“YOUR HAND IS VERY COLD,” she told me when we were introduced. It was later that same evening, and all the conference participants were heading to the Hoover Pavilion for an opening reception.
“We have black squirrels here at Stanford,” another graduate student told Nathalie Babel, pointing at a squirrel. “Have you ever seen a black squirrel?”
Nathalie glanced vaguely in the direction of the squirrel. “I CANNOT SEE ANYTHING ANYMORE,” she said. “I cannot hear, I cannot see, I cannot walk. For this reason,” she continued, eyeing the steep cement stairway to the pavilion, “everyone thinks I am always drunk.”
At the top of the stairs, two Chinese men were taking turns photographing each other with Viktor Zhivov, a Berkeley professor with a kind expression and a tobacco-stained Old Believer beard.
“Lots of Chinese,” I overheard someone say in Russian.
“True. It’s not clear why.”
“They’re taking pictures with Zhivov.”
“They want to prove that they’ve been to California. Ha! Ha!”
The two Chinese were in fact filmmakers, whose adaptation of the Red Cavalry cycle, Qi Bing Jun, was supposed to premiere in Shanghai the following year. (I believe the project was eventually canceled.) The screenwriter was tall, round-faced, smiled a lot, and spoke very good English; the director was short, slight, serious, and didn’t seem to speak at all. Both wore large cameras around their necks.
In the Chinese Red Cavalry, the screenwriter told us, Cossacks would be transformed into “barbarians from the north of China”; the Jewish narrator would be represented by a Chinese intellectual. “There are not so many differences between Jews and Chinese,” he explained. “They give their children violin lessons, and they worry about money. Lyutov will be a Chinese, but he will still have ‘spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.’ ” At nose, he touched his nose, and at heart, he struck his chest. The director nodded.
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 alclass="underline" 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 Babeclass="underline" 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.