by Isaac Babel
OUR DIVISION OCCUPIED Berestechko yesterday evening. The staff set itself up in the house of the priest Tuzinkiewicz. Disguised as a peasant woman, Tuzinkiewicz fled Berestechko before our troops entered the town. What I know about him is that he’d spent forty-five years pottering about with God in Berestechko and was a good priest. When the residents want us to understand this, they tell us he was loved by the Jews. Under Tuzinkiewicz, the ancient church was renovated. They finished the repairs on the day of the temple’s tercentenary. The bishop had come out from Zhitomir for the occasion. Prelates in silk cassocks held a service in front of the church. Pot-bellied and blissful, they stood like bells in the dewy grass. Duteous rivers flowed in from the surrounding villages. Peasants bent their knees, kissed priests’ hands, and that same day such clouds flamed in the heavens as had never been seen before. The banners of heaven were waving in honour of the old church. The bishop himself kissed Tuzinkiewicz on the forehead and called him the father of Berestechko, pater Béresteckea.
I heard this story in the morning at headquarters, where I was going over the report of our flank column, which was reconnoitring around Lwów in the district of Radziechów. I was reading the documents, and the snoring of the orderlies behind my back spoke of our never-ending homelessness. The clerks, damp from a lack of sleep, were writing out orders for the division, eating cucumbers and sneezing. It was only by midday that I was free, walked over to the window and saw the temple of Berestechko—mighty and white. It glowed in the cool sun, like a delftware tower. Midday lightning bolts sparkled in its glossy sides. Their convex lines began at the ancient green colour of the cupolas and ran lightly downward. Pink veins glimmered in the white stone of the pediment, while at the top stood columns as slender as candles.
Then the singing of the organ struck my ears, and at that very moment an old woman with loose yellow hair appeared on the threshold of headquarters. She moved like a dog with a broken paw, circling and lurching to the ground. Her pupils, poured full of the white moisture of blindness, were sprinkling tears. The sounds of the organ, now ponderous, now hurried, floated over to us. Their flight was difficult, and their trail rang long and plaintively. The old woman wiped her tears with her yellow hair, sat down on the ground and started kissing my boots at the knee. The organ fell silent and then burst out laughing in bass notes. I grabbed the old woman by the arm and looked around. The clerks were tapping at typewriters; the orderlies snored all the louder, their spurs cutting the thick felt beneath the velvet upholstery of the couches. The old woman was kissing my boots tenderly, embracing them as she would an infant. I dragged her outside and locked the door behind me. The church stood before us, as dazzling as a stage set. Its side gates were open, and the graves of Polish officers were strewn with horse skulls.
We ran into the yard, walked through a gloomy corridor and ended up in a square room attached to the chancel. Sashka, a nurse of the Thirty-First Regiment, was running things in there. She was rummaging through silks that someone had thrown on the floor. The deathly aroma of brocade, crushed flowers and fragrant decay poured into her quivering nostrils, tickling and poisoning them. Then some Cossacks came into the room. They burst out laughing, grabbed Sashka by the hand and tossed her with all their might onto the mountain of fabrics and books. Sashka’s body, flowering and reeking like the meat of a freshly slaughtered cow, was laid bare; her hiked-up skirts exposed the legs of a squadron woman—shapely, cast-iron legs—and Kudryukov, a doltish youngster, straddled Sashka and bounced as if in a saddle, pretending to be overcome with passion. She threw him off and ran to the door. And only then, after passing the altar, did we penetrate into the church.
It was full of light, this church—full of dancing rays, airy columns, some kind of cool joy. How can I ever forget the picture that hung over the right bye-altar and was painted by Apolek? In this picture, twelve pink paters are rocking a chubby infant Jesus in a cradle entwined with ribbons. His toes stick out, and his body is lacquered by the hot sweat of morning. The child is rolling on his fatty back, which is gathered into folds; the twelve apostles, in cardinals’ tiaras, are bent over the cradle. Their faces are shaved blue and their fiery cloaks stick out over their bellies. The apostles’ eyes sparkle with wisdom, determination, joy; thin smiles play at the corners of their mouths, and flame-coloured warts are planted on their double chins—crimson warts, like radishes in May.
