by Isaac Babel
Notes
1 Hershel of Ostropol is a trickster figure in Yiddish folklore.
2 tsaddik: a term of respect in the Jewish tradition, bestowed upon the most righteous figures.
THE ROAD TO BRODY
I MOURN FOR THE BEES. They’ve been harried to death by warring armies. There are no more bees in Volyn.
We’ve defiled their indescribable hives. We’ve wiped them out with sulphur and blown them to shreds with gunpowder. Smouldering rags emitted their stench in the sacred republics of the bees. Perishing, they flew slowly, with a barely audible buzz. Deprived of bread, we extracted honey with our sabres. There are no more bees in Volyn.
The chronicle of mundane atrocities weighs on me relentlessly, like heart disease. Yesterday saw the first bloody battle at Brody. Wandering lost on the blue earth, we didn’t even suspect it—neither I nor my friend Afonka Bida. The horses had got their grain in the morning. The rye was tall, the sun beautiful, and the soul, which didn’t deserve these shining and fleeting skies, longed for leisurely pains. That’s why I forced Afonka’s unflinching lips to bend to my sorrows.
“All through the Cossack villages the womenfolk talk of the bee, how she’s kind-hearted,” began my friend, the platoon commander, “talk all kinds of things. Did people do wrong by Christ, or didn’t they? The rest’ll find that out in due time. But the womenfolk in the villages say here is Christ pining away on the Cross. And gnats of all kinds are flying up to Christ, so as to torture him. And he sets his eyes on them, and his spirits sink. But the countless gnats, they can’t see his eyes. And a bee’s flying around Christ, too.
“‘Strike him,’ the gnats shout at the bee. ‘Strike him one for us…’
“‘Can’t do it,’ says the bee, raising her wings over Christ. ‘Can’t do it—he’s carpenter class…’
“You’ve got to understand the bee,” concludes Afonka, my platoon commander. “Let the bee tough it out for a while. It’s for her sake, too, that we’re getting our hands dirty…”
Waving at the thought, Afonka struck up a song. It was a song about a light-bay stallion. Eight Cossacks—Afonka’s platoon—joined in.
The light-bay stallion, Dzhigit by name, belonged to a Cossack captain who got himself drunk on the Day of the Beheading. So sang Afonka, drawing his voice out like a string and dozing off. Dzhigit was a loyal steed, but on feast days the captain’s desires knew no bounds. There were five jugs of vodka on the Day of the Beheading. After the fourth, the captain mounted his steed and rode off for heaven. The climb was a long one, but Dzhigit was a loyal steed. They arrived in heaven, and the captain grabbed for the fifth jug. But they’d left it on earth—that last jug. Then the captain broke down and wept at the futility of his efforts. He wept, and Dzhigit flicked his ears, staring at his master…
So sang Afonka, clinking and dozing off. The song wafted like smoke. And we were riding towards the heroic sunset.
Its boiling rivers ran down the embroidered towels of peasant fields. A rosy silence. The land lay like a cat’s back, overgrown with the shimmering fur of grains. Up on a hill crouched the little mud-brick village of Klekotów. The sight of deathly, jagged Brody awaited us over the pass. But at Klekotów a shot burst loudly in our faces. Two Polish soldiers glanced at us from behind a hut. Their horses were tied to stakes. The enemy’s light battery came riding briskly up the hill. Bullets stretched in strings along the road.
“Move out!” Afonka said.
And we fled.
O Brody! The mummies of your trampled passions had breathed their insurmountable poison upon me. I already felt the deadly chill of eye sockets brimming with cooling tears. And now—a staggering gallop carries me away from the chipped stone of your synagogues…
Brody, August 1920
THE TACHANKA DOCTRINE
THEY SENT ME A COACHMAN from headquarters, or a wagoner, as we call them around here. Grishchuk is his name. He’s thirty-nine years old. His story is awful.
He spent five years as a German prisoner of war, ran off a few months ago, tramped through Lithuania and north-west Russia, reached Volyn, and then he was caught in Belyov by the most brainless mobilization committee in the world, which assigned him to active duty. Grishchuk had only fifty versts to go before he reached the Kremenets District, the land of his birth. He has a wife and kids in the Kremenets District. He hasn’t been home in five years and two months. The mobilization committee made him my wagoner, and I’ve ceased to be a pariah among the Cossacks.
