The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (22 page)

Broydin spread his long-legginged legs, and listened without raising his eyes. The brown fringe of his beard lay motionless on his new jacket. He seemed immersed in sad, tranquil thought.

“Forgive me, Arye-Leib,” Broydin sighed, turning to the cemetery sage. “Forgive me, but I must say that I cannot but see ulterior motives and political goals here. Standing behind you, I cannot but see people who know exactly what they are doing, just as you know exactly what you are doing.”

Broydin raised his eyes. In a flash they filled with the white water of fury. He trained the trembling hills of his pupils on the old folk.

“Arye-Leib!” Broydin said in his powerful voice. “I want you to read this telegram from the Tatar Republic, where an immense number of Tatars are starving like madmen! Read the petition of the Petersburg proletariat who are working and waiting, hungering by their benches!”

“I dont have time to wait!” Arye-Leib interrupted Broydin. “I have no time!”

“There are people,” Broydin continued without listening, “who have it worse than you do, and there are thousands of people who have it worse than the people who have it worse than you do! You are sowing trouble, Arye-Leib, and a whirlwind is what you shall reap. You are as good as dead if I turn my back on you. You will die if I go my way and you go yours. You will die, Arye-Leib. You will die, Simon-Volf. You will die, Meyer Beskonechny. But tell me one thing, just one thing, before you die—do we have a Soviet government, or could it be that we do not? If we do not have a Soviet government, if its all in my imagination, then I would be grateful if you would be so kind as to take me back to Mr. Berzon’s on the corner of Deribasovskaya and Ekaterininskaya Streets, where I worked as a tailor sewing vests all my life! Tell me, Arye-Leib, is the Soviet government all in my imagination?”

And Broydin came right up to the old cripples. His quivering pupils broke loose and went hurtling over the groaning, petrified herd like searchlights, like tongues of flame. Broydin s leggings crackled, and sweat stewed on his furrowed face. He came closer and closer to Arye-Leib, demanding an answer to whether it was all in his imagination that the Soviet government was now in power.

Arye-Leib remained silent. This silence might have been the end of him, had not Fedka Stepun appeared at the end of the walk, barefoot and in a sailors shirt.

Fedka had been shell-shocked near Rostov and lived in a hut next to the cemetery, recovering. He wore a whistle on an orange police cord and carried a revolver without a holster.

Fedka was drunk. The locks of his rock-hard curls rested on his forehead. Beneath his locks his face, with its high cheekbones, was twisted by convulsions. He walked up to Lugovoy’s grave, which was surrounded by wilted wreaths.

“Where were you, Lugovoy, when I took Rostov?” Fedka asked the dead man.

Fedka gnashed his teeth, blew his police whistle, and pulled the revolver from his belt. The revolver’s burnished muzzle glittered.

“They’ve trampled on the czars,” Fedka shouted. “There are no czars! Let them all lie without coffins!”

Fedka was clutching his revolver. His chest was bare. On it were tattooed the name “Riva” and a dragon, its head inclined toward a nipple.

The gravediggers crowded around Fedka with their raised shovels. The women who were washing corpses came out of their sheds ready to join Doba-Leya in her howling. Roaring waves beat against the locked cemetery gates.

People with dead relatives on wheelbarrows demanded to be let in. Beggars banged their crutches against the fence.

“They’ve trampled on the czars!” Fedka shouted, firing into the sky.

The people came hopping and jumping up the cemetery walk. Broydin’s face slowly turned white. He raised his hand, agreed to all the demands of the almsfolk, and, with a soldierly about-turn, went back to his office. At that very instant the gates burst open. Pushing their wheelbarrows in front of them, the relatives of the dead briskly hurried down the paths. Self-proclaimed cantors sang “El moley rakhim
²
in piercing falsettos over open graves. In the evening the old folk celebrated their victory at Krivoruchka’s. They gave Fedka three quarts of Bessarabian wine.

“Hevel havolim” Arye-Leib said, clinking glasses with Fedka. “You’re one of us, one of us! Kuloy hevel

The mistress of the wine cellar, Krivoruchka’s wife, was washing glasses behind the partition.

“When a Russian man is blessed with a good character,” Madame Krivoruchka commented, “it’s a rare luxury!”

Fedka was led out of the wine cellar after one in the morning.

