by James Salter
It’s summer, fields of wheat. Down the road at a hard trot, eight abreast, an endless column of Cossacks are coming with their topknots, carbines, long swords, and ragged clothes, the dust rising behind. Divisions are attacking, orders being sent out, dead and wounded men, nurses on horseback. By one of the cottages—a cow, recently calved, with its throat cut. Bluish teats on the ground, just skin. Indescribable pity! A murdered young mother. Death is everywhere. The images are like Goya’s in his passionate series of etchings Desastres de la Guerra, the mutilation and murder, and above all, a kind of hopeless understanding and even forgiveness.
There are thirty-four staggering stories in Red Cavalry, which opens like a cannon shot, crossing the River Zbrucz into Poland. The blackened river roars, twisting itself into foamy knots at the falls.
The bridges were down, and we waded across the river. On the waves rested a majestic moon. The horses were in to the cruppers, and the noisy torrent gurgled among hundreds of horses’ legs. Somebody sank, loudly defaming the Mother of God. The river was dotted with the black patches of wagons, and was full of confused sounds.
Certain figures reappear, Savitsky, the long-legged division commander, disgraced and living with a Cossack woman he has lured away from a Jew in the commissariat (“The Story of a Horse, Parts I and II”). Sasha, the girlfriend of the squadrons, with her shapely, cast-iron legs; Afonka Bida, the platoon commander, who shoots a gravely wounded comrade who is pleading for death rather than being left behind and caught alive by the Poles (“The Death of a Dolgushov”).
He was leaning up against a tree, his boots thrust out apart. Without lowering his eyes from mine he warily rolled back his shirt. His belly had been torn out. The entrails hung over his knees, and the heartbeats were visible.
Afonka talks to him briefly, takes some papers offered to him, puts them in his boot, and shoots the wounded man in the mouth. Lyutov/Babel, the narrator, had been unable to do it. “Get out of my sight,” Afonka says, “or I’ll kill you. You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat has for a mouse.”
Along the way on a bowlegged horse rides Brigade Commander Maslak, suffused with drunken blood and the putrescence of his greasy humors. His abdomen rested upon the silver-plated saddlebow like a big tomcat.
Along the way also are peasant girls whom a soldier describes sympathetically (“Salt”):
Look at them two girls cringe at present on account of what they went through from us this night. Look at our wives in the wheat plains of the Kuban that are spending their women’s strength without their husbands, and the husbands, alone too, all through dire necessity violating the girls as come into their lives.
In one of the final stories there is the death of a prince, actually a rabbi’s son who had commanded a scratch regiment but was defeated. Swarms of retreating troops are clambering alongside to get aboard the Political Section train as it passes through them. Babel is tossing them potatoes and, when there are no more, Trotsky’s leaflets. Only a single man stretches a filthy hand to catch one. It’s Elijah, son of the Rabbi of Zhitomir, beneath a heavy soldier’s pack. Defying regulations, they pull him aboard and lay him on the floor, the long, shamed body of the dying man . . . and Cossacks in loose red trousers set straight the clothes that were dropping off him. The female typists stare dully at his sexual organs. He had been a member of the Party, he manages to tell Babel, but at first he couldn’t leave his mother.
“And now, Elijah?” “When there’s a revolution on, a mother’s an episode,” he whispered. He died before we reached Rovno. He—that last of the Princes—died among his poetry, phylacteries, and coarse foot wrappings. We buried him at some forgotten station. And I, who can scarce contain the tempests of my imagination within this age-old body of mine, I was there beside my brother when he breathed his last (“The Rabbi’s Son”).
