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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  “OY, A SWEET KISS FOR THE BRIDE!”

  The gangsters jump onto the chairs and pour vodka straight from the bottles into their mouths. Dvoira throws herself onto the cringing groom, drags him toward her as a dockworker might drag a sack of flour down a gangplank, and devours him with a long, wet, predatory kiss. The gangsters break plates.

  Dvoira kissing Shpilgagen. A lame beggar comes crawling over to the newlyweds and stares at their kiss with blunt attention.

  A policeman is dragging a bucket of boiling water through a corridor in the police station.

  The cell. The policeman takes the boiling water inside. Kolka grabs the bucket out of the policemans hands and pours the boiling water over his head. The scalded policeman collapses.

  Kolka runs out into the corridor. He throws the rubber suit on a pile of slop pails lying in a corner, slits it open, and sets fire to the kerosene that is pouring out of it.

  Glechik, the deputy chief of police, is wavering in uncertainty outside the gates of the Kriks’ house. His stomach is squeezed into a new uniform, he is dragging a saber behind him, and on his head is a large, old-fashioned cap with a patent-leather peak. Glechiks chest is covered in medals: one for saving someone from drowning, another issued by Empress Maria in commemoration of the three-hundred-year reign of the Romanovs, and so on. Glechik timidly opens the gate a little.

  A very bizarre musician, a large Turkish drum in front of him, stands a few paces away from the main table. He has a piece of string tied to his foot with which he makes copper plates on the drum clash, while he pounds the drum with a stick attached to his knee. The top part of his body is devoted to a gigantic tuba, more reminiscent of the coils of a boa constrictor. The suns blue baton is blazing on the tuba. The musician is resting.

  Glechik appears at the far end of the courtyard. Benya rushes over to him, and they kiss each other three times on the cheeks.* Benya makes a sign to the musician.

  The musician starts up and jumps into action: he blows into the tuba, tugs at the string and thumps the stick attached to his knee against the drum.

  Benya brings Glechik over to the other wedding guests. The delight of the guests that the deputy chief of police is present. The bride, covered in spilled wine, throws herself on Glechiks chest, Papa Krik thumps him on the back with all his might, and sixty-year-old Manka places a maternal kiss on his forehead. Savka comes hurrying over to Glechik with two bottles of vodka. Savka s woman tries to snatch one of them away, but he breaks the bottle over her head, and

  * A traditional Russian sign of friendship, the three kisses symbolizing the Holy Trinity, an idiosyncratic act at a Jewish wedding.

  then rushes over to Glechik and places the other bottle to his lips, as if he were giving a baby a bottle of milk. Papa Krik comes hurrying over with a cucumber.

  The musician goes into a frenzy, his limbs bouncing every which

  way.

  The rollicking Moldavanka women dance in a circle around Glechik, plying him with vodka, cucumbers, gefilte fish, and oranges. The womens hips are blossoming out, and old Krik and Grandma Manka dance face-to-face in the circle. Lyovka Bik, crazed with merriment, shoots bullets into the air, plunges into the circle, grabs hold of the old woman, and presses the revolver into her hand. Manka tenderly narrows her eyes and pulls the trigger.

  The old womans wrinkled hand, her finger pulling the trigger.

  The shot. The dance reaches a crazed pitch. Papa Krik suddenly stops, sniffs at the air, and takes Benya aside:

  “BENYA! YOU KNOW WHAT? I THINK I SMELL FIRE!”

  Conducting the dance, Benya calms his father:

  “PAPA! PLEASE EAT AND DRINK AND DON’T LET THESE

  FOOLISH THINGS BE WORRYING YOU!”

  The musician in full swing, his leg is jerking, his tuba sends shivers through the sun.

  The Moldavanka dance with its bravura, gunshots, breaking plates, and money flying between the dancers’ feet.

  The edge of the sky, reddened by the fire.

  The fire brigade dashes through the streets of the Moldavanka. The crowd in front of the burning police station. The policemen are throwing boxes out the windows, a shower of paper is flying through the air. Sokovich, crazed, is galloping on his horse.

  Inside the smoke-filled building, three fat bottoms are sliding with desperate speed down a slanting plank.

  The wall of the police station. Prisoners are jumping out of smashed windows. Their wives run up to them and hug them.

  The musician in full swing.

  The Moldavanka amazons abducting their husbands. The women drag the prisoners to their houses.

  The dancing in the Kriks’ courtyard.

  The firemen uncoil a long rubber hose and attach it to a fire hydrant on the street. They point the hose menacingly in the direction of the blaze, turn on the faucet, and ... a few drops of water dribble with great effort onto the ground. The fire hydrant is not working.

