The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (28 page)

He smiled at me, smacked the table with his whip, and picked up the order which the chief of staff had just dictated. It was an order for Ivan Chesnokov to advance to Chugunov-Dobryvodka with the regiment he had been entrusted with, and, on encountering the enemy, to proceed immediately with its destruction.

“. . . the destruction of which,” Savitsky began writing, filling the whole sheet, “I hold the selfsame Chesnokov completely responsible for. Noncompliance will incur the severest punitive measures, in other words I will gun him down on the spot, a fact that I am sure that you, Comrade Chesnokov, will not doubt, as its been quite a while now that you have worked with me on the front. ...”

The commander of the Sixth Division signed the order with a flourish, threw it at the orderlies, and turned his gray eyes, dancing with merriment, toward me.

I handed him the document concerning my assignment to the divisional staff.

“See to the paperwork!” the division commander said. “See to the paperwork, and have this man sign up for all the amusements except for those of the frontal kind.* [
The division commander is punning, substituting the word udovolstvie, “amusements,” for prodovolstvie, “provisions
].” you read and write?”

“Yes, I can,” I answered, bristling with envy at the steel and bloom of his youth. “I graduated in law from the University of Petersburg.” “So you’re one of those little powder puffs!” he yelled, laughing. “With spectacles on your nose! Ha, you lousy little fellow, you! They send you to us, no one even asks us if we want you here! Here you get hacked to pieces just for wearing glasses! So, you think you can live with us, huh?”

“Yes, I do,” I answered, and went to the village with the quartermaster to look for a place to stay.

The quartermaster carried my little suitcase on his shoulder. The village street lay before us, and the dying sun in the sky, round and yellow as a pumpkin, breathed its last rosy breath.

We came to a hut with garlands painted on it. The quartermaster stopped, and suddenly, smiling guiltily, said, “You see we have a thing about spectacles here, there ain’t nothing you can do! A man of high distinguishings they’ll chew up and spit out—but ruin a lady, yes, the most cleanest lady, and youre the darling of the fighters!”

He hesitated for a moment, my suitcase still on his shoulder, came up very close to me, but suddenly lunged away in despair, rushing into the nearest courtyard. Cossacks were sitting there on bundles of hay, shaving each other.

“Fighters!” the quartermaster began, putting my suitcase on the ground. “According to an order issued by Comrade Savitsky, you are required to accept this man to lodge among you. And no funny business, please, because this man has suffered on the fields of learning!” The quartermaster flushed and marched off without looking back. I lifted my hand to my cap and saluted the Cossacks. A young fellow with long, flaxen hair and a wonderful Ryazan face walked up to my suitcase and threw it out into the street. Then he turned his backside toward me, and with uncommon dexterity began emitting shameless sounds.

“That was a zero-zero caliber!” an older Cossack yelled, laughing out loud. “Rapid-fire!”

The young man walked off, having exhausted the limited resources of his artistry I went down on my hands and knees and gathered up the manuscripts and the old, tattered clothes that had fallen out of my suitcase. I took them and carried them to the other end of the yard. A large pot of boiling pork stood on some bricks in front of the hut. Smoke rose from it as distant smoke rises from the village hut of one s childhood, mixing hunger with intense loneliness inside me. I covered my broken little suitcase with hay, turning it into a pillow, and lay down on the ground to read Lenin’s speech at the Second Congress of the Comintern,
¹⁵
which Pravda had printed. The sun fell on me through the jagged hills, the Cossacks kept stepping over my legs, the young fellow incessantly made fun of me, the beloved sentences struggled toward me over thorny paths, but could not reach me. I put away the newspaper and went to the mistress of the house, who was spinning yarn on the porch.

“Mistress,” I said, “I need some grub!”

The old woman raised the dripping whites of her half-blind eyes to me and lowered them again.

“Comrade,” she said, after a short silence. “All of this makes me want to hang myself!”

“Goddammit!” I muttered in frustration, shoving her back with my hand. Tm in no mood to start debating with you!”

And, turning around, I saw someone’s saber lying nearby. A haughty goose was waddling through the yard, placidly grooming its feathers. I caught the goose and forced it to the ground, its head cracking beneath my boot, cracking and bleeding. Its white neck lay stretched out in the dung, and the wings folded down over the slaughtered bird.

“Goddammit!” I said, poking at the goose with the saber. “Roast it for me, mistress!”

