Of sunshine and bedbugs, p.1
Of Sunshine and Bedbugs, page 1
ISAAC BABEL
OF SUNSHINE
AND BEDBUGS
Essential Stories
Translated from the Russian
by Boris Dralyuk
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
CONTENTS
Title Page
Translator’s Preface
Guy de Maupassant
Part I: Childhood and Youth
The Story of My Dovecote
First Love
In the Basement
The Awakening
Di Grasso
Part II: Gangsters and Other “Old Odessans”
The King
How It Was Done in Odessa
Lyubka the Cossack
Father
Justice in Quotes
The End of the Almshouse
Part III: Red Cavalry
Crossing the Zbrucz
The Catholic Church in Novograd
A Letter
Pan Apolek
The Italian Sun
Gedali
My First Goose
The Rebbe
The Tachanka Doctrine
The Death of Dolgushov
The Life Story of Pavlichenko, Matvei Rodionych
Salt
The Rebbe’s Son
Argamak
Bibliographic Information
Copyright
Translator’s Preface
This essential selection from my two previous volumes of Isaac Babel’s stories for Pushkin Press weaves together three strands that, at first blush, make for a motley braid. What do they have in common, these poignant reflections on a childhood marred by anti-Semitism, these gleefully garish evocations of a Jewish underworld that looms as large as Mount Olympus, these searing dispatches from the front lines of a war between Red Cossacks and revanchist Poles?
One answer is a mastery of style, for Babel was among the most agile, most energetic prose stylists of his or any other era. I’ve written about the pleasures and challenges of getting his prose across in my forewords to Red Cavalry, the cycle that draws on his experiences during the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–21, and to Odessa Stories, which gathers fiction inspired by his boyhood and rollicking tall tales about his home town’s gangsters and lowlifes. This time I’ll let the harmonies, discords and subtle modulations speak for themselves.
There is another thing binding these stories together: every one of them is wedded to reality, if only with a shotgun at its back. They are, unarguably, works of imagination, but an imagination lent weight and colour by life. Though he was raised in a middle-class household, Babel was born in Moldavanka, Odessa’s Jewish ghetto, and he could never shake his fascination with its perilous, flavourful existence, for which he was unsuited both by temperament and upbringing. As a child witness to the pogroms that swept the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the first decade of the twentieth century, how could he not revere the real-life prototypes of his mythic gangsters, who began as humbly as the biblical David, stood up to the Goliath of anti-Semitism and tsarist “law and order”, and ended up as kings? Yet how could he not recoil in disgust when contemplating their brutality? Much the same questions haunt every page of Babel’s fictionalized accounts of riding alongside the Cossacks, who are tasked with ensuring the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution—a revolution his narrator yearns to believe is just—by any means necessary. But what end could possibly justify those unthinkable means? And is he himself up to the task of defending that end, much less securing it? We feel the full force of these questions because they were real for Babel, not hypothetical.
Bringing these stories together under one cover allows us to view the larger-than-life figures of Benya the King, Froim the Rook and Lyubka the Cossack through the eyes of the child whose dream of doves is dashed by a pogromist’s blow, whose world is “small and terrible”, who shuts his “only unplastered eye” so that he doesn’t have to see what lies bare before him: “a jagged pebble, like the face of an old woman with a large jaw; and a piece of string; and a clump of feathers, still breathing”. When the narrator of “How It Was Done in Odessa” asks the old Reb on the cemetery wall, “Why did Benya Krik alone climb to the top of the rope ladder, leaving the rest of them dangling below on shaky steps?”, we think of the learned boy in “First Love” who imagines himself a lover and fighter, “gripped by the pride of imminent death […] because the measure of that day’s grief was too great for a person of ten”. And when Kirill Lyutov (Babel’s nom de plume from his days with the front-line newspaper The Red Cavalryman) first meets the Sixth Division commander and marvels “at the beauty of his gigantic body”, at his “long legs [that] looked like a pair of girls clad in shiny shoulder-length jackboots”, we think of Benya at the top of that rope ladder.
And throughout we notice that Babel’s narrators, who do their best, as Lyutov promises the Sixth Division commander, to “get along” with the crew, remain perpetually off to the side, by turns marvelling and shrinking in horror. They may, like the boy in “The Story of My Dovecot”, recite Pushkin’s “verses in violent sobs” at an entrance exam to an elite secondary school, with its strict quotas for Jewish enrolment, but they soon learn that acceptance into the first form is no guarantee of happiness or safety. They may follow the exploits of daring gangsters, but they know Benya’s shoes are several sizes too big for them. They may kill an animal to prove their mettle and win the confidence of their comrades, as Lyutov does in “My First Goose”, but their hearts, “crimson with murder”, creak and bleed.
