The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (92 page)

By evening, all the worrying had given Father Ivan a bad stomachache, and his back hurt.

“Oy, that I should have to fear the hooligans as little as you have to fear all this here!” Yankel said, sitting on the priest and massaging his massive stomach. “There is no evidence, even if they stand on their heads twenty times. Tomorrow, with Gods help, we will go to the lawyer and wipe the floor with their ugly mugs!”

“Yankel,” Father Ivan said in a quiet voice, “so the drunkard came in, so Kostya yelled at him, he flew into a rage ... where is justice in all of this?”

“Justice,” Yankel said, sliding off the priest’s stomach, “justice will win! If only everyone should have the kind of sweet life that you will have!”

He lay down on the sofa, curled up, and quietly fell asleep.

“Yankel!” Father Ivan called out to him. “I cant sleep, I am so unhappy. Quick, take me to the outhouse!”

Yankel awoke, swung his legs to the floor, and, disheveled, led the priest outside.

“Its his personality,” he muttered, yawning. “The strangest personality. My brother has a wife, Cecilia, whos just the same. At the drop of a hat her stomach acts up. Yankel, she always tells me, when you die, Yankel, I wont be around no more to see you off!”

The following day Yankel started rushing around from the lawyer s office to the jail, from the jail to the government bureau, from the government bureau to the investigator’s office. Father Ivan remained listless, depressed, and quiet.

Then came the day of the trial.

[...]
¹

THE JEWESS

“The Jewess” is an unfinished manuscript of a novel that was found among the papers of Babel's friend Lev Ilich Slonim, in whose apartment in Leningrad Babel often stayed between 1927 and 1934. It is particularly interesting to follow Babels creative process in this work-in-progress. Some passages read like notes that will be developed: “He took Boris aside, and peering at him with his blinking eyes (blinded from within), told him (he did this in an attempt to bond with his nephew who had strayedfrom the family) ...” Much of the writing, however\ already possesses a mature stylistic finish. “The Jewess” was never published in Russia, except for a Yiddish translation that appeared in the 1980s. Phrases in parentheses are Babel's.

1.

In observance of custom, the old woman sat on the floor for seven days. On the eighth day, she rose and went out onto the shtetl street. The weather was beautiful. A chestnut tree, drenched in sunlight, stood in front of the house, the candles on it already lit. When you think about the recently deceased on a beautiful day, the calamities of life seem even more cruel and inescapable. The old woman was wearing an old-fashioned black silk dress with a black floral print, and a silk kerchief. She had dressed up as she would have for her husband, who was now dead, so that the neighbors would not think that he and she were wretched in the face of death.

Old Esther Erlich headed to the cemetery. The withering petals of the flowers strewn across the burial mound had begun to curl. She touched them with her fingertips, and they crumbled and fell apart. Reb Alter, an old cemetery fixture, came hurrying up to her.

“Madame Erlich! For my prayers for the dead!”

She opened her bag, slowly counted out some silver coins, and handed them to Reb Alter in solemn silence.

Reb Alter, disconcerted by her silence, walked off on his crooked legs, holding a hushed conversation with himself. The sun followed his faded, crooked back. She stayed alone by the grave. The wind blew through the treetops, and they bent forward.

“Fm having a very bad time without you, Marius,” Esther said. “I cant tell you how bad.” She sat by the grave until noon, clutching some wilted flowers in her wrinkled hands. She clenched her fingers until they hurt, trying to dispel the memories. It is terrible for a wife to stand before a burial mound thinking back over thirty-five years of marriage, of the days and nights of marriage. Vanquished by her battle against these memories that were so painful to face, she trudged back home (in her silk dress) through the squalid shtetl.

Yellow rays filled the marketplace. Misshapen old men and women stood by their hawkers stands selling sunflower oil, withered onions, fish, and toffee for the children. In front of the house, Esther ran into her fifteen-year-old daughter.

“Mama!” the girl shouted in that particularly Jewish desperate womans voice. “You’re not going to torment us, are you? Boris has come!

Esthers son stood fidgeting in the doorway in his military uniform, his chest covered with medals. The broken old woman, her damp face flushed and feverish, stopped in front of him.

