The Bookshelf: The Sin of Jesus

The epigraph to this story will be as follows: A woman and Jesus Christ is able to lead into sin! The story of Isaac Babel "Jesus' sin" is written in the genre of philosophical and religious reasoning about the essence of female nature. The main theme of the story: the heat of female passion in space and time.

Arina had a little room by the grand stairway near the guestrooms, and Sergei, the janitors assistant, had a room near the service entrance. They had done a shameful deed together. Arina bore Sergei twins on Easter Sunday. Water flows, stars shine, muzhiks feel lust, and Arina again found herself in a delicate condition. She is in her sixth month, the months just roll by when a woman is pregnant, and Sergei ends up being drafted into the army—a fine mess! So Arina goes to him and says, “Listen, Sergunya, theres no point in me sitting around waiting for you. We wont see each other for four years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I had another brood of three or four by the time you come back. Working in a hotel, your skirt is hitched up more often than not. Whoever takes a room here gets to be your lord and master, Jews or whatever. When you come back from the army my womb will be worn out, I’ll be washed up as a woman, I don’t think I’ll be of any use to you.”

“True enough,” Sergei said, nodding his head.

“The men who want to marry me right now are Trofimich the contractor, he’s a rude roughneck, Isai Abramich, a little old man, and then there’s the warden of Nilolo-Svyatskoi Church, he’s very feeble, but your vigor has rattled my soul to pieces! As the Lord is my witness, I’m all chewed up! In three months I’ll be rid of my burden, I’ll leave the baby at the orphanage, and I’ll go marry them.”

When Sergei heard this he took off his belt and gave Arina a heroic beating, aiming for her belly.

“Hey!” the woman says to him. “Don t beat me on the gut, remember it’s your stuffing in there, not no one else’s!”

She received many savage wallops, he shed many a bitter tear, the womans blood flowed, but thats neither here nor there. The woman went to Jesus Christ and said:

“This and that, Lord Jesus. Me, I’m Arina, the maid from the Hotel Madrid & Louvre on Tverskaya Street. Working in a hotel, your skirt is hitched up more often than not. Whoever takes a room there gets to be your lord and master, Jews or whatever. Here on earth walks a humble servant of Yours, Sergei the janitors assistant. I bore him twins last year on Easter Sunday.”

And she told him everything.

“And what if Sergei didn’t go to the army?” the Savior pondered. “The constable would drag him off.”

“Ah, the constable,” the Savior said, his head drooping. “I’d forgotten all about him. Ah!—and how about if you led a pure life?”

“For four years!” the woman gasped. “Do you mean to say that everyone should stop living a life? You’re still singing the same old tune! How are we supposed to go forth and multiply? Do me a favor and spare me such advice!”

Here the Savior’s cheeks flushed crimson. The woman had stung him to the quick, but he said nothing. You cannot kiss your own ear, even the Savior knew that.

“This is what you need to do, humble servant of the Lord, glorious maidenly sinner Arina!” the Savior proclaimed in all his glory. “I have a little angel prancing about up in heaven, his name is Alfred, and he’s gotten completely out of hand. He keeps moaning, ‘Why, O Lord, did you make me an angel at twenty, a fresh lad like me?’ I’ll give you, Arina, servant of God, Alfred the angel as a husband for four years. He’ll be your prayer, your salvation, and your pretty-boy, too. And there’s no way you’ll get a child from him, not even a duckling, because there’s a lot of fun in him, but no substance.”

“That’s just what I need!” maid Arina cried. “It’s their substance that has driven me to the brink of the grave three times in two years!” “This will be a sweet respite for you, child of God, a light prayer, like a song. Amen.”

And thus it was decided. Alfred, a frail, tender youth, was sent down, and fluttering on his pale blue shoulders were two wings, rippling in a rosy glow like doves frolicking in the heavens. Arina hugged him, sobbing with emotion and female tenderness.

“My little Alfredushka, my comfort and joy, my one-and-only!” The Savior gave her instructions that, before going to bed, she had to take off the angels wings, which were mounted on hinges, just like door hinges, and she had to take them off and wrap them in a clean sheet for the night, because at the slightest frolic the wings could break, as they were made of infants’ sighs and nothing more.

