The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (24 page)

“You old thief!” Madame Gorobchik yelled, hobbling around her husband, twisting his mustache and tugging at it. “You’re an old thief, my darling Mendel!”

All the neighbors were awakened by her yelling. Everyone came running to the gate, and bare-bellied children began tooting on their whistles. All Moldavanka came running, eager for scandal. And Benya

Krik, gray with shame in front of everyone, barely managed to jostle his “newlyweds” back into the house. He chased the people away with a stick, herding them toward the gates, but Lyovka, his younger brother, grabbed him by the collar and shook him like a pear tree.

“Benchik,” he said, “we are torturing the old man! Tears are gnawing at me, Benchik!”

“Tears are gnawing at you, are they?” Benchik said to Lyovka, and sucking the spit together in his mouth, spat in Lyovkas face. “You are the lowest of the low,” he whispered. “You disgust me! Dont tie my hands, and dont get tangled between my feet!”

And Lyovka didnt tie his hands. He slept in the stables until dawn and then disappeared from the house. The dust of other streets and the geraniums in other peoples windows were a comfort to him. The young man walked the roads of sorrow, disappeared for two days and nights, came back on the third day, and saw the blue sign floating above the Kriks’ house. The blue sign struck him to the heart, and the velvet tablecloths knocked his eyes right off their feet. The velvet tablecloths were spread over tables, and a large crowd of guests was laughing in the front garden. Dvoira was walking among the guests in a white headdress, starched women glittered in the grass like enameled teapots, and staggering workmen, who had already thrown off their jackets, grabbed Lyovka and pushed him into the house. Mendel Krik, the eldest of the Kriks, was sitting there, his face bruised. Usher Boyarsky, the owner of the firm Chef d’oeuvre, his hunchbacked cutter Efim, and Benya Krik, were all circling around the disfigured father.

“Efim,” Usher Boyarsky said to his cutter, “be so kind as to come a little closer and measure Monsieur Krik for one of our prima striped suits, like hes family, and make so bold as to inquire what material the gentleman would prefer—English naval double-breasted, English civilian single-breasted, Lodz demi-saison, or thick Moscow cloth?”

“What kind of suit would you prefer?” Benchik asked Papa Krik. “Confess to Monsieur Boyarsky.”

“What you feel in your heart is good enough for your father,” Papa Krik said, wiping away a tear, “that’s the kind of suit you’ll have him make.”

“Well, since Papa isn’t a navy man,” Benya interrupted his father, “a civilian would suit him better. First of all choose a suit for him for everyday use.”

Monsieur Boyarsky bent forward and cupped his ear.

“What, pray, might you have in mind?”

“This is what I have in mind. . . .”

1

An elegant and expensive cafe that attracted a wealthy international clientele.

2

Hebrew: El maley rakhamim, “God is filled with mercy.” A prayer traditionally chanted at burials.

^Hebrew quotations from the Bible (Ecclesiastes 12:8), Hevel havolim., “vanity of vanities,” and Kuloy hevel, “All is vanity.”

3

Broydin has hired cemetery workers from outside Odessa to take over the funerary duties of the old folk from the almshouse. Ekaterinoslav in Eastern Ukraine has been renamed Dnipropetrovsk.

' Khadzhibei was the small settlement where in 1794 Czarina Catherine II decided to build a powerful Black Sea harbor, which she then renamed Odessa.

4

Mikhail Moisevich Mayorov (born Meyer Biberman), 1890-1938, like Broydin also originally a tailor by profession, became the director of the Communal Economics Department in July

1920.

huge sepulchral mound in which victims of the 1812 plague were buried.

In late May 1920, the First Cavalry of the Soviet Red Army, under the command of General Budyonny\ rode into Volhynia, today the border region of western Ukraine and eastern Poland. The Russian-Polish cam-paign was under way, the new Soviet government’s first foreign offensive, which was viewed back in Moscow as the first step toward spreading the doctrines of World Revolution to Poland, then to Europe; then to the world.

