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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  We hurried into the churchyard, went through a dark corridor, and arrived in a square-shaped room, which had been built as an extension to the chancel. Sashka, the nurse of the Thirty-first Regiment, was puttering about in there, rummaging through a pile of silk that somebody had thrown on the floor. The cadaverous aroma of brocade, scattered flowers, and fragrant decay seeped into her nostrils, tickling and poisonous. Then Cossacks entered the room. They burst into guffaws, grabbed Sashka by the arms, and flung her with gusto onto a pile of cloth and books. Sashkas body, blossoming and reeking like the meat of a freshly slaughtered cow, was laid bare, her raised skirts revealing the legs of a squadron woman, slim, cast-iron legs, and dim-witted Kurdyukov, the silly fool, sat on top of Sashka, bouncing as if he were in a saddle, pretending to be in the grip of passion. She pushed him off and rushed out the door. We passed the altar, and only then did we enter the nave of the church.

  The church was filled with light, filled with dancing rays, columns of air, and an almost cool exultation. How can I ever forget Apoleks painting, hanging over the right side-altar? In this painting twelve rosy Paters are rocking a cradle girdled with ribbons, with a plump infant Jesus in it. His toes are stretched out, his body lacquered with hot morning sweat. The child is writhing on his fat, wrinkly back, and twelve apostles in cardinals’ miters are bending over the cradle. Their faces are meticulously shaven, flaming cloaks are billowing over their bellies. The eyes of the Apostles sparkle with wisdom, resolution, and cheer. Faint grins flit over the corners of their mouths, and fiery warts have been planted on their double chins—crimson warts, like radishes in May.

  This church of Berestechko had its private and beguiling approach to the death agonies of the sons of man. In this church the saints marched to their deaths with the flair of Italian opera singers, and the black hair of the executioners shone like the beard of Holofernes. Here, above the altar, I saw the sacrilegious painting of John the Baptist, which had also sprung from Apoleks heretical, intoxicating brush. In this painting the Baptist was beautiful in the ambiguous and reticent way that drives the concubines of kings to shed their half-lost honor and their blossoming lives.

  At first I did not notice the signs of destruction in the church, or didn’t think they looked too bad. Only the shrine of Saint Valentine had been smashed. Lying around it were shreds of decayed wadding and the saint’s ridiculous bones, which, if they resembled anything, looked like chicken bones. And Afonka Bida was still playing the organ. Afonka was drunk, wild, his body was lacerated. He had come back to us only yesterday with the horse he had seized from local farmers. Afonka was obstinately trying to play a march, and someone was badgering him in a sleepy voice, “Enough, Afonka, enough, let s go eat!” But Afonka wouldn’t give up. Many more of Afonka’s songs followed. Each sound was a song, and one sound was torn from the other. The song’s dense tune lasted for a moment and then crossed over into another. I listened, looked around—the signs of destruction didn’t look too bad. But Pan Ludomirski, the bell ringer of the Church of Saint Valentine and husband of the old blind woman, thought otherwise.

  Ludomirsky had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. He walked through the church with measured steps, his head lowered. The old man could not bring himself to cover the scattered relics because a simple man, a lay person, may not touch what is holy. The bell ringer threw himself on the blue slabs of the floor, lifted his head, his blue nose jutting up above him like a flag above a corpse. His blue nose quivered above him and at that moment a velvet curtain by the altar swayed, rustled, and fell open. In the depths of the niche, against the backdrop of a sky furrowed with clouds, ran a bearded little figure wearing an orange Polish caftan—barefoot, his mouth lacerated and bleeding. A hoarse wail assailed our ears. The man in the orange caftan was being pursued by hatred, and his pursuer had caught up with him. The man lifted his arm to ward off the blow, and blood poured from it in a purple stream. The young Cossack standing next to me yelled out and, ducking, started to run, even though there was nothing to run from, because the figure in the niche was only Jesus Christ—the most unusual portrayal of the Son of God I have ever seen in my life.

  Pan Ludomirskis Savior was a curly-headed Jew with a scraggly little beard and a low, wrinkled forehead. His sunken cheeks were tinted with carmine, and thin, red-brown eyebrows curved over eyes that were closed in pain.