In this temple of Berestechko there was a singular, seductive point of view on the mortal sufferings of the sons of men. In this temple the saints marched off to their deaths with the picturesqueness of Italian singers, and the executioners’ black hair glistened like the beard of Holofernes. There too, above the royal doors, I beheld a blasphemous image of John belonging to the heretical and intoxicating brush of Apolek. In this image the baptist was beautiful, with that ambiguous, unspoken beauty over which the concubines of kings lose their half-lost honour and blossoming lives.
Driven mad by the memory of my desire, the memory of Apolek, I didn’t notice the traces of destruction in the church, or they seemed insignificant to me. It was only the shrine of St Valentine that was broken. Tufts of decayed wadding lay about underneath it, along with the laughable bones of the saint, resembling chicken bones more than anything. And Afonka Bida was still playing the organ. He was drunk, Afonka, wild and gashed all over. He’d only come back to us the day before, with a horse he’d won over from the peasants. Afonka was stubbornly trying to pick out a march on the organ, and someone was urging him in a sleepy voice: “Drop it, Afonka, let’s go and feed.” But the Cossack wouldn’t drop it, and there was a multitude of them—Afonka’s songs. Each sound was a song, and all the sounds were cut off from one another. A song—its dense strain—would last a moment and pass into another… I listened, gazing around, and the traces of destruction seemed insignificant to me. But Pan Ludomirski, the bell-ringer of the Church of St Valentine and the blind old woman’s husband, thought otherwise.
Ludomirski had crept out of nowhere. He walked into the church at a steady pace with his head down. The old man couldn’t bring himself to throw a covering over the scattered relics, because a commoner isn’t permitted to touch a sacred object. The bell-ringer fell onto the light-blue tile of the floor, lifted his head, and his blue nose rose over him like a flag over a corpse. The blue nose trembled above him; at that moment, the velvet curtain at the altar rippled and, trembling, crept back to one side. In the depths of the opened niche, against the background of a sky furrowed by clouds, ran a bearded little figure in an orange kontusz1—barefoot, with a lacerated, bleeding mouth. And then a hoarse howl ripped through our ears. We retreated, incredulous, in the face of horror; horror overtook us and probed our hearts with dead fingers. I saw that the man in the orange kontusz was being pursued by hatred and overtaken by the chase. He had bent his arm to ward off an impending blow, and blood spilt from the arm in a purple current. The little Cossack standing next to me cried out and, lowering his head, ran off, though there was nothing to run from, because the figure in the niche was merely Jesus Christ—the most extraordinary image of God that I have ever seen in my life.
Pan Ludomirski’s Saviour was a curly little Yid with a small, scraggly beard and a low, wrinkled forehead. His sunken cheeks were painted with carmine, and thin ginger eyebrows arched over the eyes closed in pain.
His mouth was lacerated, like a horse’s lip, his Polish kontusz was girdled by an expensive belt, and under the caftan writhed little porcelain feet—painted, bare and pierced with silver nails.
Pan Ludomirski stood under the statue in his green frock coat. He stretched his withered hand above our heads and cursed us. The Cossacks opened their eyes wide and hung their straw-coloured forelocks. In a thunderous voice the bell-ringer of the Church of St Valentine anathematized us in the purest Latin. Then he turned away, fell to his knees and embraced the Saviour’s legs.
When I returned to headquarters, I wrote a report to the division commander concerning this insult to the religious feelings of th
e local population. It was ordered that the church be closed, and that the perpetrators, after being subjected to a disciplinary punishment, be tried before a military tribunal.
Berestechko, August 1920
Notes
1 kontusz (Polish spelling): a long outer garment worn by Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian nobility, as well as by Ukrainian Cossacks, in the time of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
SQUADRON COMMANDER TRUNOV
AT NOON WE BROUGHT the shot-through body of Trunov, our squadron commander, to Sokal. He had been killed that morning in battle with enemy aeroplanes. Trunov had taken all the hits in his face—his cheeks were studded with wounds, his tongue torn out. We washed the dead man’s face as best we could, so as to make its appearance less terrible; we placed the Caucasian saddle at the head of the coffin and dug Trunov a grave in a solemn place—in the public garden, in the centre of town, near the cathedral. Our squadron assembled on horseback, along with the regimental staff and the division’s military commissar. And at the stroke of two on the cathedral clock, our decrepit little canon gave the first shot. She saluted the dead commander with all of her old three inches—she made a full salute, and we carried the coffin to the open pit. The coffin’s lid was open, and the clean midday sun lit the long corpse, its mouth, stuffed with broken teeth, and the polished boots, with their heels placed together, as if on drill.
