by Isaac Babel
2 The Radziwiłłs and Sapiehas were among the most powerful princely families in the Commonwealth. Princes Janusz Radziwiłł (1880–1967) and Eustachy Sapieha (1881–1963) were members of Piłsudski’s government; Sapieha served in the Polish cavalry during the Polish–Soviet War. The town of Radzivilov, mentioned repeatedly throughout the cycle, is named after a member of the Radziwiłł family.
A LETTER
HERE IS A LETTER HOME, dictated to me by Kurdyukov, a boy in our detachment. It doesn’t deserve oblivion. I copied it out, without any embellishment, and pass it on word for word, in accordance with the truth.
Dear mama Yevdokiya Fyodorovna. In the first lines of this letter I hasten to inform you that, thank the good Lord, I’m alive and well, which same I’d like to hear from you. And I bow low before you, my white brow on the damp earth… (There follows a list of kith, kin, godparents. We’ll omit it and proceed to the second paragraph.)
Dear mama Yevdokiya Fyodorovna Kurdyukova. I hasten to write that I’m in Comrade Budyonny’s Red Cavalry,1 and so is my godfather Nikon Vasilich, who is at present a Red Hero. He took me to work for him, in the Polit-Department’s detachment, where we distribute pamphlets and newspapers along the front—the Moscow Central Committee’s Izvestiya, the Moscow Pravda and our own merciless paper The Red Cavalryman, which every frontline fighter here wants to read all the way through, because then they get the heroic spirit and hack the damn Polacks to pieces, and I get along here at Nikon Vasilich’s real fine.
Dear mama Yevdokiya Fyodorovna. Send whatever you can spare. I’m asking—slaughter our speckled boar and put together a parcel, send it to Comrade Budyonny’s Polit-Department, make it out to Vasily Kurdyukov. I lay myself down every night without eating, without any clothes, so it’s mighty cold. Write me a letter about my Styopa—he alive, dead? I’m asking—look after him and write me about him. Is he still clipping like he used to, and also about the mange on his front legs, and is he shod? I’m asking, dear mama Yevdokiya Fyodorovna, keep washing his front legs with soap all the time—the soap I left behind the icons—and if papa’s used it up, buy some more in Krasnodar so God don’t abandon you. And I can tell you that the land’s plenty poor here. The peasants run to the woods with their horses, hiding out from our Red eagles. There’s not much wheat, you know, and it’s awful small—good for a laugh. Those with land, they sow rye and oats. Hops grow on sticks in these parts, so they come out very neat—and everyone makes moonshine.
In the second lines of this letter, I hasten to describe about papa, how he chopped down my brother Fyodor Timofeich Kurdyukov a year back. Our Red Brigade, under Comrade Pavlichenko, was advancing on the city of Rostov, when there was treason in our ranks. And papa was with Denikin2 at the time, a company commander. The people that saw him back then, they said he had medals all over him, like under the old regime. And on account of this treason, all of us were taken prisoner, and papa caught sight of brother Fyodor Timofeich. And papa took to slashing Fyodor with a sabre, calling him a worthless hide, red dog, son of a bitch, and all sorts of things, and he slashed him till it was dark, till Fyodor Timofeich was gone. I wrote you a letter then, how your Fedya is lying without a cross. But papa, he caught me with the letter and he said, “You’re your mother’s sons, you take after that whore—I filled her belly up once, I’ll do it again—my life’s ruined—I’ll kill off my own seed for the sake of justice,” and all sorts of things. I suffered at his hands like the saviour Jesus Christ. Only soon I got away from papa and found my way to my unit, under Comrade Pavlichenko. And our brigade received orders to go to the city of Voronezh for reinforcements, and so we got reinforcements there, along with horses, cartridge pouches, revolvers and everything we had coming to us. As for Voronezh, I can describe about it, dear mama Yevdokiya Fyodorovna, that it’s a real fine town, probably a trifle bigger than Krasnodar—the people are mighty handsome, and the river’s fit for bathing. They gave us two pounds of bread a day, half a pound of meat, and proper sugar, so that when we’d get up we’d drank sweet tea, and we’d have the same in the evening so we forgot about hunger, and for lunch I’d go to brother Semyon Timofeich’s for pancakes or goose, and then I’d lie down for a rest. At the time the whole regiment wanted Semyon Timofeich for a commander, on account of how wild he is, and so Comrade Budyonny gave the order, and Semyon got two stallions, proper clothes, a whole separate cart for this and that, and the Order of the Red Banner—and they gave me special consideration as his brother. From then on, say some neighbour treats you badly—Semyon Timofeich can cut him right down, just like that. Then we gave chase to General Denikin, and we cut them down by the thousands and drove them into the Black Sea, only papa was nowhere to be found—and Semyon Timofeich looked for him all over the front, on account of he missed our brother Fyodor. But you know full well, dear mama, about papa and how stubborn he is—so what did he do? He went and dyed his beard from red to black and holed up in the town of Maykop, in civilian clothes, so that nobody there had a clue that he’d been as much a constable as could be under the old regime. But the truth, it’ll always out. Godfather Nikon Vasilich happened to see him in some local’s hut and wrote a letter to Semyon Timofeich about it. So we get on our horses and ride two hundred versts3—myself, brother Senka and some boys from the village what were willing.
