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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  We remained in the town of Niort for at least another year, although my memories of this time are vague. I must have gone to school for another year. I do, however, remember the atmosphere of our life at that time. We were living in a kind of limbo. It was a purgatory, as we waited for the door to open for us to return to a normal life. We stayed in the same little house, without a toilet or bathroom—without hot water or heating.

  I have often been asked whether I ever went back to Niort. Never. It has remained for me a place out of time, out of space, out of tangible reality. I do not actually remember where that town is on the map— somewhere not too far from the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, I do remember the streets, some specific places, the market, where I stood in line at five in the morning in winter. Like most French towns, Niort had its covered produce market, with separate stalls for the different merchants. In those days, the market was allowed to open for one or two days a week. Peasants and farmers brought whatever victuals they had to sell. But there were too many people and very little to buy. In order to have the chance to buy anything, you had to be right at the head of the line, which began to form in the middle of the night. When the gates opened at seven, you had to race at top speed to your targeted booth. We kids made arrangements among ourselves, since even those at the head of the line could not reach two stalls at the same time. “Look, Til buy the potatoes, if you can get me the eggs. . . .” There was a playful element to this, but if you lost the game, you might not eat at all that day. For years, I was obsessed by these recollections. It took a very long time for those of my generation—who were between the ages of ten and fifteen during the war, the occupation, and the terror—to adapt to a more normal life.

  Early in 1946, my mother took a trip to Paris, a journey which was quite an odyssey at the time. The trains were still so overcrowded. I remember pushing her through the window to get a seat in the train. She wanted to find out whether we had anything left there and, above all, to see if she could find out something about the fate of her husband. She did learn that we had lost all claim to our small house in Plessis Robinson, a suburb south of Paris. Another family had occupied it for some time, and there was nothing she could do about it. In addition to the house, we had lost all our furnishings. This included a very good library, which today would be invaluable, as it contained all of my fathers first editions. There was also my mothers art collection, along with her own works of art—paintings, which might now be still on walls somewhere in Europe—a retrospective compliment, perhaps.

  While in Paris, my mother was told through the Montparnasse* [Montparnasse: favorite Left Bank “quartier of Paris for the bohemian and artistic crowd. Artists, painters, writers, poets, and emigres from all over the world passed their days and nights in its famous cafes—La Rotonde, La Coupole, Le Dome. The Russian crowd i^Les Russes'), including many famous artists and writers, was especially well known there. grapevine that Ilya Ehrenburg^ wanted to see her.[Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg: 1891-1967, famous Soviet novelist, essayist, journalist. Paris correspondent for Izvestia in the 1930s. Author of The Fall of Paris (1941), for which he won the Stalin Prize for Literature. Recipient of the Order of Lenin in 1944 for his efforts as a wartime journalist. Member of the French Legion of Honor. Winner of the Stalin Peace Prize (1953). Author of The Thaw (1954)] .She had known him since the mid-1920s, when he was living in Paris, and by which time he had already established a significant place for himself in Soviet literature. She disliked him intensely, considering him the ultimate spokesmen for the Soviet regime. Since the beginning of the war, when he returned to Moscow, he was the most famous and widely read journalist in the USSR, read avidly even by Stalin himself. He was one of the few writers to escape the Stalinist purges.

  Despite her feelings, she went to see him, hoping for news of her husband. He told her—quite amazingly—that Babel was alive, that he had spent the war in exile, and was now living under surveillance not far from Moscow.

  And so she returned to Niort with renewed hope about her husband. It was the first news she had received of him since his last letters in 1939. There were many reasons to believe Ehrenburg, because he was such a prestigious and well-informed person. She harbored these hopes and illusions until 1949 or 1950, since there was never any official announcement of my father s death. Meanwhile, American organizations were also searching for displaced persons. And in 1948, they let us know that no traces of Babel could be found in Russia after 1939.

  We left Niort at last in the late spring of 1946. An old family friend let us have what used to be the summer residence of his rich relatives, who had never returned after the war. It was in the small village of Bois-le-Roi, just at the edge of the vast forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris. The house was big, with a large garden full of fruit trees. Everything was abandoned and neglected, yet lovely. We harvested many different varieties of apples, and prepared them in all sorts of ways. I remember that when my mother planted corn, a neighbor asked her if she was planning to raise pigs. The French did not consider corn on the cob fit for human consumption in those days. My mother began to take in paying guests, including her friends and acquaintances. She was an excellent cook, and often fed a dozen people a day. I helped with the cleaning. By that time, I was ready to enter the tenth grade. The fact that I had continued my schooling throughout the war years is astonishing, and sheds another light on my mothers character. She never considered that I could not go to school, even in times when it was dangerous to step outside our home, when anti-Semitism was raging everywhere, even in the elementary school classes. I had to continue my education, no matter what hardship or risk it entailed.

