Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(6)
Babel was born in 1894 in Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea, in a poor neighborhood called the Moldavanka, which he made famous in his stories. Odessa had a large Jewish population, and Babel is a Jewish writer, though not in the way of Isaac Singer or Sholem Aleichem. In the diary he writes of feeling happy among the beset Jews of eastern Poland, who, along with their history, would be almost completely exterminated twenty years later. Enormous faces and black beards. Every house remains in my heart. Clusters of Jews. Their faces—this is the ghetto and we are an ancient people. In a ruined synagogue he sits, almost praying—it has an irresistible effect on him, though he writes as a Russian and a loyal communist much of the time.
He grew up having witnessed, in 1905, the great pogroms, massacres of Jews, that were sanctioned by the czarist government, although he and his family escaped harm—all brilliantly and almost innocently described in “The Story of My Dovecote” and “First Love.” Babel’s father was a tractor salesman, and Babel studied French, English, and German as a child. His first stories were written in French, perhaps from the influence of Maupassant and Flaubert.
There were restrictions for Jews, quotas, cities they were prohibited from living in, but the overthrow of the czarist regime broke down doors, if not prejudices. Babel had made his way to St. Petersburg in 1916, the year before the Revolution, and his early stories were published there in Maxim Gorky’s literary magazine, Letopis.
Babel became a favorite of Gorky, who recognized his talent and advised him to go out and get some experience of life. Gorky himself had plenty of it, a bitter childhood and years of hard work. His famous play The Lower Depths made his name in 1902, and he became the writer of the Revolution, Babel’s champion, and always a devoted Marxist, until his death in the fateful year of 1936 under somewhat mysterious circumstances. His judgment had been simple: “Babel is the great hope of Russian literature.”
In 1920, with credentials as a war correspondent and under the assumed, very Russian name of Kiril Lyutov, Babel spent three and a half months, from June into September, with the First Cavalry Army, commanded by a legendary mustached Cossack, Semyon Budyonny. In late May Budyonny had ridden into eastern Poland from the Ukraine in a campaign against the Poles, who had moved forces into the disputed border regions. It was also a first move in the Soviets’ plan to spread communism. Russia was thought to be a less than ideal place for a true workers’ revolution, being too archaic. The new order would take hold better in a more industrialized society: Germany. Russia was only a temporary base for it.
There were early successes, and then defeats in the fall of 1920 that led to retreat. Amid the chaos, battles, rapes, and massacres, Babel traveled, writing articles for a government newspaper and keeping, in a plain, lined notebook, an intense, hasty diary of which it could be said that, as with other great writers, he threw away a novel on every page. Describe he is continually reminding himself, describe. The fifty-four opening pages have been lost, and with them Babel’s first impressions, but from the beginning there is the muted horror: they are in Zhitomir, the western Ukraine.
The Poles entered the town, stayed for three days, there was a pogrom, they cut off beards, that’s usual, assembled 45 Jews in the marketplace, led them to the slaughteryard, tortures, cut out tongues, wails heard all over the square. They set fire to 6 houses, I went to look at Koniuchowski’s house on Cathedral Street, they machine-gunned those who tried to rescue people. The yardman, into whose arms a mother dropped a child from a burning window, was bayoneted, the priest put a ladder up against the back wall, they escaped that way.
It’s summer, fields of wheat. Down the road at a hard trot, eight abreast, an endless column of Cossacks are coming with their topknots, carbines, long swords, and ragged clothes, the dust rising behind. Divisions are attacking, orders being sent out, dead and wounded men, nurses on horseback. By one of the cottages—a cow, recently calved, with its throat cut. Bluish teats on the ground, just skin. Indescribable pity! A murdered young mother. Death is everywhere. The images are like Goya’s in his passionate series of etchings Desastres de la Guerra, the mutilation and murder, and above all, a kind of hopeless understanding and even forgiveness.
There are thirty-four staggering stories in Red Cavalry, which opens like a cannon shot, crossing the River Zbrucz into Poland. The blackened river roars, twisting itself into foamy knots at the falls.
The bridges were down, and we waded across the river. On the waves rested a majestic moon. The horses were in to the cruppers, and the noisy torrent gurgled among hundreds of horses’ legs. Somebody sank, loudly defaming the Mother of God. The river was dotted with the black patches of wagons, and was full of confused sounds.
Certain figures reappear, Savitsky, the long-legged division commander, disgraced and living with a Cossack woman he has lured away from a Jew in the commissariat (“The Story of a Horse, Parts I and II”). Sasha, the girlfriend of the squadrons, with her shapely, cast-iron legs; Afonka Bida, the platoon commander, who shoots a gravely wounded comrade who is pleading for death rather than being left behind and caught alive by the Poles (“The Death of a Dolgushov”).
He was leaning up against a tree, his boots thrust out apart. Without lowering his eyes from mine he warily rolled back his shirt. His belly had been torn out. The entrails hung over his knees, and the heartbeats were visible.
Afonka talks to him briefly, takes some papers offered to him, puts them in his boot, and shoots the wounded man in the mouth. Lyutov/Babel, the narrator, had been unable to do it. “Get out of my sight,” Afonka says, “or I’ll kill you. You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat has for a mouse.”