‘Die. Die quickly,’ I said to myself. ‘Die. Otherwise what am I to do with you?’
‘She’ll die now,’ whispered the feldsher as if guessing my thoughts. He glanced meaningfully at the sheet, but apparently changed his mind. It seemed a pity to stain it with blood. But a few seconds later he had to cover her. She lay like a corpse, but did not die. Suddenly my head became quite clear, as if I were standing under the glass roof of the anatomy theatre in that faraway medical school.
‘Camphor again,’ I said hoarsely.
And once again the feldsher obediently injected the oil.
‘Is she really not going to die?’ I thought in despair. ‘Will I really have to…’
Everything lit up in my mind and I suddenly became aware without any textbooks, without any advice or help (and with unshakeable conviction), that now, for the first time in my life I had to perform an amputation on a dying person. And that that person would die under the knife. She was bound to die under the knife; after all, there was no blood left in her body. It had all drained out through her shattered legs over six miles and there was not even a sign that she was conscious. She was silent. Oh, why didn’t she die? What would her maddened father say to me?
‘Prepare for an amputation,’ I said to the assistant in a voice that was not my own.
The midwife gave me a fierce look, but the feldsher showed a spark of sympathy in his eyes and began busying himself with the instruments. A primus-stove started to roar.
A quarter of an hour passed. I raised her cold eyelid and looked with superstitious fear at the expiring eye. It told me nothing. How could a semi-corpse stay alive? Drops of sweat ran uncontrollably down my forehead from under my white cap and Pelageya wiped away the salt sweat with gauze. What remained of the blood in the girl’s veins was now diluted with caffeine. Ought it to have been injected or not? Anna Nikolayevna was gently massaging the swellings caused by the saline solution. And the girl lived on.
I picked up the knife, trying to imitate the man I had once in my life seen perform an amputation, at university. I entreated fate not to let her die at least in the next half hour. ‘Let her die in the ward, when I’ve finished the operation…’
I had only common sense to rely on, and it was stimulated into action by the extraordinary situation. Like an experienced butcher, I made a neat circular incision in her thigh with the razor-sharp knife and the skin parted without exuding the smallest drop of blood. ‘What will I do if the vessels start bleeding?’ I thought, and without turning my head glanced at the row of forceps. I cut through a huge piece of female flesh together with one of the vessels – it looked like a little whitish pipe – but not a drop of blood emerged from it. I stopped it up with a pair of forceps and proceeded, clamping on forceps wherever I suspected the existence of a vessel. ‘Arteria… arteria… what the devil is it called?’ The operating theatre had begun to take on a thoroughly professional look. The forceps were hanging in clusters. My assistants drew them back with gauze, retracting the flesh, and I started sawing the round bone with a gleaming, fine-toothed saw. ‘Why isn’t she dying? It’s astonishing… God, how people cling to life!’
The bone fell away. Demyan Lukich was left with what had been a girl’s leg in his hands. Shreds of flesh and bone. This was all discarded and there remained on the table a young girl shortened, as it were, by a third, with a stump splayed out to one side. ‘Just a little bit more… Please don’t die,’ I wished ardently, ‘keep going till they take you to the ward, let me come out of this frightful episode with some credit.’
They tied the ligatures and then, knees knocking, I started sewing up the skin with widely spaced stitches. Suddenly I stopped, brought to my senses by an inspired thought: I left a gap for drainage in which I inserted a gauze wick. My eyes were dimmed with sweat. I felt as if I were in a steam bath.
I heaved a sigh of relief. I looked wearily at the stump and at her waxen face and asked, ‘Is she alive?’
‘Yes, she’s alive,’ came the immediate and almost soundless echo as the feldsher and Anna Nikolayevna replied in unison.
‘She’ll last perhaps another minute or so,’ the feldsher mouthed voicelessly into my ear. Then he hesitated and suggested tentatively, ‘Perhaps you needn’t touch the other leg, doctor. We could just bandage it, you know… otherwise she won’t last till the ward… all right? Better if she doesn’t die in the theatre.’
‘Let’s have the plaster,’ I uttered hoarsely, urged on by some unknown force.
