The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (29 page)
Authors: Peter Constantine Isaac Babel Nathalie Babel
The song drifted like smoke. We rode toward the sunset, its boiling rivers pouring over the embroidered napkins of the peasants’ fields. The silence turned rosy. The earth lay like a cat s back, covered with a thick, gleaming coat of grain. The mud hamlet of Klekotov crouched on a little hill. Beyond the pass, the vision of deadly, craggy Brody awaited us. But in Klekotov a loud shot exploded in our faces. Two Polish soldiers peered out from behind a hut. Their horses were tied to a post. A light enemy battery came riding up the hill. Bullets unfurled like string along the road.
“Run for it!” Afonka yelled.
And we fled.
Brody! The mummies of your trampled passions have breathed their irresistible poison upon me. I had felt the fatal chill of your eye sockets filled with frozen tears. And now, in a tumbling gallop, I am being carried away from the smashed stones of your synagogues. . . .
*[
An open carriage or buggy with a machine gun mounted on the back.]
Headquarters sent me a coachman, or, as we generally say here, a vehicular driver. His name is Grishchuk. He is thirty-nine years old.
He had spent five years in a German prison camp, escaped a few months ago, walked across Lithuania and northwest Russia, reached Volhynia, only, in Byelov, to fall into the hands of what must be the worlds most brainless draft commission, which reconscripted him into active service. He had been a mere fifty versts from his home in the Kremenec District. He has a wife and children in the Kremenec District. He hasn’t been home for five years and two months. The Draft Commission made him my vehicular driver, and now I am no longer a pariah among the Cossacks.
I have a tachanka and a driver for it. Tachanka! That word has become the base of the triangle on which our way of fighting rests: hack to pieces—tachanka—blood.
The simplest little open carriage, the britzka, the kind you would see some cleric or petty official riding in, has, through a whim of all the civil strife, become a terrible and fast-moving war machine, creating new strategies and tactics, twisting the traditional face of war, spawning tachanka heroes and geniuses. Such was Makhno [
the Ukrainian anarchist leader
.] who had made the tachanka the crux of his secretive and cunning strategy, abolishing infantry, artillery, even cavalry, and replaced that clumsy hodgepodge by mounting three hundred machine guns onto britzkas. Such was Makhno, as innovative as nature: hay carts lined up in military formation to conquer towns. A wedding procession rolls up to the headquarters of a provincial executive committee, opens fire, and a frail little cleric, waving the black flag of anarchy, demands that the authorities immediately hand over the bourgeois, hand over the proletariat, hand over music and wine.
An army of tachankas is capable of unprecedented mobility.
Budyonny was just as adept at demonstrating this as Makhno was. To hack away at such an army is difficult, to corner it impossible. A machine gun buried under a stack of hay, a tachanka hidden in a peasant s shed, cease to be military targets. These hidden specks—the hypothetically existing but imperceptible components of a whole—when added up result in the new essence of the Ukrainian village: savage, rebellious, and self-seeking. Makhno can bring an army like this, its ammunition concealed in all its nooks and crannies, into military readiness within an hour, and can demobilize it even faster.
Here, in Budyonnys Red Cavalry, the tachanka does not rule so exclusively. But all our machine gun detachments travel only in britzkas. Cossack fantasy distinguishes two kinds of tachanka, “German settler” and “petty official,” which is not fantasy but a real distinction.
The petty official britzkas, those rickety little carts built without love or imagination, had rattled through the wheat steppes of Kuban carrying the wretched, red-nosed civil servants, a sleep-starved herd of men hurrying to autopsies and inquests, while the settler tachankas came to us from the fat German settlements of the Volga regions of Samara and the Urals. The broad oaken seat backs of the settler tachankas are covered with simple paintings, plump garlands of rosy German flowers. The sturdy cart decks are reinforced with steel. The frame rests on soft, unforgettable springs. I can feel the ardor of many generations in these springs, now bouncing over the torn-up high roads of Volhynia.
