The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (73 page)

That’s how things stand.

There is falsehood all around—it is both bought and sold. Even in the theater. If I have money, then I can go to Paris, proclaim that I am a renowned singer, and hold a press conference. Fifty articles are written analyzing my voice, my mode of singing, proclaiming that the crowds carry me on their shoulders through the streets of Moscow, and, needless to say, the public comes in droves. One thing is certain: the worse my voice, the more I have to pay for publicity.

This canker is devouring France, so wonderful in its diversity and wealth, this country of great scientists, poets, and artists.

THE RED BELT

Paris is girdled by small towns. They are considered her suburbs, and most of her mills and factories, businesses and establishments are there. The votes of the masses working there belong to the Communist Party, and most of the towns surrounding Paris are Communist municipalities. This belt tied tightly around Paris is a red belt.

One of the places our Soviet delegation visited (we were attending the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture) was Villejuif, one of the Red suburbs of Paris. The mayor of Villejuif, Vaillant-Couturier, is a member of the French Communist Party, a writer and journalist, and the editor in chief of the newspaper VHumanite* The transition from the capital, with its intricate, contradictory, frightening apparatus of the bourgeois state, to Villejuif, a hotbed of the future, was striking.

There is no noticeable border marking where Paris ends and the small surrounding towns begin. The endless city stretches over dozens of kilometers, the quarters becoming poorer the farther one gets from the center, and one sees more and more factory overalls being worn, which soon enough become the predominant dress.

We arrived in Villejuif and went straight to the town hall. Everyone addresses each other as “Comrade,” and in all the offices there is so much esprit de corps, simplicity, and sincerity, that we immediately felt as if we were back home. We understood not only with our minds but also with our hearts that the world of Communist ideals is as wide and boundless as the earth.

In the town hall we spent a few hours talking to Vaillant-Couturier. People came to this Communist mayor on the most unusual business— workers, the bourgeoisie, speculators, and military men.

Most of the people who came were out of work. One of them complained to the mayor, “My boss, that damn dog, laid me off, and now he refuses to sign a paper so that I can get my severance pay! Please help me, Vaillant!”

And Vaillant helps him. Then and there he writes a note to the “damn dog”:

“Dear Sir, etc., etc., I suggest that you immediately pay in full the money owed to Monsieur so-and-so. Should you refuse to do so, then ...” One feels certain that the “damned dog” will not “refuse to do so.” The worker takes the note and thanks the mayor.

Within half an hour the boss comes rushing in, disheveled and distraught.

“Monsieur Vaillant, I swear that deep in my soul I too am a Communist, but I swear that I do not owe that man a hundred francs! You are ruining me! You’re adding things up all wrong. The workers live better than I do! I’m ruined! I don’t even have enough money to pay off the mounting interest.”

Vaillant pats him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, my friend! Soon enough all your troubles will be over! When France becomes Communist you will no longer have to pay any interest, and the state will no longer have to pay any unemployment!”

A cold chill runs down the boss’s spine, and he leaves deep in thought.

The best school in France has been built in the Communist municipality of Villejuif.
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Its architecture is uncommonly attractive and cheerful—it is exquisitely built. There is a large fresco by Lur$at and classrooms full of light and harmony. There are flower beds, halls for physical education, and a movie theater. This school is the eighth wonder of the world for the people of France, who are used to dour, medieval school buildings. Even the official government could not help but be impressed by the brilliance and simplicity of the building and the innovative methods of teaching. The Minister of Education had expressed the wish to participate in the ceremony opening the school. However, he had been given to understand that the prospect of his par-ticipation was not viewed with much enthusiasm. He got the message.

A Red belt surrounds Paris, and the hour is approaching when, to the joy of all progressive men and women, the Red suburbs will unite with a Red Paris.

