The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (64 page)

Ovanes is in jail. At night he dreams that nothing happened, that he is in the Palmyra Restaurant looking at women.

•    •    •

Burishkin is bristling with energy. He is a witness.

•    •    •

Galichka’s abortion went well. She is weak and tender. Shuriks husband became an instructor in the Red Army, participated in a number of battles on the home front, receives a pound of bread a day, is very cheerful, has come back with a regrettable illness. Shurik is being treated by an expensive doctor, and is full of whims and fancies. Her husband says that everyone is sick nowadays.

•    •    •

The general is cultivating a friendship with Leibzon the chemist. The general has become weak, emaciated. He is beginning to admire Jewish enterprise.

•    •    •

Lida visits Galichka, who has not yet managed to get over her illness. Her looks have faded, she is working as a secretary in the Smolny,
¹⁶
and spring is having a bad effect on her. She says that its hard for a woman to get by nowadays. The railroads aren’t working, so you cant go on trips to the countryside.

THE BLIND

The sign said: “Refuge for Blind Soldiers.” I rang the bell by the tall oak doors. Nobody answered. It turned out that the door was open. I went inside, and this is what I saw.

A tall, dark-haired man wearing sunglasses comes down the broad staircase. He taps in front of himself with a reed cane. The blind man has negotiated the staircase, but now many paths lie before him: dark back streets, blind alleys, stairs, side rooms. His cane softly taps the smooth, dimly shimmering walls. The blind mans head points upwards unmoving. He walks slowly, probes for the step with his foot, stumbles, and falls. A rivulet of blood cuts across his protruding white forehead, flows around his temples, and disappears under his sunglasses. The dark-haired man gets up, dips his fingers in his blood, and quietly calls out, “Kablukov!” The door to the adjoining room opens noiselessly. Reed canes shimmer before my eyes. The blind are coming to the aid of their fallen comrade. Some cannot find him, and huddle against the walls, looking upward with their unseeing eyes; others grab him by the arms and help him up from the floor and, hanging their heads, wait for the nurse or the orderly.

The nurse comes. She leads the soldiers to their rooms, and then explains things to me. “This sort of thing happens every day. This building is completely wrong for us, completely wrong! What we need is a level, one-story building with long corridors. Our ward is a death trap, full of stairs and more stairs! Every day they fall!”

Our government, as everyone knows, wallows in administrative bliss in only two cases: when we need to run for our lives or when we need to be mourned. During periods of evacuation and ruinous mass resettlement, the government’s activity takes on a vigor, a creative verve, an ingenious voluptuousness.

I was told how the blind were evacuated from the refuge. The initiative for the move had come from the patients themselves. With the approach of the Germans, the fear of occupation had unleashed extreme agitation in the blind men. The reasons for this agitation are many. The main reason is that all worry is sweet for the blind. Excitement grabs them quickly and unyieldingly, and restless aspiration toward an imaginary goal triumphs over the gloom of their darkness.

The second reason for the evacuation is their peculiar fear of the Germans.

Most of the blind men have come from prisoner-of-war camps. They firmly believe that when the Germans come they will be made to slave and starve again.

“You are blind,” the nurses have told them. “You’re no use to anyone! They wont do anything to you!”

But the blind men answered, “The German doesn’t let anyone slip through his fingers! The German makes everyone work—we’ve lived with Germans, sister!”

Their fear is touching, and typical of returned prisoners of war.

The blind men asked to be taken to the depths of Russia. Since it looked as if an evacuation was in the works, the authorization was quick to come. And this is where it all started.

With decisiveness stamped on their haggard faces, the blind men, wrapped in their coats, hobbled over to the train station. Their guides later told us what they had to go through. It was raining that day. All night the drenched men huddled together in the rain waiting to board the train. Then, in the cold and dark boxcars, they rattled over the face of their destitute fatherland, went to government offices, waited in dirty reception halls to be handed rations, and, dismayed and silent, followed their tired, angry guides. Some of the blind headed for villages. But the villages wanted nothing to do with them. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them. These worthless dregs of humanity, of no use to anyone, roamed about the railroad stations like packs of blind dogs looking for shelter. But there was no shelter. They all returned to Petrograd. Petrograd was silent, absolutely silent.