The old woman, her blindness and her spectacles flashing, picked up the bird, wrapped it in her apron, and hauled it to the kitchen.

“Comrade,” she said after a short silence. “This makes me want to hang myself.” And she pulled the door shut behind her.

In the yard the Cossacks were already sitting around their pot. They sat motionless, straight-backed like heathen priests, not once having looked at the goose.

“This fellow’ll fit in here well enough,” one of them said, winked, and scooped up some cabbage soup with his spoon.

The Cossacks began eating with the restrained grace of muzhiks who respect one another. I cleaned the saber with sand, went out of the courtyard, and came back again, feeling anguished. The moon hung over the yard like a cheap earring.

“Hey, brother!” Surovkov, the oldest of the Cossacks, suddenly said to me. “Sit with us and have some of this till your goose is ready!”

He fished an extra spoon out of his boot and handed it to me. We slurped the cabbage soup and ate the pork.

“So, what are they writing in the newspaper?” the young fellow with the flaxen hair asked me, and moved aside to make room for me.

“In the newspaper, Lenin writes,” I said, picking up my Pravda, “Lenin writes that right now there is a shortage of everything.”

And in a loud voice, like a triumphant deaf man, I read Lenin’s speech to the Cossacks.

The evening wrapped me in the soothing dampness of her twilight sheets, the evening placed her motherly palms on my burning brow.

I read, and rejoiced, waiting for the effect, rejoicing in the mysterious curve of Lenins straight line.

“Truth tickles all and sundry in the nose,”
¹⁶
Surovkov said when I had finished. “It isn’t all that easy to wheedle it out of the pile of rubbish, but Lenin picks it up right away, like a hen pecks up a grain of corn.

That is what Surovkov, the squadron commander, said about Lenin, and then we went to sleep in the hayloft. Six of us slept there warming each other, our legs tangled, under the holes in the roof which let in the stars.

I dreamed and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, crimson with murder, screeched and bled.

"All things are mortal. Only a mother is accorded eternal life. And when a mother is not among the living, she leaves behind a memory that no one has yet dared to defile. The memory of a mother nourishes compassion within us, just as the ocean, the boundless ocean, nourishes the rivers that cut through the universe.”

These were Gedalis words. He uttered them gravely. The dying evening wrapped him in the rosy haze of its sadness.

“In the ardent house of Hasidism,” the old man said, “the windows and doors have been torn out, but it is as immortal as a mother s soul. Even with blinded eyes, Hasidism still stands at the crossroads of the winds of history.”

That is what Gedali said, and, after having prayed in the synagogue, he took me to Rabbi Motale, the last rabbi of the Chernobyl dynasty.

Gedali and I walked up the main street. White churches glittered in the distance like fields of buckwheat. A gun cart moaned around the corner. Two pregnant Ukrainian women came out through the gates of a house, their coin necklaces jingling, and sat down on a bench. A timid star flashed in the orange battles of the sunset, and peace, a Sabbath peace, descended on the slanted roofs of the Zhitomir ghetto.

“Here,” Gedali whispered, pointing at a long house with a shattered facade.

We went into a room, a stone room, empty as a morgue. Rabbi Motale sat at a table surrounded by liars and men possessed. He was wearing a sable hat and a white robe, with a rope for a belt. The rabbi was sitting, his eyes closed, his thin fingers digging through the yellow fluff of his beard.

“Where have you come from, Jew?” he asked me, lifting his eyelids.

“From Odessa,” I answered.

“A devout town,” the rabbi said. “The star of our exile, the reluctant well of our afflictions! What is the Jews trade?”

“I am putting the adventures of Hershele of Ostropol
¹⁷
into verse.”

“A great task,” the rabbi whispered, and closed his eyelids. “The jackal moans when it is hungry, every fool has foolishness enough for despondency, and only the sage shreds the veil of existence with laughter .. . What did the Jew study?”

“The Bible.”

“What is the Jew looking for?”

“Merriment.”

“Reb Mordkhe,” the rabbi said, and shook his beard. “Let the young man seat himself at the table, let him eat on the Sabbath evening with other Jews, let him rejoice that he is alive and not dead, let him clap his hands as his neighbors dance, let him drink wine if he is given wine!

And Reb Mordkhe came bouncing toward me, an ancient fool with inflamed eyelids, a hunchbacked little old man, no bigger than a ten-year-old boy.