  His mouth was wrenched open, like a horses mouth, his Polish caftan fastened with a precious girdle, and from under the caftan jutted crooked little porcelain feet, painted, bare, pierced by silver nails.

  Pan Ludomirski stood under the statue in his green frock coat. He stretched his withered arm toward us and cursed us. The Cossacks stared at him with wide eyes and let their straw-colored forelocks hang. In a thundering voice, the bell ringer of the Church of Saint Valentine cursed us in the purest Latin. Then he turned away, fell to his knees, and clasped the feet of the Savior.

  Back at the headquarters, I wrote a report to the division commander about the insult to the religious feelings of the local population. A decree was issued that the church be closed, and the guilty parties were charged with a breach of discipline and sent before the military tribunal.

  1

  A pun: Koleso, short for Kolesnikov, means “wheel.”

  2

  Renamed Stalingrad in 1925 in honor of Joseph Stalin, who had played a major role in the defense of the city against General Denikin’s White Russian Army. Today Volgograd.

  "I" Zavalinka: a mound of earth around a Russian peasant hut that protects it from the weather and is often used for sitting outside.

  3

  1918, the year following the Bolshevik Revolution.

  4

  From the Russian folktale The Little Humpbacked Horse, in which the hero summons his magic horse with, “Appear before me like a leaf before a blade of grass!”

  5

  Berestechko, 1820, my beloved Paul, I hear that Emperor Napoleon is dead. Is it true? I feel well; it was an easy birth, our little hero is already seven weeks old.

  6

  The Russian Communist Party

  t The Red Cavalryman, the newspaper distributed to the Red Cavalry forces and for which Babel also wrote pieces. See The Red Cavalryman: Articles, Part V in this book.

  7

  The train belonging to the Polit-otdel, the political organ of the new Soviet government charged with the ideological education of the military.

  Term for Cossack leader.

  ^ Maslakov, commander of the First Brigade of the Fourth Division, a relentless partisan who was soon to betray the Soviet regime. [Footnote by Isaac Babel.]

  8

  The Ukrainian anarchist leader.

  9

  Ukrainian Cossacks shaved their heads, leaving only a forelock, known as a chub.

  SQUADRON COMMANDER TRUNOV

  At noon we brought the bullet-ridden body of Trunov, our squadron commander, back to Sokal. He had been killed that morning in a battle with enemy airplanes. All the hits had caught Trunov in the face; his cheeks were riddled with wounds, his tongue torn out. We washed the dead mans face as best we could so that he would look less horrifying, placed his Caucasian saddle at the head of his coffin, and dug him a grave in a stately spot—in the public park in the middle of the town, right by the fence. Our squadron rode there on horseback. The regimental staff and the divisional military commissar were also present. And at two in the afternoon, by the cathedral clock, our rickety little cannon fired the first shot. The cannon saluted Squadron Commander Trunov with its timeworn three-inch bore, did a full salute, and we carried the coffin to the open pit. The coffin was open, the clean midday sun lit the lanky corpse, lit his mouth filled with smashed teeth and his carefully polished boots, their heels placed together as at a drill.

  “Fighters!” Regimental Captain Pugachov said, as he eyed the dead man and walked up to the edge of the pit. “Fighters!” he said, standing at attention, shaking with emotion. “We are burying Pashka Trunov, an i
nternational hero! We are according Pashka the final honor!”

  Pugachov raised his eyes, burning with sleeplessness, to the sky and shouted out his speech about the dead fighters of the First Cavalry, that proud phalanx which pounds the anvil of future centuries with the hammer of history. Pugachov shouted out his speech loudly, clenched the hilt of his curved Chechen saber, and scuffed the earth with his tattered boots and their silver spurs. After his speech the orchestra played the “Internationale,” and the Cossacks took leave of Pashka Trunov. The whole squadron leaped onto their horses and fired a volley into the air, our three-inch cannon hissed toothlessly a second time, and we sent three Cossacks to find a wreath. They whirled off at full gallop, firing as they rode and plunging from their saddles in a display of acrobatics, and brought back armfuls of red flowers. Pugachov scattered the flowers around the grave, and we stepped up to Trunov for the last kiss. I touched my lips on an unblemished patch of forehead crowned by his saddle, and then left to go for a walk through the town, through gothic Sokal, which lay in its blue dust and in Galicia’s dejection.

