We’re supposed to read this as the real Babel, the man who preferred meadows in May, with a swath of women and horses. Horses are as powerful a motif in Red Cavalry as the Cossacks themselves. Afonka Bida, a platoon commander, has his horse shot right out from under him. “Farewell, Stepan,” he says to the dying animal, bowing from the waist “like a woman seized with hysterics in church.”
He abandons his own unit and starts punishing Poles.
“A horse is like a father,” says one of the men in Bida’s platoon, “saves one’s life time and again. Bida will be lost without his horse.”
And he is. The whole countryside bears the traces of Bida’s butchering.
“He’s hunting around for a horse,” the platoon sings about its commander.
Two weeks go by as Bida sets fire to village after village in his “despairing, lone-wolf attacks.”
Lyutov’s division takes a particular town. The men believe that Bida has had his head bashed in by Galician peasants in the woods. But suddenly he rides up to them on a tall gray stallion, without his left eye. He’s glad to give his eye if it means capturing a magnificent horse.
His men look at him in wonder, pull on the stallion’s tail, count its teeth. They’re envious. They’d all give up an eye to have such a horse . . . (“Afonka Bida”).
Red Cavalry doesn’t end with a horse or a horseman, but with a prince who has lost his pants. Elijah, a rabbi’s son and a dying revolutionary, is laid out on board the propaganda train, with his maddening mix of Lenin and Maimonides—he’s a Jewish poet and propagandist, like Babel himself, but at least Elijah has actual cartridges with his pages from Solomon’s Song of Songs. And Lyutov finishes off the story with another one of his lies. “And I, who can scarce contain the tempests of my imagination within this age-old body of mine, I was there beside my brother when he breathed his last” (“The Rabbi’s Son”).
Lyutov wasn’t there at all. He was drifting in his own mirage of words. But we can’t forget that curious dilemma of a rabbi’s son who found his own new faith in the Revolution, and dies with his poetry and phylacteries. And Babel? He’s Elijah’s double who didn’t die, who has to go deeper into the whirlwind. . . .
And then, six years after the book appeared, Babel wrote a new ending, called it “Argamak: An Unpublished Chapter of the Red Cavalry. ” Ever since his first success in Moscow, Babel had also become a lover of white stallions, a writer who lived on a stud farm, who mingled with jockeys like the ex-cavalryman he’d never been.
“Argamak” is his own story of a horse.
“I resolved to transfer to the active forces,” Lyutov says in the opening line. There are no horses, but Lyutov is given a horse. His squadron commander punishes a Cossack who has killed a couple of captured officers, deprives him of Argamak. But Lyutov can’t really handle the horse. “I would wobble like a sack on the stallion’s long lean spine.”
Argamak’s hind legs swell up. He grows thin. His old master appears, dressed in galoshes and rags. “Argamak stretched out his long neck and neighed toward his master, neighed in a soft squeal, like a horse in the desert.”
Lyutov transfers to another squadron, where he’s triumphant on a lesser horse, having learned the Cossack style of riding from Argamak. He’s accepted as a cavalryman, but it’s at a terrible price. Babel’s own dream has intruded upon the narrative. Still, it doesn’t spoil Red Cavalry.
We tolerate “Argamak” as another bouncing mirror in a text that metamorphoses in front of our eyes. The genius of the book is that it behaves like a cannibal that can swallow its own parts and spit them back at us in a new configuration. . . .
Babel was never a horseman no matter how hard he tried. It was the pose of a picaro. The craftsman who didn’t like to talk about books. But when he was with Olesha, his only rival as a fiction writer, he was the hunger artist who longed not to be alone. Olesha grew even more silent than Babel under Stalin’s thumb, and drank too much. “Don’t overdo it, Yura,” Babel would sigh in his company, “[or] I’ll have no one to talk with.”
2.
IT WASN’T BLIND luck that brought Babel to the Kavalerists in the spring of 1920. His family considered it a suicidal act—a Yid from Odessa riding with Cossacks who were a pogrom unto themselves, the tsar’s most loyal ally in killing Jews and putting down rebellion. But Babel’s encounter with the Cossacks would crystallize him in a way that no mythical meeting with Gorky ever could.
