The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  “Greetings,” I said to the people there. “Greetings. May I come in, your lordship, or how shall we handle this?”

  “Lets handle this nicely, correctly,” one of the men says, who, judging by the way he speaks, must be a land surveyor. “Let us handle things nicely, correctly, but from what I see, Comrade Pavlichenko, it seems you have ridden quite a distance, and dirt has crossed your face from side to side. We, the local authorities, are frightened of such faces. Why is your face like that?”

  “Because you are the local cold-blooded authorities,” I answer. “Because in my face one cheek has been burning for five years now, burning when I’m in a trench, burning when I’m with a woman, and it will be burning at my final judgment! At my final judgment!” I tell him, and look at Nikitinsky with fake cheerfulness. But he no longer has any eyes—there are now two cannonballs in the middle of his face, ready and in position under his forehead, and with these crystal balls he winks at me, also with fake cheerfulness, but so abominably.

  “My dear Matyusha,” he says to me, “we’ve known each other so long now, and my wife Nadyezhda Vasilevna, whose mind has come unhinged on account of the times we’re living in, she was always kind to you, Nadyezhda Vasilevna was, and you, my dear Matyusha, always looked up to her above all others! Wouldn’t you like to at least see her, even though her mind has come unhinged?”

  “Fine,” I tell him, and follow him into another room, and there he started clasping my hands, the right one, then the left.

  “Matyusha!” he says. “Are you my fate or are you not?”

  “No,” I tell him. “And stop using such words! God has dropped us lackeys and run. Our fate is a chicken with its head cut off, our life is

  not worth a kopeck! Stop using such words and let me read you Lenins letter!”

  “Lenin wrote me, Nikitinsky, a letter?”

  “Yes, he wrote you a letter,” I tell him, and take out the book of decrees, open it to an empty page, and read—though Im illiterate to the bottom of my soul. “In the name of the people,” I read, “for the establishment of a future radiant life, I order Pavlichenko—Matvey Rodionovich—to deprive, at his discretion, various persons of their lives.”

  “There we are,” I tell him. “That is Lenins letter to you!”

  And he says to me, “No!”

  “No,” he says, “my dear Matyusha, even if life has gone tumbling to the devil, and blood has become cheap in Holy Mother Russia! But regardless of how much blood you want, you’ll get it anyway, and you’ll even forget my last dying look, so wouldn’t it be better if I just show you my secret hideaway?”

  “Show me,” I tell him. “Maybe it’ll be for the better.”

  And again we went through the rooms, climbed down into the wine cellar, where he pulled out a brick, and behind this brick lay a little case. In it, in this case, were rings, necklaces, medals, and a pearl-studded icon. He threw the case over to me and stood there rigidly.

  “Take it!” he says. “Take what is most holy to the Nikitinskys, and go off to your den in Prikumsk!”

  And here I grabbed him by the neck, by the hair.

  “And what about my cheek?” I tell Nikitinsky. “How am I supposed to live with my cheek this way?”

  And he burst out laughing for all he was worth, and stopped struggling to get away.

  “A jackal’s conscience,” he says, and does not struggle. “I speak to you as to an officer of the Russian Empire, and you, you scum, were suckled by a she-wolf. Shoot me, you son of a bitch!”

  But shoot him I did not—I did not owe him a shot. I just dragged him up to the sitting room. There in the sitting room Nadyezhda Vasilevna was wandering about completely mad, with a drawn saber in her hand, looking at herself in the mirror. And when I dragged Nikitinsky into the sitting room, Nadyezhda Vasilevna runs to sit in the chair, and she is wearing a velvet crown and feathers on her head. She sat in the chair and saluted me with the saber. Then I started kicking Nikitinsky, my master, I kicked him for an hour, maybe even more than an hour, and I really understood what life actually is. With one shot, let me tell you, you can only get rid of a person. A shot would have been a pardon for him and too horribly easy for me, with a shot you cannot get to a mans soul, to where the soul hides and what it looks like. But there are times when I don t spare myself and spend a good hour, maybe even more than an hour, kicking the enemy. I want to understand life, to see what it actually is.

