REMINISCENCES
OF BABEL
393
theJ;lhestopped to give passers-by a chance to go round
him,
but he
never once raised his head to look at them.
And the people in the street did avoid bumping into him. Some
stared, rather bewildered, but they didn't .say a word. Soon he dis–
appeared
in
the shade of the plane trees whose velvety foliage
quivered in the liquid Black Sea air.
Later, I often met Babel in town. He was never alone. What
we called the "Odessa literary boys" hung around
him
like flies.
They caught up his witticisms and immediately spread them all
over Odessa. He sent them off on all sorts of errands, which they
carried out without a murmur.
If
one of them was not zealous
enough, Babel would tell him off sharply, and when he got tired
of them, he chased them away mercilessly. But the harsher Babel
was with them, the more the literary boys liked it; the objects of
J3abel's ire seemed to thrive on it. But it was not only the literary
boys for whom Babel was a god. Older writers
to~there
were
several in Odessa at that time-as well as young Odessan writers
and poets had great respect for him. At that time he was, for us,
the first really Soviet writer. . ..
I came into close contact with him toward the end of the
summer. He was living at Fontan. Izya Lifshits and I had rented
a dilapidated little summer cabin there, not far from Babel's....
I saw a lot of him. Sometimes we spent the whole day together
on the beach, fishing with homemade nets and listening to Babel's
leisurely stories. There was real genius in the way he told things.
When he told a story, it sounded even stronger, even more flawless
than when it was written. He was very fond of talking about Gorky,
about the revolution, and about how he had lived in the Anichkov
Palace in Petersburg where he slept on a couch in Alexander Ill's
study. One day he had looked into a drawer of the Czar's desk and
found a box of magnificent cigarettes, a gift to the Czar from the
Turkish Sultan, Abd\ll Hamid.
These fat cigarettes were rolled in pink paper with a gilded
arabesque design. With an air .of mystery Babel gave one cigarette
each to Izya and to me. Their delicate .odQr was wafted .over Fon–
tan. Immediately we both got terrible headaches and for a whole
hour staggered around like drunks, groping our · way
alo~
the
~tone
walls as we went.
