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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  “So here you are!” Kalugin said, raising his head. “Great! We need you here.”

  I brushed aside the toys piled on the table, lay down on the shining tabletop, and . . . woke up on a low sofa—perhaps a few minutes, perhaps a few hours later. The lights of a chandelier danced above me in a waterfall of glass. The wet rags that had been cut off me lay on the floor in a puddle.

  “You need a bath,” Kalugin told me, standing above the sofa. He lifted me up and carried me to a bathtub. It was an old-fashioned tub, with low sides. The water didnt flow from taps. Kalugin poured water over me with a bucket. Clothes were laid out on yellowish satin pouffes, on wicker stools—a robe with buckles, a shirt and socks of doublewoven silk. The long underpants went all the way up to my head, the robe had been tailored for a giant, the sleeves were so long I tripped over them.

  “So you’re making fun of old Alexander Alexandrovich?” Kalugin said as he rolled up my sleeves. “The old boy weighed a good nine poodT

  We somehow managed to tie Czar Alexander Ills robe, and went back to the room we had been in before. It was the library of Maria Fyodorovna,^ a perfumed box, its walls lined with gilded bookcases filled with crimson spines.

  I told Kalugin which of our men in the Shuysky Regiment had been killed, who had become a commissar, who had gone to Kuban. We drank tea, and stars streamed over the crystal walls of our glasses. We chased our tea down with horsemeat sausages, which were black and somewhat raw. The thick, airy silk of a curtain separated us from the world. The sun, fixed to the ceiling, reflected and shone, and the steam pipes from the central heating gave off a stifling heat.

  “You only live once,” he said, after we had finished our horsemeat. He left the room and came back with two boxes—a gift from Sultan Abdul Hamid11 to the Russian sovereign. One was made of zinc, the other was a cigar box sealed with tape and paper emblems. “A sa majeste, VEmpererur de toutes les Russies” was engraved on the zinc lid, “from his well-wishing cousin.”

  Maria Fyodorovna’s library was flooded with an aroma she had known a quarter of a century ago. Cigars twenty centimeters long and thick as a finger were wrapped in pink paper. I do not know if anyone besides the autocrat of all the Russias had ever smoked such cigars, but nevertheless I chose one. Kalugin looked at me and smiled.

  “You only live once,” he said. “Let’s hope they’ve not been counted. The lackeys told me that Alexander III was an inveterate smoker. He loved tobacco, kvass, and champagne. But on his table—take a look!—there are five-kopeck clay ashtrays, and there are patches on his trousers!”

  And sure enough, the robe I had been arrayed in was stained, shiny, and had been mended many times.

  We passed the rest of the night going through Nicholas Us toys, his drums and locomotives, his christening shirt, and his notebooks with their childish scribbles. Pictures of grand dukes who had died in infancy, locks of their hair, the diaries of the Danish Princess Dagmar,* the letters of her sister, the Queen of England, breathing perfume and decay, crumbling in our fingers. On the title pages of the Bible and Lamartine,^ her friends and governesses—the daughters of burgomasters and state councilors—bade farewell in laborious slanting lines to the princess leaving for Russia. Her mother, Louisa, queen of a small kingdom, had put much effort into seeing her children well settled. She gave one of her daughters to Edward VII, the Emperor of India and King of England, and the other to a Romanov. Her son George was made King of Greece. Princess Dagmar turned into Maria in Russia. The canals of Copenhagen and the chocolate sideburns of King Christian faded in the distance. Bearing the last of the sovereigns, Maria, a tiny woman with the fierceness of a fox, hurried through the palisades of the Preobrazhensky Grenadiers. But her maternal blood was to spill on Russia’s implacable, unforgiving granite earth.

  We could not tear ourselves from the dull, fatal chronicle till dawn. I had finished smoking Abdul-Hamid’s cigar. In the morning, Kalugin took me to the Cheka, to Gorokhovaya Street, number two. He had a word with Uritsky.12 I stood behind a heavy curtain that hung to the ground in cloth waves. Fragments of words made their way through to me.

  uHes one of us,” Kalugin said. “His father is a storekeeper, a merchant, but he’s washed his hands of them. . . . He knows languages.”

  Uritsky came out of his office with a tottering gait. His swollen eyelids, burned by sleeplessness, bulged behind the glass of his pince-nez.

