Savage Shorthand by Jerome Charyn

Author:Jerome Charyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307431790
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

4.

BENYA KRIK WAS released in 1927 and the Party apparatus soon plucked it out of circulation. An old-world gangster wasn’t a suitable subject in a Soviet Union that believed in garage mechanics and baker-commissars like Kochetkov. . . .

Babel continues to wander. He talks of a novel he’s writing about the Cheka—he goes deeper and deeper into the Devil’s mouth. There are tales and rumors of Babel sitting down with the secret police, prying, pressing, as inquisitive as ever. He will brag to Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam how he “spent all his time meeting militiamen”—Chekists—and drinking with them. Osip asks him why he’s so drawn to these militiamen. “[W]as it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise is 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 want to have a sniff and see what it smells like.’ ”

He visits France in ’27, boasts about his former service with the Cheka and about the novel he is writing, but Zhenya will later tell Nathalie that there was no such novel—or, at least, he hadn’t confided in her. And even if he had envisioned such a novel, would it have concerned the adventures of Kiril Lyutov inside the Lubyanka? Babel himself had become the Jewish giant in the photograph, powerless and puffed up.

He grows listless in Paris, as if he were living in some strange swamp. In March 1928 he writes to I. Livshits, a boyhood friend: “What I am going through must be called by its proper name—it’s an illness, neurasthenia, like the one in the days of my youth.”

But he didn’t have a dovecote to comfort him, or that mysterious rot of the Moldavanka, a Moldavanka where his grandmother lived and where he could watch those magnificent draymen, who must have been as exotic as Jewish acrobats for a sickly boy. . . .

He lingers in France, visits Marseilles, which reminds him of the Moldavanka, and the longer he’s away, the more other Soviet writers begin to carp—Babel has abandoned the Soviets; Babel is a slave of the West. He returns in October 1928, with little to show for his fifteen months abroad. But he’s come back to a much different Soviet Union. That Russian Wild West is gone. Stalin has strangled Lenin’s “breather,” and will introduce the “great breaking point,” where all Soviet citizens have to become udarniki—shock troops—on that sacrificial highway called socialism.

A born battler, Budenny senses that it’s the opportune moment to revive his attack on Babel. And Gorky has given him the occasion. In an article about the craft of writing, Gorky declares: “Comrade Budenny has pounced upon Babel’s Red Cavalry and I don’t believe he should have, because Budenny himself likes to embellish the outside not only of his men, but of his horses too.” Budenny counterattacks; in an open letter to the grand old man of Soviet literature, he starts

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