He’d become a soldier of sorts, even with his empty gun. He had his own ambulance tachanka and other duties that propelled him into the arms of the general staff. He was some kind of military historian, attached to his division as its very own “scribe,” writing battle reports, interrogating prisoners; during battle he would climb aboard his ambulance and help with the wounded. Babel was everywhere. Suicidal or not, he’d picked the right campaign and had positioned himself within it as the propagandist who held a whole bunch of keys: he could observe and participate, blend into the battle or remain apart, while experimenting with his fictional personas, and “like the classic picaro,” wearing his own false identity, Babel “found himself a character in a wholly different picaresque,” where nothing was what it seemed—devils were invoked and blood was spilled out of misconceived malice.
The Polish peasants thought that all Jews were Bolsheviks; therefore they had the right to kill as many as they could. And the Jews of the Pale were startled to learn that the Bolsheviks who had come to liberate them were only Cossacks like other Cossacks, ready to steal and rape. And Babel, as some phantasmagoric information officer, would feed them fairy tales about the wonders of the Revolution, fairy tales that he half believed. Hadn’t Babel arrived with a crusading army? These crusaders cared about no one but themselves. They were marauders with a Red star. . . .
Did Babel realize that he would touch upon an historical moment when he volunteered to join the Cossack crusade? We have no record of him as a Chekist or as a foot soldier on the Rumanian front. These were mosaics for his Avtobiographiya, put there to build the aura of an Odessa bookworm who transforms himself into a Soviet hero. He would write “The Road” (published in 1932, the same year as “Argamak”), about his adventures as a picaro in Petersburg during the Civil War. Our narrator leaves “the crumbling front,” arrives in Kiev, gets on the train to Petersburg with a Jewish teacher and his wife. But a telegrapher climbs aboard, looks at the teacher’s travel permit, and shoots him in the face. Then a hunchbacked muzhik slices off the teacher’s sexual organs and stuffs them into the wife’s mouth, telling her that now she can eat something kosher.
Next, all Jews are thrown off the train. The hunchback strips off the narrator’s boots and coat, steals the four gold coins that his mother had sewn into his underwear, hits him on the back of the neck, and cackles in Yiddish, “Run away, Chaim.”
And he runs, his bare feet sinking into snow. He arrives in a shtetl and informs us with his usual élan: “There was no doctor at the hospital to amputate my frostbitten feet.” The Soviets move him out on a cart in the middle of the night. His feet heal. He arrives in Petersburg by train, sleeping beneath the muzzle of a howitzer.
He can’t enter into the city’s secrets. “This frozen, basalt Venice stood transfixed.” He stops at the Cheka headquarters on Gorokhovaya Street, shows the commandant a letter from Vanya Kalugin, a sergeant in his old regiment who is now with the Cheka. The commandant tells him to find Kalugin at the Anichkov Palace.
Our narrator trudges across Petersburg. “The Nevsky Prospekt flowed into the distance like the Milky Way. Dead horses lay along it like milestones. Their legs, pointing upward, supported the descending sky.”
He finds Kalugin sitting in the palace next to a table with a heap of toys. He falls asleep on the table, shoving the toys aside. He wakes up on a sofa. “The lights of a chandelier danced above me in a waterfall of glass.”
Kalugin carries him like a baby into a bathtub, gives the barefoot boy a bath, pouring water over him with a buck
et. Our narrator gets into a robe with buckles, tailored for a giant—it’s the robe of Tsar Alexander III, who weighed 325 pounds and once lived in the palace.
They drink tea together as “stars [stream] over the crystal walls of our glasses.” They smoke cigars thick as a finger— Alexander’s own cigars, the gift of a sultan. And our narrator looks at the giant’s robe, which has been mended many times. The toys on the table once belonged to Alexander’s son, Nicholas II, the last of the tsars, murdered with his family at Ekaterinburg in 1918, the same year that our narrator and Kalugin pass a whole night playing with his toys.
In the morning Kalugin takes him to Gorokhovaya Street. “He’s one of us,” Kalugin explains to the chairman of the Petersburg Cheka. “His father is a storekeeper, a merchant, but he’s washed his hands of them. . . . He knows languages.”