  They made me a translator in the Foreign Division. I was issued a military uniform and food coupons. In a corner of the Petersburg City Hall that was allocated to me I set about translating depositions of diplomats, agents provocateurs, and spies.

  Within a single day I had everything: clothes, food, work, and comrades true in friendship and death, comrades the likes of which you will not find anywhere in the world, except in our country.

  That is how, thirteen years ago, a wonderful life filled with thought and joy began for me.

  THE IVAN AND MARIA

  In the summer of 1918 Sergei Vasilevich Malishev,13 who was to become the chairman of the Nizhny-Novgorod Fair Committee, organized our nations first produce expedition. With Lenin’s approval, he loaded a series of trains with goods useful to peasants, and sent these trains to the Volga region to exchange the goods for wheat.

  I ended up in the clerical department of this expedition. We chose the Novo-Nikolayev district in the province of Samara as our field of operation. According to the specialists, this province, if properly cultivated, was capable of feeding the whole Moscow region.

  Near Saratov,^ the goods were reloaded onto a barge at the river docks of Uvek. The hold of this barge became a makeshift department store. We pinned up portraits of Lenin and Marx between the curved ribs of our floating warehouse and framed the portraits with ears of corn, and we arranged bales of calico, scythes, nails, and leather goods on the shelves, even concertinas and balalaikas.

  At Uvek we had been given a tugboat, the Ivan Tupitsin, named after a Volga merchant who had been its previous owner. The “staff,” Malishev with his assistants and cashiers, made themselves at home on the tugboat, while the guards and sales clerks slept on the barge, under the counters.

  It took a week to load the goods onto the barge. On a July morning the Ivan Tupitsin, gushing fat puffs of smoke, began to pull us up the Volga to Baronsk.14The local German settlers call it Katarinenstadt. It is now the capital of the Volga German Province, a wonderful region settled by hardy, taciturn folk.

  The steppes outside Baronsk are covered with heavy, golden wheat, such as you can only find in Canada. They are filled with sunflowers and black oily clumps of earth. We had traveled from a Petersburg licked clean by granite flames to a California that was Russian through and through, and therefore even more outlandish. In our own California a pound of grain cost sixty kopecks, and not ten rubles as it did back in the north. We threw ourselves onto the loaves of bread with a savagery that nowadays is impossible to understand. We plunged our canine teeth, sharpened by hunger, into the breads gossamer core. For two weeks we languished in a blissful drunkenness of indigestion. To me, the blood flowing through our veins had the taste and color of raspberry jam.

  Malishevs calculations had been right: sales went well. Slow streams of carts flowed to the riverbank from all corners of the steppes. The sun crept over the backs of well-fed horses. The sun shone on the tops of the wheat-covered hills. Carts in a thousand dots descended to the Volga. Giants in woolen jerseys, descendants of the Dutch farmers who had settled in the Volga regions in the days of Catherine, strode beside the horses. Their faces looked just as they had back in Zaandam^ and Haarlem. Drops of sparkling turquoise shone from within a mesh of leathery wrinkles beneath patriarchal mossy eyebrows. Smoke from tobacco pipes melted into the bluish lightning that flashed over the steppes. The settlers slowly climbed the gangplank onto the barge. Their wooden shoes clanged like bells heralding strength and peace. The goods were chosen by old women in starched bonnets and brown bodices. Their purchases were carr
ied to the carts. Village painters had strewn armfuls of wildflowers and pink bull muzzles along the sides of the carts—the outer sides were usually painted a deep blue, within which waxen apples and plums gleamed, touched by the rays of the sun.

