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

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  “So where are you sailing off to?” Vorobyov asked the nurse. “Sit down here with us, Sash!”

  “I'm not sitting with you!” Sashka answered, and slapped her mare on the belly. “No way!”

  “What d’you mean?” Vorobyov shouted, laughing. “Or have you had second thoughts about drinking tea with men?”

  “Its you that IVe had second thoughts about!” she told the commander, hurling away the reins. “Yes, IVe had second thoughts about drinking tea with you, after I saw you all today and saw what heroes you all are, and how disgusting you are, Commander!”

  “So when you saw it,” Vorobyov muttered, “how come you didnt join in the shooting?”

  “Join in the shooting?” Sashka shouted in desperation, tearing off her nurses band. “What am I supposed to shoot with? This?”

  Here Akinfiev, the former vehicular driver of the Revolutionary Tribunal, with whom I still had some unfinished business to settle, came up to us.

  “You've got nothing to shoot with, Sash,” he said soothingly. “No ones blaming you for that! I blame those who get all mixed up in battle and forget to load cartridges in their revolvers!” A spasm suddenly shot over his face. “You rode in the attack!” he shouted at me. “You rode but didnt put any cartridges in! Why?”

  “Back off, Ivan,” I said to Akinfiev. But he wouldn’t back off, and kept coming closer to me, an epileptic with a twisted spine and no ribs.

  “The Pole shot at you, yes, but you didn’t shoot at him!” he muttered, twisting and turning with his shattered hip. “Why?”

  “The Pole did shoot at me,” I told him brusquely, “but I didn’t shoot at the Pole!”

  “So you’re a wimp, right?” Akinfiev whispered, stepping back.

  “So I’m a wimp!” I said, louder than before. “What do you want?” “What I want is for you to be aware,” Akinfiev yelled in wild triumph, “aware that you’re a wimp, because in my books all wimps should be shot dead, they believe in God!”

  A crowd gathered, and Akinfiev yelled on about wimps without stopping. I wanted to walk away, but he ran after me, and caught up with me, and punched me in the back with his fist.

  “You didn’t put any cartridges in!” Akinfiev whispered in a breathless voice right next to my ear, and with his large thumbs began trying to wrench my mouth open. “You believe in God, you traitor!”

  He tugged and tore at my mouth. I pushed the epileptic back and hit him in the face. He keeled over onto his side, hit the ground, and began to bleed.

  Sashka went over to him with her dangling breasts. She poured water over him, and pulled out of his mouth a long tooth which was swaying in the blackness like a birch tree on a bare country road.

  “These bantams know just one thing,” Sashka said, “and thats how to belt each other in the mouth. With a day like this and everything, I just want to shut my eyes!”

  There was anguish in her voice, and she took wounded Akinfiev with her, while I staggered off into the village of Czesniki, which was sliding around in the relentless Galician rain.

  The village floated and bulged, crimson clay oozing from its gloomy wounds. The first star flashed above me and tumbled into the clouds. The rain whipped the willow trees and dwindled. The evening soared into the sky like a flock of birds and darkness laid its wet garland upon me. I was exhausted, and, crouching beneath the crown of death, walked on, begging fate for the simplest ability—the ability to kill a man.

  THE SONG

  When we were quartered in the village of Budziatycze, it was my lot to end up with an evil landlady She was a widow, she was poor. I broke many locks on her storerooms, but found no provisions.

  All I could do was to try and outsmart her, and one fine day, coming home early before dusk, I caught her closing the door of the stove, which was still warm. The hut smelled of cabbage soup, and there might well have been some meat in that soup. I did smell meat in her soup and laid my revolver on the table, but the old woman denied everything. Her face and black fingers were gripped by spasms, she glowered at me with fear and extraordinary hatred. Nothing would have saved her—I would have made her own up with my revolver if Sashka Konyayev, in other words Sashka Christ, hadn’t suddenly turned up.

  He came into the hut with his concertina under his arm, his exquisite legs shuffling in battered boots.

  “How about a song?” Sashka said, looking at me, his eyes filled with blue and dreamy ice crystals. “How about a song?” he said, and sat down on the bench and played a prelude.