The floor was covered in white blobs of gypsum. We were all bathed in sweat. The body lay lifeless. Its right leg was encased in plaster and the shin showed through where in another inspired moment I had left a window to coincide with the fracture.
‘She’s alive,’ the assistant breathed in surprise.
Then we started lifting her and an enormous cavity could be seen under the sheet – we had left a third of her body on the operating table.
Shadows flitted down the passage, nurses darted to and fro and I saw a dishevelled male figure shuffle past along the wall and let out a muffled howl. But he was led away. Silence fell.
In the operating room I washed off the blood which had stained my arms up to the elbow.
‘I suppose you’ve done a lot of amputations, doctor?’ Anna Nikolayevna asked suddenly. ‘That was very good, no worse than Leopold.’
She invariably pronounced the name ‘Leopold’ as if she were talking about the dean of a medical school.
I glanced suspiciously at their faces and saw respect and astonishment in all of them, including Demyan Lukich and Pelageya Ivanovna.
‘Hm, well, the fact is I’ve done only two…’
Why did I lie? I cannot understand it to this day. The hospital was utterly silent.
‘When she dies, be sure to send for me,’ I told the feldsher in an undertone, and for some reason instead of just answering ‘All right,’ he said deferentially, ‘Very good, sir.’
A few minutes later I was standing beside the green-shaded lamp in the study of the doctor’s quarters. There was not a sound to be heard.
A pale face was reflected in the pitch-dark window.
‘No, I don’t look like Dmitry the Pretender, and, do you know, I seem to have aged, there’s a furrow between my eyebrows… right now there’ll be a knock… and they’ll say, “She’s dead.”
‘Yes, I’ll go and have a last look, any minute now there’ll be a knock…’
There was a knock at the door. It was two and a half months later. One of the first bright days of winter was shining through the window.
He came in; only then did I really look at him. Yes, he definitely had good features. Forty-five years old. Sparkling eyes. Then a rustling sound. A young girl of enchanting beauty came bounding in on crutches; she had only one leg and was dressed in a very wide skirt with a red border at the hem.
She looked at me and her cheeks flushed pink.
‘In Moscow… in Moscow,’ I said and started writing down an address, ‘they’ll fix you up with a prosthesis – an artificial leg.’
‘Kiss his hand,’ the father suddenly commanded her.
I was so confused that I kissed her on the nose instead of the lips.
Then, hanging on her crutches, she undid a bundle and out fell a snow-white towel artlessly embroidered with a red cockerel. So that was what she’d been hiding under her pillow when I did my rounds in the ward! And indeed I remembered seeing some thread on her bedside table.
‘I can’t accept it,’ I said sternly, and even shook my head. But she gave me such a look that I took it.
It hung in my bedroom in Muryovo and then went with me on my travels. In the end it grew threadbare, faded, wore out and disappeared just as memories fade and disappear.
First published in 1926
Translated by Michael Glenny
ISAAK EMMANUILOVICH BABEL (1894–1940)
Babel was born in Odessa, the son of a Jewish tradesman. He fought in the First World War from 191
7 and spent most of 1918 in Petrograd and most of the next few years in Odessa, working in journalism and publishing. From 1923 he lived mainly in Moscow. His wife emigrated to France, but he himself decided against emigration; in 1928, while visiting his wife in Paris, he wrote: ‘As regards individual freedom, life here is excellent, but we from Russia are homesick for the wind of great thoughts and great passions.’ During the 1930s he worked in film and published relatively little. In a speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, mixing irony and pathos, he hailed Stalin’s oratorical style as a model for writers, noted that Soviet power had taken away a writer’s right to make mistakes, and claimed that he himself had now mastered the genre of literary silence. In 1937 Babel had a second daughter by Antonina Pirozhkova, whom he had met five years before. On 27 January 1940 he was shot, falsely accused of being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy.
Babel’s stories fall into three main groups: semi-autobiographical stories; The Odessa Tales – an expressionistic celebration of the lives of the Jewish gangsters and whores of a city often seen as a Russian Naples; and the story-cycle Red Cavalry – the fruit of his months as what would now be called an ‘embedded’ war correspondent with a Cossack regiment in Poland in 1920. 1The first stories from Red Cavalry were published in 1923–4 and brought Babel swift recognition: with their demotic language and vivid depictions of violence, they seemed a perfect response to demands for a new, post-revolutionary prose.
