Red Cavalry

by Isaac Babel

“Kolesnikov is leading the brigade,” said an observer positioned in a tree above our heads.

  “Very good,” Budyonny replied, lit a cigarette and closed his eyes.

  The “hurrah” fell silent. The cannonade broke off. Unnecessary shrapnel burst above the woods. And we heard the great silence of hacking.

  “Hearty little fellow,” said the Army commander, rising up. “Looking for glory. Believe he’ll pull it off.”

  Calling for horses, Budyonny rode off to the battlefield. The staff followed him.

  I happened to see Kolesnikov that same evening, an hour after the Poles were destroyed. He was riding in front of his brigade, alone, on a light-dun stallion, and dozing. His right arm hung in a sling. A Cossack cavalryman carried an unfurled banner ten paces behind him. The head squadron lazily led the others in singing bawdy verses. The brigade trailed along, dusty and endless, like peasant carts heading to a fair. Weary brass bands panted at the rear.

  That evening, in Kolesnikov’s manner of riding, I saw a Tatar khan’s lordly indifference and recognized the battle training of the celebrated Kniga,3 the wilful Pavlichenko and the captivating Savitsky.

  Brody, August 1920

  Notes

  1 koleso: wheel (Russian).

  2 sazhen: an obsolete Russian unit of measure, equivalent to seven feet, or approximately two metres.

  3 Vasily Ivanovich Kniga (1883–1961) was a Soviet military commander, who would be become a major general in 1940. He began his career as a cavalry officer in the First World War, and joined the Red Army soon after the October Revolution. During the Civil War he commanded the Thirty-First Cavalry Regiment of the First Stavropol Cavalry Division and the First Cavalry Brigade of the First Cavalry Army’s Sixth Cavalry Division. He was a native of Stavropol, and a close associate of Iosif Apanasenko (see note on Pavlichenko below) and Konstantin Arkhipov Trunov (1866–1920), the subject of the story ‘Squadron Commander Trunov’ (p. 132).

  SASHKA THE CHRIST

  SASHKA—that was his name. They nicknamed him Christ on account of his meekness. He was a community shepherd in the Cossack village and hadn’t done any hard work since the age of fourteen, when he’d caught a foul disease. This is how it all came about:

  Tarakanych, Sashka’s stepfather, went off to the city of Grozny for the winter and joined up with a peasant collective there. It turned out to be a successful collective, made up of sturdy Ryazan men. Tarakanych handled the carpentry for them and was making a nice profit. He couldn’t keep up with the orders and had the boy sent up as an apprentice; the village could get along without Sashka in the winter. Sashka put in a week with his stepfather. Then came Saturday. They laid aside their tools and sat down to tea. It was October, but the air was mild. They opened the window and heated up their second samovar. A beggar woman was going from window to window. She knocked on their sill and said:

  “Good day, visiting peasants. Consider my situation.”

  “What d’you mean, situation?” Tarakanych said. “Come on in, cripple.”

  The beggar woman fumbled behind the wall, then hopped into the room. She walked up to the table and bowed from the waist. Tarakanych snatched her kerchief, threw it aside and ran his fingers through her hair. The beggar woman’s hair was dull, hoary, all wispy and dusty.

  “Goodness, what a fine, rowdy fellow!” she said. “It’s a real circus with you, ain’t it? Don’t be squeamish just ’cause I’m old,” she whispered quickly and clambered up onto the bench. Tarakanych lay down with her and got as much pleasure out of her as he could. The beggar woman kept tossing back her head and laughing.

  “It’s finally raining on the old woman,” she laughed. “I’ll sprout two hundred poods to the desyatina…”1

  After she said this, she spotted Sashka, who was drinking tea at the table and wouldn’t lift his eyes to God’s world.

  “Your boy?” she asked Tarakanych.

  “Sort of,” said Tarakanych. “The wife’s.”

  “There’s a good boy, his eyes are popping,” said the woman. “Well, get over here, then.”

  Sashka went over to her—and caught a foul disease. But no one thought of foul diseases just then. Tarakanych gave the beggar woman the bones from their supper and a silver five-copeck piece, bright and shiny.

  “Rub it clean with sand, God-fearing woman,” said Tarakanych, “and it’ll look even finer. Offer it to the Lord God on a dark night, and that fiver, it’ll shine instead of the moon…”

  The cripple wrapped herself up in her kerchief, took the bones and left. While two weeks later, things became clear for the men. They suffered plenty from the foul disease, tried to fight it all winter, treated themselves with herbs. In the spring they went back to the village, to their peasant work.

