Savage Shorthand

by Jerome Charyn

  “I’m tired, tired of the future,” she tells John. And we grasp the horror of Agatha’s earlier line.

  Is it now?

  All our lives we’ve taken the present for granted, as if it belonged to us, as if it flowed out of the past with our individual copyright, and suddenly Agatha forces us to confront the fact that now has its own memory stream, that it doesn’t belong to us at all, that it’s a multiplicity of “hits” we love to privatize into our own little saga of ourselves. Perhaps this saga keeps us sane.

  But Red Cavalry (Konarmiya), Babel’s fictional portrait of his time with the Cossacks, is the closest thing we have to Agatha’s ordeal. It reproduces the present tense with all its simultaneity and shocks, and shows us the disconnection not only of “battle,” but of our very lives, and of our terrible, terrible need to narratize, to form lines of attack when there are none. The originality of Konarmiya is that it is a text in search of a narrator. This never would have happened if Babel hadn’t experienced the Polish campaign in a very particular way. He’s a writer from Odessa pretending to be a Russian war correspondent, Kiril Lyutov. Kiril makes up his history as he goes along: he has a law degree from St. Petersburg University, a Jewish mother, and a wife who’s left him (Babel did study “law” for a little while in Petersburg, did have a Jewish mother, and a wife who “left” him to go to Paris). The Cossacks call Kiril “Four-Eyes,” and though they have contempt for him as an intellectual and a city boy who’s never been on a horse, he does become their scribe. Peacocks who are proud of their chub (the forelock that accompanies their otherwise shaven skull), they have a distinctive, spicy speech, decorated with their own private grammar, but they’re also peasants who can neither read nor write, and it’s “Four-Eyes” who has to transcribe their melodic voice into words on a page; it’s “Four-Eyes” who has to read Pravda and Krasny Kavalerist (their own paper) to them. And this Lyutov is hardly at a disadvantage; language is as much a weapon as their curved Circassian sabers; he can censor them whenever he wishes, distort their own speech, dilute their power. He wears a cavalryman’s uniform, and he’s his own kind of Cossack when he parades among impoverished Jews in the Pale of Settlement. Much of Babel’s diary is taken up with this pretense and with his wants. He can be as cruel as any Cossack when he snatches a bun out of a child’s fist, and shares some of the Cossacks’ legendary lust. “I am sad because there’s no one to copulate with.” He can be a war correspondent and a diarist, babble in different tongues. But something happens in the stories. Babel’s persona won’t stay put. Voices run all over the place, as if he were his very own sibyl, trying to capture the present tense of war.

  Critics like to see Lyutov as the unifying narrator of Red Cavalry. I do not. Lyutov’s the fiction of a fiction, a sort of illness that drags across Red Cavalry, like the horse that drags Lyutov by the foot; we might even say the entire narrative could be that of a man being dragged by a horse while he’s dreaming.

  The narrator is unnamed for most of the book. And when he’s finally called Lyutov, in the twenty-fifth tale, it doesn’t mean much. Lyutov could be anybody—a shadow from hell, a soldier, or someone playing a soldier. The narrator also assumes other voices, as he transcribes the letters that certain Cossacks dictate to him in their own “voice,” but they have no voice other than the one Lyutov allows them. There’s a name for this in Russian— skaz: the colloquial speech of a storyteller who is less educated than the reader or the person to whom he’s telling the story. Mark Twain used his own kind of skaz in Huckleberry Finn. But if Mark Twain is Huck’s “scribe,” we never feel that he’s inserting himself between Huck and the reader, or limiting Huck’s voice. As the author, he may navigate Huck down the Mississippi, but he doesn’t interfere. We never feel removed from Huck’s own “moral passion,” or from the roundness of his voice. But with Babel there are at least three or four degrees of separation—the looseness of transcribing from one voice to another, the secretiveness of the narrator’s own voice, and the moments when the narrator splits into several personas and Babel can no longer tell the difference between Lyutov and himself, and we can no longer believe in the narration, as if the stories themselves were having a breakdown. . . .

  2.

