Isaac Babel
01 GRASSO
*
A
Tale of Odessa
I was fourteen, and of the undauntable fellowship of
dealers in theater tickets. My boss was a tricky customer with a per–
manently screwed-up eye and enormous silky handlebars; Nick
Schwarz was
his
name. I came under his sway in that unhappy year
when the Italian Opera flopped in Odessa. Taking a lead from the
critics on the local paper, our impresario decided not to import An–
selmi and Tito-Ruffo as guest artistes but to make do with a good
stock company. For this he was sorely punished; he went bankrupt,
and we with
him.
We were promised Chaliapin to straighten out our
affairs, but Chaliapin wanted three thousand a performance; so
in–
stead we had the Sicilian tragedian Di Grasso with his troupe. They
arrived at the hotel
in
peasant carts crammed with children, cats,
cages in which Italian birds hopped and skipped. Casting an eye
over
this
gypsy crew, Nick Schwarz opined:
"Children, this stuff won't sell."
When he had settled in, the tragedian made his way to the mar–
ket with a bag. In the evening he arrived at the theater with another
bag. Hardly fifty people had turned up. We tried selling tickets at
half price, but there were no takers.
That evening they staged a Sicilian folk-drama, a tale as com–
monplace as the change from night to day and vice versa. The
daughter of a rich peasant pledges her troth to a shepherd. She is
faithful to him till one day there drives out from the city a young
slicker in a velvet waistcoat. Passing the time of day with the new
arrival, the maiden giggled in all the wrong places and fell silent
• This story, which has never before been translated into English, will appear in
The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel,
to be published this year by Criterion Books.