The Red Cavalry stories were written in 1923–1924. Babel had withdrawn to the Caucasus with his wife and was living in a house above Batum. The stories brought immediate fame as well as the disapproval of Budyonny, who wrote denouncing the depiction of the Cossacks. Gorky defended Babel, who was now a public figure and to some extent privileged. This period, the 1920s, was the most productive in Babel’s life. In the Odessa stories and others, written before Red Cavalry and after, the canvas is broadened: there is childhood, first love, family, remembrance, and Benya Krik, known as the King, a legendary gangster in an orange suit and wearing a bracelet set with diamonds, who comes to call on one of the rich men in Odessa, Zender Eichbaum, to ask for his daughter’s hand. The old man has a slight stroke at this but recovers. He was good for another twenty years.
“Listen, Eichbaum,” said the King. “When you die I will bury you in the First Jewish Cemetery, right by the entrance. I will raise you, Eichbaum, a monument of pink marble. I will make you an elder of the Brody Synagogue . . . No thief will walk the street you live on. I will build you a villa where the streetcar line ends. Remember, Eichbaum, you were no rabbi in your young days. People have forged wills, but why talk about it? And the King shall be your son-in-law—no milksop, but the King.”
Babel himself was the heir of Maupassant, for whom he named one of his greatest stories. In it is Raisa Bendersky, who tells the penniless narrator that Maupassant is the only passion of her life.
Black-haired with pink eyes and a wide bosom, she is one of those charming Jewesses who have come to us from Kiev and Poltava, from the opulent steppe-towns full of chestnut trees and acacias. The money made by their clever husbands is transformed by these women into a pink layer of fat on the belly, the back of the neck, and the well-rounded shoulders. Their subtle sleepy smiles drive officers from the local garrisons crazy.
Together they translate Maupassant from a shelf of twenty-nine morocco-bound volumes, and a week or two later on a climactic night when the others have gone to the theater, Raisa appears in an evening dress, holding out her arms:
“I’m drunk, darling.” Her body swayed like a snake’s dancing to music. She tossed her marcelled hair about, and suddenly, with a tinkle of rings, slumped into a chair with ancient Russian carvings. Scars glowed on her powdered back.
They are alone, drinking glass after glass of muscatel. She holds out her glass. “Mon vieux, to Maupassant.” He kisses her on the lips, which quiver and swell. “You’re funny,” she mumbled. The inevitable perhaps happens. The ending, however, is not that but something unexpected and amazing.
Drawing conclusions, Chekhov said, is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented.
So it is with Babel. The stories submit themselves. Life is life, Babel says, and on dark velvet presents marvelous jewels. As it happened, the Holocaust followed a few years after him. What he saw and felt was a presentiment. He wrote the merciful and unforgivable at the same time. The furnace doors swing open, and a fierce, frightening heat comes forth, but the incandescence brightens life like the sun.
By the 1930s the optimism of the Revolution had hardened into grim reality as Stalin tightened his grip. Soviet orthodoxy ruled, together with the secret police, and the independence of writers disappeared. In 1936 in great, Inquisition-like trials, former high officials, Party rivals, and men who had been prominent in the Revolution confessed sins and were executed. The terror was in full force. Nikolai Yezhov became head of the notorious NKVD. His wife, Evgenia Gladun, had an earlier love affair with Babel and remained friendly. He was a guest at their house a number of times, driven in part by a curiosity about how things were going higher up in the ominous times. A great knell was Gorky’s death in June of 1936. “Now they are not going to let me live,” Babel predicted. The former minister of defense, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and other top commanders were arrested, tried in secret, and executed. Then Yezhov himself was replaced by a brutal Georgian, Lavrentiy Beria, and subsequently arrested. In his obligatory confession he implicated Babel.
Early in the mornin
g of May 15, 1939, Babel was arrested and charged with espionage. The stories he had been working on, his notebooks and diaries, were all confiscated. Like other prisoners he was allowed no visitors. Stalin worked late and sometimes made telephone calls from his offices in the Kremlin, one night to Ilya Ehrenburg. Was Babel a good writer? Stalin asked.
“A wonderful writer,” Ehrenburg replied.
“Zhalko [pity],” Stalin said and hung up.
