by Frank Wynne
Bolesław didn’t go straight home from the lakeside after hearing Malina’s news that her wedding to Michał would happen in October. He wanted to make the best of the beautiful evening, to wander about the forest, looking in here and there; or rather what he really wanted to do was to listen to the thoughts and images stirring inside him, leaving a gentle hint of intoxication. It really did feel like intoxication. Love had come out of the blue, and for a short while had changed what was going on inside him, making him quietly cheerful. But it had all started in a dreadful way.
Staś had died in the afternoon, and at once the old women, Janek’s mother, Katarzyna and Maryjka, had come and bustled about over washing and dressing the body. Although it was light outside, candles were lit, then the windows were draped in headscarves again. Staś was dressed in two rather tight pairs of pyjamas, one blue and one green, one on top of the other, and it was hard to undress him. Yet the old women managed to unwrap the corpse and laid it out naked on the counterpane. Bolesław was in the room throughout, standing in a corner, mournfully watching the preparations. He was ruminating over what he wanted to say to someone, but there was no one to say it to; nor was he really sure what he should say or what exactly he wanted to say; there probably weren’t any words for the things he was thinking. In any case, everything going through his mind was bad – hard, bitter and unruly. He had had enough of it – though he wasn’t entirely sure what ‘it’ was.
Staś lay on the bed, his extreme emaciation pitiful to see: his skin, white and pitted with rough tubercular lesions, was a tight, perfect fit for his narrow chest; his arms lay inert and at ease, the hands much darker than the body. His nipples had gone almost completely black, shrunk by the chill of evening and the chill of death. His face was covered with a handkerchief, while another red peasant kerchief bound up his drooping jaw. But no facial expression was needed: the abandoned body, thin, limp and dry as sticks, was all too expressive. The old women fetched a bowl of warm water and slowly, ceremonially dipped a sponge in it, murmuring prayers as they rubbed down Staś’s wretched chest.
At that point Malina came in. Bolesław tensed and took a step forward. Malina stood at the foot of the bed, wanting to stand and gaze at the shameless nakedness of the corpse stretched out before her, but the old women wouldn’t let her.
‘Fetch some more water and vinegar,’ said her mother. But she refused to budge. She looked avidly at Staś, then stepped forward and took the handkerchief from his face; she gave a gentle shriek, or rather sigh, but very quietly. Then she stepped back a pace and started trying to sponge him with the others.
Bolesław took another pace forward and said firmly, ‘What’s Malina doing here?’
Malina turned around and stared at him. Her eyes were dull, almost white, with narrowed pupils; she stared as if blind, and her large, chiselled features looked almost as dead as Staś’s pinched face. She stared around her and turned away, her breasts quivering in her tightly fitting bodice. She was strong and sturdy, expressionless and indifferent.
‘Malina, please leave.’
She didn’t answer. She picked up the bucket of water and set it down nearer Staś’s head, then plunged a long white towel in it.
‘Malina, please leave at once,’ repeated Bolesław in a hushed, almost desperate tone.
But she went on nonchalantly drawing out the towel, then wrung it out, unwound it and covered Staś’s chest with it. The black nipples were hidden beneath the white expanse of the towel.
‘Get out!’ screamed Bolesław suddenly, and grabbing her by the arm he pushed her forcefully towards the door. She stopped and stared at him again, then she opened the door, went out, and closed it behind her. Throughout it felt as if the terrible words ‘Get out!’ were still shuddering and swaggering in the room. At once Bolesław came to his senses and bounded after her. Outside he was amazed to find it was already dark. He didn’t know which way she had gone, so he softly called out her name a couple of times. He ran down the porch steps and walked briskly over to the courtyard, where he almost tripped over the girl. She was standing impassively beneath a tree, leaning against its white trunk.
