The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  The girl married him six months ago.

  Any minute now a child will be born in this peculiar building filled with peculiar people.

  This child will be a true child of our times.

  THE EVENING

  m not about to draw any conclusions. I’m not in the mood.

  My story will be simple.

  I was walking along Ofitserskaya Street. It was May 14, ten o’clock at night. I heard a shout coming from inside one of the courtyard gates. All kinds of people went to peek through this gate: a passing storekeeper, a sharp-eyed shop assistant, a young lady carrying a musical score, a fat-cheeked maid flushed with spring.

  In the depths of the courtyard, by the shed, stood a man in a black jacket. Calling him a “man,” however, might be going somewhat too far. He was a thin, narrow-chested little fellow of about seventeen. A group of brawny men howling drawn-out curses was circling around him in new, squeaking boots. One of the men ran up to him with a bewildered look and punched him in the face. The litde fellow lowered his head silently.

  A hand holding a revolver jutted out of a window on the second floor, and a rapid, wheezing voice yelled, “One things for certain—you wont live! Comrades, I will tear him to pieces! You will not live!”

  Hanging his head, the little fellow stood below the window and, with attentive sadness, peered up at the yelling man. The yelling man had widened the narrow slits of his lackluster blue eyes to their utmost, and the rage of his passionate, ridiculous shouting was making him increasingly incensed. The little fellow stood motionless. A candle was flickering in the window. The sound of a gunshot resonated like a powerful, velvety note delivered by a baritone.

  The little fellow tottered and ducked to the side.

  “What are you doing, Comrades?” he whispered. “My God. . . .”

  Then I saw the men beating him on the stairs. I was told that they were policemen, and that this building was their regional headquarters. The fellow was a prisoner who had tried to escape.

  The fat-cheeked maid and the eager storekeeper were still standing by the gate. The beaten, gray-faced prisoner ran toward them. Seeing him, the storekeeper slammed the gate shut with sudden gusto and leaned against it with his shoulder, his eyes bulging. The prisoner threw himself against the gate, and one of the policemen hit him over the head with the butt of his gun. There was a dull, muffled gasp: “Murder.”

  I walked down the street, my heart aching, despair seizing hold of me.

  The men beating the little fellow were all workers. None of them was over thirty. They dragged him over to the police station. I slipped in behind them. Broad-shouldered men with crimson faces crept along the corridors. The prisoner sat on a wooden bench, surrounded by guards. His insignificant face was covered with blood and filled with doom. The policemen became businesslike, tense, and unhurried. One of them came up to me and, staring me in the eye, said, “What re you doing here? Get out!”

  All the doors slammed shut. The police station screened itself off from the outside world. Silence descended. From behind the door came the sound of distant, muffled bustling. A gray-haired guard came over to me.

  “Go away, Comrade, you’re looking for trouble. They’re going to finish him off. See? They’ve locked the door.” Then the guard added, “Killing that dog is too good for him! I’d like to see him try to escape again!

  A few streets away from the police station I saw a cafe with a lit-up row of windows. Sweet music came drifting out. I was sad. I went inside. The look of the room startled me. It was flooded with the strange light of powerful electric lamps—a hot, white, blinding light. The brilliance made my eyes blur. The blue, red, and white uniforms painted a bright and joyful picture. Young blond heads and the gold of epaulettes, buttons, and cockades glittered beneath the shining lamps, and the black glow of the hard-polished boots shone with precision and exactness. All the tables were occupied by German soldiers. They were smoking long, black cigars, gazing pensively at the blue rings of smoke, and drinking large amounts of coffee with milk. A plump, maudlin old German was serving. He kept telling the band to play Strauss waltzes and Mendelssohns “Songs Without Words.” The soldiers’ powerful shoulders moved to the beat of the music, their bright eyes shone with sly confidence. They swaggered before one another and kept looking in the mirror. The cigars and the gold-embroidered uniforms had just been sent to them from Germany. The coffee-gulping Germans included all types: reticent and talkative, handsome and gnarled, laughing and silent. But the stamp of youth lay on all of them. Their thoughts and smiles were calm and confident.