  The village stood about nine versts from the railroad. Tarakanych and Sashka walked through the fields. The earth lay in the April dampness. Emeralds glimmered in black ditches. Green shoots embroidered an intricate stitch in the earth. And the earth gave off a sour smell, like a soldier’s wife at dawn. The first herd trickled down from the mounds, and foals played in the horizon’s blue expanses.

  Tarakanych and Sashka walked along paths that were barely noticeable.

  “Tarakanych, let me go and be a shepherd for the community,” said Sashka.

  “What for?”

  “I can’t stand it—the shepherds have such a wonderful life.”

  “I won’t permit it,” Tarakanych said.

  “For God’s sake, let me go, Tarakanych,” repeated Sashka. “All the saints came from shepherds.”

  “Sashka the saint,” the stepfather broke out laughing, “went and caught syphilis from the Mother of God.”

  They walked by the bend at the Red Bridge, passed the grove, the pasture, and saw the cross on the village church. The women were still rooting around in their vegetable gardens, while the Cossacks were sitting among the lilacs, drinking vodka and singing. It was about half a verst’s walk to Tarakanych’s hut.

  “Pray God it’ll all turn out,” Tarakanych said and crossed himself.

  They came up to the hut and looked in the little window. There was no one inside the hut. Sashka’s mother was milking the cow in the stable. The men crept up to her in silence. Then Tarakanych laughed and cried out behind the woman’s back:

  “Motya, your highness, rustle up some supper for your guests…”

  The woman turned, trembled, then ran out of the stable and began circling about the yard. Then she returned to her place and threw herself on Tarakanych’s chest, quivering.

  “What a fool you are, a homely fool,” said Tarakanych and gently pushed her away. “Show me the children…”

  “The children have left our yard,” said the woman, all white, then ran through the yard again and fell to the ground. “Oh, Alyoshenka,” she cried out wildly, “our kids have left us, feet first…”

  Tarakanych waved his hand at her and went over to the neighbours. The neighbours told him that God had taken his boy and girl last week, with typhus. Motya had written to him, but he’d probably set out before getting the letter. Tarakanych returned to the hut. His woman was kindling the stove.

  “You sure got rid of ’em, Motya, free and clear,” said Tarakanych. “Ought to rip you apart.”

  He sat down at the table and began to grieve—and grieved till bedtime, ate meat and drank vodka, and didn’t go about his chores. He snored at the table, woke up and snored again. Motya laid out the bed for herself and her husband, and for Sashka on the side. She blew out the lamp and lay down with her husband. Sashka tossed and turned on the hay in his corner, with his eyes open. He didn’t sleep and saw, as in a dream, the hut, a star in the window, the edge of the table and the horse collars under his mother’s bed. A forceful vision conquered him; he succumbed to his fantasies and rejoiced in his waking dream. It seemed to him that two silver cords descended from the sky, twisting into a thick thread, and that a cradle was attached to them—a cradle of rosewood covered with carvings. It roc
ked high above the earth and far from the sky, and the silver cords swayed and shimmered. Sashka lay in the cradle, and the air fanned him. The air, as loud as music, blew in from the fields, and a rainbow blossomed above the unripened grain.

  Sashka rejoiced in his waking dream and kept shutting his eyes, so as not to see the horse collars under his mother’s bed. Then he heard a quiet puffing coming from Motya’s stove bench and it occurred to him that Tarakanych was tumbling his mother.

  “Tarakanych,” he said loudly. “I have some business with you.”

  “What business, in the middle of the night?” Tarakanych called back angrily. “Sleep, you little louse…”

  “I swear on the Cross, I have some business with you,” Sashka replied. “Come out into the yard.”

  And out in the yard, beneath the unfading star, Sashka said to his stepfather:

  “Don’t hurt mother, Tarakanych—you’re tainted.”

  “Do you know my temper?” asked Tarakanych.

  “I know your temper, but you see mother, what a body she has. Her legs are pure, and her breast is pure. Don’t hurt her, Tarakanych. We’re tainted.”

  “Kind fellow,” the stepfather replied. “Step back from bloodshed, from my temper. Here, take twenty copecks, sleep it off, sober up…”

  “I’ve got no use for twenty copecks,” Sashka muttered. “Let me go be a shepherd for the community…”

  “I won’t permit that,” said Tarakanych.