“Fighters,” Pugachov, the regimental commander, said then, gazing at the deceased and taking his place at the edge of the pit. “Fighters,” he said, trembling and stretching his arms down his seams. “We’re burying Pasha Trunov, a world hero, giving Pasha the final honour…”
And lifting his eyes, red-hot with sleeplessness, to the sky, Pugachov shouted out a speech about the dead fighters of the First Cavalry, about this proud phalanx pounding the anvil of future centuries with the hammer of history. Pugachov shouted his speech loudly. He clutched the hilt of his curved Chechen sabre and dug at the earth with his ragged, silver-spurred feet. After his speech the orchestra played the ‘Internationale’ and the Cossacks bid farewell to Pashka Trunov. The entire squadron jumped onto their horses and fired a volley into the air, our three-incher mumbled a second time, and we sent three Cossacks out for a wreath. They raced off, shooting at a full gallop, dropping out of their saddles and pulling fancy tricks, and they brought back whole armfuls of red flowers. Pugachov scattered these flowers beside the grave, and we stepped up to give Trunov a final kiss. I stood in the back ranks. I touched my lips to his brightened forehead, topped with a saddle, and walked off into town, into Gothic Sokal, which lay in dark-blue dust and indomitable Galician gloominess.
A large square stretched out to the left of the garden, a square built round with ancient synagogues. Jews in torn frock coats were quarrelling in the square, dragging each other about in incomprehensible blindness. Some of them—the Orthodox—praised the teachings of Hadas, the rebbe of Belz, and for this the Orthodox were attacked by Hasidim of the moderate persuasion, followers of the Husiatyn rebbe, Judah. The Jews were arguing about the Kabbalah and made mention in their disputes of the name of Elijah, the Vilna Gaon,1 the persecutor of the Hasidim…
“Elijah!” they’d shout, writhing and opening wide their hair-covered mouths.
Forgetting the war and the gun volleys, the Hasidim abused the very name of Elijah, the Vilna high priest, and I, pining with grief over Trunov, also jostled and bawled with them for my relief, until I saw before me a Galician as long and ghastly as Don Quixote.
This Galician was dressed in a white linen shirt that reached down to his toes. He was dressed as though for burial or for Communion, and he led a dishevelled little cow behind him on a rope. Atop his gigantic torso sat the mobile, shaved little head of a snake; it was covered with a wide-brimmed hat of village straw and teetered slightly. The pathetic little cow walked behind the Galician on his rein; he led it with an air of importance and cleaved the hot lustre of the heavens with the gallows of his long bones.
With solemn step he bypassed the square and entered a crooked lane steeped in thick, nauseating fumes. In the charred little houses, in the beggarly kitchens, Jewesses pottered about looking like old Negresses—Jewesses with exorbitant breasts. The Galician passed them by and stopped at the end of the lane before the pediment of a shattered building. There, near the pediment, near a warped white column, sat a Gypsy blacksmith shoeing horses. The Gypsy pounded the hooves with his hammer, shaking his greasy hair, whistling and smiling. A few Cossacks with horses stood around him. My Galician came up to the blacksmith, silently handed him a dozen baked potatoes and, without looking at anyone, turned back. I would have marched off after him, because I couldn’t understand what kind of man he was and what kind of life he led here in Sokal, but I was stopped by a Cossack who was keeping his unshod horse at the ready. This Cossack’s surname was Seliverstov. He’d left Makhno at some point and was now serving in the Thirty-Third Cavalry Regiment.
“Lyutov,” he said, taking my hand in greeting. “You pick on everybody. There’s a devil in you, Lyutov—why’d you have to go and cripple Trunov this morning?…”
And relying on foolish hearsay Seliverstov shouted some absolute nonsense at me, about how that morning I’d supposedly beaten up Trunov, my squadron commander. Seliverstov reproached me in every possible way for this, reproached me in front of all the Cossacks, but there wasn’t a hint of truth in his story. Trunov and I had quarrelled that morning, it’s true, because Trunov was always winding up an endless rigmarole with the prisoners; we’d quarrelled, but he died, Pashka, he has no more judges in this world, and I, of all people, am the last one to judge him. Here’s why we fought.
