Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(7)
Along the way on a bowlegged horse rides Brigade Commander Maslak, suffused with drunken blood and the putrescence of his greasy humors. His abdomen rested upon the silver-plated saddlebow like a big tomcat.
Along the way also are peasant girls whom a soldier describes sympathetically (“Salt”):
Look at them two girls cringe at present on account of what they went through from us this night. Look at our wives in the wheat plains of the Kuban that are spending their women’s strength without their husbands, and the husbands, alone too, all through dire necessity violating the girls as come into their lives.
In one of the final stories there is the death of a prince, actually a rabbi’s son who had commanded a scratch regiment but was defeated. Swarms of retreating troops are clambering alongside to get aboard the Political Section train as it passes through them. Babel is tossing them potatoes and, when there are no more, Trotsky’s leaflets. Only a single man stretches a filthy hand to catch one. It’s Elijah, son of the Rabbi of Zhitomir, beneath a heavy soldier’s pack. Defying regulations, they pull him aboard and lay him on the floor, the long, shamed body of the dying man . . . and Cossacks in loose red trousers set straight the clothes that were dropping off him. The female typists stare dully at his sexual organs. He had been a member of the Party, he manages to tell Babel, but at first he couldn’t leave his mother.
“And now, Elijah?” “When there’s a revolution on, a mother’s an episode,” he whispered. He died before we reached Rovno. He—that last of the Princes—died among his poetry, phylacteries, and coarse foot wrappings. We buried him at some forgotten station. And I, who can scarce contain the tempests of my imagination within this age-old body of mine, I was there beside my brother when he breathed his last (“The Rabbi’s Son”).
The Red Cavalry stories were written in 1923–1924. Babel had withdrawn to the Caucasus with his wife and was living in a house above Batum. The stories brought immediate fame as well as the disapproval of Budyonny, who wrote denouncing the depiction of the Cossacks. Gorky defended Babel, who was now a public figure and to some extent privileged. This period, the 1920s, was the most productive in Babel’s life. In the Odessa stories and others, written before Red Cavalry and after, the canvas is broadened: there is childhood, first love, family, remembrance, and Benya Krik, known as the King, a legendary gangster in an orange suit and wearing a bracelet set with diamonds, who comes to call on one of the rich men in Odessa, Zender Eichbaum, to ask for his daughter’s hand. The old man has a slight stroke at this but recovers. He was good for another twenty years.
“Listen, Eichbaum,” said the King. “When you die I will bury you in the First Jewish Cemetery, right by the entrance. I will raise you, Eichbaum, a monument of pink marble. I will make you an elder of the Brody Synagogue . . . No thief will walk the street you live on. I will build you a villa where the streetcar line ends. Remember, Eichbaum, you were no rabbi in your young days. People have forged wills, but why talk about it? And the King shall be your son-in-law—no milksop, but the King.”
Babel himself was the heir of Maupassant, for whom he named one of his greatest stories. In it is Raisa Bendersky, who tells the penniless narrator that Maupassant is the only passion of her life.
Black-haired with pink eyes and a wide bosom, she is one of those charming Jewesses who have come to us from Kiev and Poltava, from the opulent steppe-towns full of chestnut trees and acacias. The money made by their clever husbands is transformed by these women into a pink layer of fat on the belly, the back of the neck, and the well-rounded shoulders. Their subtle sleepy smiles drive officers from the local garrisons crazy.
Together they translate Maupassant from a shelf of twenty-nine morocco-bound volumes, and a week or two later on a climactic night when the others have gone to the theater, Raisa appears in an evening dress, holding out her arms:
“I’m drunk, darling.” Her body swayed like a snake’s dancing to music. She tossed her marcelled hair about, and suddenly, with a tinkle of rings, slumped into a chair with ancient Russian carvings. Scars glowed on her powdered back.
They are alone, drinking glass after glass of muscatel. She holds out her glass. “Mon vieux, to Maupassant.” He kisses her on the lips, which quiver and swell. “You’re funny,” she mumbled. The inevitable perhaps happens. The ending, however, is not that but something unexpected and amazing.
Drawing conclusions, Chekhov said, is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented.
So it is with Babel. The stories submit themselves. Life is life, Babel says, and on dark velvet presents marvelous jewels. As it happened, the Holocaust followed a few years after him. What he saw and felt was a presentiment. He wrote the merciful and unforgivable at the same time. The furnace doors swing open, and a fierce, frightening heat comes forth, but the incandescence brightens life like the sun.
By the 1930s the optimism of the Revolution had hardened into grim reality as Stalin tightened his grip. Soviet orthodoxy ruled, together with the secret police, and the independence of writers disappeared. In 1936 in great, Inquisition-like trials, former high officials, Party rivals, and men who had been prominent in the Revolution confessed sins and were executed. The terror was in full force. Nikolai Yezhov became head of the notorious NKVD. His wife, Evgenia Gladun, had an earlier love affair with Babel and remained friendly. He was a guest at their house a number of times, driven in part by a curiosity about how things were going higher up in the ominous times. A great knell was Gorky’s death in June of 1936. “Now they are not going to let me live,” Babel predicted. The former minister of defense, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and other top commanders were arrested, tried in secret, and executed. Then Yezhov himself was replaced by a brutal Georgian, Lavrentiy Beria, and subsequently arrested. In his obligatory confession he implicated Babel.