by Isaac Babel
GEDALI
ON SABBATH EVES I am tormented by the rich sorrow of memories. Long ago, on these evenings, my grandfather would stroke the volumes of Ibn Ezra with his yellow beard. The old woman, in a lace headdress, would conjure with her gnarled fingers over the Sabbath candle and sob sweetly. On these evenings my child’s heart would sway like a boat on enchanted waves… O the Talmuds of my childhood, reduced to dust! O the rich sorrow of memories!
I roam Zhitomir and search for the shy star. By the ancient synagogue, by her yellow and indifferent walls, old Jews are selling chalk, bluing, wicks—Jews with the beards of prophets, with passionate rags on their sunken chests…
Here before me is the bazaar and the death of the bazaar. The fat soul of abundance is killed. Mute padlocks hang on the stalls and the granite pavement is as clean as a dead man’s bald pate. It twinkles and fades, the shy star…
Success came to me later, came just before sunset. Gedali’s shop was tucked away among closely packed rows of stalls. Dickens, where was your shade that evening? In that old curiosity shop you’d have seen gilt shoes and ships’ ropes, an antique compass and a stuffed eagle, a Winchester hunting rifle engraved with the date 1810, and a broken stewpan.
Old Gedali paces around his treasures in the pink emptiness of the evening—a little shop-owner in smoky glasses and a green frock coat reaching down to the ground. He rubs his little white hands, tugs at his little grey beard and, bowing his head, heeds the invisible voices drifting down to him.
This shop is like the box of an inquisitive and serious boy who’ll someday become a professor of botany. The shop has both buttons and a dead butterfly, and its little owner is named Gedali. Everyone’s left the bazaar, but Gedali remains. He wends his way through a labyrinth of globes, skulls and dead flowers, whisks his motley brush of rooster feathers and blows the dust off the perished flowers.
We are sitting on empty beer kegs. Gedali twists and untwists his narrow beard. His top hat sways above us like a black turret. Warm air floats past us. The sky changes colour. Up there, high up, delicate blood flows from an overturned bottle, and I am enveloped in the faint odour of decay.
“The revolution—we’ll say ‘yes’ to her, but will we say ‘no’ to the Sabbath?” so begins Gedali, entwining me in the silk straps of his smoky eyes. “‘Yes,’ I cry to the revolution, ‘yes,’ I cry to her, but she hides from Gedali, and all she sends our way is shooting…”
“The sun doesn’t enter eyes that are closed,” I answer the old man, “but we will rip those closed eyes open…”
“The Pole closed my eyes,” the old man whispers, almost inaudibly. “The Pole is a mad dog. He takes a Jew and pulls out his beard—eh, that cur! And now they’re beating him good, the mad dog. That’s wonderful, that’s the revolution! And then the one who beat the Pole says to me, ‘We have to take your gramophone in account, Gedali…’ ‘But I love music, Pani,’ I tell the revolution. ‘You don’t know what you like, Gedali—I’ll shoot at you and then you’ll find out, and I can’t help shooting, because I’m the revolution…’”
“She can’t help shooting, Gedali,” I say to the old man, “because she’s the revolution…”
“But the Pole shot, my dear Pan, because he’s the counter-revolution. You shoot because you’re the revolution. But the revolution is happiness. And happiness doesn’t like orphans in the house. Good deeds are done by good men. The revolution is the good deed of good men. But good men do not kill. So the revolution is the work of bad men. But the Poles, too, are bad men. So who will tell Gedali where’s the revolution and where’s the counter-revolution? I once studied the Talmud—I love the commentaries of Rashi, the books of Maimonides. And there are other men of wisdom in Zhitomir. And here we are, all learned men, falling on our faces and crying out loud, ‘Woe unto us, where is the sweet revolution?…’”
The old man fell silent. And we saw the first star cutting its path along the Milky Way.