  A large square stretched to the left of the park, a square surrounded by ancient synagogues. Jews in long, torn coats were cursing and shoving each other on this square. Some of them, the Orthodox, were extolling the teachings of Adassia, the Rabbi of Belz, which led the Hasidim of the moderate school, students of Rabbi Iuda of Husyatyn, to attack them. The Jews were arguing about the Kabbala, and in their quarrel shouted the name of Elijah, Gaon of Vilna, the persecutor of the Hasidim.

  Ignoring war and gunfire, the Hasidim were cursing the name of Elijah, the Grand Rabbi of Vilna, and I, immersed in my sorrow over Trunov, joined in the jostling and yelled along with them to ease my pain, until I suddenly saw a Galician before me, sepulchral and gaunt as Don Quixote.

  This Galician was wearing a white linen garment that reached down to his ankles. He was dressed as for burial or as for the Eucharist, and led a bedraggled little cow tied to a rope. Over its wide back darted the tiny wriggling head of a snake. On the snakes head was a teetering wide-brimmed hat made of village straw. The pitiful little cow tagged along behind the Galician. He led her with importance, and his lanky body cut into the hot brilliance of the sky like a gallows.

  He crossed the square with a stately stride and went into a crooked little alley seasoned with sickeningly thick smoke. In the charred little hovels, in beggarly kitchens, were Jewesses who looked like old Negro women, Jewesses with boundless breasts. The Galician walked past them and stopped at the end of the alley before the pediment of a shattered building.

  There by the pediment, near a crooked white column, sat a gypsy blacksmith shoeing horses. The gypsy was pounding the horses’ hooves with a hammer, shaking his greasy hair, whistling, and smiling. A few Cossacks with horses were standing around him. My Galician walked up to the blacksmith, gave him a dozen or so baked potatoes without a word, and turned and walked off, not looking up at anyone. I was about to follow him, but one of the Cossacks, waiting for his horse to be shod, stopped me. This Cossacks name was Seliverstov. He had left Makhno1 some time ago and was serving in the Thirty-third Cavalry Regiment.

  “Lyutov,” he said, shaking my hand, “you cant keep from picking quarrels with everyone! YouVe got the devil in you! Why did you finish off Trunov this morning?”

  And from the scraps of gossip he had heard, Seliverstov yelled foolish gibberish at me, about how that very morning I had given Trunov, my squadron commander, a good beating. Seliverstov hurled all kinds of reproaches at me, reproached me in front of all the Cossacks, but there wasn’t a grain of truth in what he said. It was true that Trunov and I had argued that morning, because Trunov wasted so much time dawdling with the prisoners. He and I had argued, but Pashka Trunov is dead, he will no longer be judged in this world, and I would be the last to do so. I will tell you why we quarreled.

  We had taken some men prisoner at dawn today near the train station. There were ten of them. They were in their underwear when we took them. A pile of clothes lay next to the Poles—it was a trick, so that we couldn’t tell the officers from the regular men by their uniforms. They had taken off their clothes themselves, but this time Trunov decided to find out the truth.

  “All officers, step forward!” he commanded, walking up to the prisoners and pulling out his revolver.

  Trunov had already been wounded in the head that morning. His head was bandaged with a rag, and blood trickled from it like rain from a haystack.

  “Officers! Own up!” he repeated, and began prodding the Poles with the butt of his revolver.

  Suddenly a thin old man with yellow cheekbones, a drooping mustache, and a large, bare bony back, came forward.

  “End of this war!” the old man said with incomprehensible delight. “All officers run away, end of this war!”

  And the Pole held out his blue hands to Trunov.

  “Five fingers,” he said, sobbing, twisting his large, wilted hands from side to side. “I raising with these five fingers my family!”