“How dare you come too late to your fathers deathbed! How dare you do that to him!”

Her children led her into the house.

She sat down on a little stool, the same stool she had sat on for seven days, and, staring into her sons eyes, tortured him with the tale of his father’s death throes. It was an extremely detailed account. She left out nothing: the swelling in his legs, his nose turning blue the morning of the day he died, how she ran to the pharmacy to get oxygen balloons, the indifference of the people who stood around his deathbed. She left out nothing—not even how his father had called out for him as he died. She had knelt by his bed, warming his hands in hers. His father had weakly pressed her hand, ceaselessly uttering his sons name. He had stared with shining eyes, had repeated the name clearly, over and over. That one word, “Boris,” had droned through the still room like the droning of a spindle. Then the old man had choked, there was a hoarse rattle in his breath, and he whispered, “Borechka.” His eyes had bulged, and he wailed and moaned, “Borechka.” The old woman had warmed his hands and said, “Here I am, your son is here!” The dying man’s hand had filled with strength and began clutching and scratching the palms that were warming it. He began to shout that one word—“Borechka”—in a changed voice, high-pitched in a way it had never been during his life, and died with that word on his lips.

“How dare you come too late!” the old woman said to her son, who was sitting turned away from her at the table. They hadn’t lit the lamps.

Boris sat in the dark, which had flooded the stillness. The old woman sat on the stool breathing heavily (with anger). Boris got up, his revolver rapping against the edge of the table, and left the room.

Half the night he roamed through the shtetl, his native shtetl. Clear serpentine reflections (of stars) quivered on the river. A stench rose from the hovels that stood along the bank. The three-hundred-year-old walls of the synagogue that had once withstood Khmelnitsky’s hordes
²
had been battered with holes.

His native shtetl was dying. The clock of the centuries chimed the end of its defenseless life. “Is this the end, or is it a rebirth?” Boris asked himself. His heart was filled with so much pain that he didn’t have the strength to answer this question. The school to which he had gone had been destroyed by Hetman Struk in 1919. The house in which Zhenya had once lived was now the labor exchange. He walked past the ruins, past the squat, crooked, sleeping houses, a hazy stench of poverty seeping out of their gates, and bade them farewell. His mother and sister were waiting for him at home. A dirty samovar was boiling on the table. A bluish piece of chicken lay next to it. Esther moved toward him with weak steps, pressed him to her, and wept. Her heart was pounding beneath her blouse, beneath her flabby, clammy skin—as was his heart, for their hearts were one. And the smell of his mother’s shuddering flesh was so bitter, so pitiful, so typical of the Erlichs, that he felt a deep and boundless pity. The old woman cried, the all-embracing [one word illegible in the manuscript], shaking on his chest on which two Red Flag Medals hung. The medals were wet with her tears. That was the beginning of her recovery, and her resignation to loneliness and death.

2.

The relatives, remnants of a large and ancient clan, arrived the following morning. There had been merchants in the family, adventurers, and timid, poetic revolutionaries from the days of the Peoples Will Party.
³
Boris’s aunt, a medical orderly who had studied in Paris while living on twenty rubles a month, had heard the speeches ofJaures and Guesde.^ His uncle was a pitiful, luckless shtetl philosopher. Other uncles had been grain merchants, traveling salesmen, and storekeepers, their livelihoods knocked out from under them, a herd of confused, pathetic men, a herd of men wearing long brown overcoats. Boris had to hear all over again how his fathers legs had become bloated, where he had developed bedsores, and who had run to the pharmacy to get oxygen. The grain merchant, once a rich man, had been driven out of his house, and now wrapped his old, thin legs in military leggings. He took Boris aside and, peering at him with his blinking eyes (blinded from within), told him (he did this in an attempt to bond with his nephew who had strayed from the [one word illegible] family), that he had never expected that his father would manage to keep his body so smooth and clean. They had looked at him while he was being washed, and he was as well built and smooth as a young man. . . . And to think that some valve somewhere in his heart, some tiny one-millimeter vein . . . His uncle spoke these words probably thinking that as both he and the dead man were born of the same mother, he probably had exactly the same heart valve as his brother who had died a week ago.

