The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (5 page)

The epigraph to the 1920 diary could be the famous phrase from the beginning of
Don Quixote
: “since I’m always reading, even scraps of paper I find in the street . . .” In Brody, in the aftermath of a pogrom, while looking for oats to feed his horse, Babel stumbles upon a German bookstore: “marvelous uncut books, albums . . . a chrestomathy, the history of all the Boleslaws . . . Tetmajer, new translations, a pile of new Polish national literature, textbooks. I rummage like a madman, I run around.” In a looted Polish estate, in a drawing room where horses are standing on the carpet, he discovers a chest of “extremely precious books”: “the constitution approved by the Sejm at the beginning of the 18th century, old folios from the times of Nicholas I, the
Polish code of laws, precious bindings, Polish manuscripts of the 16th century, writings of monks, old French novels . . . French novels on little tables, many French and Polish books about child care, smashed intimate feminine accessories, remnants of butter in a butter dish—newlyweds?” In an abandoned Polish castle, he finds “French letters dated 1820,
nôtre petit héros achève 7 semaines
. My God, who wrote it, when . . .”

These materials are assimilated and expanded upon in the
Red Cavalry
stories, for example in “Berestechko,” whose narrator also finds a French letter in a Polish castle:
“Paul, mon bien aimé, on dit que l’empereur Napoléon est mort, estce vrai? Moi, je me sens bien, les couches ont été faciles . . .”
From the phrase “
nôtre petit héros achève 7 semaines
,” Babel conjures the full precariousness of time, a point as delicately positioned in human history as a seven-week-old child, or a false rumor of Napoleon’s death.

Reading the whole
Red Cavalry
cycle after the diary, I understood “My First Goose.” I understood how important it was that the suitcase thrown in the street by the Cossacks was full of manuscripts and newspapers. I understood what it meant for Babel to read Lenin aloud to the Cossacks. It was the first hostile encounter of writing with life itself. “My First Goose,” like much of
Red Cavalry
, is about the price Babel paid for his literary material. Osip Mandelstam once asked Babel why he went out of his way to socialize with agents of the secret police, with people like Yezhov: “Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? ‘No,’ Babel replied, ‘I don’t want to touch it with my fingers—I just like to have a sniff and see what it smells like.’ ” But of course he had to touch it with his fingers. He had to shed blood with his own hands, if only that of a goose. Without that blood,
Red Cavalry
could never have
been written. “It sometimes happens that I don’t spare myself and spend an hour kicking the enemy, or sometimes more than an hour,” observes one of Babel’s narrators, a Cossack swineherd turned Red Army general. “I want to understand life, to learn what it really is.”

The imperative to understand life and describe it provides an urgent, moving refrain in the 1920 diary.

“Describe the orderlies—the divisional chief of staff and the others—Cherkashin, Tarasov.”

“Describe Matyazh, Misha.
Muzhiks
, I want to penetrate their souls.”

Whenever Babel meets anyone, he has to fathom what he is. Always “what,” not “who.”

“What is Mikhail Karlovich?” “What is Zholnarkevich? A Pole? His feelings?”

“What are our soldiers?” “What are Cossacks?” “What is Bolshevism?”

“What is Kiperman? Describe his trousers.”

“Describe the work of a war correspondent, what is a war correspondent?” (At the time he wrote this sentence, Babel himself was technically a war correspondent.)

Sometimes he seems to beg the question, asking, of somebody called Vinokurov: “What is this gluttonous, pitiful, tall youth, with his soft voice, droopy soul, and sharp mind?”

“What is Grishchuk? Submissiveness, endless silence, boundless indolence. Fifty
versts
from home, hasn’t been home in six years, doesn’t run.”

“I go into the mill. What is a water mill? Describe.”

“Describe the forest.”

“Two emaciated horses, describe the horses.”

“Describe the air, the soldiers.”

“Describe the bazaar, baskets of cherries, the inside of the tavern.”

“Describe this unendurable rain.”

“Describe ‘rapid fire.’ ”

“Describe the wounded.”

“The intolerable desire to sleep—describe.”

“Absolutely must describe limping Gubanov, scourge of the regiment.”

“Describe Bakhturov, Ivan Ivanovich, and Petro.”