I am the proud owner of a tachanka1 and of the coachman that goes with it. Tachanka! This word has come to serve as the base of the triangle on which our way of life rests: slash—tachanka—steed…
Through the caprice of our civil strife, the garden-variety britchka,2 conveyance of priests and assessors, has got its chance: it has become a formidable and agile combat vehicle, has created a new strategy and new tactics, has distorted the familiar face of war and has brought forth heroes and geniuses of the tachanka. Makhno, whom we’ve stifled, was one of them. Makhno, who made the tachanka the axis of his mysterious and cunning strategy, abolished the infantry, the artillery, even the cavalry, and replaced those hulking masses with three hundred machine guns screwed onto britchkas. Makhno, as Protean as nature itself. Hay carts, lined up in battle formation, seize towns. A wedding procession approaches the local district’s executive committee, opens concentrated fire, and a puny little priest, brandishing the black flag of anarchy over his head, demands that the authorities hand over the bourgeoisie, hand over the proletariat, the wine, the music.
An army of tachankas is capable of unprecedented manoeuvrability.
Budyonny demonstrated this just as well as Makhno. It’s hard to cut such an army down, and capture is unthinkable. The machine gun buried under a hayrick, the tachanka drawn off into a peasant’s threshing barn—they cease to be military units. These hidden emplacements, these implied but intangible items, add to up to the Ukrainian village of recent days—fierce, rebellious and self-interested. Makhno can whip such an army, with its ammunition scattered all over, into fighting condition in an hour; he needs even less time to demobilize it.
Here, in Budyonny’s regular cavalry, the tachanka doesn’t hold such exclusive sway. Nevertheless, all our machinegun detachments ride around on britchkas. The imaginative Cossack distinguishes between two types of tachanka: the colonists’ and the assessors’. But this is no mere imagining—it’s a real distinction.
In the assessors’ britchkas, in these rickety wagons fashioned without love or ingenuity, wretched, red-nosed bureaucrats—a sleep-deprived bunch rushing off to post-mortems and criminal inquiries—would rattle across the wheat steppes of the Kuban. The colonists’ britchkas, meanwhile, came to us from Samara and the Urals, the fertile tracts of the German colonies along the Volga. The spacious oaken backs of the colonists’ tachankas are covered with homey artwork—plump garlands of pink German flowers. Their sturdy bottoms are bound in iron. Their mechanisms rest on unforgettable springs. I feel the ardour of many generations in these springs, which now beat along the upturned highways of Volyn.
I experience the rapture of the first-time owner. Every day after lunch we harness up. Grishchuk leads the horses from the stable. They’re improving by the day. With proud joy I note the matt sheen on their groomed flanks. We rub down the horses’ swollen legs, trim their manes, throw the Cossack harness—a tangled, shrivelled network of thin straps—over their backs and leave the yard at a trot. Grishchuk sits sideways on the box; my seat is padded with floral sackcloth and hay that smells of perfume and serenity. The tall wheels creak in the granular white sand. Patches of blooming poppy colour the land and ruined churches gleam in the hillocks. High above the road, in a niche smashed by a shell, stands a brown statue of St Ursula with bare, round hands. Thin ancient letters weave an uneven chain on the blackened gilt of the pediment… “For the glory of Jesus and His Holy Mother…”
Lifeless Jewish shtetls cling to the feet of lordly esta
tes. Prophetic peacocks shimmer on brick fences—dispassionate apparitions in the blue expanse. Hidden behind sprawling shanties, a synagogue squats on the barren soil—eyeless, gap-toothed, as round as a Hasidic hat. Narrow-shouldered Jews hang about glumly at the crossroads. And the image of southern Jews flares up in my memory—jovial, pot-bellied, bubbling like cheap wine. They have nothing in common with the bitter arrogance of these long bony backs, these tragic yellow beards. There is no fat, no warm pulse of blood in these passionate, painfully etched features. The movements of the Galician and Volynian Jew are violent, jerky and offensive to good taste, but the power of their grief is full of gloomy grandeur and their secret contempt for the Pan knows no limits. Watching them, I understood the whole burning history of this faraway region, tales of Talmudists who rented out taverns, of rabbis who engaged in usury, of girls who were raped by Polish soldiers and on whose account Polish magnates fought duels.