  Against the backdrop of the sky, filled with the glow of the fire, two black crossbeams twist and come crashing down.

  Sokovich’s mustache is singed. He is watching the blaze. Benya Krik walks past him with Kolka Pakovsky, whose clothes are ripped and covered in kerosene and water. Benya raises his hat.

  “AI-AI-AI! WHAT BAD LUCK! A NIGHTMARE!”

  Benya shakes his head mournfully. Sokovich fixes him with his dull, puzzled eyes.

  FADEOUT

  In the Kriks’ courtyard. Sunrise. The lanterns are going out. Drunken guests are lying on the ground like collapsed stacks of firewood.

  Dvoira Krik’s quadruple bed. She is pulling Shpilgagen toward it. He turns pale, struggles to get away, but his resistance weakens and he falls onto the bed.

  The musician, entangled in his bits of string, sticks, and copper plates, is sleeping, slumped over his drum.

  How Things Were Done in Odessa

  Much water and blood have flowed since the day of Dvoira Kriks wedding.

  A sea of banners. On these banners: “Long Live the Provisional Government!”3

  A big-breasted lady in a military uniform is carrying a banner proclaiming: “We shall fight for victory to the bitter end!”

  A battalion of women of the Kerensky era.4 The battalion is made up of ladies and streetwalkers. The ladies’ faces are filled with resolve and inspiration—the streetwalkers’ faces are puffy and tired.

  A gigantic safe, taking up the whole screen. Its compartments are filled with stocks, foreign currency, and diamonds. Someone’s hands place piles of gold coins into the safe.

  Rubin Tartakovsky, proprietor of nineteen bakeries, clarifies his attitude toward the Revolution

  Tartakovsky’s office. The safe covering the whole wall. Tartakovsky, an old man with a silver beard and powerful shoulders, is handing money to Muginshtein, his assistant, who is placing the money in various compartments in the safe.

  The raised revolutionary breasts of the women’s battalion are streaming down the street, which is filled with loafers and hollering children.

  The safe’s heavy metallic door slowly falls shut.

  “AND NOW, MUGINSHTEIN, WE SHALL GO AND CONGRATULATE THE WORKERS!”

  the old man tells his assistant, and they leave the office.

  Tartakovsky’s bookkeeping department. A prereform setup reminiscent of Dickens’s London. None of the clerks are wearing jackets. They have pen holders behind their ears and cotton wool in their ears. They are all either very fat or very thin. The fat workers are wearing sweaters and dirty vests, the thin workers shirtfronts and bow ties. Some have uncommonly rich heads of hair, others are bald. Some are sitting on tattered armchairs covered with pillows, others are perching on high, three-legged stools, but they all look as if they had just swallowed something very bitter. Only one bookkeeper, an Englishman, keeps an inviolable calm. He is gnawing at a pipe that envelops him with billows of the most vicious smoke. A boy is turning a press wheel

  in the corner, copying letters. A fleshy lady, Greek-looking because of
her aquiline nose, is sitting at a window with the sign “Cashier” over it. Tartakovsky and Muginshtein walk up and down the room. The workers sit up. The boy, seeing his boss, begins turning the press with great vigor. He is holding his breath and turns red.

  A large number of snot-nosed, rachitic children squirming in a heap. Half naked, their legs rickety, they are teeming on the ground like worms.

  A large, four-story building on Moldavankas Prokhorovskaya Street, where unimaginable Jewish poverty has gathered. Green, shivering old men dressed in rags are warming themselves in the sun, a watchmaker in tattered shoes has set up his table in the yard, bald-headed Jewesses in torn smocks cook food in battered pails. Tartakovsky and Muginshtein walk through the yard. The ragged old men rise from their seats, train their pus-filled eyes covered with thick bloody fluid on Tartakovsky, and bow to him. A disheveled Jewess in mens boots comes running up to him:

  “WHAT ABOUT THE TOILET, MONSIEUR TARTAKOVSKY?” she asks the old man. Tartakovsky shrugs his shoulders.

  “WHAT ABOUT THE TOILET?”

  he answers. The Jewess grabs him by the hand and takes him to her apartment.

  She leads Tartakovsky up stairs that are covered in the dirt and trash of abject poverty. Wild, scraggly cats are flitting up and down the stairs.

  The woman drags Tartakovsky to her toilet. There is no toilet bowl, only a hole in the cement floor. Reeking liquid is dribbling from the ceiling. Next to the toilet, almost within the toilet area itself, stands a bed heaped with tattered blankets. A hunchbacked girl with carefully plaited hair is lying on the bed. Tartakovsky pats the woman approvingly on the back:

  “NOW THAT YOUR NIKOLAI HAS BEEN SNATCHED AWAY BY

  THE CHOLERA, WE’LL ALL BE BETTER OFF, YOU TOO!”

