The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (31 page)

So that’s how everything had come about. I had recently met Sashka Christ, and took my little suitcase and moved over to his cart. Many times we watched the sunrise and rode into the sunset. And whenever the obdurate will of war brought us together, we sat in the evenings on a sparkling earth mound,^ or boiled tea in our sooty kettle in the woods, or slept next to each other on harvested fields, our hungry horses tied to our legs.

Dear comrades, brothers, fellow countrymen! Hear in the name of mankind the life story of Red General Matvey Pavlichenko. This general had been a mere swineherd, a swineherd on the estate of Lidino of which Nikitinsky was master, and, until life gave him battle stripes, this swineherd tended his master s pigs, and then with those battle stripes our little Matvey was given cattle to herd. Who knows— had he been born in Australia, my friends, our Matvey, son of Rodion, might well have worked his way up to elephants, yes, our Matyushka would have herded elephants, but unfortunately there are no elephants to be found in our district of Stavropol. To be perfectly honest, there is no animal larger than a buffalo in all the lands of Stavropol. And the poor fellow would not have had any fun with buffaloes—Russians dont enjoy taunting buffaloes. Give us poor orphans a mare on Judgment Day, and I guarantee you we will know how to taunt her till her soul goes tearing out of her sides.

So here I am, herding my cattle, cows crowding me from all sides, Im doused in milk, I stink like a slit udder, all around me calves and mouse-gray bullocks roam. Freedom lies all around me in the fields, the grass of all the world rustles, the skies above me open up like a many-buttoned concertina, and the skies, my brothers, the skies we have in the district of Stavropol, can be very blue. So there I am, herding the beasts and playing my flute to the winds with nothing better to do, when an old man comes up to me and tells me, “Go, Matvey,” he says to me, “go to Nastya.”

“What for?” I ask him. “Or are you maybe pulling my leg, old man?”

“Go to her,” he says. “She wants you.”

So I go to her.

“Nastya!” I say to her, and all my blood runs dark. “Nastya,” I say to her, “or are you making fun of me?”

But she does not speak a word, runs straight past me, running as fast as her legs can carry her, and she and I run together until were out on the meadow, dead tired, flushed, and out of breath.

“Matvey,” Nastya says to me at this point. “On the third Sunday before this one, when the spring fishing season began and the fishermen came back to shore, you were walking with them, and you let your head hang. Why did you let your head hang, or is it that a thought is squeezing down on your heart? Answer me!”

And I answer her.

“Nastya,” I say to her. “I have nothing to tell you, my head is not a gun, it has neither a fore-sight nor back-sight, and you know my heart full well, Nastya, it is empty, completely empty, except perhaps for being doused in milk—its a terrible thing how I stink of milk!”

And I can see that Nastya is about to burst into laughter at my words.

“I swear by the Holy Cross,” she says, bursting into laughter, laughing loudly, laughing with all her might, her laughter booming across the steppes as if she were pounding a drum, “I swear by the Holy Cross, you sure know how to sweet-talk a girl!”

So we exchange a few foolish words, and soon enough were married. Nastya and me began living together as best we could, and we did our best. We felt hot all night, we felt hot all winter, all night we went naked and tore the hide off each other. We lived it up like devils, until the day the old man came to me again.

“Matvey,” he says. “The other day the master touched your wife in all those places, and the master is going to have her.”

And I say to him, “No,” I say to him, “it cannot be, and please excuse me, old man, or I shall kill you right here and now.”

The old man rushed off without another word, and I must have marched a good twenty versts over land that day, yes, that day a good chunk of earth passed beneath my feet, and by evening I sprouted up in the estate of Lidino, in the house of my merry master Nikitinsky. The old man was sitting in his drawing room busy taking apart three saddles, an English, a dragoon, and a Cossack saddle, and I stood rooted by his door like a burdock, I stood rooted there for a good hour. Then he finally clapped eyes on me.

“What do you want?”

“I want to quit.”

“You have a grudge against me?”

“I dont have a grudge, but I want to quit.”

At this point he turned his eyes away, leaving the high road for the field path, put the red saddlecloths on the floor—they were redder than the Czars banners, his saddlecloths were—and old Nikitinsky stepped on them, puffing himself up.

“Freedom to the free,” he tells me, all puffed up. “Your mothers, all Orthodox Christian women, I gave the lot of them a good plowing! You can quit, my dear little Matvey, but isnt there one tiny little thing you owe me first?”

