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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  “She’s no woman, that one!” the villagers told them. “Our widows the devil, she is!”

  Gapa threw bread, twigs, and plates from the roof. She finished the vodka and smashed the bottle against the chimney ledge. The muzhiks who had gathered below roared. The widow jumped off the roof, untied her shaggy-bellied mare who stood dozing by the wooden fence, and rode off to get some wine. She came back weighed down with flasks, as a Circassian tribesman is weighed down with ammunition. Her horse was panting heavily and tossing its muzzle. Its belly, heavy with foal, surged and bulged, and equine madness quivered in its eyes.

  At the weddings, the villagers danced holding handkerchiefs, with lowered eyes, their boots shuffling in one spot. Only Gapa whirled around, as they do in the towns. She danced with Grishka Savchenko, her lover. They held each other as if they were wrestling. They tugged at each others shoulders with headstrong anger. They drummed the ground with their boots, and tumbled down as if they had been knocked off their feet.

  The third day of the wedding feasts began. The couples’ best men wore their sheepskin coats inside out and ran smeared with soot through the village, banging on oven doors. Bonfires were lit in the streets. People jumped through them, horns painted on their foreheads. Horses were harnessed to troughs that were dragged hurtling through the flames over clods of grass. Men fell to the ground, overpowered by sleep. Housewives threw broken pots and pans into their yards. The newlyweds washed their feet and climbed into tall beds, and only Gapa was still dancing alone in an empty shed. She whirled in circles, holding a tarred boat pole in her hand, her hair untied. She pounded the pole against the walls, leaving sticky black wounds, the thuds jolting the shed.

  “We bring fire and death,” Gapa whispered, waving the pole over her head.

  Planks and straw rained down on her as the walls caved in.

  She danced with loose hair among the ruins, in the din and dust of the crumbling wattle and the flying splinters of the breaking planks. Her delicate red-rimmed boots whirled through the rubble, drumming the ground.

  Night fell. The bonfires were dying out in the thawing snow pits.

  The shed lay in a tangled heap on the hill. A light began to flicker in the village council hut across the street. Gapa threw away her pole and ran over to the hut.

  “Ivashko!” she yelled, as she rushed into the room. “Come have some fun with us, let’s drink our life away!”

  Ivashko was the representative of the Regional Commission for Collectivization. For two months now he had been trying to talk the villagers into collectivizing. He was sitting in front of a pile of crumpled, tattered papers, his hands resting on the table. The skin on either side of his forehead was wrinkled, and in his eyes hung the pupils of an ailing cat. Above them bulged the arches of his bare pink eye sockets. “Are you sneering at our peasants?” Gapa yelled, stamping her foot. ‘Tm not sneering,” Ivashko said gloomily. “But it would be inappropriate for me to join you all.”

  Gapa danced past him, tapping her feet and waving her arms. “Come break bread with us,” she said to him. “And then tomorrow we’ll do exactly as you say, Comrade Representist! We will tomorrow, not today!”

  Ivashko shook his head.

  “It would be inappropriate for me to break bread with you,” he said. “You people aren’t human—you bark like dogs! I’ve lost fifteen pounds since I came here!”

  He chewed his lip and closed his eyes. He stretched out his hand, groped for his canvas bag, got up, staggered forward, and made his way toward the door with dragging feet, as if he were walking in his sleep.

  “Comrade Ivashko is pure gold,” Kharchenko, the council secretary, said after he had left. “He’s a kind fellow, but our village has been too rough on him.”

  An ash-blond forelock5 hung over Kharchenko’s button nose and pimples. He was reading a newspaper, his feet resting on the bench.

  “Just wait till the judge from Voronkov^ comes over,” Kharchenko said, turning a page of his newspaper. “Then you’ll all sit up straight.” Gapa slipped a bag of sunflower seeds out of her cleavage.

  “How come all you think about’s your duties, Comrade Secretary?”

  she asked. “Why are you afraid of death? Who ever heard of a muzhik turning away from death?”

  Outside, a swollen black sky was seething around the village belfry, and wet huts crouched and slithered away. The stars struggled to ignite above them, and the wind crept along the ground.