  The hunchbacked girl looks at Tartakovsky. Water is streaming down the side of the wall next to her bed.

  Children are crawling on the floor—the naked, rachitic, snot-nosed children of the ghetto.

  Tartakovsky and Muginshtein walk through the teeming heap of children, Tartakovsky struggling to find a place to tread. In the depths of the courtyard is the entrance to the cellar where the bakery is.

  The sign above the cellar: “Bakery and Pastry Shop No. 16, Joint Stock Company, Rubin Tartakovsky.” Next to it hangs another sign: “Fancy Cakes Made to Order.”

  A slimy staircase, many of its treads broken, leads to the cellar. A little boy working at the bakery is dragging a 150-pound sack down the stairs. The sack begins sliding down the stairs, and he lies down in front of it and blocks it with his head.

  The bare backs of two dough kneaders: the sweat-lacquered back of young Sobkov, and an old mans crooked back with cracked shoulder blades. The old mans shoulder blades are not moving in the directions they ought to be moving in. The smooth, endless play of the dough kneaders’ back muscles.

  Muginshtein and Tartakovsky walk down the stairs and enter the bakery. They slip and stumble, but Muginshtein zealously props up his boss.

  The backs of the dough kneaders. Young Sobkov, as he kneads, is reading the Newspaper of the Odessa Council of Workers' Deputies, which he has nailed to the wall above the dough trough. The newspaper is lit by the restless flame of a kerosene lamp.

  The bakery is a foul-smelling cellar. Scant rays of light pierce the dusty hatches in the ceiling. Uncovered kerosene lamps are smoking in the corner. The bakers are stripped to the waist. Kochetkov, a cheerful, bowlegged fellow, is stoking a flaming oven, and the head baker is pulling baking paddles lined with ready loaves of bread out of another oven.

  The head baker pulling the baking paddles with the baked bread out of the oven. Tartakovsky and Muginshtein entering the bakery. Workers, looking more like spirits of the netherworld than men, crowd around them. Tartakovsky proclaims:

  “GENTLEMEN! I CONGRATULATE YOU ON OBTAINING YOUR

  BELOVED FREEDOM! NOW WE TOO CAN BREATHE FREELY!”

  Tartakovsky fervently begins shaking his workers’ hands, and they line up as a crowd will line up outside a store.

  The bakers, not used to being treated so well, eagerly wipe their hands on their aprons to shake their master s hand with pitiful clumsiness, quickly brushing off any flour that might have settled on him.

  Sobkovs back. The young man is still kneading the dough and reading his newspaper. Tartakovsky gives the bronzed back with its rippling muscles a friendly slap, and then holds out his hand to him. The young man pulls his hands very slowly out of the sticky dough, turns his sly face, framed by a shock of curls, to his master, and slowly, with solemn formality, holds out a dough-caked hand to him. Kochetkov, the cheerful fellow stoking the oven, rushes over to Sobkov and quickly begins to clean the dough off Sobkovs fingers. Sobkov laughs and looks his master in the eye. Tartakovsky abruptly turns around and leaves. Kochetkov winks at Sobkov.

  Little snakes of dough writhe on Sobkovs shapeless and monstrously enlarged palm.

  FADEOUT

  Cafe Fankoni.* Businesswomen with large handbags, stockbrokers, an Odessa crowd. A dapper young man waving shackles in the air is standing on a platform where the orchestra usually plays. A gloomy man with an asymmetrical face sits behind him, holding a chain cutter in his hands. The chain cutter is for cutting through the shackles.

  “CITIZENS OF FREE RUSSIA! FOR GOOD LUCK BUY A PIECE

  OF THE LEGACY LEFT US BY THE ACCURSED REGIME AND

  HELP OUR WOUNDED WAR HEROES! FIFTY RUBLES! WHO

  WILL BID MORE?”

  Three disabled veterans—three close-cropped, armless mannequins—are sitting next to each other on a plush sofa by the wall across from the platform.

  A girl wearing a low-cut blouse and a large hat with a sagging brim is walking among the tables carrying a jar in which she collects money “for the Revolution.” Her blouse is disarranged and her shoes are worn

  * An elegant and expensive Odessan cafe that attracted a wealthy international clientele before the Revolution.

  through. Enthusiasm, spring, and fervor have covered her long nose with delicate pearls of sweat. Tartakovsky is sitting at a table, surrounded by a flock of fawning brokers. The table is heaped with samples: wheat, strips of leather, karakul fur. He drops a twenty-kopeck coin in the girls jar.