  Our hushed Rome of the north was grand and melancholy that night. For the first time this year the streetlights were not lit. The white nights were beginning.

  The granite streets lay empty in the milky fog of the spectral night. Womens dark shadows stood out dimly against the wide intersections. The mighty St. Isaacs Cathedral loomed like a single, airy, everlasting stone thought. One could see in the blue, dusky radiance how clean was the delicate granite design of the carriageways. The Neva, imprisoned within its unyielding shores, coldly caressed the gleam of the lights in its dark, smooth waters.

  Everything lay silent: the bridges and palaces, and the monuments that were waiting to be torn down, entangled in red bands and ulcerated by scaffolding. No one was out in the streets anymore. All noise had died away. The impetuous light of an automobile dipped out of the thinning darkness and disappeared without a trace.

  The bodiless shroud of the night coiled itself around the golden steeples. The silent emptiness hid the most airy and cruel of thoughts.

  I WAS STANDING AT THE BACK

  We are like flies in September. We are sitting limply, as if we are about to expire. We have come together for a meeting of the unemployed of the district of Petrogradskaya Storona.

  We have been allotted a spacious hall for this meeting. The advancing rays of the sun—wide, hot, white—lie on the walls.

  The talk is being given by the chairman of the Committee of the Unemployed.

  He is saying, “There are one hundred thousand unemployed. The factories that have come to a standstill cannot be brought back into action. There is no fuel. The Labor Exchange is inefficient. Even though workers are running it, they happen to be workers who are not very clever, not very literate. The Food Distribution Department is not answerable in its operations to anyone. Those distributing bread among the population have the right to declare it unfit for distribution. No good comes of this. No one is being held accountable for anything.”

  The audience listens passively to the report. It is waiting for the conclusions. The conclusions follow.

  “It is essential that these government institutions not employ families as a whole—husband, wife, and children.

  “It is essential that the unemployed control the Labor Exchange.

  “It is essential that spacious premises be allotted to the Committee of the Unemployed”—and so on and so forth.

  Boots gleam with a black sparkle under the chairs. It is common knowledge that an unemployed worker, with a lot of free time and a lit-tie money left over from his severance pay, will spit assiduously on his boots every morning to give himself the illusion of activity.

  The speaker has stopped. Awkward, subdued men in stunted coats come up to the podium. The unemployed of Petrograd give speeches about their great neediness, the five-ruble assistance, and the supplementary ration cards.

  “Our people have gotten so quiet,” an aged toothless voice whispers timidly behind me. “Our people have gotten so meek. Look how quiet the peoples expressions are.”

  “One quiets down,” another voice answers in a rich and rumbling bass. “Without food, your head doesn’t work the way it should. On the one hand its hot, on the other there’s no food. The people, I tell you, have fallen into silence.”

  “That is true, they have fallen,” the old man corroborates.

  The orators changed. All were applauded. The intelligentsia took the rostrum.
A shy man with a little beard, distracted, coughing, covering his eyes with the palm of his hand, informed the audience that Marx has been misunderstood, that capital should be put to work.

  The orators finished speaking, and the public began to disperse. Only the sullen-faced workers stayed behind, waiting for something.

  A worker of about forty, with a kind, round face, red with emotion, comes up to the platform. The speech he gives is incoherent.

  “Comrades, the chairman has just spoken here, others too 1 think

  that’s fine, I don’t know how to express my thoughts. At the factory they ask me, ‘Who are you with?’ I tell them, ‘I don’t belong to no one, I’m illiterate, give me some work, I’ll feed you, I’ll feed everyone. The men came to the factory with newspapers, they all yelled their throats out. I was standing at the back, Comrades, I didn’t belong to no one, give me some work.’... One of them made a great speech—and what do we see? He turns out to be a commissar yelling orders—March around the Labor Exchange!—so what are we supposed to do? March around the Labor Exchange, and then around Petrogradskaya Storona, and then around the whole of Russia? . .. What’s the point of all that, Comrade?”