The translator Clarence Brown has said of Babel’s decision to serve with a regiment of Cossacks, ‘This is something like a lone cat’s voluntarily cultivating the society of a pack of hounds; for the image of the Cossack horseman, sabre in hand, is the quintessential horror in the collective Jewish nightmare of the pogroms that swept through Central and Eastern Europe.’2 Whatever motivated this decision – Babel’s understanding of human violence is clear and penetrating: in Red Cavalry sadism and vengefulness come in many guises, and victims and executioners absorb one another’s identities with dizzying speed. These insights are conveyed with delicacy. In ‘The Death of Dolgushov’, for example, the intensity of the narrator’s unconscious identification with the wounded Dolgushov is brought out by the repetition of a single word: Dolgushov’s ‘intestines were slithering down onto his thighs’ and (eight lines later) ‘Sweat was slithering down my body’.
Primo Levi included ‘Salt’ in his personal anthology The Search for Roots. ‘To what degree is it legitimate to exploit violence in literature?’ Levi asks. ‘That there is a limit is certain; as soon as you cross it you fall into mortal sins, aestheticism, sadism, prostitution for the cannibalistic consumption of a certain public. Babel is close to that limit but he doesn’t cross it. He is saved by his compassion, which is modest and swathed in irony.’3
The narrator of ‘The Death of Dolgushov’ and ‘My First Goose’ is a Jewish political commissar, similar to Babel in many ways but not to be identified with him.
MY FIRST GOOSE
Savitsky, commander of the Sixth Division, stood up when he saw me, and I was astonished at the beauty of his huge body. He got to his feet and – with his purple breeches, his crimson cap cocked to one side, his medals pinned to his chest – immediately split the hut in two, the way a banner splits the sky. He smelt of perfume and the cloying coolness of soap. His long legs were like two young women thrust up to their shoulders into shining boots.
He smiled at me, struck the table with his whip and drew towards him an order that had just been dictated by his Chief of Staff. Ivan Chesnokov was being commanded to advance with the regiment entrusted to him towards Chugunov-Dobryvodka and, on making contact with the enemy, to destroy him.
‘For which destruction’ – the commander himself began to write, soon filling the whole sheet – ‘I will hold the said Chesnokov entirely responsible, and liable to pay with his life, and I myself shall be the one who blows out his brains, and you, comrade Chesnokov, having been with me on this front for several months now, can entertain no doubt about this…’
The Commander of the Sixth Division signed the order with a flourish, threw it to his orderlies and turned his grey eyes, dancing with merriment, towards me.
I handed him the document detailing my secondment to the divisional staff.
‘See to his papers!’ said the Commander. ‘See to his papers. Put him down for all front-line provisions except virgins and whores. Can you read and write?’
‘Yes, I can,’ I answered, envying him the iron and flowers of his youth. ‘I graduated in law from the University of St Petersburg.’
‘One of them milksops, are you?’ he shouted out with a laugh. ‘And with glasses on your nose. Mangy little runt! Nobody ever asked us if we want your sort here. People get killed for wearing glasses round here. Think you’ll fit in, do you?’
‘I’ll fit in,’ I answered, and set off with the quartermaster to look for a billet in the village.
The quartermaster carried my case on his shoulders, the village street stretched out before us; a dying sun, round and yellow as a pumpkin, was releasing its last rosy breath into the sky.
We went up to a hut with painted carvings around the windows. The quartermaster stopped and blurted out with a guilty smile: ‘The lads ‘ave a thing about glasses – there’s nowt we can do about it. If you’re a man of the ‘ighest excellence – you’ve not got an ‘ope in ‘ell. But ruin a young lady, aye, ruin the purest of ladies – and you’ll be the fighters’ darlin’.’
He hesitated a moment, my case still on his shoulders, came right up to me, then threw me a despairing look and darted off into the outer yard. A group of Cossacks was sitting there on some hay; they were shaving one another.
