“Why did you saddle me with an enemy?” I said to him. “None of this is my fault.”
The squadron commander raised his head.
“I can see right through you!” he said. “Right through you! What you want is to live without enemies, you’ll do anything not to have enemies.”
“Kiss him three times,” Bizyukov muttered, turning away.
A fiery spot burned on Baulin’s forehead. His cheek twitched.
“You know what you end up with like that?” he said in a gasping voice. “You end up being bored! To goddamn hell with you!”
It was obvious I had to leave. I got myself transferred to the Sixth Squadron. Things went better there. The long and the short of it was that Argamak had taught me some of Tikhomolov s horsemanship. Months passed. My dream had become a reality. The Cossacks’ eyes stopped following me and my horse.
THE KISS
At the beginning of August, headquarters sent us to Budziatycze to regroup. The Poles had occupied it at the beginning of the war, but we had been quick to win it back. Our brigade entered the shtetl at dawn. I arrived later in the day. The best billets had already been taken, and I ended up at the schoolmasters house. He was a paralyzed old man sitting in an armchair in a low-ceilinged room, among buckets with fruit-bearing lemon trees. On his head was a Tyrolean hat with a feather. His gray beard lay on his chest, which was covered with cigarette ash. Babbling, his eyes fluttering, he seemed to be asking me for something. I washed, went to the headquarters, and didnt come back until night. My orderly, Mishka Surovtsev, a cunning Cossack from Orenburg, gave me a full report: besides the paralyzed old man, there was also a daughter present, Elizaveta Alekseyevna Tomilina, and her five-year-old son who was also called Mishka, like Surovtsev. The daughter, the widow of an officer who had fallen in the Great War, was a respectable woman but, according to Surovtsev’s information, would be willing to make herself available to a proper gentleman.
“I can arrange things,” he told me, and went off to the kitchen, where he began clattering about with plates. The schoolmaster’s daughter helped him. As they cooked, Surovtsev told her of my brave feats, how I had knocked two Polish officers out of their saddles in a battle, and how much the Soviet authorities respected me. He was answered by the restrained, soft voice of Tomilina.
“Where dyou sleep?” Surovtsev asked her as he left the kitchen. “You should come sleep closer to us, were living, breathing people.”
He brought me some fried eggs in a gigantic frying pan, and put it on the table.
“Shes up for it,” he said, sitting down. “She just hasn’t come out and said it yet.”
At that very instant we heard whispering, rattling, and heavy, careful steps. We didn’t have time to finish eating our war meal, when some old men on crutches and old women with kerchiefs on their heads came hobbling through the house. They dragged little Mishkas bed into the dining room, into the lemon-tree forest, next to his grandfathers armchair. The feeble guests, readying themselves to defend Elizaveta Alekseyevnas honor, huddled together in a flock, like sheep in a storm, and, barricading the door, spent the whole night silently playing cards, whispering, “My trick,” and falling silent at every sound. I was so mortified, so embarrassed, that I simply could not fall asleep behind that door, and could barely wait for the sun to rise.
“For your information,” I told Tomilina when I ran into her in the hall, “for your information, I have a law degree and am a member of the so-called intelligentsia!”
Rigid, her arms dangling, she stood there in her old-fashioned housedress, which clung tightly to her slim body. Without blinking, she looked straight at me with widening blue eyes sparkling with tears.
Within two days we were friends. The schoolmaster s family, a family of kind, weak people, lived in boundless fear and uncertainty. Polish officials had convinced them that Russia had fallen in fire and barbarity, like Rome. They were overcome with a childlike, fearful joy when I told them of Lenin, the Moscow Arts Theater, of a Moscow in which the future was raging. In the evenings, twenty-two-year-old Bolshevik generals with scraggly red beards came to visit us. We smoked Moscow cigarettes, we ate meals that Elizaveta Alekseyevna prepared with army provisions, and sang student songs. Leaning forward in his armchair, the paralyzed old man listened avidly, his Tyrolean hat bobbing to the rhythm of our songs. Through all these days the old man was in the clutches of a sudden, stormy, vague hope, and, in order not to let anything darken his happiness, he did his best to overlook the foppish bloodthirstiness and loudmouthed simplicity with which in those days we solved all the problems of the world.