  RED CAVALRY OPENS with “Crossing into Poland,” when the “blackened Zbruch” twists into foamy knots and Babel and his fellow cavalrymen wade across the river. The narrator has just gone through battle and he imagines the world around him in metaphors of mutilation. “The orange sun rolled down the sky like a lopped-off head.” And he can’t break away from “the smell of yesterday’s blood, of slaughtered horses.” We hop from image to image, from the yellowing rye to buckwheat rising like a wall to the serpentine trails of the moon, as if past, present, and future merge into “the square black patches of the wagons,” with the sound of whistling and singing right beside us: we already feel a kind of vertigo, and we haven’t gotten beyond the second paragraph.

  “The special effect of [Babel’s] work is of being placed outside time, of being caught in a single recurring event, of going from innocence to knowledge in a flash,” and of being like an amnesiac who cannot find his moorings. Babel’s work unsettles us, and is made to unsettle, because it does not offer us the usual lifeline of a beginning, a middle, and an end. We plunge into the narrative, and either we swim or disappear into “the noisy torrent.”

  The narrator reaches Novograd and is billeted in the house of a pregnant woman, two red-haired Jewish men, and a third man who is asleep, huddled against the wall. All we can find is filth—human excrement, pieces of fur coats, fragments of crockery left over from some lost seder.

  Clearly disgusted, he orders the woman to clean up the debris. “What a filthy way to live!” The pair of redheads jump around “like Japs in a circus act,” clean up, and produce a feather bed “that has been disemboweled.” The narrator lies down near the wall, next to the third man. He starts to dream about Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, who is chasing the brigade commander and shoots him twice between the eyes; with his head torn open, both of the brigade commander’s eyes fall to the ground. Savitsky shouts at him, and he could have been shouting at the narrator, whose hysterical need to name things, to blanket the world with images, seems to cover up fears about his own manhood—if his eyes fall out, he will lose this power to name and will be exposed as a fraud. His eyes are akin to his sexuality; he arouses himself with words—he cannot name if he cannot see—and also soothes himself, resting like “a majestic moon.”

  The pregnant woman drags him out of his dream. He’s been tossing in his sleep, she tells him, and pushing her father about. She uncovers her father, who is dead. His throat has been torn out “and his face cleft in two.” And the narrator, again covering his emotion and fear, is quick to notice the design of the dead man, his blue beard “clotted like a lump of lead.”

  The Jewess tells her father’s tale. Pan, she says, the Poles cut his throat while he begged them to kill him in the yard so that his daughter couldn’t see him die. But the Poles still cut his throat in front of her. And now the woman cries into the narrator’s face with a sudden violence: “I should wish to know where in the whole world you could find another father like my father?”

  And we’ve moved from one eternity to another in three pages: from the pomp of a victorious army crossing into another country to the terrifying dignity of an old man to the cry of his daughter—a cry much more legitimate than the claims of any war.

  The narrator is left with nothing, and so are we: we’ve entered a landscape where we can find lots of ornament but little comfort, where the language finally eats at us, mocks us, and like drugged men and women, we’re never quite sure who we are or where we are. . . .

  And now we’re introduced to our first lesson in skaz, as the narrator offers us a letter that has been dictated to him by Vasily Kurdyukov, a Cossack lad in “our special group” (“The Letter”). He assures us that he hasn’t changed a word and then tells us about the
scraps of material that he’s left out.

  Vasily is writing to his mother. He belongs to the Political Section, to the cavalry’s newspaper. He talks about his father, who served with the Whites and killed one of his sons (also a Kavalerist). He’d been a cop under the old regime. And as the Reds began to win, Vasily’s father “dyed his beard shamelessly from red to black.” It’s the first of many disguises that crop up again and again in Red Cavalry. But the ultimate disguiser is Lyutov himself. He saunters into battle with an unloaded gun; in fact, his gun is never loaded as he moves from tale to tale on his tachanka or his horse. Dolgushov, a telephonist, is sitting by a road. “His belly had been torn out. The entrails hung over his knees, and the heartbeats were visible” (“The Death of Dolgushov”). He doesn’t want to be tortured by the Poles. He asks Lyutov to finish him off. Lyutov refuses and rides away. It’s Alfonka, the platoon commander, who shoots the telephonist in the mouth. And he’s prepared to kill Lyutov, too. “You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat for a mouse.”

