by Isaac Babel
“Money’s right here,” Sashka muttered and jumped onto the mare.
I raced after her and we moved off at a gallop. Duplischev’s howl rang out behind us, along with the light rap of a gunshot.
“Just look here a minute!” the little Cossack cried, running through the woods just as fast as he could.
The wind leapt between the branches like a hare gone mad, the Second Brigade flew through the Galician oaks, and the serene dust of a cannonade rose above the ground as over a peaceful hut. And at a sign from the division commander we went on the attack, the unforgettable attack at Cześniki.
AFTER THE BATTLE
THE STORY OF MY FEUD with Akinfiyev goes like this:
The attack at Cześniki took place on the 31st. Our squadrons amassed in the woods near the village and at five o’clock in the evening rushed at the enemy. He was waiting for us up on high ground, three versts away. We covered the three versts on our infinitely weary horses and, leaping up on the hill, met a lifeless wall of black uniforms and pallid faces. These were Cossacks who’d betrayed us at the start of the Polish battles and been gathered into a brigade by Cossack Captain Yakovlev. Having formed the horseman into a square, the captain was waiting for us with sabre drawn. A gold tooth glistened in his mouth, and his black beard lay on his chest like an icon on a corpse. The adversary’s machine guns were firing at twenty paces; men fell wounded in our ranks. We trampled them and struck at the enemy, but its square didn’t falter—then we fled.
That’s how Savinkov’s men gained a short-lived victory over the Sixth Division. It was gained because the object under attack did not turn its face from the lava of our onrushing squadrons. The captain stood fast this time, and we fled without staining our swords crimson with the wretched blood of traitors.
Five thousand men, our whole division, came scudding down the slopes, with no one pursuing us. The enemy remained on the hill. He couldn’t believe his improbable victory and didn’t dare chase us. This is why we survived and slid down unharmed into the valley, where we were met by Vinogradov, head of the Sixth Division’s political section. Vinogradov was charging about on a rabid steed, sending fleeing Cossacks back into battle.
“Lyutov,” he cried, catching sight of me, “turn those fighters around, or it’s the end of you…”
Vinogradov was belting his reeling stallion with the butt of his Mauser, screeching and gathering up men. I got away from him and rode over to Gulimov, the Kyrgyz, who was galloping close by:
“Turn your horse around, Gulimov,” I said, “get up there…”
“Get up a mare’s rear,” answered Gulimov and glanced back. He glanced back furtively, fired a shot, and singed the hair above my ear.
“Turn yours back,” Gulimov whispered, grabbed me round the shoulders, and tried to pull his sabre out with the other hand. The sabre sat tight in its scabbard. The Kyrgyz kept trembling, looking around. He held me by the shoulder, bending his face closer and closer to mine.
“Yours goes first,” he repeated almost inaudibly, “mine goes behind”—and he struck me lightly in the chest with the blade of his sabre, which had given way. The proximity of death, its suffocating closeness, made me nauseous; I pressed my palm against the Kyrgyz’s face, which was as hot a stone in the sun, and scratched him as deeply as I could. Warm blood stirred beneath my fingernails, tickling them, and I rode away from Gulimov, gasping for breath as after a long journey. My tormented friend, my horse, moved slowly, at a walk. I rode without seeing the way, rode without turning, until I met Vorobyov, commander of the First Squadron. Vorobyov was looking for his quartermasters, with no luck. He and I came to the village of Cześniki and sat down on a bench with Akinfiyev, ex-wagoner for the Revolutionary Tribunal. Sashka, nurse of the Thirty-First Cavalry Regiment, came walking past, and two commanders sat down next to us. These commanders dozed silently; one of them, shell-shocked, kept shaking his head uncontrollably and winking his bulging eye. Sashka went off to report on him at the hospital and then came back to us, dragging her horse by the reins. Her mare was putting up a fight, its legs slipping in the wet clay.
