The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (38 page)

“Lie flat on his back awaiting his last breath!” Lyovka repeats enthusiastically, stretching his arms up to the sky, letting the night envelop him like an aura. The tireless wind, the clean wind of the night, sings, fills itself with sound, and gently rocks the soul. The stars, blazing in the darkness like wedding rings, fall on Lyovka, become entangled in his hair, and expire on his tousled head.

“Lyovka, come here,” Shevelyov suddenly whispers to him with blue lips. “The gold I have is for Sashka,” the wounded man whispers. “The rings, the harness—everything’s hers. We did our best to get by, I want to reward her. My clothes, my underwear, my medal for selfless heroism, are for my mother on the Terek. Send them to her with a letter and write in the letter: The regimental captain sends his regards, and don’t cry. The house is yours, old woman, enjoy it. If anyone lays a finger on you, go straight to Budyonny and tell him, ‘I’m Shevelyov’s mama!’ My horse, Abramka, I offer to the regiment, I am offering the horse in memory of my soul.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll see to the horse,” Lyovka mumbles. “Sashka!” he yells to the woman, waving to her. “You heard what he said? Swear before him—will you be sure to give the old woman what’s hers or won’t you?”

“I you-know-what the old woman!” Sashka says, and walks off into the bushes, holding her head high like a blind woman.

“Will you give her her miserable share?” Lyovka asks, catching up with her and grabbing her by the throat. “Say it here in front of him!”

“I’ll give it to her, let me go!”

And then, having forced the declaration out of her, Lyovka grabbed the pot from the fire and began pouring soup into the dying man’s rigid mouth. Cabbage soup trickled down Shevelyov’s face, the spoon clanked against his sparkling, dead teeth, and bullets sang with growing mournfulness and force through the dense expanses of the night.

“They’re shooting with rifles, the bastards,” Lyovka said.

“The damn lackeys!” Shevelyov answered. “They’re ripping open our right flank with their machine guns.”

And Shevelyov, closing his eyes, stately as a corpse on a slab, listened to the battle with his large, waxen ears. Next to him, Lyovka was chewing meat, crunching and panting. When he had finished, Lyovka licked his lips and pulled Sashka into a ditch.

“Sash,” he said, trembling, burping, his hands fidgeting. “Sash, as the Lord is my witness, were covered in vice like yard dogs with lice. You only live once and then you die! Let me have you, Sash—111 serve you, even if its with my blood! His time’s up, Sash, but the Lord has plenty more days in store for us!”

They sat down in the tall grass. The wavering moon crept from behind the clouds and stopped over Sashkas bare knee.

“You’re warming each other,” Shevelyov mumbled, “but it looks like the Fourteenth Division has been routed.”

Lyovka crunched and panted in the bushes. The misty moon loitered in the sky like a beggar woman. Distant gunfire floated in the air. Feather grass rustled on the troubled earth onto which August stars fell.

Then Sashka returned to her previous place. She changed the wounded inan’s bandages and raised the flashlight over the festering wound.

“By tomorrow youll be gone,” Sashka said, wiping the cold sweat off Shevelyov. “By tomorrow you’ll be gone. Deaths already in your guts.”

At that moment a heavy, many-voiced blast hit the earth. Four fresh enemy brigades, sent into battle under a unified command, had fired their first shell at Busk, lighting up the Bug watershed and severing our communications. Obedient blazes rose on the horizon, and heavy birds of cannon fire soared up from the flames. Busk was burning and Lyovka sped through the forest with the rattling cart of the commander of Division Six. He gripped the red reins tightly; the lacquered wheels banged against tree stumps. Shevelyov’s ambulance cart came flying behind, Sashka checking the horses, which were straining at their harnesses.

They came to a clearing in the forest where there was a first-aid station. Lyovka unharnessed the horses and set out for the medical officer to ask for a horse blanket. He walked through the forest, which was filled with carts. Nurses’ bodies jutted out from under their carts, timid dawn trudged over the soldiers’ sheepskins. The sleeping men’s boots lolled in a jumble, their pupils pointed to the sky, the black pits of their mouths askew.

The medical officer did have a horse blanket. Lyovka returned to Shevelyov, kissed his forehead, and pulled the blanket over his head. Then Sashka came up to the cart. She had knotted her kerchief under her chin and shaken the straw out of her dress.