‘Fighters!’ said the quartermaster, putting my case down on the ground. ‘Orders from comrade Savitsky are you take this man in and no monkey business because this fella, who has suffered on the fields of learning…’
The quartermaster turned crimson and walked off without looking back. I raised my hand to my cap and saluted the Cossacks. A young lad with long flaxen hair and a handsome Ryazan face went over to my case and hurled it over the gate. Then he turned his backside to me and, with remarkable skill, let out a series of unmentionable sounds.
‘Bog artillery!’ an older Cossack shouted out, and then laughed. ‘Rapid fire!’
The young lad exhausted his guileless artistry and walked away. I began crawling around on my hands and knees, gathering the manuscripts and tattered old clothes that had tumbled out of my case.
When I’d gathered them all up, I took them away to the far end of the yard. Near the hut, standing on some bricks round a fire, was a large pot of pork, slowly simmering, and the steam was like smoke drifting up from my childhood home back in the village, and it filled me with a confusion of desperate hunger and loneliness. I covered my battered little case with hay, made it into a pillow and lay down on the ground to read, in Pravda, the speech Lenin had given at the Second Congress of the Comintern. Sunlight fell on me through gaps in jagged little mounds, the Cossacks stepped now and again on my legs, the young lad made tireless fun of me, and Lenin’s beloved lines travelled a thorny path, unable to get through to me. Then I put down the paper and went over to the mistress of the house, who was spinning yarn on the porch.
‘Mistress,’ I said, ‘I need some grub.’
As if to look at me, the old woman raised, then lowered the rheumy whites of her half-blind eyes.
‘Comrade,’ she said, ‘all this makes me want to go and hang myself.’
‘Fuck and goddam you, woman!’ I muttered crossly, and gave the old woman a shove in the chest with my fist. ‘I’m not in the mood for discussion.’
Turning round, I saw someone’s sabre lying on the ground close by. A haughty goose was roaming around the yard, imperturbably preening its feathers. I trapped it and pinned it to the ground; the goose’s head cracked beneath my boot, cracked and began to bleed. Its white neck lay stretched out in the dung while, above the slaughtered
bird, its wings flapped up and down.
‘Fuck and goddam you!’ I said, jabbing my sabre into the goose’s insides. ‘Roast it for me, mistress.’
Her glasses and her blindness glistening, the old woman picked up the bird, wrapped it in her apron and carried it off to the kitchen.
‘Comrade,’ she said, ‘I want to go and hang myself.’ And she closed the door behind her.
By now the comrades were sitting around their pot. They had been sitting motionless, upright as heathen priests, not watching the goose.
‘The lad will do all right with us,’ said one of them, winking as he took a spoonful of soup.
The Cossacks began to eat with the restrained elegance of peasants who hold one another in respect. I cleaned the sabre with some sand, went out through the gate and came back again in anguish. The moon hung over the yard like a cheap earring.
‘Brother,’ Surovkov, the eldest of the Cossacks, called out to me, ‘sit down with us and have a bite to eat while you’re waiting for your goose.’
He took a spare spoon out of his boot and handed it to me. We ate the pork and spooned up the cabbage soup.
‘What does the newspaper say?’ asked the lad with the flaxen hair, moving aside to make room for me.
‘In the newspaper,’ I said, pulling out my copy of Pravda, ‘Lenin writes that everything is in short supply.’
In a loud voice, like a deaf man triumphant, I read the speech out to the Cossacks.
The evening wrapped me in the life-giving moisture of her twilight sheets; the evening pressed a mother’s hands to my burning forehead.
I read and rejoiced, keeping track, as I rejoiced, of the mysterious curve along which Lenin went straight to the point.
‘Truth tickles every nostril,’ said Surovkov when I got to the end, ‘yet not everyone can pick it out of the heap. But he’s always spot on, like a hen pecking corn.’
After these words about Lenin from Surovkov, a platoon commander in the staff squadron, we went up to the hay loft to sleep. There we slept, all six of us, warming one another, legs entangled, beneath a roof whose holes let in the stars.
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics) Page 32
