The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (32 page)

One day Savitsky, our division commander, took for himself a white stallion belonging to Khlebnikov, the commander of the First Squadron. It was a horse of imposing stature, but with a somewhat raw build, which always seemed a little heavy to me. Khlebnikov was given a black mare of pretty good stock and good trot. But he mistreated the mare, hankered for revenge, waited for an opportunity, and when it came, pounced on it.

After the unsuccessful battles of July, when Savitsky was dismissed from his duties and sent to the command personnel reserves, Khlebnikov wrote to army headquarters requesting that his horse be returned to him. On the letter, the chief of staff penned the decision: “Aforementioned stallion is to be returned to primordial owner.” And Khlebnikov, rejoicing, rode a hundred versts to find Savitsky, who was living at the time in Radzivillov, a mangled little town that looked like a tattered old whore. The dismissed division commander was living alone, the fawning lackeys at headquarters no longer knew him. The fawning lackeys at headquarters were busy angling for roasted chickens in the army commanders smiles, and, vying to outgrovel each other, had turned their backs on the glorious division commander.

Drenched in perfume, looking like Peter the Great, he had fallen out of favor. He lived with a Cossack woman by the name of Pavla, whom he had snatched away from a Jewish quartermaster, and twenty thoroughbreds which, word had it, were his own. In his yard, the sun was tense and tortured with the blindness of its rays. The foals were wildly suckling on their mothers, and stableboys with drenched backs were sifting oats on faded winnowing floors. Khlebnikov, wounded by the injustice and fired by revenge, marched straight over to the barricaded yard.

“Are you familiar with my person?” he asked Savitsky, who was lying on some hay.

“Something tells me IVe seen you somewhere before,” Savitsky said to him with a yawn.

“In that case, here is the chief of staff s decision,” Khlebnikov said gruffly. “And I would be obliged, Comrade of the reserve, if you would look at me with an official eye!”

“Why not?” Savitsky mumbled appeasingly. He took the document and began reading it for an unusually long time. He suddenly called over the Cossack woman, who was combing her hair in the coolness under the awning.

“Pavla!” he yelled. “As the Lord s my witness, youVe been combing your hair since this morning! How about heating a samovar for us!”

The Cossack woman put down her comb, took her hair in both hands, and flung it behind her back.

“YouVe done nothing but bicker all day, Konstantin Vasilevich,” she said with a lazy, condescending smile. “First you want this, then you want that!”

And she came over to Savitsky; her breasts, bobbing on her high -heels, squirmed like an animal in a sack.

“You've done nothing but bicker all day,” the woman repeated, beaming, and she buttoned up the division commander's shirt.

“First I want this, then I want that,” the division commander said, laughing, and he got up, clasped Pavlas acquiescing shoulders, and suddenly turned his face, deathly white, to Khlebnikov.

“I am still alive, Khlebnikov,” he said, embracing the Cossack woman tighter. “My legs can still walk, my horses can still gallop, my hands can still get hold of you, and my gun is warming next to my skin.”

He drew his revolver, which had lain against his bare stomach, and stepped closer to the commander of the First Squadron.

The commander turned on his heels, his spurs yelped, he left the yard like an orderly who has received an urgent dispatch, and once

again rode a hundred versts to find the chief of staff—but the chief of staff sent him packing.

“I have already dealt with your matter, Commander!” the chief of staff said. “I ordered that your stallion be returned to you, and I have quite a few other things to deal with!”

The chief of staff refused to listen, and finally ordered the errant commander back to his squadron. Khlebnikov had been away a whole week. During that time we had been transferred to the Dubno forest to set up camp. We had pitched our tents and were living it up. Khlebnikov, from what I remember, returned on the twelfth, a Sunday morning. He asked me for some paper, a good thirty sheets, and for some ink. The Cossacks planed a tree stump smooth for him, he placed his revolver and the paper on it, and wrote till sundown, filling many sheets with his smudgy scrawl.

“Youre a real Karl Marx, you are!” the squadrons military commissar said to him in the evening. “What the hell are you writing there?”

“I am describing various thoughts in accordance with the oath I have taken,” Khlebnikov answered, and handed the military commissar his petition to withdraw from the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks.