Babel chronicled this campaign in his Red Cavalry stories, later to become the most well-known and enduring of his literary legacy. These loosely linked stories take the reader from the initial triumphant assault against the
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Polish masters
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to the campaigns of the summer of 1920\ and the increasingly bitter defeats that led to the wild retreat of the cavalry in the autumn. Babel blends fiction and fact, creating a powerful effect that is particularly poignant in his rendering of the atrocities of war. The stories were published in magazines and newspapers between 1923 and 1926; the reading public was torn between delight at BabeVs potent new literary voice and horror at the brutality portrayed in the stories. In 1926\ thirty-four of the stories were included in the book Konarmia (translated into English as

Red Cavalry^ which quickly went into eight editions and was translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. It immediately turned Babel into an international literary figure and made him into one of the Soviet Union’s foremost writers.

The stories, as Babel himself repeatedly stressed, were fiction set against a real backdrop. Literary effect was more important to Babel than historical fact. Babel might also have felt more comfortable reconfiguring military strategy that might still have been classified when the stories began appearing in newspapers and magazines in the first years after the war. Novograd-Volynsk,for instance, the town in the first story, lies on the river Slucz, not on the Zbrucz as the story indicates. (The Zbrucz runs along the western frontier of Volhynia, along the former border between the kingdom of Poland and Russia.) Also, Novograd-Volynsk was not occupied by the Red Cavalry, but by the Soviet 14th Army. As the historian Norman Davies has pointed out, a high road from Warsaw to Brest had been built by serfs under Nicholas I, but it lay two hundred miles beyond the front at Novograd-Volynsk, and so could not have been cluttered by the rear guard.

One of Babel’s strategies for creating a sharper feeling of reality in his stories was to mix real people with fictional characters. This was to have serious repercussions. General Budyonny, for instance, the real-life commander of the cavalry, often comes across in the stories as brutal, awkward, and irresolute. Babel makes fun of his oafish and uneducated Cossack speech. In the story “Czesniki,” Budyonny is asked to give his men a speech before battle: “Budyonny shuddered, and said in a quiet voice, ‘Men! Our situations . . . well, it’s . . . bad. A bit more liveliness, men!’ ”

Babel had, of course, no way of knowing that General Budyonny was to become a Marshal of the Soviet Union, First Deputy Commissar for Defense, and later “Hero of the Soviet Union.”Another real character in the stories, Voroshilov, the military commissar, also does not always come across particularly well. The implication in “Czesniki” is that Voroshilov overrode the other commanders’ orders, resulting in an overhasty attack that led to defeat. Voroshilov happened to be a personal friend of Stalin; he had become the People’s Commissar of Defense by the time the Red Cavalry collection was in print, and was destined to become Head of State. These were dangerous men to cross.

In these stories Babel uses different narrators, such as Lyutov; the young intellectual journalist, hiding his Jewishness and struggling to fit in with the Cossacks, and Balmashov, the murderous, bloodthirsty Cossack.

The Soviet Union wanted to forget this disastrous campaign, its first venture at bringing Communism to the world. Babel’s Red Cavalry stories, however; kept the fiasco in the public eye, both in the Soviet Union and abroad, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and ever since.

The commander of the Sixth Division reported that Novograd-J Volynsk was taken at dawn today. The staff is now withdrawing from Krapivno, and our cavalry transport stretches in a noisy rear guard along the high road that goes from Brest to Warsaw, a high road built on the bones of muzhiks by Czar Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies are blossoming around us, a noon breeze is frolicking in the yellowing rye, virginal buckwheat is standing on the horizon like the wall of a faraway monastery. Silent Volhynia is turning away, Volhynia is leaving, heading into the pearly white fog of the birch groves, creeping through the flowery hillocks, and with weakened arms entangling itself in the underbrush of hops. The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill. The blackened Zbrucz roars and twists the foaming knots of its rapids. The bridges are destroyed, and we wade across the river. The majestic moon lies on the waves. The water comes up to the horses’ backs, purling streams trickle between hundreds of horses’ legs. Someone sinks, and loudly curses the Mother of God. The river is littered with the black squares of the carts and filled with humming, whistling, and singing that thunders above the glistening hollows and the snaking moon.

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. In the quarters to which I am assigned I find a pregnant woman and two red-haired Jews with thin necks, and a third Jew who is sleeping with his face to the wall and a blanket pulled over his head. In my room I find ransacked closets, torn pieces of womens fur coats on the floor, human excrement, and fragments of the holy Seder plate that the Jews use once a year for Passover.