  Whenever the school year began, I had to be sent away somewhere, and was put into boarding school. The Lycee de Versailles was the choice, although I do not remember why. I was allowed to return home on the weekends. It was an excellent school, very upscale, and it was very hard to gain admittance. The discipline was extremely strict. The staff consisted mostly of elderly spinsters, not very attuned to the needs of traumatized adolescents. For me, boarding school life was far from easy, like being in a Charles Dickens novel. Everything had to be done according to detailed rules and regulations. You had to get up at a certain time, and had so many minutes to get dressed, then breakfast at an appointed time, and so on, until lights out at nine o’clock. This discipline created the sense of ropes tied around my body. We had to walk to class two by two, as if we were little girls. I do not remember a single thing that I learned or studied there, but I do recall being deeply unhappy. I had been living such a close and protected life with my mother for so long—living in fear during the Nazi occupation, but also in great independence. I longed for the weekends, when I would go home to that big, beautiful, frigid house, where Mother was waiting for me after a week alone. I was becoming emotionally and mentally unbalanced. I think that it was not so much what we now call post-traumatic stress as it was the living trauma of being in that school, and away from my mother and from my first great love. My nerves, already frayed, became live electric wires. Mercifully, this painful episode lasted less than three months. I was expelled before the Christmas break. Expelled for rebellious behavior, bad character, and loose morals.

  It seems that my correspondence was being monitored, and a passionate letter from my boyfriend had been discovered and opened. My mother and I were summoned by Madame La Directrice and given a full treatment of humiliation. Watching my mother in that situation was more painful to me than all my problems. She was told, among other things, that I could only be destined to a life of menial labor, given my “condition of moral turpitude.” That she had obviously not been able to raise a decent girl—and that if I were not destined for a life of whoredom, I might at best become a seamstress, which seemed to be for the headmistress barely above the bottom. I was fifteen years old! I was given a certificate with the statement “Conduct to be watched” (conduite a surveiller). This was a horrible stigma in those days, almost certainly preventing acceptance at
any other school. And so my mother and I went back to the big, empty house in Bois-le-Roi.

  The end of the year passed—long, dark, and dreary. Finally, on New Years Day 1947, we were reunited with my auntie and uncle from Belgium. It was the first time they had been able to leave Brussels since the end of the war to visit us. They, of course, knew of my situation and decided, together with my mother, that the only solution was for me to return to Belgium with them. Belgium seemed to be one of the European countries which “normalized” very quickly after the war and, in 1947, no longer had the same great shortages of food, clothing, and heating, which still existed in France. We were still using rationing coupons to buy things, whereas Belgium had already done away with them.

  And so, as an adolescent, I was to go to Belgium. But this turned out not to be so simple. There was the question of what kind of official papers I possessed, since a special visa was needed. My father had registered me as a Soviet citizen, by putting me in his passport, during his stay in Paris in 1932. This meant that in 1947, although I had been born in France, I was not a French citizen—and this was certainly an obstacle to freedom. However, I had to wait until my eighteenth birthday to petition for French citizenship—to which I was entitled. By this time, my mother had given up her Soviet passport and was “a citizen without a country”—an apatride, even after living over twenty years in France.

  As I had no permission to enter Belgium legally, my uncle arranged for me to enter the country illegally. He must have paid someone to get me across the border into Belgium from the northeast part of France. I remember having to cross a field of snow, crawling flat on my belly to get underneath the rows of barbed wire, which still separated the two countries. I do not know whether this was really necessary, or whether the man in charge of this mission wanted to impress on my uncle that he was really earning his money. But for me, after the Nazi danger, it was one of the darkest moments of my life. This whole long passage of events—the boarding school, the winter in the forest, the continued absence of my father, the illegal crossing—was a bitter experience, and made me feel that the war was far from over for me. It took years for me to feel free from the memory of so many fears, losses, and sorrows.

  I was admitted to the Lycee Fran£ais in Brussels, based only on papers from my school in Niort. The fact that I had been expelled from a French national school was to remain a deep and shameful secret for years. I was much too afraid to talk about it, for fear that my trickery would be discovered. I learned later that the Directrice of the Lycee de Versailles was known for being anti-Semitic and xenophobic. And it was rumored that, during the occupation, she had reported on Jewish students. Perhaps, she had only used my love letter as a pretext to expel me.

  In contrast, the Lycee Fran£ais was a wonderful school. The teachers, who were still young and had themselves just gone through the war, understood that our generation was a bit different—that strict discipline was not the best approach. My classmates were all between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, and we were a fairly motley group. Many of us had already seen a great deal in our short lifetimes. One of my classmates had lost all of his hair—we never knew exactly how— some ordeal, I suppose. Once, as I was climbing the stairs behind him, he suddenly turned around, all white, upset, and belligerent. He explained that the sound of my heavy boots (I did not have new shoes yet) was intolerable to him, awakening memories of other boots. Another classmate stuttered badly. We could all be pretty rude and difficult. We were prone to fits of anger, probably unjustified. I outdid myself the day that I put my fist into a classmates face hard enough to make his nose bleed. And he was quite a peaceful fellow, as I recall. I admire the teachers at that school, who never punished us, always tried to establish a good rapport with us, and who understood our excesses and their causes.

