her relentlessly observant, unblinking gaze very hard to take, but I was used to it. Then Grandmother would listen to me recite my lessons. It must be said that she spoke Russian poorly, mangling words in her own peculiar way, mixing Russian with Polish and Yiddish ones. She was not literate in Russian, of course, and would hold the book upside down. But this did not prevent me from reciting the lesson to her from beginning to end. Grandmother would listen, understanding none of it, but the music of the words was sweet to her, she was in awe of learning, believed me, believed in me, and wanted me to become a “big man”—that was her name for a rich man. 40 The boy in the story was reading Turgenev’s “First Love.” And because Turgenev’s “First Love” was the boy’s first love, Babel’s “First Love” was a version of Turgenev’s, except that the boy was even younger. The woman he loved was named Galina Apollonovna (daughter of Apollo), and she was happily married to a young officer who had just returned from the Russo-Japanese war. She could not take her eyes off her husband because she had not seen him for a year and a half, but I dreaded that look and kept turning away and trembling. In the two of them, I saw the wonderful and shameful life of all the people in the world. I wanted to fall into a magic sleep so that I could forget about this life that exceeded all my dreams. Galina Apollonovna used to walk around the room with her hair down, wearing red slippers and a Chinese robe. Beneath the lace of her low-cut gown one could see the hollow between the top parts of her white, heavy, swollen breasts. Her robe was embroidered with pink silk dragons, birds, and trees with gnarled trunks. 41 Before he could partake of the “wonderful and shameful life of all the people in the world,” however, he had to overcome his tonguelessness: the violent, throat-stopping hiccups that came upon him the day his grandfather was murdered, his father humiliated, and his doves smashed against his temple—the day he felt such “bitter, ardent, and hopeless” love for Galina Apollonovna. That first victory—over the “tongue-tiedness and tonguelessness,” Turgenev’s “First Love,” and the “Russian boys with fat cheeks”—always came in due course, usually at a gymnasium exam. In a kind of ecstatic Russian bar mitzvah, Jewish adolescents recited specially selected sacred texts to mark their initiation