When it started to rain, Matej and I decided to go into the library to look up the Russian original of the sentence we disagreed about: “These hidden points—suggested, but not directly perceived—yield in their sum a construction of the new Ukrainian village: savage, rebellious, and self-seeking.” Even once we had the Russian text, though, we still disagreed about the meaning of “hidden points.” Rereading this story now, I can’t see what we could have been debating for so long, but I remember Matej saying irritably, “You’re making it sound as if he’s just adding things up, like he’s some kind of double-entry bookkeeper.”
“That’s exactly right,” I snapped. “He is a double-entry bookkeeper!”
We concluded that we would never agree on anything because I was a materialist, whereas he had a fundamentally religious view of history. Finally we parted ways, Matej to write about Babel’s replacement of old gods with a new mythology, and I to write about Babel as a bookkeeper.
“How good it is,” writes Mandelstam, “that I managed to love not the priestly flame of the icon lamp but the little red flame of literary spite!” I don’t know if Matej wrote his presentation in the priestly flame of the icon lamp, but I think it was literary spite that made me want to prove that Babel “was really” a bookkeeper. But, to my own surprise, it actually turned out to be true: not only did accountants and clerks keep turning up in Babel’s stories, but Babel himself had been educated at the Kiev Commercial Institute, where he received top marks in general accounting. I was particularly struck by the story “Pan Apolek,” in which the Polish protagonist calls the narrator “Mr. Clerk”—“pan pisar’ ” in the original. Pan is Polish for “sir” or “Mr.,” and pisar’ is a Russian word for “clerk.” In Polish, however, pisarz means not “clerk,” but “writer.” Pan Apolek was trying to call the narrator “Mr. Writer,” but the writer in the Red Cavalry turned into a clerk.
I ended up writing about the double-entry relationship in Babel’s work between literature and lived experience, centering on “Pan Apolek” (the story of a village church painter who endows biblical figures with the faces of his fellow villagers: a double-entry of preexisting artistic form with observations from life). The seminar presentation went well, and I expanded upon it a few months later at a Slavic colloquium, where it caught the interest of the department Babel expert, Grisha Freidin. Freidin said he would help me revise the paper for publication—“Why would you study the gospel with anyone but St. Peter?” he demanded—and offered me a job doing research for his new critical biography of Babel.
The title of the book was fluctuating at that time between A Jew on Horseback and The Other Babel. I was fascinated by the idea of The Other Babel, namely, that Babel wasn’t who we thought he was, or who said he was: he was some other person. His “Autobiography”—a document barely one and a half pages long—is full of untruths, such as his claim to have worked for the Cheka starting in October 1917, two months before the Cheka was founded, or to have fought on “the Romanian front.” “Now you might think ‘the Romanian front’ is a joke,” Freidin said. “Well, it’s not, it seems it really did exist. But Babel was never there.”
Babel’s undocumented life was likewise full of mysteries—chief among them, why he had returned to Moscow from Paris in 1933, after having spent nearly all of 1932 struggling to get permission to go abroad. Stranger still, why, in 1935, just when the purges were starting, did Babel begin making plans to bring his mother, sister, wife, and daughter from Brussels and Paris back to the Soviet Union?
As my first research assignment, I went to the Herbert Hoover archive to look up the Russian émigré newspapers in Paris from 1934 and 1935, starting with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, to see how much Babel’s family would have known about the purges. The newspapers hadn’t been transferred to microfilm, and the originals, which had been bound in enormous, tombstone-size books, couldn’t be photocopied because of the fragility of the paper. I sat in a corner with my laptop, typing out the lists of people who had been shot or sent to Siberia, typing the headlines about Kirov, and other headlines like “Who Burned the Reichstag?” and “Bonnie and Clyde Shot Dead.” Hours slipped by and the next thing I knew, all the lights went out. When I got up, I realized that the entire library was not only dark but also deserted and locked. I banged on the locked doors for a while with no result, then felt my way through the dark to a hallway with administrative offices, where I was happy to discover a tiny Russian woman reading a microfiche and eating lasagna from a tiny plastic box. She seemed surprised to see me, and even more surprised when I asked for directions on how to leave the building.
“ ‘Get out’?” she echoed, as if referring to the exotic custom of an unknown people. “Ah, I do not know.”
“Oh,” I said. “But how are you going to get out?”
“Me? Well, it is . . .” She glanced away, evasively. “But I show you something.” She got up from her desk, took a flashlight from a drawer, and went back into the hallway, motioning me to follow. We came to an emergency door with a big sign: ALARM WILL SOUND.
“It is not locked,” she said. “But behind you, it will lock.”
The alarm did not sound. I went down several flights of steps and out another fire door, and found myself in the yellow late-afternoon sunlight, standing in a concrete well below ground level. At the main entrance to Hoover Tower, just around the corner, two Chinese women wearing enormous straw hats were rapping on the door. I unlocked my bicycle and slowly rode home. I had no idea why Babel wanted his family to come back to the Soviet Union in 1935.
That month, Freidin began organizing an international Babel conference, to be held at Stanford, and I started working on an accompanying exhibit of literary materials from the Hoover archive.
The contents of the hundred-plus boxes on Babel turned out to be extremely diverse, a bit like one of those looted Polish manors: copies of Red Cavalry in Spanish and Hebrew; “original watercolors” of the Polish conflict, executed circa 1970; a Big Book of Jewish Humor, circa 1990; an issue of the avant-garde journal LEF, edited by Mayakovsky; The Way They Were, a book of childhood photographs of famous people, in alphabetical order, with a bookmark to the page where fourteen-year-old Babel in a sailor suit was facing a teenage Joan Baez. There was a book on the Cavalry Army designed by Alexander Rodchenko, with a photograph of Commander Budyonny’s mother, Melaniya Nikitichna, standing outside a hut, squinting at the camera, bearing in her arms a baby goose. (“Budyonny’s first goose,” observed Freidin, “and Budyonny’s trousers.” The trousers were hanging on a clothesline in the background.)
I had also been instructed to choose two propaganda posters from 1920, one Polish and one Soviet. The exhibit coordinator took me into a labyrinthine basement, where a new collection was being indexed. On top of a bank of filing cabinets lay various posters from 1920 representing Russia as the Whore of Babylon, or as the four horsemen of the apocalypse, on horses with Lenin and Trotsky heads; one showed Christ’s body lying in the postapocalyptic rubble—“This Is How All of Poland Will Look, Once Conquered by the Bolsheviks”—bringing to mind Babel’s diary entry about “the looting of an old church”: “how many counts and serfs, magnificent Italian art, rosy Paters rocking the infant Jesus, Rembrandt . . . It’s very clear, the old gods are being destroyed.”