  Alfonka’s indictment cuts to the bone. The narrator is toying with the Cossacks, slumming in his own way. In “My First Goose,” the Cossacks reject him until he kills a goose and obliges his landlady to cook it for him. This little act pleases them, and they welcome him into their company. There’s something staged about the whole performance, and Babel offers us a clue when he has the narrator declare: “Already the moon hung above the yard like a cheap earring.”

  The narrator falls asleep with his five new Cossack friends in a hayloft, “our legs intertwined. I dreamed: and in my dreams saw women. But my heart, stained with bloodshed, grated and brimmed over.”

  And why don’t I believe him? His lament seems out of proportion to the deed. The more eloquent the narrator becomes the more dishonest he is. Killing the goose is a trifle compared to not killing Dolgushov.

  In the next story, “The Rabbi,” we catch one of our few naked glimpses of the narrator. He shucks off his mask, declares himself a Jew from Odessa to the grand rabbi of Zhitomir, the last of a great dynasty.

  “What is the Jew’s occupation?” asks the rabbi in his own mock inquisition.

  “I am putting into verse the adventures of Hersch of Ostropol.”

  This was Babel’s own line of work. In 1918 he’d published a story about Hersch, a trickster and schlemiel from Yiddish folklore. And in the Cossack tales, Babel-Lyutov is often a trickster, a schlemiel on a horse who has to plunk his revolver on the kitchen table if he wants his Jewish landlady to feed him. And when Akinfiev, a syphilitic Cossack in “After the Battle,” exposes him as a cavalryman without a single cartridge, he fights with the Cossack. Akinfiev falls down and starts to bleed. Lyutov grows eloquent again. “Evening flew up to the sky like a flock of birds,” he says, “and darkness crowned me with its watery wreath,” as if Lyutov were some little suffering Christ who implores fate “to grant me the simplest of proficiencies—the ability to kill my fellow-men.” And we’re supposed to sympathize with his humane-ness, support the Babelesque irony behind it—a soldier who can’t kill—and forget the toy soldier who’s prepared to set fire to his landlady’s house if she won’t feed him.

  But the narrator loses his eloquence after the most brutal moment in the book (“Berestechko”). Some Cossacks are about to shoot an old Jew with a silver beard for spying. The old man struggles and begins to scream. A machine-gunner named Kudrya grabs him by the head and tucks it under his arm. “The Jew stopped screaming [ . . . ] Kudrya drew out his dagger with his right hand and carefully, without splashing himself, cut the old man’s throat.”

  There are no epic images here, just a description of murder, simple and direct, without the blanket of metaphor, but if we shut our eyes we might have a vision of the same peasant-soldier slaughtering some lamb, “without splashing himself.”

  Babel’s silence is much more disturbing than any comment Lyutov might care to make. But other readers of Red Cavalry don’t agree. Richard Hallett talks of the book’s “basic heartlessness.” And Frank O’Connor, himself a master of the short story, can’t decide whether he should regard Babel “as a real writer or a dangerous lunatic.”

  Patricia Carden is a much keener critic. We resist Red Cavalry, feel that we’ve “been dealt a blow with a powerful instrument,” forcing us into the dream of a narrative that has no connective tissue. The stories are like melodic episodes that leave us utterly stranded and alone. Babel is recapturing his own dislocation, when narrators have nowhere to go. . . .

  In “Berestechko,” the narrator speaks the only way he can. After the murder of the old Jew, he has to distance himself from the ghetto in order to preserve his sanity and stay alive. He kills the entire ghetto with his own kind of cartridges—words. Berestechko begins to stink: “a violent smell of rotten herrings emanates from all its inhabitants [ . . . ] and instead of human beings there go about mere faded schemata of frontier misfortunes.”

  But this isn’t enough. He has to blind himself, or at least discover an image of blindness. He climbs out of the ghetto and into the “sacked castle” of the counts who once presided over Berestechko. “I wandered past walls where nymphs with gouged-out eyes were leading a choral dance.”

  And perhaps we’ve stumbled upon some sort of key: terror rules the stories, a blinding terror, and the narrator has to sing and dance like Hersch, play the fool, if he’s going to survive all that he sees. His manuscripts, locked in a trunk, can’t help him here—nothing can, except his own music.