  “Let me go and be a shepherd,” Sashka muttered, “or I’ll come clean with mother, what sort of men we are. Why should she suffer with such a body?…”

  Tarakanych turned around, went into the barn and brought out an axe.

  “Sashka the saint,” he said in a whisper. “That’s all there is to it… I’ll chop you down, saint…”

  “You won’t chop me down for a woman,” the boy said, almost inaudibly, and bowed down before his stepfather. “You pity me. Let me go and be a shepherd…”

  “The hell with you,” said Tarakanych and threw the axe aside. “Go be a shepherd.”

  And he returned to the hut and slept with his wife.

  That same morning Sashka went to hire himself out to the Cossacks, and from that time on he lived as a community shepherd. He became known throughout the area for his simple-heartedness, the villagers nicknamed him “Sashka the Christ”, and he lived as a shepherd till the day he was called up for service. Old peasants, the very worst of them, would come out to the pasture to see him and to wag their tongues; women would run to Sashka to get some relief from their husbands’ terrible ways, and they weren’t cross with Sashka over his love and his disease. Sashka got called up in the first year of the war. He spent four years at the front and returned to the village when the Whites were riding roughshod over it. Sashka was goaded into leaving for the village of Platovskaya, where a detachment was being formed against the Whites. Semyon Mikhaylovich Budyonny, a former cavalry sergeant major, was running things in this detachment, along with three of his brothers: Yemelyan, Lukyan and Denis. Sashka went to Platovskaya, and there his fate was sealed. He was in Budyonny’s regiment, in his brigade, division, and the First Cavalry Army. He went to rescue heroic Tsaritsyn, joined up with Voroshilov’s Tenth Army,2 fought at Voronezh, at Kastornaya and at General’s Bridge on the Donets. Sashka entered the Polish campaign as a transport driver, because he’d been injured and was considered an invalid.

  That’s how it all came about. I’ve recently struck up an acquaintance with Sashka the Christ and shifted my little trunk to his cart. We’ve greeted the morning light and accompanied the setting sun quite often by now. And when the wilful desire of battle would bring us together—we’d sit in the evenings by glittering mounds of earth, or boil tea in a sooty kettle in the woods, or sleep side by side in freshly mown fields with hungry horses tethered to our legs.

  Notes

  1 pood and desyatina: obsolete Russian units of measure, the first being roughly equivalent to thirty-six pounds (sixteen kilograms), and the second to 11,000 square metres (118,000 square feet).

  2 Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (1881–1969) led the defence of Tsaritsyn, commanded the Tenth and Fourteenth Armies, and was one of the organizers of Budyonny’s First Cavalry during the Russian Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War. He was a close associate of Joseph Stalin and served as People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR from 1925 to 1934, as People’s Commissar for Defence from 1934 to 1940 and, in 1935, was named a Marshal of the Soviet Union.

  THE LIFE STORY OF

  PAVLICHENKO, MATVEI RODIONYCH

  COUNTRYMEN, COMRADES, BROTHERS! Heed, in the name of all mankind, the life story of the Red General Matvei Pavlichenko.1 He was a herdsman, this general—a herdsman on the estate of Lidino, which belonged to Nikitinsky, and he herded the master’s pigs till life doled him out some stripes for his shoulder-straps, and so Matyushka commenced herding cattle. And who knows? If he’d been born in Australia, then our Matvei—the honourable Rodionych—well, it’s a sure thing, my friends, that he’d have worked his way up to elephants, that our Matyushka would’ve been herding elephants. But as much as it pains me to say, we haven’t got any elephants in this Stavropol province of ours. In this sprawling Stavropol country of ours, I’ll tell you frankly, there isn’t a single animal larger than a buffalo. And what joy can a poor peasant get out of the buffalo? The Russian man finds it dull tormenting the buffalo. Give us orphans a horse to torment till doomsday, a horse—so that her soul gives out on the boundary path along with her guts…

  And so I’m herding this cattle of mine, cows on every side. I’m shot through with milk, stink like a sliced udder, and I’ve got bull calves walking around me for propriety’s sake, mousy-grey bull calves. Pure freedom has fallen on the fields, the grass crunches for all the world to hear, the heavens unfurl above me like a multi-row accordion—and the heavens, boys, can be very blue in the province of Stavropol. And so I’m herding along like this, having nothing better to do than swap melodies with the wind on my fife, till one of the old fellows says to me:

  “Matvei, go and see Nastya,” he says.

