Free The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine by Peter Constantine Isaac Babel Nathalie Babel Page B

on the caustic, and noisily marches out.
    The second person to enter the editor’s office is a young lady— slim, shy, very beautiful. She is there for the third time. Her poems are not intended for publication. All she wants to know, and absolutely nothing more, is if there’s any point in her continuing to write. The editor is extremely pleasant to her. He sometimes sees her walking along the Nevsky Prospekt with a tall gentleman who, from time to time, gravely buys her half a dozen apples. His gravity is ominous. Her poems testify to this. They are a guileless chronicle of her life.
    “You want my body,” the girl writes. “So take it, my enemy, my friend! But wheit will my soul find its dream?”
    “Hell be getting his hands on your body any day now, thats pretty clear!” the editor thinks. “Your eyes look so lost, weak, and beautiful. I doubt your soul will be finding its dream anytime soon, but youll definitely make quite a spicy woman!”
    In her poems the girl describes life as “madly frightening” or “madly marvelous,” in all its little aggravations: “Those sounds, sounds, sounds that me enfold, those sounds eternal, so drunken and so bold.” One thing is certain: once the grave gentlemans enterprise comes to fruition, the girl will stop writing poetry and start visiting midwives.
    After the girl, Lunev, a small and nervous man of letters, enters the editors office. Here things get complicated. On a former occasion Lunev had blown up at the editor. He is a talented, perplexed, hapless family man. In his fluster and scramble for rubles he is unable to discriminate who he can afford to shout at and who not. First he blew up at the editor, and then, to his own and the editors amazement, handed over the manuscript, suddenly realizing how foolish all this was, how hard life was, and how unlucky he was, oh, how very unlucky! He had already begun having palpitations in the waiting room, and now the editor informed him that his “little daubs” weren’t all that bad, but, au fond\ you couldn’t really classify them as literature, they were, well . . . Lunev feverishly agreed, unexpectedly muttering, “Oh, Alexander Stepanovich! You are such a good man! And all the while I was so horrible to you! But it can all be seen from another perspective! Absolutely! That is all I want to elucidate, there is more to it than meets the eye, I give you my word of honor!” Lunev turns a deep crimson, scrapes together the pages of his manuscript with quaking fingers, endeavoring to be debonair, ironic, and God knows what else.
    After Lunev, two stock figures found in every editorial office come in. The first is a lively, rosy, fair-haired lady. She emits a warm wave of perfume. Her eyes are naive and bright. She has a nine-year-old son, and this son of hers, “you wouldn’t believe it, but he simply writes and writes, day and night, at first we didn’t pay any attention, but then all our friends and acquaintances were so impressed, and my husband, you know, he works in the Department of Agricultural Betterment, a very practical man, you know, he will have nothing to do with modern literature, not Andreyev, not Nagrodskaya, but even he couldn’t stop laughing—I have brought along three notebooks. ...”
    The second stock figure is Bykhovsky. He is from Simferopol. He is a very nice, lively man. He has nothing to do with literature, he doesn’t really have any business with the editor, he doesn’t really have anything to say to him, but he is a subscriber, and has dropped by for a little chat and to exchange ideas, to immerse himself in the hurly-burly of Petrograd life. And he is immersing himself. The editor mumbles something about politics and cadets, and Bykhovsky blossoms, convinced that he is taking an active part in the nations public life.
    The most doleful of the visitors is Korb. He is a Jew, a true Ahasuerus. He was born in Lithuania, and had been wounded in a pogrom in one of the southern towns.