I was first introduced to the work of Isaac Babel as a college sophomore, when “My First Goose” was assigned in a creative-writing class. The instructor, Robert Cohen, was a melancholy Jewish novelist with a beard, whom I remember primarily for the time he suddenly realized the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: “You’re going to die. And you’re going to die. And you’re going to die.” I remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused.

[...] I remember Jakov saying, a bit irritably, “You’re making it sound as if he’s just adding things up, like he’s some kind of double-entry bookkeeper.”

“That’s exactly right,” I said, also irritably, “he is a double-entry bookkeeper!”

In the course of the next five minutes, we concluded that we would never agree on anything because I was a materialist, whereas he, Jakov, had a fundamentally religious view of history, and then we parted ways, Jakov to write about Babel’s replacement of old gods with a new mythology, and I to write about Babel as a bookkeeper.

In this way I managed to get locked in the archive; I was sitting at my carrel and lost track of time, and suddenly all the lights went out. When I got up, I realized that the entire library was not only dark but also deserted and locked. I banged on the locked doors for a while with no result, then felt my way in the dark into the hallway with the administrative offices, where I finally found a tiny Russian woman reading a microfiche and eating lasagna from a tiny plastic box. She seemed surprised to see me, and even more surprised when I asked for directions on how to leave the building.

“Get out?” she echoed, as if referring to the exotic custom of an unknown people. “Ah, I do not know.”

“Oh,” I said. “But how are you going to get out?”

But then there were so many problems. First, my copy was sent back to me with a note: “Please call ASAP regarding portrayal of Cossacks as primitive monsters.” It turned out that my copy was lacking in cultural sensitivity toward Cossacks. I tried to explain that, far from calling Cossacks primitive monsters, I was merely suggesting that others had considered Cossacks to be primitive monsters. The coordinator, however, said that this was my mistake: others didn’t consider Cossacks to be primitive monsters; in fact, “Cossacks have a rather romantic image.”

I considered quoting to her the entry for Cossack in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas: “Eats tallow candles”; but then the burden of proof would still be on me to show that tallow candles are a primitive form of nourishment. Instead I adopted the line that the likelihood of any Cossacks actually attending the exhibit was very slim. But the editor said this wasn’t the point, “and anyway you never know in California.”

This was great news for my classmate, Josh, who was also working on the exhibit, and who had somehow developed a crush on Pirozhkova, based on the pictures from the 1930s which show her to be, indeed, an extremely attractive woman. Josh’s parents were Star Wars fans and his full name is Joshua Sky Walker; to differentiate him from other Joshes, he is often called Skywalker.

“Man, do I hope I get to pick her up from the airport,” Skywalker said of Pirozhkova.

“I hope so too,” I said, “but you do realize she must be more than ninety years old.”

“I don’t care—she is so hot. You don’t understand.”

Alas, I did understand; one develops strange ideas working in an archive. I had noticed some Cossacks in the Rodchenko book whom I would gladly have picked up from the airport, were it not that, in accordance with my prediction, none of them came to the conference.

We drove by another billboard: “Ted Lempert for State Senate.”

“Ted Lempert,” Lidiya mused, then turned to me. “Who is this Ted Lempert?”

I said that I didn’t know, but that I thought he wanted to be a senator.

“Hmm,” she said. “Lempert. I knew a Lempert once—an artist. His name was Vladimir. Vladimir Lempert.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to think of something to say. “I’m reading a novel by Balzac now about somebody called Louis Lambert.” I tried to say “Lambert” to sound like “Lempert”.

We drove the rest of the way to the hotel in silence.

I told her about my freshman advisor, a middle-aged British woman with a kind, weary demeanor, who worked in the telecommunications office and had never once known the answer to a single question I had asked.

“The telecommunications office?” Anna repeated.

I nodded. “I would see her when I went to pay my phone bill.”

“Did she have any other connection to Harvard, other than working in the telecommunications office? Was she an alumna?”

“Yeah, actually, she got an MA in the seventies, in Old Norse literature.”

Anna stared at me. “Old Norse literature? What good is an MA in Old Norse literature?”

“I think it’s useful in telecommunications work,” I said.

“Elif, hello. I don’t know if this is pleasant or a surprise, but, yes, this is Grisha.” Freidin was at the dinner for the conference participants. He was, he said, experiencing confusion due to the total lack at this dinner of any graduate student presence. “You are not here,” he explained, “and Fishkin isn’t here. Josh isn’t here. Nobody is here. It looks—well, it looks strange. It’s a bit embarrassing.”

I considered this for a moment. “But we weren’t invited to the dinner,” I pointed out.

Silence.

“I see. You were waiting to be invited.”

I got into the left lane and made the next available U-turn.

“He is not Chinese!” shouted a depressed-looking historian.

Everyone turned and looked at him.

“I don’t think he’s really Chinese,” the historian repeated.

“He does look—different,” said Lidiya.

“Maybe he is an Uyghur,” Zholkovsky suggested.

“Wha-a-at?”

“An Uyghur, an Uyghur, an Uyghur.”

“When I asked the other Chinese what his religion was,” continued the first scholar, “he said to me, ‘My religion is Isaac Babel.’”

“I used to be a student here at Stanford,” the screenwriter began. “Right here. I used to study computer programming. I used to work all night in the computer cluster next door. Then I took a creative writing class to learn how to write stories. There, my teacher assigned Isaac Babel’s story ‘My First Goose.’ This story changed my life.”

I was amazed anew at the varieties of human experience: to think we had both read the same story under such similar circumstances, and it had such different effects on us.