And what did we see in this Maykop? We saw that the rear don’t feel a whit for the front, that there’s treason all over the place and that it’s full of yids, like under the old regime. And Semyon Timofeich got into a fine quarrel with the yids in Maykop, who didn’t want to hand papa over and put him in prison under lock and key, saying an order came down from Comrade Trotsky about not hacking prisoners up, we’ll judge him ourselves, don’t get sore, he’ll get his. But Semyon Timofeich proved that he’s regimental commander and has every Order of the Red Banner from Comrade Budyonny, and he threatened to cut down anyone who stood up for papa and wouldn’t hand him over, and the boys from the village did a little threatening too. Soon as Semyon Timofeich got papa, they set to whipping him and lined all the fighting boys up in the yard, in proper military order. And then Senka splashed water on papa Timofei Rodionych’s beard, and dye came dripping off the beard. And Senka asked Timofei Rodionych:
“Well, papa, does it feel good, being in my hands?”
“No,” said papa. “It’s bad.”
Then Senka asked:
“And Fedya, when you were slashing at him, was it good for him, in your hands?”
“No,” said papa. “It was bad for Fedya.”
Then Senka asked:
“And did you think, papa, that it’d be bad for you?”
“No,” said papa. “I didn’t think it’d be bad for me.”
Then Senka turned to the people and said:
“Well, I think that if yours ever get ahold of me, there won’t be any mercy. And now, papa, we’ll finish you off…”
And Timofei Rodionych commenced cursing Senka—mother this, Mother of God that—and smacking Senka in the face, and Semyon Timofeich sent me away from the yard, so I can’t, dear mama Yevdokiya Fyodorovna, describe to you how they finished papa off, seeing how I was sent away from the yard.
After that we had a stop in the city of Novorossiysk. Of this town I can say that there’s no land beyond it, only water, the Black Sea, and we stayed there right up until May, when we set out for the Polish front, and now we’re giving the Polacks real hell…
I remain your dear son Vasily Timofeich Kurdyukov. Mama, look after Styopka so God don’t abandon you.
That’s Kurdyukov’s letter, not a word of it altered. When I’d finished, he took the paper covered with writing and stuck it inside his shirt, next to his naked body.
“Kurdyukov,” I asked the boy, “was your father bad?”
“My father was a dog,” he said grimly.
“Is your mother any better?”
“Mother’s proper. If you want—here’s our folk…”
He handed me a creased photog
raph. It showed Timofei Kurdyukov, a broad-shouldered constable with his official cap and a combed beard, rigid, with high cheekbones, and with a sparkling gaze in his colourless, senseless eyes. Next to him, in a bamboo armchair, glimmered a tiny peasant woman in an untucked blouse, with sickly pale, timid features. And against the wall, against this pitiful provincial photographic background, with its flowers and doves, hulked two boys—monstrously huge, dumb, broad-faced, goggle-eyed and frozen as if on drill: the two Kurdyukov brothers—Fyodor and Semyon.
