by Isaac Babel
“Good day,” I say to the people. “Good day, and my regards. Welcome your guest, master, or how will it be with us?”
“It will be peaceful and dignified,” one of the men answers me, and I can tell he’s a surveyor by the way he says it. “It will be peaceful and dignified, but you, Comrade Pavlichenko, have galloped a long way to see us, it seems. Mud crosses your face. We, the local authority, are terrified by such faces. Why is this so?”
“It’s so,” I answer. “It’s so, you local and cold-blooded authority, because one of the cheeks in my face has been burning for five years—it burns when I’m in the trenches, burns when I’m with a woman, and it’ll burn at the Last Judgement. At the Last Judgement,” I say, and look at Nikitinsky, all cheerful-like, but he’s got no eyes left—just two balls in the middle of his face, as if they’d rolled those balls into position under his forehead, and he winks at me with those crystal balls, also trying to be cheerful-like, but it’s terrible.
“Matyusha,” he says to me, “we knew each other way back when, and my wife, Nadezhda Vasilyevna—she’s lost her mind on account of these times—she was always good to you, you know. And you, Matyusha, you always respected Nadezhda Vasilyevna above anyone. Won’t you step in and see her, now that she’s lost to the world?”
“All right,” I say, and we walk into another room, and there he starts touching my hands, first the right hand, then the left one.
“Matyusha,” he says, “are you my fate or what?”
“I’m not,” I say. “And get rid of those words. God gave us lackeys the slip—our fate’s just a turkey, our life’s worth a copeck. So get rid of those words, and listen, if you like, to this letter from Lenin.”
“A letter to me, Nikitinsky?”
“To you,” and I take out my order book, open it to an empty page, and read, even though I’m illiterate to the depths of my soul.
“In the name of the people,” I read, “and for the foundation of a bright future life, I order Pavlichenko, Matvei Rodionych, to deprive various people of life at his discretion…”
“There it is,” I say. “That’s Lenin’s letter to you…”
And he says to me, “No!”
“No,” he says. “Matyusha, although our life’s gone to hell and blood’s cheap in this Equiapostolic Russian Empire of ours, whatever blood’s due to you, you’ll get it, and you’ll forget all about my dying looks—and wouldn’t it better if I showed you my floorboard?”
“Show it,” I say. “Maybe it’ll be better.”
And again we walk across the room, head down into the wine cellar, and there he moves a brick and finds a box behind the brick. There were rings in this box, necklaces, medals and a sacred image done up in pearls. He tosses me the box and stands there, frozen.
“It’s yours,” he says. “Take what is sacred to the Nikitinskys and walk away, Matvei, to your den in Prikumsk.”
That’s when I grabbed him, by his throat, by his hair.
“And what about my cheek?” I say. “What do I do about that? How do I live with my cheek, brother?”
And then he laughed, too loud, and didn’t try to break free.
“Jackal’s conscience,” he says and doesn’t try to break free. “I’m talking to you like you’re an officer of the Russian Empire, but you, louts, were suckled by a she-wolf… Shoot me, then, son of a bitch…”
But I didn’t shoot him. I didn’t owe him any shooting. I just dragged him up to the big room. Nadezhda Vasilyevna was up there, gone completely crazy. She was holding an unsheathed sabre, kept walking back and forth across the big room and looking in the mirror. But when I dragged Nikitinsky into the room, Nadezhda Vasilyevna ran over to an armchair and sat down. She had a velvet crown on, with feathers sticking out of it. She sat down smart and quick, and presented arms to me with the sabre. And then I stomped my master Nikitinsky. I stomped him for an hour or more than an hour, and in that time I got to know life to its fullest. With shooting—I’ll put it this way—with shooting, all you do is get rid of a man. Shooting’s a pardon for him, and too damn easy for you. Shooting, it won’t get you to the soul—to where it is in a man, how it shows itself. But, when the time comes, I don’t spare myself—when the time comes, I stomp the enemy for an hour or more than an hour. I want to get to know life, what life’s all about…
Notes
1 The character of Pavlichenko is based on Iosif Rodionovich Apanasenko (1890–1943), who had indeed been a herdsman in Stavropol before being drafted into the Imperial Army in 1911. He commanded the Sixth Division from August to October 1920. Apanasenko rose through the ranks in the interwar years and was killed at the front in 1943, to which he had been sent after repeatedly lobbying for reassignment to active duty.
THE CEMETERY IN KOZIN
A CEMETERY in a Jewish shtetl. Assyria and the mysterious decay of the East on the weed-cluttered fields of Volyn.
Carved grey stones with three-hundred-year-old inscriptions. The crude embossing of reliefs hewn into the granite. The image of a fish and a sheep over a dead human head. Images of rabbis in fur hats. The rabbis’ narrow loins are girded with belts. Beneath their eyeless faces runs a wavy stone line of curly beards. To one side, under an oak crushed by lightning, stands the crypt of Rebbe Azriel, slaughtered by the Cossacks of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.1 Four generations lie in this tomb, which is as lowly as a water-carrier’s hovel, and tablets, greening tablets, sing of them in a Bedouin’s prayer:
Azriel, son of Ananias, mouth of Jehovah.
