KONSTANTIN PAUSTOVSKY
Babel's mother demanded that the child be taken immediately to
Odessa to see an ear, nose and throat specialist.
Then Babel leaped to his feet, threw his napkin on the table
next to his unfinished tea and, red with indignation, shouted:
"You must be out of your mind, mother! What are you trying
to do? You want to kill the boy, or what? Do you call those Odessa
quacks physicians? They're horse doctors, the lot of them, charla·
tans, ignoramuses!" . ..
"What am I to do then?" Mrs. Gronfein exclaimed, sobbing
pathetically....
"You ask me what to do!" Babel cried angrily. "You, a native
of Kiev! Don't you know that you have a world-famous specialist
for ear, nose and throat diseases, Professor Grinblat? My advice
is to take the child to Kiev. Without a moment's delay!" . . .
And a week later a letter arriver from Kiev:
"Would you believe it?" the mother-in-law wrote, indignantly.
"What do you think Professor Grinblat found? He found that brat
had stuffed a piece of indelible pencil into his ear, and that's all
there was to it. Now how do you like that?"
After the incident with Lusya, we felt that peace was
reo
stored. . . . Babel began working hard and I would see him com·
ing out of his room silent and rather sad.
Hard Labor
"I have no imagination," Babel once told me. "I'm very
serious about this. I can't invent. I have to know everything, down
to the last vein, otherwise I can't write a thing. My motto is
au·
thenticity.
That's why I write so little and so slowly. Writing is
very hard for me. After each short story, I feel several years older.
Don't talk to me about creative work
a
la Mozart, about the bliss–
ful time spent over a manuscript, about the free flow of imagina.
tion! Somewhere I once wrote that I'm rapidly aging from asthma,
that strange illness which lodged itself in my puny body when I
was a child. But I was lying. When I'm writing the shortest story,
I still have to work at it as if I were required to dig up Mount
Everest all by myself with a pick and shovel.When I start working
I always feel that it's too much for me. Sometimes I get so tired
I cry. All
my
blood vessels ache from the work. I have heart spasms
