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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  “Forgive me!” Ivan said, stretching out his hand to her. “Forgive me, my one and only!”

  He held out his palm to her. The mares ear hung limply, her eyes rolled, rings of blood sparked around them, her muzzle lay in a straight line with her neck. She curled back her upper lip in despair. She stretched out her neck and scuttled forward, pulling the jumping harrow behind her. Ivan raised the axe over his head. The blow hit her between the eyes, her foal again turned inside her tumbling belly. Ivan walked across the yard to the shed and dragged out the winnowing fan. He swung the axe down with wide, slow blows, smashing the machine, dragging the axe into the drum and the delicate grid of the wheels. His wife came out onto the stoop in her long bodice.

  “Mother!” Kolyvushka heard her faraway voice. “Mother! Hes smashing everything up!”

  The door opened. Out of the house came an old woman in canvas trousers, steadying herself on a stick. Yellow hair hung over the hollows of her cheeks, and her shirt clung to her thin body like a shroud. The old woman stepped into the snow with her shaggy stockings.

  “Murderer!” she said to her son, grabbing the axe out of his hand. “Do you remember your father? Do you remember your brothers in the labor camps?”

  The neighbors began to gather in the yard. The muzhiks stood in a semicircle and looked away. A woman lunged forward and began to shriek.

  “Shut up, you foolish cow!” her husband told her.

  Kolyvushka stood leaning against the wall. His rasping breath echoed through the courtyard. It was as if he were working strenuously, panting heavily.

  Kolyvushka’s Uncle Terenti was shuffling about the gate, trying to lock it.

  “I am a man!” Kolyvushka suddenly said to the people around him. “I am a man, a villager like you! Have you never seen a man before?”

  Terenti hustled the villagers out of the yard. The gates creaked and fell shut. They swung open again in the evening, and a sledge piled high with possessions came sweeping out of the yard, the women perched on bales like frozen birds. A cow, tethered by her horn, came trotting behind. The sledge passed the outskirts of the village and disappeared into the flat, snowy desert. The wind spiraled in this desert, pummeling and moaning, scattering its blue waves behind which stretched the metallic sky, through which a mesh of diamonds wound sparkling.

  Kolyvushka walked down the street to the village council, his eyes fixed straight ahead. A meeting of the new kolkhoz named “Renaissance” was under way. Hunchbacked Zhitnyak sat slouching behind the desk.

  “The great change in our lives—what’s this great change all about?” he said.

  The hunchbacks hands pressed against his torso, and then went flying up.

  “Fellow villagers! We are redirecting ourselves into dairy production and market gardening! This is of momentous importance! Our fathers and grandfathers trudged over great treasures with their boots, and the time has now come for us to dig these treasures up! Is it not a disgrace, is it not an outrage that though we are only some sixty versts from our regional capital, we haven’t developed our farming according to scientific methods? Our eyes were closed, my fellow villagers, we’ve been running away from ourselves! What does sixty versts mean? Does anyone here know? In our country that is equal to an hour—but even that one hour belongs to us! It is worth its weight in gold!”

  The door of the village council opened. Kolyvushka came in and walked over to the wall in his voluminous fur jacket and tall sheepskin hat. Ivashko’s fingers jumped and went scuttling into the pile of papers in front of him.

  “I must ask all individuals without a voting right to immediately leave this meeting,” he said, looking down at the papers.

  Outside the window, beyond the dirty glass, the sunset was spilling out in green emerald streams. In the twilight of the village hut, sparks glittered faintly in the raw clouds of rough tobacco. Ivan Kolyvushka took off his hat, and his mop of black hair came pouring forth.

  He walked up to the table around which the committee was sitting: Ivga Movchan, a woman who worked as a farmhand, Evdokim, the head of the village council, and silent Adrian Morinets.

  “My people!” Ivan Kolyvushka said, stretching out his hand and laying a bunch of keys on the table. “My people, I am cutting all ties with you!”

  The iron keys clanked and lay on the blackened boards. Adrians haggard face appeared from within the darkness.

  “Where will you go, Ivan?”

  “My people wont have me, maybe the earth will!”

  Kolyvushka walked out quietly, his head lowered.