  The old man gasped, swayed, and broke into tears of delight. He fell on his knees before Trunov, but Trunov pushed him back with his saber.

  “Your officers are dogs!” Trunov said. “Your officers threw their uniforms here, but Im going to finish off whoever they fit! Were going to have a little fitting!”

  And Trunov picked out an officer’s cap from the pile of rags and put it on the old mans head.

  “It fits,” Trunov murmured, stepping up closer to him, “it fits.” And he plunged his saber into the prisoners gullet.

  The old man fell, his legs twitching, and a foamy, coral-red stream poured from his neck. Then Andryushka Vosmiletov, with his sparkling earring and his round villagers neck, sidled up to the dying man. Andryushka unbuttoned the dying Poles trousers, shook him lightly, and pulled the trousers off. He flung them onto his saddle, grabbed another two uniforms from the pile, and then trotted off, brandishing his whip. At that moment the sun came out from behind the clouds. It nimbly enveloped Andryushka’s horse, its cheerful trot, the carefree swish of its docked tail. Andryushka rode along the path to the forest— our cavalry transport was in the forest, the carters of the transport yelling and whistling, and making signs to Vosmiletov like to a deaf man.

  The Cossack was already halfway there when Trunov, suddenly falling to his knees, hoarsely yelled after him.

  “Andrei!” he shouted, lowering his eyes to the ground. “Andrei!” he repeated without looking up. “Our Soviet Republic is still alive, it’s too early to be dealing out her property! Bring back those rags, Andrei!” But Vosmiletov didnt even turn around. He rode at his amazing Cossack trot, his horse pertly swatting its tail, as if to shoo us away.

  “Treason!” Trunov mumbled in disbelief. “Treason!” he said, quickly shouldering his gun and shooting, missing in his haste. This time Andrei stopped. He turned his horse toward us, bouncing on his saddle like a woman, his face red and angry, his legs jerking.

  “Listen, countryman!” he yelled, riding closer, and immediately calming down at the sound of his own deep and powerful voice. “I should knock you to Kingdom Come to where your you-know-what mother is! Here youVe caught a dozen Poles, and make a big song-and-dance of it! WeVe taken hundreds and didn’t come running for your help! If you’re a worker, then do your job!”

  Andryushka threw the trousers and the two uniforms off his saddle, snorted, turned away from the squadron commander, and came over to help me draw up a list of the remaining prisoners. He loafed about and snorted unusually loudly. The prisoners howled and ran away from him. He ran after them and gathered them under his arms, the way a hunter grips an armful of reeds and pushes them back to see a flock of birds flying to the river at dawn.

  Dealing with the prisoners, I exhausted my repertoire of curses, and somehow managed to write up eight of the men, the numbers of their units, the type of gun they carried, and moved on to the ninth prisoner. The ninth was a young man who looked like a German acrobat from a good
circus, a young man with a white, German chest, sideburns, a tricot undershirt, and a pair of long woolen drawers. He turned the nipples on his high chest toward me, threw back his sweaty blond hair, and told me the number of his unit. Andryushka grabbed him by his drawers and sternly asked him, “Where did you get those?”

  “My mama knitted them,” the prisoner answered, suddenly tottering. “Shes a great knitter, that mama of yours,” Andryushka said, looking more closely at the drawers, and ran his fingertips over the Poles neat nails. “Yes, a great knitter—us, we never got to wear nothing like that.”

  He felt the woolen drawers again and took the ninth man by the hand in order to take him over to the other prisoners who were already on my list. But at that moment I saw Trunov creeping out from behind a mound. Blood was trickling from his head like rain from a haystack and the dirty rag had come undone and was hanging down. He crawled on his stomach holding his carbine in his hands. It was a Japanese car-

  bine, lacquered and with a powerful shot. From a distance of twenty paces, Pashka shot the young Poles skull to pieces and his brains spattered onto my hands. Trunov ejected the empty cartridges from his carbine and came over to me.

  “Cross that one off,” he said, pointing at my list.

  “I’m not crossing him off,” I answered, quaking. “From what I see, Trotskys orders don’t apply to you!”