He’s given a military uniform and food coupons, and in a corner of the City Hall he starts translating the “depositions of diplomats, agents provocateurs, and spies.”
And in a single day our narrator has everything: “clothes, food, work, and comrades true in friendship and death . . . That is how, thirteen years ago, a wonderful life filled with thought and joy began for me.”
The story is as ambiguous and rich in coloration as anything Babel ever wrote. But the tag he places at the end reads like a kiss to Comrade Stalin and the Central Committee, as if Babel were preparing his own progress report as a Bolshevik pilgrim. Stalin has demanded a prose that serves the Party. And “The Road” is Babel’s little wayward dance toward the perimeters of Bolshevik reality. Babel now identifies himself as a Chekist and a good soldier. It’s one more fairy tale, but it’s marked with hysteria. The hunchback who stuffs the sexual organs of the Jewish teacher into his wife’s mouth is like an ogre who’s come out of a magic forest. And Petersburg, with its fields of ice and dead horses holding up the sky, is like an enchanted town that lives within the walls of its own enchanted clock. . . .
Babel must have been dreaming about the Anichkov Palace for a long time. He told Paustovsky in 1921 of his “unofficial residence ” at the palace, how he’d slept on Tsar Alexander’s divan and smoked “fat, pink cigarettes” instead of cigars, cigarettes from the Sultan of Turkey.
Yet nothing he told Paustovsky was quite as fantastic or disturbingly factual as his summer with the Red Cavalry. How could Babel have known that the Polish campaign would be the last significant mounting of cavalry in modern European warfare? The Red Cavalry, with its “16,000 active sabers,” would soon disappear. Babel himself marks its death cry when he has a full squadron of Kavalerists ride into the woods to avoid four enemy bombers, while their wounded commander attacks the plane with a certain panache and is cut to pieces.
The Red Cavalry had been the Revolution’s most successful and celebrated cadre. It was created in November 1919 to counter those Cossacks who had sided with the Whites. The Kavalerists would become an instantaneous myth—the entire cavalry had been given over to the Cossacks. They were irresistible as they charged with their red banners shivering in the sky. Stalin himself was their “leader,” since he was the political commissar of the southern front. Red Cavalry commanders remained among his favorites, and weren’t touched when Stalin decided to plow into his own generals during the Great Purge. But within ten years of the disastrous Polish campaign, the Cossacks themselves would be persecuted. Not even the Boss could mold them into shock troops.
There was that little moment when a man in a mask appeared on the propaganda train, writing for a Cossack newspaper that the Cossacks couldn’t read, riding into a Poland that had been carved up by two or three different empires, and encountering an enigmatic world of poor Jews, since the path of the Polish campaign was the Pale of Settlement itself. And Babel, the Revolution’s own writer, was troubled and half crazed by what he saw—marauding and rape by both sides, the Reds and the Catholic Poles. Whatever we might call it, he suffered a breakdown. He would return to Odessa at the end of the year with glazed eyes, months after the Red Cavalry had been sent into reserve. Later, in a story that wasn’t published together with Red Cavalry, he would write about his experiences with the cruel tone of a cavalier. Six Ukrainian anarchists have raped a Jewish maid. And when Lyutov hears about it he “decide[s] to find out what a woman looks like after being raped six times” (“Makhno’s Boys”). The cruelty continues as Lyutov describes how she walks “with the heavy gait of a cavalryman whose numb legs have just touched the ground after a very long ride.” But the centerpiece of the story is neither Lyutov nor the maid. It’s Kikin, an errand boy for the anarchists who assisted in the rape—he held down the girl’s arms—but couldn’t seem to rape her himself. Disgruntled half the time, he’s considered a simpleton who likes to walk about on his hands. But he’s the only human barometer we have left; and Babel, like Kikin, is also someone who spent most of the campaign walking around on his hands. . . .