The verdict had already been decided. Babel remained in prison, without communication of any kind, for eight months. He made a forced confession that he tried unsuccessfully to retract. The police photograph of him shows a swollen face and dark, bruised eyes—his eyeglasses, without which he could barely see, had been taken from him. An indictment was handed to him on January 25, 1940, and the next day there was a twenty-minute agony called a trial with no lawyer or witnesses. The sentence was death, to be carried out immediately. His final words were a plea: “Let me finish my work . . .”
What he felt as he walked to the chamber or courtyard in which he would be executed, shaken and alone, we cannot know. It may have been memories, his wife, daughter, even the fate of the folders of manuscripts that had been taken from him. Then, standing or kneeling near a wall, like countless others, he was shot. His wife and daughter were told that he had been convicted but sentenced by the military tribunal to “ten years without the right to correspond.” Despite rumors that he was alive in the camps and purportedly seen there by witnesses, his true fate remained unknown until 1954, after Stalin’s death, when Babel was officially rehabilitated, the facts made public, and the verdict set aside. Despite searches in the KGB archives, his manuscripts have never been found. It was claimed that they had been burned.
There are writers one always goes back to, the pages never lose their power. For me, Babel is one such.
Narrative Magazine
Spring 2009
Like a Retired Confidential Agent, Graham Greene Hides Quietly in Paris
The greatest living English writer resides in a large and somewhat sparsely furnished apartment on the second floor of a bourgeois building in Paris on the Boulevard Malesherbes. Though he has owned it for years, his name is missing from the inked list of tenants in the concierge’s window downstairs. On his telephone, in place of a number, is a blank disk. Like a retired informer or spy or the principal figure in a notorious criminal case, Graham Greene lives in anonymity and quiet.
He was seventy-one last October and is extremely guarded about his personal life. Still, most facts about so famous a man are well-known. He is the son of a schoolmaster and has two grown children, a son and a daughter. He has been separated from his wife for more than twenty-five years.
Through the large windows one can see the bare branches of trees and the celebrated blue of the Paris sky. Greene wears an old cardigan sweater and gray trousers. His eyes, behind horn-rimmed glasses, are a pale, watery blue. Thin hair, the faded color of an old coat, is gray on the sides. From his photographs one recognizes him instantly; he looks like a prisoner long confined.
Greene’s speech is soft and reserved with a vague scholarly impediment. There is a certain sense of loneliness, especially when he is talking of domestic life: “very desirable, but marriage is a bit tricky,” he says. “Yes, one is always looking for a happy couple. It’s hard to find a man and woman one likes equally, but marvelous when you do.”
This season the Royal Shakespeare Company in London put on his new play, The Return of A. J. Raffles. It’s a comedy about the famous gentleman thief created by E. W. Hornung, brother-in-law of the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had Dr. Watson, and Raffles also had a devoted chronicler and accomplice with the more appealing name of Bunny. The Raffles stories were enormously popular, in which Hornung wrote a classic line that will probably live as long as his dashing criminal. Of Conan Doyle’s master detective, he punned, “Though he might be more humble, there is no police like Holmes.”
This is Greene’s fifth play and was not well received by most of the critics. Among its predecessors are The Living Room, The Potting Shed, and The Complaisant Lover. He has had partial success in the theater. Like another great Catholic writer, François Mauriac, he came to it late. He was forty-nine when The Living Room was first produced in London. It was a sensation, though it failed in New York the following year, 1954. “A dreadful flop,” he admits. “It was very miscast. I’ve never had much success in America with plays.”
With everything else, his serious novels, his thrillers or “entertainments” as he once preferred to call them, his films, he has had enormous success. Almost alone among important writers, Greene has had a long and close connection with the movies. It’s a kind of love-hate relationship, he confesses. Many of his books (The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians, Orient Express) have been turned into films, not all of them satisfactorily as far as he is concerned, though he has scripted a number of them and collaborated on the making of others.