• • •

“The Communist Party,” his petition went, “was, it is my belief, founded for the promotioning of happiness and true justice with no restrict-ings, and thus must also keep an eye out for the rights of the little man. Here I would like to touch on the matter of the white stallion who I seized from some indescribably counterrevolutionary peasants, and who was in a horrifying condition, and many comrades laughed brazenly at that condition, but I was strong enough to withstand that laughing of theirs, and gritting my teeth for the Common Cause, I nursed the stallion back to the desired shape, because, let it be said, Comrades, I am a white-stallion enthusiast and have dedicated to white stallions the little energy that the Imperial War and the Civil War have left me with, and all these stallions respond to my touch as I respond to his silent wants and needs! But that unjust black mare I can neither respond to, nor do I need her, nor can I stand her, and, as all my comrades will testify, theres bound to be trouble! And yet the Party is unable to return to me, according to the chief of staff’s decision, that which is my very own, handing me no option but to write this here petition with tears that do not befit a fighter, but which flow endlessly, ripping my blood-drenched heart to pieces!”

• • •

This and much more was written in Khlebnikovs petition. He spent the whole day writing it, and it was very long. It took me and the military commissar more than an hour to struggle through it.

“What a fool you are!” the military commissar said to him, and tore it up. “Come back after dinner and you and I will have a little talk.”

“I dont need your little talk!” Khlebnikov answered, trembling. “You and I are finished!”

He stood at attention, shivering, not moving, his eyes darting from one side to the other as if he were desperately trying to decide which way to run. The military commissar came up to him but couldn’t grab hold of him in time. Khlebnikov lunged forward and ran with all his might.

“We’re finished!” he yelled wildly, jumped onto the tree stump, and began ripping his jacket and tearing at his chest.

“Go on, Savitsky!” he shouted, throwing himself onto the ground. “Kill me!”

We dragged him to a tent, the Cossacks helped us. We boiled some tea for him, and rolled him some cigarettes. He smoked, his whole body shivering. And it was only late in the evening that our commander calmed down. He no longer spoke about his deranged petition, but within a week he went to Rovno, presented himself for an examination by the Medical Commission, and was discharged from the army as an invalid on account of having six wounds.

That’s how we lost Khlebnikov. I was very upset about this because Khlebnikov had been a quiet man, very similar to me in character. He was the only one in the squadron who owned a samovar. On days when there was a break in the fighting, the two of us drank hot tea. We were rattled by the same passions. Both of us looked upon the world as a meadow in May over which women and horses wander.

So there we were making mincemeat of the Poles at Belaya Tserkov.

So much so that the trees were rattling. I’d been hit in the morning, but managed to keep on buzzing, more or less. The day, from what I remember, was toppling toward evening. I got cut off from the brigade commander, and was left with only a bunch of five proletarian Cossacks tagging along after me. All around me everyones hugging each other with hatchets, like priests from two villages, the saps slowly trickling out of me, my horse has pissed all over itself. Need I say more?

Me and Spirka Zabuty ended up riding off a ways from the forest. We look—and yes, two and two does make four!—no less than a hundred and fifty paces away, we see a dust cloud which is either the staff or the cavalry transport. If it’s the staff—that’s great, if it’s the cavalry transport—that’s even better! The boys’ tattered clothes hung in rags, their shirts barely covering their manhood.

“Zabuty!” I yell over to Spirka, telling him he’s a son of a whore, that his mother is a you-know-what, or whatever (I leave this part up to you, as you’re the official orator here). “Isn’t that their staff that’s riding off there?”

“You can bet your life it’s their staff]” Spirka yells back. “The only thing is, we’re two and they’re eight!”

“Let’s go for it, Spirka!” I shout. “Either way, I’m going to hurl some mud at their chasubles! Let’s go die for a pickle and World Revolution!”

And off we rode. They were eight sabers. Two of them we felled with our rifles. I spot Spirka dragging a third to Dukhonin’s headquarters to get his papers checked. And me, I take aim at the big King of Aces. Yes, brothers, a big, red-faced King of Aces, with a chain and a gold pocket watch. I squeezed him back toward a farm. The farm was full of apple and cherry trees. The horse that the Big Ace was riding was nice and plump like a merchant s daughter, but it was tired. So the general drops his reins, aims his Mauser at me, and puts a hole in my leg.

“Ha, fine, sweetheart!” I think to myself. “Ill have you on your back with your legs spread wide in no time!”