  “It’s a trick!” Ivashko yelled the moment the door fell shut. “It’s a provocation! Hes gone to get his rifle, that’s what! He’s gone to get his rifle!”

  Ivashko banged his fist on the table. Words about panic and the need to keep calm tried to struggle through his lips.

  Adrians face again retreated into its dark corner. “No, Comrade Chairman,” he said from within the darkness. “I dont think he went to get his rifle.”

  “I have a proposal to make!” Ivashko shouted.

  The proposal was that a guard be set up outside Kolyvushkas place. Timish the bailiff was voted to be the guard. Grimacing, he took a bentwood chair out onto the stoop, slumped down on it, and laid his shotgun and his truncheon by his feet. From the heights of the stoop, from the heights of his village throne, Timish bantered with the girls, whistled, shouted, and thumped his shotgun on the ground. The night was lilac and heavy, like a bright mountain crystal. Veins of frozen rivulets lay across it. A star sank into a well of black clouds.

  The following morning Timish reported that there had been no incidents. Kolyvushka had spent the night at Grandpa Abrams, an old man overgrown with raw flesh.

  In the evening Abram had hobbled off to the well.

  “Why go there, Grandpa Abram?” Kolyvushka asked.

  ‘Tm going to put on a samovar,” Grandpa said.

  They slept late. Smoke rose above the hut. Their door remained shut.

  “He’s run for it!” Ivashko said at the kolkhoz meeting. “Are we going to cry tears over him? What d’you think, villagers?”

  Zhitnyak sat at the table, his sharp, quivering elbows spread wide, entering the particulars of the confiscated horses. The hump on his back cast a moving shadow.

  “How much more are we going to stuff down our throats?” Zhitnyak pronounced philosophically as he wrote. “Now we suddenly need everything in the world! We need crop sprinklers, we need plows, tractors, pumps! Gluttony, thats what this is! Our whole country has been seized by gluttony!”

  The horses that Zhitnyak entered in the book were all bay or skewbald, with names like “Boy” and “Little Miss.” Zhitnyak had the owners sign against their surnames.

  He was interrupted by a noise, a faraway, muffled clatter of hooves. A tidal wave was rolling toward Velikaya Staritsa6 and came crashing over it. A crowd poured over the ravished street, legless cripples hobbling in front. An invisible banner was fluttering above their heads. They slowed as they arrived at the village council and drew into formation. A circle opened in their midst, a circle of ruffled-up snow, a gap as for a priest during a church procession. Kolyvushka was standing in the circle, his shirt hanging loose beneath his vest, his head completely white. The night had silvered his gypsy locks, not a black hair was left. Flakes of snow, weak birds carried by the wind, drifted across the warming sky. An old man with broken legs jostled his way forward and peered avidly at Kolyvushka’s white hair.

  “Tell us, Ivan,” the old man said, raising his arms. “Tell us what is in your soul!”

  “Where will you chase me to, my fellow villagers?” Kolyvushka whispered, looking around. “Where shall I go? I was born here among you.”

  The crowd began to rumble. Morinets elbowed his way to the front.

  “Let him be,” he said in a low, trembling voice, the cry trapped in his powerful chest. “Let him be! Whose share will he grab?”

  “Mine!” Zhitnyak said, and burst out laughing
. He walked up to Kolyvushka, shuffling his feet, and winked at him.

  “I slept with a woman last night!” the hunchback said. “When we got up she made pancakes, and me and her, we gobbled them down like we was hogs—ha, we blew more farts than you could shake a stick at—”

  The hunchback stopped in midsentence, his guffaws broke off, and the blood drained from his face.

  “So you’ve come to line us up against the wall?” he asked in a lower voice. “YouVe come to bully us with that white head of yours, to turn the thumbscrews on us? But we wont let you, the time for thumbscrews has passed!”

  The hunchback came nearer on his thin, bowed legs. Something whistled inside him like a bird.

  “You should be killed,” he whispered, an idea flitting through his mind. “Ill go get my gun and finish you off.”

  His face brightened. He gave Kolyvushka s hand a spirited tap and hurried off into the house to get Timish s gun. Kolyvushka wavered for a moment, and then walked off. His silver head disappeared in the tangled mesh of houses. He stumbled as he walked, but then his strides grew firmer. He took the road to Ksenevka.