Notes
1 tachanka: a machine-gun cart.
2 britchka: a long horse-drawn carriage.
THE DEATH OF DOLGUSHOV
THE CURTAINS OF BATTLE advanced towards the town. At noon Korochayev flew past us in a black felt cloak. The disgraced Fourth Division commander fought alone, seeking death. Galloping by, he shouted:
“Communications cut—Radzivilov and Brody in flames!…”
And off he went—all black and fluttering, with pupils of coal.
The brigades were regrouping on the board-flat plain. The sun rolled in the purple dust. Wounded men were eating in the ditches. Nurses lay on the grass, singing softly. Afonka’s scouts combed the field, searching for corpses and uniforms. Afonka rode by within two paces of me and said, without turning his head:
“They whipped us good. Sure as hell. Got a notion about the division commander—getting canned. Fighters have doubts…”
The Poles reached the woods, about three versts from us, and positioned machine guns somewhere close by. The bullets whine and squeal. Their lament grows unbearably loud. The bullets shoot the earth, digging into it, trembling with impatience. Vytyagaychenko, the regimental commander, who’d been snoring in the blazing sun, cried out in his sleep and woke up. He mounted his horse and rode over to the lead squadron. His face was creased, streaked red from uncomfortable sleep, and his pockets were full of plums.
“Son of a bitch,” he said angrily and spat out a plum stone. “A damned waste of time. Timoshka, throw up the flag!”
“So we’re going?” Timoshka asked, taking the pole from his stirrups and unwinding the banner, which bore a painted star and some writing about the Third International.
“We’ll see when we get there,” Vytyagaychenko said, and suddenly shouted wildly: “Girls, hop on them horses! Call your men, squadron commanders!…”
Buglers sounded the alarm. The squadrons formed a column. A wounded man climbed out of a ditch and, shading his eyes with his palm, said to Vytyagaychenko:
“Taras Grigoryevich, they made me delegate down there. Looks, you know, like you’re leaving us behind…”
“You’ll fight ’em off,” Vytyagaychenko muttered and made his horse rear.
“We’ve got this idea, Taras Grigoryevich, that we won’t manage to fight ’em off,” the wounded man called after him.
“Quit your moaning,” Vytyagaychenko said, turning back. “Don’t worry, I won’t leave you.” Then he gave the order to move off.
And suddenly the wailing woman’s voice of Afonka Bida, my friend, rang out:
“Don’t start us out at a trot, Taras Grigoryevich—we’ve got five versts to cover. How’re we supposed to hack ’em down on worn-out horses… No point in rushing—we’ll pick our fruits when the time comes…”
“At a walk!” Vytyagaychenko commanded, without looking up.
The regiment rode off.
“If my notion ’bout the division commander’s right,” Afonka whispered, hanging back, “if he’s getting canned, then soap the withers and knock out the props. Period.”
Tears streamed from his eyes. I stared at Afonka in amazement. He spun around like a top, clutched his cap, snorted, whooped and dashed off.
Grishchuk with his silly tachanka and I—we stayed back alone, knocking about until evening between walls of fire. The division staff vanished. Other units wouldn’t take us in. The Poles entered Brody and were dislodged by a counter-attack. We rode up to the town cemetery. Polish patrolmen sprang out from behind the graves, shouldered their rifles and opened fire on us. Grishchuk turned around. His tachanka yowled with all four of its wheels.
“Grishchuk!” I cried through the whining and the wind.
“A joke,” he replied sadly.
“We’re done for,” I cried out, seized by the rapture of ruin. “Done for, old man!”
“Why do womenfolk take the trouble?” he said even more sadly. “Why all the matchmaking, marrying, all the kinfolk dancing at weddings…”
A rosy trail lit up in the sky and died out. The Milky Way showed through the stars.