  The pensive prelude came as if from far away. He stopped, and his blue eyes filled with longing. He turned away, and, knowing what I liked, started off on a song from Kuban.

  “Star of the fields,” he sang, “star of the fields over my native hut, and my mother’s hand, so sorrowful. . . .”

  I loved that song. Sashka knew this, because both of us, both he

  and I, had first heard this song back in 919 in the shallows of the Don in the Cossack village of Kagalnitskaya.

  A hunter who poached in the protected waters there had taught it to us. There, in the protected waters, fish spawn and countless flocks of birds nest. The fish multiply in the shallows in incredible numbers, you can scoop them up with a ladle or even with your bare hands, and if you dip your oar in the water, it just stands there upright—a fish will have grabbed it and will carry it away. We saw this with our own eyes, we will never forget the protected waters of Kagalnitskaya. Every government has banned hunting there—a good ban—but back in ’19 a war was raging in the shallows, and Yakov the hunter, who plied his forbidden trade right before our eyes, gave Sashka Christ, our squadron singer, a concertina as a present so that we would look the other way He taught Sashka his songs. Many of them were soulful, old songs. So we forgave the roguish hunter, for we needed his songs: back then, no one could see the war ever ending, and Sashka covered our arduous paths with melody and tears. A bloody trail followed our paths. The songs soared over this trail. That is how it was in Kuban and on our campaigns against the Greens,8 and that is how it was in the Urals and in the Caucasian foothills, and that is how it is to this very day. We need these songs, no one can see this war ever ending, and Sashka Christ, our squadron singer, is too young to die.

  And this evening too, cheated of my landlady’s cabbage soup, Sashka calmed me with his soft, wavering voice.

  “Star of the fields,” he sang, “star of the fields over my native hut, and my mothers hand, so sorrowful. . . .”

  And I listened, stretched out in a corner on my rotting bedding. A dream broke my bones, the dream shook the putrid hay beneath me, and through the dreams burning torrent I could barely make out the old woman, who was standing by the wall, her withered cheek propped on her hand. She hung her ravaged head and stood fixed by the wall, not moving even after Sashka had finished playing. Sashka finished and put down his concertina, yawned, and burst out laughing as after a long

  sleep, and then, noticing the chaos in the widow s hut, he wiped the debris from the bench and brought in a bucket of water.

  “You see, deary, what your boss is up to?” the landlady said to him, pointing at me and rubbing her back against the door. “Your boss came in here, yelled at me, stamped his foot, broke all the locks in my house, and shoved his gun at me. It is a sin before the Lord to shove a gun at me—I’m a woman, after all!”

  She rubbed her back against the door again and threw a sheepskin coat over her son. Her son lay snoring beneath an icon on a large bed covered with rags. He was a deaf-mute boy with a white, water-swollen head and gigantic feet, like those of a grown muzhik. His mother wiped the snot from his nose and came back to the table.

  “Mistress,” Sashka said to her, caressing her shoulder, “if you wish, I could be really nice to you.”

  But it was as if the woman hadn’t heard what he had said.

  “I didnt see no cabbage soup at all,” she said, her cheek propped on her hand. “It ran away, my cabbage soup, and people shove their guns at me, so that
even when a nice man comes along and I get a chance to tumble a little, IVe ended up feeling so drab, I cant even enjoy sinning!” She dragged out her mournful lament and, mumbling, rolled her deaf-mute son to the wall. Sashka lay with her on the rag-covered bed while I tried to sleep, conjuring up dreams so that I would doze off with pleasant thoughts.

  THE RABBI’S SON

  Do you remember Zhitomir, Vasily? Do you remember the River Teterev, Vasily, and that night in which the Sabbath, the young Sabbath, crept along the sunset crushing the stars with the heel of her red slipper?

  The thin horn of the moon dipped its arrows in the black waters of the Teterev. Litde, funny Gedali, the founder of the Fourth International,9 who took us to Rabbi Motale Bratslavsky for evening prayer. Little, funny Gedali, shaking the cockerel feathers of his top hat in the red smoke of the evening.The candles’ predatory pupils twinkled in the rabbis room. Broad-shouldered Jews crouched moaning over prayer books, and the old jester of the Chernobyl line of tsaddiks jingled copper coins in his frayed pocket.

