The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine
Page 101
Tfie Germans in tfie Ukraine
Kaiser Wilhelm Us soldiers are marching along the main street of Shepetovka, stamping their boots. They are wearing dark gray uniforms. On their heads, steel helmets. On their rifles, bayonets broad as knives. The officers march in front of the rows of soldiers, their long legs flying high. Small, white, stony faces shudder on thin necks; colorless stares are fixed straight ahead, past people cowering against walls. These are typical shtetl people of the time: hunched-over Jews in yarmulkes and coats tied with string; boys from cheder, their sap already drained by the Principles of the Torah, with chestnut-brown peyes hanging in a curls down the sides of large-eyed, doleful faces; workers’ wives wrapped in heavy shawls; peasants in white smocks and wide-brimmed hats made of coarse straw. Next to them lies, bitterly twisted, a world of monstrously crisscrossing, rotting beams, Hasidic hovels, and wooden synagogues stretching up narrowly to the sky.
Drums roll. The rectilinear roar of marching bands ricochets down the jagged streets. The artillery comes rumbling loudly onto the main street.
“What power!” an old man in a torn shirt sighs.
“Well have to figure out something,” a youth answers vaguely, and disappears into the crowd.
• • •
At Shepetovka Station. Germans in helmets with eagles atop are dragging struggling animals to boxcars: gray Ukrainian oxen, offended squealing pigs, and meek calves. Weapons, machine guns, and soldiers are being loaded onto another train.
From a trackmans hut two Ukrainians are watching the soldiers embark.
“Even if the partisans tried their hand,” one of them says slowly, “how could they hope to tackle such a force?”
A broad-chested, red-faced commandant in a new belt and a high gray Prussian-style military cap with a patent leather brim is furiously striding down the platform alongside the trains.
The doors of the boxcars slowly open. The commandant jumps onto the step of a first-class car. A dark blue, oily locomotive, enveloped in steam, is quivering in front of the train. The commandant raises a whistle to his lips.
“Abfahrtr
The train does not move.
“Donnerwetterf^ the German mumbles, flushing a deep red.
He rushes up and down the platform, his bottom wobbling, his meaty purple face stuck on his stiff neck. Gasping for breath, he hurries to the locomotive. There is an unbearably shrill whistle as steam escapes. The dials on the instruments swing wildly. The locomotive stands empty, the engineer has disappeared.
“Das ist Russlandi ’4 the commandant says to an orderly. He steadies himself on the handrails, thrusts out his fat legs, and climbs down from the locomotive.
At the railroad depot, two metalworkers are working on adjacent workbenches: Artyom Korchagin, a giant with a perpetually guilty look on his face, and Zhukhrai, a stocky, well-proportioned man in a Ukrainian peasant shirt, with a powerful, even glow in his eyes.
“So, what s your take on the Communist Party?” Zhukhrai asks Artyom, looking him straight in the eye.
Artyom s face looks even more guilty than usual.
“I dont really have much of a take on any of those parties, Fyodor Ivanovich,” he says in an unsure voice. “They need help, so I help . . .” “Are you going to join the strike?” Zhukhrai asks him, still staring him in the eye.
“Ill do whatever the other men will do.”
“How about leading the other men for a change?” Zhukhrai says, peering at him slyly.
Suddenly the doors of the depot open with a loud rumble. The commandant comes marching through the work hall with stomping, echoing steps, his aiguillettes and buttons sparkling, his boots immaculately polished. Two Prussian sergeant majors, inhumanly large living pillars, come marching behind him, followed by a pathetic figure who comes scurrying on feeble legs clad in tattered trousers, his mustache drooping and the tip of his nose quivering.
The commandant, his neck rigid, barks out a tirade of chopped German words.
“Ubersetsen! Ubersetzen Sie, bitteF* he says over his shoulder to the man with the quivering nose.
• • •
INTERPRETER: Well, what the German general is saying is that you laborers can dream all you want—nothings gonna happen.” COMMANDANT [Unleashes another tirade of German—wheezing, barking, with a cascade of chopped words. Single phrases can be made out: Seine Majestat, Kaiser und Konig.]: His majesty, our King and Kaiser ... His Excellency, the Grand Field Marshal and Commander of. . .
in opposing Germany, you oppose God. In opposing God, you oppose Germany!
