The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (41 page)

Do you remember Zhitomir, Vasily? Do you remember the River Teterev, Vasily, and that night in which the Sabbath, the young Sabbath, crept along the sunset crushing the stars with the heel of her red slipper?

The thin horn of the moon dipped its arrows in the black waters of the Teterev. Litde, funny Gedali, the founder of the Fourth International,
⁹
who took us to Rabbi Motale Bratslavsky for evening prayer. Little, funny Gedali, shaking the cockerel feathers of his top hat in the red smoke of the evening.The candles’ predatory pupils twinkled in the rabbis room. Broad-shouldered Jews crouched moaning over prayer books, and the old jester of the Chernobyl line of tsaddiks jingled copper coins in his frayed pocket.

You remember that night, Vasily? Outside the window horses neighed and Cossacks shouted. The wasteland of war yawned outside and Rabbi Motale Bratslavsky, clutching his tallith with his withered fingers, prayed at the eastern wall. Then the curtains of the cabinet fell open, and in the funerary shine of the candles we saw the Torah scrolls wrapped in coverings of purple velvet and blue silk, and above the Torah scrolls hovered the humble, beautiful, lifeless face of Ilya, the rabbis son, the last prince of the dynasty.

And then, Vasily, two days ago the regiments of the Twelfth Army opened the front at Kovel. The victors’ haughty cannonade thundered through the town. Our troops were shaken and thrown into disarray. The Polit-otdel train* [
the train sent out by the Polit-otdel, the political organ of the new Soviet government charged with the ideological education of the military
] crept along the dead spine of the fields. The typhoid-ridden muzhik horde rolled the gigantic ball of rampant soldier death before it. The horde scampered onto the steps of our train and fell off again, beaten back by rifle butts. It panted, scrambled, ran, was silent. And after twelve versts, when I no longer had any potatoes to throw to them, I threw a bundle of Trotsky leaflets at them. But only one of them stretched out a dirty, dead hand to grab a leaflet. And I recognized Ilya, the son of the Zhitomir rabbi. I recognized him straightaway, Vasily! It was so painful to see the prince, who had lost his trousers, his back snapped in two by the weight of his soldier’s rucksack, that we broke the rules and dragged him up into the railroad car. His naked knees, clumsy like the knees of an old woman, knocked against the rusty iron of the steps. Two fat-breasted typists in sailor blouses dragged the dying man’s timid, lanky body along the floor. We laid him out in the corner of the trains editorial compartment. Cossacks in red Tatar trousers fixed his slipped clothing. The girls, their bandy bovine legs firmly planted on the floor, stared coolly at his sexual organs, the withered, curly manhood of the emaciated Semite. And I, who had met him during one of my nights of wandering, packed the scattered belongings of Red Army soldier Ilya Bratslavsky into my suitcase.

I threw everything together in a jumble, the mandates of the political agitator and the mementos of a Jewish poet. Portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side—the gnarled steel of Lenin’s skull and the listless silk of the Maimonides portrait. A lock of woman’s hair lay in a book of the resolutions of the Sixth Party Congress, and crooked lines of Ancient Hebrew verse huddled in the margins of Communist pamphlets. Pages of The Song of Songs and revolver cartridges drizzled on me in a sad, sparse rain. The sad rain of the sunset washed the dust from my hair, and I said to the young man, who was dying on a ripped mattress in the corner, “Four months ago, on a Friday evening, Gedali the junk dealer took me to your father, Rabbi Motale, but back then, Bratslavsky, you were not in the Party.”

“I was in the Party back then,” the young man answered, scratching his chest and twisting in his fever. “But I couldnt leave my mother blind."

“What about now, Ilya?”

“My mother is just an episode of the Revolution,” he whispered, his voice becoming fainter. “Then my letter came up, the letter ‘B/ and the organization sent me off to the front. ...”

“So you ended up in Kovel?”

“I ended up in Kovel!” he shouted in despair. “The damn kulaks opened the front. I took over a mixed regiment, but it was too late. I didnt have enough artillery.”

He died before we reached Rovno. He died, the last prince, amid poems, phylacteries, and foot bindings. We buried him at a desolate train station. And I, who can barely harness the storms of fantasy raging through my ancient body, I received my brother s last breath.

1

The Ukrainian anarchist leader.

2

Sergei Sergeyevich Kamenev, 1881-1963, was the commander in chief of the Eastern Front.