Notes
1 Though not a Cossack himself, Semyon Mikhaylovich Budyonny (1883–1973) was born and raised among the Don Cossacks of the Rostov region. He was drafted into the Imperial Army in 1903, became a cavalryman and served in the Russo-Japanese War. He became a cavalry officer in 1908 and served with distinction in the First World War, although he had repeated trouble with his superiors. He sided with the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution of 1917 and formed a Red Cavalry detachment in the Don region, which became the First Cavalry Army in 1919. He fought at Tsaritsyn and Voronezh, where he became a close associate of Kliment Voroshilov and Joseph Stalin (see note on Voroshilov on p. 213). After the Civil War, Budyonny’s status climbed steadily; he was named a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935. Although Stalin relieved him of his duty as Commander-in-Chief of the south-western and southern fronts during the Second World War, Budyonny remained in the leadership’s good graces and was named a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1958, 1963 and 1968.
2 General Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872–1947) was one of the leaders of the anti-Bolshevik White movement in the Russian Civil War. He commanded the White forces in southern Russia.
3 verst: an obsolete Russian unit of measure, equivalent to 3,500 feet or approximately one kilometre.
THE CHIEF OF THE REMOUNT SERVICE
THE WHOLE VILLAGE is whining. The cavalry’s trampling the grain and changing horses. The cavalrymen are swapping their wretched nags for workhorses. No one’s to blame. Without horses there’s no army.
But knowing this doesn’t make the peasants feel any better. The peasants crowd around headquarters and won’t budge.
Behind them, on ropes, they drag jibbing old hacks whose weak legs slip and skid. The peasant men have been deprived of their breadwinners; sensing a bitter courage welling up inside them and aware that it won’t last long, they hurry to rail hopelessly at the authorities, at God, at their miserable fates.
Zh——, the chief of staff, stands on the porch in full uniform. Shielding his inflamed eyelids, he listens to the peasants’ complaints, evidently paying attention. But this attention of his is nothing more than a ploy. Like any well-trained and overworked employee, he’s able to halt the workings of his brain altogether during vacant minutes of existence. In these few minutes of blissful senselessness our chief of staff overhauls his worn-out machine.
And so it is this time around, with the peasants.
To the soothing accompaniment of their disjointed and desperate din, Zh—— observes, from the sidelines, the soft jostling in his brain that heralds purity and power of thought. Arriving at the proper break, he seizes the final peasant sob, snarls authoritatively and steps back into headquarters to work.
This time he didn’t even have to snarl. Suddenly Dyakov, a former circus athlete and now chief of the Remount Service—a red-skinned, grey-moustached fellow with a black cloak and silver stripes on his red Cossack trousers—came galloping up to the porch on his fiery Anglo-Arabian.
“The Father’s blessing to all honest bastards!” he shouted, reining in his steed at full gallop, and at that very moment a mangy nag—one of the horses the Cossacks had swapped—keeled over right under his stirrups.
“Look there, Comrade Commander!” a peasant howled, slapping himself on his trousers. “Look—that there’s what your boys hand our boys… You ever see a thing like that? Try farming on that…”
“For this steed,” Dyakov began, distinctly and weightily. “For this steed, my venerable friend, you are fully entitled to receive fifteen thousand roubles from the Remount Service, and if this steed were livelier, well, that being the case, then, my beloved friend, you’d receive twenty thousand roubles from the Remount Service. Now, however, the steed fell down—but that’s no matter. If the steed falls and gets back up, it’s a steed; if, to put it another way, it doesn’t get up, then it’s no steed. But this fine little filly, well, I say she’ll get up for me…”
“Oh, lordy lord, mother gracious!” the peasant threw up his hands. “How’s she supposed to get up, the poor thing… Poor thing’ll croak for sure…”
“You’re insulting the steed, brother,” Dyakov responded with deep conviction. “Brother, you’re downright blaspheming.” He deftly swung his statuesque athlete’s body from the saddle. All splendid and deft, as if he were on the stage, he straightened his magnificent legs, which were gartered by belts at the knees, and approached the dying animal. It stared sadly at Dyakov with its deep, grim eye, licked some invisible command off his crimson palm—and suddenly the exhausted horse felt an onrush of power flowing from this grey-haired, vigorous and dashing Romeo. Weaving her snout in the air, her tottering legs slipping beneath her, the nag sensed the whip impatiently, imperiously tickling her belly and slowly, carefully rose to her feet. And we all saw a thin wrist in a flowing sleeve pat the dirty mane and a whip cling to the bleeding flank with a whine. Trembling all over, the nag stood on her four legs, never taking her dog-like, fearful, loving eyes off Dyakov.
