The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (78 page)

Nikitich silently watched me combat the waves single-handed. Seeing that there was no hope I would ever learn to swim on my own, he let me join the other little lodgers of his heart. His cheerful heart was completely devoted to us. It was never disdainful, never miserly, and never agitated. He lay among us by the breakwater, the king of these melon and kerosene waters, with his copper shoulders, his head that of an aging gladiator, and his lightly crooked, bronze legs. I loved him as only a boy afflicted with hysteria and headaches can love an athlete. I didnt leave his side, and tried to please him every way I could.

“Calm down,” he told me. “Steady your nerves, and swimming will come of its own accord. . . . What do you mean, the water won t hold you up? Why shouldn’t it?”

Seeing how I was reaching out to him, Nikitich made an exception for me among all his pupils, and invited me to come up to his place, a clean, spacious garret covered in mats, and showed me his dogs, his hedgehog, his tortoise, and his doves. In gratitude for his generosity I brought him a tragedy I had written the night before.

“I knew you were a scribbler!” Nikitich said. “You have that look in your eyes. Youre no longer looking at things.”

He read my play, shrugged his shoulders, ran his fingers through his stiff, gray locks, and paced up and down the garret.

“I believe,” he said in a slow drawl, pausing between words, “that there is a divine spark in you.”

We went out into the street. The old man stopped, banged his stick hard on the sidewalk, and peered at me.

“There’s something lacking in your work, but what is it? That you are young is no problem—that will pass in time. What you lack is a feel for nature.”

He pointed his stick at a tree with a reddish trunk and a low crown.

“What kind of tree is that?”

I didnt know.

“Whats growing on this bush?”

I didn’t know that either. We walked through the little park on Aleksandrovsky Boulevard. The old man poked at all the trees with his stick, grabbed my shoulder whenever a bird flew by, and had me listen to their different calls.

“What bird is that singing?”

I couldn’t answer. The names of birds and trees, what families they belonged to, where the birds flew, on which side the sun rose, when the dew was at its heaviest—all this was unknown to me.

“And you have the audacity to write? A man who does not exist in nature the way a stone or an animal exists in it will not write a single worthwhile line in all his life. Your landscapes resemble descriptions of stage sets. Goddamn it! What could your parents have been thinking of these past fourteen years?”

What had they been thinking of? Of contested bills and the mansions of Mischa Elman. I didn’t tell Nikitich that, I remained silent.

At home, at the dinner table, I didn’t touch my food—it wouldn’t go down.

“A feel for nature!” I thought. My God, why hadn’t this occurred to me? Where could I find someone to tell me what the different birdcalls and the names of trees were? How much did I know about these things? I could perhaps identify lilacs—that is, if they were in bloom. Lilacs and acacias. Deribasovskaya and Grecheskaya Streets were lined with acacias.

At dinner, Father told us a new story about Jascha Heifetz. On his way to Robyn’s, father had run into Mendelson, Jascha’s uncle. It turned out that the boy was getting eight hundred rubles a performance: “So go ahead and add up how much that comes to at fifteen concerts a month!”

I added it up. The result was twelve thousand a month. As I multiplied the number, carrying the four in my head, I looked out the window. My music teacher, Mr. Zagursky, wearing a lightly billowing cape, red ringlets jutting out from under his soft hat, and propping himself up with his cane, came marching through our cement yard. It cannot be said that he had been quick to notice my absence: more than three months had already passed since the day my violin had sunk to the sandy bottom off the breakwater.

Zagursky came up to our front door. I rushed off to the back door. It had been boarded up the night before to keep out thieves. So I locked myself in the toilet. Within half an hour my whole family had gathered outside the toilet door. The women were crying. Auntie Bobka, quivering with sobs, was grinding her fat shoulder against the door. My father was silent. He began speaking more quietly and distinctly than ever before in his life.

“I am an officer,” my father said. “I have an estate. I ride out on hunts. The muzhiks pay me rent. I sent my son to the Cadet Corps. There is no reason for me to lose any sleep over my son.”

He fell silent. The women sniffled. Then a terrible blow came crashing against the toilet door. My father began throwing himself on it with his whole body; he took runs and hurled himself against it.

