The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (8 page)

Looking at the Chinese filmmakers, I remembered Viktor Shklovsky’s account of how Babel spent the whole year 1919 writing and rewriting “a story about two Chinese.” “They grew young, they aged, broke windows, beat up a woman, organized this or that”; Babel hadn’t finished with them when he joined the Red Cavalry. In the 1920 diary, “the story about the Chinese” becomes part of the propaganda that Babel relays in the pillaged shtetls: “I tell fairy tales about Bolshevism, its blossoming, the express trains, the Moscow textile mills, the universities, the free food, the
Revel Delegation, and, to crown it off, my tale about the Chinese, and I enthrall all these poor tortured people.” At Stanford, we had it all: a university, free food, and, to crown it off, the Chinese.

Not all of the Russians were as delighted by the Chinese as I was. “We don’t mess with your
I Ching
 . . . ,” I overheard one audience member saying.

Some Russian people are skeptical or even offended when foreigners claim an interest in Russian literature. I still remember the passport control officer who stamped my first student visa. He suggested to me that there might be some American writers, “Jack London for example,” whom I could study in America: “the language would be easier and you wouldn’t need a visa.” The resistance can be especially high when it comes to Babel, who wrote in an idiosyncratic Russian-Jewish Odessa vernacular—a language and humor that Russian-Jewish Odessans earned the hard way. While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can’t do that, what’s it good for? On these grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the
Red Cavalry
cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov’s “specifically Jewish alienation.”

“Right,” I finally said. “As a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.”

He nodded: “So you see the problem.”

•   •   •

The reception was followed by a dinner, which began with toasts. A professor from Moscow was proposing a toast to Pirozhkova. “In Russian we have an expression, a little-known but good expression, that we say when someone dies: ‘He ordered us to live a long time.’ Now I look at Antonina Nikolayevna and I think of Babel who died before his time, and I think, ‘Babel ordered her to live a long time.’ We are so lucky for this, because she can tell us all the things that only she knows. A long life to Antonina Nikolayevna!”

This toast struck me as both bizarre and depressing. I downed nearly a whole glass of wine and became light-headed to the extent that I almost told a dirty joke to Freidin’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Anna. Anna, who was applying to colleges, had asked about undergraduate advising at Harvard. I told her about my freshman adviser, a middle-aged British woman who held advisee meetings in a pub—once I missed our meeting because they were checking IDs at the door—and who worked in the telecommunications office.

“The telecommunications office?”

“Uh-huh. I would see her there when I went to pay my phone bill.”

“Did she have any other connection to Harvard, other than working in the telecommunications office? Was she an alumna?”

“Yeah, she got an MA in the seventies, in Old Norse literature.”

Anna stared at me. “Old Norse literature? What good is an MA in Old Norse literature?”

“I think it’s useful in telecommunications work,” I said.

“Old Norse literature,” Anna repeated. “Hmm. Well, it must be a
fecund
area of study. Aren’t the Norse the ones who invented Thor, god of thunder?”

“Oh—I know a joke about Thor!” The joke involves the
comic exchange between Thor and a farmer’s daughter: “I AM THOR!” says Thor, to which the farmer’s daughter replies: “I’m thor, too, but I had tho much fun!”

“So Thor comes down to earth for a day,” I began, when I suddenly became conscious that Joseph Frank—the Stanford emeritus famous for his magisterial five-volume biography of Dostoevsky—had abandoned the lively discussion he had been having with a Berkeley professor about Louis XIII. Both were regarding me from across the table with unblinking interest.

“You know,” I said to Anna, “I just remembered it’s kind of an inappropriate joke. Maybe I’ll tell you another time.”

By now, every single person at the table was staring at me. Frank leaned over the arm of his wheelchair toward Freidin’s wife, a professor at Berkeley who was also in a wheelchair. “Who is that?” he asked loudly.

“That is Elif, a graduate student who has been very helpful to Grisha,” she replied.

“Ah.” Joseph Frank nodded and turned his attention to his pasta.