“Clean up this mess!” I tell the woman. “How can you live like this?”

The two Jews get up from their chairs. They hop around on their felt soles and pick up the broken pieces of porcelain from the floor. They hop around in silence, like monkeys, like Japanese acrobats in a circus, their necks swelling and twisting. They spread a ripped eiderdown on the floor for me, and I lie down by the wall, next to the third, sleeping Jew. Timorous poverty descends over my bed.

Everything has been killed by the silence, and only the moon, clasping its round, shining, carefree head in its blue hands, loiters beneath my window.

I rub my numb feet, lie back on the ripped eiderdown, and fall asleep. I dream about the commander of the Sixth Division. He is chasing the brigade commander on his heavy stallion, and shoots two bullets into his eyes. The bullets pierce the brigade commander s head, and his eyes fall to the ground. “Why did you turn back the brigade?” Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, shouts at the wounded man, and I wake up because the pregnant woman is tapping me on the face.

“Pan”
¹
she says to me, “you are shouting in your sleep, and tossing and turning. Til put your bed in another corner, because you are kicking my papa.”

She raises her thin legs and round belly from the floor and pulls the blanket off the sleeping man. An old man is lying there on his back, dead. His gullet has been ripped out, his face hacked in two, and dark blood is clinging to his beard like a clump of lead.

“Pan,” the Jewess says, shaking out the eiderdown, “the Poles were hacking him to death and he kept begging them, ‘Kill me in the backyard so my daughter wont see me die!’ But they wouldn’t inconvenience themselves. He died in this room, thinking of me. .. . And now I want you to tell me,” the woman suddenly said with terrible force, “I want you to tell me where one could find another father like my father in all the world!”

Yesterday I took a report over to the military commissar who had been billeted to the house of a Catholic priest who had fled. In the kitchen I was met by Pani* Eliza [
“Mrs.” in Polish
], the Jesuit’s housekeeper. She gave me a cup of amber tea and some sponge cake. Her sponge cakes had the aroma of crucifixion. Within them was the sap of slyness and the fragrant frenzy of the Vatican.

In the church next to the house the bells were howling, tolled by the crazed bell ringer. It was an evening filled with the stars of July. Pani Eliza, shaking her attentive gray hair, kept on heaping cookies on my plate, and I delighted in the Jesuitical fare.

The old Polish woman addressed me as “Pan," gray old men with ossified ears stood to attention near the door, and somewhere in the serpentine darkness slithered a monks soutane. The Pater had fled, but he had left behind his curate, Pan Romuald.

Romuald was a eunuch with a nasal voice and the body of a giant, who addressed us as “Comrade.” He ran his yellow finger along the map, circling the areas where the Poles had been defeated. He counted the wounds of his fatherland with rasping ecstasy. May gentle oblivion engulf the memory of Romuald, who betrayed us without pity and was then shot without so much as a second thought. But that evening his tight soutane rustled at all the portieres and swept through all the corridors in a frenzy, as he smiled at everyone who wanted a drink of vodka. That evening the monks shadow crept behind me wherever I went. Pan Romuald could have become a bishop if he had not been a spy.

I drank rum with him. The breath of an alien way of life flickered beneath the ruins of the priest s house, and Pan Romualds ingratiating seduction debilitated me. O crucifixes, tiny as the talismans of a courtesan! O parchment of the Papal Bull and satin of womens love letters moldering in blue silken waistcoats!

I can see you now, you deceptive monk with your purple habit, your puffy, swollen hands, and your soul, tender and merciless like a cats! I can see the wounds of your God, oozing with the seed, the fragrant poison that intoxicates young maidens.

We drank rum, waiting for the military commissar, but he still hadn’t come back from headquarters. Romuald had collapsed in a corner and fallen asleep. He slept and quivered, while beyond the window an alley seeped into the garden beneath the black passion of the sky. Thirsting roses swayed in the darkness. Green lightning bolts blazed over the cupolas. A naked corpse lay on the embankment. And the rays of the moon streamed through the dead legs that are pointing upward.