Cheka destroyed its files in 1941, as the Germans sat outside the walls of Moscow. Legends have continued to grow about these manuscripts, that their very burning was a Stalinist ruse, that they’re still sitting somewhere in the cellars of the Lubyanka. Every few years or so there’s talk of an imminent Babel “sighting,” of some novel that was recovered from the ashes like a priceless jewel and is on the verge of being published in the former Soviet Union. . . .
Manuscripts don’t burn, says the Devil in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, but even if Babel’s unpublished manuscripts had escaped the Cheka’s fire by some divine intervention or devilish trick, I still have to wonder how Babel could have published a collection of “New Stories” in Stalin’s age of the New Soviet Man, unless he was Kiril Lyutov again on board the propaganda train. Babel’s “plumage”—his absolute belief in the cunning twists of language—was almost an attack on Stalin himself.
He could have polished and polished with the purity of a Spinoza, but he was still in some kind of fugue state. “I’m not afraid of arrest as long as they let me keep working,” Babel confides to Antonina, the same Babel who was so curious about the Cheka, who had watched men and women vanish. He was running out of masks to wear and roles to play. He’d embarked on a new family, with a new child, Lydia (born in 1937), and he arrives at the maternity hospital “carrying so many boxes of chocolate that he has to steady the top of the stack with his chin”—the comical Babel, the gallant Babel, the magnanimous writer-schlemiel who hands out chocolates to every doctor and nurse in sight. However much he loved Antonina and little Lydia, what about the family he’d left behind in Belgium and France? His distance from Makhno—and the thought that he couldn’t watch her grow up into a magnificent bandit chief—must have eaten him alive, this man with a morbid sense of responsibility. Babel was his own haunted house. His existence had become a kind of Red Cavalry—a series of short takes with several narrators. . . .
2.
THE LAST TWO STORIES that Babel published in his lifetime—“The Trial” and “Di Grasso”—offer us a tiny window into his despair. I’ve already talked about Nedachin, the failed jewel thief, trapped in Stalin’s circus “like an animal from another world.” “The Trial” reads like a parable that’s a little too opaque, but “Di Grasso” is full of sinews and flesh. Our narrator is fourteen. He works for a ticket scalper, Nick Schwarz, “a tricky customer with a permanently screwed-up eye and enormous silky handle bars.” But these are hard times on Theater Lane. Chaliapin is too expensive, and so the Sicilian tragedian Di Grasso comes to Odessa with his troupe. Nick Schwarz takes one look at Di Grasso’s folk drama and says, “This stuff stinks.” The narrator has nothing to scalp; he can’t even sell his tickets at half price.
In the first act, the daughter of a rich peasant pledges herself to a shepherd, played by Di Grasso himself. But a city slicker named Giovanni arrives in a velvet waistcoat and flirts with the maiden, while Di Grasso keeps flattening himself against walls. In the second act, she gives him back his ring. In the third act, the city slicker is at the village barber, while the shepherd stands in a far corner of the stage, as gloomy as Hamlet: “[T]hen he gave a smile, soared into the air, sailed across the stage, plunged down on Giovanni’s shoulder, and having bitten through the latter’s throat, began, growling and squinting, to suck blood from the wound.” The curtain falls, hiding “killed and killer,” and Di Grasso’s folk drama is declared a masterpiece. He goes on to play Lear and Othello, and confirms the terrible truth “that there is more justice in outbursts of noble passion than in all the joyless rules that run the world.”
And here Babel, with his usual mischief, is poking fun at the deadening art of socialist realism. Di Grasso’s troupe could be likened to Stalin’s own troupe of Soviet writers. Di Grasso is as much of a swindler as Nick Schwarz—his troupe has no talent at all, and it’s only through one magical leap that he blinds his audience to the mediocrity of “performance” in Stalin’s little state.
In the “terrifying and playful labyrinth of Babel’s fiction,” nothing is what it seems—opposites attract and collide, and in that collision produce a strange motif. Di Grasso is as nonverbal as the Boss, who could barely recite his own speeches, who would sit in silence for hours and draw wolves on the back of an envelope, but with his murderous jump into the air Di Grasso is transformed into a tragedian who can mouth the Boss’s favorite character, King Lear. According to one Moscow legend, the Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, a close friend of Babel’s and founder of the State Jewish Theater in Moscow, would come to the Kremlin in the middle of the night and sing Lear’s lines for Stalin, who would always cry during the performance. But this proximity to the Boss couldn’t save Mikhoels. Perhaps Stalin was secretly enraged that another man had seen him cry. He would have Mikhoels murdered in 1948. It was the Cheka that staged Mikhoels’ death, having a “drunken driver” run him over in a Cheka truck. . . .