  I spent two-and-a-half years there, and did well in my studies, passing both of the baccalaureate examinations required for entrance to a French university.

  Revelations

  At the beginning of 1956,1 went to London for several months to study English. When I returned to Paris in the summer, I found my mother looking very poorly. In fact, she was already extremely ill, having been diagnosed with cancer. It was discovered much too late, and she died less than a year later. On my arrival, my mother was very distressed and agitated about an event which, unfortunately, had taken place during my absence.

  I soon learned what had happened during my stay in England. My mother had received an invitation—or a summons, I dont know—for a second meeting with Ilya Ehrenburg, whom she had last seen in 1946, ten years earlier. She had no reason to change her feelings of mistrust, shared by many others. But by then he was an even more powerful and important person in the Soviet literary world and had the authority of the official regime behind him. He was able to travel quite freely between Moscow and Paris. He was an important cultural link between the two countries, and was greatly favored in French leftist literary circles. He was the one person in that intellectual milieu who could have known the truth about Babels disappearance in 1939. Actually, during the 1950s, my mother had been stopped in the street several times by total strangers, who seemed to know very well who she was, and who would say, “I can give you news of Babel.” The stories varied—he was in camp, in prison, in Siberia, and so on. I dont think my mother ever believed these strangers, and indeed suspected that they were Soviet plants. But it always unnerved us, because they said what we wanted to believe—that Babel was still alive. It was also after Stalins death in 1953 when we started hearing about the process of “rehabilitations.”* Since she still harbored suspicions about Ehrenburg, and also because she was already quite ill, she asked a friend, a Madame Shakoff, to accompany her on this visit. Thus, there was a witness to her encounter with him. The story of this meeting has never ceased to disturb me.

  Ehrenburg informed my mother that Babel had been rehabilitated two years earlier in 1954, and that the official date of his death was March 17,1941.^ He then asked my mother to sign a paper certifying that she and my father had been divorced since before the war. He knew perfectly well, of course, that no such divorce had taken place between the time of Babels last visit to Paris in the winter of 1935-1936 and his arrest in May 1939. Even living in Moscow, how could he have divorced his wife without informing anyone in his family, with whom he was in constant correspondence? Ehrenburg then told her, apparently with great brutality, that my father had a second wife living in the Soviet Union, by whom he had another child—a daughter. When my mother asked the name of the child, he answered, “Natasha,” which is, of course, my name. I honestly dont know whether this was just a mistake on his part or whether he said this on purpose to upset her even more. What I do know is that my mother then spat in his face and fainted. All of these dramatic and dreadful details were confirmed to me by Madame Shakoff—also a rather emotional old Russian lady. My mother never recovered from this episode, which contributed greatly to the pain she was already enduring in the final months of her illness before her death in May 1957.

  * “Rehabilitation” was a new Soviet term, indicating that all criminal charges against a person condemned and "repressed” under the Stalinist regime were dropped in the absence of evidence.

  ^ This was the officially accepted death date for Babel until KGB archives opened after perestroika revealed the actual date of January 27, 1940. See La Parole ressuscitee. Dans les archives lit-teraires du K.G.B., by Vitali Chentalinski, Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1993.

  During my whole childhood, I suffered from having neither a brother nor a sister. I used to invent them with such intensity that I managed to convince even my most skeptical classmates of the existence of a big brother and a small sister. Some judiciously chosen photographs of attractive children totally unknown to me helped to make my illusions real. There is a painful irony in this faraway past. As an adult, I learned within a relatively short period of time that fate indeed had given me an older brother and a younger sister.


  I thought I had always known all the reasons why my mother left Russia in 1925. She despised and feared the Soviet regime, and as an artist, she wanted to paint and study abroad. Paris was the obvious choice for that purpose. My mother kept her secrets well. She had to be dying in a public ward of the St. Antoine Hospital in Paris to share with me emotional regions of her life that had always been relegated to the shadows. She did this not because she felt that she owed me these private truths, but because she feared that in an uncertain future, my ignorance could do me harm.

  “You should know,” my mother said, “that you have a half-brother. I left Russia mostly because of an affair your father was having with an actress, a very beautiful woman. She pursued him relentlessly, and didnt 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.”

  At the time of their acquaintence, Tamara Vladimirovna Kashirina, a beautiful and well-known actress, was twenty-five years old, with a pleasant husband, a small daughter, and a full social calendar. She had only one problem: she was “bored.” With Babel courting her insistently, with his gift as an “incomparable raconteur,” her boredom vanished. While Babel apparently convinced her that he was really in love for the first time, the circumstances of his family life were complicated and required a good deal of his attention. Babel told her that* he was planning to send his wife to France, where she could study painting. His mother would be going to live with her married daughter, who by this time had settled in Brussels. While taking care of all of these family arrangements in 1925 and 1926, Babel traveled frequently. He was always moving to the country or to another city, searching for that elusive place where he could work in peace. In 1925 alone, Babel wrote to Tamara from seven different cities. Their own encounters were infrequent, short, and often postponed.