“Where you setting sail for?” Vorobyov said to the nurse. “Come and sit with us, Sash…”
“I won’t,” Sashka said, and hit her mare on the belly. “Won’t sit with you…”
“Why’s that?” Vorobyov shouted, laughing. “Gone and changed your mind about drinking tea with men, Sash?…”
“Changed my mind about you,” the woman turned to the commander and flung the reins away from herself. “Changed my mind, Vorobyov, about drinking tea with you, ’cause I seen you today, all you heroes, and you sure weren’t pretty, Commander…”
“And when you seen it,” muttered Vorobyov, “shoulda started shooting…”
“Shooting,” Sashka said in despair and tore the hospital band from her sleeve. “I’m supposed to shoot with this, eh?”
That’s when Akinfiyev, ex-wagoner for the Revolutionary Tribunal, with whom I had an old score to settle, moved up to us.
“You got nothing to shoot with, Sashok,” he said, soothingly. “Nobody’s faulting you there—who I’m faulting is folks that get all turned around when the fight’s on, and don’t load no cartridges in their guns… You went on the attack,” Akinfiyev suddenly shouted at me, and a spasm took hold of his face. “You went but you didn’t load no cartridges… Where’s the reason for that?”
“Leave me be, Ivan,” I said to Akinfiyev, but he wouldn’t step back. He kept coming closer and closer, all twisted and epileptic, without a rib in his body.
“Pole’s coming at you, but you ain’t coming at the Pole…” the Cossack muttered, twitching and shifting his shattered hip. “Where’s the reason for that?…”
“Pole’s coming at me,” I answered boldly, “but I ain’t coming at the Pole…”
“So you’re a Molokan1 then?” Akinfiyev whispered, stepping back.
“So I’m a Molokan,” I said, louder than before. “Whaddya want, Ivan?”
“What I want is for you to know it,” Ivan shouted with wild triumph. “For you to know it, and I got me a written law about Molokans—law says you can shoot ’em down, the God-worshippers…”
The Cossack kept shouting about Molokans, gathering a crowd. I started to walk away from him, but he caught up with me and hit me on the back with his fist.
“You didn’t load no cartridges,” Akinfiyev whispered haltingly, right into my ear, and set to work, trying to tear my mouth open with his thumbs. “You worship God, traitor…”
He tugged and tore at my mouth; I was pushing the epileptic away, punching him in the face. Akinfiyev fell to the ground sideways and busted himself bloody.
Then Sashka went over to him with her dangling breasts. The woman doused Ivan with water and pulled from his mouth a long tooth, which had been swaying in that black hole like a birch on a bare road.
“Cocks have only got one care in the world,” said Sashka, “and that’s knocking their beaks together, but me—today’s business makes me wanna cover me eyes…”
She said this mournfully and led the shattered Akinfiyev off with her, while I trudged into the village of Cześniki, which had slipped on the tireless Galician rain.
The village floated and swelled, crimson clay flowing from its dismal wounds. The first star sparkled above me and plunged into the clouds. Rain lashed at the willows and grew weary. Evening flew up into the sky like a flock of birds, and darkness lowered its wet wreath onto my head. Dead tired and stooping beneath my funereal crown, I walked on, begging fate for the simplest of knacks—the knack of killing a man.
Galicia, September 1920
Notes
1 Molokans, or “milk-drinkers”, are members of a pacifist Christian sect who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church; their name is thought to derive from their practice of drinking milk on fasting days, when Orthodox Christians are prohibited from consuming meat and dairy.
SONG
IN THE HAMLET of Budziatycze it
fell to my lot to be billeted with a bad hostess. She was a widow, poor; I busted many locks on her larders but found no poultry.
So I had to be clever about it, and one day, after returning home early, before dusk, I saw the hostess shutting the door on her oven, which was still warm. There was a smell of shchi in the hut, and there could’ve been meat in that shchi. I scented meat in her shchi and laid my revolver on the table, but the old woman denied it. Spasms showed in her face and black fingers; she darkened all over and looked at me with fear and astounding hatred. But nothing would’ve saved her—I’d have gotten it out of her with my revolver, had I not been interrupted by Sashka Konyayev, otherwise known as Sashka the Christ.
He walked into the hut with an accordion under his arm, his splendid legs knocking about in broken-down boots.
