386
ISAAC BABEL
his
pupils glowing like embers, "teaches the likes of you that there
mustn't be any nations, but we say: a nation must exist...."
Tearing the bandages from my feet, he would straighten
up and, gritting
his
teeth, ask me in a low voice:
"Where are you headed? What devil drives you? Why is it
always on the move, this tribe of yours? ... Why are you making
all
this trouble, why all this turmoil? ..."
One night the town Soviet had us taken away in a cart–
patients who didn't get along with the male nurse, and old Jewish
women in wigs, the mothers of local commissars.
My feet healed up. I set out further along the hunger–
stricken road to Zhlobin, Orsha and Vitebsk.
From Novo-Sokolniki to Loknya, I found shelter under the
muzzle of a howitzer. We were riding on a flatcar. Fediukha, my
chance companion who was on the great odyssey of a deserter,
was a storyteller, punster and wit. We slept under the mighty,
short, upturned muzzle of the gun, keeping each other warm
in
a canvas den, lined with hay like the lair of a beast. Past Loknya,
Fediukha stole my traveling box and disappeared. The box had
been given me by the town Soviet and contained two sets of
army underwear, some dry bread and a little money. For two
days-we were then approaching Petersburg-I had no food.
At the Tsarskoye Selo station I had my last taste of shooting. A
patrol fired into the air to greet the oncoming train.
The black marketeers were led out onto the platform and
the soldiers began to strip off their clothes. The liquor-filled rub–
ber
bags in which they were encased flopped down on the asphalt
next to the real men. At nine in the evening, the howling prison
of the station disgorged me onto Zagorodny Prospect. Across the
street, on the wall of a boarded-up pharmacy, the thermometer
registered twenty-four degrees below zero. The wind roared
through the tunnel of Gorokhovaya Street. A gas light flickered
wildly over the canal. Our chilled, granite Venice stood motion–
less. I entered Gorokhovaya, an icy field hemmed in by cliffs.
The Cheka was housed in Number 2, in what had
been
the
