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 Finally, somebody asked Nathalie whether it was true that she was “still sitting on some unpublished letters.”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.