The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (83 page)

Karl Biedermayer had no idea that the Civil War was rolling toward his home.

At night I returned to our hold in the barge with Seletsky, who was a clerk, just as I was. He sang as we walked. Heads in nightcaps peered out of lancet windows. The moonlight flowed down the roof tiles’ red canals. The muffled barking of dogs rose above this Russian Zaandam. Riveted Augustas and Annas listened to Seletsky’s song. His deep bass carried us to the steppes, to the gothic enclosure of the wheat barns. Crossbeams of moonlight flickered on the river, and the breezy darkness swept over the sand of the riverbanks. Iridescent worms writhed in a torn sweep net.

Seletsky’s voice was unnaturally powerful. He was an enormous fellow who belonged to that race of provincial Chaliapins,
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of which so many, to our great fortune, have arisen throughout Russia. He even had the same kind of face as Chaliapin, part Scottish coachman, part grandee from the era of Catherine the Great. Seletsky was a simple man, unlike his divine prototype, but his voice resounded boundlessly, fatally, filled one’s soul with the sweetness of self-destruction and gypsy oblivion. Seletsky preferred the songs of convicts to Italian arias. It was from him that I first heard Grechaninov’s^ song “Death.” It resounded, menacing, relentless, passionate, over the dark water through the night.

She will not forget, she will come to you,

Caress, embrace, and love you for all eternity.

But a bridal wreath of thorns shall crown her head.

This song flows within man’s ephemeral shell like the waters of eternity. It washes away everything, it gives birth to everything.

The front was twenty versts away. The Ural Cossacks, joined by Major Vozenilek’s Czech battalion, were trying to drive the dispersed Red detachments out of Nikolayevsk. Farther north, the troops of Komchuk—the Committee of the Members of the Constituent Assembly—were advancing from Samara.* [
The Komchuk was a government formed in Samara by the anti-Soviet Social Revolutionary Party on June 18,1918.
] Our scattered, untrained units regrouped on the left bank. Muravyov had just betrayed us. Vatsetis was appointed the Soviet commander in chief. ^ [
 Mikhail Artemevich Muravyov, 1880-1918, had been the commander in chief of the Southern Revolutionary Front, but began an anti-Soviet uprising in Simbirsk on July 10, 1918. He was killed the following day. Ioachim Ioachimovich Vatsetis, 1883-1938, took over from Muravyov immediately after his defection.Weapons for the front were brought from Saratov
.]  Once or twice a week the pink and white paddle steamer Ivan and Maria docked at Baronsk. It carried rifles and shells. Its deck was full of boxes with skulls stenciled on them, under which the word “lethal” was written.

The ships captain, Korostelyov, was a man ravished by drink, with lifeless flaxen hair. He was an adventurer, a restless soul, and a vagabond. He had traveled the White Sea on sailing vessels, walked the length and breadth of Russia, had done time in jail and penance in a monastery.

We always dropped by to see him on our way back from Biedermayers if there were still lights on board the Ivan and Maria. One night, as we passed the wheat barns with their enchanted blue and brown castle silhouettes, we saw a torch blazing high in the sky. Seletsky and I were heading back to our barge in that warm, passionate state of mind that can only be spawned by this wondrous land, youth, night, and the melting rings of fire on the river.

The Volga was rolling on silently. There were no lights on the Ivan and Maria, and the hulk of the ship lay dark and dead, with only the torch burning above it. The flame was flaring and fuming above the mast. Seletsky was singing, his face pale, his head thrown back. He stopped when we came to the edge of the river. We walked up the unguarded gangplank. Boxes and gun wheels lay about the deck. I knocked on the door of the captains cabin, and it fell open. A tin lamp without a glass cover was burning on the table, which was covered with spilled liquor. The metallic ring around the wick was melting. The windows had been boarded up with crooked planks. The sulfuric aroma of home-brewed vodka rose from cans under the table. Captain Korostelyov was sitting on the floor in a canvas shirt among green streams of vomit. His clotted, monastic hair stood around his head. He was staring fixedly up at Larson, his Latvian commissar, who was sitting, holding a Pravda in a yellowish cardboard folder open in front of him, reading it in the light of the melting kerosene flicker.

“You’re showing your true colors!” Captain Korostelyov said from the floor. “Go on with what you were saying ... go on torturing us if you have to.”

“Why should I do the talking?” Larson answered, turning his back and fencing himself off with his Pravda. “I’d rather listen to you.”

A redheaded muzhik, his legs dangling, was sitting on a velvet sofa.