3

The Revolutionary Tribunals were set up by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution in 1918 to combat counterrevolutionary elements, abuse of power, speculation, and desertion from the Soviet army. The Revolutionary Tribunal carts were used to transport any personnel, prisoners, and supplies that connected with the tribunals’ military work.

4

A device for treating syphilis.

5

Polish: “There’s nothing.”

6

Polish: “Wait.”

7

Raymond Poincare, 1860-1932, president of France, supported the Imperialist Russian forces against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. Ebert and Noske were held responsible for the suppression of the Spartacus Rebellion in Germany.

8

Defectors from the Imperial army and later also from the new Soviet army, who banded together in guerrilla groups. They were called “Greens” because they hid in forests. Both the Whites and the Reds tried to organize them under their influence, creating bands of Red Greens and White Greens.

9

See the story “Gedali,” in which Gedali envisions an ideal International that would supplant the Third Communist International founded in Moscow in 1919 to promote Communism worldwide.

The seven additional Red Cavalry stories in this section were not included in Babel’s book Konarmia (Red Cavalry), published in 1926. Most of them appeared in magazines in the late 1920s and 1930s after the book had come out, while “And Then There Were Nine”and the fragment “And Then There Were Ten” were not published during Babel’s lifetime. The last piece, “A Letter to the Editor,” appeared in the magazine Oktyabr in October 1924. It was a response to General Budyonny’s vitriolic article with the punning title “Babism Bablya” (“Babel’s woman-ishnessin which he condemned Babel’s Red Cavalry stories and their portrayal of himself and other real commanders.

The previous night, six Makhno
¹
fighters raped a maid. When I  heard this the following morning, I decided to find out what a woman looks like after being raped six times. I found her in the kitchen. She stood bent over a tub, washing clothes. She was a fat girl with blooming cheeks. Only a tranquil life on fertile Ukrainian soil can douse a Jewish girl in such bovine juices, lend her face such a lusty gloss. The girls legs, fat, brick-red, bulging like globes, gave off the luscious stench of freshly carved meat, and it seemed to me that all that remained of yesterday s virginity were her cheeks, more flushed than usual, and her lowered eyes.

Young Kikin, the errand boy at Makhno s headquarters, was also in the kitchen. He was known at the headquarters as something of a simpleton— he had a tendency to walk about on his hands at the most unsuitable moments. More than once I found him in front of the mirror, stretching out his leg in his tattered trousers. He would wink at himself, slap himself on his bare, boyish stomach, sing marching tunes, and make triumphant grimaces which made even him guffaw. This boys imagination worked with incredible vigor. Today I again found him busy on one of his special projects—he was sticking strips of gold paper on a German helmet.

“How many of them did you accommodate yesterday, Ruhlya?” he asked the girl, narrowing his eyes as he eyed the decorated helmet.

She remained silent.

“You accommodated six of them,” he continued, “but there are girls who can accommodate up to twenty. Our boys did a Krapivno housewife and they kept pounding and pounding away at her till they ran out of steam. But she was a good deal fatter than you are.”

“Go get me some water,” the girl said.

Kikin brought a bucket of water from the yard. He shuffled over to the mirror in his bare feet, put the helmet with the gold ribbons on his head, and carefully peered at his reflection. His image in the mirror fascinated him. He stuck his fingers in his nose and avidly watched it change shape under the pressure from within.

I'll be going out on a mission,” he said to the Jewess. “Dont you say a word to no one! Stetsenko s taking me into his squadron. At least they give you a real uniform, people respect you, and Til have some real fighter pals, not like here, where we re just some dinky little flea-ridden outfit. Yesterday, when they grabbed you and I was holding you down by the head, I said to Matvey Vasilich, Hey, Matvey Vasilich, I said to him, four have already had a go, and I still get to keep holding and holding her down! YouVe already had her twice, Matvey Vasilich, and just because Im underage and not in your gang, everyone can just push me around! And you yourself, Ruhlya, must have heard what he said to me—We, he said to me, dont push you around, Kikin! Once all my orderlies have had a go, it’ll be your turn. He did say I could, and then, when they were already dragging you out into the woods, Matvey Vasilich tells me, You can do her now, Kikin, if you wish!—No way do I wish, Matvey Vasilich! I tell him, not after Vaska has had her, I’d never get over it till I die!”