“Hevel havolim.” He muttered the dire, incomprehensible words as he tottered along Stepovaya Street. “Kuloy hevel

On the following day the old folk of the almshouse were each given four sugar cubes, and there was meat in their borscht. In the evening they were taken to the Odessa City Theater to a performance organized by the Department of Social Assistance. A performance of Carmen. It was the first time in their lives that these invalids and cripples saw an Odessa theaters gilt tiers, the velvet of its loges, and the oily sparkle of its chandeliers. During intermission they were given liver-sausage sandwiches.

An army truck took them back to the cemetery. It rolled through the deserted streets, banging and sputtering. The old folk slept with full stomachs. They belched in their sleep and shuddered with satiation, like dogs who have run so much they can run no more.

The next morning, Arye-Leib got up earlier than the rest. He faced east to say his prayers and saw a notice pinned to the door, in which Broydin announced that the almshouse was going to be closed for renovations and that all its wards were to report immediately to the local Department of Social Assistance for their employability to be reassessed.

The sun emerged over the green treetops of the cemetery grove. Arye-Leib raised his hand to his eyes. A tear dropped from the spent hollows.

The shining chestnut walk stretched toward the mortuary. The chestnuts were in bloom, the trees bore tall white blossoms on their spreading boughs. An unknown woman with a shawl tied tautly under her breasts was working in the mortuary. Everything had been redone—the walls decorated with fir branches, the tables scraped clean. The woman was washing an infant. She nimbly turned it from side to side, the water pouring in a diamond stream over its crushed, blotchy little back.

Broydin was sitting on the mortuary steps in his leggings. He sat there like a man of leisure. He took off his cap and wiped his forehead with a yellow handkerchief.

“Thats exactly what I said to Comrade Andreychik at the union,” said the melodious voice of the unknown woman. “Were not afraid of work! Let them go ask about us in Ekaterinoslav—Ekaterinoslav knows how we work.
³

“Make yourself at home, Comrade Blyuma, make yourself at home,” Broydin said placidly, sticking his yellow handkerchief into his pocket. “Im easy enough to get along with, yes, Im easy enough to get along with!” he repeated, and turned his sparkling eyes to Arye-Leib, who had dragged himself all the way up to the stoop. “As long as you dont spit in my kasha.”

Broydin did not finish what he was saying. A buggy harnessed to a large black horse pulled up at the gate. Out of the buggy stepped the director of the Communal Economics Department, wearing a fine shirt. Broydin rushed over to help him out of the buggy and, bowing and scraping, took him to the cemetery.

The former tailors apprentice showed his director a century of Odessan history resting beneath the granite tombstones. He showed him the vaults and memorials of the wheat exporters, shipping brokers, and merchants who had built Russia’s Marseille on the site of Khadzhibei.^ They all lay here, their faces toward the gate, the Ashkenazis, Gessens, and Efrussis—the lustrous misers and philosophical bon vivants, the creators of wealth and Odessa anecdotes. They lay beneath their labradorite and rose-marble memorials, shielded by chains of acacias and chestnut trees from the plebes clumped against the wall.

“They wouldn’t let us live while they were alive,” Broydin said, kicking a memorial with his boot. “And after their death they wouldn’t let us die.”

Inspired, he told the director of the Communal Economics Department about his reorganization program for the cemetery and his campaign plan against the Jewish Burial Brotherhood.

“And get rid of them over there too,” the director said, pointing to the beggars who had gathered by the gate.

“I am already seeing to that,” Broydin answered. “Step by step, everything’s being taken care of.”

“Well, keep up the good work,” Mayorov,
⁴
the director, said. “I see you have things under control here. Keep up the good work!”

He placed his boot on the buggys footboard, but suddenly remembered Fedka.

“By the way, who was that clown back there?”

“Just some shell-shocked fellow,” Broydin said, lowering his eyes. “There are times when he loses control of himself—but hes been straightened out, and he apologizes.”

“That Broydin knows his onions,” Mayorov told his companion, as they drove off. “Hes handling things well.”

The large horse took Mayorov and the director of the Department of Public Services into town. On the way, they passed the old men and women who had been thrown out of the almshouse. They were hobbling along the road in silence, bent under their bundles. Spirited Red Army fighters were herding them into lines. The invalid carts of the paralyzed were screeching. Asthmatic whistling and humble wheezing tore from the chests of the retired cantors, wedding jesters, circumci-sion-feast cooks, and washed-up sales clerks.