  No one ever saw him again in Velikaya Staritsa.

  THE ROAD

  I left the crumbling front in November 1917. At home my mother packed underwear and dried bread for me. I arrived in Kiev the day before Muravyov began shelling the city.* [Mikhail Artemevich Muravyov, 1880-1918, was the commander in chief of the Southern Revolutionary Front. He was shelling Kiev in order to occupy it for the Bolsheviks.] I was trying to get to Petersburg. For twelve days and nights I hid with Chaim Tsiryulnik in the basement of his Hotel Bessarabka. The commander of Soviet Kiev issued me a pass to leave the city.

  In all the world there is no more cheerless sight than the Kiev train station. For many years makeshift wooden barracks have defaced the town outskirts. Lice crackled on wet planks. Deserters, smugglers, and gypsies were all crowded together in the station. Old Galician women urinated standing on the platform. The low sky was furrowed with clouds full of rain and gloom.

  Three days went by before the first train left. At first it stopped every verst; then it gathered speed, its wheels rattling faster, singing a powerful song. This filled everyone in our transport car with joy. Fast travel filled people with joy in 1918. At night, the train gave a jolt and stopped. The door of our car opened, and we saw the green glimmer of snow before us. A station telegrapher in soft Caucasian boots and a fur coat tied with a strap climbed aboard. The telegrapher stretched out his hand and tapped his finger on his open palm. “Put all travel permits here!”

  Right by the door an old woman lay quietly curled up on some bundles. She was heading for Lyuban to her son, who was a railroad worker. Dozing next to me was a schoolmaster, Yehuda Veynberg, and his wife. The schoolmaster had married a few days earlier, and was taking his young wife to Petersburg. They had been whispering throughout the journey about new structured methods in teaching, and then dozed off. Their hands were clasped even in sleep.

  The telegrapher read their permit signed by Lunacharsky,7 pulled a Mauser with a thin, dirty muzzle from under his coat, and shot the schoolmaster in the face.

  A big, hunchbacked muzhik in a fur cap with dangling earflaps was standing behind the telegrapher. The telegrapher winked at him, and the muzhik put his lamp on the floor, unbuttoned the dead mans trousers, sliced off his sexual organs with a pocketknife, and stuffed them into the wifes mouth.

  “Treft wasn’t good enough for you!” the muzhik said. “So now eat something kosher!”

  The woman’s soft throat swelled. She remained silent. The train was standing on the steppes. The furrowed snows swarmed with polar brilliance. Jews were being thrown out of the cars onto the rails. Shots rang out unevenly, like shouts. The muzhik in the fur cap with the dangling earflaps took me behind a pile of logs and began to search me. The darkened moon shone down on us. Smoke rose from the forest’s lilac wall. Frozen wooden fingers crept stiffly over my body.

  “A Yid or a Russian?” the telegrapher yelled from the car platform. “Yeah, a Russian! So much so, he’d make a first-rate rabbi!” the muzhik muttered as he searched me.

  He brought his wrinkled, anxious face close to mine, ripped out the four golden ten-ruble coins which my mother had sewn into my underwear for the journey, took my boots and my coat, and then, turning me around, hit me on the back of my neck with the edge of his palm and said in Yiddish, “Antloyf, Chaim!”**

  I ran, my bare feet sinking in the snow. I felt him mark a target on my back, the nip of his aim cutting through my ribs. But the muzhik did not shoot. A light was quavering within a garland of smoke among the columns of pine trees, within the covered cellar of the forest. I ran toward the hut. The smoke of burning dung patties rose from it. The forester groaned when I burst into his hut. Huddled in strips cut from furs and coats, he was sitting on a finely wrought bamboo armchair with velvet cushions, crumbling tobacco on his knees. Enveloped in smoke, the forester groaned again, got up, and bowed deeply.

  “You mustn’t come in here, my dearest friend! You mustn’t come in here, dearest Comrade!”

  He led me to a path and gave me some rags to wrap my feet in. By late next morning I had reached a shtetl. There was no doctor at the hospital to amputate my frostbitten feet. The medical orderly was running the ward. Every morning he came galloping over to the hospital on his short black stallion, tied it to the hitching post, and came over to us full of fire, sparks burning in his eyes.