I am experiencing the delight of first possession. Every day after we eat, we put on the harnesses. Grishchuk leads the horses out of the stable. They are becoming stronger with every passing day. With proud joy I notice a dull sheen on their groomed flanks. We rub the horses’ swollen legs, trim their manes, throw Cossack harnesses—a tangled, withered mesh of thin straps—over their backs, and drive out of the yard at a fast trot. Grishchuk is sitting sideways on the box. My seat is covered with a bright sackcloth and hay smelling of perfume and tranquillity. The high wheels creak in the white, granular sand. Patches of blooming poppies color the earth, ruined churches glow on the hills. High above the road, in a niche wrecked by shells, stands the brown statue of Saint Ursula with bare round arms. And narrow, ancient letters form an uneven chain on the blackened gold of her pediment: “Glory Be to Jesus and the Mother of God.”
Lifeless Jewish shtetls cluster around the foot of the Polish nobles’ estates. The prophetic peacock, a passionless apparition in the blue vastness, glitters on brick walls. The synagogue, enmeshed in a tangle of huts, crouches eyeless and battered, round as a Hasidic hat, on the barren earth. Narrow-shouldered Jews hover sadly at crossroads. And the image of southern Jews flares up in my memory—-jovial, potbellied, sparkling like cheap wine. There is no comparison between them and the bitter aloofness of these long bony backs, these tragic yellow beards. In their fervent features, carved by torture, there is no fat or warm pulse of blood. The movements of the Galician and the Volhynian Jew are abrupt, brusque, and offensive to good taste, but the power of their grief is filled with dark grandeur, and their secret contempt for the Polish masters is boundless. Looking at them, I understood the fiery history of these faraway hinterlands, the stories of Talmudists who leased out taverns, of rabbis who dabbled in moneylending, of girls who were raped by Polish mercenaries and for whom Polish magnates shot themselves.
DOLGUSHOV’S DEATH
( he veils of battle swept toward the town. At midday, / Korotchaev, the disgraced commander of the Fourth Division, who fought alone and rode out seeking death, flew past us in his black Caucasian cloak. As he came galloping by, he shouted over to me, “Our communications have been cut, Radzivillov and Brody are in flames!” And off he charged—fluttering, black, with eyes of coal.
On the plain, flat as a board, the brigades were regrouping. The sun rolled through the crimson dust. Wounded men sat in ditches, eating. Nurses lay on the grass and sang in hushed voices. Afonkas scouts roamed over the field, looking for dead soldiers and ammunition. Afonka rode by two paces from me and, without turning his head, said, “We got a real kick in the teeth! Big time! They re saying things about our division commander—it looks like he’s out. Our fighters dont know what’s what!”
The Poles had advanced to the forest about three versts away from us, and set up their machine guns somewhere nearby. Flying bullets whimper and yelp; their lament has reached an unbearable pitch. The bullets plunge into the earth and writhe, quaking with impatience. Vytyagaichenko, the commander of the regiment, snoring in the hot sun, cried out in his sleep and woke up. He mounted his horse and rode over to the lead squadron. His face was creased with red stripes from his uncomfortable sleep, and his pockets were filled with plums.
“Son of a bitch!” he said angrily, spitting out a plum stone. “A damn waste of time! Timoshka, hoist the flag!”
“Oh, so were going for it?” Timoshka asked, pulling the flagpole out of the stirrup, and unrolling the flag on which a star had been painted, along with something about the Third International.
19
“Well see what happens,” Vytyagaichenko said, and suddenly shouted wildly, “Come on, girls, onto your horses! Gather your men, squadron leaders!”
The buglers sounded the alarm. The squadrons lined up in a column. A wounded man crawled out of a ditch and, shading his eyes with his hand, said to Vytyagaichenko, “Taras Grigorevich, I represent the others here. It looks like youre leaving us behind.”
“Dont worry, youll manage to fight them off,” Vytyagaichenko muttered, and reared his horse.
“We sort of think we wont be able to fight them off, Taras Grigorevich,” the wounded man called after Vytyagaichenko as he rode off.
Vytyagaichenko turned back his horse. “Stop whimpering! Of course I wont leave you!” And he ordered the carts to be harnessed.
At that very moment the whining, high-pitched voice of my friend Afonka Bida burst out, “Lets not set off at full trot, Taras Grigorevich! Its five versts. How are we supposed to hack them down if our horses are worn out? Why the rush? Youll be there in time for the pear pruning on St. Marys Day!”
“Slow trot!” Vytyagaichenko ordered, without raising his eyes.
The regiment rode off.
“If what they re saying about the division commander is true,” Afonka whispered, reining in his horse, “and they re getting rid of him, well then thank you very much—we might as well kill off the cattle and burn down the barn!”