  The auctioneer on the platform waves the shackles in the air.

  The girl with the low-cut blouse weaves her way among the tables. Benya Krik is lounging at a table by the window, carefully writing something on a napkin. Drunken Savka is sitting next to him, eating one cream puff after another. The young lady comes up to Benya. With an elegant flick of the wrist, the King throws a golden coin into her jar. The auctioneer quickly comes down from his platform and brings Benya a link from the shackles. The veterans come hobbling after the auctioneer and thank Benya with lifeless voices. Drunken Savka stares at the spectacle. He gets up, his legs faltering, and peers down the young ladys blouse.

  The low-cut blouse and Savka’s sullen, resolute face above it.

  Sobkov, dressed in his Sunday best, walks past Benyas table. Benya asks him to sit down.

  “YOU’VE WAITED LONG ENOUGH FOR YOUR REVOLUTION,

  SOBKOV, AND HERE IT IS!”

  Sobkov grins and motions with his head toward the patrons of the cafe.

  “THE REVOLUTION WILL BE HERE ONCE WE’VE TAKEN

  THEIR COINS FROM THEM.”

  Benya wipes the nib of his pen on Savkas jacket and grimaces very expressively.

  “WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT THE COINS IS TRUE, SOBKOV!”

  he says, and begins writing again. Savka has fallen asleep. Sobkov eyes the patrons of the cafe.

  Tartakovsky s table. One of the brokers pours a pile of gold crosses and amulets onto it.

  “AND HERE, MONSIEUR TARTAKOVSKY, I HAVE A CONSIGNMENT OF RELIGIOUS RELICS AT HALF PRICE!”

  Tartakovsky looks unwillingly at the merchandise and weighs the crosses on his palm.

  Benya folds the note, calls the waiter, and asks him to hand the note to Tartakovsky.

  Tartakovsky is
not interested in the merchandise. He pushes away the ‘consignment of religious relics.” The waiter hands him Benyas note.

  Benyas note, scribbled on a flowered napkin:

  Monsieur Tartakovsky, I ordered one person to find tomorrow morning by the gate of number 17, Sofiyevskaya Street, fifty thousand rubles. If he does not find it, then something awaits you, the like of which has never before been heard, and you will be the talk of all Odessa. Sincerely yours, Benya the King.

  Outraged, Tartakovsky crumples the letter, and makes indignant signs at Benya, furiously tugging at his shirt collar as if to say, “Go ahead, rip the last shirt I own off my back!” And he furiously sets about writing a reply.

  The waiter gives the invalids three glasses of grenadine with straws in them. The armless mannequins slurp the grenadine through the straws.

  The waiter hands Tartakovsky s reply to Benya.

  Tartakovsky s epistle, also written on a napkin:

  Benya, If you were an idiot, I would write you as to an idiot. But from what I know of you, you aren’t one, and may the Lord prevent me from changing my mind. I have no money, all I have is ulcers, sores, worries, and no sleep! Drop your foolish thoughts, Benya. Your friend, Rubin Tartakovsky.

  Benya puts Tartakovsky’s letter in his pocket, pays the check, and wakes Savka. Savka jumps up, his eyes bulge, and he grabs Benya by the throat. Savka had dreamed that the police descended upon him in the night. He comes to his senses and immediately calms down. Benya, Savka, and Sobkov head for the exit. Tartakovsky is still tugging at his shirt collar—“Go ahead, rip the last shirt I own off my back!” The King spreads out his arms, as if to say: “Well, I did my best!”

  The corner of Ekaterininskaya and Deribasovskaya Streets. A beautiful spring day. The strolling Odessa crowd. Benya calls out to a cabbie—shteiger in Odessa slang—and points at drunken Savka. He tells the shteiger.

  “DRIVE HIM ABOUT TILL HE COMES TO, VANYA!”

  Savka is lolling back on the cab seat with all the hauteur and chic he can muster. The horse starts off at a fast trot.

  A group of flower girls on the corner of Ekaterininskaya and Deribasovskaya Streets. The playful women and their flowers against the backdrop of the shop windows of Wagners, the most elegant store in Odessa. Foreign goods are displayed in the windows: elegant luggage, porcelain, bibelots, little bottles of perfume in boxes lined with blue satin. Among the women selling flowers is a girl of about fifteen, dressed in rags. The King goes up to her, buys some violets, and, while Sobkov is not looking, slips some pieces of paper with messages scribbled on them among her bouquets. The girl watches Benya tensely.