The next person we consulted was Babel. I do not think he ever lived in any of the apartment buildings reserved for writers, but always managed to find peculiar places of his own. With great difficulty we tracked him down in a strange house that must formerly have been a private villa. I have a vague recollection that there were foreigners living in this house, and that Babel rented rooms from them on the second floor. But perhaps he just said so to astonish us—he was very fond of startling people like this. At that time foreigners were avoided like the plague—you could lose your head for the slightest contact with them. Who in his right mind would have lived in the same house as foreigners? I still remember my astonishment, and still cannot understand it. Whenever we saw Babel
he gave us something to be surprised about.
We told him our troubles, and during the whole of our long conversation he listened with remarkable intentness. Everything about Babel gave an impression of all-consuming curiosity—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.
With his usual ability to size things up, he was quick to decide on the best course for us. "Go out to Kalinin," he said, "Erdman is there—his old women just love him." This was Babel's cryptic way of saying that all Erdman's female admirers would never have allowed him to settle in a bad place. He also thought we might be able to get some help from them—in finding a room there, for instance. But Babel, as it turned out, had exaggerated Erdman's hold over his "old women"—when we went to Kalinin, we found that none of them lived out there with him, and that he had to come into Moscow to see them.
Babel volunteered to get the money for our fare the next day, and we then started talking about other things. He told us he now spent all his time meeting militiamen and drinking with them. The previous evening he had been drinking with one of the chief militiamen of Moscow, who in his drunken state had declared that "he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword." The chiefs of the militia, he said, were disappearing one after another and "today you're all right, but you don't know where you'll be tomorrow."
The word "militia" was of course a euphemism. We knew that Babel was really talking about Chekists. M. asked him why he was so drawn to "militiamen": 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."
It was known that among the "militiamen" Babel visited was Yezhov himself. After the arrest of Babel, Katayev and Shklovski said he had visited Yezhov because he was so frightened, but that it hadn't saved him—Beria had had him arrested precisely on this account. I am convinced that Babel went to see Yezhov not out of cowardice but out of sheer curiosity—just to have a sniff and see what it smelled like.
The question "What will happen to us tomorrow?" was the chief topic of all our conversations. Babel, with his storyteller's gift, put it into the mouth of his "militiamen." M. was generally silent about it—he knew too well what awaited him. Only once did he blurt out something when we happened to run into Shervinski on the street. He was no friend of ours, but M. suddenly told him it couldn't go on like this—"I am right in front of their noses all the time and they must have no idea what to do with me—in other words, they will soon have to pick me up." Shervinski listened to this brief outburst and said nothing at all. After M.'s death I sometimes met him, but he never mentioned it to me. I should not be surprised if he had forgotten—there was so much unpleasantness in our lives that this was the only thing to do.
69 A Scene from Life
B
abel was not the only one who knew Yezhov—we too had once made his acquaintance. This had happened in the 1930's when M. and I were staying in a Government villa in Sukhumi. The Yezhov we met then was remarkably like his later portraits and photographs—especially the one where he appears with a broad smile at the moment when Stalin is shaking his hand to congratulate him on some Government award. The Sukhumi Yezhov also had his famous limp, and I remember Podvoiski, who liked to lecture people about the qualities of a true Bolshevik, scolding me for my laziness and telling me to follow the example of "our Yezhov" who danced the gopak despite his lame leg. But there were many Yezhovs and I still find it difficult to believe that the man we saw in Sukhumi was the legendary People's Commissar at the dawn of his brief but dazzling career. It is hard to credit that we sat at the same table, eating, drinking and exchanging small talk with this man who was to be one of the great killers of our time, and who totally exposed—not in theory but in practice—all the assumptions on which our "humanism" rested.
The Sukhumi Yezhov was a modest and rather agreeable person. He was not yet used to being driven about in an automobile and did not therefore regard it as an exclusive privilege to which no ordinary mortal could lay claim. We sometimes asked him to give us a lift into town, and he never refused. At the Government villa, automobiles were a burning issue—cars from the Abkhaz Council of People's Commissars were always sweeping up the hill to the front entrance, and the children of Central Committee officials staying in the villa chased away the grubby brats of the service personnel, proudly taking their places in the driver's seat as though entitled to do so by right of birth. On one occasion M. called this expulsion scene to the attention of Yezhov's wife and another Central Committee lady. The two women told the children of their colleagues to make room for the servants' children and let them sit in the car as well. They were very much upset to see the children departing from the democratic principles of their fathers and told us they were sent to the same school as other children and were dressed no better than the others, so that they wouldn't "lose touch with the people." These children were now preparing themselves to rule the people, but many of them were to meet a different fate.
In the morning Yezhov got up before everybody else to cut roses for the young woman student of literature and friend of Bagritski with whom he was flirting. After him came Podvoiski—to get roses for Yezhov's wife. This was an act of pure chivalry—so the other inhabitants of the villa said—since Podvoiski was a model family man and never flirted with any wives except his own. The rest of the ladies, who had no one to pay court to them, came down to get their own roses, and discussed Podvoiski's gallant behavior as they did so.
Yezhov's wife (her name was Tonia, I think) spent her time lying in a deck chair on the terrace opposite the villa. If she was upset by her husband's conduct, she gave no sign of it—Stalin had not yet begun to insist on the need for a healthy family life. "Where is your comrade?" she asked me whenever she saw me alone. At first I didn't realize that she was referring to M. In these circles they still stuck to the usage of their days in the revolutionary underground, and a husband was primarily a comrade. Tonia was reading Das Kapital and softly recapitulated it to herself as she went along. She was angry with the vivacious and intelligent wife of Kossior for going out on horseback with a young and rather brash musician who was collecting Abkhaz folk music. "We all know Kossior," said Tonia, "he is a comrade of ours, but who is this fellow? He could be a spy, for all we know!" Everybody denounced Lakoba's irresponsibility in putting someone who was "not one of us" in such an important villa. Probably the presence of anybody who was not a member of the Party gave rise to similar protests, and I even heard some talk about the need to centralize the whole process of allotting places in Party rest homes, but Lakoba didn't give a damn for any of them: the villa belonged to the Abkhaz Council of People's Commissars—that is, virtually to him.