By 1925, Isaac Babel was beginning to gain fame and notoriety throughout the Soviet Union. In the previous two years, his Red Cavalry stories had appeared in quick succession in newspapers and literary magazines, and had been received with great enthusiasm by readers and critics. But they were received with outrage by the powerful commanders who found themselves appearing in the stories in a most unfavorable light. General Budyonny, Division Commander Timoshenko, and Squadron Commander Melnikov (who had been portrayed in the “The Story of a Horse” as having a breakdown that prompted him to leave the cavalry and to resign his membership in the Communist Party), wrote outraged letters and articles that were printed in major newspapers and magazines*
[In reaction to the protests, Babel changed some of the names in later editions of the stories. Timoshenko, for instance, became Savitsky, and Melnikov became Khlebnikov
.] This added greatly to Babel’s mystique, and after the Red Cavalry stories came out as a book in 1926, it was reprinted eight times over the next few years.

In the stories in this section, Babel broadened his range of subject matter, dealing more directly than before with autobiographical material and writing in longer forms. He intended to collect the stories he wrote based on his childhood in a single volume under the title The Story of my Dovecote, and began working on a novel, Velikaya Krinitsa, named after a Ukrainian village (Velikaya Staritsa) that he visited in the spring of 1930. The novel was to be about the effects of enforced coldec^ tivization on farmers, a dangerous subject for a book during the Stalin era. Two chapters of this novel have survived as separate stories
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Gapa Guzhva ” which was to be the first chapter; and “Kolyvushka” which was not published during Babel’s lifetime.

Some of Babel’s most celebrated stories are from this period. As Maxim Gorky wrote to Romain Rolland in 1928,
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Babel is the great hope of Russian literature”

For Maxim Gorky

As a child I wanted a dovecote very badly. In all my life I have never desired anything more intensely. I was nine years old when my father promised to give me the money to buy some planks and three pairs of doves. The year was 1904. I was getting ready for the examinations for the preparatory class of the Nikolayev Lycee. My family lived in Nikolayev, in the province of Kherson. This province no longer exists; our town was absorbed into the district of Odessa.

I was only nine years old, and was frightened of the examinations. In both Russian and mathematics I could not afford to get less than five, the highest grade. The Jewish entry quota for our lycee was harsh, only five percent. Out of forty boys, only two Jews could be admitted into the preparatory class. The teachers would come up with the most cunning questions for these two boys; nobody was given the kind of complicated questions we were. So my father promised to buy me doves on condition that I manage to get two five-pluses. He tormented me more than I can say, I tumbled into a never-ending daydream—the long, desperate dream of a child—and though I went to the examination immersed in that dream, I still fared better than the rest.

I was good at learning. The teachers, though they tried every trick, did not manage to waylay my mind and my sharp memory. I was good at learning, and so got two fives. But then the situation changed. Khariton Efrussi,
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the grain merchant who exported wheat to Marseilles, proffered a five-hundred-ruble bribe for his son, I was given a five-minus instead of a five, and the lycee admitted Efrussi Junior in my place. My father was deeply pained by this. From the time I was six, he had taught me all the subjects you could imagine. That minus drove him to desperation. He wanted to beat Efrussi up, or to hire two dock-workers to beat him up, but mother talked him out of it, and I began preparing myself for the examination next year for the following grade. Behind my back, my family talked my tutor into going over the lessons for both the preparatory class and the first class within one year, and, as we were completely desperate, I ended up learning three books by heart. These books were Smirnovsky’s grammar, Yevtushevsky’s book of mathematical problems, and Putsikovichs introduction to Russian history. Children no longer study these books, but I learned them by heart, line by line, and the following year Karavayev, the schoolmaster, gave me those unattainable five-pluses in my Russian language examination.

Karavayev was a ruddy-faced, indignant man who had been a student in Moscow. He was barely thirty. His manly cheeks blossomed with the flush seen on the cheeks of peasant children. He had a wart on his face from which a tuft of ashen, feline hair sprouted. Also present at the examination besides Karavayev was the deputy warden, who was considered an important figure not only in the lycee but in the whole province. The deputy warden asked me about Peter I, and a blankness came over me, a feeling that the end, the abyss, was near, a dry abyss surrounded by delight and despair.