After our victory over the Poles—the family counsel decided—the Tomilins would move to Moscow. We would have a celebrated professor cure the old man, Elizaveta Alekseyevna would take classes, and we would put Mishka in the selfsame school that his mother had once gone to at Patriarkhy Prudy. The future seemed incontestably ours, and war was merely a stormy prelude to happiness, happiness, the core of our being. The only things that remained unresolved were the specific details, and nights passed in discussing these details, mighty nights, in which the candle end was mirrored in the dull bottle of our homebrewed vodka. Elizaveta Alekseyevna, blossoming, was our silent listener. I have never met a more impulsive, free, or timorous being. In the evenings, cunning Surovtsev, in the wicker cart he had requisitioned back in Kuban, drove us up the hill to where the abandoned house of the Counts Gasiorowski shone in the flames of the sunset. The horses, thin but long-bodied and thoroughbred, were running in step in their red reins. A carefree earring swayed on Surovtsevs ear. Round towers rose up from a pit that was overgrown with a yellow tablecloth of flowers. The ruined walls drew a crooked line flooded with ruby-red blood across the sky. A dog-rose bush hid its berries, and blue steps, the remains of the flight of stairs that Polish kings had once mounted, shone in the thickets. Once, as I sat there, I pulled Elizaveta Alekseyevnas head toward me and kissed her. She slowly pulled away, got up, and leaned against the wall, holding on to it with both hands. She stood there motionless, and around her, around her dazzled head, swirled a fiery dusty ray. Shuddering, as if she had just heard something, Tomilina raised her head and let go of the wall. She ran down the hill, her uncertain steps becoming faster. I called out to her, she didn’t answer. Below, red-cheeked Surovtsev lay sprawled out in his wicker cart.
At night, when everyone was asleep, I crept to Elizaveta Alekseyevnas room. She sat reading, holding her book at arms length. Her hand, lying on the table, seemed lifeless. She turned when I knocked, and rose.
“No,” she said, looking me in the eyes, “please, dearest, no.” And, embracing my head with her long, bare arms, she gave me an increasingly violent, never-ending, silent kiss.
The shrill ring of the telephone in the next room pushed us apart. An orderly was calling from headquarters.
“Were pulling out!” he said over the phone. “You are to report to the brigade commander now!”
I rushed out of the house without even putting on my hat, stuffing my papers into my bag as I ran. Horses were being brought out of yards, horsemen galloped yelling through the darkness. The brigade commander, tying his cloak, told us that the Poles had broken through our lines near Lublin, and that we had been ordered to execute a bypass maneuver. Both regiments pulled out an hour later. The old man, awoken from his sleep, anxiously followed me with his eyes through the leaves of a lemon tree.
“Promise me you will return,” he kept saying, his head wagging. Elizaveta Alekseyevna, a fur jacket over her batiste nightdress, accompanied us out onto the street. An invisible squadron raced past violently. At the curve in the road by the field I turned to look back— Elizaveta Alekseyevna was bending down to fix the jacket of little Mishka, who was standing in front of her, and the erratic light of the lamp burning on the windowsill streamed over the tender bones of her nape.
After riding a hundred kilometers without rest, we joined forces with the Fourteenth Cavalry Division and, fighting, we bega
n our retreat. We slept in our saddles. At rest stops, we fell to the ground overwhelmed with exhaustion, and our horses, pulling at their reins, dragged us fast asleep through the harvested fields. It was the beginning of autumn and the soundless, drizzling Galician rain. Huddled together in a bristling silent herd, we dodged and circled, fell into the Poles’ waiting net, but managed to slip out again just before they could close it. We lost all sense of time. When we were quartered in the church in Toscza, it did not even occur to me that we were only nine versts from Budziatycze. Surovtsev reminded me, we exchanged glances.
“The problem is that the horses are exhausted,” he said cheerfully. “Otherwise we could go.”
“We couldnt anyway,” I replied. “They’d notice if we left in the middle of the night.”
