The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (44 page)

“You Jude, Pane,”* he whispered, frantically caressing my stirrup. “You Jude!” he whimpered, dribbling spittle, writhing with joy.

“Get back in line, Shulmeister,” I yelled at the Jew, and suddenly, seized by deathly numbness, slipped off my saddle.

“How come you know?” I asked him breathlessly.

“Your eyes, their sweet Jewish look,” he yelped, hopping on one leg, leaving his thin dogs track behind him. “Your sweet Jewish look, Panel”

I barely managed to extricate myself from his condemned mans frenzy. I came back to my senses slowly, as after a concussion.

The chief of staff ordered me to take care of the details and rode off to the units.

The machine guns were dragged up onto the hill like calves on halters. They moved up side by side, like a well-ordered herd, clanking reassuringly. The sun played on their dusty muzzles. And I saw a rainbow on their steel. The Polish youth with the curly sideburns stared at them with village curiosity. He leaned his whole body forward, revealing a view of Golov, who was crawling out of a ditch pale and intent, his smashed head and his rifle raised. I stretched my hands out to Golov and yelled, but the sound choked and bulged in my throat. Golov quickly shot the prisoner in the back of the neck and jumped up to his feet. The surprised Pole turned to him, executing a half spin on his heel, as in a military exercise. With the slow movements of a woman giving herself to a man, he lifted both hands to his nape, slumped to the ground, and died instantly.

A smile of peace and relief flitted over Golovs face. A light flush returned to his cheeks.

*“You are a Jew, sir”—Shulmeister uses vy, the Russian polite form for “you” Jude, the German word for “Jew,” and Pane, the Polish word for “sir.”

“Our mothers dont knit drawers like that for us,” he told me slyly. “Cross that one off, and give me a list for eight.”

I gave him the list.

“Youll answer for that, Golov!” I said in desperation.

“I will answer for that!” he yelled in unbridled triumph. “But not to you, four-eyes, 111 answer to my own people from the Sormov factory They know whats what!”

Nine prisoners of war are no longer alive. I know that in my heart. This morning I decided to hold a memorial service for the murdered men. In the Red Cavalry there is no one but me who can do it. Our unit stopped to rest on a ravaged Polish estate. I took out my diary and went into the flower garden, which had remained untouched. Hyacinths and blue roses were growing there.

I began writing about the platoon commander and the nine dead men, but a noise, a familiar noise, interrupted me. Cherkashin, the headquarters lackey, had launched a raid against the beehives. Mitya, a red-cheeked youth from Oryol, was following him, holding a smoking torch in his hand. Their heads were wrapped in their army coats. The slits of their eyes glowed. Swarms of bees charged their conquerors and died by their hives. And I put down my pen. I was horrified at the great number of memorial services awaiting me.

[The following story fragment is an earlier variation of the two stories “Squadron Commander Trunov” and “And Then There Were Nine."
^]

Zavadi Station. This happened yesterday. About thirty Poles were sitting tight in the stone building by the junction of the railroad tracks. The chief of staff himself got involved in this serious business. He strutted in front of our line of men with a revolver in his hand.

“How pointless it is to die at Zavady Station,” I thought, and went over to the chief of staff.

The Poles ran [and broke through] our line of men. We brought back ten of them alive. We took them to the field. They looked like a striped blanket laid out on the ground. In front of them, Platoon Commander Golov, mounted, was standing in his stirrups.

“Officers! Own up!” he said, shaking his reins. Blood trickled from his head like rain from a haystack. He had been wounded on the forehead.

“All officers, step forward!” he repeated in a thicker voice, getting off his horse.

Suddenly a lanky man with a drooping little mustache stepped forward from the group.

“End of this war!” the man said with delight, and began crying. “All officers run away, end of this war!”

And the lanky man held out his blue hand to the squadron commander. On his face was an incomprehensible bliss.

“Five fingers,” he muttered, sobbing, “I raising with these five fingers my family!”

And, with burning eyes, he slowly waved his large, wilted hand. Golov pushed it back with his saber.

“Your officers threw their uniforms here!” he yelled. “But were going to have a little fitting now, and whoever the uniforms fit, Im going to finish off!”