“Pavlik,” she said. “Jesus Christ in Heaven.” And she lay herself against the dead man, covering him with her massive body.

“Her grief’s killing her,” Lyovka said. “Say what you want, she had it good with him. Now she’ll have to take on the whole squadron again. Its tough.”

And he drove off to Busk, where the headquarters of the Sixth Cavalry Division had been set up.

There, about ten versts from town, the battle against the Savinkov Cossacks was raging. The traitors were fighting us under the command of Cossack Captain Yakovlev, who had gone over to the Poles. They fought with courage. It was the second day our division commander was out with the troops, and as Lyovka did not find him at the headquarters, he went back to his hut, cleaned his horses, poured water over the wheels of his cart, and lay down to sleep on the threshing floor in the shed. The shed was filled with fresh hay, as arousing as perfume. Lyovka slept himself out, and then sat down to eat. His landladyboiled him some potatoes, which she doused in buttermilk. Lyovka was still sitting at the table when the funereal wail of trumpets and the clatter of many hooves resounded in the street. A squadron with bugles and banners rode along the winding Galician street. Shevelyovs body, covered with flags, was lying on a gun carriage. Sashka was riding behind the coffin on Shevelyovs stallion. A Cossack song came drifting from the back rows.

The squadron marched along the main street and turned toward the river. Lyovka, barefoot and without a cap, ran after the marching detachment and grabbed the reins of the squadron commander's horse.

Neither the division commander, who had stopped by the crossroads to salute the dead commander, nor his staff could hear what Lyovka was saying to the squadron commander.

“Drawers ... mother on the Terek ...” came wafting over to us in fragments on the breeze. Lyovka was shouting incoherently.

The squadron commander, without listening any further, freed his reins and pointed at Sashka. The woman shook her head and rode on. Lyovka jumped onto her horse behind her, grabbed her by the hair, pulled her head back, and slammed his fist into her face. Sashka wiped the blood away with the hem of her skirt and rode on. Lyovka slipped off her saddle, shook his forelock out of his face, and tied his red scarf around his hips. And the howling bugles led the squadron to the sparkling shore of the River Bug.

Lyovka came back to us later that day, his eyes glittering, and shouted, “I gave it to her! ‘When the time comes/ she says, Til send it to his mother. I won't forget him/ she says, ‘I’ll remember him/ ‘You’d better remember him, you evil snake! If you forget, we’ll come around and remind you! And if you forget a second time, we’ll come around and remind you a second time!’ ”

The division commander and his staff were lying on a harvested field about three versts from Zamosc. The troops were going to attack the town that evening. Our orders were that we were to spend the night in Zamosc, and the division commander was waiting for a report of victory.

It was raining. Wind and darkness blew over the sodden earth. Stars were extinguished in the swelling ink of the clouds. Exhausted horses sighed and stamped their hooves in the darkness. We had nothing to give them to eat. I tied my horses reins to my foot, wrapped myself in my cloak, and lay down in a waterlogged pit. The wet earth wrapped me in its comforting sepulchral embrace. The mare tugged at her reins, pulling at my leg. She found a tuft of grass and began nibbling at it. I fell asleep and dreamed of a threshing floor covered with hay. The dusty gold of threshed corn droned over it. Sheaves of wheat flew into the sky, the July day turned into evening, and the thickets of the sunset arched back over the village.

I lay stretched out on my silent bed of hay, and the hay caressing the nape of my neck drove me out of my mind. Then the barn doors opened with a whistle. A woman in a ball gown came up to me. She released one of her breasts from the black lace of her bodice and carefully offered it to me, like a wet nurse about to suckle an infant. She laid her breast on mine. An agonizing warmth shook the foundations of my soul, and drops of sweat—living, flowing sweat—seethed between our nipples.

“Margot!” I wanted to shout. “The earth is dragging me away with the rope of its wretchedness like a stubborn dog, and yet I have managed to see you again!”

I wanted to shout these words, but my jaws, clamped shut by a sudden frost, would not unclench.

Then the woman moved away from me and fell to her knees.

“Lord Jesus,” she said, “take unto Thee the soul of Thy departed slave!”