There is a single-story house huddling at the side of the main building. In it live peculiar people from a peculiar time, blind men with their families.

I talked with one of the wives, a pudgy young woman in a housecoat and Caucasian slippers. Her husband, sitting right next to her, was an old, bony Pole with an orange-colored face eaten away by poison gas.

I asked a few questions, and was quick to get the picture. The slothful little woman was a typical Russian woman of our times, who had been hurled about by the whirlwind of war, shock, and migration. When the war began she had enlisted as a nurse, “out of patriotism.” She had gone through a lot: maimed “boys,” German air raids, dances at the officers’ club, officers in “riding britches,” a womans ailment, love for some delegate or other, then the Revolution, the Campaign, another love, evacuation, and then the subcommittees.

Somewhere, at some point, she had had parents in Simbirsk, as well as a sister, Varya, and a cousin who was a railway man. But she hadn’t had a letter from her parents in a year and a half, and as her sister, Varya, was far away, the warm family aroma had dissipated.

What she now has instead is exhaustion, a body that is coming apart at the seams, a seat by the window, a penchant for idleness, lackluster eyes that slither gently from one object to another, and her husband—a blind Pole with an orange face.

There are quite a few such women in the refuge. They don’t leave because there’s nowhere to go and no point in going.

“I can’t understand what kind of a place we’re running here,” the head nurse often says to them. “We all live here bunched together, but you people have no right to be here! I don’t even know what to call this refuge. By law we’re supposed to be a public establishment, but with all of you here, I’m not so sure!”

In a dark, low-ceilinged room, two pale, bearded muzhiks sit facing each other on narrow beds. Their glass eyes are fixed. With soft voices they talk about land, wheat, the current price of suckling pigs.

In another room a rickety, apathetic little old man is giving a tall, strong soldier violin lessons. Weak, yelping sounds flow from under the bow in a singing, trembling stream.

I walk on.

In one of the rooms a woman is moaning. I look in and see a girl of about seventeen with a thin crimson face, writhing in pain on a wide bed. Her dark husband sits on a low stool in a corner, weaving a basket with broad hand movements, listening carefully and coldly to her moans.

The girl married him six months ago.

Any minute now a child will be born in this peculiar building filled with peculiar people.

This child will be a true child of our times.

THE EVENING

m not about to draw any conclusions. I’m not in the mood.

My story will be simple.

I was walking along Ofitserskaya Street. It was May 14, ten o’clock at night. I heard a shout coming from inside one of the courtyard gates. All kinds of people went to peek through this gate: a passing storekeeper, a sharp-eyed shop assistant, a young lady carrying a musical score, a fat-cheeked maid flushed with spring.

In the depths of the courtyard, by the shed, stood a man in a black jacket. Calling him a “man,” however, might be going somewhat too far. He was a thin, narrow-chested little fellow of about seventeen. A group of brawny men howling drawn-out curses was circling around him in new, squeaking boots. One of the men ran up to him with a bewildered look and punched him in the face. The litde fellow lowered his head silently.

A hand holding a revolver jutted out of a window on the second floor, and a rapid, wheezing voice yelled, “One things for certain—you wont live! Comrades, I will tear him to pieces! You will not live!”

Hanging his head, the little fellow stood below the window and, with attentive sadness, peered up at the yelling man. The yelling man had widened the narrow slits of his lackluster blue eyes to their utmost, and the rage of his passionate, ridiculous shouting was making him increasingly incensed. The little fellow stood motionless. A candle was flickering in the window. The sound of a gunshot resonated like a powerful, velvety note delivered by a baritone.

The little fellow tottered and ducked to the side.

“What are you doing, Comrades?” he whispered. “My God. . . .”

Then I saw the men beating him on the stairs. I was told that they were policemen, and that this building was their regional headquarters. The fellow was a prisoner who had tried to escape.