But Babel’s art moves in all directions at once. Even if he’s parodying the idea that Di Grasso’s “outburst of noble passion” (a complete fraud) can bring justice to a joyless world, the leap itself is like an act of faith: the artist has to jump into the void, can only create by flinging himself through the barriers of language into the lyricism of “an unknown tongue.”
And then there’s the misadventures of the narrator in “Di Grasso.” He’s had to hock his father’s watch to Nick Schwarz. But Nick refuses to give back this “golden turnip.” And the boy, fearful of his father’s wrath, decides to run away to Constantinople. For the last time, he watches Di Grasso play that shepherd “who is swung aloft by an incomprehensible power.” Nick Schwarz has brought his missus to the play, a mountainous woman who looks like a grenadier with shoulders “stretching right out to the steppes.”
Nick is scared of his missus, who cries after Di Grasso sucks the blood out of Giovanni. “Now you see what love means,” she says to Nick. Madame sees the boy sob. She obliges Nick to return the golden turnip. “What can I expect but beastliness today and beastliness tomorrow?” she asks as she turns the corner into Pushkin Street with Nick. The boy stands there all alone, watch in hand. And he has one of those epiphanies that often frame Babel’s stories, for better or worse. He has a clarity, a certain distinctness of vision, with the bronze head of Pushkin’s statue “touched by the dim gleam of the moon.” And for the first time he sees the things surrounding him “as they really were: frozen in silence and ineffably beautiful.”
But the boy’s epiphany ricochets back to Babel in a manner it had never done before. Even with his father’s watch, the boy isn’t free. His only freedom is Di Grasso’s crazy leap, as genuine and fraudulent as any art; and without it, he’s stuck in a glimmering world that’s frozen and beautiful in its silence, as if Babel were fantasizing the “epiphany” of his own death—a landscape without him.
3.
“AFTER SLAPPING ALEXEI TOLSTOY in the face, M. returned immediately to Moscow.” Thus begins Nadezhda Mandelstam’s own journey with her husband, Osip, through Stalin’s endless gulag, in Hope Against Hope. We never learn why Alexei Tolstoy, “The Red Count,” got slapped. That’s o
ne of the beauties of Nadezhda’s book. But the energy of that slap carries us right across Stalin’s gulag with Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam. And one can only wish that Antonina Pirozhkova had written about Babel with the same acumen and sense of impassioned detail. Why did she have to protect him so much? Nadezhda reveals all of Osip’s faults—his paranoia; his need to wound himself—and he comes alive on the page as Babel never does in Pirozhkova’s memoir. It’s partly because Nadezhda was involved in Mandelstam’s writing, had memorized every poem and could recite them like songs in her head. And Antonina was an engineer who abandoned Babel to the mystery of his own work. . . .
But we discover more from Hope Against Hope about Babel’s time and the panic that must have paralyzed him than we ever do from any Soviet celebration of Babel. “Terror,” she tells us, “was planned, like the economy, and quotas for life and death were manipulated at will.” But it wasn’t out of Stalin’s own whim or perversity. “M. always said that they always knew what they were doing: the aim was to destroy not only people, but the intellect itself.”
And with the intellect, imagination and memory. Mikhoels, Stalin’s personal King Lear, was so full of sorrow after his first wife died, he couldn’t function. “He can’t forget her: he goes into the closet and kisses her dresses,” according to Pirozhkova. But Mikhoels’ obsessive grief—his memory—had little room in Stalin’s brave new world of Young Pioneers, Party apparatchiks, and shock troops.
And Nadezhda wonders why there was no rebellion among the intelligentishki, or anyone else who surrendered to the secret police. “We were all the same: either sheep who went willingly to the slaughter, or respectful assistants to the executioner. . . . Why did we never try to jump out of windows or give way to unreasoning fear and just run for it—to the forests, the provinces, or simply into a hail of bullets? Why did we stand so meekly as they went through our belongings?” There was “a paralyzing sense of one’s own helplessness to which we were all prey, not only those who were killed, but the killers themselves. . . .”
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