  THE CEMETERY IN KOZIN

  The cemetery in a shtetl, Assyria and the mysterious decay of the East on the overgrown, weed-covered fields of Volhynia. Gray, abraded stones with letters three hundred years old. The rough contours of the reliefs cut into the granite. The image of a fish and a sheep above a dead mans head. Images of rabbis wearing fur hats. Rabbis, their narrow hips girded with belts. Beneath their eyeless faces the wavy stone ripple of curly beards. To one side, below an oak tree cleft in two by lightning, stands the vault of Rabbi Asriil, slaughtered by Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks. Four generations lie in this sepulcher, as poor as the hovel of a water carrier, and tablets, moss-green tablets, sing of them in Bedouin prayer:

  “Azriily son of Anania, mouth of Jehovah.

  Elijah, son ofAzriil, mind that fought oblivion hand to hand.

  Wolf, son of Elijah) prince taken from his Torah in his nineteenth spring

  Judah, son of Wolf Rabbi of Krakow and Prague.

  0 death, 0 mercenary, O covetous thief, why did you not, albeit one single time, have mercy upon usT'

  PRISHCHEPA

  I'm making my way to Leshniov, where the divisional staff has set up quarters. My traveling companion, as usual, is Prishchepa, a young Cossack from Kuban, a tireless roughneck, a Communist whom the party kicked out, a future rag looter, a devil-may-care syphilitic, an unflappable liar. He wears a crimson Circassian jacket made of fine cloth, with a ruffled hood trailing down his back. As we rode, he told me about himself.

  A year ago Prishchepa had run away from the Whites. As a reprisal, they took his parents hostage and killed them at the interrogation. The neighbors ransacked everything they had. When the Whites were driven out of Kuban, Prishchepa returned to his Cossack village.

  It was morning, daybreak, peasant sleep sighed in the rancid stuffiness. Prishchepa hired a communal cart and went through the village picking up his gramophone, kvas jugs, and the napkins that his mother had embroidered. He went down the street in his black cloak, his curved dagger in his belt. The cart rattled behind him. Prishchepa went from one neighbors house to the next, the bloody prints of his boots trailing behind him. In huts where he found his mothers things or his father s pipe, he left hacked-up old women, dogs hung over wells, icons soiled with dung. The people of the village smoked their pipes and followed him sullenly with their eyes. Young Cossacks had gathered on the steppes outside the village and were keeping count. The count rose and the village fell silent. When he had finished, Prishchepa returned to his ransacked home. He arranged his reclaimed furniture the way he remembered it from his childhood, and ordered vodka to be brought to him. He locked himself in the hut and for two days drank, sang, cried, and hacked tables to pieces with his saber.

  On the third night, the village saw smoke rising above Prishchepas hut. Seared and gashed, he came staggering out of the shed pulling the cow behind him, stuck his revolver in her mouth, and shot her. The earth smoked beneath his feet, a blue ring of flame flew out of the chimney and melted away, the abandoned calf began wailing. The fire was as bright as a holy day. Prishchepa untied his horse, jumped into the saddle, threw a lock of his hair into the flames, and vanished.

  THE STORY OF A HORSE

  One day Savitsky, our division commander, took for himself a white stallion belonging to Khlebnikov, the commander of the First Squadron. It was a horse of imposing stature, but with a somewhat raw build, which always seemed a little heavy to me. Khlebnikov was given a black mare of pretty good stock and good trot. But he mistreated the mare, hankered for revenge, waited for an
opportunity, and when it came, pounced on it.

  After the unsuccessful battles of July, when Savitsky was dismissed from his duties and sent to the command personnel reserves, Khlebnikov wrote to army headquarters requesting that his horse be returned to him. On the letter, the chief of staff penned the decision: “Aforementioned stallion is to be returned to primordial owner.” And Khlebnikov, rejoicing, rode a hundred versts to find Savitsky, who was living at the time in Radzivillov, a mangled little town that looked like a tattered old whore. The dismissed division commander was living alone, the fawning lackeys at headquarters no longer knew him. The fawning lackeys at headquarters were busy angling for roasted chickens in the army commanders smiles, and, vying to outgrovel each other, had turned their backs on the glorious division commander.