She pressed two worn five-kopeck coins onto my lids and stuffed fragrant hay into the opening of my mouth. A moan tried in vain to flutter through my clenched jaws; my expiring pupils slowly rolled beneath the copper coins; I could not unclasp my hands, and ... I awoke.

A muzhik with a tangled beard was lying in front of me. He held a rifle in his hands. My horses back cut the sky like a black crossbeam. The reins gripped my foot in a tight noose, pulling it upward.

“You fell asleep, countryman,” the muzhik said, and smiled with nocturnal, sleepless eyes. “That horse has dragged you a good half verst!”

I untied the reins and got up. Blood was trickling down my face, slashed by thistles.

Right there, not two paces away from me, lay the front line. I could see the chimneys of Zamosc, the thievish lights in the ravines of its ghetto, and the watchtower with its shattered lantern. The damp sunrise poured down on us like waves of chloroform. Green rockets soared over the Polish camp. They flashed in the air, came showering down like roses beneath the moon, and expired.

And in the silence I heard the distant breath of a moan. The smoke of a furtive murder encircled us.

“They re killing someone,” I said. “Who is it they re killing?”

“The Poles on a rampage,” the muzhik told me. “The Pole is slashing the Yids’ throats.”

The muzhik moved the rifle from his right hand to his left. His beard had slid completely to one side. He looked at me fondly. “These nights on the front line are long,” he said. “Theres no end to these nights. One itches all over to talk to someone, but where d’you find this someone?”

The muzhik passed me his cigarette for me to light mine.

“It’s all the fault of those Yids,” he said. “They try to please everybody. After the war there’ll be hardly any of them left. How many Yids you reckon theres in the world?”

“Around ten million,” I answered, and began to bridle my horse.

“There’ll be two hundred thousand of them left!” the muzhik yelled, grabbing me by the arm, afraid that I was about to leave. But I climbed onto my saddle and galloped off in the direction of our headquarters.

The division commander was preparing to ride off. The orderlies were standing at attention before him, dozing on their feet. Squadrons of dismounted horsemen crept over wet hillocks.

“They’ve turned the screws on us,” the division commander whispered, and rode off.

We followed him along the road to Sitaniec.

It began raining again. Dead mice floated down the roads. Autumn surrounded our hearts with traps. Trees, upright naked corpses, stood swaying at crossroads.

We arrived in Sitaniec in the morning. I was with Volkov, the staff quartermaster. He found us a hut at the edge of the village.

“Wine,” I told the mistress of the house. “Wine, meat, and bread!”

The old woman sat down on the floor and fed the calf she had hidden under her bed.

“Nic niema”
⁵
she answered indifferently, “and I don’t remember a time when there ever was anything.”

I sat at the table, took off my revolver, and fell asleep. A quarter of an hour later I opened my eyes and saw Volkov hunched over the windowsill. He was writing a letter to his bride.

“Highly esteemed Valya,” he wrote. “Do you remember me?”

I read the first line, and then took some matches out of my pocket and lit a pile of straw lying on the floor. Unfettered flames flashed up and came moving toward me. The old woman hurled herself chest-first onto the fire and extinguished it.

“What you doing, PanT the old woman gasped, staggering back in horror.

Volkov turned around and stared at her with his empty eyes, and went back to writing his letter.

“Im going to burn you, old woman,” I muttered, drowsily. “Im going to burn you and that stolen calf of yours.”

“Czekaj/”
⁶
she shouted in a high-pitched voice. She ran out into the hall and came back with a jug of milk and some bread.

We had barely eaten half the bread when we heard shots rattling outside in the yard. There were many shots. They went on rattling and got on our nerves. We finished the milk, and Volkov went out into the yard to see what was going on.

“IVe saddled your horse,” he called through the window. “TheyVe shot mine full of holes. The Poles have set up their machine guns less than a hundred paces from here!”

So the two of us ended up with one horse. She barely managed to take us out of Sitaniec. I sat in the saddle, and Volkov climbed on behind.

Transport carts rolled, roared, and sank in the mud. The morning seeped out of us like chloroform seeping over a hospital table.

“You married, Lyutov?” Volkov suddenly said, sitting behind me.

“My wife left me,” I answered, dozing off for a few seconds, and I dreamed that I was sleeping in a bed.

Silence.

Our horse totters.

“Two more versts and this mare will be finished,” Volkov says, sitting behind me.