  Gapa heard the dull murmur of an unfamiliar, husky voice in the front room of her hut. A woman pilgrim had come to spend the night and was sitting on the bench above the stove with her legs pulled in under her. The icon lamp’s crimson threads of flame threw a net on the wall. A stillness hung over the clean hut. An odor of apple liquor seeped from the walls and partitions. Gapas fat-lipped daughters, craning their necks, were staring at the beggar woman. Short horsy hair covered their heads, and their lips were large and puffed out. A dead, greasy sheen lay on their narrow foreheads.

  “Keep up your lies, Grandma Rakhivna,” Gapa said, leaning against the wall. “I love it when you tell your lies.”

  Rakhivna sat on the bench above the stove with her head against the low ceiling, plaiting her hair into braids, which she then coiled in rows over her little head. Her washed, misshapen feet rested on the edge of the stove.

  “There’s three patriarchs in this world,” the old woman said, lowering her wrinkled face. “Our government has imprisoned the Patriarch of Moscow, the Jerusalem Patriarch is living among Turks. It is the Antioch Patriarch who now rules all of Christianity. He sent forty Greek priests onto Ukrainian soil to curse the churches from which our government took down the bells. The Greek priests passed Kholodny Yar, theyVe already been seen at Ostrogradsk, and come next Sunday they’ll be here in Velikaya Krinitsa!”

  Rakhivna closed her eyes and fell silent. The light of the icon lamps flickered over the hollows of her feet.

  “The judge from Voronkov,” the old woman suddenly said. “He collectivized the whole of Voronkov in a single day! He stuck nine squires in a cold cell, and on the following day they were to march in the chain gangs to Sakhalin. I tell you, daughter, there’s people everywhere, Christ is gloried everywhere! The squires were kept in a cold cell all night—then in come the guards to take them, the guards open the dungeon door, and what do their eyes behold in the full light of the morning? Nine squires dangling from the rafters on their belts!”

  Before she lay down, Rakhivna fussed about for a long time, sorting through her rags, whispering to her God as she would have whispered to her old man lying next to her. Then her breathing suddenly became light. Grishka Savchenko, the husband of one of the village women, was lying on a bench by the wall. He lay curled up, right on the edge as if he had been crushed, his back twisted, his vest bunched up over it, and his head sunk in pillows.

  “A mans love,” Gapa said, prodding and shaking him. “I know all there is to know about a man s love. They turn their snouts away from their wives and shuffle off, like this one here! He didnt go home to his wife Odarka, no, he didnt!”

  Half the night they rolled on the bench in the darkness, their lips tightly clenched, their arms stretching out in the darkness. Gapas braid went flying over the pillow. At dawn Grishka started up, moaned, and fell asleep with a snarl on his lips. Gapa gazed at her daughters’ brown shoulders, low foreheads, thick lips, and dark breasts.

  “What camels!” she said to herself. “How could they have come from me?”

  Darkness receded from the oak-framed window. Dawn opened a violet streak in the clouds. Gapa went out into the yard. The wind enveloped her like cold river water. She harnessed her sledge and loaded it with sacks of wheat—during the wedding celebrations everyone had run out of flour. The road slithered through the fog and mist of dawn.

  It snowed all day. At the mill they couldn’t start grinding till the following evening. At the edge of the village, short-legged Yushko Trofim, wearing a soaked cap, came out from
inside a sheet of snow to meet Gapa. His shoulders, covered in a sea of flakes, were surging and falling.

  “Well, they finally got up,” he muttered. He came up to her sledge and raised his bony black face up to her.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Gapa asked him. She pulled at her reins.

  “All the big men came to our village last night,” Trofim said. “TheyVe already dragged off that old biddy staying with you and arrested her. The head of the Collectivization Commission and the secretary of the District Party Committee. TheyVe nabbed Ivashko and now the Voronkov judge is stepping in.”

  Trofim walked off, his walrus whiskers bobbing, snowflakes slithering down them. Gapa shook the reins but then tugged at them again. “Trofim! What did they drag the old biddy off for?”

  Trofim stopped and yelled back from far away through the whirling, flying snow.

  “They said it was because of her propaganda campaign about the world coming to an end!”

