The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (36 page)

This Galician was wearing a white linen garment that reached down to his ankles. He was dressed as for burial or as for the Eucharist, and led a bedraggled little cow tied to a rope. Over its wide back darted the tiny wriggling head of a snake. On the snakes head was a teetering wide-brimmed hat made of village straw. The pitiful little cow tagged along behind the Galician. He led her with importance, and his lanky body cut into the hot brilliance of the sky like a gallows.

He crossed the square with a stately stride and went into a crooked little alley seasoned with sickeningly thick smoke. In the charred little hovels, in beggarly kitchens, were Jewesses who looked like old Negro women, Jewesses with boundless breasts. The Galician walked past them and stopped at the end of the alley before the pediment of a shattered building.

There by the pediment, near a crooked white column, sat a gypsy blacksmith shoeing horses. The gypsy was pounding the horses’ hooves with a hammer, shaking his greasy hair, whistling, and smiling. A few Cossacks with horses were standing around him. My Galician walked up to the blacksmith, gave him a dozen or so baked potatoes without a word, and turned and walked off, not looking up at anyone. I was about to follow him, but one of the Cossacks, waiting for his horse to be shod, stopped me. This Cossacks name was Seliverstov. He had left Makhno
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some time ago and was serving in the Thirty-third Cavalry Regiment.

“Lyutov,” he said, shaking my hand, “you cant keep from picking quarrels with everyone! YouVe got the devil in you! Why did you finish off Trunov this morning?”

And from the scraps of gossip he had heard, Seliverstov yelled foolish gibberish at me, about how that very morning I had given Trunov, my squadron commander, a good beating. Seliverstov hurled all kinds of reproaches at me, reproached me in front of all the Cossacks, but there wasn’t a grain of truth in what he said. It was true that Trunov and I had argued that morning, because Trunov wasted so much time dawdling with the prisoners. He and I had argued, but Pashka Trunov is dead, he will no longer be judged in this world, and I would be the last to do so. I will tell you why we quarreled.

We had taken some men prisoner at dawn today near the train station. There were ten of them. They were in their underwear when we took them. A pile of clothes lay next to the Poles—it was a trick, so that we couldn’t tell the officers from the regular men by their uniforms. They had taken off their clothes themselves, but this time Trunov decided to find out the truth.

“All officers, step forward!” he commanded, walking up to the prisoners and pulling out his revolver.

Trunov had already been wounded in the head that morning. His head was bandaged with a rag, and blood trickled from it like rain from a haystack.

“Officers! Own up!” he repeated, and began prodding the Poles with the butt of his revolver.

Suddenly a thin old man with yellow cheekbones, a drooping mustache, and a large, bare bony back, came forward.

“End of this war!” the old man said with incomprehensible delight. “All officers run away, end of this war!”

And the Pole held out his blue hands to Trunov.

“Five fingers,” he said, sobbing, twisting his large, wilted hands from side to side. “I raising with these five fingers my family!”

The old man gasped, swayed, and broke into tears of delight. He fell on his knees before Trunov, but Trunov pushed him back with his saber.

“Your officers are dogs!” Trunov said. “Your officers threw their uniforms here, but Im going to finish off whoever they fit! Were going to have a little fitting!”

And Trunov picked out an officer’s cap from the pile of rags and put it on the old mans head.

“It fits,” Trunov murmured, stepping up closer to him, “it fits.” And he plunged his saber into the prisoners gullet.

The old man fell, his legs twitching, and a foamy, coral-red stream poured from his neck. Then Andryushka Vosmiletov, with his sparkling earring and his round villagers neck, sidled up to the dying man. Andryushka unbuttoned the dying Poles trousers, shook him lightly, and pulled the trousers off. He flung them onto his saddle, grabbed another two uniforms from the pile, and then trotted off, brandishing his whip. At that moment the sun came out from behind the clouds. It nimbly enveloped Andryushka’s horse, its cheerful trot, the carefree swish of its docked tail. Andryushka rode along the path to the forest— our cavalry transport was in the forest, the carters of the transport yelling and whistling, and making signs to Vosmiletov like to a deaf man.

The Cossack was already halfway there when Trunov, suddenly falling to his knees, hoarsely yelled after him.