  You remember that night, Vasily? Outside the window horses neighed and Cossacks shouted. The wasteland of war yawned outside and Rabbi Motale Bratslavsky, clutching his tallith with his withered fingers, prayed at the eastern wall. Then the curtains of the cabinet fell open, and in the funerary shine of the candles we saw the Torah scrolls wrapped in coverings of purple velvet and blue silk, and above the Torah scrolls hovered the humble, beautiful, lifeless face of Ilya, the rabbis son, the last prince of the dynasty.

  And then, Vasily, two days ago the regiments of the Twelfth Army opened the front at Kovel. The victors’ haughty cannonade thundered through the town. Our troops were shaken and thrown into disarray. The Polit-otdel train* [the train sent out by the Polit-otdel, the political organ of the new Soviet government charged with the ideological education of the military] crept along the dead spine of the fields. The typhoid-ridden muzhik horde rolled the gigantic ball of rampant soldier death before it. The horde scampered onto the steps of our train and fell off again, beaten back by rifle butts. It panted, scrambled, ran, was silent. And after twelve versts, when I no longer had any potatoes to throw to them, I threw a bundle of Trotsky leaflets at them. But only one of them stretched out a dirty, dead hand to grab a leaflet. And I recognized Ilya, the son of the Zhitomir rabbi. I recognized him straightaway, Vasily! It was so painful to see the prince, who had lost his trousers, his back snapped in two by the weight of his soldier’s rucksack, that we broke the rules and dragged him up into the railroad car. His naked knees, clumsy like the knees of an old woman, knocked against the rusty iron of the steps. Two fat-breasted typists in sailor blouses dragged the dying man’s timid, lanky body along the floor. We laid him out in the corner of the trains editorial compartment. Cossacks in red Tatar trousers fixed his slipped clothing. The girls, their bandy bovine legs firmly planted on the floor, stared coolly at his sexual organs, the withered, curly manhood of the emaciated Semite. And I, who had met him during one of my nights of wandering, packed the scattered belongings of Red Army soldier Ilya Bratslavsky into my suitcase.

  I threw everything together in a jumble, the mandates of the political agitator and the mementos of a Jewish poet. Portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side—the gnarled steel of Lenin’s skull and the listless silk of the Maimonides portrait. A lock of woman’s hair lay in a book of the resolutions of the Sixth Party Congress, and crooked lines of Ancient Hebrew verse huddled in the margins of Communist pamphlets. Pages of The Song of Songs and revolver cartridges drizzled on me in a sad, sparse rain. The sad rain of the sunset washed the dust from my hair, and I said to the young man, who was dying on a ripped mattress in the corner, “Four months ago, on a Friday evening, Gedali the junk dealer took me to your father, Rabbi Motale, but back then, Bratslavsky, you were not in the Party.”

  “I was in the Party back then,” the young man answered, scratching his chest and twisting in his fever. “But I couldnt leave my mother blind."

  “What about now, Ilya?”

  “My mother is just an episode of the Revolution,” he whispered, his voice becoming fainter. “Then my letter came up, the letter ‘B/ and the organization sent me off to the front. ...”

  “So you ended up in Kovel?”

  “I ended up in Kovel!” he shouted in despair. “The damn kulaks opened the front. I took over a mixed regiment, but it was too late. I didnt have enough artillery.”

  He died before we reached Rovno. He died, the last prince, amid poems, phylacteries, and foot bindings. We buried him at a desolate train station. And I, who can barely harness the storms of fantasy raging through my ancient body, I received my brother s last breath.

  1

  The Ukrainian anarchist leader.

  2

  Sergei Sergeyevich Kamenev, 1881-1963, was the commander in chief of the Eastern Front.

  3

  The Revolutionary Tribunals were set up by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution in 1918 to combat counterrevolutionary elements, abuse of power, speculation, and desertion from the Soviet army. The Revolutionary Tribunal carts were used to transport any personnel, prisoners, and supplies that connected with the tribunals’ military work.

  4

  A device for treating syphilis.

