Awakening

== AWAKENING ==
=== by Isaac Babel ===
From International Literature, No. 3, March 1935. 
ISAAC BABEL, born 1894 in Odessa, of Jewish
middle-class parentage, dates the beginning of his literary career to
encouragement from Maxim Gorky, whom he met in 1916. He served in the army on
the Rumanian front; later in the army in the north against Yudenich; then as a
reporter on and Tifiis papers, as a
worker in a printing shop, etc. His best-known short stories, which began to
appear in 1924., deal with the civil war in Russia, and particularly with
Budenny's Red Cavalry. 
All the people of our class: brokers,
shopkeepers, and employees in banks and shipping-offices, had their children
taught music. Our parents, who saw no bright prospects before them, devised a
lottery, which they built up on the bones of little folk. This madness attacked
 much
more violently than other towns. And sure enough, for years our town supplied the
concert platforms of the world with infant prodigies. It was from that Mischa Elman,
Zimbalist and Gabrilovich came, and Yasha Heifetz began with us, too. 
As soon as a boy had reached four or five
years of age, his mother took the puny little creature to Mr. Zagurski. Zagurski
kept a factory of infant prodigies, a factory of Jewish dwarfs in lace collars
and patent-leather slippers. He discovered them in the slums of the Moldavanka
quarter, in the evil smelling yards of the Old Bazaar. Zagurski set them on the
right track and then delivered them over to Professor Auer in . A mighty harmony dwelt in the
souls of these miserable mites with blue, swollen heads. They became famous
musicians. One day my father decided to join in the race. Although somewhat over
the infant prodigy age I was almost fourteen I was so small and puny that I
could easily pass as an eight year old child. All our hopes hung on this. 
I was taken to Zagurski. Out of respect for
my grandfather he agreed to teach me for a ruble a lesson, an extremely low
rate. My grandfather, Levy Idzhok, was at once the laughing stock and the pride
of the town. He walked about in a top hat, with his feet bound in linen strips
instead of socks, and dispersed people's doubts upon the most obscure points.
He was applied to for information on Gobelin tapestries, on the reasons for the
Jacobins' betrayal of Robespierre, on the production of artificial silk, and
the exact method of making a Caesarean section. My grandfather could answer all
these questions. Out of respect for his learning and madness Zagurski charged
us no more than a ruble a lesson. And the trouble he took with me he took
solely from fear of my grandfather, for it was clearly a waste of time. Sounds
like iron filings crept out of my violin, sounds that cut me to the very heart,
but my father would not give up. At home the talk was all of Mischa Elman, who
had been exempted from military service by the Tsar himself. Zimbalist,
according to my father's information, had been presented to the King of
England, and had played in ; Gabrilovich's
parents had bought two houses in . These infant prodigies had brought their
parents wealth. My father would have borne poverty patiently, but glory was a
necessity to him. 
"It could not be," whispered the
people who dined at his expense, "it could not be that the grandson of
such a man. . . ." 
I had something quite different in mind.
While I played my exercises I placed some work of Turgenyev's or Dumas' on the
music-stand before me and devoured page after page as I sawed away at the
violin. In the day time I spun yarns to the neighbors' children, and spent the
night committing them to paper. 
Story-telling was an hereditary passion in
our family. My grandfather, who became a little crazy in his old age, had been
writing a story entitled The Headless John all his life. I took after him. 
Three times a week I had to trail off,
weighed down with my violin and music, to Zagurski's. Against the wall, awaiting
their turn, sat a row of Jewesses in a state of almost hysterical animation.
The violins they clutched on their weak knees were much larger than those who
were to perform on them in . 
The door of the holy of holies would open
and freckled children with large heads on thin necks like stalks of flowers and
an epileptic flush on their cheeks would emerge. The door closed again after
swallowing up the next dwarf. On the other side of the wall the teacher with
the carrotty curls, the bow-tie, and the thin legs, chanted and conducted till
he was ready to burst. The manager of this monstrous lottery, he populated the
Moldavanka quarter and the black alleys of the Old Bazaar with the spectres of
pizzicato and cantilena. Later this polish was to be heightened to an infernal
brilliance by old Professor Auer. 
I had nothing in common with this sect.
Though I was a dwarf like them, I hearkened to a different inspiration in the
voice of my ancestors. 
The first stage was hard for me. One day I
left the house loaded with my violin in its case, my music, and twelve rubles,
the fee for the month's lessons. I went along , and should have turned into
to get to Zagurski's, but instead, I went up , and found myself in the
port. The hours appointed for my lesson flew by at the docks. That was the
beginning of my liberation. Zagurski's waiting-room never saw me again. More
important business occupied my mind now. Together with a playmate of mine named
Nemanov, I visited an old sailor, Mr. Trottyburn, on the steamship Kensington.