  The worker is interrupted. A roar shakes the hall. The applause is deafening.

  The orator is bewildered, elated, he waves his arms and kneads his cap.

  “Comrades, I dont know how to express my thoughts, but they fired me, and what is there left for me to do now? We all learned about justice. If there is justice, if we are the people, then that means the Treasury is ours, the forests are ours, the estates are ours, all the land and water are ours. Push us forward! We stood at the back, we are completely blameless, we’ve ended up hanging around jobless on street corners. A man cannot keep on living with such worry... . Everyones our enemy, the Germans and others too, and I wore myself out knocking them down . . . about justice I wanted to say ... if we could find a little work this summer, and all. . .”

  This last orator was successful, the most successful, the only one who was successful. When he came down from the podium, the workers lifted him in the air, clustered around him, and everyone applauded. He smiled happily.

  “Its never been my thing to talk,” he said, looking around him. “But from now on, Comrades, I will go to all the meetings, I have to say whats what about work!”

  He will go to all the meetings. He will speak. And I am afraid that he will be successful, this last orator of ours.

  1

  A brigade commander of the Sixth Cavalry Division who had been demoted after his provisionary tenure as commander of the Fourth Cavalry Division.

  2

  Iosif Rodionovich Apanasenko took over as commander of the Sixth Cavalry Division on August 5, 1920, from Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko.

  t Konstantin Karlovich Zholnarkevich was the chief of staff of the Sixth Cavalry Division until August 5,1920, during the period when Timoshenko was the division commander.

  3

  Timoshenko, the commander of the Sixth Division, and his chief of staff, K. K. Zholnarkevich.

  4

  Parfenti Melnikov, commander of the First Squadron of the Sixth Cavalry Division, who appears as Khlebnikov in “The Story of a Horse” and “The Continuation of the Story of a Horse.”

  5

  A figure in Vladimir Korolenkos autobiographical novel The History of My Contemporary.

  6

  Lepin, one of the staff officers, was Latvian.

  7

  The Petrograd Council, the seat of Lenin’s government, situated in the former Smolny Institute for Girls of the Nobility.

  ^ Approximately forty kilograms.

  8

  The Greek name for St. Petersburg/Petrograd, often used in Russian literature to give the city a classical air.

  9

  A Georgian sweet made of walnuts or almonds and honey.

  10

  The Petrograd Council, the seat of Lenin’s government.

  11

  The Greek name for St. Petersburg/Petrograd often used in Russian literature to give the city a classical air.

  ^ Field Marshall Alexei Razumovsky, 1709-1771, was a favorite of Catherine the Great.

  12

  See “The Georgian, the Kerensky Rubles, and the General’s Daughter (A Modern Tale).”

  13

  The Bolshevik October Revolution in 1917.

  ^ The area surrounding the Winter Palace.

  14

  Father Ioann of Kronstadt, 1829-1908, was the confessor of Czar Alexander III, and was considered capable of performing miracles.

  A small town outside St. Petersburg.

  15

  A Georgian sweet made of walnuts or almonds and honey.

  16

  The Petrograd Council.

  A BEAST CAN’T TALK

  The woman's face is smiling, gentle, a radiant white. An old monkey stares at her from its cage with cold scrutiny.

  The parrots, seized by tedious malaise, begin screeching with unbearable shrillness. They rub the wires with their silvery tongues, their curled talons grab the bar, they open and close their gray, tin-flute beaks like birds dying of thirst. The white and pink bodies of the parrots rhythmically rock on the wires of the cage.

  An Egyptian dove looks at the woman with its red sparkling eye.

  Guinea pigs, heaped into a quivering pile, squeak and poke their white hairy snouts out of their cage.

  The woman does not give the hungry animals any food. She cannot afford nuts or fruit drops.