  “Why?” I say. “You having a laugh at me or what, old man?”

  “Go and see her,” he says. “She’s asking.”

  And so I go.

  “Nastya,” I say, and blacken with all my blood. “Nastya,” I say, “you having a laugh at me or what?”

  But she doesn’t say a word, just tears away from me and runs with all ’er might, and we’re running together till we’re in the pasture, and we stand there dead tired, red, out of breath.

  “Matvei,” Nastya says to me then, “it’s three Sundays since the spring fishing season, when all the fisherman went to the shore—and you went with them, with your head down. Why was your head down, Matvei—have you got some thought gnawing at your heart? Answer me…”

  And I tell her:

  “Nastya,” I tell her. “I’ve got nothing to tell you. My head’s not a rifle—it’s got no foresight, and no back-sight either. And you know my heart, Nastya—it’s all empty, it must be shot through with milk. It’s an awful thing, how I stink of milk…”

  And Nastya, I see, is about to burst.

  “I’ll swear on the Cross,” she bursts out, laughing her head off, laughing at the top of her lungs over the whole steppe, like she’s banging a drum. “I’ll swear on the cross, you’ve been winking at the ladies…”

  So we talk nonsense for a while, and soon enough we get married. And so Nastya and I start living as best we can, and we sure could. We were hot all night, hot in the wintertime—went around naked all night long, tearing at each other’s hides. We lived swell, like devils, up until the old man shows up a second time.

  “Matvei,” he says, “the master’s been touching your wife all over the place lately, and he’ll get ’er yet, the master…”

  And I say:

  “No,” I say. “No, and excus
e me, old man, or I’ll mow you down right here on the spot.”

  The old man, of course, took off at full pelt, and that day I covered twenty versts of land on my feet. I covered a large chunk of land on my feet that day, and in the evening I turned up at the estate of Lidino, at my merry master Nikitinsky’s. He was sitting in the upstairs room, old as the hills, taking apart three saddles—one English, one dragoon, one Cossack—and I stood stock still by the door, like a burdock, stood stock still for a solid hour, and nothing came of it. But then he laid eyes on me.

  “What do you want?” he says.

  “I want to settle accounts.”

  “Have you got some intention?”

  “Haven’t got no intentions, but I want to settle.”

  Then he turned his eyes to the side, turned off the highway into a side road, laid his scarlet saddle cloths on the floor—redder than the tsar’s flags, they were—and the old geezer stood on them and commenced fuming.

  “Freedom to the freedman,” he tells me, fuming. “I’ve tickled all your mothers, you Orthodox Christians. We can settle accounts—but Matyusha, my friend, don’t you owe me a trifle?”

  “Heh-heh,” I answer him. “Now that’s a good one, you joker—so help me God, you’re a hell of a joker! It’s you that owes me my wages…”

  “Wages,” my master grinds out through his choppers and throws me down on my knees, stamping his feet, and plugs my ears with the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. “Wages, you want—but my yoke you’ve forgotten, you! Last year you busted my ox-yoke—where is it, my yoke?”

  “I’ll give you your yoke,” I say to my master, and I raise my foolish eyes to him, standing on my knees, lower than any lowland. “You’ll have your yoke, but don’t press me on the debts, old man—give me some time…”

  And so, my boys of Stavropol, my countrymen and comrades, my brothers, the master waited on my debts for five years. I wasted away for five wasted years, until the year ’18 came to visit me, a poor wastrel. He rode in on gay stallions—on those Kabardian horses of his. He came with a long train of troops, and all kinds of songs. And hell, what a darling you are, ’18! Will we really never whoop it up again, blood of my blood, my darling ’18? We sang up your songs, drank up your wine, established your truth, and all that’s left of you is clerks. But hell, my darling! It wasn’t the clerk flying about the Kuban in those days, sending generals’ souls into the air at a step’s distance. Matvei Rodionych lay covered in blood at Prikumsk back then, and there was only a day’s march of five versts between Matvei Rodionych and the estate of Lidino. And I rode out there alone, without a detachment, and when I went into the upstairs room, I went in quiet. The local authority’s sitting there, in the upstairs room, and Nikitinsky’s taking the tea round, bowing and scraping to ’em. When he sees me, though, he turns white as a sheet—but I take off my Kuban cap to him.