“Let’s play us some songs,” he said, and looked up at me with eyes full of sleepy blue ice. “Let’s play us some songs,” Sashka said, sitting down on a bench, and played a little prelude.
It was as if this pensive prelude were drifting in from afar; the Cossack cut it off and his blue eyes grew glum. He turned away from us and, knowing how to please me, struck up a song from the Kuban.
“Star of the fields,” he sang, “star of the fields above my father’s house, my mother’s mournful hand…”
I loved that song—the love of it raised my heart to a state of sublime ecstasy. Sashka knew this, because both of us, he and I, first heard it in 1919, in the Don delta, near the Cossack village of Kagalnitskaya.
A hunter who plied his trade in protected waters taught us the song. Those protected waters are swarming with spawning fish, with countless flocks of birds. The fish propagate in ineffable abundance, so that you can scoop them up with buckets or just with your hands, and if you put an oar in the water, it’ll stand upright—the fish will hold it, carry it off with them. We saw it for ourselves; we’ll never forget the protected waters near Kagalnitskaya. All the authorities prohibited hunting there—this is a proper prohibition—but there was a brutal war in the delta in 1919, and the hunter Yakov, who plied his improper trade right in front of us, gave Sashka the Christ, our squadron’s singer, an accordion so that we’d turn a blind eye. He taught Sashka his songs; many of them were ancient heartfelt chants. And so we forgave the crafty hunter everything, because we needed his songs: back then, no one could see an end to the war, and Sashka alone paved our wearisome path with jangling and tears. A bloody trail stretched along this path. Songs hovered above our trail. So it was in the Kuban and in the Green campaigns,1 so it was in Uralsk and in the foothills of the Caucasus, and so it is to this day. We need songs, no one sees an end to the war, and Sashka the Christ, the squadron’s singer, isn’t ripe for death…
And this evening too, when I’d been cheated of my hostess’s shchi, Sashka pacified me with his half-stifled, swaying voice.
“Star of the fields,” he sang, “star of the fields above my father’s house, my mother’s mournful hand…”
And I listened to him, stretched out on my fusty bedding in the corner. Reverie broke my bones, reverie shook the rotten hay beneath me; through its torrid downpour I could barely make out the old woman propping her withered cheek on her hand. She stood near the wall without stirring, her insect-bitten head drooping, and didn’t budge after Sashka had finished playing. Sashka finished and put aside the accordion; he yawned and laughed, as after a long sleep, and then, noticing the desolation of our widow’s cabin, brushed the dirt from the bench and brought a bucket of water into the hut.
“You see, sweetheart,” the hostess said to him, scratched her back against the door and pointed to me, “your chief there showed up just now, shouted at me, stamped about, took all the locks off my house and laid his gun out for me… It’s a sin from God, laying a gun out for me—I’m a woman, you know…”
She scratched against the door again and began throwing sheepskins over her son. Her son was snoring under the icon on a big bed strewn with rags. He was a mute boy with a waterlogged, swollen white head and the giant feet of a grown peasant. His mother wiped his dirty nose and returned to the table.
“Hostess,” Sashka said then and touched her shoulder. “If you’d like, I can show you a little attention…”
But it was as if the old woman hadn’t heard his words.
“Haven’t seen any shchi,” she said, propping her cheek. “My shchi’s all gone, and all people do is show me their guns, and if I come across a good fellow and it’s time for a little sweetness, well, I’m so sick to my stomach, I can’t even get joy outta sinning…”
She dragged out her dismal complaints and, muttering, pushed the mute boy closer to the wall. Sashka lay down with her on the rag-covered bed, while I tried to fall asleep and began thinking up dreams, so as to fall asleep with good thoughts.
Notes
1 The Green armies were groups of peasants who took up arms against all the governments involved in the Russian Civil War of 1917–22 in order to protect their interests.
THE REBBE’S SON
… DO YOU REMEMBER ZHITOMIR, Vasily? Do you remember the Teterev River, Vasily, and that night when the Sabbath, the youthful Sabbath, came slinking across the sunset, pressing the stars down with her little red heel?