Nemanov was a year younger than I, but from the age of eight he had been
engaged in the most complicated trading operations in the world. He had a
genius for trade and fulfilled all that he promised. Now he is a millionaire, a
director of the General Motors Company, a firm no less powerful than Ford's. Nemanov
took me about with him everywhere simply because I obeyed him implicitly. He
bought the tobacco pipes smuggled in by Mr. Trottyburn. These pipes were made
by the old sailor's brother in .
"Gentlemen," said Mr. Trottyburn
to us, "mark my words, children should be made by hand. ... To smoke a
factory-made pipe is like sticking a syringe in your mouth. . . . Have you ever
heard of Benvenuto Cellini? There was a real craftsman. My brother in could tell you
all about him. My brother doesn't believe in poking his nose into anyone's
business. But he's a rooted conviction that children and pipes ought to be made
by one's own hands and not by strangers. We can't but agree with him, gentlemen
. . ." 
Nemanov used to resell Trottyburn's pipes
to bankdirectors, foreign consuls and wealthy Greeks. He made a profit of a
hundred per cent on them. 
The pipes of the craftsman breathed poetry. There was
a thought in each of them, a drop of eternity. A yellow eye shone in every
mouthpiece, every case was lined with satin. I tried to imagine how Matthew
Trottyburn, the last pipe-craftsman, the man who had withstood the march of
things, lived away over in Old England. 
"We cannot but agree with him,
gentlemen, that children should be made by hand. . . ." 
The heavy breakers at the jetty divided me
more and more from a home that smelt of onions and of Jewish fate. From the
docks I migrated to the breakwater. There was a little sandy patch inhabited by
the boys from .
There they could play from morning till night without putting on their
trousers; they dived under the rafts, stole coconuts for their dinner, and
waited till the string of barges laden with water-melons would arrive from
Kherson and Kamenka and the melons could be split on the capstans. 
To be able to swim became the dream of my
life. I shrank from admitting to these bronzed lads that although I had been
born in ,
I had never set eyes on the sea until I was ten and at the age of fourteen was unable
to swim. 
How late I learnt the most essential
things! In my early years I sat nailed to the Talmud, living the life of a
sage, and I was almost grown-up when I began to climb trees. 
Swimming proved beyond my powers. The
phobia of my ancestors, Spanish rabbis and 
moneychangers, drew me inexorably down to the bottom of the sea. The water
would not support me. Soused with salt water, I returned to the shore, to my
violin and music. I was attached to these witnesses of my crimes and dragged them
everywhere with me. The struggle of the rabbis and the sea continued until the
sea-god of those parts, one Ephim Nikitich Smolich, a proof-reader on the
Odessa News, took pity on me. In that athletic bosom dwelt a great compassion
for the small Jewish boy. He was the leader of a mob of rickety weaklings.
Nikitich had gathered them from the bug-ridden tenements in the Moldavanka
quarter, had led them to the sea, rolled them in the sand, drilled them, dived
with them, taught them to sing songs, and, roasting alongside them in the
direct rays of the sun, told them stories of fishermen and animals. To
grown-ups Nikitich explained that he was a lover of philosophy and nature.
Nikitich's tales made the Jewish children cry with laughter; they squealed and
cuddled up to him like puppies. The sun bespattered them with freckles that
melted into one another, freckles the color of a lizard. 
The old man silently watched my
single-handed fight with the breakers out of the corner of his eye. Seeing that
there was no hope of my ever learning to swim, he included me in the circle of
those to whom he had opened his heart. His whole heart was laid open to us and
it was a merry heart, that knew neither pride nor greed nor worry. With
copper-colored shoulders, the head of an aging gladiator, the bronzed legs a
little bowed, he lay in our midst behind the breakwater the sovereign of those
melon-strewn, kerosene-tainted waters. I came to love this man as only a boy
constantly suffering from hysteria and headaches can love an athlete. I would
not leave him alone; I was always trying to do something for him. "Don't
fuss about so much," he said to me. "Strengthen your nerves first.
Then swimming will come naturally to you. . . . What do you mean by saying the watef
won't hold you up. . . . Why shouldn't it hold you up?" 
When he saw how hard I tried, Nikitich
singled me out of all his pupils and asked me to come and see him in his clean,
spacious attic with its straw matting. There he showed me his dogs, hedgehog,
tortoise and pigeons. By way of exchange for all these riches I brought him the
tragedy I had written the day before. 