These events took a toll on me, and I overslept the next morning, missing the nine a.m. panel on biography. I got to the conference center as everyone was leaving for lunch, and immediately spotted Luba, who is my height, with huge, sad, gray eyes, and an enormous quantity of extremely curly hair.

“Elishka!” she exclaimed. “Did you just wake up? Don’t worry, I wrote everything down for you, in case you want to use it in a novel.” We went to the student union for lunch, and Luba told me about the panel.

Three different people were writing biographies about Babel. The first, Freidin, presented on the Other Babel. The
second, an American journalist, talked about her experiences researching Babel’s life in 1962 Moscow. She had interviewed Babel’s old acquaintance, the French chargé d’affaires, Jacques de Beaumarchais (descendant of the author of
Figaro
), and was followed by the KGB, whom Beaumarchais gallantly instructed “
Fichez le camp!
” but the KGB took her in for questioning anyway. The third, Werner Platt, a German who taught Russian history in Tashkent, read a paper called “Writing a Biography of Isaac Babel: A Detective’s Task,” largely about getting kicked out of various Russian archives and not managing to find out anything about Babel. On the premise that “good detective work means returning to the scene of the crime,” the historian had made pilgrimages to Babel’s old house in Odessa, the Moscow apartment, the dacha in Peredelkino—only to find that all had been torn down. Undiscouraged, Platt got on a bus to Lemberg. In his diary Babel had mentioned Budyonny’s decision not to attack Lemberg in 1920: “Why not? Craziness, or the impossibility of taking a city by cavalry?” Looking around Lemberg, Platt concluded that, as Babel had implied by calling Budyonny’s withdrawal “crazy,” Lemberg was indeed a beautiful city.

His talk was poorly received. Someone had muttered: “For an incompetent scholar, everything is ‘a detective’s task.’ ” It seemed that some of the documents that Platt had been unable to access in the archives had been published years ago. “You can buy this in the Barnes & Noble,” someone said.

Platt had also made some provocative claims about the lost manuscripts, which led to a free-for-all about the location and contents of the missing folders.

“Empty!” an unknown Russian had shouted. “The folders were empty!”

Nathalie Babel had stood up and taken the microphone—“The best part,” Luba said, sitting up straighter and reading from her notebook in a deep, sepulchral voice.

“WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, I WAS TOLD THAT MY PUPPY WAS A WRITER.” Pause. “LATER I HEARD PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT ISAAC BABEL, SAYING THAT HE WAS A GREAT WRITER.” Pause. “TO ME, HE WAS MY PUPPY.”

Long pause.

“I AM CONFUSED.”

Another pause.

“I AM
CONFUSED
.”

One minute, two minutes passed, in total silence. Finally, somebody asked Nathalie whether it was true that she was “still sitting on some unpublished letters.”

Nathalie Babel sighed. “LET ME TELL YOU A STORY ABOUT LETTERS.” The story was that Nathalie Babel had come into possession of a trunk of her father’s letters. (“Her puppy’s letters,” Luba explained.) “I KNEW THE BIOGRAPHER WOULD COME,” she said, “BUT HE ANNOYED ME. SO I GAVE THE LETTERS TO MY AUNT. WHEN THE BIOGRAPHER CAME, I SAID, ‘I HAVE NOTHING.’ ” And where were the letters now? Nathalie Babel didn’t know. “MAYBE THEY ARE UNDER MY BED, I DON’T REMEMBER.” The panel ended in pandemonium.

Later that afternoon, after the panel on Babel and World Literature, I rode my bike back to the graduate-student housing complex and nearly ran over Fishkin, who was standing outside wearing pajamas and smoking a cigarette. I welcomed him back from Tahoe, and asked how he was enjoying the conference. Fishkin, I learned, was not enjoying the conference. Not only was he in trouble about Tahoe, but Boris Zalevsky, a well-known twentieth-centuryist, had given him the finger in the parking lot.

“Is that a joke?” I asked.

“N-n-no!” said Fishkin, who stuttered at emotional moments. “He really did it, I swear!”