  5

  Polish: “There’s nothing.”

  6

  Polish: “Wait.”

  7

  Raymond Poincare, 1860-1932, president of France, supported the Imperialist Russian forces against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. Ebert and Noske were held responsible for the suppression of the Spartacus Rebellion in Germany.

  8

  Defectors from the Imperial army and later also from the new Soviet army, who banded together in guerrilla groups. They were called “Greens” because they hid in forests. Both the Whites and the Reds tried to organize them under their influence, creating bands of Red Greens and White Greens.

  9

  See the story “Gedali,” in which Gedali envisions an ideal International that would supplant the Third Communist International founded in Moscow in 1919 to promote Communism worldwide.

  IV

  The Red Cavalry Cycle: Additional Stories

  The seven additional Red Cavalry stories in this section were not included in Babel’s book Konarmia (Red Cavalry), published in 1926. Most of them appeared in magazines in the late 1920s and 1930s after the book had come out, while “And Then There Were Nine”and the fragment “And Then There Were Ten” were not published during Babel’s lifetime. The last piece, “A Letter to the Editor,” appeared in the magazine Oktyabr in October 1924. It was a response to General Budyonny’s vitriolic article with the punning title “Babism Bablya” (“Babel’s woman-ishnessin which he condemned Babel’s Red Cavalry stories and their portrayal of himself and other real commanders.

  MAKHNO’S BOYS

  The previous night, six Makhno1 fighters raped a maid. When I heard this the following morning, I decided to find out what a woman looks like after being raped six times. I found her in the kitchen. She stood bent over a tub, washing clothes. She was a fat girl with blooming cheeks. Only a tranquil life on fertile Ukrainian soil can douse a Jewish girl in such bovine juices, lend her face such a lusty gloss. The girls legs, fat, brick-red, bulging like globes, gave off the luscious stench of freshly carved meat, and it seemed to me that all that remained of yesterday s virginity were her cheeks, more flushed than usual, and her lowered eyes.

  Young Kikin, the errand boy at Makhno s headquarters, was also in the kitchen. He was known at the headquarters as something of a simpleton— he had a tendency to walk about on his hands at the most unsuitable moments. More than once I found him in front of the mirror, stretching out his leg in his tattered trousers. He would wink at himself, slap himself on his bare, boyish stomach, sing marching tunes, and make triumphant grimaces which made even him guffaw. This boys imagination worked with incredible vigor. Today I again found him busy on one of his special projec
ts—he was sticking strips of gold paper on a German helmet.

  “How many of them did you accommodate yesterday, Ruhlya?” he asked the girl, narrowing his eyes as he eyed the decorated helmet.

  She remained silent.

  “You accommodated six of them,” he continued, “but there are girls who can accommodate up to twenty. Our boys did a Krapivno housewife and they kept pounding and pounding away at her till they ran out of steam. But she was a good deal fatter than you are.”

  “Go get me some water,” the girl said.

  Kikin brought a bucket of water from the yard. He shuffled over to the mirror in his bare feet, put the helmet with the gold ribbons on his head, and carefully peered at his reflection. His image in the mirror fascinated him. He stuck his fingers in his nose and avidly watched it change shape under the pressure from within.

  I'll be going out on a mission,” he said to the Jewess. “Dont you say a word to no one! Stetsenko s taking me into his squadron. At least they give you a real uniform, people respect you, and Til have some real fighter pals, not like here, where we re just some dinky little flea-ridden outfit. Yesterday, when they grabbed you and I was holding you down by the head, I said to Matvey Vasilich, Hey, Matvey Vasilich, I said to him, four have already had a go, and I still get to keep holding and holding her down! YouVe already had her twice, Matvey Vasilich, and just because Im underage and not in your gang, everyone can just push me around! And you yourself, Ruhlya, must have heard what he said to me—We, he said to me, dont push you around, Kikin! Once all my orderlies have had a go, it’ll be your turn. He did say I could, and then, when they were already dragging you out into the woods, Matvey Vasilich tells me, You can do her now, Kikin, if you wish!—No way do I wish, Matvey Vasilich! I tell him, not after Vaska has had her, I’d never get over it till I die!”