  “Friedrich Engels teaches us that there should be no nations,” the medical orderly said, bending over the head of my bed, his pupils fiery coals. “And yet we say the opposite—nations have to exist.”8

  Ripping the bandages off my feet, he straightened his back, and, gnashing his teeth asked me in a low voice, “So where is it taking you, this nation of yours? Where? Why doesn’t it stay in one place? Why is it stirring up trouble, making waves?”

  The Soviets moved us out on a cart in the night: patients who had not seen eye to eye with the medical orderly and old Jewesses in wigs, the mothers of the shtetl commissars.

  My feet healed. I continued along the destitute road to Zhlobin, Orsha, and Vitebsk. The muzzle of a howitzer acted as my shelter from Novosokolniki to Loknya.^ We were riding on the uncovered cannon platform. Fedyukha, my chance traveling companion, a storyteller and witty jokester, was undertaking the great journey of the deserters. We slept beneath the powerful, short, upward-pointing muzzle, and warmed each other in the canvas pit, covered with hay like the den of an animal. After Loknya, Fedyukha stole my suitcase and disappeared. The shtetl soviet had issued me the suitcase along with two pairs of soldier s underwear, dried bread, and some money. Two days went by without food as we approached Petersburg. At the station in Tsarskoe Selo9 I witnessed the last of the shooting. The defense detachment fired shots into the air as our train pulled in. The smugglers were led out onto the platform and their clothes were ripped off, and rubber suits filled with vodka came tumbling off of them onto the asphalt.

  Shortly after eight in the evening, the Petersburg station hurled me from its howling bedlam onto the Zagorodny Boulevard. A thermometer on the wall of a boarded-up pharmacy across the street showed -24 degrees Celsius. The wind roared through the tunnel of Gorokhovaya Street; jets of gaslight faded over the canals. This frozen, basalt Venice stood transfixed. I entered Gorokhovaya Street, which lay there like a field of ice cluttered with rocks.

  The Cheka^ had installed itself at number 2, the former office of the governor. Two machine guns, iron dogs with raised muzzles, stood in the entrance hall. I showed the commandant the letter from Vanya Kalugin, my sergeant in the Shuysky Regiment. Kalugin had become an investigator in the Cheka, and had sent me a letter to come see him.

  “Go to Anichkov Palace,” the commandant told me. “Hes there now.”

  “Ill never make it,” I thought, and smiled at him.

  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. Their bare bellies were clean and shiny. An old man who resembled an Imperial guardsman trudged past me, dragging a wooden toy sledge behind him, driving his boots with difficulty into the ice. A Tyrolean hat was perched on his head, and he had tied his beard with a piece of string and stuck it into his shawl.

  “I’ll never make it,” I said to the old man.

  He stopped. His furrowed leonine face was filled with calm. He hesitated for a moment, but then continued dragging the sledge along the street.

  “Thus falls away the need to conquer Petersburg,” I said to myself, and tried to remember the name of the man who had been crushed by the hooves of Arab stallions at the very end of his journey. It was Yehuda Halevi.10

  Two Chinese men in bowler hats stood on the corner of Sadovaya Street with loaves of bread under their arms. They showed them to passing prostitutes, and with frozen fingernails drew lines across the crust. The women walked past them in a silent parade.

  At Anichkov Bridge I sat on the base of the statue by Klodt s horses.^

  I lay down on the polished flagstone, my elbow under my head, but the freezing granite blistered me, and drove, pushed, propelled me forward to the palace.

  The portal of the raspberry-red side wing stood open. Blue gaslight shone above a lackey, who had fallen asleep in an armchair. His lower lip was hanging from an inky, moribund face filled with wrinkles, and his military tunic, flooded with light, hung beltless over livery trousers trimmed with gold lace. A splotchy arrow, drawn in ink, pointed the way to the commandant. I went up the stairs and passed through low, empty chambers. Women painted in somber black danced rounds on ceilings and walls. Iron grates covered the windows, their broken latches hung on the frames. At the end of the suite of chambers Kalugin was sitting at a table, lit as if on stage, his head framed by straw-colored muzhik hair. On the table in front of him was a heap of toys, colorful rags, and torn picture books.