He picked out a cap without a brim from the pile of rags and put it on the lanky mans head.

“It fits,” Golov whispered. He stepped up closer to the prisoner, looked him in the eyes, and plunged his saber into his gullet. The lanky man fell, shivered, his legs twitching in a frenzy. A foamy, coral-red stream poured from his neck. A young red-cheeked Cossack with silky hair knelt before the dying man. He unbuttoned the mans [trousers].

This letter from Babel was published in 1924 in the literary magazine Oktyabr, issue no. 4 in answer to an article by General Budyonny, in which Budyonny attacked Babel for his portrayal of the Red Cavalry and its fighters in his stories, accusing Babel\ among other things, of character assassination and “counterrevolutionary lies. ”

In 1920, I served in the First Cavalrys Sixth Division, of which Comrade Timoshenko was commander at the time. I witnessed his heroic, military, and revolutionary work with much admiration. This wonderful and pristine image of my beloved division commander long ruled my imagination, and when I set about to write my memoirs of the Polish Campaign, my thoughts often returned to him. But in the process of writing, my aim of keeping within the parameters of historical truth began to shift, and I decided instead to express my thoughts in a literary form. All that remained from my initial outline were a few authentic surnames. Through an unforgivable oversight, however, I did not undertake to remove these surnames, and, to my great consternation, these names have now appeared by mistake in print, as for instance in the piece “Timoshenko and Melnikov,”* published in the third volume of Krasnaya Nov, 1924. This oversight came about because I was late handing in the materials for that volume, and the editorial office, not to mention the typesetting department, had put me under extreme pressure, and in this last-minute rush, I overlooked the vital task of changing the original surnames in the final proofs. I need not stress that Comrade Timoshenko has nothing whatsoever in common with the character in that piece, a fact clear to anyone who has ever crossed paths with the former commander of Division Six, one of the most courageous and selfless of our Red Commanders.

I. Babel

* In later editions of Red Cavalry, this piece was renamed “The Story of a Horse.”

1

Nestor Ivanovich Makhno, 1889-1934, the Ukrainian anarchist leader.

2

The abortive German November Revolution of 1918.

3

The Revolutionary Tribunals were the organs of military justice representing the Revolutionary Military Council. They investigated crimes committed by military personnel and dealt with prisoners of war. Revolutionary Tribunal detachments were present in each army division and brigade.

4

A manifestation of friendship symbolizing the Holy Trinity.

Babel wrote the following pieces under the nonfewish nom-de-plume Kiril V. Lyutov, for Krasny Kavalerist, The Red Cavalryman— the newspaper distributed to the fighters of the Cavalry during the Russian-Polish Campaign. In Babel’s story “The Letter’’ a young Cossack had described Krasny Kavalerist as “our own merciless newspaper [. . .] which every fighter on the front wants to read and then go and heroically hack the damn Poles to pieces.”

The pseudonymous Lyutov is also one of the narrators in the Red Cavalry stories. Lyutov is very Russian (as opposed to Jewish), one of the young intellectuals of the new Soviet Union, a journalist sent to cover the fighting on the front. He is furthermore the persona whom Babel adopted in his daily life during the Russian-Polish Campaign as a way of deflecting the ruthless anti-Semitism of his Cossack colleagues. Lyutov’s role in the Krasny Kavalerist pieces is to incite his fellow fighters to action with propaganda and Bolshevik slogans.

We must add one more name now to our heroic, bloody, and sorrowful list, a name that will never be forgotten by the Sixth Division: the name of Konstantin Trunov, commander of the Thirty-fourth Cavalry Regiment, who died in the line of duty on August 3, near K. Another grave is now hidden by the shadows of the dense forests of Volhynia, another distinguished life marked by self-sacrifice and devotion to duty has been relinquished to the cause of the oppressed, another proletarian heart has been crushed so that its fiery blood will tint the red flags of Revolution. The story of Comr. Trunovs final years of life is inextricably linked with the titanic battle of the Red Army. He emptied his cup to the last drop, participating in every campaign from Tsaritsyn to Voronezh, and from Voronezh to the shores of the Black Sea. In the past he suffered hunger, deprivation, wounds, overwhelming battles fought alongside the best men in the front lines, and finally the bullet of the Polish nobleman which cut down the Stavropol peasant from the faraway steppes who was bringing the word of freedom to people who were strangers to him.