In many ways, the predicament in which these narrators find themselves is a Jewish one, but only insofar as the Jewish predicament is that of the outsider—and who among us has not been an outsider? The unspoken complement to Groucho Marx’s infamous refusal to join any club that would have him as a member is the aching desire to belong to the clubs that wouldn’t let him in. That desire, with its tangle of Eros and Thanatos, of passion and shame, of ludicrousness and deadly seriousness, is the living pulse of Babel’s prose. Yet there is, in the end, one club to which he was granted undisputed, irrevocable entry—the club of immortal storytellers. In a sketch from 1916, titled “Odessa”, Babel makes a prediction: “Petrograd is bound to receive—and quite soon, at that—the fruitful, life-giving influence of the Russian south, of Russian Odessa, of what may be (qui sait?) the only city in the Russian Empire that could give birth to our much-needed national Maupassant.” In the newly translated story that opens this volume—which first appeared in 1932, towards the close of his career as a published writer—Babel proves the prediction entirely accurate.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
In the winter of 1916 I found myself in Petersburg, flat broke, with forged papers. Alexey Kazantsev, a teacher of Russian literature, gave me shelter.
He lived on a frozen, yellow, foul-smelling street in Peski and augmented his meagre salary with translations from Spanish; Blasco Ibáñez was all the rage just then.1
Kazantsev had never so much as set foot in Spain, but the whole of his being was imbued with a love for that country—he knew each of its castles, its parks and its rivers by heart. Around him flocked a great many others who had, like me, been knocked off life’s proper course. Ours was a hand-to-mouth existence. Once in a while the cheap dailies would run, in tiny print, our accounts of local incidents.
I spent my mornings hanging around morgues and police stations.
When it came down to it, Kazantsev was luckier than the rest of us. He had his homeland—Spain.
In November I was offered a clerical job at the Obukhov Plant—a pretty good position, which would have exempted me from military service.2
I refused to become a clerk.
By that point (I was all of twenty) I had already sworn to myself that I would sooner starve, go to jail or hit the road than sit at a desk for ten hours a day. There’s nothing especially bold about this vow, but I haven’t broken it and will not break it. Firmly lodged in my head was the wisdom of my grandfathers: we are born to take pleasure in our work, our brawling, our lovemaking—born for this and nothing else.
As he heard out my rationale, Kazantsev kept rubbing the short yellow fluff on his head. The horror in his eyes was mingled with admiration.
At Christmastime fortune fell into our lap. Bendersky, a barrister and proprietor of the Halcyon Press, had decided to bring out a new edition of Maupassant. The work of translation was to be done by the barrister’s wife, Raisa. Their grand venture, however, had failed to bear fruit.
As a translator from Spanish, Kazantsev was asked whether he knew anyone who might lend Raisa Mikhailovna a hand. He suggested me.
The following day I donned another man’s jacket and made my way to the Benderskys’. They lived at the corner of Nevsky and the Moika, in a house of Finnish granite lined with rose-colored columns, pierced with loopholes, and embellished with stone coats of arms. Before the war, bankers of low birth who’d converted to Christianity and grown rich off government contracts had dotted Petersburg with scores of these vulgar, falsely majestic castles.
Strips of red carpet ran down the flights of steps. On each landing a stuffed plush bear stood on its hind legs.
Globes of crystal glowed in their open maws.
The Benderskys lived on the third floor. The door was opened by a high-breasted maid in a cap. She ushered me into a drawing room done up in Old Slavonic style. On the walls hung Roerich’s blue canvases of prehistoric boulders and beasts.3 Ancient icons rested on stands in the corners. Slender, nearsight
“Maupassant is the sole passion of my life,” Raisa told me.
Struggling to keep her large hips from swaying, she left the room and returned with a translation of ‘Miss Harriet’. Her version retained no trace of Maupassant’s free, fluent phrasing, with its long breath of passion. Benderskaya wrote in a tediously correct manner, lifeless and careless—the way Jews used to write in Russian.
I took the manuscript home to Kazantsev’s garret, and, while others slept all around me, spent the whole night cutting swathes through someone else’s translation. This kind of work isn’t as dreary as it sounds. A phrase comes into the world good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely perceptible turn. The lever sits in your hand, getting warm. You’ve got to turn it once, not twice.
The next morning I came back with the corrected manuscript. Raisa hadn’t lied when she spoke of her passion for Maupassant. She sat motionless during the reading, her hands clasped; these hands of satin flowed down to the ground, her forehead grew pale, and the lace between her slightly sagging breasts rose from her flesh and trembled.
“How did you do that?”
And so I began to talk of style, of the army of words, an army in which all sorts of weapons are always on the move. No iron penetrates the human heart as icily as a period placed at just the right moment. She listened with her head bowed, her painted lips slightly open. A black gleam shone in her lacquered hair, which was smoothed down and neatly parted. Her legs, with their strong, fleshy calves poured into stockings, were propped apart on the carpet.
The maid, averting her lewd, hardened eyes, brought in breakfast on a tray.
The glassy Petersburg sun fell on the faded, uneven carpet. Twenty-nine volumes of Maupassant stood on a shelf above the table. The sun ran its melting fingers across their morocco bindings—across this splendid tomb of the human heart.