“Lisyei! Vodka!” the captain said to him.

“None left,” Lisyei said. “And nowhere to get none.”

Larson put down his paper and burst out laughing, as if he were pounding a drum.

“A Russian man needs his drink, the Russian man’s soul wants to carouse, but there’s not a drop to be found anywhere around here!” the Latvian said in his thick accent. “And it still calls itself the Volga!”

Captain Korostelyov stretched out his thin, boyish neck, and his legs in their canvas trousers sprawled out across the floor. There was pitiful bewilderment in his eyes, and then they flashed. “Torture us,” he said to the Latvian, barely audibly, stretching out his neck. “Torture us, Karl.”

Lisyei clasped his plump hands together and peered at the Latvian. “Ha! He’s trumping the Volga! No, Comrade, you will not trump our Volga, you will not bad-mouth her! Don’t you know the song we sing: Mother Volga, Czarina of all rivers?”

Seletsky and I were still standing by the door. I kept thinking of retreating.

“Well, this is simply beyond my grasp!” Larson said, turning to us, but clearly continuing the argument. “Maybe these comrades here can explain to me why reinforced concrete is worse than birches and aspens, and airships worse than Kaluga dung?”

Lisyei’s head twisted in his quilted collar. His legs didn’t reach the floor. His plump fingers, pressed to his stomach, were knotting an invisible net.

“Ha! And what is it you know about Kaluga, my friend?” Lisyei asked in a pacifying tone. “I’ll have you know there’s famous folk that lives in Kaluga! Yes, fabulous folk!”

“Some vodka,” Captain Korostelyov muttered from the floor. Larson again threw back his piggish head and laughed out loud. “You win some, you lose some, “ he muttered, pulling the Pravda closer. “Yes, you win some, you lose some.”

Sweat was seething on his forehead, and oily streams of fire were dancing in his clotted, dirt-crusted hair.

“You win some, you lose some,” Larson snorted again. “Yes, you win some, you lose some.”

Captain Korostelyov patted the floor around him with his fingers. He began crawling forward, hauling himself along with his hands, dragging his skeletal body in its sackcloth shirt behind him.

“Dont you dare bait Russia, Karl,” he whispered, crawling toward the Latvian, hitting him in the face with his clenched fist, and then, with a sudden shriek, beginning to flail at him. The Latvian puffed himself up and looked at us over his skewed glasses. Then he wound a silken rivulet of Korostelyovs hair around his finger and banged Korostelyov s head on the floor. He yanked his head up and banged it down again.

“There!” Larson said curtly, flinging the bony body to the side. “And theres more where that came from!”

The captain propped himself up on his hands and got on all fours like a dog. Blood was flowing from his nostrils, and his eyes were crossed, darting about. Suddenly he flung himself up and hurled himself with a howl under the table.

“Russia!” he mumbled from under the table, and started kicking and flailing. “Russia!”

The shovels of his bare feet thrashed about. Only one whistling, moaning word could be heard in his screeching.

“Russia!” he moaned, stretching out his hands, beating his head against the floor.

Redheaded Lisyei was still sitting on the velvet sofa.

“This has been going on since noon,” he said, turning to Seletsky and me. “Fighting for Russia, feeling sorry for Russia.”

“Vodka!” Korostelyov said harshly from under the table. He crawled out and stood up. His hair, dripping with blood, hung down on his cheeks.

“Where’s the vodka, Lisyei?”

“The vodka, my friend, is forty versts away, in Voznesenskoe—forty versts by water or by land. There’s a church there now, so there must be home brew to be had. Whatever you do, the Germans don’t have none!”
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Captain Korostelyov turned around and walked out on rigid heron’s legs.

“We’re Kalugans!” Larson yelled out unexpectedly.

“He has no respect for Kaluga,” Lisyei sighed, “whichever way you look at it. But me, I’ve been there in Kaluga! Proper folk live there, famous—”

Outside, someone yelled an order, and the clanking of the anchor was heard—the anchor was being weighed. Lisyei raised his eyebrows.

“We’re not off to Voznesenskoe, are we?”

Larson burst out laughing, throwing his head back. I ran out of the cabin. Korostelyov stood barefoot on the bridge. The copper rays of the moon lay on his gashed face. The gangplanks fell onto the riverbank. Whirling sailors unwound the moorings.

“Dimitri Alekseyevich,” Seletsky shouted up to Korostelyov. “At least let us get off] What do you need us along for?”