INTERPRETER: Well, what hes saying is, get all the engineers and the trains set up, ’cause Germany’s got to be fed.
[The COMMANDANT points at ARTYOM KORCHAGIN.]
INTERPRETER [To ARTYOM.]: You!
[The two SERGEANT MAJOR5 march toward ARTYOM like moving pillars. The COMMANDANT points his finger at POLENTOVSKY, a lean, stooped old man with a silver-gray, short-cropped head of hair.]
INTERPRETER [To POLENTOVSKY.]: You too, old man!
ARTYOM [His eyes stillfixed on the ground.]: What do you want us for? INTERPRETER: Let’s go!
ARTYOM [His eyes fixed on the ground!]: Where to?
INTERPRETER: You’re going to run the military train for the Germans. ARTYOM [Turning away.]: I’m a sick man.
INTERPRETER [Pointing at the two SERGEANT MAJORS.]: We’ve got doctors here who know how to take care of a sick man. COMMANDANT [His face flushing a deep crimson.]: Donner wetter!* We know how to show our appreciation for service!
INTERPRETER: He says he’ll give you a nice tip.
ARTYOM: I told you I’m a sick man.
INTERPRETER [To one of the SERGEANT MAJORS.]: You take over, Doctor!
• • •
Artyom, his large arms dangling by his side, walks with gray-headed Polentovsky through the depot steeped in heavy metallic twilight. The sergeant majors and the commandant with the rigid neck are marching behind them.
“Artyom,” Zhukhrai says in a low voice, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
“How dreadful,” Artyom whispers sadly.
“They re taking the train into battle,” Zhukhrai says in an even lower voice.
A painfully harsh roll of drums. A forest of short bayonet knives moves past the railroad workshop.
The depot gates roll toward each other hopping on narrow rails, and suddenly, with a thundering hullabaloo, the whole workshop jumps to life.
“Well, boys, time to go home!” Zhukhrai says in his usual rough voice, throwing his overalls on the ground. “Okay, boys! The party’s over!”
“Sergey, were striking!” a cheerful, ringing boyish voice flies through the workshop.
“We’ll be done for, Fedya,” says a pensive older worker wearing an apron and a black leather strap over his clean, high forehead.
“We wont run the train for the Germans!” Zhukhrai answers. “We re not running anything that’s against the Workers’ Cause!”
“What are you teaching the people with your black soul?” A crimson face with a heavy mustache rises before Zhukhrai.
“We won’t run the train!” Zhukhrai says in a low voice, raising his face, which turns pale. A dull, growing hissing, the clanking of steel, the spasm of an underground rumble, keeps coming nearer.
A swanlike cloud of smoke flies past the window, flares up in a flash, and dissipates. The blue locomotive with its oily, darkening sides floats past the window.
“How did we get into this bind, Artyom?” Zhukhrai mutters.
• • •
A train with gun cars rolls past the window, their squat gun barrels threatening the sky, armored train cars with blindly sparkling headlights, airtight boxcars with people’s souls sealed in them.
The train has passed. The night outside the window is clear. Above it the ghastly, narrow lamp of the moon has lit up. The slackening crackle of transmission in the workshop, the slackening movement around the workbenches.
The train carrying the soldi
ers of Kaiser Wilhelm II hurtles through the darkness of the Ukrainian steppes. Flashing by are forests, ravines, a hamlet—little hovels shining blue in the moonlight—blue trees in blossom.
“They’re taking this train into battle,” Artyom says, throwing coal into the firebox. “What a mess were in!”
Illuminated by the flames’ rosy gold, he bangs shut the iron hatch, wipes his face covered in sweat and coal dust with his sleeve, sits down on a stool, and lets his black hands fall. A German soldier, wearing a helmet with an eagle on it, is sitting on the coal tender, his fat legs dangling down. Night. The sparkling moon has sunk into a lake, on land sunflowers are hanging their dark heads.