Tears flowed from his eyes. I looked at him in amazement. He spun like a top, held his cap down, wheezed, and then charged off with a loud whoop.
Grishchuk, with his ridiculous tachanka^ and I stayed behind, rushing back and forth among walls of fire until the evening. Our divisional staff had disappeared. Other units wouldn’t take us in. The regiments pushed forward into Brody but were repelled. We rode to the town cemetery. A Polish patrol jumped up from behind the graves, put their rifles to their shoulders, and started firing at us. Grishchuk spun his tachanka around. It shrieked with all its four wheels.
“Grishchuk!” I yelled through the whistling and the wind.
“What damn stupidity!” he shouted back morosely.
“Were done for!” I hollered, seized by the exhilaration of disaster. “Were finished!”
“All the trouble our womenfolk go to!” he said even more morosely. “What’s the point of all the matchmaking, marrying, and in-laws dancing at weddings?”
A rosy tail lit up in the sky and expired. The Milky Way surfaced from under the stars.
“It makes me want to laugh!” Grishchuk said sadly, and pointed his whip at a man sitting at the side of the road. “It makes me want to laugh that women go to such trouble!”
The man sitting by the roadside was Dolgushov, one of the telephonists. He stared at us, his legs stretched out in front of him.
“Here, look,” Dolgushov said, as we pulled up to him. Tm finished . . . know what I mean?”
“I know,” Grishchuk answered, reining in the horses.
“You’ll have to waste a bullet on me,” Dolgushov said.
He was sitting propped up against a tree. He lay with his legs splayed far apart, his boots pointing in opposite directions. Without lowering his eyes from me, he carefully lifted his shirt. His stomach was torn open, his intestines spilling to his knees, and we could see his heart beating.
“When the Poles turn up, they’ll have fun kicking me around. Heres my papers. Write my mother where, what, why.”
“No,” I replied, and spurred my horse.
Dolgushov placed his blue palms on the ground and looked at his hands in disbelief.
“Running away?” he muttered, slumping down. “Then run, you bastard!”
Sweat slithered over my body. The machine guns hammered faster and faster with hysterical tenacity. Afonka Bida came galloping toward us, encircled by the halo of the sunset.
“Were kicking their asses!” he shouted merrily. “What re you up to here, fun and games?”
I pointed at Dolgushov and moved my horse to the side.
They spoke a few words, I couldnt hear what they said. Dolgushov held out his papers. Afonka slipped them into his boot and shot Dolgushov in the mouth.
“Afonka,” I said, riding up to him with a pitiful smile. “/ couldnt have done that.”
“Get lost, or 111 shoot you!” he said to me, his face turning white. “You spectacled idiots have as much pity for us as a cat has for a mouse!”
And he cocked his trigger.
I rode off slowly, without looking back, a feeling of cold and death in my spine.
“Hey! Hey!” Grishchuk shouted behind me, and grabbed Afonkas hand. “Cut the crap!”
“You damn lackey bastard!” Afonka yelled at Grishchuk. “Wait till I get my hands on him!”
Grishchuk caught up with me at the bend in the road. Afonka was not with him. He had ridden off in the opposite direction.
“Well, there you have it, Grishchuk,” I said to him. “Today I lost Afonka, my first real friend.”
Grishchuk took out a wrinkled apple from under the cart seat. “Eat it,” he told me, “please, eat it.”
Polish for “Sir” or “Mr.”
Poland’s official name after 1918.
^Jozef Klemens Pilsudski, 1867-1935, the first Chief of State of Poland after its independence from Russia in 1918, and commander-in-chief of the Polish army.
Janusz Radziwill, 1880-1967, politician belonging to an important Polish-Lithuanian princely family; Eustachy Sapieha, 1881—1963, was Polish envoy to London in 1919—20 and Polish Foreign Minister in 1920-21. Later he was a leader of the monarchist movement.
The humorous implication here is that when the narrator first saw the Cossack commanders carrying candles, he had assumed that these hard-line Communist fighters had come to the church to pray.
A political organ of the new Soviet government charged with the ideological education of the military during the Russian Civil War and the Russo-Polish War of 1920.
^ The newspaper published by the Central Executive Committee, which was the executive branch of the new Bolshevik government.
The Red Cavalryman.