And we went. We tied gifts to our saddles—a clump of sugar, a fox-fur wrap, and a live, two-week-old goat kid. The road went through a
swaying wet forest, a metallic star strayed through the crowns of the oaks. In less than an hour we arrived at the shtetl, its burned-out center filled with trucks, pale with flour dust, and with machine-gun-cart harnesses and broken shafts. Without dismounting, I knocked on the familiar window. A white cloud flitted through the room. Wearing the same batiste nightdress with its hanging lace, Tomilina came rushing out onto the porch. She took my hand in her hot hand and led me into the house. Mens underclothes were hanging out to dry on the broken branches of the lemon trees, and unknown men were sleeping in camp beds lined up in tight rows like in a field hospital. With crooked, hardened mouths they yelled out hoarsely in their sleep, breathing greedily and loud, their dirty feet jutting out. The house was occupied by our War Spoils Commission, and the Tomilins had been bundled off into a single room.
“When will you take us away from here?” Elizaveta Alekseyevna asked, clasping my hand.
The old man woke, his head wagging. Little Mishka cuddled the goat kid, and brimmed over with happy, soundless laughter. Above him stood Surovtsev, puffing himself up. Out of the pockets of his Cossack trousers he shook spurs, shot-through coins, and a whistle hanging on a yellow string. In this house occupied by the War Spoils Commission there was nowhere to hide, and Tomilina and I went to the wooden shed where the potatoes and beehive frames were kept in winter. There, in the shed, I saw what an inevitably pernicious path that kiss had been, the path that had begun by the castle of the Counts Gasiorowski.
Surovtsev came knocking shortly before dawn.
“When will you take us from here?” Elizaveta Alekseyevna asked, turning her head away.
I stood there silently, and then walked over to the house to say good-bye to the old man.
“The problem is were running out of time,” Surovtsev said, blocking my way. “Get on your horse, weVe got to go!”
He jostled me out onto the street and brought me my horse. Elizaveta Alekseyevna gave me her chilled hand. As always, she held her head high. The horses, well rested overnight, carried us off at a brisk trot. The flaming sun rose through the black tangle of the oak trees. The rejoicing morning filled my whole being.
A glade in the forest opened up before us. I directed my horse toward it, and, turning back to Surovtsev, called out to him, “We could have stayed a bit longer. You came for me too early!”
“Too early?” he said, riding up closer to me, pushing away the wet branches that dropped their sparkling raindrops. “If it wasnt for the old man, I’d have come for you even earlier. He was trying to tell me something and suddenly was all nerves, started squawking, and keeled over. I rush to him, I look, hes dead, dead as a doornail!”
The forest came to an end. We rode over a plowed field without paths. Standing up in his stirrups, looking all around, whistling, Surovtsev sniffed out the right direction and, breathing it in with the air, hunched forward and went galloping toward it.
We arrived in time. The men of the squadron were just being awakened. The sun shone warmly, promising a hot day. That morning our brigade crossed the former border of the Kingdom of Poland.
AND THEN THERE WERE NINE
[This story is an earlier variation of "Squadron Commander Trunov."]
Nine prisoners of war are no longer alive. I know that in my heart. When Golov, a platoon commander from the Sormov workers,* [the Sormov Steelworks (19,839 workers in 1917) played a key role in the Revolution and the Civil War] killed the gangly Pole, I said to the chief of staff, “The example the platoon commander is setting is demoralizing our fighters. We must draw up a list of prisoners and then send them to headquarters for interrogation.”
The chief of staff agreed. I took pencil and paper out of my bag and called Golov over.
“You look at the world through your spectacles,” he told me, looking at me with hatred.
“Yes, through my spectacles,” I said to him. “And what about you, Golov? How do you look at the world?”
“I look at it through the miserable life of a worker,” he said, and went over to the prisoner who was holding a Polish uniform with dangling sleeves. The uniform had been too small for him. The sleeves had barely reached his elbows. Golov examined the prisoners woolen
drawers.
“You an officer?” Golov asked him, shielding his eyes from the sun.
“No,” the Pole answered firmly.
“We never got to wear nothing like that!” Golov muttered, and fell silent. He stood there without saying a word, shuddered, looked at the prisoner, and his eyes paled and widened.