  Drenched in perfume, looking like Peter the Great, he had fallen out of favor. He lived with a Cossack woman by the name of Pavla, whom he had snatched away from a Jewish quartermaster, and twenty thoroughbreds which, word had it, were his own. In his yard, the sun was tense and tortured with the blindness of its rays. The foals were wildly suckling on their mothers, and stableboys with drenched backs were sifting oats on faded winnowing floors. Khlebnikov, wounded by the injustice and fired by revenge, marched straight over to the barricaded yard.

  “Are you familiar with my person?” he asked Savitsky, who was lying on some hay.

  “Something tells me IVe seen you somewhere before,” Savitsky said to him with a yawn.

  “In that case, here is the chief of staff s decision,” Khlebnikov said gruffly. “And I would be obliged, Comrade of the reserve, if you would look at me with an official eye!”

  “Why not?” Savitsky mumbled appeasingly. He took the document and began reading it for an unusually long time. He suddenly called over the Cossack woman, who was combing her hair in the coolness under the awning.

  “Pavla!” he yelled. “As the Lord s my witness, youVe been combing your hair since this morning! How about heating a samovar for us!”

  The Cossack woman put down her comb, took her hair in both hands, and flung it behind her back.

  “YouVe done nothing but bicker all day, Konstantin Vasilevich,” she said with a lazy, condescending smile. “First you want this, then you want that!”

  And she came over to Savitsky; her breasts, bobbing on her high -heels, squirmed like an animal in a sack.

  “You've done nothing but bicker all day,” the woman repeated, beaming, and she buttoned up the division commander's shirt.

  “First I want this, then I want that,” the division commander said, laughing, and he got up, clasped Pavlas acquiescing shoulders, and suddenly turned his face, deathly white, to Khlebnikov.

  “I am still alive, Khlebnikov,” he said, embracing the Cossack woman tighter. “My legs can still walk, my horses can still gallop, my hands can still get hold of you, and my gun is warming next to my skin.”

  He drew his revolver, which had lain against his bare stomach, and stepped closer to the commander of the First Squadron.

  The commander turned on his heels, his spurs yelped, he left the yard like an orderly who has received an urgent dispatch, and once

  again rode a hundred versts to find the chief of staff—but the chief of staff sent him packing.

  “I have already dealt with your matter, Commander!” the chief of staff said. “I ordered that your stallion be returned to you, and I have quite a few other things to deal with!”

  The chief of staff refused to listen, and finally ordered the errant commander back to his squadron. Khlebnikov had been away a whole week. During that time we had been transferred to the Dubno forest to set up camp. We had pitched our tents and were living it up. Khlebnikov, from what I remember, returned on the twelfth, a Sunday morning. He asked me for some paper, a good thirty sheets, and for some ink. The Cossacks planed a tree stump smooth for him, he placed his revolver and the paper on it, and wrote till sundown, filling many sheets with his smudgy scrawl.

  “Youre a real Karl Marx, you are!” the squadrons military commissar said to him in the evening. “What the hell are you writing there?”

  “I am describing various thoughts in accordance with the oath I have taken,” Khlebnikov answered, and handed the military commissar his petition to withdraw from the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks.