“The castle of Count Raciborski. A seventy-year-old man and his ninety-year-old mother. People say it was always just the two of them, that they’re crazy. Describe.”

Babel’s “describe” in his diaries shares a certain melancholy quality with Watson’s mention of those of Sherlock Holmes’s cases that do not appear in his annals: “the case of the Darlington substitution scandal,” the “singular affair of the aluminum crutch,” “the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra . . . for which the world is not yet prepared.” All the stories that will never be told—all the writers who were not allowed to finish! It’s much more comforting to think that, in their way, the promises have already been executed—that perhaps Babel has already sufficiently described limping Gubanov, scourge of the regiment, and that the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra is, after all, already the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Babel does return to the Raciborskis in
Red Cavalry
: “A ninety-year-old countess and her son had lived in the castle. She had tormented him for not having given the dying clan any heirs, and—the
muzhiks
told me this—she used to beat him with the coachman’s whip.” But even with the Zolaesque note of hereditary vitiation, the Turgenevian kinkiness of the coachman’s whip, and the hinted Soviet rhetoric of a knightly Poland “gone berserk” (a phrase from Babel’s own propaganda work), the “description” is still just two sentences.

•   •   •

One of the most chilling relics to emerge from Babel’s KGB dossier was the pair of mug shots taken upon his arrest in 1939.

Photographed in profile, Babel gazes into the distance, chin raised, with an expression of pained resoluteness. Photographed face-on, however, he seems to be looking at something quite close to him. He seems to be looking at someone who he knows to be on the verge of committing a terrible action. Of these images, a German historian once observed: “Both show the writer without his glasses and with one black eye, medically speaking a
monocle haematoma
, evidence of the violence used against him.”

I felt sorry for the German historian. I understood that it was the inadequacy of “without his glasses and with one black eye” that drove him to use a phrase so absurd as “medically speaking a
monocle haematoma
.” The absence of glasses is unspeakably violent. You need long words, Latin words, to describe it. Babel was never photographed without his glasses. He never wrote without them, either. His narrator always has, to quote a popular line from the Odessa stories, “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” Another famous line, spoken by Babel’s narrator to a nearsighted comrade at a beautiful Finnish winter resort: “I beg you, Alexander Fyodorovich, buy a pair of glasses!”

In “My First Goose,” the Cossack divisional commander yells at the Jewish intellectual: “They send you over without asking—and here you’ll get killed just for wearing glasses! So, you think you can live with us?” The glasses represent precisely Babel’s determination to live with them, to watch their every move, with an attention bordering on love—to see everything and write it all down. “Everything about Babel gave an impression of all-consuming curiosity,” Nadezhda Mandelstam once wrote: “the way he held his head, his mouth and
chin, and particularly his eyes. It is not often that one sees such undisguised curiosity in the eyes of a grownup. I had the feeling that Babel’s main driving force was the unbridled curiosity with which he scrutinized life and people.” That’s what they took away when they replaced his glasses with the
monocle haematoma
.

I had been persuaded to sign up for the biography seminar by one of my classmates, Matej, who knew the professor. “He’s a textbook Jewish intellectual from New York,” Matej said excitedly, as if describing some rare woodland creature. (Matej was a textbook Catholic intellectual from Zagreb.) “When he talks about Isaac Babel, he gets so excited that he starts to stutter. But it’s not the annoying kind of stutter that obstructs understanding. It’s an endearing stutter that makes you feel sympathy and affection.”

At the end of the term, Matej and I had agreed to collaborate on a presentation about Babel. We met one cold, gray afternoon at a dirty metal table outside the library, where we compared notes, drank coffee, and went through nearly an entire pack of Matej’s Winston Lights, which, I learned, he ordered in bulk from an Indian reservation. We settled on a general angle right away, but when it came to details, we didn’t see eye to eye on anything. For nearly an hour we argued about a single sentence in “The Tachanka Theory”: a story about the transformation of warfare by the
tachanka
, a wagon with a machine gun attached to the back. Once it is armed with
tachanki
, Babel writes, a Ukrainian village ceases to be a military target, because the guns can be buried under haystacks.