  Frank O’Connor compares Babel to Hemingway, says both have one thing in common: “a romanticism of violence.” O’Connor is wrong again. The nearest analogue we have to Red Cavalry is Hemingway’s In Our Time, but it’s not “a romanticism of violence” that holds the books together—it’s the dreamlike distortion of war. Both Lyutov and Nick Adams (Hemingway’s fictional mask) wander across the landscape like drugged men. But Nick is reliable, and Nick is no Hersch. He’s not a trickster. Yet we feel the same dislocation in him and in Lyutov, the same sense of amnesia. Nick can’t sleep. He was blown up during the war, and he’s convinced that if he falls asleep, his soul will leap out of his body and never come back. And so he remembers the streams he’d fished as a boy, revisits them like some haunted angler and clutches at the details. Lyutov isn’t like that. Lyutov dreams all the time. But in his sleep men lose their eyes. . . .

  It’s the nature of narrative that really links both authors and their early books. As Hemingway said to Ilya Ehrenburg in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, after he discovered Babel during an air raid in Madrid: “I have been criticized for writing too concisely, but I find that Babel’s style is even more concise than mine.” Both men were hunters who realized the merciless drama of where a sentence ended and began. “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place,” Babel says in “Guy de Maupassant.” And he could have been Hemingway here. They were among the very first writers to insist that the reader had to be brought right into the narrative: fiction was like detective work that depended on the reader’s own participation. The reader lived in those white islands between the words. But none of this might have happened if “Hem” and Babel hadn’t gone to war—war would mark them with an ambiguity worse than any wound. Hem liked to brag that he’d served in the Arditi, the Italian shock troops of World War I who were as notorious as the Red Cavalry would become in the Russian Civil War. But Hem was only a boy in the Red Cross, an ambulance driver who switched to canteen service because he wanted to be near the front line. And he was blown up weeks before his nineteenth birthday, while distributing chocolate and cigarettes in the trenches; he would have pieces of shrapnel embedded in his buttocks for the rest of his life, remain with a little forest of scars on his legs. And Babel would return from Poland with a severe case of asthma and lice all over his body; a few of his friends had even given him up for dead. Hem would adopt the swagger of an air marshal, and Babel would often behave like a man who wa
s still rocking along on a horse, but whatever their pretense and personal fables, they’d absorbed the no-man’s-land of military conflict . . . and what that conflict could do on a page of prose.

  Reading Red Cavalry and In Our Time is like looking at the world through barbed wire while the wire is moving out from under you. We catch the jarred edge of things, the rip and tear of memory. The language both men use—a savage shorthand— doesn’t glamorize; it’s about the closing off that comes from shock, little time bombs as crisp as articles of war. Hem may have delivered candy for the Red Cross, and Babel may have been Kiril Lyutov on his propaganda train, but they were still “combatants.” A writer, Babel would say, was like “a soldier on reconnaissance.”

  Chapter Four

  ARGAMAK

  1.

  CYNTHIA OZICK writes like a lost daughter of Isaac Babel—a picaro with her very own plumage. In her introduction to the master’s complete works, she compares him with that ghostly internal wanderer and waif, Franz Kafka, who starved to death because he could no longer swallow. Kafka was, she says, “the man who thinks but barely lives,” a metaphysician of sick souls who navigated entire worlds from his private closet. But Babel “lives, lives, lives! [ . . . ] He is a trickster, rapscallion, ironist, wayward lover, imprudent impostor.” The list could go on and on. Babel himself loved to support that impression, to play the picaro. In Red Cavalry, he summons up Khlebnikov, commander of the 1st Squadron, who has lost his white stallion to Savitsky, his own divisional commander: Savitsky simply stole the horse, and Khlebnikov can’t recover from the unfairness of it. He resigns from the Party, writes a declaration—“I am, comrades, a lover of white horses”—and the Party can’t give him back the horse. He’s demobilized, drummed out of the service. And Lyutov sees in Khlebnikov some kind of brother. “We were both shaken by the same passions. Both of us looked at the world as a meadow in May—a meadow traversed by women and horses” (“The Story of a Horse”).