  People from far away rode in on camels. These animals lay on the riverbank, their collapsed humps cutting into the horizon. Our trading always ended toward evening. We locked our store. The guards—war invalids—and the sales clerks undressed and jumped off the barges into the Volga burning in the sunset. On the distant steppes the wheat rolled in red waves. The walls of the sunset were collapsing in the sky. The swimming workers of the Samara Province Produce Expedition (that is what we were called in official documents) were an unusual spectacle. The cripples spouted silty pink streams from the river. Some of the guards were one-legged, others were missing an arm or an eye. They hooked themselves up in twos so they could swim. Two men would then have two legs, thrashing the water with their stumps, silty streams rushing in whirls between their bodies. Growling and snorting, the cripples rolled out onto the riverbank, frolicking, shaking their stumps at the flowing skies, covering themselves with sand, and wrestling, grabbing hold of each others chopped extremities. After swimming, we went to the tavern of Karl Biedermayer. Our day was crowned by supper there. Two girls with brick-red hands, Augusta and Anna, served us meat patties—red flagstones quivering under whorls of seething butter and heaped with haystacks of fried potatoes. They spiced this mountain of village fare with onions and garlic. They placed jars of sour pickles in front of us. The smoke of the sunset wafted in from the marketplace through little round windows high up near the ceiling. The pickles smoldered in the crimson smoke and smelled of the seashore. We washed down the meat with cider. Every evening we, the residents of Peski and Okhta, men of the Petersburg suburbs that were frozen over with yellow urine, once again felt like conquerors. The little windows, cut into black walls centuries old, resembled portholes. Through them shone a courtyard, blissfully clean, a little German courtyard with rosebushes and wisteria, and the violet precipice of an open stable. Old women in bodices sat on stoops, knitting stockings for Gulliver. Herds were coming back from the pastures. Augusta and Anna sat down on stools beside the cows. Radiant bovine eyes glittered in the twilight. It was as if there had never been war on earth. And yet the front of the Ural Cossacks was only twenty versts from Baronsk.* [ The Red Army was fighting the White counterrevolutionary troops made up of Ural Cossacks and Czech divisions.]

  Karl Biedermayer had no idea that the Civil War was rolling toward his home.

  At night I returned to our hold in the barge with Seletsky, who was a clerk, just as I was. He sang as we walked. Heads in nightcaps peered out of lancet windows. The moonlight flowed down the roof tiles’ red canals. The muffled barking of dogs rose above this Russian Zaandam. Riveted Augustas and Annas listened to Seletsky’s song. His deep bass carried us to the steppes, to the gothic enclosure of the wheat barns. Crossbeams of moonlight flickered on the river, and the breezy darkness swept over the sand of the riverbanks. Iridescent worms writhed in a torn sweep net.

  Seletsky’s voice was unnaturally powerful. He was an enormous fellow who belonged to that race of provincial Chaliapins,15 of which so many, to our great fortune, have arisen throughout Russia. He even had the same kind of face as Chaliapin, part Scottish coachman, part grandee from the era of Catherine the Great. Seletsky was a simple man, unlike his divine prototype, but his voice resounded boundlessly, fatally, filled one’s soul with the sweetness of self-destruction and gypsy oblivion. Seletsky preferred the songs of convicts to Italian arias. It was from him that I first heard Grechaninov’s^ song “Death.” It resounded, menacing, relentless, passionate, over the dark water through the night.

  She will not forget, she will come to you,

  Caress, embrace, and love you for all eternity.

  But a bridal wreath of thorns shall crown her head.

  This song flows within man’s ephemeral shell like the waters of eternity. It washes away everything, it gives birth to everything.

  The front was twenty versts away. The Ural Cossacks, joined by Major Vozenilek’s Czech battalion, were trying to drive the dispersed Red detachments out of Nikolayevsk. Farther north, the troops of Komchuk—the Committee of the Members of the Constituent Assembly—were advancing from Samara.* [The Komchuk was a government formed in Samara by the anti-Soviet Social Revolutionary Party on June 18,1918.] Our scattered, untrained units regrouped on the left bank. Muravyov had just betrayed us. Vatsetis was appointed the Soviet commander in chief. ^ [ Mikhail Artemevich Muravyov, 1880-1918, had been the commander in chief of the Southern Revolutionary Front, but began an anti-Soviet uprising in Simbirsk on July 10, 1918. He was killed the following day. Ioachim Ioachimovich Vatsetis, 1883-1938, took over from Muravyov immediately after his defection.Weapons for the front were brought from Saratov.] Once or twice a week the pink and white paddle steamer Ivan and Maria docked at Baronsk. It carried rifles and shells. Its deck was full of boxes with skulls stenciled on them, under which the word “lethal” was written.

  The ships captain, Korostelyov, was a man ravished by drink, with lifeless flaxen hair. He was an adventurer, a restless soul, and a vagabond. He had traveled the White Sea on sailing vessels, walked the length and breadth of Russia, had done time in jail and penance in a monastery.