When it started to rain, Matej and I decided to go into the library to look up the Russian original of the sentence we disagreed
about: “These hidden points—suggested, but not directly perceived—yield in their sum a construction of the new Ukrainian village: savage, rebellious, and self-seeking.” Even once we had the Russian text, though, we still disagreed about the meaning of “hidden points.” Rereading this story now, I can’t see what we could have been debating for so long, but I remember Matej saying irritably, “You’re making it sound as if he’s just adding things up, like he’s some kind of double-entry bookkeeper.”

“That’s exactly right,” I snapped. “He
is
a double-entry bookkeeper!”

We concluded that we would never agree on anything because I was a materialist, whereas he had a fundamentally religious view of history. Finally we parted ways, Matej to write about Babel’s replacement of old gods with a new mythology, and I to write about Babel as a bookkeeper.

“How good it is,” writes Mandelstam, “that I managed to love not the priestly flame of the icon lamp but the little red flame of literary spite!” I don’t know if Matej wrote his presentation in the priestly flame of the icon lamp, but I think it was literary spite that made me want to prove that Babel “was really” a bookkeeper. But, to my own surprise, it actually turned out to be true: not only did accountants and clerks keep turning up in Babel’s stories, but Babel himself had been educated at the Kiev Commercial Institute, where he received top marks in general accounting. I was particularly struck by the story “Pan Apolek,” in which the Polish protagonist calls the narrator “Mr. Clerk”—“
pan pisar’
” in the original.
Pan
is Polish for “sir” or “Mr.,” and
pisar’
is a Russian word for “clerk.” In Polish, however,
pisarz
means not “clerk,” but “writer.” Pan Apolek was trying to call the narrator “Mr. Writer,” but the writer in the Red Cavalry turned into a clerk.

I ended up writing about the double-entry relationship in Babel’s work between literature and lived experience, centering on “Pan Apolek” (the story of a village church painter who endows biblical figures with the faces of his fellow villagers: a double-entry of preexisting artistic form with observations from life). The seminar presentation went well, and I expanded upon it a few months later at a Slavic colloquium, where it caught the interest of the department Babel expert, Grisha Freidin. Freidin said he would help me revise the paper for publication—“Why would you study the gospel with anyone but St. Peter?” he demanded—and offered me a job doing research for his new critical biography of Babel.

The title of the book was fluctuating at that time between
A Jew on Horseback
and
The Other Babel
. I was fascinated by the idea of
The Other Babel
, namely, that Babel wasn’t who we thought he was, or who said he was: he was some
other person
. His “Autobiography”—a document barely one and a half pages long—is full of untruths, such as his claim to have worked for the Cheka starting in October 1917, two months before the Cheka was founded, or to have fought on “the Romanian front.” “Now you might think ‘the Romanian front’ is a joke,” Freidin said. “Well, it’s not, it seems it really did exist. But Babel was never there.”

Babel’s undocumented life was likewise full of mysteries—chief among them, why he had returned to Moscow from Paris in 1933, after having spent nearly all of 1932 struggling to get permission to go abroad. Stranger still, why, in 1935, just when the purges were starting, did Babel begin making plans to bring his mother, sister, wife, and daughter from Brussels and Paris back to the Soviet Union?

As my first research assignment, I went to the Herbert Hoover archive to look up the Russian émigré newspapers in Paris from 1934 and 1935, starting with the assassination
of Sergei Kirov, to see how much Babel’s family would have known about the purges. The newspapers hadn’t been transferred to microfilm, and the originals, which had been bound in enormous, tombstone-size books, couldn’t be photocopied because of the fragility of the paper. I sat in a corner with my laptop, typing out the lists of people who had been shot or sent to Siberia, typing the headlines about Kirov, and other headlines like “Who Burned the Reichstag?” and “Bonnie and Clyde Shot Dead.” Hours slipped by and the next thing I knew, all the lights went out. When I got up, I realized that the entire library was not only dark but also deserted and locked. I banged on the locked doors for a while with no result, then felt my way through the dark to a hallway with administrative offices, where I was happy to discover a tiny Russian woman reading a microfiche and eating lasagna from a tiny plastic box. She seemed surprised to see me, and even more surprised when I asked for directions on how to leave the building.