“Ho, ho!” I answer. “What a joker! May the Lord strike me dead if you’re not a joker! It is you who still owes me my wage!”

“Your wage!” my master thunders, shoving me down onto my knees, kicking me and yelling in my ear, cursing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. “You want your wage, but the bulls yoke you ruined seems to have slipped your mind! Where is my bulls yoke? Give me back my bulls yoke!”

“I will give you back your bulls yoke,” I tell my master, raising my foolish eyes up at him as I kneel there, lower than the lowest of living creatures. Til give you back your bulls yoke, but dont strangle me with debts, master, just wait awhile!”

So, my dear friends, my Stavropol compatriots, fellow countrymen, my comrades, my very own brothers: for five years the master waited with my debts, five years I lost, until, lost soul that I was, finally the year ’18 came!
³
It rode in on merry stallions, on Kabardinian steeds! It brought big armies with it and many songs. O, my sweet year ’18! O, for us to dance in each other’s arms just one more time, my sweet darling year ’18! We sang your songs, drank your wine, proclaimed your

truth, but all thats left of you now is a few scribblers! Yet, ah, my love, it was not the scribblers back then who came flying through Kuban, shooting the souls of generals to Kingdom Come! No! It was me, Matvey Rodionovich, who lay outside Prikumsk in a pool of my own blood, and from where I, Matvey Rodionovich, lay to the estate of Lidino was a mere five versts. And I rode to Lidino alone, without my regiment, and as I entered the drawing room, I entered peacefully. People from the local authorities were sitting there in the drawing room, Nikitinsky was serving them tea, groveling all over them. When he saw me his face tumbled to pieces, but I lifted my fur hat to him.

“Greetings,” I said to the people there. “Greetings. May I come in, your lordship, or how shall we handle this?”

“Lets handle this nicely, correctly,” one of the men says, who, judging by the way he speaks, must be a land surveyor. “Let us handle things nicely, correctly, but from what I see, Comrade Pavlichenko, it seems you have ridden quite a distance, and dirt has crossed your face from side to side. We, the local authorities, are frightened of such faces. Why is your face like that?”

“Because you are the local cold-blooded authorities,” I answer. “Because in my face one cheek has been burning for five years now, burning when I’m in a trench, burning when I’m with a woman, and it will be burning at my final judgment! At my final judgment!” I tell him, and look at Nikitinsky with fake cheerfulness. But he no longer has any eyes—there are now two cannonballs in the middle of his face, ready and in position under his forehead, and with these crystal balls he winks at me, also with fake cheerfulness, but so abominably.

“My dear Matyusha,” he says to me, “we’ve known each other so long now, and my wife Nadyezhda Vasilevna, whose mind has come unhinged on account of the times we’re living in, she was always kind to you, Nadyezhda Vasilevna was, and you, my dear Matyusha, always looked up to her above all others! Wouldn’t you like to at least see her, even though her mind has come unhinged?”

“Fine,” I tell him, and follow him into another room, and there he started clasping my hands, the right one, then the left.

“Matyusha!” he says. “Are you my fate or are you not?”

“No,” I tell him. “And stop using such words! God has dropped us lackeys and run. Our fate is a chicken with its head cut off, our life is

not worth a kopeck! Stop using such words and let me read you Lenins letter!”

“Lenin wrote me, Nikitinsky, a letter?”

“Yes, he wrote you a letter,” I tell him, and take out the book of decrees, open it to an empty page, and read—though Im illiterate to the bottom of my soul. “In the name of the people,” I read, “for the establishment of a future radiant life, I order Pavlichenko—Matvey Rodionovich—to deprive, at his discretion, various persons of their lives.”

“There we are,” I tell him. “That is Lenins letter to you!”

And he says to me, “No!”

“No,” he says, “my dear Matyusha, even if life has gone tumbling to the devil, and blood has become cheap in Holy Mother Russia! But regardless of how much blood you want, you’ll get it anyway, and you’ll even forget my last dying look, so wouldn’t it be better if I just show you my secret hideaway?”

“Show me,” I tell him. “Maybe it’ll be for the better.”

And again we went through the rooms, climbed down into the wine cellar, where he pulled out a brick, and behind this brick lay a little case. In it, in this case, were rings, necklaces, medals, and a pearl-studded icon. He threw the case over to me and stood there rigidly.