“Andrei!” he shouted, lowering his eyes to the ground. “Andrei!” he repeated without looking up. “Our Soviet Republic is still alive, it’s too early to be dealing out her property! Bring back those rags, Andrei!” But Vosmiletov didnt even turn around. He rode at his amazing Cossack trot, his horse pertly swatting its tail, as if to shoo us away.

“Treason!” Trunov mumbled in disbelief. “Treason!” he said, quickly shouldering his gun and shooting, missing in his haste. This time Andrei stopped. He turned his horse toward us, bouncing on his saddle like a woman, his face red and angry, his legs jerking.

“Listen, countryman!” he yelled, riding closer, and immediately calming down at the sound of his own deep and powerful voice. “I should knock you to Kingdom Come to where your you-know-what mother is! Here youVe caught a dozen Poles, and make a big song-and-dance of it! WeVe taken hundreds and didn’t come running for your help! If you’re a worker, then do your job!”

Andryushka threw the trousers and the two uniforms off his saddle, snorted, turned away from the squadron commander, and came over to help me draw up a list of the remaining prisoners. He loafed about and snorted unusually loudly. The prisoners howled and ran away from him. He ran after them and gathered them under his arms, the way a hunter grips an armful of reeds and pushes them back to see a flock of birds flying to the river at dawn.

Dealing with the prisoners, I exhausted my repertoire of curses, and somehow managed to write up eight of the men, the numbers of their units, the type of gun they carried, and moved on to the ninth prisoner. The ninth was a young man who looked like a German acrobat from a good circus, a young man with a white, German chest, sideburns, a tricot undershirt, and a pair of long woolen drawers. He turned the nipples on his high chest toward me, threw back his sweaty blond hair, and told me the number of his unit. Andryushka grabbed him by his drawers and sternly asked him, “Where did you get those?”

“My mama knitted them,” the prisoner answered, suddenly tottering. “Shes a great knitter, that mama of yours,” Andryushka said, looking more closely at the drawers, and ran his fingertips over the Poles neat nails. “Yes, a great knitter—us, we never got to wear nothing like that.”

He felt the woolen drawers again and took the ninth man by the hand in order to take him over to the other prisoners who were already on my list. But at that moment I saw Trunov creeping out from behind a mound. Blood was trickling from his head like rain from a haystack and the dirty rag had come undone and was hanging down. He crawled on his stomach holding his carbine in his hands. It was a Japanese car-

bine, lacquered and with a powerful shot. From a distance of twenty paces, Pashka shot the young Poles skull to pieces and his brains spattered onto my hands. Trunov ejected the empty cartridges from his carbine and came over to me.

“Cross that one off,” he said, pointing at my list.

“I’m not crossing him off,” I answered, quaking. “From what I see, Trotskys orders don’t apply to you!”

“Cross that one off the list!” Trunov repeated, pressing his black finger down onto the paper.

“I’m not crossing him off!” I yelled with all my might. “There were ten of them, now there are eight—back at headquarters, Trunov, they’re not going to let you get away with this!”

“At headquarters they’ll chalk it up to the rotten life we live,” Trunov said, coming up to me, all tattered, hoarse, and covered in soot. But then he stopped, raised his blood-drenched face to the sky, and said with bitter reproach, “Buzz, buzz! And there comes another one buzzing!”

And Trunov pointed to four dots in the sky, four bombers that came floating out from behind the shining, swanlike clouds. These were machines from the air squadron of Major Fauntleroy, large, armored machines.

“To horse!” the platoon commanders yelled when they saw the airplanes, and took the squadron at a fast trot into the woods. But Trunov did not ride with his squadron. He stayed back at the station building, huddled silently against the wall. Andryushka Vosmiletov and two machine-gunners, two barefoot fellows in crimson breeches, stood next to him, increasingly anxious.

“Run for it, boys!” Trunov said to them, and the blood began to drain from his face. “Here’s a message to Pugachov from me.”

And Trunov scrawled gigantic peasant letters on a crookedly torn piece of paper.

“As I have to perish today,” he wrote, “I see it my duty to add two dead toward my possible shooting down of the enemy, and at the same time I am handing over my command to Platoon Commander Semyon Golov.”

He sealed the letter, sat down on the ground, and took off his boots with great difficulty.

“For you,” he said, handing the machine-gunners the message and his boots. “These boots are new.”

“Good luck to you, Commander,” the machine-gunners muttered back to him, shifting from one foot to the other, hesitating to leave.