I got my wheels rolling and put two bullets in his horse. I felt bad about the horse. What a Bolshevik of a stallion, a true Bolshevik! Copper-brown like a coin, tail like a bullet, leg like a bowstring. I wanted to present him alive to Lenin, but nothing came of it. I liquidated that sweet little horse. It tumbled like a bride, and my King of Aces fell out of his saddle. He dashed to one side, then turned back again and put another little loophole in my body. So, in other words, I had already gotten myself three decorations for fighting the enemy.

“Jesus!” I think to myself. “Just watch him finish me off by mistake!”

I went galloping toward him, he’d already pulled his saber, and tears are running down his cheeks, white tears, the milk of man.

“Youll get me a Red Flag Medal!” I yell. “Give yourself up while Im still alive, Your Excellency!”

“I cant do that, Pan!” the old man answers. “Kill me!”

And suddenly Spirka is standing before me like a leaf before a blade of grass.
⁴
His face all lathered up with sweat, his eyes as if they re dangling on strings from his ugly mug.

“Konkin!” he yells at me. “God knows how many I’ve finished off
¹
. But you have a general here, hes got embroidery on him, I’d like to finish him off myself
¹
.”

“Go to the Turk!” I tell Zabuty, and get furious. “Its my blood thats on his embroidery!”

And with my mare I edge the general into the barn, where there was hay or something. It was silent in there, dark, cool.

“Pan
_y
think of your old age!” I tell him. “Give yourself up to me, for Gods sake, and we can both have a rest.”

And he s against the wall, panting with his whole chest, rubbing his forehead with a red finger.

“I cant,” he says. “Kill me, I will only hand my saber to Budyonny!”

He wants me to bring him Budyonny! O, Lord in Heaven! And I can tell the old mans on his last legs.

“Pan!” I shout at him, sobbing and gnashing my teeth. “On my proletarian honor, I myself am the commander-in-chief. Dont go looking for embroidery on me, but the titles mine. You want my title? I am the musical eccentric and salon ventriloquist of Nizhny . . . Nizhny, a town on the Volga!”

Then the devil got into me. The generals eyes were blinking like lanterns in front of me. The Red Sea parted before me. His snub enters my wound like salt, because I see that the old man doesn’t believe me. So, my friends, what I did is, I closed my mouth, pulled in my stomach, took a deep breath, and demonstrated, in the proper way, our way, the fighter s way, the Nizhny way—demonstrated to this Polish nobleman my ventriloquy.

The old man went white in the face, clutched his heart, and sat on the ground.

“Do you now believe Konkin the Eccentric, commissar of the Third Invincible Cavalry Brigade?”

“A commissar?” he shouts.

“A commissar,” I tell him.

“A Communist?” he shouts.

“A Communist,” I tell him.

“At my hour of death,” he shouts, “at my last breath, tell me, my dear Cossack friend, are you a Communist, or are you lying to me?

“I am a Communist,” I tell him.

So there’s grandpa, sitting on the ground, kissing some kind of amulet or something, breaks his saber in half, and in his eyes two sparks flare up, two lanterns above the dark steppes.

“Forgive me,” he says, “but I cannot give myself up to a Communist.”

And he shakes my hand. “Forgive me,” he says, “and finish me off like a soldier.”

Konkin, the political commissar of the N. Cavalry Brigade and three-time Knight of the Order of the Red Flag, told us this story with his typical antics during a rest stop one day.

“So, Konkin, did you and the Pan come to some sort of an agreement in the end?”

“Can you come to an agreement with someone like that? He was too proud. I begged him again, but he wouldn’t give in. So we took his papers, those he had with him, we took his Mauser, and the old fools saddle, the one Im sitting on right now. Then I see all my life flowing out of me in drops, a terrible tiredness grabs hold of me, my boots are full of blood, I lost interest in him.”

“So you put the old man out of his misery?”

“Well, I guess I did.”

We were advancing from Khotin to Berestechko. Our fighters were dozing in their saddles. A song rustled like a stream running dry. Horrifying corpses lay on thousand-year-old burial mounds. Muzhiks in white shirts raised their caps and bowed as we passed. The cloak of Division Commander Pavlichenko was fluttering ahead of the staff officers like a gloomy banner. His ruffled hood hung over his cloak, his curved saber at his side.