The moon’s slender horn bathed its arrows in the Teterev’s black water. Silly Gedali, founder of the Fourth International, led us to Rebbe Motale Bratslavsky’s for the evening prayers. The cock feathers on silly Gedali’s top hat swayed in the red smoke of the evening. The predatory pupils of candles flickered in the rebbe’s room. Broad-shouldered Jews moaned dully, bent over their prayer books, and the old fool of the Chernobyl tsaddiks jingled copper coins in his tattered pocket…
…Do you remember that night, Vasily?… Outside the window horses neighed and Cossacks shouted. The waste-land of war gaped outside the window, and Rebbe Motale Bratslavsky, digging his withered fingers into his tallit, prayed at the eastern wall. Then the curtain of the Ark parted, and in the candles’ funereal splendour we saw the scrolls of the Torah, wrapped in a cover of purple velvet and light-blue silk, and over the Torah hung the lifeless, obedient, beautiful face of Ilya, the rebbe’s son, the last prince of the dynasty…
Well, two days ago, Vasily, the regiments of the Twelfth Army opened the front at Kovel. The conqueror’s scornful cannonade thundered over the city. Our troops wavered and got mixed up. The political-department train took off, creeping across the dead backbone of the fields. And monstrous Russia, as improbable as a flock of clothing lice, went stamping in bast shoes along both sides of the carriages. The typhoid-ridden peasantry rolled before it the customary hump of a soldier’s death. It jumped up onto our train’s footboards and fell away, knocked down by rifle butts. It snorted, scrabbled, rushed forward and kept silent. And at the twelfth verst, when I’d run out of potatoes, I hurled a pile of Trotsky’s leaflets at them. But only one man reached for a leaflet with a dirty, dead hand. And I recognized Ilya, the son of the Zhitomir rebbe. I recognized him right off, Vasily. And it was so agonizing to see a prince who’d lost his trousers, who’d been bent in two by a soldier’s knapsack, that we broke regulations and pulled him into the carriage. Bare knees, clumsy as an old woman’s, knocked against the rusty iron of the steps; two big-breasted typists in sailors’ jackets dragged the dying man’s long, shy body along the floor. We laid him in a corner on the floor of the editorial office. Cossacks in red trousers straightened his clothes, which had slipped off. The girls, standing firm on the bowed legs of unpretentious cows, coldly observed his sexual parts—the wilted, tender, curly-haired manhood of a worn-out Semite. While I, who had seen him on one of my nights of wandering—I started packing a little trunk with the scattered belongings of Red Army soldier Bratslavsky.
Everything was thrown together in one heap—the mandates of the agitator and the commemorative booklets of a Jewish poet. The portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side. The knotted iron of Lenin’s skull and the dull silk of Maimonides’s port
raits. A lock of woman’s hair was pressed in a book of resolutions from the Sixth Party Congress, and the margins of communist leaflets were crammed with the crooked lines of Ancient Hebrew verse. They fell upon me in a scarce, sorrowful rain—a page from the Song of Songs and the cartridges from a revolver. The sorrowful rain of sunset washed the dust from my hair, and I said to the boy dying in the corner on a tattered mattress:
“Four months ago, on a Friday evening, the junkman Gedali brought me to your father, Rebbe Motale, but you weren’t in the Party back then, Bratslavsky.”
“I was in the Party back then,” said the boy, clawing at his chest and writhing in his fever, “but I couldn’t leave my mother…”
“And now, Ilya?”
“In the revolution, my mother’s an episode,” he whispered, quieting down. “My letter came up, the letter B, and the organization sent me to the front…”
“And you wound up in Kovel, Ilya?”
“I wound up in Kovel!” he cried in despair. “The kulak1 bastards opened the front. I took over a scratch regiment, but too late. Didn’t have the artillery…”
*
He died before reaching Rovno. He died, the last prince, among poems, phylacteries and foot cloths. We buried him at some forgotten station. And I—barely able to contain the tempests of my imagination inside my ancient body—I received my brother’s final breath.
Notes
1 The kulak (Russian: literally, “fist”) is a rich peasant. They were traditional enemies of the Bolsheviks and were virtually eliminated during the mass collectivization of the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s.
POSTSCRIPT
(1933)