“The Sabbath is coming,” Gedali pronounced with significance. “Jews must go to the synagogue… Pan Comrade,” he said, rising up, the top hat swaying like a black turret on his head, “bring a few good people to Zhitomir. Oh, what a shortage we have in our town. Oh, what a shortage! Bring good people, and we’ll give them all our gramophones. We aren’t ignorant. The International… We know what the International is. And I want an International of good people—I want them to take every soul into account and give it a first-grade ration. Here, soul, eat, go ahead, get some happiness out of life. It’s you, Pan Comrade—it’s you who doesn’t know what they eat the International with…”
“They eat it with gunpowder,” I answered the old man, “and season it with the best blood…”
And so she ascended her throne out of the deep-blue darkness, the young Sabbath.
“Gedali,” I say, “today is Friday, and the evening is here. Where can I get a Jewish shortcake, a Jewish glass of tea, with some of that retired God in the glass?…”
“No place,” Gedali answers, hanging a padlock on his box. “No place. There’s a cook-shop next door, and good people did trade there, but nobody eats there nowadays, they weep…”
He fastened his green frock coat on three bone buttons. He dusted himself off with the rooster feathers, splashed a little water on his soft palms and walked off—tiny, lonely, dreamy, with a black top hat on his head and a big prayer book under his arm.
The Sabbath is coming. Gedali—the founder of a hopeless International—has gone off to the synagogue to pray.
MY FIRST GOOSE
SAVITSKY, the Sixth Division commander, rose when he saw me, and I marvelled at the beauty of his gigantic body.1 He rose and—with the purple of his breeches, with his crimson cap tilted to one side, with the decorations hammered into his chest—cut the hut in half, as a banner cuts the sky. He smelt of perfume and the overwhelmingly sweet coolness of soap. His long legs looked like a pair of girls clad in shiny shoulder-length jackboots.
He smiled at me, slapped his whip against the table and reached for the order that the chief of staff had just dictated. It was an order for Ivan Chesnokov to advance in the direction of Chugunov-Dobryvodka with the regiment entrusted to him and, upon coming into contact with the enemy, to destroy the same…
“…For said destruction,” wrote the division commander, filling the whole sheet with his scrawl, “I hold Chesnokov entirely responsible, under pain of capital punishment, and I’ll shoot him down on the spot, which you, Comrade Chesnokov, have no reason to doubt, as this isn’t our first month working together at the front…”
The Sixth Division commander signed the order with a flourish, tossed it to his orderlies and turned his face towards me. His grey eyes were dancing with joy.
“Report!” he shouted, and cleaved the air with his whip. Then he read the paper assigning me to the division staff.
“Make it an order!” said the division commander. “Make it an order and issue him a soldier’s provisions—but he’ll take care of his own privates. Can you read and write?”
“I can,” I said, envying the iron and flowers of his youth. “I’m a graduate in law of Petersburg University…”
“You’re one of those pansies!” he shouted, laughing. “And with glasses on your nose. What a little louse!… They send you without so much as checking with us—and you get cut to pieces for glasses around here. Think you’ll get along, do you?”
“I’ll get along,” I said, and went off to the village with the quartermaster to find lodging for the night. The quartermaster carried my little trunk on his shoulders. The village street lay before us. The dying sun, yellow and round as a pumpkin, was breathing its last rosy breath into the sky.
We came up to a hut with painted carvings of garlands around the windows. The quartermaster suddenly stopped and said with an apologetic grin:
“We’ve got trouble with glasses around here, and you can’t do a thing about it. A man of the highest distinction—he’s a goner for sure. But you ruin a l
ady, the nicest little lady, and our fighting boys treat you real kind…”
He hesitated a moment with my little trunk on his shoulders, came right up to me, then jumped back in despair and ran into the first courtyard. Cossacks were sitting on hay in there, shaving one another.
“All right, men,” said the quartermaster, placing my little trunk on the ground. “According to Comrade Savitsky’s orders, you have to take this fellow into your billet, and no nonsense, on account of his having suffered on the fields of learning…”
The quartermaster reddened and walked away without looking back. I raised my hand to my cap and saluted the Cossacks. A young lad with lank, flaxen hair and a handsome Ryazan face walked up to my little trunk and flung it over the gate. Then he turned his backside towards me and, with unusual skill, began emitting shameful sounds.