“Take it!” he says. “Take what is most holy to the Nikitinskys, and go off to your den in Prikumsk!”

And here I grabbed him by the neck, by the hair.

“And what about my cheek?” I tell Nikitinsky. “How am I supposed to live with my cheek this way?”

And he burst out laughing for all he was worth, and stopped struggling to get away.

“A jackal’s conscience,” he says, and does not struggle. “I speak to you as to an officer of the Russian Empire, and you, you scum, were suckled by a she-wolf. Shoot me, you son of a bitch!”

But shoot him I did not—I did not owe him a shot. I just dragged him up to the sitting room. There in the sitting room Nadyezhda Vasilevna was wandering about completely mad, with a drawn saber in her hand, looking at herself in the mirror. And when I dragged Nikitinsky into the sitting room, Nadyezhda Vasilevna runs to sit in the chair, and she is wearing a velvet crown and feathers on her head. She sat in the chair and saluted me with the saber. Then I started kicking Nikitinsky, my master, I kicked him for an hour, maybe even more than an hour, and I really understood what life actually is. With one shot, let me tell you, you can only get rid of a person. A shot would have been a pardon for him and too horribly easy for me, with a shot you cannot get to a mans soul, to where the soul hides and what it looks like. But there are times when I don t spare myself and spend a good hour, maybe even more than an hour, kicking the enemy. I want to understand life, to see what it actually is.

The cemetery in a shtetl, Assyria and the mysterious decay of the East on the overgrown, weed-covered fields of Volhynia. Gray, abraded stones with letters three hundred years old. The rough contours of the reliefs cut into the granite. The image of a fish and a sheep above a dead mans head. Images of rabbis wearing fur hats. Rabbis, their narrow hips girded with belts. Beneath their eyeless faces the wavy stone ripple of curly beards. To one side, below an oak tree cleft in two by lightning, stands the vault of Rabbi Asriil, slaughtered by Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks. Four generations lie in this sepulcher, as poor as the hovel of a water carrier, and tablets, moss-green tablets, sing of them in Bedouin prayer:

“Azriily son of Anania, mouth of Jehovah.

Elijah, son ofAzriil, mind that fought oblivion hand to hand.

Wolf, son of Elijah) prince taken from his Torah in his nineteenth spring

Judah, son of Wolf Rabbi of Krakow and Prague.

0 death, 0 mercenary, O covetous thief, why did you not, albeit one single time, have mercy upon usT'

I'm making my way to Leshniov, where the divisional staff has set up quarters. My traveling companion, as usual, is Prishchepa, a young Cossack from Kuban, a tireless roughneck, a Communist whom the party kicked out, a future rag looter, a devil-may-care syphilitic, an unflappable liar. He wears a crimson Circassian jacket made of fine cloth, with a ruffled hood trailing down his back. As we rode, he told me about himself.

A year ago Prishchepa had run away from the Whites. As a reprisal, they took his parents hostage and killed them at the interrogation. The neighbors ransacked everything they had. When the Whites were driven out of Kuban, Prishchepa returned to his Cossack village.

It was morning, daybreak, peasant sleep sighed in the rancid stuffiness. Prishchepa hired a communal cart and went through the village picking up his gramophone, kvas jugs, and the napkins that his mother had embroidered. He went down the street in his black cloak, his curved dagger in his belt. The cart rattled behind him. Prishchepa went from one neighbors house to the next, the bloody prints of his boots trailing behind him. In huts where he found his mothers things or his father s pipe, he left hacked-up old women, dogs hung over wells, icons soiled with dung. The people of the village smoked their pipes and followed him sullenly with their eyes. Young Cossacks had gathered on the steppes outside the village and were keeping count. The count rose and the village fell silent. When he had finished, Prishchepa returned to his ransacked home. He arranged his reclaimed furniture the way he remembered it from his childhood, and ordered vodka to be brought to him. He locked himself in the hut and for two days drank, sang, cried, and hacked tables to pieces with his saber.

On the third night, the village saw smoke rising above Prishchepas hut. Seared and gashed, he came staggering out of the shed pulling the cow behind him, stuck his revolver in her mouth, and shot her. The earth smoked beneath his feet, a blue ring of flame flew out of the chimney and melted away, the abandoned calf began wailing. The fire was as bright as a holy day. Prishchepa untied his horse, jumped into the saddle, threw a lock of his hair into the flames, and vanished.