Quickly Bolesław said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m doing, you see, I didn’t mean it, Staś is dead, Master Stanisław is dead, he was my only brother, we’re going to bury him beside my wife …’
There stood Malwina, large as life, impassive, saying nothing. He could sense that she wasn’t even looking at him. He touched her: she was warm, her body was hot. He thought of Staś’s cold body, of his thin ribcage, lying torpid on the counterpane. He grasped Malwina’s arms and suddenly burying his face in her proud, hot bosom, he burst into a fit of weeping. He felt her hands on his head as she pressed him to her. But he didn’t weep for long; suddenly he tore away from her and hurried home, where the old women had finished washing Staś and were dressing him in his foreign Sunday-best.
Now, as he walked along the edge of the forest, Bolesław no longer thought of that scene, although for some time he had gone on seeing it vividly. It had often come back to haunt him, thrusting itself into view; meanwhile, his only conscious thoughts were of his new job, the autumn fellings, the impending move and the fact that something needed to be done to care for Ola. The pines had not changed into autumn dress, except that flimsy flakes of reddish bark were floating down from the tree-tops. He ran into Edek and Olek; Maryjka’s cows had strayed into the forest and got into the courtyard, so they would have to drive them home. The brown cows were stealing their way through the yellow hazel thickets, with the boys after them, calling out now and then and cracking a short string whip. For a while he followed in their tracks, then stopped at his favourite spot. Maryjka’s cottage was drowning in mists and shades of yellow, and it was impossible to see that it was just a clearing. He felt as if he had come out onto broad, open fields. He watched as the large cows, then the boys went down the sandy path. Their silhouettes were blurring as the early autumn evening set in. Peace, peace – almost happiness.
[Zakopane, Atma, 1932]
1 Translator’s note: Where the characters’ names appear in more than one form (e.g. Malina/Malwina) the translation follows the original Polish text throughout.
SALT
Isaac Babel
Translated from the Russian by Peter Constantine
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (1894–1940) was a Russian language journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry, Story of My Dovecote, and Tales of Odessa, all of which are considered masterpieces of Russian literature. Loyal to, but not uncritical of, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Babel fell victim to Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge as a result of his long-term affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Babel was arrested by the NKVD at Peredelkino on the night of 15 May 1939. After confessing under interrogation to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, he was shot on 27 January 1940. Gorky was Babel’s greatest supporter and protector in Soviet Russia. Several of Babel’s short stories are dedicated to him. Legend has it that Babel became famous among the NKVD, fighting so ferociously at the time of his arrest that he gravely wounded several of the arresting officers.
Dear Comrade Editor,
I want to tell you of some ignorant women who are harmful to us. I set my hopes on you, that you who travel around our nation’s fronts, have not overlooked the far-flung station of Fastov, lying afar beyond the mountains grand, in a distant province of a distant land, where many a jug of home-brewed beer we drank with merriment and cheer. About this aforementioned station, there is much you can write about, but as we say back home: you can shovel till the cows come home, but the master’s dung heap never gets no smaller. So I will only describe what my eyes have seen in person.
It was a quiet, glorious night seven days ago when our well-deserved Red Cavalry transport train, loaded with fighters, stopped at that station. We were all burning to promote the Common Cause and were heading to Berdichev. Only
, we notice that our train isn’t moving in any way at all, our Gavrilka is not beginning to roll, and the fighters begin mistrusting and asking each other: “Why are we stopping here?” And truly, the stop turned out to be mighty for the Common Cause, because the peddlers, those evil fiends among whom there was a countless force of the female species, were all behaving very impertinently with the railroad authorities. Recklessly they grabbed the handrails, those evil fiends, they scampered over the steel roofs, frolicked, made trouble, clutching in each hand sacks of contraband salt, up to five pood in a sack. But the triumph of the capitalist peddlers did not last long. The initiative showed by the fighters who jumped out of the train made it possible for the struggling railroad authorities to emit sighs from their breasts. Only the female species with their bags of salt stayed around. Taking pity, the soldiers let some of the women come into the railroad cars, but others they didn’t. In our own railroad car of the Second Platoon two girls popped up, and after the first bell there comes an imposing woman with a baby in her arms: “Let me in, my dear Cossacks,” she says. “I have been suffering through the whole war at train stations with a suckling baby in my arms, and now I want to meet my husband, but the way the railroad is, it is impossible to get through! Don’t I deserve some help from you Cossacks?”