“Artillery, zero calibre!” an older Cossack shouted and laughed. “Rapid fire…”
The lad exhausted his simple art and walked off. Then, crawling along the ground, I began gathering up the manuscripts and tattered old clothes that had fallen out of my little trunk. I gathered them up and carried them to the far end of the yard. Pork was cooking in a kettle that stood on bricks near the hut. It sent up a column of smoke, like one’s family home in the village seen from a distance, mingling inside me a feeling of hunger and unprecedented loneliness. I covered my battered little trunk with hay, made a pillow out of it and lay down on the ground to read Lenin’s speech at the Second Congress of the Comintern in Pravda. The sun fell on me from behind jagged hillocks, Cossacks stepped on my legs and the lad made fun of me relentlessly; Lenin’s beloved lines travelled down a thorny path and couldn’t reach me. So I put the paper aside and went over to the landlady, who was spinning yarn on the porch.
“Hostess,” I said, “I gotta eat…”
The old woman lifted the flooded whites of her purblind eyes towards me and lowered them again.
“Comrade,” she said, after a pause, “this business makes me want to hang myself.”
“Mother of fucking Christ,” I muttered angrily, and pushed the old woman in the chest with my fist. “I didn’t come here to reason with you…”
Turning around, I saw someone else’s sabre lying close by. A dour goose was wandering around the yard, calmly preening its feathers. I caught up with him, bent him to the ground. The goose’s head cracked under my boot, cracked and bled. The white neck lay stretched out in the dung and the wings folded over the dead bird.
“Mother of fucking Christ!” I said, digging the sabre into the goose. “Roast it up for me, hostess.”
The old woman, her blindness and glasses glinting, picked up the bird, wrapped it in her apron and carried it off to the kitchen.
“Comrade,” she said, after a pause, “I want to hang myself,” and shut the door behind her.
In the yard the Cossacks were already sitting around their kettle. They were motionless, straight-backed as priests. They hadn’t looked at the goose.
“Our kind of lad,” one of them said, winked, and scooped up some cabbage soup with his spoon.
The Cossacks commenced their dinner with the restrained elegance of peasants who hold one another in respect. I wiped the sabre down with sand, went out of the gate and came back in again, languishing. The moon hung over the yard like a cheap earring.
“Little brother,” the eldest of the Cossacks, Surovkov, suddenly said to me, “come and have a bite with us till your goose is ready…”
He drew a spare spoon from his boot and handed it to me. We supped up the home-made cabbage soup and ate the pork.
“What’re they writing in the newspaper?” asked the lad with the flaxen hair, making room for me.
“In the newspaper Lenin writes…” I said, pulling out Pravda. “Lenin writes we have a shortage in everything.”
And loudly, like a deaf man triumphant, I read Lenin’s speech to the Cossacks.
Evening enveloped me in the bracing dampness of its twilight sheets—evening laid its motherly palms on my blazing forehead. I read and rejoiced, and caught, rejoicing, the mysterious curve of Lenin’s straight line.
“Truth tickles every nostril,” Surovkov said when I’d finished. “Question is, how do you pull it out of the pile? But Lenin hits it straight away, like a hen pecking at a grain.”
That’s what Surovkov, platoon commander of the staff squadron, said about Lenin, and then we went to sleep in the hayloft. There were six of us, huddling together for warmth, our legs tangled, under a roof full of holes that let in the stars. I had dreams—dreamt of women—and only my heart, crimson with murder, creaked and bled.
Notes
1 The character of Savitsky is based on Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko (1895–1970), the son of a Ukrainian peasant from what is now the Odessa region, who was drafted into the Imperial Army in 1914 and joined the Red Army in 1918. He commanded the Sixth Division from November 1919 to August 1920; he was wounded five times during the Civil War and the Polish conflict. He had participated in the defence of Tsaritsyn (see note on Voroshilov on p. 213), where he befriended Semyon Budyonny and Joseph Stalin. Timoshenko rose to become a People’s Commissar for Defence and a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1940. His daughter married Stalin’s son in 1944. After commanding troops on various fronts during the Second World War, Timoshenko became Inspector-General of the Defence Ministry.
