The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (131 page)

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.

On July 13,1926, their son Mikhail was born in Leningrad. Babel, who was then in Moscow, expressed his enthusiasm from a distance. “The long-awaited telegram arrived last night. Well done,Tamara! Its great that it s a boy. Girls are common enough, but a boy can turn out to be a real provider. . . . Im dying to know how it all went, how you are feeling, where you had the baby. Please tell me everything quickly. Its such a bitter feeling not to know, but Im tied down here completely and just cant break away for the time being. . . . God bless you, dear Tamara, and get well soon—and when I come, I shall be so happy for you. Letters, letters, letters! I kiss you warmly, my dear soul.”*

By the time their son was born, Tamara thought that he had finished all the necessary arrangements for his family s departure. She believed, not unreasonably, that the moment had arrived when Babel could start a real family life with her and Mikhail. But this was never to happen.

Later in 1926 and 1927, Babel wrote to Tamara mostly from Kiev, where he had temporarily settled. They celebrated together Mikhails first birthday on July 13, 1927, and again Tamara made plans for their future together. But it was the last time that Babel was ever to see his son. Two weeks later, he was already in Paris with his wife.

* Memoirs of Tamara Ivanova, published in the literary journal Oktyabr (October), May, June, July 1992, Moscow.

The Soviet Way

Four years after my mothers death, in 1961,1 traveled to the USSR for the first time. There, I found out that in Moscow my mothers deepest secret was common knowledge. Everybody in the literary and cultural milieu knew that Mikhail V. Ivanov was Babels natural son. He was still a small child when his mother, Tamara Vladimirovna Kashirina, married the Soviet writer Vsevolod Ivanov, who adopted, raised, and loved Mikhail as his own. For this reason, Tamara Ivanova never permitted Babel to see his son again. When Mikhail was about eighteen, some well-intended soul told him the truth about his origins. Such a revelation must have caused him much pain and confusion. He later became a painter, and was known for his cityscapes of Moscow. We never met and never will, although I always felt a lot of fraternal sympathy with him. I learned recently of his death in Moscow in the spring of 2000.

That first trip to the Soviet Union in 1961 was a sort of pilgrimage for me. My primary motivations were to learn something more about the fate of my father, and I still wanted to find out what really lay behind that last meeting between my mother and Ehrenburg. I went in an official capacity, a modest one, but one which provided the protection of the French government. I was a guide-interpreter for the first postwar national exhibition organized by the French Chamber of Commerce. The exhibition was intended to show off all the advances of French industry, from fountain pens to radios to tractors to cars. It was a momentous occasion. Two hundred guide-interpreters were eventually chosen by the Soviet embassy, out of four hundred candidates, all of whom had been preselected and trained by the French. The selection, as we learned later, had been carried out according to very specific criteria: a certain percentage of actual Russian emigres (by 1961, these persons had already reached middle age); a certain percentage of their children, born in France, who were bearing Russian surnames; a certain number of women of Russian origin, who had married Frenchmen, thereby acquiring French surnames; and Frenchwomen who had acquired Russian surnames through marriage! How I stayed on that list, I do not know and I never asked.