  He walked on, limping on one foot, and in an instant his wide back was swallowed up by the sky that melted into the earth.

  Gapa rode up to her hut and tapped on the window with her whip. Her daughters were lounging around the table dressed in shawls and shoes as if they were at a feast.

  “Mama,” the oldest said. “Odarka came over while you were out and took her husband back home.”

  The daughters set the table and lit the samovar. Gapa ate, and then went to the village council, where she found the elders of Velikaya Krinitsa sitting in silence along the walls. The window, smashed some time back during a debate, was boarded up, the glass of the lamps had worn thin, and a sign saying “No Smoking” had been nailed to the pockmarked walls. The judge from Voronkov, his shoulders hunched, sat at the table reading. He was reading through the record ledger of the village council of Velikaya Krinitsa. He had raised the collar of his shabby little coat. Kharchenko, the council secretary, was sitting next to him, drawing up a formal charge against his own village. On columned sheets of paper he was entering all the crimes, arrears, and fines—all the wounds, visible and invisible. When Judge Osmolovsky from Voronkov had arrived in the village, he had refused to call a general meeting of the citizens, as the representatives before him had done. He did not give speeches, but simply asked for a list of quota dodgers and former merchants, an inventory of their property, crops, and farmsteads.

  The elders of Velikaya Krinitsa sat quietly on the benches, while Kharchenkos bustling, whistling pen crackled through the silence. There was a flurry of movement when Gapa came into the room. Evdokim Nazarenkos face lit up when he saw her.

  “Here’s our number one activist, Comrade Judge!” Evdokim said, guffawing and rubbing his palms together. “Our widow here has been actively ruining all our village youths.”

  Gapa stopped by the door and narrowed her eyes. A sneer flitted over Judge Osmolovsky s lips, and he crinkled his thin nose.

  “Good morning,” he said, nodding to her.

  “She was the first one to sign up for the collective farm,” Evdokim said, trying to chase away the brewing storm with a gush of words. “But then the good people of the village had a chat with her, and she designed up.”

  Gapa didn’t move. Her face flushed brick red.

  “The good people of the village say that in the collective farm everyone is to sleep under the same blanket!” she said in her sonorous voice.

  Her eyes twinkled in her fixed face.

  “Well, I for one am against sleeping wholesale! We like sleeping in twos, and we like our home-brewed vodka, goddamn it!”

  The muzhiks burst out laughing, but immediately fell silent. Gapa peered at the judge. He raised his inflamed eyes and nodded to her. Then he slumped even lower, took his head in his thin, red-haired hands, and once again immersed himself in the record ledger of Velikaya Krinitsa. Gapa turned around, and her stately back flashed out of the room.

  In the yard, Grandpa Abram, overgrown with raw flesh, was sitting on some wet planks with his knees pulled up. A yellow mane of hair hung to his shoulders.

  “What’s wrong?” Gapa asked him.

  “I’m sad,” the old man said.

  Back at home, her daughters were already in bed. Late at night, a little slanting flame, its mercurial tongue flickering, hovered across the road in the hut of Nestor Tyagay, a member of the Young Communist League. Judge Osmolovsky was lodging there. A sheepskin coat had been laid out on a bench, and his supper was waiting for him. A bowl of yogurt, an onion, and a thick slice of bread. The judge took off his spectacles and covered his aching eyes with his palms. He was known throughout the district as Comrade Two-Hundred-and-Sixteen-Percent—that had been the percentage of grain which he had managed to exact from the renegade town of Voronkov. Osmolovsky’s percentage had given rise to tales, songs, and folk legends.

  He chewed the bread and the onion, and spread out in front of him

  Pravda, the instructions of the District Committee, and the collectivization reports of the People s Commissariat for Agriculture. It was late, after one in the morning, when the door opened and Gapa, her shawl tied across her chest, came in.

  “Judge,” she said to him, “whats going to happen to the whores?”

  Osmolovsky raised his eyes, his face covered in rippled light.

  “They will no longer exist.”

  “Wont the whores be allowed to earn their living?”

  “They will,” the judge said. “But in a different, better way.”

  Gapa stared into a corner of the room with unseeing eyes. She fingered the necklace that hung across her chest.