THE REBBE
“… ALL THINGS ARE MORTAL. Only a mother is destined for eternal life. And when a mother is no longer among the living, she leaves behind a memory that no one dares to desecrate. A mother’s memory nourishes compassion within us, just as the ocean, the boundless ocean, nourishes the rivers that cleave the universe…”
These were Gedali’s words. He pronounced them with significance. The dying evening surrounded him with the rosy haze of its sadness. The old man said:
“The doors and windows have been knocked out of Hasidism’s passionate edifice, but it is immortal, like a mother’s soul… Its eyes have been gouged from their sockets, but Hasidism still stands at the crossroads of the furious winds of history.”
So said Gedali, and, having finished his prayers at the synagogue, he led me to Rebbe Motale, the last rebbe of the Chernobyl dynasty.
Gedali and I went up the main street. White churches glittered in the distance like fields of buckwheat. A cannon wheel groaned around the corner. Two pregnant Ukrainian girls walked out of a gate, their necklaces jangling, and sat on a bench. The shy star lit up amid the orange battle scenes of sunset, and peace, a Sabbath peace, descended on the crooked roofs of the Zhitomir ghetto.
“Here,” Gedali whispered, pointing to a long house with a broken pediment.
We entered a room that was stony and barren, like a morgue. Rebbe Motale sat at the table, surrounded by liars and the bedevilled. He wore a sable cap and a white gown bound with a rope. The rebbe sat with his eyes closed and his thin fingers fumbling in the yellow down of his beard.
“Where has the Jew come from?” he asked, lifting his eyelids.
“From Odessa,” I answered.
“A pious city,” said the rebbe, “the star of our exile, the involuntary well of our calamities!… What is the Jew’s occupation?”
“I am putting the adventures of Hershel of Ostropol1 into verse.”
“A great task,” whispered the rebbe, lowering his eyelids. “The jackal whines when he is hungry, any fool is fool enough for despondency, and only the wise man rends the veil of being with laughter… What has the Jew studied?”
“The Bible.”
“What does the Jew seek?”
“Joy.”
“Reb Mordkhe,” said the tsaddik,2 shaking his beard, “let the young man take a seat at the table, let him eat this Sabbath eve with other Jews, let him rejoice that he is alive and not dead, let him clap his hands when his neighbours dance, let him drink wine if he is given wine…”
And Reb Mordkhe scurried over to me—a timeworn jester with turned-out eyelids, a tiny
hunchbacked old man, no taller than a ten-year-old boy.
“Oh, my dear and so young a man!” said the ragged Reb Mordkhe, winking at me. “Oh, how many wealthy fools I have known in Odessa, how many poor wise men I have known in Odessa! Sit down at the table, young man, and drink the wine you won’t be given…”
We all sat together—the bedevilled, the liars, the loafers. In the corner, moaning over their prayer books, stood broad-shouldered Jews who looked like fishermen and apostles. Gedali dozed against the wall in his green frock coat, like a gay little bird. And suddenly I saw a young man seated behind him, a young man with the face of Spinoza, with Spinoza’s mighty brow and a nun’s sallow face. He was smoking and quivering, like a fugitive captured after a chase and brought back to prison. Ragged Mordkhe crept up behind him, snatched the cigarette from his mouth and ran back to me.
“That is the rebbe’s son, Ilya,” Mordkhe rasped, approaching me with the bleeding flesh of his mangled eyelids. “A damned son, the last son, a disobedient son…”
Mordkhe shook his fist at the young man and spat in his face.
“Blessed be the Lord,” Rebbe Motale Bratslavsky’s voice rang out, and he broke bread with his monkish fingers. “Blessed be the God of Israel, who has chosen us among all the nations of the earth…”
The rebbe blessed the food and we sat down at table. Outside the window horses neighed and Cossacks shouted. The desert of war yawned outside the window. The rebbe’s son smoked one cigarette after another amid the silence and prayers. When the supper was over, I was the first to rise.
“My dear and so young a man,” Mordkhe muttered behind my back and pulled at my belt, “if there were no one in this world but evil rich men and poor tramps, how would holy men live?”
I gave the old man money and went out into the street. Gedali and I parted ways and I walked on to the station. There, at the station, on the agitprop train of the First Cavalry Army, I was awaited by the glare of countless lights, the magical glimmer of the wireless, the stubborn running of the printing press and an unfinished article for The Red Cavalryman newspaper.