I knew by heart the passage about Peter the Great in Putsikovichs book and Pushkins poems. I recited the poems in sobs. Faces swarmed into my eyes, mixing and shuffling deep inside like a fresh deck of cards, while I, shivering, straight-backed, shouted out Pushkins verses with all my might, as fast as I could. I went on shouting the verses for a long time, nobody interrupting my crazed rambling. Across my crimson blindness, across the freedom that had taken hold of me, I only saw Pyatnitsky’s old face leaning forward with its silvery beard. He did not interrupt me, but turned to Karavayev, who was rejoicing in Pushkin and me, and whispered, “What a nation! The devil is in these Yids!”

When I finished he said, “Very good, off you go now, my little friend.”

I left the classroom and went out into the corridor, and there, leaning against the unpainted wall, I woke from the convulsions of my dreams. Russian boys were playing all around me, the school bell hung nearby over the official-looking flight of stairs, a watchman was dozing on a broken chair. I gazed at him and began to come back to my senses. Children came creeping toward me from all sides. They wanted to poke me and get me to play with them, but suddenly Pyatnitsky appeared in the corridor. Passing by me, he stopped for an instant, his frock coat undulating in a heavy slow wave over his back. I saw emotion in his large, fleshy, gentlemanly back, and I went up to him.

“Children,” he told the schoolboys. “Leave this boy alone!” And he laid his fat, tender hand on my shoulder. “My little friend,” Pyatnitsky said, turning to me. “You can go and tell your father that you have been accepted into the first class.”

A magnificent star shone on his chest, medals tinkled by his lapel, and hemmed in by the murky walls, moving between them like a barge moves through a deep canal, his large, black, uniformed body marched off on rigid legs and disappeared through the doors of the headmaster s office. A little attendant brought him tea with solemn ceremony, and I ran home to our store.

In our store a muzhik customer sat scratching his head in the grip of indecision. When my father saw me, he abandoned the muzhik and drank in my story without a moment’s doubt. He shouted to his sales clerk to close the store, and rushed over to Sobornaya Street to buy me a cap with the school emblem on it. My poor mother barely managed to wrest me away from my delirious father. She stood there, pale, trying to foresee my fate. She kept caressing me and then pushing me away in disgust. She said that a list of all the children admitted into the lycee was always published in the newspapers, and that God would punish us and that people would laugh at us, if we bought a school uniform ahead of time. My mother was pale, she was trying to foresee my fate in my eyes, and looked at me with bitter pity, as if I were a little cripple, for she was the only one who fully realized how luckless our family was.

All the men of our clan had been too trusting of others and too quick to take unconsidered action. We had never had any luck in anything. My grandfather had once been a rabbi in Belaya Tserkov, had been chased out of town for blasphemy, and then lived in scandal and poverty for another forty years, learned foreign languages, and started going insane in his eightieth year. My Uncle Lev, my fathers brother, studied at the Yeshiva in Volozhin, evaded conscription in 1892, and abducted the daughter of a quartermaster serving in the Kiev military district. Uncle Lev took this woman to California, to Los Angeles, where he abandoned her, and he died in a madhouse among Negroes and Malays. After his death, the American police sent us his belongings—a large trunk reinforced with brown iron hoops—from Los Angeles. In this trunk were dumbbells, locks of a womans hair, Uncles tallithy whips with gilded tips, and herbal tea in little boxes trimmed with cheap pearls. The only men left in the family were mad Uncle Simon, who lived in Odessa, my father, and me. But my father was too trusting of others, he offended people with his exhilarating welcome of first love. They did not forgive him for this, and so cheated him. This was why my father believed that his life was governed by a malevolent fate, an inscrutable being that pursued him and that was unlike him in every way. So in our family I was my mothers only hope. Like all Jews, I was short in stature, weak, and plagued by headaches from too much study. My mother could see this clearly. She had never been blinded by her husbands destitute pride and his incomprehensible belief that our family would one day be stronger and richer than other people in this world. She did not foresee any success for us, was frightened of buying a school uniform ahead of time, and only acceded to my having my picture taken by a portrait photographer.