  “Im glad to hear that!”

  Her necklace clinked. Gapa left, closing the door behind her.

  The piercing, frenzied night hurled itself down on her with thickets of low-hanging clouds—twisted ice floes lit up by black sparks. Silence spread over Velikaya Krinitsa, over the flat, sepulchral, frozen desert of the village night.

  KOLYVUSHKA

  Four men entered Ivan Kolyvushkas courtyard: Ivashko, the representative of the Regional Commission for Collectivization, Evdokim Nazarenko, the head of the village council, Zhitnyak, the chairman of the newly formed kolkhoz,* and Adrian Morinets. Adrian walked like a tower that had uprooted itself and was on the march. Ivashko had hurried past the barns, pressing his canvas briefcase to his side, and came bursting into Kolyvushkas house. Kolyvushkas wife and two daughters were sitting by the window spinning yarn on blackened spindles. They looked like nuns, with their kerchiefs, their long bodices, and their small, clean, bare feet. Photographs of Czarist ensigns, schoolmistresses, and townsfolk at their dachas hung on the walls between embroidered towels and cheap mirrors. Ivan Kolyvushka came into the house after his guests, and took off his hat.

  “How much tax does Kolyvushka pay?” Ivashko asked, turning to face the others.

  Evdokim, the village council head, watched the whirling wheels of the spindles with his hands in his pockets.

  Ivashko snorted when he was told that Kolyvushka paid two hundred and sixteen rubles.

  “Surely he can swing more than that!”

  “It looks like he cant.”

  Zhitnyak stretched his dry lips in a thin line. Evdokim continued watching the spindles. Ivan Kolyvushka stood in the doorway and winked at his wife, who went and pulled a receipt out from behind an icon and handed it to Ivashko, the representative of the Collectivization Commission.

  “And what about the seed fund?” Ivashko asked abruptly, impatiently digging his foot into the floorboards.

  Evdokim raised his eyes and looked around the room.

  “This household has already been cleaned out, Comrade Representative,” Evdokim said. “This isn’t the kind of household that doesn’t pay its share.”

  The whitewashed walls curved up into a low, warm cupola over the guests’ heads. The flowers in glass jars, the plain cupboards, the polished benches, all sparkled with an oppressive cleanliness. Ivashko jumped up and hurried out the door, his briefcase swinging. />
  “Comrade Representative!” Kolyvushka called out, hurrying after him. “So will instructions be sent to me, or what?”

  “You’ll be notified!” Ivashko shouted, his arms dangling, and rushed off.

  Adrian Morinets, inhumanly large, rushed after him. Timish, the cheerful bailiff, bobbed past the gate close at Ivashko’s heel, wading with his long legs through the mud of the village street.

  “What’s this all about?” Kolyvushka called out, waving him over and grabbing him by the sleeve. The bailiff, a long cheerful stick, bent forward and opened his mouth, which was packed with a purple tongue and set with rows of pearls.

  “They are about to confiscate your house.”

  “What about me?”

  “You’ll be sent off for resettlement.”

  And Timish rushed after Ivashko and the others with cranelike steps.

  A horse harnessed to a sledge was standing in Kolyvushka’s courtyard, and the red reins had been thrown over some sacks of wheat piled up in the sledge. There was a tree stump with an axe stuck in it in the middle of the yard by a stooping lime tree. Kolyvushka ran his fingers over his hat, pushed it back, and sat down. The mare came over to him, dragging the sledge behind her. She hung out her tongue and then curled it up. She was with foal, and her belly was heavily swollen. She

  playfully nudged and nuzzled her masters shoulder. Kolyvushka looked down at his feet. The trampled snow lay in ripples around the tree stump. Hunching over, Kolyvushka grabbed the axe, held it up high in the air for an instant, and brought it down on the horses forehead. One of her ears lunged back, the other fluttered and then slumped down. She moaned and bolted to the side, the sledge toppling over, the wheat flying in curved ribbons over the snow. She reared her forelegs into the air, tossing back her muzzle, and got caught in the spikes of a harrow by the shed. Her eyes peered out from under a streaming curtain of blood. She sang out in lament. The foal turned within her. A vein puffed up on her belly.