Elijah, son of Azriel, mind that entered into single combat with oblivion.
Wolf, son of Elijah, prince abducted from the Torah in his nineteenth spring.
Judah, son of Wolf, Rabbi of Cracow and Prague.
O death, O profit-seeker, O greedy thief, why have you not spared us, even once?
Notes
1 Bohdan Khmelnytsky (c.1595—1657) was a hetman of the Zaporozhian Host of Cossacks in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He led an uprising that resulted in the creation of an independent Cossack state. The Treaty of Pereyaslav, which he concluded with the Tsardom of Russia in 1654, led to the eventual absorption of this state into the Russian Empire; there is a controversy as to how the signatories interpreted the terms of the treaty. Khmelnytsky’s uprising devastated the Jewish community of the Commonwealth.
PRISHCHEPA
I’M MAKING MY WAY to Leszniów, where the division staff has taken up residence. My travelling companion is still Prishchepa—young Kuban Cossack, indefatigable lout, purged communist, future ragpicker, carefree syphilitic and leisurely liar. He’s wearing a crimson Circassian coat made of fine cloth and a downy hood thrown over his shoulder. Along the way he told me about himself…
A year ago Prishchepa ran away from the Whites. In retaliation, they took his parents hostage and killed them in the counter-intelligence unit. The neighbours looted their property. When the Whites were driven out of the Kuban, Prishchepa returned to his native village.
It was morning, dawn, peasant sleep sighed in the acrid stuffiness. Prishchepa hired a community cart and went around the village collecting his gramophones, his kvass jugs and the towels his mother had embroidered. He came out into the street in a black cloak, with a curved dagger in his belt, dragging the cart along. Prishchepa went from one neighbour to another, the bloody prints of his soles trailing behind him. In those huts where the Cossack found his mother’s things or a chibouk of his father’s, he left stabbed old women, dogs hung over the well, icons soiled with dung. The men of the village, puffing at their pipes, followed his path with sullen eyes. The young Cossacks scattered across the steppe, keeping a tally. The tally mounted, and the village was silent. When he was done, Prishchepa returned to his father’s devastated home. He set up the recaptured furniture as he’d remembered it standing since childhood and sent for vodka. Shutting himself up in the hut, he drank for two days and nights, sang, cried and hacked at the tables with his sabre. On the third night the village saw smoke over P
rishchepa’s hut. Singed and ragged, shuffling his feet, he led the cow out of the stall, put a revolver in its mouth and fired. The earth was smoking beneath him, a blue ring of flame flew out of the chimney and melted away, and the abandoned bull calf wailed out in the stable. The fire was as bright as Sunday. Prishchepa untied his horse, jumped into the saddle, threw a lock of his hair into the blaze and vanished.
THE STORY OF A HORSE
SAVITSKY, our division commander, once took a white stallion from Khlebnikov, commander of the First Squadron. The horse had a magnificent exterior, but its features were raw and always seemed a bit heavy to me. In exchange, Khlebnikov received a little black mare of decent breed, with a smooth trot. But he treated the mare badly, thirsted for vengeance, awaited his chance and finally got it.
After July’s unsuccessful battles, when Savitsky was removed from his position and sent back to the reserve ranks of command personnel, Khlebnikov wrote a petition to Army headquarters for the return of his horse. The chief of staff appended the following instructions to the petition: “Said stallion to be restored to his former state.” And Khlebnikov, feeling triumphant, covered a hundred versts to find Savitsky, who was then living in Radzivilov, a mutilated little town that looked like a ragged old gossip of a woman. He lived alone, the removed division commander, and the staff’s bootlickers no longer recognized him. The staff’s bootlickers fished for roast chicken in the Army commander’s smiles and, grovelling, turned their backs on the famed division commander.
Bathed in perfume and looking like Peter the Great, he lived in disgrace with Pavla, a Cossack woman he’d won over from a Jewish quartermaster, and twenty thoroughbreds, which we all considered his personal property. The sun in his yard strained and languished with the blinding brightness of its rays; the foals in his yard roughly suckled their dams; grooms with sweaty backs sifted oats on faded fanning mills. Wounded by truth and driven by vengeance, Khlebnikov headed straight for the barricaded yard.
“Are you familiar with my person?” he asked Savitsky, who was lying on some hay.
“Seems I’ve seen you around,” Savitsky answered and yawned.
“Then accept these instructions from the chief of staff,” Khlebnikov said firmly. “And I would ask you, comrade from the reserve ranks, to regard me with an official eye…”
“All right,” Savitsky murmured soothingly, took the paper and began to read it for an extraordinarily long time. Then he suddenly called to the Cossack woman, who was combing her hair in the cool shade of an awning.
“Pavla,” he said. “Lord almighty, we’ve been combing our hair since morning… Might be nice to get the samovar going…”
The Cossack woman put aside her comb, took her hair in her hands and tossed it behind her back.
“All day long we’re after something, Konstantin Vasilyevich,” she said with a lazy, imperious grin. “First it’s this you want, then that…”
And she went over to the division commander, bearing her breast on high-heeled boots—a breast that moved like an animal in a sack.