The Savior blessed the union one last time, and called over a choir of abbots for the occasion, their voices thundering in song. There was nothing to eat, not even a hint of food — that wouldn’t have been proper — and Arina and Alfred, embracing, descended to earth on a silken rope ladder. They went to Petrovka, that’s were the woman dragged him to, she bought him lacquered shoes, checkered tricot trousers (by the way, not only was he not wearing pants, he was completely in the altogether), a hunting frock, and a vest of electric-blue velvet.

“As for the rest, sweetie,” she said, “we’ll find that at home.”

That day Arina did not work in the hotel, she took the day off. Sergei came and made a big to-do outside her room, but she wouldn’t open, and called out from behind her door, “Sergei Nifantich, I’m busy washing my feet right now and would be obliged if you would distance yourself without all that to-do!”

He left without saying a word. The angelic power was already taking effect.

Arina cooked a meal fit for a merchant—ha, she was devilishly proud, she was! A quart of vodka, and even some wine, Danube herring with potatoes, a samovar filled with tea. No sooner had Alfred eaten this earthly abundance than he keeled over into a deep sleep. Arina managed to snatch his wings off their hinges just in time. She wrapped them up, and then carried Alfred to her bed.

Lying on her fluffy eiderdown, on her frayed, sin-ridden bed, is a snowwhite wonder, an otherworldly brilliance radiating from him. Shafts of moonlight mix with red rays and dart about the room, trip-pling over their feet. And Arina weeps, rejoices, sings, and prays. The unheard of, O Arina, has befallen you in this shattered world, blessed art thou among women!

They had drunk down the whole quart of vodka. And it was pretty obvious, too. As they fell asleep, Arina rolled over onto Alfred with the hot, six-month gut that Sergei had saddled her with. You can imagine the weight! It wasn’t enough that she was sleeping next to an angel, it wasn’t enough that the man next to her wasnt spitting on the wall, or snoring, or snorting—no it wasnt enough for this lusty, crazed wench! She had to warm her bloated, combustible belly even more. And so she crushed the Lord`s angel, crushed him in her drunken bliss, crushed him in her rapture like a week-old infant, mangled him beneath her, and he came to a fatal end, and from his wings, wrapped in the sheet, pale tears flowed.

Dawn came, the trees bowed down low. In the distant northern woods, every fir tree turned into a priest, every fir tree genuflected.

The woman comes again before the throne of the Savior. She is strong, her shoulders wide, her red hands carrying the young corpse.

“Behold, Lord!”

This was too much for Jesus’ gentle soul, and he cursed the woman from the bottom of his heart.

“As it is in the world, Arina, so it shall be with you!”

“But Lord!” the woman said to him in a low voice. “Was it I who made my body heavy, who brewed the vodka, who made a womans soul lonely and stupid?”

“I do not wish to have anything further to do with you,” Lord Jesus exclaimed. “You have crushed my angel, you trollop, you!” And Arina was hurled back down to earth on a purulent wind, to Tverskaya Street, to her sentence at the Madrid & Louvre. There all caution had been thrown to the winds. Sergei was carousing away the last few days before he had to report as a recruit. Trofimich, the contractor, who had just come back from Kolomna, saw how healthy and red-cheeked she was.

“Ooh what a nice little gut!” he said, among other things.

Isai Abramich, the little old man, came wheezing over when he heard about the little gut.

“After all that has happened,” he said, “I cannot settle down with you lawfully, but I can definitely still lie with you.”

Six feet under, that’s where he should be lying, and not spitting into her soul like everyone else! It was as if they had all broken loose from their chains—dishwashers, peddlers, foreigners. A tradesman likes to have some fun.

And here ends my tale.

Before she gave birth—the remaining three months flew by quickly — Arina went out into the backyard behind the janitors room, raised her horribly large belly to the silken skies, and idiotically uttered, “Here you are, Lord, here is my gut! They bang on it as if it were a drum. Why, I don’t know! And then, Lord, I end up like this again! IVe had enough!”

Jesus drenched Arina with his tears. The Savior fell to his knees.

“Forgive me, my Arinushka, sinful God that I am, that I have done this to you!”

“I will not forgive you, Jesus Christ!” Arina replied. “I will not!”

Translated by Peter Constantine

1921