“My mama knitted them,” the prisoner said firmly I turned around and looked at him. He was a slender young man. Long sideburns curled over his yellowish cheeks.
“My mama knitted them,” he repeated, and lowered his eyes.
“Shes a great knitter, that mama of yours,” Andryushka Burak cut in. He was a young red-cheeked Cossack with silky hair, who earlier had dragged the trousers off a dying Pole. The trousers now lay thrown over his saddle. Laughing, Andryushka rode over to Golov, carefully scooped the uniform out of his hands, threw it over the trousers on his saddle, and, tapping his horse lightly with his whip, rode off.
At that moment the sun came pouring out from behind a cloud, enveloping with dazzling light Andryushka’s horse, its lively trot, the carefree swish of its docked tail. In a daze, Golov watched the Cossack ride off. He turned and saw me drawing up the list of prisoners. He saw the young Pole with the curly sideburns. The Pole raised calm eyes filled with youthful arrogance and smiled at Golovs dismay. Golov cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “Our Republic is still alive, Andrei! Its too early to be dealing out her property! Bring back those rags!”
Andrei turned a deaf ear. He rode on at a trot, his horse pertly swatting its tail, as if it were shooing us away.
“Treason!” Golov mumbled, morose and rigid, pronouncing the word syllable by syllable. He kneeled, took aim, and fired, but missed. Andrei swerved his horse around and came galloping back toward Golov. His red-cheeked, blossoming face was filled with anger.
“Listen, countryman!” he yelled loudly, suddenly rejoicing in the sound of his powerful voice. “I should knock you to Kingdom Come, Platoon Commander! I should knock you to where your you-know-what mother is! YouVe got a dozen Poles on your hands, and you’re making a big fuss! We’ve taken hundreds, and didn’t come running for your help! If you’re a worker, then do your job!”
And, glancing at us triumphantly, Andryushka rode off at a gallop. Platoon Commander Golov did not look up at him. He clutched his forehead. Blood was trickling from his head like rain from a haystack. He lay down on his stomach, crawled toward the stream, and for a long time held his smashed, blood-drenched head in the shallow water.
Nine prisoners of war are no longer alive. I know that in my heart.
Sitting on my horse, I made a list of them arranged in neat columns. In the first column I entered a row of numbers, in the second their names and surnames, and in the third column the units to which they had belonged. All in all there were nine names. The fourth name was Adolf
Shulmeister, a clerk from Lodz, a Jew. He kept snuggling up to my horse and caressing my boots with tender, trembling fingers. His leg had been shattered by a rifle butt, and he left behind him a thin track, like a lame, wounded dog. The sun boiled the sparkling sweat on his orange, pockmarked, bald pate.
“You Jude, Pane,”* he whispered, frantically caressing my stirrup. “You Jude!” he whimpered, dribbling spittle, writhing with joy.
“Get back in line, Shulmeister,” I yelled at the Jew, and suddenly, seized by deathly numbness, slipped off my saddle.
“How come you know?” I asked him breathlessly.
“Your eyes, their sweet Jewish look,” he yelped, hopping on one leg, leaving his thin dogs track behind him. “Your sweet Jewish look, Panel”
I barely managed to extricate myself from his condemned mans frenzy. I came back to my senses slowly, as after a concussion.
The chief of staff ordered me to take care of the details and rode off to the units.
The machine guns were dragged up onto the hill like calves on halters. They moved up side by side, like a well-ordered herd, clanking reassuringly. The sun played on their dusty muzzles. And I saw a rainbow on their steel. The Polish youth with the curly sideburns stared at them with village curiosity. He leaned his whole body forward, revealing a view of Golov, who was crawling out of a ditch pale and intent, his smashed head and his rifle raised. I stretched my hands out to Golov and yelled, but the sound choked and bulged in my throat. Golov quickly shot the prisoner in the back of the neck and jumped up to his feet. The surprised Pole turned to him, executing a half spin on his heel, as in a military exercise. With the slow movements of a woman giving herself to a man, he lifted both hands to his nape, slumped to the ground, and died instantly.
A smile of peace and relief flitted over Golovs face. A light flush returned to his cheeks.
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Page 34