“It’s a laugh,” Grishchuk said sorrowfully and pointed his whip at a man sitting by the roadside. “A laugh, womenfolk taking the trouble…”
The man sitting by the roadside was Dolgushov, the telephonist. He looked straight at us, his legs thrown wide apart.
“Listen,” said Dolgushov when we rode up to him. “I’m finished… Got it?”
“Got it,” Grishchuk replied, stopping the horses.
“Got to waste a cartridge on me,” Dolgushov said sternly.
He sat leaning against a tree. His boots were stuck wide apart. Without taking his eyes off me he carefully lifted his shirt. His stomach had been torn out, his guts were sliding onto his knees, and you could see his heartbeats.
“The Poles’ll come, have some fun with me. Take my papers, write my mother what’s what…”
“No,” I said, and spurred my horse.
Dolgushov spread his blue palms out on the ground and examined them incredulously.
“Running away?” he murmured, sliding down. “Run, you bastard…”
Sweat slid over my body. The machine guns were hammering faster and faster, with hysterical obstinacy. Afonka Bida came galloping towards us, encircled by the halo of sunset.
“We’re pelting ’em good,” he shouted cheerfully. “What’ve you got going here?”
I pointed him to Dolgushov and rode off to the side.
They spoke briefly—I didn’t hear the words. Dolgushov handed the platoon commander his booklet. Afonka stuffed it into his boot and shot Dolgushov in the mouth.
“Afonya,” I said with a pitiful smile, riding up to the Cossack, “I just couldn’t myself.”
“Get away,” he said, turning pale, “or you’re dead! You care for our kind, four-eyes, like a cat cares for a mouse…”
And he cocked his rifle.
I rode off at a walk, without turning, sensing cold and death on my back.
“Hey!” Grishchuk shouted behind me. “Quit fooling around!” He grabbed Afonka by the arm.
“Lackey bastard!” Afonka cried. “He won’t get away from me…”
Grishchuk caught up with me at the turn. Afonka was gone. He’d ridden off in the other direction.
“You see, Grishchuk,” I said. “Today I lost Afonka, my first friend…”
Grishchuk took a wrinkled apple out from his driver’s seat.
“Eat,” he said to me. “Eat, please…”
And I accepted Grishchuk’s charity and ate his apple with sadness and reverence.
Brody, August 1920
THE SECOND
BRIGADE COMMANDER
BUDYONNY STOOD by a tree in red trousers with silver stripes. The Second Brigade commander had just been killed. The Army commander appointed Kolesnikov to replace him.
An hour ago Kolesnikov had been a regimental commander. A week ago Kolesnikov had been a squadron commander.
The new brigadier had been summoned to see Budyonny. The Army commander was waiting, standing by a
tree. Kolesnikov rode up with Almazov, his commissar.
“Bastards are closing in,” the Army commander declared with that dazzling smile of his. “It’s win or croak. No other way. Got that?”
“Got it,” Kolesnikov replied, his eyes bulging.
“You run—I have you shot,” the Army commander said, smiled and turned his eyes towards the chief of the Special Section.
“Yes, sir,” said the Special Section chief.
“Roll on, Koleso!”1 some Cossack standing off to the side shouted cheerfully.
Budyonny turned swiftly on his heels and saluted the new brigade commander. The latter stuck five red, youthful fingers to the peak of his cap, broke out in a sweat and went off along a ploughed boundary path. The horses were waiting for him about a hundred sazhens2 off. He walked with his head down, shifting his long crooked legs with agonizing slowness. The blaze of sunset was spreading above him, crimson and implausible, like impending death.
And suddenly, on the outstretched earth, on the turned-up, yellow nakedness of the fields, we saw nothing but Kolesnikov’s narrow back, with dangling arms and drooping head in a grey cap.
An orderly brought him a horse.
He jumped into the saddle and galloped off to his brigade without looking back. The squadrons were waiting for him near the big road, the highway to Brody.
A groaning “hurrah”, rent by the wind, finally reached us.
Training my field glasses on the brigade commander, I saw him circling on his horse amid pillars of blue dust.