“I am an officer!” he howled. “I ride out on hunts! I will kill him! That’s it!”

The hook went hurtling off the door, but the bolt was still there, held by a single nail. The women threw themselves on the floor, grappling for my fathers legs. Raving, he tried to tear himself loose. Hearing the rumpus, my old grandmother, my father’s mother, came hurrying in.

“My child,” she said to him in Yiddish. “Our sorrow is great, it knows no bounds. The last thing we need in our house is blood. I do not want to see blood in our house!”

My father moaned. I heard his footsteps receding. The latch was hanging on its last nail.

I sat in my fortress till nightfall. When everybody had gone to bed, Auntie Bobka took me to my grandmothers. It was a long walk. The moonlight froze on unknown shrubs, on nameless trees. An invisible bird whistled once and then was quiet, perhaps it had fallen asleep. What kind of bird was it? What was it called? Was there dew in the evenings? Where was the constellation of the Great Bear in the sky? On what side did the sun rise?

We walked along Pochtovaya Street. Auntie Bobka held my hand tightly so that I wouldn’t run away. She was right. I was thinking of running away.

I was a boy who told lies. This came from reading. My imagination was always aroused. I read during class, between classes, on my way home, and under the table at night, hidden by the tablecloth that hung down to the floor. Reading books, I missed out on everything the world around me had to offer: skipping classes to go to the port, the coming of billiards to the coffee shops along Grecheskaya Street, swimming at Langeron.*[ 
A beach in Odessa, named after the French count, Alexander Langeron, who was governor general of Odessa from 1816-1822
. ] I had no friends. Who would have wanted to spend time with someone like me?

One day I saw the brightest student in our class, Mark Borgman, with a book about Spinoza. He had just read it and was dying to tell the boys around him about the Spanish Inquisition. What he told them was nothing but scientific prattle. There was no poetry in Borgman’s words. I could not stop myself from cutting in. To whoever would listen, I talked about old Amsterdam, about the gloom of the ghetto, about the philosopher diamond cutters. I added quite a lot of spice to what I had read in books. I couldn’t resist. My imagination sharpened dramatic scenes, altered endings, steeped the beginnings in more mystery. Spinoza’s death, his lonely death in freedom, appeared to me in my imagination as a battle. The Sanhedrin had tried to compel the dying man to repent, but he held fast. It was at this point that I blended in Rubens. I imagined Rubens standing at the head of Spinoza’s bed, casting a death mask of the corpse’s face.

My schoolmates listened to my outlandish tale with open mouths. I told my tale with gusto. When the bell rang we reluctantly dispersed. Borgman came up to me during the following break, took me by the arm, and we went for a walk together. Soon we were seeing eye to eye. Borgman wasnt a bad specimen of top student. To his powerful brain, high school learning was only a scribble in the margin of the book of life. And he sought that book with ardor. Even as foolish little twelve-year-olds, we were all very aware that a wondrous and erudite life lay before him. He didnt even prepare for classes, he just sat there and listened. This reserved, sober boy was drawn to me because of my knack for twisting things, even the simplest things you could imagine.

That year we moved up to the third class. My report card was full of three-minuses.
⁴
I was so strange, with all the outlandish gibberish bouncing through my mind, that my teachers, after much deliberation, decided against giving me twos.

At the beginning of summer, Borgman invited me to come to his dacha. His father was the director of the Russian Bank for International Trade. He was one of those men who was turning Odessa into a Marseilles or Naples. The core of the old Odessa merchant was within him. He was one of those pleasant but skeptical bon vivants who avoided speaking Russian, preferring instead the rough, choppy language of the Liverpool ship captains. When an Italian opera came to Odessa in April, Borgman invited the whole cast to dinner. The puffy banker, the last of the Odessa merchants, had a little two-month liaison with the buxom prima donna. She took with her memories that did not burden her conscience along with a necklace chosen with taste but not costing too much.

The old man also held the position of Argentinean consul, and was chairman of the stock exchange committee. And I had been invited to his house. My Auntie Bobka ran out into the courtyard trumpeting the news. She dressed me up as best she could. I took the train to the sixteenth stop at Bolshoy Fontan.^ The dacha stood on a low, red cliff right by the shore. A flower garden of fuchsias and clipped thuya shrubs covered the cliff.