• • •
ARTYOM: We’ve gone about twenty versts.
POLENTOVSKY [Looking out the window.]: We’re at the crooked gully. ARTYOM: Yes, we are. [Suddenly with all the desperation of his dark, kind soul.]. This German’s a human being, just like you and me!
[The GERMAN puffs up his cheeks; he is smoking a long, black, two-kopeck cigar.]
ARTYOM: What has he ever done to anyone?
POLENTOVSKY: What have we ever done to anyone?
ARTYOM [Dejectedly.]: It’s a sin, that’s what it is.
POLENTOVSKY: Sin’s got nothing to do with it.
[The GERMAN, puffing out his fat cheeks, sucks on the cigar, snorts, and, nestling his rifle, dozes off. ARTYOM towers over him, blocking out the sky, a crowbar in his hands.
The GERMAN s body topples onto the platform of the tender.]
POLENTOVSKY [Straightens up, his eyes shining.]: No, sin’s got nothing to do with it.
• • •
The train hurtles through meadows, among indistinctly lit flowers. The moon floats effortlessly in the thundering expanse. Two shadows hurl themselves from the locomotive and go rolling down the embankment.
The train, liberated, with no one running it, quakes, goes tearing
toward a ravine, screeches over a bridge, and, its indicator arrows spinning, flies out of control, is illuminated, surges into the air.
Explosion.
Crates of ammunition explode one after the other in the pile of flaming debris.
1
The Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which was to become the KGB in 1955.
Nikita Minin, 1605-1681, Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, initiated reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church that led to a schism. The Old Believers (Starover) refused to accept his liturgical reforms. One of Nikon’s most controversial reforms was to change the practice of crossing oneself using the index and middle finger into crossing oneself using thumb, index, and middle finger.
2
A recreational area on the Moscow River.
3
A system named after a coal miner, Alexei Grigoryevich Stakhanov, 1906-1977, in which workers endeavored to increase their efficiency and productivity, for which they were rewarded with bonuses.
4
German: “That’s Russia for you.”
German: “Translate! Translate, please!”
5
“Damn it!”
In Petfyura s Prison
People lying motionless on bunk beds and in shadowy corners. Weak light trickles through a little window high up by the ceiling. An old man is sleeping huddled by the wall, his open mouth twisted. One of his cheeks is covered with raw scar tissue. Across the cellar from the window, a woman with a shawl wrapped around her plump round shoulders is delousing a girl whose head is resting on her lap. Pavel, his face slashed, is lying in the far corner on the rough dirt floor. A peasant girl in a kerchief and bast shoes comes tiptoeing quietly and timidly up to him.
“So, what s your name?” the old man by the wall, waking up, asks her in a hoarse voice.
“Krista,” the girl answers, barely audibly.
The old mans snoring echoes once more through the cellar.
The girl squats down to give Pavel a cup of water. Pavels thin hand shudders, his teeth are chattering.
“People are saying there is no God,” Krista whispers, her eyes fixed on Pavel, who is lying stretched out on the floor. “Can there be a God when young people suffer like this?”
She spreads out her skirts the way peasant girls do and sadly rests her head on her hand. Outside the cellar door there is a burst of loud voices, soldiers’ laughter. The bolt of the door clanks, and Krista shudders. She gets up. A Cossack captain wearing a blue sleeveless jacket, his head shaved except for a long forelock,1 enters the cellar, his clumsily fastened spurs clattering on the floor. He is a fat young man with a pink, flabby face. He winks at Krista, and, wiggling his finger, beckons her to come over. She comes toward him, tottering in zigzags like an injured bird.
“So, you want to stay cooped up in here forever?” the captain says, nudging her with his fat shoulder.
“Please, sir, dont,” Krista says, raising eyes filled with unbearable, sparkling anguish to the captain.
The red-cheeked Petlyura fighter bends closer to her and winks at her again slowly, while his other eye stares lifelessly straight ahead.
“I could maybe arrange things, if you’d like me to.”
“Please, sir, no!”
“Well, if its ‘Please, sir, no!’ then I’ll have to hand you over to the Cossacks.”