The following day Boris’s uncles asked him, first timidly, then with the shudder of long suppressed-despair, if he could give them a recommendation so that they could join the trade union. Because of their former prosperity, none of the Erlichs were now accorded membership in the trade union.

Their lives were indescribably sad. Their houses were collapsing with leaks everywhere, they had sold everything, even their cupboards, and nobody would hire them. On top of that, they had to pay rent and water bills at much higher rates than members of the trade union. And they were old and suffering from terrible illnesses, harbingers of cancer and fatal disease, as were all members of ancient and dwindling Jewish families. Boris had long ago formed a theory about mankind—that people on their last legs should be put out of their misery as quickly as possible. But his mother was standing right next to him, her face resembling his face, her body like his was going to be in two or three decades, and through the closeness of his mother arose a feeling of fate, a feeling of their common fate, the fate of the bodies of all the Erlichs (in some respect all the same). He overcame his reservations and went to see the chairman of the Local Executive Committee. The chairman, a Petersburg worker, seemed to have been waiting all his life to tell someone how dismal it was to work on an Executive Committee in this damned former Jewish Pale of settlement, how difficult it was to resurrect these shtetls of the western provinces and lay the foundation for a new prosperity in these damned Jewish shtetls (of the damned southwest region) that were dying in misery (and like dogs).

For several days Boris kept seeing before him the cemetery of his native shtetl and the imploring eyes of his uncles, the former (devil-may-care?) traveling salesmen, who now dreamed of joining the trade union or the Labor Exchange. A few days passed. The Indian summer changed into autumn. A (slushy) shtetl rain was falling. Mud from the mountain, mud with rolling stones (like concrete) came flowing down from the mountain. The front room of the house was filled with water. Rusty bowls and Passover saucepans were put under the cracks in the roof. As they walked through the room they had to be careful where they stepped so they wouldn’t trip over a bowl.

“Lets go,” Boris said to his mother.

“Where to?”

“To Moscow, Mama.”

“Aren’t there enough Jews in Moscow?”

“Nonsense,” Boris said. “Who cares what people say!”

She sat in the leaking room in her corner by the window from which she could see the pockmarked carriageway and her neighbor’s collapsing house—and thirty years of her life. Sitting by the window and (sharing) her souls tears and her old-womans compassion for her sisters, brothers-in-law, and nephews, to whom fate had not granted a son like hers. Esther knew that sooner or later he would talk of going to Moscow and that she would give in. But before she did, she wanted to (torment herself and infuse her surrender with the sorrow of the shtetl...). She said that it pained her to death to leave without her husband, who had dreamed of Moscow as he had dreamed of leaving this godforsaken place to live (the rest of his life) more happily, from which you expect nothing more than peace and the happiness of others, to live with his son in this new (Promised) land. And now he lay in his grave, beneath the rain that had lashed down all night, while she was preparing to go to Moscow, where, word had it, people were happy, cheerful, spirited, full of plans (doing all kinds of special things). Esther said that it was hard for her to leave all her graves behind—of her fathers and her grandfathers, rabbis, tsaddiks, and Talmudists who lay under the gray (traditional) stones. She would never see them again. And how would he, her son, answer for her when her time came to die on foreign soil, among people who were so very foreign. . . . And then, how could she forgive herself if life in Moscow turned out to be pleasant? Her hands with their long (gout-ridden, twisted, soft, swollen) fingers trembled when Esther considered how unbearable it would be for her to be happy at such a time. Her damp, twisted fingers trembled, the veins on her yellow chest swelled and throbbed, the (shtetl) rain drummed on the iron roof. . . . For the second time since her son had come home, the little old Jewess in her galoshes wept. She agreed to go to Moscow because there was nowhere else for her to go, and because her son looked so (terribly) like her husband that she could not be parted from him, even though her husband, like everyone else, had had faults and pitiful little secrets, which a wife knows but never tells.

3.

Most of their arguments centered around what to take with them. Esther wanted to take everything, while Boris wanted to have done with it all and sell it off. But there was nobody in Kremenets to whom one could sell anything. The last thing the townsfolk needed was furniture. The dealers, angry men who had sprung up from God knows where, and who looked like undertakers, like visitors from the beyond, were only prepared to pay small change. They could only resell the mer-