  • • •

  “The Communist Party,” his petition went, “was, it is my belief, founded for the promotioning of happiness and true justice with no restrict-ings, and thus must also keep an eye out for the rights of the little man. Here I would like to touch on the matter of the white stallion who I seized from some indescribably counterrevolutionary peasants, and who was in a horrifying condition, and many comrades laughed brazenly at that condition, but I was strong enough to withstand that laughing of theirs, and gritting my teeth for the Common Cause, I nursed the stallion back to the desired shape, because, let it be said, Comrades, I am a white-stallion enthusiast and have dedicated to white stallions the little energy that the Imperial War and the Civil War have left me with, and all these stallions respond to my touch as I respond to his silent wants and needs! But that unjust black mare I can neither respond to, nor do I need her, nor can I stand her, and, as all my comrades will testify, theres bound to be trouble! And yet the Party is unable to return to me, according to the chief of staff’s decision, that which is my very own, handing me no option but to write this here petition with tears that do not befit a fighter, but which flow endlessly, ripping my blood-drenched heart to pieces!”

  • • •

  This and much more was written in Khlebnikovs petition. He spent the whole day writing it, and it was very long. It took me and the military commissar more than an hour to struggle through it.

  “What a fool you are!” the military commissar said to him, and tore it up. “Come back after dinner and you and I will have a little talk.”

  “I dont need your little talk!” Khlebnikov answered, trembling. “You and I are finished!”

  He stood at attention, shivering, not moving, his eyes darting from one side to the other as if he were desperately trying to decide which way to run. The military commissar came up to him but couldn’t grab hold of him in time. Khlebnikov lunged forward and ran with all his might.

  “We’re finished!” he yelled wildly, jumped onto the tree stump, and began ripping his jacket and tearing at his chest.

  “Go on, Savitsky!” he shouted, throwing himself onto the ground. “Kill me!”

  We dragged him to a tent, the Cossacks helped us. We boiled some tea for him, and rolled him some cigarettes. He smoked, his whole body shivering. And it was only late in the evening that our commander calmed down. He no longer spoke about his deranged petition, but within a week he went to Rovno, presented himself for an examination by the Medical Commission, and was discharged from the army as an invalid on account of having six wounds.

  That’s how we lost Khlebnikov. I was very upset about this because Khlebnikov had been a quiet man, very similar to me in character. He was the only one in the squadron who owned a samovar. On days when there was a break in the fighting, the two of us drank hot tea. We were rattled by the same passions. Both of us looked upon the world as a meadow in May over which women and horses wander.

  KONKIN

  So there we were making mincemeat of the Poles at Belaya Tserkov.

  So much so that the trees were rattling. I’d been hit in the morning, but managed to keep on buzzing, more or less. The day, from what I remember, was toppling toward evening. I got cut off from the brigade commander, and was left with only a bunch of five proletarian Cossacks tagging along after me. All around me everyones hugging each other with hatchets, like priests from two villages, the saps slowly trickling out of me, my horse has pissed all over itself. Need I say more?

  Me and Spirka Zabuty ended up riding off a ways from the forest. We look—and yes, two and two does make four!—no less than a hundred and fifty paces away, we see a dust cloud whi
ch is either the staff or the cavalry transport. If it’s the staff—that’s great, if it’s the cavalry transport—that’s even better! The boys’ tattered clothes hung in rags, their shirts barely covering their manhood.

  “Zabuty!” I yell over to Spirka, telling him he’s a son of a whore, that his mother is a you-know-what, or whatever (I leave this part up to you, as you’re the official orator here). “Isn’t that their staff that’s riding off there?”

  “You can bet your life it’s their staff]” Spirka yells back. “The only thing is, we’re two and they’re eight!”

  “Let’s go for it, Spirka!” I shout. “Either way, I’m going to hurl some mud at their chasubles! Let’s go die for a pickle and World Revolution!”

  And off we rode. They were eight sabers. Two of them we felled with our rifles. I spot Spirka dragging a third to Dukhonin’s headquarters to get his papers checked. And me, I take aim at the big King of Aces. Yes, brothers, a big, red-faced King of Aces, with a chain and a gold pocket watch. I squeezed him back toward a farm. The farm was full of apple and cherry trees. The horse that the Big Ace was riding was nice and plump like a merchant s daughter, but it was tired. So the general drops his reins, aims his Mauser at me, and puts a hole in my leg.

  “Ha, fine, sweetheart!” I think to myself. “Ill have you on your back with your legs spread wide in no time!”