“So it’s a steed,” Dyakov said to the peasant, and added softly, “and you were bellyaching, my friend…”
Tossing his reins to his orderly, the chief of the Remount Service took all four porch steps in one stride and, with a flap of his opera cloak, disappeared into headquarters.
Belyov, July 1920
PAN APOLEK
PAN APOLEK’S wise and wonderful life went to my head like an old wine. In Novograd-Volynsk, among the gnarled ruins of that hastily crushed city, fate threw at my feet a gospel that had been sheltered from the world. Surrounded by the simple-hearted glow of halos, I vowed to follow the example of Pan Apolek. And the sweetness of dreamy malice, bitter contempt for the curs and swine of humanity, the fire of silent and intoxicating vengeance—I sacrificed them all to this new vow.
*
An icon hung high on the wall of the house from which the Novograd priest had fled. It bore an inscription: “The Death of the Baptist”. It didn’t take long for me to recognize in John the likeness of a man I’d once seen.
I remember: A summer morning’s gossamer stillness lingered between straight, bright walls. The sun had cast a straight beam at the foot of the painting. It swarmed with sparkling dust. John’s lank figure descended upon me from the blue depths of the niche. A black cloak hung solemnly on this implacable, repulsively gaunt body. Drops of blood glistened in the cloak’s fastenings. John’s head had been crookedly severed from his tattered neck. It lay on a clay dish grasped firmly in a warrior’s big yellow fingers. The dead man’s face seemed familiar. I felt the light touch of a premonition. The dead head lying on the clay dish had been modelled on Pan Romuald, the fugitive priest’s assistant. The tiny trunk of a snake, its scales glittering floridly, trailed from the grinning mouth. Its pale-pink little head, full of animation, stood out magnificently against the deep background of the cloak.
I marvelled at the painter’s artistry, his grim inventiveness. The next day I marvelled even more at the red-cheeked Mother of God hanging above the matrimonial bed of Pani Eliza, the old priest’s housekeeper. Both canvases bore the marks of a single brush. The fleshy face of the Mother of God was a portrait of Pani Eliza. And that clue solved the mystery of the Novograd icons. The clue led to Pani Eliza, to the kitchen, where the shades of old feudal Poland gathered on fragrant evenings, the holy-fool artist at their head. But was he a holy fool, this Pan Apolek, who had populated the surrounding villages with angels and promoted the lame convert Janek to sainthood?
>
He had come here on a plain summer day thirty years ago, with blind Gottfried. The two friends—Apolek and Gottfried—approached Shmerel’s tavern, which stands on the Rovno highway about two versts from the city limits. Apolek had a box of paints in his right hand and was leading the blind accordion player with his left. The melodious tread of their hobnailed German boots resounded with calm and hope. A canary-yellow scarf hung from Apolek’s scrawny neck, and three chocolate-coloured feathers fluttered in the blind man’s Tyrolean hat.
In the tavern the newcomers laid their paints and accordion on the window sill. The artist unwound his scarf, as endless as a fairground magician’s ribbon. Then he went out into the yard, stripped naked and doused his pink, narrow, frail body with frigid water. Shmerel’s wife brought the guests raisin vodka and a bowl of zrazy.1 Sated, Gottfried placed the accordion on his sharp knees. He sighed, threw back his head and set his skinny fingers in motion. The sounds of Heidelberg songs filled the Jewish tavern’s walls. Apolek joined in with a quavering voice. It was as if an organ had been brought to Shmerel’s from the Church of St Indehilda and two muses had alighted upon it, side by side, in their motley cotton scarves and hobnailed German boots.
The guests sang until nightfall, then they put both the accordion and the paints away in canvas sacks, and Pan Apolek, with a low bow, handed a sheet of paper to Brajna, the tavern keeper’s wife.
“Gracious Pani Brajna,” he said. “Accept from this wandering artist, baptized under the Christian name of Apolinary, this portrait of you—as a sign of our humble gratitude, a testament to your splendid hospitality. If Our Lord Jesus should prolong my days and strengthen my art, I’ll return to copy this portrait in paint. Pearls will suit your hair, and we’ll adorn your bosom with an emerald necklace…”