“By the way, woman,” I tell her, “whichever way the platoon decides will be your fate.” And, turning to the platoon, I tell them that here we have a woman who is requesting to travel to her husband at an appointed place and that she does, in fact, have a child with her, so what will your decision be? Let her in or not?
“Let her in,” the boys yell. “Once we’re done with her, she won’t be wanting that husband of hers no more!”
“No,” I tell the boys quite politely, “I bow to your words, platoon, but I am astonished to hear such horse talk. Recall, platoon, your lives and how you yourselves were children with your mothers, and therefore, as a result, you should not talk that way!”
And the Cossacks said, “How persuasive he is, this Balmashov!” And they let the woman into the railroad car, and she climbs aboard thankfully. And each of the fighters, saying how right I am, tumble all over each other telling her, “Sit down, woman, there in the corner, rock your child the way mothers do, no one will touch you in the corner, so you can travel untouched to your husband, as you want, and we depend upon your conscience to raise a new change of guard for us, because what is old grows older, and when you need youth, it’s never around! We saw our share of sorrow, woman, both when we were drafted and then later in the extra service, we were crushed by hunger, burned by cold. So just sit here, woman, and don’t be frightened!”
The third bell rang and the train pulled out of the station. The glorious night pitched its tent. And in that tent hung star lanterns. And the fighters remembered the nights of Kuban and the green star of Kuban. And thoughts flew like birds. And the wheels clattered and clattered. With the passing of time, when night was relieved of its watch and the red drummers drummed in the dawn on their red drums, then the Cossacks came to me, seeing that I am sitting sleepless and am unhappy to the fullest.
“Balmashov,” the Cossacks say to me, “why are you so horribly unhappy and sitting sleepless?”
“I bow to you deeply, O fighters, and would like to ask you the small favor of letting me speak a few words with this citizen.”
And trembling from head to toe, I rise from my bunk from which sleep had run like a wolf from a pack of depraved dogs, and walk up to her, take the baby from her arms, rip off the rags it’s swaddled in and its diaper, and out from the diaper comes a nice fat forty-pound sack of salt.
“What an interesting little baby, Comrades! It does not ask Mommy for titty, doesn’t peepee on mommy’s skirty, and doesn’t wake people from their sleep!”
“Forgive me, my dear Cossacks,” the woman cut into our conversation very coolly, “it wasn’t me who tricked you, it was my hard life.”
“I, Balmashov, forgive your hard life,” I tell the woman. “It doesn’t cost Balmashov much. What Balmashov pays for something, that is the price he sells it for! But address yourself to the Cossacks, woman, who elevated you as a toiling mother of the republic. Address yourself to these two girls, who are now crying for having suffered under us last night. Address yourself to our women on the wheat fields of Kuban, who are wearing out their womanly strength without husbands, and to their husbands, who are lonely too, and so are forced against their will to rape girls who cross their paths! And you they didn’t touch, you improper woman, although you should have been the first to be touched! Address yourself to Russia, crushed by pain!”
And she says to me, “As it is I’ve lost my salt, so I’m not afraid of calling things by their real name! Don’t give me that about saving Russia—all you care about is saving those Yids, Lenin and Trotsky!”
“Right now our topic of conversation is not the Yids, you evil citizen! And by the way, about Lenin I don’t really know, but Trotsky is the dashing son of the Governor of Tambov who, turning his back on his high social rank, joined the working classes. Like prisoners sentenced to hard labor, Lenin and Trotsky are dragging us to life’s road of freedom, while you, foul citizen, are a worse counter-revolutionary than that White general waving his sharp saber at us from his thousand-ruble horse. You can see him, that general, from every road, and the worker has only one dream—to kill him! While you, you dishonest citizen, with your bogus children who don’t ask for bread and don’t run out into the wind, you one doesn’t see. You’re just like a flea, you bite and bite and bite!”