The sun stood high in the sky. The heat tore into the hearts of the heaps of rags dragging themselves along the earth. Their journey lay along a joyless, scorched, stony high road, past shacks of straw and clay, fields smothered by rocks, gutted houses mangled by shells, and past the plague mound.t This inexpressibly sad Odessan high road led from the town to the cemetery.

One day Lyovka, the youngest of the Kriks, saw Lyubka's daughter Tabl. “Tabl” in Yiddish means dove. He saw her and left home for three days and nights. The dust of other streets and the geraniums in other people’s windows were a comfort to him. After three days and nights, Lyovka came back home and found his father in the front garden. His father was eating supper. Madame Gorobchik was sitting next to her husband with murder in her eyes.

“Get out of here, you lout!” Papa Krik said to Lyovka when he saw him.

“Papa, pick up your tuning fork and tune your ears,” Lyovka said to him.

“What might be the issue?”

“There is this girl,” Lyovka said. “Shes got blond hair on her head. Her name is Tabl. ‘Tabl’ in Yiddish means dove. I’ve clapped my eyes on that girl!”

“You’ve clapped your eyes on a slop bucket!” Papa Krik said. “And her mother is a gangster!”

On hearing these paternal words, Lyovka rolled up his sleeves and raised a sacrilegious hand to his father. But Madame Gorobchik jumped up from her chair and threw herself between them.

“Mendel!” she screeched. “Bash in Lyovka’s ugly kisser! Lyovka, he ate eleven from my meatballs!”

“What? You ate eleven meatballs from your mother?” Mendel shouted, lunging at his son. But Lyovka dodged his blow and ran out of the yard, and Benchik, his older brother, ran with him. They roamed the streets until nightfall, seething like yeast in which vengeance is brewing, and finally Lyovka turned to his brother Benya, who within a few months was destined to become Benya the King: “Benchik,” he said, “lets act now, and people will be lining up to kiss our feet. Lets kill Papa. The Moldavanka no longer calls him Mendel Krik. The Moldavanka is calling him Mendel the Pogrom. Lets kill Papa—can we wait any longer?”

“No, the time hasn’t come yet,” Benya answered. “But the time is coming. Listen to its footsteps and make way for it. You must step aside, Lyovka.”

And Lyovka stepped aside to make way for time. Time, that ancient bookkeeper, set out, and along the way met Dvoira, the Kings sister, Manasseh, the carter, and a Russian girl called Marusya Yevtushenko.

Ten years ago I still knew men who might have wanted Dvoira, the daughter of Mendel the Pogrom, but now goiter is dangling beneath her chin and her eyes are bulging from their sockets. Nobody wants Dvoira. And yet only recently an elderly widower with grown daughters appeared. He wanted a cart and two horses. When Dvoira heard the news, she rushed off to wash her green dress and hung it in the yard to dry. She wanted to call at the widowers to find out how old he was, what kind of horses he wanted, and whether she could get him. But Papa Krik didn’t like widowers. He took the green dress, hid it in his cart, and left for work. Dvoira heated up the flatiron so she could press her dress, but the dress was nowhere to be found, and Dvoira threw herself on the ground and had a fit. Her brothers dragged her to the water pipe and poured water over her. So, my friends, can you see the workings of their father’s, Mendel the Pogroms, hand?

And now to Manasseh, the old carter, who harnessed Maid of Honor and Solomon the Wise. To his misfortune, he heard that old Butsis, Froim Grach, and Chaim Drong had their horses shod with rubber. Following their example, Manasseh went over to Pyatirubel and had Solomon the Wise shod with rubber. Manasseh loved Solomon the Wise, but Papa Krik told him, Tm not Chaim Drong and Im not Czar Nicholas II, that my horses should go to work in rubber soles!” And he grabbed Manasseh by the collar, lifted him up into his cart, and went riding out of the courtyard with him. Manasseh was dangling from Papa Kriks outstretched arm as from a gallows. The sunset was boiling in the skies, a sunset thick as jam, the bells of Alekseyevsky Church moaned, and the sun was sinking behind Blizhniye Melnitsy,*[
“Near Mills,” a poor factory and shantytown suburb.
] and Lyovka, the younger son of the house, ran after the cart like a dog running after its master.

An immense crowd followed the Kriks as if they were an ambulance cart, Manasseh still hanging from Papa Kriks iron grip.

“Papa, you are crushing my heart with your outstretched hand!” Lyovka shouted over to his father. “Drop my heart, let it roll in the dust!”