The engines erupted into erratic hammering. The paddlewheel dug into the river. A rotten plank on the pier creaked softly. The Ivan and Maria swung its bow around.

“So we’re off,” Lisyei said, coming out of the cabin. “So we’re off to Voznesenskoe to get some home brew.”

The Ivan and Marias uncoiling paddlewheel was gaining speed. The engine’s oily clanking, rustling, and whistling grew. We flew through the darkness, forging straight ahead, plowing through buoys, beacons, and red signals. The water foamed beneath the paddles and went flashing back like the golden wings of a bird. The moon plunged into swirls of black water. “The Volga’s waterway is full of bends” was a phrase I remembered from a schoolbook. “It abounds in sandbanks.” Captain Korostelyov was shuffling about on the bridge. Blue shining skin stretched over his cheekbones.

“Full steam ahead!” he said into the tube.

“Full steam ahead it is!” a muffled invisible voice answered.

“I want even more steam!”

There was silence from the engine room.

“The engine will blow,” the voice said, after a moment of silence. The signal torch toppled off the mast and streamed over the rolling waves. The steamer rocked. An explosion shuddered through the hull. We flew through the darkness, straight ahead. A rocket went soaring up from the riverbank, a three-inch gun started pounding us. A shell went whistling between the masts. The galley boy, dragging a samovar across the deck, raised his head. The samovar went skidding out of his hands and rolled down the stairs, split open, and a glittering stream poured down the dirty steps. The galley boy snarled, tottered over to the stairs, and fell asleep. The deadly aroma of home-brewed vodka came pouring from his mouth. Belowdecks, among the oily cylinders, the stokers, stripped to the waist, were roaring, waving their arms, and rolling on the floor. Their twisted faces shone in the pearly gleam of the pistons. The crew of the Ivan and Maria was drunk. Only the helmsman stood firmly at his wheel. He turned and looked at me.

“Hey, Yid!” he called out to me. “Whats going to become of the children?”

“What children?”

“The children aren’t going to school,” the helmsman shouted, turning the wheel. “The children will turn into thieves!”

He brought his leaden, blue cheekbones close to my face and gnashed his teeth. His jaws grated like millstones. It was as if his teeth were being ground to sand.

“I’ll rip you to pieces!”

I edged away from him. Lisyei came walking across the deck.

“What’s going on here, Lisyei!”

“I guess he’ll get us there,” the redheaded muzhik said, and sat down on a bench.

When we got to Voznesenskoe, we sent him ashore. There was no “church” to be found, no lights, no carousel. The sloping riverbank was dark, covered by a low-hanging sky. Lisyei sank into darkness. He had been away for more than an hour when he resurfaced right by the water, hauling some large cans. A pockmarked woman, as well built as a horse, was following him. The child’s blouse she was wearing was much too small and stretched tightly over her breasts. A dwarf in a pointed hat and tiny little boots was standing nearby, openmouthed, watching us haul the cans on deck.

“Plum liquor,” Lisyei said, putting the cans on the table. “The plummiest home brew!”

And the race of our spectral ship began once more. We arrived in Baronsk toward daybreak. The river spread out boundlessly. Water trickled off the riverbanks, leaving a blue satin shadow. A pink ray struck the mist hanging on the ragged bushes. The bleak, painted walls of the barns and their thin steeples slowly turned and floated toward us. We steamed toward Baronsk among peals of song. Seletsky had cleared his throat with a bottle of the plummiest home brew, and was singing his heart out. Mussorgsky’s Flea was in his song, Mephistopheles’ booming laughter, and the aria of the crazed miller, “I am a raven, no miller am I.”

The barefoot captain lay slumped over the railing of the bridge. His head was lolling, his eyelids shut tight, and his gashed face, a vague childish smile wandering over it, was flung up toward the sky. He regained consciousness when the boat began slowing down.

“Alyosha!” he shouted into the tube. “Full steam ahead!”

And we went charging toward the pier at full steam ahead. The gangplank we had mangled as we pulled out the night before went flying into the air. The engines stopped just in time.

“You see, he brought us back,” Lisyei said, turning up beside me. “And there you were, all worried.”

Chapayev’s machine gun carts were already lining up on the river-bank.
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Rainbow stripes darkened and cooled on the bank from which the tidewaters had just ebbed. In a heap next to the pier were boxes of cartridges left by boats that had come and gone. Makeyev, the commander of one of Chapayev’s squadrons, was sitting beltless on a box in a peasant shirt and a tall fur hat. Captain Korostelyov went up to him with outspread arms.