"I knew it. I knew you wrote,"
said Nikitich. "You've got that sort of a glance. You never look anywhere.
..." 
He read my manuscript, gave a twitch of his
shoulders, passed his hand over his stiff grey curls, and walked the length of
the attic. 
"One must come to the
conclusion," he said very softly, pausing after every word, "that you
have the divine spark in you. . . ." 
We went out into the street. The man stood
still, thumped his stick on the pavement and fixed his eyes on me. 
"What is it you lack? . . . Youth is
no hindrance, it'll pass with the years. . . . It's the feeling for nature that
you haven't got." 
He pointed with his stick to a low tree
with a reddish trunk. 
"What tree is that?" 
I did not know. 
"What grows on this bush?" 
I did not know that either. We were passing
through the square in Alexandrovsky Boulevard. The old man pointed out all the trees with
his stick, caught me by the shoulder whenever a bird flew by, and made me
listen to the different bird-notes. 
"What bird is singing now?" 
I could give no reply. The names of trees
and birds, the division of them into species, where they were flying, where the
sun rises, when the dew falls the heaviest, all these things were hidden from
me. 
"And yet you dare to write? ... A man
who doesn't live in nature like a stone or an animal lives in it, will never
write two lines worth anything. . . . Your landscapes are like descriptions of
stage scenery. Devil take me, but what were your parents thinking about for fourteen
years?" 
What were they thinking about? . . . About
unpaid O. U.'s and the mansions bought by
Mischa Elman. . . . I did not tell Nikitich this. I held my tongue. 
At dinner-time, at home, I would not touch
the food. It would not go down my throat. 
"The feeling for nature," I
thought. "My God, why did it never enter my head before? . . , Where can I
find someone to interpret the different bird-notes for me and the names of
trees? Let me see, what do I know about them? I might possibly recognize a
lilac-bush and then only when it's in blossom. Lilac and acacia.
Deribassovskaya and Greek Streets are lined with acacias, . . ." 
At dinner-time father told us a new story
about Yascha Heifetz. He had met Mendelsohn, Yascha's uncle. The boy, it
seemed, was being paid eight hundred rubles for every appearance. How much does
that work out at fifteen concerts a month? 
I worked it out. It came to twelve thousand
rubles a month. As I multiplied and carried four in my head, my glance wandered
to the window. Across the cement yard my music teacher, Mr. Zagurski, was
marching, leaning on his stick. He came on with the breeze gently swelling his cape, his auburn ringlets escaping from under th'e
brim of his soft hat. He was none too soon. Over three months had gone by since
my violin first rested on the sand behind the breakwater. . . . 
Zagurski was approaching the front door. I
rushed for the back door, but it had been boarded up for fear of thieves only
the day before. Then I locked myself in the lavatory. In half-an-hour's time
the whole family had assembled outside my doon The women were crying. Aunt
Bobka rubbed her greasy shoulders against the door wailing and sobbing. My
father was silent. Then he spoke, more quietly and distinctly than I had ever
heard him speak before: 
"I'm an officer, am I?" said my
father. "I have an estate. I hunt. The peasants pay me rent, don't they? I
have sent my son to a military school. I do not need to worry about my son any
more." 
He ceased speaking. The women snuffled.
Then the door of the lavatory was shaken by a terrific blow. My father threw
himself upon it bodily. He ran back a few paces and rushed at it again. 
"I'm an officer!" he shrieked.
"I hunt, do I? I'll kill him. . . . It's the end. . . ." 
The latch sprang off the door, but there
still remained the bolt, which hung by one nail. The women rolled on the floor,
trying to catch my father by the legs; he tore himself free; he was in a
frenzy. An old woman came tottering out at last to the noisy scene. It was my
father's mother. 
"My child," she said to him in
Yiddish, "our sorrow is great. It knows no bounds. There has been all but
bloodshed in our house. I do not want to see blood in my house. . . ." 
My father groaned. I heard his footsteps
receding. The bolt was still hanging by the last nail. 
I sat in my fortress till night-fall. When
everyone had gone to bed, Aunt Bobka led me away to my grandmother's. We had a
long way to go. The moonlight lay numb on unknown bushes, on nameless trees. .
. . An invisible bird gave a whistle and faded into silence, perhaps into
slumber. . . . What bird was it? What was it called? Did the dew fall of an
evening? . . . Where did the constellation of the Great Bear lie? Where did the
sun rise? 
We went along . Aunt Bobka held me
firmly by the hand so that I could not run away. She was quite right. I was
thinking of escape. 
==
Category:Babel
Category:International Literature