  We always dropped by to see him on our way back from Biedermayers if there were still lights on board the Ivan and Maria. One night, as we passed the wheat barns with their enchanted blue and brown castle silhouettes, we saw a torch blazing high in the sky. Seletsky and I were heading back to our barge in that warm, passionate state of mind that can only be spawned by this wondrous land, youth, night, and the melting rings of fire on the river.

  The Volga was rolling on silently. There were no lights on the Ivan and Maria, and the hulk of the ship lay dark and dead, with only the torch burning above it. The flame was flaring and fuming above the mast. Seletsky was singing, his face pale, his head thrown back. He stopped when we came to the edge of the river. We walked up the unguarded gangplank. Boxes and gun wheels lay about the deck. I knocked on the door of the captains cabin, and it fell open. A tin lamp without a glass cover was burning on the table, which was covered with spilled liquor. The metallic ring around the wick was melting. The windows had been boarded up with crooked planks. The sulfuric aroma of home-brewed vodka rose from cans under the table. Captain Korostelyov was sitting on the floor in a canvas shirt among green streams of vomit. His clotted, monastic hair stood around his head. He was staring fixedly up at Larson, his Latvian commissar, who was sitting, holding a Pravda in a yellowish cardboard folder open in front of him, reading it in the light of the melting kerosene flicker.

  “You’re showing your true colors!” Captain Korostelyov said from the floor. “Go on with what you were saying ... go on torturing us if you have to.”

  “Why should I do the talking?” Larson answered, turning his back and fencing himself off with his Pravda. “I’d rather listen to you.”

  A redheaded muzhik, his legs dangling, was sitting on a velvet sofa.

  “Lisyei! Vodka!” the captain said to him.

  “None left,” Lisyei said. “And nowhere to get none.”

  Larson put down his paper and burst out laughing, as if he were pounding a drum.

  “A Russian man needs his drink, the Russian man’s soul wants to carouse, but there’s not a drop to be found anywhere around here!” the Latvian said in his thick accent. “And it still calls itself the Volga!”

  Captain Korostelyov stretched out his thin, boyish neck, and his legs in their canvas trousers sprawled out across the floor. There was pitiful bewilderment in his eyes, and then they flashed. “Torture us,” he said to the Latvian, barely audibly, stretching out his neck. “Torture us, Karl.”

  Lisyei clasped his plump hands together and peered at the Latvian. “Ha! He’s trumping the Volga! No, Comrade, you will not trump our Volga, you will
not bad-mouth her! Don’t you know the song we sing: Mother Volga, Czarina of all rivers?”

  Seletsky and I were still standing by the door. I kept thinking of retreating.

  “Well, this is simply beyond my grasp!” Larson said, turning to us, but clearly continuing the argument. “Maybe these comrades here can explain to me why reinforced concrete is worse than birches and aspens, and airships worse than Kaluga dung?”

  Lisyei’s head twisted in his quilted collar. His legs didn’t reach the floor. His plump fingers, pressed to his stomach, were knotting an invisible net.

  “Ha! And what is it you know about Kaluga, my friend?” Lisyei asked in a pacifying tone. “I’ll have you know there’s famous folk that lives in Kaluga! Yes, fabulous folk!”

  “Some vodka,” Captain Korostelyov muttered from the floor. Larson again threw back his piggish head and laughed out loud. “You win some, you lose some, “ he muttered, pulling the Pravda closer. “Yes, you win some, you lose some.”

  Sweat was seething on his forehead, and oily streams of fire were dancing in his clotted, dirt-crusted hair.

  “You win some, you lose some,” Larson snorted again. “Yes, you win some, you lose some.”

  Captain Korostelyov patted the floor around him with his fingers. He began crawling forward, hauling himself along with his hands, dragging his skeletal body in its sackcloth shirt behind him.

  “Dont you dare bait Russia, Karl,” he whispered, crawling toward the Latvian, hitting him in the face with his clenched fist, and then, with a sudden shriek, beginning to flail at him. The Latvian puffed himself up and looked at us over his skewed glasses. Then he wound a silken rivulet of Korostelyovs hair around his finger and banged Korostelyov s head on the floor. He yanked his head up and banged it down again.