Kikin grunted and fell silent. Barefoot, lanky, sad, his stomach bare, the glittering helmet on his straw-colored head, he lay down on the floor and stared into the distance.

“The whole world reckons the Makhno gang is all heroic and everything!” he said morosely. “But when you start hanging out with them, you soon see that they all harbor some grudge or other!”

The Jewess lifted her flushed face from the tub, glanced over at the boy, and left the kitchen with the heavy gait of a cavalryman whose numb legs have just touched the ground after a very long ride. Left alone, the boy looked dully around the kitchen, sighed, rested his palms on the floor, swung his legs in the air, and, with his heels together, quickly walked around on his hands.

Three Makhno fighters—Gniloshkurov and two others—had come to an agreement with a woman about her love services. For two pounds of sugar, she agreed to take on the three of them, but when the third ones turn came, she couldnt hold out and went reeling around the room. The woman scrambled out into the yard, where she ran straight into Makhno.* [
The anarchist leader
] He lashed her with his whip, tearing her upper lip, and Gniloshkurov got it too.

This happened in the morning, at nine o’clock. After that the day went by with much activity, and now its night, the rain is drizzling, whispering and unyielding. It is rustling beyond the wall. In front of me, outside the window, hangs a single star. The town of Kamenka has drowned in the haze—the teeming ghetto is filled with teeming darkness and the inexorable bustling of the Makhno fighters. Someone’s horse neighs softly like a pining woman; beyond the edge of the shtetl sleepless t
achankas
[
an open carriage or buggy with a machine gun mounted on the back
] creak, and the cannonade, falling silent, lies down to sleep on the black, wet earth.

Only Makhno’s window is ablaze in a faraway street. It cuts through the gloom of the autumn night like an exhilarated searchlight, flashing, drenched with rain. There, in Makhno’s headquarters, a brass band is playing in honor of Antonina Vasilevna, a nurse who was spending her first night with Makhno. The thick, melancholy trumpets blow louder and louder, and the partisans, huddled together beneath my window, listen to the thundering of old marches. Three partisans are sitting beneath my window—Gniloshkurov and his comrades—and then Kikin, a crazed Cossack, comes rushing over to join them. He kicks his legs up in the air, does a handstand, chirps and sings, and has difficulty calming down, like an epileptic after a fit.

“Oat-head!” Gniloshkurov suddenly whispers to Kikin. “Oat-head,” he repeats morosely. “How can it be that she let two more have a go after me without so much as batting an eyelash? There I was, putting my belt back on, and she looks at me and says to me, ‘Merci for spending some time with me, Papa, you are so charming! My name is Anelya—that’s what I’m called, Anelya.’ So you see, Oat-head, I think to myself she must have been chewing some bitter herbs since the morning, and then Petka wanted to have a go at her too!”

“Then Petka wanted to have a go at her too,” fifteen-year-old Kikin chimes in, sitting down and lighting a cigarette. “ ‘Young man/ she tells Petka, would you please be kind enough, I’m at the end of my rope!' And she jumps up and starts spinning like a top, and the boys spread their arms and wont let her out the door, and she keeps begging and begging.” Kikin stands up, his eyes flash, and he begins to laugh. “She escapes,” Kikin continues, “and then right there at the door, who does she run into? Makhno himself. ‘Halt!’ he yells. ‘I bet you have the clap! Im going to hack you up here and now!’ And he starts lashing her, and she—she still wants to give him some lip!”

“It must also be said,” Petka Orlovs pensive and tender voice interrupts Kikin, “it must also be said, that there is greed among people, ruthless greed! I told her—‘Theres three of us, Anelya! Bring a girlfriend along, share the sugar with her, shell help you!’ ‘No/ she says, ‘I can cope well enough, I have three children to feed, its not like Im a virgin or something/ ”

“A hardworking woman!” Gniloshkurov, still sitting beneath my window, assures Petka. “Hardworking to the last!”

And he falls silent. I can still hear the sound of water. The rain is continuing to stutter, bubble, and moan on the roofs. The wind grabs the rain and shoves it to the side. The triumphant blowing of the trumpets falls silent in Makhnos courtyard. The light in his room has dimmed by half. Gniloshkurov rises from the bench, splicing the dim glimmer of the moon. He yawns, tugs his shirt up, and scratches his remarkably white stomach, and then goes over to the shed to sleep. Petka Orlovs tender voice floats after him.