The fat-cheeked maid and the eager storekeeper were still standing by the gate. The beaten, gray-faced prisoner ran toward them. Seeing him, the storekeeper slammed the gate shut with sudden gusto and leaned against it with his shoulder, his eyes bulging. The prisoner threw himself against the gate, and one of the policemen hit him over the head with the butt of his gun. There was a dull, muffled gasp: “Murder.”

I walked down the street, my heart aching, despair seizing hold of me.

The men beating the little fellow were all workers. None of them was over thirty. They dragged him over to the police station. I slipped in behind them. Broad-shouldered men with crimson faces crept along the corridors. The prisoner sat on a wooden bench, surrounded by guards. His insignificant face was covered with blood and filled with doom. The policemen became businesslike, tense, and unhurried. One of them came up to me and, staring me in the eye, said, “What re you doing here? Get out!”

All the doors slammed shut. The police station screened itself off from the outside world. Silence descended. From behind the door came the sound of distant, muffled bustling. A gray-haired guard came over to me.

“Go away, Comrade, you’re looking for trouble. They’re going to finish him off. See? They’ve locked the door.” Then the guard added, “Killing that dog is too good for him! I’d like to see him try to escape again!

A few streets away from the police station I saw a cafe with a lit-up row of windows. Sweet music came drifting out. I was sad. I went inside. The look of the room startled me. It was flooded with the strange light of powerful electric lamps—a hot, white, blinding light. The brilliance made my eyes blur. The blue, red, and white uniforms painted a bright and joyful picture. Young blond heads and the gold of epaulettes, buttons, and cockades glittered beneath the shining lamps, and the black glow of the hard-polished boots shone with precision and exactness. All the tables were occupied by German soldiers. They were smoking long, black cigars, gazing pensively at the blue rings of smoke, and drinking large amounts of coffee with milk. A plump, maudlin old German was serving. He kept telling the band to play Strauss waltzes and Mendelssohns “Songs Without Words.” The soldiers’ powerful shoulders moved to the beat of the music, their bright eyes shone with sly confidence. They swaggered before one another and kept looking in the mirror. The cigars and the gold-embroidered uniforms had just been sent to them from Germany. The coffee-gulping Germans included all types: reticent and talkative, handsome and gnarled, laughing and silent. But the stamp of youth lay on all of them. Their thoughts and smiles were calm and confident.

Our hushed Rome of the north was grand and melancholy that night. For the first time this year the streetlights were not lit. The white nights were beginning.

The granite streets lay empty in the milky fog of the spectral night. Womens dark shadows stood out dimly against the wide intersections. The mighty St. Isaacs Cathedral loomed like a single, airy, everlasting stone thought. One could see in the blue, dusky radiance how clean was the delicate granite design of the carriageways. The Neva, imprisoned within its unyielding shores, coldly caressed the gleam of the lights in its dark, smooth waters.

Everything lay silent: the bridges and palaces, and the monuments that were waiting to be torn down, entangled in red bands and ulcerated by scaffolding. No one was out in the streets anymore. All noise had died away. The impetuous light of an automobile dipped out of the thinning darkness and disappeared without a trace.

The bodiless shroud of the night coiled itself around the golden steeples. The silent emptiness hid the most airy and cruel of thoughts.

I WAS STANDING AT THE BACK

We are like flies in September. We are sitting limply, as if we are about to expire. We have come together for a meeting of the unemployed of the district of Petrogradskaya Storona.

We have been allotted a spacious hall for this meeting. The advancing rays of the sun—wide, hot, white—lie on the walls.

The talk is being given by the chairman of the Committee of the Unemployed.

He is saying, “There are one hundred thousand unemployed. The factories that have come to a standstill cannot be brought back into action. There is no fuel. The Labor Exchange is inefficient. Even though workers are running it, they happen to be workers who are not very clever, not very literate. The Food Distribution Department is not answerable in its operations to anyone. Those distributing bread among the population have the right to declare it unfit for distribution. No good comes of this. No one is being held accountable for anything.”

The audience listens passively to the report. It is waiting for the conclusions. The conclusions follow.