I came from a loud, impoverished family. The Borgman dacha filled me with awe. White wicker chairs glittered in walks covered with foliage. The dinner table was filled with flowers, the windows fitted with green casings. A low wooden colonnade opened up before the house.

The bank director came to the dacha in the evenings. After dinner he placed his wicker chair at the very edge of the cliff in front of the shifting plain of the sea, stretched out his legs in his white trousers, lit a cigar, and began to read the Manchester Guardian. The guests, Odessa ladies, played poker on the veranda. A narrow samovar with ivory handles was sputtering on the edge of the table.

The women—card-playing gourmands, sluttish coquettes, and furtive debauchees with large hips and perfumed undergarments—fluttered black fans and staked their gold. The sun pierced its way to them through the copse of wild vines. Its fiery globe was immense. Copper sparks weighed down the womens black hair. Flashes of sunset pierced their diamonds—diamonds that hung everywhere: in the deep hollows of breasts pressed apart, from powdered ears, and on plump and bluish female fingers.

Evening fell. A bat rustled by. The sea rolled blacker against the red cliff. My twelve-year-old heart surged with the cheer and ease of others’ wealth. My friend and I ambled hand in hand down the long walks. Borgman told me that he would become an aviation engineer. There was a rumor that his father would be appointed the London representative of the Russian Bank for International Trade. Borgman would be educated in England.

At our house, Auntie Bobka’s house, no one talked of such things. I had nothing with which I could match this uninterrupted splendor. So I told Borgman that although things back at my place were very different, my grandfather Levy-Itskhok and my uncle had traveled the whole world over and had thousands of adventures under their belts. I described these adventures one after the other. Within seconds, I lost all sense of reality, and took Uncle Volf from the Russian-Turkish War to Alexandria and Egypt.

Night rose in the poplars, stars pressed down on stooping branches. I spoke with wild gesticulations. The fingers of the future aviation engineer trembled in my hand. He emerged with difficulty from the

hallucination, and promised to come visit me at my place the following Sunday. Braced by his promise, I took the ferry back home to Auntie Bobkas.

The whole following week I imagined I was a bank director. I brought about millions of transactions with Singapore and Port Said. I acquired a yacht, and sailed it single-handedly. By Sabbath reality struck. Little Borgman was to come visiting the following day. Nothing of what I had told him actually existed. What did exist was far more extraordinary than anything I had invented, but at the age of twelve I had no idea how to grapple with the truth of my world. Grandpa Levy-Itskhok, a rabbi chased out of his shtetl for forging Count Branitsky’s signature on promissory notes, was considered a madman by neighbors and street boys alike. Uncle Simon-Volf I could not stand because of his loud eccentricity, full of mad fire, yelling, and harassment. Auntie Bobka was the only one I could count on. She was very proud that the son of a bank director was my friend. She saw this friendship as the beginning of a bright career and baked a fruit strudel and a poppy-seed pie for our guest. Into that pie she put the heart of our tribe, the heart that had withstood so many tribulations. We hid my grandfather, with his tattered top hat and his swollen feet bound in rags, with our neighbors the Apelkhots, and I begged him not to show himself until our guest left. I also dealt with Simon-Volf. He went off with his profiteer pals to drink tea at the Medved Tavern. Tea there was braced with vodka, and it was safe to assume that Simon-Volf would be delayed. It has to be said that my family was not your typical Jewish family. There were drunks in our clan, we had run away with the daughters of generals and then abandoned them before crossing the border, and our grandfather had forged signatures and written blackmailing letters for abandoned wives.

All my efforts went into keeping Simon-Volf away for the whole day. I gave him the three rubles I had managed to save up. Spending three rubles took some doing, Simon-Volf would come back late, and the bank directors son would never know that the tales of my uncles kindness and strength were all lies. It must, however, be said that were one to appraise things purely with ones heart, then my tale could be seen as true and not a lie at all. But when you first came face-to-face with the loud and dirty Simon-Volf, this intangible truth was not to be discerned.