“And good luck to you too,” Trunov said, “whatever happens.” And he went over to the machine guns that stood on a mound by the station hut. Andryushka Vosmiletov, the rag looter, was waiting for him there.

“Yes, whatever happens,” Trunov said to him, and aimed his machine gun. “So youre staying with me, Andryushka?”

“Jesus Christ!” Andryushka answered, terrified, started sobbing, went white, and burst out laughing. “Damned Mother of Lord Jesus Christ!”

And he aimed the second machine gun at the airplanes.

The airplanes came flying over the station in tighter circles, rattled fussily high in the air, plunged, drew arcs, and the sun rested its pink rays on the sparkle of their wings.

In the meantime we, the Fourth Squadron, sat in the forest. There, in the forest, we awaited the outcome of the unequal battle between Pashka Trunov and Major Reginald Fauntleroy of the American forces. The major and three of his bombers proved their ability in this battle. They descended to three hundred meters, and first shot Andryushka and then Trunov. None of the rounds our men fired did the Americans any harm. The airplanes turned and flew away without even noticing our squadron hidden in the forest. And that was why, after waiting for half an hour, we were able to go pick up the bodies. Andryushka Vosmiletovs body was taken by two of his kinsmen who were serving in our squadron, and we took Trunov, our deceased squadron commander, to the gothic town of Sokal and buried him there in a stately spot— in a flower bed, in the public park in the middle of the town.

Deacon Aggeyev had deserted from the front twice. For this he had been sent to Moscow’s “regiment of the branded.” Sergei Sergeyevich Kamenev,
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the commander in chief, had inspected this regiment at Mozhaysk before it was to be sent to the front.

“I have no use for them,” the commander in chief had said. “Send them back to Moscow to clean latrines.”

In Moscow the branded regiment was somehow absorbed into an infantry company. The deacon also ended up in it. He arrived at the Polish front, where he claimed to be deaf. Barsutsky, the medical assistant from the first-aid detachment, after going back and forth with him for a week, was amazed at the deacons obstinacy.

“To hell with that deaf man!” Barsutsky said to Soychenko, the medical orderly. “Go see if you can get a cart from the cavalry transport, we’ll send the deacon to Rovno for a checkup.”

Soychenko went to the transport and got three carts. Akinfiev was the driver of the first cart.

“Ivan,” Soychenko said to him, “you’re going to take the deaf man to Rovno.”

“Take him I can,” Akinfiev answered.

“Be sure to get me a receipt.”

“Will do,” Akinfiev said. “And what was it that caused it, this deafness of his?”

“To save his own goods and chattels a man will gladly set fire to another mans hide,” Soychenko, the medical orderly, said. “Thats what caused it. He’s a damn freemason, that’s what he is, not deaf]”

“Take him I can,” Akinfiev repeated, and drove off after the other carts.

Three carts pulled up in front of the first-aid station. In the first cart sat a nurse who was being transferred to the rear lines, the second cart had been brought for a Cossack with an inflamed kidney, and in the third cart sat Ivan Aggeyev, the deacon.

Having arranged everything, Soychenko called the medical assistant.

“There goes that damn freemason,” he said. “I’m putting him on the Revolutionary Tribunal cart
³
against receipt. They’ll be off any minute now.”

Barsutsky looked out the window, saw the carts, and went running out of the house, red-faced and hatless.

“Hey, I know you’re going to cut his throat!” he yelled to Ivan Akinfiev. “I want the deacon in another cart!”

“Wherever you put him,” the Cossacks standing nearby said, laughing, “our Ivan’s going to get him.”

Ivan Akinfiev, whip in hand, was also standing there next to his horses.

“Greetings, Comrade Medical Assistant,” he said politely, taking off his cap.

“Greetings, my friend,” Barsutsky answered. “You’re going to have to put the deacon in another cart, you wild beast!”

“It would interest me to know,” Akinfiev began in a whiny voice, and his upper lip shivered, slid up, and began quivering over his dazzling teeth, “it would interest me to know, if this is right behavior or behavior that is not right, that when the enemy is tormenting us unbelievably, when the enemy is pounding our last breath out of us, when the enemy is clinging to our legs like a lead weight and tying our hands with snakes, is it correct behavior for us to clog our ears at such a deadly hour?”