I suspect that his ride with the Kavalerists had broken his revolutionary zeal. He’d gone through the war in a kind of dream state, as a wounded picaro, where the boundaries between him and his masks began to merge; this sense of an hallucinated self would provide Red Cavalry with much of its power. But he kept to the role of the picaro. Perhaps it was the one means of escaping the absurdity of his situation. The Revolution wasn’t interested in writers who walked on their hands. It wanted soldiers, not verbal acrobats. . . .
3.
RED CAVALRY IS one of those books, like Melville’s Confidence-Man or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, that are larger, more mysterious, than our means of interpreting them. They grow more and more modern, seem to mirror the strangeness within and around us. Saul Bellow addressed this “affliction” of the modern when he wrote that “narrative art itself has dissolved.” The sense of the single person, or narrating force, has skipped town. “Instead of a unitary character with his unitary personality, his ambitions, his passions, his soul, his fate, we find in modern literature an oddly dispersed, ragged, mingled, broken, amorphous creature whose outlines are everywhere, whose being is bathed in mind as the tissues are bathed in blood, and who is impossible to circumscribe in any scheme of time.”
Kiril Lyutov.
Red Cavalry is filled with Kiril’s own darker doubles. In “Two Ivans,” Kiril’s horse has been killed. He stops to take a leak. While buttoning up his pants, he feels “splashes of something” on his hand. He lights his little lantern and sees lying on the ground a Pole he had splattered with his piss. “It was pouring out of his mouth, bubbling between his teeth, gathered in his empty sockets.” He finds a notebook near the corpse, with personal expenses, “a list of plays to be given at the Cracow theater, the date of the birthday of a woman called Marie-Louise”—a writer’s notebook, random, with a fury of detail.
Lyutov plays with us again when he wipes the skull of his “unknown brother” with a page of Polish propaganda. “Night flew toward me on mettlesome horses,” horses that disturb the soul. Babel may have been the poet of sunlight, but Red Cavalry collects images of a hellish night, where the moon is green as a lizard . . . or loiters in the sky like a beggar woman, and morning doesn’t want to come, as it oozes over Lyutov “like chloroform on a hospital table.”
He’s one more prince of the night, pissed-upon, with eye sockets that reflect nothing, give nothing back, as spurious as that notebook on the ground, with its riddle of numbers and names, and words that leap out at us and Lyutov.
The Soviets could not bear to see this, a “hero” whose persona seems to unravel on every page. It took a French critic, Roland Barthes, to read Babel for us. “Style is indifferent to society,” says Barthes in Writing Degree Zero; it is the writer’s “glory and his prison, it is his solitude.” Great writing is a kind of agraphia, “it is anti-communication, it is intimidating”—it longs to say that which cannot be said. “Modernism begins with the search for a literature which is no longer possible.” It is like a text that explodes, that destroys itself, crawling
deep into the night. Babel takes us into the belly of the beast and holds our hand. His book is about a terrifying, brutal loneliness, but we aren’t lonely as we read it. He’s captured that one perverse moment in the Revolution where the lawless dance of the Cossacks was outside ideology, was pure ritual, and their “mettlesome horses” belonged neither to the Russians nor the Poles, but to that long lament of language, the sadness of song.
Chapter Five
BENYA KRIK
1.
YEARS AGO I HAPPENED upon a photograph called A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., and immediately thought of Babel. The Jewish giant could have been one more gargoyle in Babel’s portrait of Odessa. He has a special shoe on his left foot, a cane in his right hand, and he has to stoop in order not to bump the ceiling with his head. He’s suffering from acromegaly, sometimes known as giantism (Goliath suffered from the same disease). Dated 1970, the photograph is by Diane Arbus.
Her giant has curly hair and a colossal jaw. He’s smiling at his parents, who have a look of total befuddlement on their faces. They’re tiny people, the two of them, seem half his size. The giant is sloppily dressed, but his father is impeccable in a dark jacket and horn-rimmed glasses; behind him is a lamp that tilts right out of the picture.
The photograph is deliberately unarranged, almost with a randomness of detail, but in that randomness Arbus has captured the parents’ dilemma: Old World immigrants gazing at the son they’ve spawned, this monster of the New World—a Jewish giant.
“Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot,” Arbus told a group of students at the Rhode Island School of Design shortly before she killed herself in 1971. “There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test. They’re aristocrats.”
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