  A monkey, dying of old age and lack of food, raises itself with great effort and clambers onto the pole, dragging its swollen, gray, hairy rear behind it.

  Hanging its dispassionate snout, coolly opening its legs, the monkey turns its dull, vacant eyes to the woman and begins performing the kind of foul act with which dim-witted old men in villages and boys behind backyard rubbish heaps entertain themselves.

  A blush floods the womans pale cheeks, her eyelashes flutter and close over her blue eyes. She moves her neck with charming, sly embarrassment.

  Soldiers and adolescent boys standing around the woman guffaw. She goes on a quick round of the zoo and comes back to the monkey’s cage.

  “You old dog, you,” she whispers reproachfully. “You have gone completely out of your mind, you shameless wretch!”

  The woman takes a piece of bread out of her pocket and holds it out to the monkey.

  Getting up with difficulty, the animal approaches her without moving its eyes from the moldy piece of bread.

  “People are sitting around starving,” a soldier nearby mutters.

  “What can a beast do? A beast cant talk!”

  The monkey carefully eats the piece of bread, moving its jaws cautiously. The suns rays touch the womans squinting eyes. Her eyes sparkle, and she throws a sidelong glance at the hunched, furry little figure.

  “Silly boy,” she whispers with a smile. Her chintz skirt billows, and brushes against the soldiers glossy boots, and with slowly swaying hips she walks toward the exit, where the swollen sun is drilling the gray street.

  The woman leaves—the soldier follows her.

  The boys and I stay behind, watching the chewing monkey. An old Polish woman who works in the building is standing next to me, muttering briskly that people have turned their backs on God, that all the animals are going to starve to death, and that people have now started the religious processions again—they have remembered God, but it is too late!

  Thin tears stream from the old womans eyes, and she wipes them out of her wrinkles with gaunt, nimble fingers. Her bent body shudders, and she continues muttering about people, about God, and about the monkey.

  • • •

  A few days ago, three gray-bearded elders came to the zoo. They were the members of the commission that had been charged with evaluating which animals appeared the least valuable. Such animals would be shot, as there was a shortage of food.

  The elders walked along the deserted, clean
-swept alleys. A zookeeper was explaining things. A visiting group of Tatar animal trainers, with meek Tatar maids in tow, walked behind the old men of the commission.

  The elders stopped by the cages. A group of two-humped camels rose onto their long legs in greeting and licked the elders’ hands, expressing the resigned bewilderment of souls confused by hunger. Bucks butted their soft, stunted horns against the iron bars.

  An elephant walked endlessly up and down the embankment, rolling and unrolling its trunk. But no one gave him anything.

  The commissioners deliberated, and the zookeeper continued desolately reporting the facts.

  Over the winter, eight lions and tigers had died in the zoo. They had been fed bad horse meat. The beasts had been poisoned.

  Out of thirty-six monkeys, only two had survived. Thirty-four had died of consumption and malnutrition. A monkey does not stay alive for more than a year in Petrograd.

  One of the two elephants fell—the better one. Hunger had made him fall. The zoo sprang into action and gave him a pood of bread and apood of hay. That didn’t help.

  The zoo no longer has any snakes. Their cages stand empty. All the boa constrictors, those illustrious specimens of the breed, have died.

  The elders walked the deserted little paths. The silent crowd of Tatar animal trainers and their meek Tatar maids followed them.

  The sun is over their heads. The motionless rays have turned the earth white. The beasts slumber behind the fences on the smooth sand.

  There are no visitors. Three yellow-haired Finnish girls with braids quietly sneak by. They are refugees from Vilnius. This is a special treat for them.

  The foliage, which has just turned green, is covered with a hot film of dust. The lonely blue sun shines high in the sky.

  FINNS

  In July 1917, Finland declared its independence from Russia. In this story, the Finns who are on Soviet territory are not sure where there allegiance should lie, and matters are further confused by a series of contradictory military orders sent to the Soviet troops stationed at the new Soviet-Finnish border; “Tatar" and “Turkic1 in this story refer to the Finns.