We were served coffee in little blue cups and began to translate ‘Idyll’. Everyone recalls the story of the hungry young carpenter who suckles the fat wet-nurse, relieving her of her burden of milk. This took place on a train going from Nice to Marseille,4 on a sultry afternoon in the country of roses, the homeland of roses, where plantations of flowers descend to the shore of the sea…
I left the Benderskys’ with a twenty-five rouble advance. Our commune in Peski got drunk that evening, drunk as a flock of sozzled geese. We scooped grains of fine black caviar into our mouths with spoons, following them up with hunks of liverwurst. Properly soused, I lit into Tolstoy.
“He got scared, your Count, chickened out… That’s his religion—fear… Afraid of the cold, of old age, the Count knitted himself a pullover out of faith…”
“And then? Then what?” Kazantsev kept prodding, shaking his birdlike head.
We fell asleep beside our own beds. I dreamt of Katya, the forty-year-old washerwoman who lived downstairs. We got boiling water from her in the mornings. I’d never even had a good look at her face, but God only knows what Katya and I got up to in that dream. We wore each other out with kisses. I couldn’t refrain from going down for boiling water the next morning.
What I saw was a withered woman with a shawl crossed over her chest, her ash-grey curls hanging loose, her hands damp.
From that time on I had breakfast at the Benderskys’ every morning. Our garret acquired a new stove, reserves of herring and chocolate. On two occasions Raisa had me accompany her to the Petersburg islands. I couldn’t hold back and told her of my childhood. To my own surprise, the story came out grim. Sparkling, fearful eyes peered out at me from under a moleskin hat. The reddish fur of her eyelashes fluttered sorrowfully.
I met Raisa’s husband, a sallow-faced, bald-headed Jew with a flat, powerful body obliquely angled for flight. There were rumours that he was close to Rasputin. The profits he had made supplying the military lent him the look of a man possessed. His eyes wandered—for him the fabric of reality had been torn. Raisa was embarrassed when introducing new people to her husband. Because of my youth, I noticed this a week later than I should have.
After the New Year two of Raisa’s sisters came up for a visit from Kiev. One morning I brought back the manuscript of ‘The Confession’ and, not finding Raisa at home, returned in the evening. The Benderskys and their guests were having dinner. Out of the dining room spilt the silvery neighing of mares and the unbridled jubilant boom of men’s voices. In wealthy homes devoid of tradition, dinners are noisy. This noise was Jewish, rumbling along towards sonorous endings. Raisa came out to me in a ball gown with a bare back. Her feet took awkward steps in teetering patent-leather pumps.
“I’m drunk, my dear…” And she held out her arms—arms dripping with platinum chains and emerald stars.
Her body swayed like the body of a snake tempted upwards by music. She shook her curly head, the rings on her fingers jangling, and suddenly fell into an armchair with ancient Russian carving. Scars smouldered on her powdered back.
Female laughter exploded once more on the other side of the wall. The sisters, with their little moustaches, emerged from the dining room, both as full-breasted and tall as Raisa. Their breasts were pushed forward and their black hair flowed free. Each was married to a Bendersky of her own. The room was flooded with incoherent feminine gaiety, the gaiety of mature women. The husbands wrapped the sisters up in sealskin coats and Orenburg shawls, encasing their feet in little black boots; all that showed from beneath the shawls’ snowy visors were rouged, glowing cheeks, marble noses, and eyes shimmering with Semitic nearsightedness. The noise died down as they left for the theatre, where Chaliapin was singing in Judith.5
“I want to work,” Raisa murmured, stretching out her bare arms. “We’ve let a whole week go by…”
She fetched a bottle and two wine glasses from the dining room. Her breasts lay loose in the silken sack of her gown; her nipples stiffened and the silk enfolded them.
“Sacred vintage,” said Raisa as she poured the wine. “An ’83 Muscat. When my husband finds out, he’ll kill me…”
I had never had any dealings with an ’83 Muscat before, and so I thought nothing of downing three glasses, one after the other. They instantly carried me off, leading me down lanes where an orange flame wavered and music filled the air.
“I’m drunk, my dear… What are we doing today?”
“Today we’re doing ‘L’Aveu’…”
“So, then, ‘The Confession’. The hero of the story is the sun, le soleil de France… Molten drops of the sun had fallen on red-haired Céleste and turned into freckles. With its vertical rays, its wine and its apple cider, the sun had buffed the face of the coachman Polyte. Twice a week Céleste would drive into town to sell cream, eggs and poultry. The fare she paid Polyte was ten sous for herself and four sous for the basket. And on each journey Polyte would ask red-haired Céleste, with a wink:
“‘When will we have a bit of fun, ma belle?’
“‘What do you mean by that, Monsieur Polyte?’
“‘Hell, fun means fun,’ the coachman explained, bouncing up and down on the seat. ‘A lad and a girl—they don’t need no music…’
“‘I do not like such jokes, Monsieur Polyte,’ replied Céleste, moving her skirts away from the lad—skirts that hung over mighty calves in red stockings.”
But that devil Polyte kept howling with laughter and coughing: “One day we’ll have our fun, ma belle.” Merry tears rolled down his face—a face the colour of brick-red blood and wine.