His spurs jingling like bells, the captain marches out, broad, fatlegged, his back round. Krista watches him leave, her face filling with pitiful, childlike perplexity. Then, silently, without warning, she collapses on the floor.
“They’re going to torment her,” the woman with the shawl over her shoulders sighs.
“What’s there to cry about?” the old man, who had been sleeping, says complacently. “Give the bosses whatever they want, and they’ll go easy on you!”
“You’re an old man, Grandpa, an old man, but still a fool,” the woman delousing the little girls thick hair says.
Pavels burning eyes are fixed on the woman.Thoughts are battling within those eyes. Pavel raises himself up from the floor, his parched lips part.
“Don’t give in, Krista!”
Curled up with her head on her knees, Krista rocks back and forth endlessly, monotonously, inconsolably.
“How can I stand up to all of them?” Her voice, barely audible, sounds as if it were coming from far away. “Oh, what a hard life this is! Oh, how they will torture me, those cursed . . .”
“If you had played your cards right, you could’ve been home by now,” the old man says with indifference, and nestles up closer to the wall.
“But I’m a virgin,” Krista says, raising her head.
The bolt of the opening cellar door clanks again. A very tall, haggard, stooping clerk with a pince-nez enters the cellar, warily sniffing the air.
In his hand he is holding a sheet of paper covered with writing.
“Christina Filipovna Gnatyuk?”
He runs his blazing eyes over the sheet of paper:
“District?”
Krista shrinks back toward the wall.
“Kiev, Shepetovsky District.”
“Russian Orthodox?”
“Yes.”
“How much land do you own?”
“We re landless.”
“You know how to sign your name?”
Krista nods.
“Then sign these discharge papers.”
“Oh, thank you, sir!”
The girl rushes over to the stooped clerk with the pince-nez and kisses his large, vein-covered hand, straightens up, and turns to the other prisoners.
“Farewell, good people.”
She turns to Pavel: “Farewell, sweet boy.”
The door closes behind her and the bolt clanks. The old man lights a shriveled cigarette and blows out a vigorous stream of smoke.
“She’ll go to her village, to her fathers house, and make herself four, five dozen piroshkis”
Outside the door, Kristas piercing shriek, rushing steps, thudding bodies. The old man lifts his head, cups his ear, and listens. “They’re ru
ining the poor girl.”
The dull thuds of Pavel throwing himself against the door. He thrusts himself against it with all his might, crazed, his head reeling, banging his fists against it. A guard slides open the grill in the door, his face appears.
“You want me to hit you with my rifle butt?”
AFTERWORD
A PERSONAL MEMOIR
By Nathalie Babel
The Arrest of My Mother*
I have adapted some of the material in the first section of this memoir from my introduction to the second edition of The Lonely Years, published in 1995 by Verba Mundi Books, David Godine, Boston.
My mother, Evgenia Borisovna Babel, nee Gronfein, was arrested a few months before my twelfth birthday. It was in the spring of 1941, just after the collapse of the German-Soviet Pact. Stalin and Hitler were no longer allies, and all persons of Russian origin residing in occupied France were now thought to be politically dangerous. Many were arrested. The provincial town of Niort in the west of France, where the 1939 exode had deposited us, had little experience with political prisoners in those days. The local French police just rounded up the dozen or so Russian women of the town and took them to the local jail. There were only women, no men. The children were left at home alone or with neighbors. I was left alone. Sometimes concerned neighbors invited me for meals or to spend the night. But most of the time, I managed by myself.
As I remember them, these Russian women were middle-aged or aged women of the old Russian Orthodox intelligentsia, the bygone bourgeoisie, and even one tall, impressive-looking lady with a mane of white hair, who had been in attendance at the court of the late Empress Alexandra. Together, this genteel and distinguished group was put into the jail with a variety of criminals. The prison warden understood quite quickly that these ladies had little in common with the usual population there, and so he decided to separate them from the ordinary inmates. They did not partake in the routine activities of prison life, were allowed in the courtyard at odd periods, and had different visiting hours than the rest of the prisoners.