In addition, there were three years during which he reviewed films for British journals and the famous suit brought against him by Shirley Temple when she was the moppet darling of Hollywood. He wrote, in effect, that she had an erotic appeal to a nation of dirty old men. He had to hide out in Mexico because of it.
Nevertheless, he still finds films interesting. “I go to them much more than to the theater. I liked Chinatown and The Last Detail. I like Nicholson, Polanski . . . I like Milos Forman. I’ve never been enthusiastic for Hitchcock. His plots don’t stand up. When you leave the theater you’re always saying, but why didn’t he ring the police? Some old films do stand up. Casablanca. And I saw on TV last year Murnau’s Dracula and I thought it was terrific.”
On the table a tray of ice cubes is slowly melting. There is a drink in Greene’s hand. He’s had this apartment for ten years; before that he always lived in hotels. He likes the neighborhood, it has rather a village atmosphere. There’s a very good butcher, a good boulangerie. He is fond of food and wine. “If I eat, I must drink,” he explains, and also it is a great help in getting people to talk.
Every real writer creates a world. Greene’s is a relentless one of sinning and divided men that is made bearable only through God and His mercy. In book after book there is forgiveness for the repentant sinner at the final hour. In the course of writing them all Greene has become, following his conversion at the age of twenty-two, the most important Catholic novelist alive. He has a dazzling sense of story, fine dialogue, and an eye for detail. He doesn’t joke. He is too involved in his obsessions. Irony, yes, there is often that, and even a kind of comedy, but beneath it is a schoolmaster’s firm will. Above all, his characters live. Scobie, the doomed policeman in The Heart of the Matter. The whiskey priest and his pursuer in The Power and the Glory. Pinkie in Brighton Rock. Coral Musker. Dr. Czinner. They are people one never forgets.
The writing table at which Greene works is almost bare. There is a TV on a set of library steps, three or four chairs, some paintings on the wall, but the principal decoration is books. The shelves hold Boswell, Ibsen, and H. G. Wells, as well as Greene’s great favorites, Henry James and Conrad. Of James, he has said that he “is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.” And as for Joseph Conrad, the Polish sea captain who carved out an immortal niche in the literature of a country not his own, Greene stopped reading him in 1932 because he was simply too influential a force.
The mystery writers Edgar Wallace and John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps) must also be counted as influences. Wallace was a phenomenally popular writer. There was a time when one of every five books sold in England was his. From him Greene learned a great deal: the restrained voice, the variety of characters, the technique of advancing a narrative, and, perhaps most of all, the mysterious ability to create a legend.
Greene still reads a lot, three or four books a week, and notes them in his diary, putting down a litt
le tick or cross in judgment. Among the Americans, he likes Kurt Vonnegut. Gore Vidal: “I like his essays.” Alison Lurie. Philip Roth, not much. Bellow, he finds rather difficult. As for his own work, even coming from a long-lived family it is not easy, he admits, to think of starting on a book these days. “The fears,” he says simply, “not knowing whether one will live to see the end of it.”
He has been a published writer since 1929 with his first novel, The Man Within. There have been novels, travel books, thrillers, films, plays, short stories, and autobiography as well as essays and reviews. His output has been protean and the breadth of his travel and experience, vast. Many of his settings are foreign. The Honorary Consul, for instance, resulted from a three months’ trip to South America. Though his command of Spanish covers only the present tense, he was visiting in Argentina and saw the town of Corrientes one day while going up the river to Asunción. Corrientes became the scene of the book. He has been in Africa, Mexico, Russia, and China (“I found it depressing”), served as an intelligence officer in Sierra Leone during the war, smoked opium in Indochina where he went as a correspondent regularly beginning in 1951, and flew in French bombers between Saigon and Hanoi. He has been an editor in a publishing house, a film reviewer, a critic, a life as varied and glamorous as that of André Malraux, another great literary and political figure. Like Malraux, he asks to be read as a political writer and has set his fiction firmly in that world. The lesson in the books of Graham Greene is the great lesson of the times: one must take sides.