I had been baffled by Zalevsky’s character ever since the question-answer session after that afternoon’s panel. A famous professor of comparative literature had just read what struck me as an incredibly lame paper comparing a passage in
Madame Bovary
, in which flies are dying in the bottom of a glass of cider, to Babel’s description of the death of Squadron Commander Trunov. (The similarity was supposedly that both Babel and Flaubert were aestheticizing the banal.) The moderator—my adviser, Monika Greenleaf—returning to the subject of those flies in the cider, had compared them to the inkwell full of dead flies at the miser’s estate in
Dead Souls
, and also to Captain Lebyadkin’s lyric about cannibalistic flies in a jar in Dostoevsky’s
Demons
. I thought this was a much more promising line of comparison—in fact, Babel, too, had a passage about “flies dying in a jar filled with milky liquid” in a Tiflis hotel. A beautiful passage: “Each fly was dying in its own way.” But before my adviser could get to her point about dead flies, Zalevsky had interrupted: “The Flaubert example was pertinent, but your example is not pertinent.”

This had confused me, because I had actually liked Zalevsky’s paper. It had been far more interesting than the one about “aestheticizing the banal” and the “rapture of perception.” But if he was such a smart guy, why was he (a) praising a mediocre paper and (b) being rude to Monika, who had at her fingertips every fly that had ever drowned in the whole Russian canon?

“He must be bipolar,” I told Fishkin. “So how did it happen?”

Fishkin had had his turn signal on and was about to pull into a parking spot when suddenly a car came around the corner from the opposite direction and slipped in before him. The driver of this car proceeded to give Fishkin the finger—and, as if that weren’t enough, he had gone and turned out to be Zalevsky!

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I-I-I turned my head, like this”—Fishkin turned his head to the left—“so that he wouldn’t see my face. Then I drove away.”

Back in my apartment, I made some tea and settled down to get through some more Balzac. But there was no escaping from Babel. In one of the critical forewords I found the following anecdote, which Balzac used to tell about his father’s early career as a clerk to the public prosecutor in Paris, and which might justly be titled “My First Partridge”:

According to the custom of the time [Balzac’s father] took his meals with the other clerks at his employer’s table . . . The Prosecutor’s wife, who was eyeing up the new clerk, asked him, “Monsieur Balzac, do you know how to carve?” “Yes, Madame,” the young man replied, blushing to the roots of his hair. He plucked up his courage and grabbed the knife and fork. Being entirely ignorant of culinary anatomy, he divided the partridge into four, but with such vigor that he smashed the plate, ripped the tablecloth and carved right through to the wood of the table. The Prosecutor’s wife smiled, and from that day on the young clerk was treated with great respect in the house.

As in “My First Goose,” a young man starts a new job, goes to live among people from a potentially unwelcoming culture, and attains respect and acceptance through the mutilation of poultry.

The anecdote appears in Théophile Gautier’s 1859 biography of Balzac. I wondered if it could be shown that Babel
had read Gautier. Then I wondered whether there was anything to eat at home. There wasn’t. I got in my car and was driving down El Camino Real when my cell phone started ringing. The phone played a cheerful melody, but the letters on the screen spelled “FREIDIN.”

“Professor Freidin! What a pleasant surprise!”

“Elif, hello. I don’t know if it is pleasant or a surprise, but, yes, this is Grisha.”

Freidin was at a dinner for the conference participants. He was experiencing confusion due to the lack at this dinner of any graduate-student presence. “You are not here. Fishkin isn’t here. Josh isn’t here. Nobody is here. It looks—well, it looks strange. It’s a bit embarrassing.”

“But we weren’t invited to the dinner,” I pointed out.

Silence.

“I see. You were waiting to be
invited
.”

I made the next U-turn and headed to the faculty club.

Of the four tables in the private room, three were completely full, and one completely empty. As I was considering whether to sit at the empty table by myself, Freidin noticed me and made a space between him and Janet Lind, a professor who had edited the first English translation of the 1920 diary. The others at the table were Nathalie Babel; the American journalist; Werner Platt; a literature professor from Budapest; and a translator who had recently published the first English edition of Babel’s collected works.