And I truthfully admit that I threw that citizen off the moving train and onto the embankment, but she, being brawny as she was, sat up, shook out her skirts, and went on her deceitful way. Seeing this uninjured woman and Russia all around her, the peasant fields without an ear of corn, the raped girls, and the comrades, many of whom were heading for the front but few of whom would ever return, I wanted to jump from the train and either kill myself or kill her. But the Cossacks took pity on me and said, “Just shoot her with that rifle.”
And I took the loyal rifle from the wall and wiped that blot off the face of the working land and the republic.
And we, the fighters of the Second Platoon, swear before you, dear Comrade Editor, and before you, dear Comrades of the editorial office, that we will deal relentlessly with all the traitors who pull us into the pit and want to turn back the stream and cover Russia with corpses and dead grass.
In the name of all the fighters of the Second Platoon,
Nikita Balmashov, Fighter of the Revolution.
A CONVERSATION IN ST. JAMES’S PARK
Josep Pla
Translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush
Josep Pla i Casadevall (1897–1981). A Catalan journalist and author, Josep Pla spent his formative years working as a reporter throughout Europe and Russia. Living under dictatorship for most of his life, he was briefly exiled by Primo de Rivera for a critical article he wrote about the Spanish military policy in Morocco. During the Franco period, a literary prize was established, under his name, for works written and published in Catalan. La increíble historia del Dr. Floït & Mr. Pla, a 1997 play, recreates the characters Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, pitting a Catalan industrialist obsessed with wealth against an educated and indulgent writer, based on Pla.
One afternoon in March when strolling through St. James’s Park with my friend Vinyals, I wrestled with the idea of justice. Vinyals was in London to perfect his skills as a dentist, although he’d already qualified and could remove and insert teeth scientifically, with impunity. He was an easy-going, eminently sensible young man who kept abreast of the latest trends and sported a trim mustache.
We were walking leisurely past the wrought-iron gate that closed the fence surrounding the lake. An astonishing sight suddenly halted Vinyals in his tracks. Motionless on the mown grass the other side of the gate, a penguin was opening and closing its long, weary brute of a beak. We stopped opposite the bizarre a
nimal and were shocked to see that the penguin had just stunned and caught a sparrow it was now softening up for consumption. It kept opening and closing the hard, elongated funnel of its beak, and, under the impact, the sparrow gradually assumed a highly flattened disposition. Passersby stopped to watch the bizarre spectacle and were quite upset. The creature toiled perhaps for two minutes. With a greedy look in its bloodshot eyes, it labored away, apparently ignoring its audience. It might possibly have turned around if they’d tried to snatch its prey … In any case, when it felt the sparrow was soft enough it stretched its neck and swallowed it without a second thought. A lump appeared beneath its mouth that slowly slipped down its gullet. Then it twitched its head, twisted its neck and the sparrow entered its body. Nothing remained of the bird: beak, toenails, feathers were all thought worthy of digestion. My impression was that the animal had enjoyed every morsel, for it preened itself for a moment before flapping its wings like a gypsy flamenco dancer about to dance a sevillana. The penguin finally waddled a few steps over the damp grass and we watched it totter off into the distance with a solemn yet sprightly air.
“My dear Vinyals,” I commented as the onlookers drifted disconsolately away, “I believe we have just witnessed a performance that was both instructive and dramatic. The penguin swallowed the sparrow as easily as we swallow a sugar lump before drinking a cup of coffee. The act itself is most regrettable. Sparrows are cheerful, amusing creatures that spend their lives fornicating in full sight of whoever happens to be passing. Sparrows are perhaps the beings on the planet most prone to acts of love and procreation. Not that we humans ever catch a glimpse. Our powers of sight aren’t sharp enough to capture certain subtle movements. However, aided by their sophisticated instruments, naturalists and other close observers testify to their existence. Particularly in the morning, sparrows cheep most beautifully. And, you know, the racket made by these tiny birds early on is, it seems, simply a series of spasmodic chirps of voluptuous pleasure. Their erotic acts are extremely swift and their way of pleasuring cannot last for more than a quarter of a second. They do it quickly, and not just once. God made them like that. The penguin, however, ate the sparrow without pursuing any reflections in this vein and not a feather was spared; this is the stark truth.”