From the first days of the Revolution, Comrade Trunov took his true position without a moment s hesitation. We found him among the organizers of the first detachments of the Stavropol troops. In the Red Army, he subsequently took over the command of the Fourth Stavropol Regiment, the First Brigade of the Thirty-second Division, and the Thirty-fourth Cavalry Regiment of the Sixth Division.

In our military ranks his memory will not pale. Under the harshest conditions he triumphed over the enemy through his exceptional, selfless courage, his unbending persistence, and his immutable self-posses-sion, and through his great influence over the men of the Red Army that was so close to him. If there were more Trunovs among us, the masters of this world would be finished.

The Polish army has gone berserk. The Polish Pans, fatally bit-ten, expiring like dogs, are writhing in mortal agony, piling up crimes in stupidity, dying and going to their graves in shame, cursed by their own people and by others. With the same feeling as before, they forge ahead not thinking of the future, forgetting that, according to their European governesses, they are the knights of European civilization, and therefore must act as the guardians of “law and order,” a barrier against Bolshevik barbarity.

This is how this Polish barrier protects civilization:

Once upon a time there lived a modest, hardworking pharmacist in Berestechko, who always did his best. He worked without respite, taking care of his patients, his test tubes, and his prescriptions. He had no connection to politics at all, and quite possibly thought that Bolsheviks were monsters with ears above their eyes.

This pharmacist was a Jew. For the Poles that was enough: he was nothing but a cowering animal! Why even waste a bullet? Beat him, cut him down, torture him! They were quick to set him up. The peaceful pharmacist, who had happily saddled himself with hemorrhoids working with his little bottles, was accused of having somewhere, at some time, for some reason, killed a Polish officer, and was therefore an accomplice of the Bolsheviks.

What followed takes us back to the most oppressive years of the Spanish Inquisition. If I had not seen that lacerated face and that shattered body with my own eyes, I would never have believed that such shocking evil could exist in our era, cruel and bloody though it is. The pharmacists body had been scorched with white-hot iron pokers, stripes like those on an officers uniform had been burned into his legs (“We see you’re in cahoots with those Cossack-Bolsheviks!”), burning needles had been driven under his nails, a Red Army star had been cut into his chest, his hair had been torn out, one hair at a time.

All this had been done at a leisurely pace, accompanied by little jibes at Communism and Jewish commissars.

But this wasn’t all! The animalized Polish Pans razed the pharmacy to the ground and trampled on all the medicines. Not a single bottle was left untouched. Now the little town will doubtless perish without medical help. You will not find any powder against toothache in Berestechko. The population of twenty thousand has been left defenseless in the face of epidemics and disease.

And so now the Polish masters are perishing. Thus the evil, rabid dogs expire. Beat them, Red Fighters, clobber them to death, if it is the last thing you do! Right away! This minute! Now!

Dear Comrade Zdanevich,

The ceaseless battles of this past month have thrown us completely off track. We are living under trying circumstances: endless advances, marches, and retreats. We are entirely cut off from what is generally called “cultured” life. We haven’t seen a single newspaper in the past month, and we have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world at large. It is as if we were living in a forest. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what we are doing—we are trudging through forests.

I don’t even know if my reports are getting through to you. When things end up this way, one feels like throwing in the towel. The most absurd rumors have begun circulating among our fighters, who are living in complete ignorance of what is happening. The harm this does is inestimable. It is vital that immediate measures be taken to supply the Sixth Division, our largest division, with our Krasny Kavalerist and other regional newspapers.

As a personal favor, I beg you to issue an order to the dispatch office, that it (1) send me at least a three-week run of our paper, and enclose any other regional papers it might have; (2) send me at least five copies of our paper on a daily basis at the following address: Sixth Division Headquarters, War Correspondent K. Lyutov. Please be sure they do this, so I can at least somehow get my bearings.