“Oy, my dear and so very young man!” ragged Reb Mordkhe said, winking at me. “Ojy, how many rich fools have I known in Odessa, how many wise paupers have I known in Odessa! Sit down at the table, young man, and drink the wine that you will not be given!”

We all sat down, one next to the other—the possessed, the liars, the unhinged. In the corner, broad-shouldered Jews who looked like fishermen and apostles were moaning over prayer books. Gedali in his green coat dozed by the wall like a bright bird. And suddenly I saw a youth behind Gedali, a youth with the face of Spinoza, with the powerful forehead of Spinoza, with the sickly face of a nun. He was smoking and twitching like an escaped convict who has been tracked down and brought back to his jail. Ragged Reb Mordkhe sneaked up on him from behind, snatched the cigarette from his mouth, and came running over to me.

“That is Ilya, the rabbis son,” Mordkhe wheezed, turning the bloody flesh of his inflamed eyelids to me, “the damned son, the worst son, the disobedient son!”

And Mordkhe threatened the youth with his little fist and spat in his face.

“Blessed is the Lord,” the voice of Rabbi Motale Bratslavsky rang out, and he broke the bread with his monastic fingers. “Blessed is the God of Israel, who has chosen us among all the peoples of the world.” The rabbi blessed the food, and we sat down at the table. Outside the window horses neighed and Cossacks shouted. The wasteland of war yawned outside.The rabbis son smoked one cigarette after another during the silent prayer. When the dinner was over, I was the first to rise.

“My dear and so very young man,” Mordkhe muttered behind me, tugging at my belt. “If there was no one in the world except for evil rich men and destitute tramps, how would holy men live?”

I gave the old man some money and went out into the street. Gedali and I parted, and I went back to the railroad station. There at the station, on the propaganda train of the First Cavalry, I was greeted by the sparkle of hundreds of lights, the enchanted glitter of the radio transmitter, the stubborn rolling of the printing presses, and my unfinished article for the Krasny Kavalerist.
¹⁸

I mourn for the bees. They have been destroyed by warring armies. There are no longer any bees in Volhynia.

We desecrated the hives. We fumigated them with sulfur and detonated them with gunpowder. Smoldering rags have spread a foul stench over the holy republics of the bees. Dying, they flew slowly, their buzzing barely audible. Deprived of bread, we procured honey with our sabers. There are no longer any bees in Volhynia.

The chronicle of our everyday crimes oppresses me as relentlessly as a bad heart. Yesterday was the first day of the battle for Brody. Lost on the blue earth, we suspected nothing—neither I, nor my friend Afonka Bida. The horses had been fed grain in the morning. The rye stood tall, the sun was beautiful, and our souls, which did not deserve these shining, soaring skies, thirsted for lingering pain.

“In our Cossack villages the womenfolk tell tales of the bee and its kind nature,” my friend began. “The womenfolk tell all sorts of things. If men wronged Christ, or if no wrong was done, other people will have to figure out for themselves. But if you listen to what the womenfolk of the Cossack villages tell, Christ is hanging tormented on the cross, when suddenly all kinds of gnats come flying over to plague him! And he takes a good look at the gnats and his spirits fall. But the thousands of little gnats cant see his eyes. At that moment a bee flies around Christ. ‘Sting him!’ a gnat yells at the bee. ‘Sting him for us!’—‘That I cannot do/ the bee says, covering Christ with her wings. ‘That I cannot do, he belongs to the carpenter class/ One has to understand the bees,” Afonka, my platoon commander, concluded. “I hope the bees hold out. Were fighting for them too!”

Afonka waved dismissively and started to sing. It was a song about a light bay stallion. Eight Cossacks in Afonka’s platoon joined in the song.

The light bay stallion, Dzhigit was his name, belonged to a junior Cossack captain who got drunk on vodka the day of his beheading, sang Afonka sleepily, his voice taut like a string. Dzhigit had been a loyal horse, but on feast days the Cossacks carousing knew no bounds. He had five jugs of vodka on the day of his beheading. After the fourth jug, the junior Cossack captain mounted his steed and rode up to heaven. The climb was long, but Dzhigit was a true horse. They rode into heaven, and the Cossack reached for his fifth jug. But the last jug had been left back on earth. He broke down and wept, for all his efforts had been in vain. He wept, and Dzhigit pointed his ears, and turned to look at his master. Afonka sang, clinking and dozing.