We’d taken today’s prisoners at dawn at the Zawada station. There were ten of them. They were in their underwear when we took them. A pile of clothes lay at the Poles’ side; this was a ploy of theirs, so that we wouldn’t be able to distinguish the officers from the rank and file by their uniforms. They’d thrown their clothes off themselves, but this time Trunov decided to get the truth.
“Officers, step forward!” he commanded as he approached the prisoners and pulled out his revolver.
Trunov had already been wounded in the head that morning. His head was bound with a rag, and blood dripped from it like rain from a hayrick.
“Officers, confess!” he repeated and began prodding the Poles with the butt of his revolver.
Then a lean old man stepped out from the crowd—a man with large bare bones on his back, yellow cheekbones and a drooping moustache.
“…War over,” the old man said in broken Ukrainian with incomprehensible rapture. “All officers ran, war over…”
And the Pole stretched out his blue hands to the squadron commander.
“Five fingers,” he said, sobbing and twirling his huge limp hand. “With these five fingers I reared my family…”
The old man choked, swayed, dissolved in rapturous tears and fell to his knees before Trunov, but Trunov pushed him away with his sabre.
“Your officers are scum,” said the squadron commander. “Your officers went and threw their clothes off… If the clothes fit—that’s the end of you. I’ll make a trial…”
And then the squadron commander picked a cap with piping from the pile of rags and pulled it down over the old man’s eyes.
“Just right,” Trunov muttered, moving closer and whispering, “just right…” And he stuck his sabre into the prisoner’s gullet. The old man fell, waggled his legs, and a frothy coral stream flowed from his throat. Then Andryushka Vosmiletov, glittering with his earring and round villager’s neck, crept up to him. Andryushka undid the Pole’s buttons, shook him gently and began pulling the trousers off the dying man. He threw them onto his saddle, took another two uniforms from the pile, and then rode away from us and started playing with his whip. At that moment the sun came out from behind the clouds. It swiftly surrounded Andryushka’s horse, her joyous run, the carefree swaying of her docked tail. Andryushka was ridin
g along the path to the woods; our unit transport was in the woods, and the transport’s coachmen were having a devil of a good time, whistling and making signs at Vosmiletov as if he were a deaf-mute.
The Cossack was already halfway there, but then Trunov suddenly fell to his knees and rasped after him:
“Andrei,” said the squadron commander, gazing at the ground. “Andrei,” he repeated, without raising his eyes from the ground, “our Soviet republic is still alive—too soon to be carving it up. Drop those rags, Andrei.”
But Vosmiletov didn’t even turn around. He rode on at his astonishing Cossack trot, his little horse pertly tossing her tail out from under her, as if waving us away.
“Treason!” Trunov muttered, astonished. “Treason!” he said, quickly brought his carbine to his shoulder, fired, and missed in his hurry. But this time Andrei stopped. He turned his horse towards us and started jumping up and down in the saddle like a woman, his face red and angry and his legs jerking.
“Listen, countryman,” he shouted, riding up, and immediately calmed down at the sound of his own deep and powerful voice. “I ought to knock you right into the next world, countryman… You clean up a dozen Poles—look what a fuss you make. We done cleaned up hundreds—never even called you… If you’re a worker—do your work…”
Throwing the trousers and two uniforms from his saddle, Andrei snorted and turned away from the squadron commander. He undertook to help me compile a list of the remaining prisoners. He kept moving about, snorting extraordinarily loudly, and this bustling of his weighed heavily on me. The prisoners howled and ran from Andryushka; he chased after them, taking hold of them like a hunter takes hold of an armful of reeds so as to get a better view of a flock descending on a river at dawn.
Dealing with the prisoners I exhausted all my curses and managed to record eight men, along with their unit numbers and the kinds of weapon they carried, and moved on to the ninth. This ninth was a youth who looked like a German gymnast from a good circus—a youth with a proud German chest and sideburns, wearing a tricot jersey and a pair of Jäger drawers. He turned the two nipples on his high chest towards me, tossed back his sweaty white hair and named his unit. At that point Andrei grabbed him by the drawers and asked him sternly:
