Red Cavalry Read online

  ISAAC BABEL

  RED

  CAVALRY

  Translated from the Russian

  by Boris Dralyuk

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Translator’s Foreword

  Red Cavalry (1926)

  Crossing the Zbrucz

  The Catholic Church in Novograd

  A Letter

  The Chief of the Remount Service

  Pan Apolek

  The Italian Sun

  Gedali

  My First Goose

  The Rebbe

  The Road to Brody

  The Tachanka Doctrine

  The Death of Dolgushov

  The Second Brigade Commander

  Sashka the Christ

  The Life Story of Pavlichenko, Matvei Rodionych

  The Cemetery in Kozin

  Prishchepa

  The Story of a Horse

  Konkin

  Berestechko

  Salt

  Evening

  Afonka Bida

  In St Valentine’s

  Squadron Commander Trunov

  The Ivans

  The Story of a Horse, Continued

  The Widow

  Zamość

  Treason

  Cześniki

  After the Battle

  Song

  The Rebbe’s Son

  Postscript (1933)

  Argamak

  Appendix: Toponyms

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

  The stories that make up the Red Cavalry cycle, which chronicle the narrator’s stint as a correspondent in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–20, originally appeared in various journals and newspapers. They were first published as a stand-alone collection in 1926. Babel continued to edit the cycle for subsequent editions, replacing individual words and excising phrases, sentences and even entire passages. Some of these excisions are clearly the result of censorship, while others may have been motivated by changes in Babel’s style. Editors and censors introduced further changes after Babel’s rehabilitation in the 1950s. These alterations, and the failure of earlier translators to take stock of them, are discussed in detail in Charles B. Timmer’s article ‘Translation and Censorship’ (Miscellanea Slavica: To Honour the Memory of Jan M. Meijer [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983], pp. 443–68). They are also meticulously chronicled in Christopher Luck’s annotated edition of the Russian text, titled Babel: Red Cavalry (London: Bristol Classical Press/Duckworth, 1994). In preparing this translation I have relied heavily on Timmer’s and Luck’s work, as well as on Timothy D. Sergay’s review essay of Peter Constantine’s translation of Babel’s complete prose, ‘Isaac Babel’s Life in English: The Norton Complete Babel Reconsidered’ (Translation and Literature 15:2 [Autumn 2006], pp. 238–53). I owe a great debt to these men, as well as to many other scholars of Babel’s work; they have helped me avoid several potential pitfalls and correct inaccuracies that had crept into previous translations. It would be unethical of me not to acknowledge the pioneering and inventive work of translators who have tackled the Cavalry before me, including Nadia Helstein, Walter Morison, Andrew R. MacAndrew, David McDuff and Peter Constantine, among others. I have learnt from all of them.

  I chose to base my translation on the first edition of Red Cavalry (1926). I did not feel it prudent to judge which omissions and changes in later editions were Babel’s own and which were the work of censors, even when the answer was fairly clear. Instead, I’ve tried to present a rendition of the cycle as the young Babel first envisioned it. This is the work of a daring young artist—a book “full of courage and crude joy”, to quote the narrator’s description of The Red Cavalryman newspaper, and still reverberating with the terror of battle. The only exception is the story ‘Argamak’, which was appended to the cycle in 1933, having appeared in a journal in 1932; it is included here as a postscript. My choice of a particular edition of the original text, however, should not imply that I have been slavishly literal to that text; I have taken some liberties in order to capture Babel’s tone, as I perceive it. Delicate modulations of tone are as essential to the cycle’s impact as its imagery. In order to illustrate the kinds of liberties I have taken, I would like to offer an example that I originally included in a short essay for the journal In Other Words.

  In the space of a few lines, Babel shifts from one register to another, from lyricism to brutal grittiness. A translator who cannot grasp the subtle indicators of these shifts in the original, and who can’t discern an original image from a fixed turn of phrase, is liable to make a tonal mistake. Here is a sample paragraph from my translation of ‘The Catholic Church in Novograd’, in which our narrator drinks rum with a Polish priest’s assistant and reflects on the seductive charms of the Catholic faith: “I was drinking rum with him. The spirit of a mysterious way of life still flickered beneath the ruins of the priest’s house, and its insidious temptations weakened me. O crucifixes as tiny as a courtesan’s amulets, the parchment of papal bulls, and the satin of women’s letters worn thin in the blue silk of waistcoats!” In rendering this passage I felt I had to preserve the flowing lyricism of the original, and I worked hard on the sound texture (e.g. “amulets” instead of the more literal “talismans”, in order to avoid a cluster of sibilants). Other translators have rendered the word used to describe the state of the letters—istlevshikh—more or less literally, as “mouldering” or “that had rotted”, but this is a shade too ghoulish, and isn’t true to the lyrical tone. If one takes a moment to imagine what Babel’s narrator imagines—the romance of this decadent “way of life”—one can conjure the fragile letters before one’s eyes, feel their texture; they have been “worn thin” by friction and sweat. Here, Babel has waxed romantic. Throughout the cycle, Babel uses the same adjective to describe things ranging from “decayed wadding” and “rotten hay” to an old rebbe’s “withered fingers”. Context is everything. There’s plenty of brutality in these stories; it derives its effect from the beguiling lyricism that surrounds it.

  Place names are exceedingly difficult to deal with in translation, especially when the places in question lie in Eastern and Central Europe. A single town—say, what is known today as Lviv—is bound in layers of toponyms: in this case the Polish “Lwów”, the Russian “Lvov”, the German “Lemberg” and so on. Babel’s narrator, Lyutov, is a Jew born and raised in the Russian Empire who finds himself in hostile, heavily Polonized terrain as a Soviet war correspondent. He consistently refers to all the places he encounters using their Russian and Russified appellations. In this translation I have decided to use Polish names for places that were absorbed into the Habsburg Empire during the three partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century; the names of regions that were absorbed into the Russian Empire are rendered in transliterated Russian. Lyutov treats the Zbrucz River as a cultural boundary between Soviet and Polish land. Clearly, the sense of a cultural barrier, which shifts uneasily beneath one’s feet, is far more important to Babel than topographic fidelity; he famously moves the Zbrucz quite a bit to the east in order to have Lyutov cross the river into Novograd-Volynsk, which actually lies on the Słucz (now Sluch). Those interested in Babel’s distortions of geography and military history may consult Norman Davies’s article ‘Izaak Babel’s Konarmiya Stories, and the Polish–Soviet War, 1919–20’ (Modern Languages Review 67:4 [1972], pp. 845–57), as well as H.T. Willetts’s translation of Babel’s 1920 Diary, edited, annotated and introduced by Carol J. Avins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). I have chosen to use the borders established by the Third Partition of 1795 as a symbolic linguistic boundary in my translation. Many of the places mentioned in this cy
cle now belong to the independent nations of Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Lithuania, and I provide the standard contemporary rendering of each toponym in a short appendix. The names of Cracow, Warsaw and Moscow are given in their traditional English forms.

  It has been an honour and a pleasure to work with Adam Freudenheim, Bryan Karetnyk, Gesche Ipsen and the team at Pushkin Press. I must thank Robert Chandler, without whom this project would not have been possible, and Maria Bloshteyn, whose encouraging feedback and sparkling wit reassured me whenever my confidence faltered—which is to say, at nearly every step. I owe a special thanks to my friend and colleague, Roman Koropeckyj, expert in all things Polish and Ukrainian. Most importantly, I am grateful to Kotrina Kajokaite, my partner and inspiration, and to my mother, Anna Glazer, whose faultless Odessan ear guided my hand.

  RED CAVALRY

  (1926)

  CROSSING THE ZBRUCZ

  THE SIXTH DIVISION commander reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn. The staff has moved out of Krapivno and our transport sprawls in a noisy rearguard along the highway that runs from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of peasant men by Nicholas the First.

  Fields of scarlet poppies blossom around us, a midday breeze plays in the yellowing rye and virgin buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn bends. Volyn recedes from us into the pearly mist of birch groves and creeps into the flowery hills, its feeble arms getting tangled in thickets of hops. An orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head, a gentle light glitters in the ravines of clouds and the banners of sunset flutter over our heads. The scent of yesterday’s blood and dead horses seeps into the evening coolness. The blackened Zbrucz roars, twisting the foamy knots of its rapids. The bridges are destroyed and we are fording the river. A stately moon lies on the waves. The horses sink up to their backs and sonorous streams trickle between hundreds of horses’ legs. Someone is drowning, loudly disparaging the Mother of God. The river is strewn with the black squares of carts, filled with rumbling, whistling and songs that thunder over snakes of moonlight and glistening pits.

  Late at night we arrive in Novograd. In my assigned billet I find a pregnant woman, along with two red-haired, thin-necked Jews; a third Jew is sleeping, huddled up against the wall with a blanket over his head. In my assigned room I find two ransacked wardrobes, scraps of women’s fur coats on the floor, human excrement and shards of the sacred plate that Jews use once a year—on Passover.

  “Clean this up,” I say to the woman. “You live in filth, hosts…”

  The two Jews spring into action. They jump around on felt soles, picking debris off the floor. They jump silently, monkey-like, like a Japanese circus act, their necks swelling and swivelling. They spread a torn feather mattress on the floor and I lie down, facing the wall, next to the third, sleeping Jew. Fearful poverty closes in above my bed.

  Silence has killed everything off, and only the moon, with its blue hands clasping its round, sparkling, carefree head, tramps about under the window.

  I stretch my numbed legs. I lie on the torn feather mattress and fall asleep. I dream of the Sixth Division commander. He’s chasing the brigade commander on a heavy stallion and plants two bullets in his eyes. The bullets pierce the brigade commander’s head, and both his eyes fall to the ground.

  “Why’d you turn the brigade back?” Savitsky, the Sixth Division commander, shouts at the wounded man—and here I wake up, because the pregnant woman’s fingers are fumbling over my face.

  “Pan,”1 she says to me. “You’re screaming in your sleep, thrashing around. I’ll make your bed in the other corner, because you’re shoving my papa…”

  She raises her skinny legs and round belly off the floor and removes the blanket from the huddled sleeper. It’s a dead old man, flat on his back. His gullet is ripped out, his face is hacked in two, and blue blood sits in his beard like a hunk of lead.

  “Pan,” says the Jewess, giving the feather mattress a shake. “The Poles were slashing him and he kept begging them, ‘Kill me in the back yard so my daughter doesn’t see me die.’ But they did it their way—he died in this room, thinking of me… And now you tell me,” the woman said suddenly with terrible force, “you tell me where else in this whole world you’ll find a father like my father…”

  Novograd-Volynsk, July 1920

  Notes

  1 Pan: a Western Slavic honorific, also used in Ukraine and Belarus, meaning “lord” or “master” and roughly equivalent to “sir” or “mister” in usage. The female equivalent is Pani.

  THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN NOVOGRAD

  YESTERDAY I TOOK a report to the military commissar, who was staying at the house of a priest that had run off. In the kitchen I met Pani Eliza, the Jesuit’s housekeeper. She gave me amber tea with biscuits. Her biscuits smelt like the crucifixion. They contained the sly sap and sweet-scented fury of the Vatican.

  The bells in the church next door were roaring, set into motion by the maddened ringer. The evening was full of midsummer stars. Pani Eliza, shaking her attentive grey tresses, kept slipping me biscuits, and I took pleasure in the Jesuit food.

  The old Polish woman called me “Pan”, grey old men with ossified ears stood to attention near the threshold, and somewhere in the serpentine twilight a monk’s cassock was fluttering. The pater ran off, but he left his assistant—Pan Romuald.

  A snuffling eunuch with the body of a giant, Romuald addressed us respectfully, as “comrades”. He’d draw a yellow finger across the map, tracing the circles of the Polish rout. Overcome with raspy enthusiasm, he’d recount his fatherland’s wounds. Let gentle oblivion engulf all memory of Romuald, who betrayed us without pity and was shot dead in passing. But that evening his narrow cassock flitted at every door-curtain, furiously sweeping all the roads and grinning at anyone who wanted vodka. That evening the monk’s shadow tailed me relentlessly. He would have made bishop, Pan Romuald—if he hadn’t been a spy.

  I was drinking rum with him. The spirit of a mysterious way of life still flickered beneath the ruins of the priest’s house, and its insidious temptations weakened me. O crucifixes as tiny as a courtesan’s amulets, the parchment of papal bulls, and the satin of women’s letters worn thin in the blue silk of waistcoats!…

  I can see you from here, faithless monk in a lilac robe—your hands swollen, your soul as tender and pitiless as the soul of a cat; I see the wounds of your God, oozing seed, a sweet-smelling poison that intoxicates virgins.

  We were drinking rum, waiting for the military commissar to return from headquarters, but he wouldn’t show. Romuald dropped down in a corner and fell asleep. He sleeps and trembles, and outside the window the garden path shimmers beneath the black passion of the sky. Thirsty roses sway in the darkness. Bursts of green lightning flare in the church’s domes. A naked corpse sprawls at the foot of the slope. Moonbeams stream across the dead legs jutting wide apart.

  There’s your Poland, there’s the haughty grief of the Commonwealth! A violent intruder, I spread a louse-ridden mattress in a temple abandoned by the clergyman and rest my head on folios full of printed hosannas to His Excellency, the illustrious chief of state, Józef Piłsudski.1

  Hordes of beggars roll on to your ancient cities, O Poland, and a song calling all serfs to unite thunders above them—and woe to you, Commonwealth, woe to you, Prince Radziwiłł, and to you, Prince Sapieha, who rose for but an hour!…2

  My commissar doesn’t show. I look for him at headquarters, in the garden, in the church. The church gates are open; I go in and am met by the sudden glare of two silver skulls on the lid of a broken coffin. In terror I rush downstairs, to the crypt. An oak staircase leads from there to the altar. And I see a multitude of lights darting high above, up in the very dome. I see the commissar, the chief of the Special Section, and Cossacks with candles in their hands. They respond to my weak cry and lead me out of the basement.

  The skulls, which turn out to be carvings on the church bier, no longer scare me,
and we all continue the search, because this was a search, which began after piles of military uniforms were discovered in the priest’s rooms.

  Sparkling with the horses’ muzzles embroidered on our cuffs, whispering and rattling with our spurs, we go round the echoing building with guttering wax in our hands. Mothers of God, studded with precious stones, follow us with their pink, mouse-like pupils, flames pulse in our fingers, and rectangular shadows writhe on the statues of St Peter, St Francis and St Vincent, on their rosy cheeks and curly beards coloured with carmine.

  We go round and search. Ivory buttons spring beneath our fingers; icons that are split down the middle move apart, revealing vaults in caves that blossom with mould. This temple is ancient and full of secrets. Its glossy walls conceal secret passages, niches and trapdoors that swing open without making a sound.

  O foolish priest, who hung the bras of his parishioners on the nails in the Saviour’s hands! In the Holy of Holies we found a suitcase stuffed with gold coins, a morocco-leather bag of banknotes and Parisian jewellers’ cases with emerald rings.

  Later we counted the money in the commissar’s room. Columns of gold, carpets of banknotes, a gusty wind blowing on the candle flames, the crow-like bewilderment in Pani Eliza’s eyes, Romuald’s thunderous laughter and the endless roar of the bells struck by Pan Robacki, the maddened ringer.

  “Away,” I told myself. “Away from these winking Madonnas deceived by soldiers…”

  Notes

  1 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, established at the Union of Lublin in July 1569, was one of the largest and most populous states in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it entered a period of decline in the eighteenth century and was wiped off the map in 1795, after the Third Partition by the monarchs of Russia, Prussia and Austria. Poland ceased to exist as a state until independence was once again declared on 11 November 1918 by Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), who remained the country’s leader until 1935.