“All day long we’re after something,” the woman repeated, beaming, and buttoned the division commander’s shirt over his chest.
“First it’s this I want, then that,” the division commander laughed, getting up. He wrapped his arm around Pavla’s surrendering shoulders and suddenly turned a deathly still face towards Khlebnikov.
“I’m still alive, Khlebnikov,” he said, hugging the Cossack woman. “My legs still walk, my horses still gallop, my hands’ll still get you and my cannon’s warmin’ up against my body…”
He drew the revolver that had been resting against his bare stomach and walked up to the commander of the First Squadron.
The latter spun on his heel, spurs whining, and left the yard like an orderly who’d received an urgent dispatch; and again he covered a hundred versts, in order to find the chief of staff, but he turned Khlebnikov away.
“Your case, Commander, is resolved,” said the chief of staff. “I have restored your stallion and I’ve got enough to worry about without you…”
He refused to listen to Khlebnikov and finally returned the truant commander to the First Squadron. Khlebnikov had been away a whole week. During that time we’d been moved to a post in the Dubno woods. We’d pitched our tents there and we lived well. Khlebnikov returned, I remember, on Sunday morning, the 12th. He asked me for more than a quire of paper and ink. The Cossacks planed a tree stump for him; he placed his revolver and the paper on the stump and wrote until evening, scribbling over a multitude of pages.
“A regular Karl Marx,” the squadron’s military commissar told him that evening. “What the hell are you writing, devil take you?”
“Describing various thoughts in accordance to my oath,” Khlebnikov replied, and handed the military commissar his declaration of withdrawal from the Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
“The Communist Party,” this declaration said, “was founded, I believe, for happiness and strict justice without limit, and it should also look after the little guy. Now I will touch on the white stallion that I won over from the incredibly counter-revving peasants, that had such a run-down appearance, and many of my comrades laughed at this appearance shamelessly, but I had the strength to bear that harsh laughter and, gritting my teeth for the common cause, I tended that stallion till the desired change, and that’s because, comrades, I fancy the white horses, and I put all my strength in them, what little strength is left over from the Imperialist and Civil Wars, and stallions of that sort feel my hand, and I too feel his wordless needs and what’s called for, but that unjust black mare is of no need to me; I can’t feel her and I can’t stand her, as all my comrades can testify, and it might come to grief. And seeing as the party can’t restore what’s mine to me, in accordance with the chief of staff’s instructions, I have no choice but to write out this declaration with tears that don’t befit a fighter, but flow on and on and lash at my heart, lashing my heart bloody…”
This and a lot besides was written in Khlebnikov’s declaration. He’d been writing it all day, and it was very long. The military commissar and I struggled with it for about an hour and read it through to the end.
“What a fool,” the military commissar said, tearing up the sheets. “Come after supper, you’ll have a talk with me.”
“Don’t need your talk,” Khlebnikov replied, trembling. “You’ve lost me, Military Commissar.”
He stood at attention, trembling, without budging, and kept glancing around as if trying to decide which way to run. The military commissar came right up to him, but he didn’t see it through. Khlebnikov took off running with all his might.
“Lost me!” he shouted wildly, climbed up on the stump and started ripping at his jacket and clawing at his chest.
“Do it, Savitsky!” he shouted, falling to the ground. “Go ahead and do it!”
We dragged him into a tent; the Cossacks gave us a hand. We boiled tea for him and rolled him cigarettes. He smoked and kept trembling. It wasn’t until evening that our commander finally calmed down. He never brought up his foolish declaration again, but a week later he went to Rovno, where he was examined by the medical commission and discharged as an invalid, having sustained six wounds.
And that’s how we lost Khlebnikov. This saddened me, because Khlebnikov was a quiet man, similar to me in character. He was the only one in the squadron with a samovar. On days when there was a lull, we’d drink hot tea together. And he’d tell me about women in such detail that, listening to him, I felt ashamed and delighted. I think this was because we were shaken by the same passions. We both looked upon the world as a meadow in May, a meadow traversed by women and horses.
Radzivilov, July 1920
KONKIN
WE WERE CHOPPING the Polish scum down by Belaya Tserkov. Chopping them real fine, with the trees bending and everything. I got hit in the morning, but I was raising plenty of hell, good and proper. The day, I remember, was bowing out to evening. Got carried away from
the brigade commander, with no more’n five Cossacks of the proletariat. And all around us, everyone’s hacking each other real close, just about hugging, like a priest and his old lady. I’ve got the sap dripping out of me little by little, my horse’s getting wet up front… In a word—two words.
Me and Spirka Zabuty hightail it out of there, away from the woods. We look up and see some numbers we like… ’Bout three hundred sazhens off, no more’n that, it’s either the staff kicking up dust, or the transport. If it’s the staff, good—if it’s the transport, even better. The boys’ rags are all tattered, shirts don’t even reach their sexual maturity.
“Zabuty,” I say to Spirka. “Up your mother’s you-know-what and the like—well, I leave it you, you’re the official orator—if that ain’t their staff moving out…”
“Sure thing, their staff,” says Spirka. “Only it’s two of us and eight of them…”