Isaac Babel
CONARMY
Crossing the Zbruch
The commander of six reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn. The headquarters set out from Krapivno, and our wagon train stretched like a noisy rearguard along the highway that goes from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of men by Nicholas the First.
Fields of purple poppies bloom all around us, midday wind plays in the yellowing rye, virgin buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. Quiet Volyn bends, Volyn leaves us in the pearly fog of birch groves, it creeps into the flowery hillocks and with weakened hands gets tangled in the thickets of hops. The orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head, a gentle light lights up in the gorges of the clouds, the standards of sunset blow over our heads. The smell of yesterday's blood and dead horses drips into the evening coolness. The blackened Zbruch makes noise and twists the foamy knots of its rapids. The bridges have been destroyed and we are fording the river. The majestic moon lies on the waves. Horses go into the water up to their backs, sonorous streams ooze between hundreds of horse legs. Someone drowns and loudly denigrates the Virgin. The river is littered with black squares of carts, it is full of hum, whistle and songs rattling over moon snakes and shining pits.
Late at night we arrive in Novograd. I find a pregnant woman in the apartment allotted to me and two red-haired Jews with thin necks; the third sleeps with his head covered and leaning against the wall. I find torn cabinets in the room allotted to me, scraps of women's fur coats on the floor, human feces and shards of sacred dishes used by Jews once a year - at Easter.
Take it away, I tell the woman. - How dirty you live, owners ...
Two Jews are removed from their seats. They hop on felt soles and clear debris from the floor, they hop in silence, monkey-like, like the Japanese in the circus, their necks swollen and twisting. They put an open feather bed on the floor, and I lie down against the wall, next to the third, asleep Jew. Fearful poverty closes over my bed.
Everything is killed by silence, and only the moon, clasping its blue hands around its round, shining, careless head, wanders under the window.
I stretch my stiff legs, I lie on an open feather bed and fall asleep. Having started six, I dream. He chases the brigade commander on a heavy stallion and puts two bullets into his eyes. Bullets pierce the brigade commander's head, and both his eyes fall to the ground. "Why did you turn the brigade around?" - Savitsky shouts to the wounded man, having started six, - and then I wake up, because the pregnant woman is rummaging her fingers over my face.
Pane, - she says to me, - you scream from sleep and you rush. I'll make a bed for you in the other corner because you're pushing my dad...
She lifts her thin legs and round belly from the floor and removes the blanket from the sleeping man. The dead old man lies there, thrown back. His throat is torn out, his face is cut in half, blue blood lies on his beard, like a piece of lead.
Pane, - says the Jewess and shakes the featherbed, - the Poles cut him, and he prayed to them: kill me in the black yard so that my daughter does not see how I die. But they did what they needed, - he ended up in this room and thought about me ... And now I want to know, - the woman suddenly said with terrible strength, - I want to know where else on earth you will find such a father, like my father...
Church in Novograd
Yesterday I went with a report to the military commissar, who was staying at the house of a fugitive priest. Pani Eliza, the Jesuit's housekeeper, met me in the kitchen. She gave me amber tea with biscuits. Her biscuits smelled like a crucifix. The evil juice was contained in them and the fragrant fury of the Vatican.
Near the house in the church bells roared, wound by a distraught bell ringer. It was an evening full of July stars. Pani Eliza, shaking her attentive gray hair, poured me cookies, I enjoyed the food of the Jesuits.
An old Polish woman called me "pan", gray old men with ossified ears stood at attention at the threshold, and somewhere in the serpentine twilight a monk's cassock writhed. Pater fled, but he left an assistant - Pan Romuald.
A nasal eunuch with the body of a giant, Romuald called us "comrades." With a yellow finger he ran across the map, pointing out the circles of the Polish rout. Overwhelmed by hoarse delight, he counted the wounds of his homeland. Let meek oblivion absorb the memory of Romuald, who betrayed us without regret and was shot in passing. But that evening, his narrow cassock moved at all the curtains, furiously swept all the roads and grinned at everyone who wanted to drink vodka. That evening the monk's shadow followed me relentlessly. He would have become a bishop - Pan Romuald, if he had not been a spy.
I drank rum with him, the breath of an unprecedented way of life flickered under the ruins of the priest's house, and his insinuating temptations weakened me. Oh crucifixes, tiny as courtesan talismans, parchment of papal bulls and an atlas of women's letters, decayed in the blue silk of waistcoats! ..
I see you from here, unfaithful monk in a purple cassock, the swelling of your hands, your soul, tender and ruthless, like the soul of a cat, I see the wounds of your god, oozing with semen, a fragrant poison that intoxicates virgins.
We drank rum, waiting for the military commissar, but he did not return from headquarters. Romuald fell into a corner and fell asleep. He sleeps and trembles, and outside the window in the garden, under the black passion of the sky, an alley shimmers. Thirsty roses sway in the dark. Green lightning blazes in the domes. The undressed corpse lies down a slope. And the moonlight streams down the dead legs sticking out apart.
Here is Poland, here is the arrogant sorrow of the Commonwealth! Violent stranger, I scatter a lousy mattress in the temple left by the clergyman, put under my head folios in which hosanna is printed to the illustrious and most luminous Head of the Pandom, Joseph Pilsudski.
The impoverished hordes are rolling on your ancient cities, O Poland, the song of the unity of all serfs thunders over them, and woe to you. The Commonwealth, woe to you, Prince Radziwill, and to you, Prince Sapieha, who stood up for an hour! ..
Still not my military commissar. I'm looking for him at headquarters, in the garden, in the church. The gates of the church are open, I enter, towards me two silver skulls flare up on the lid of a broken coffin. Frightened, I rush down into the dungeon. An oak staircase leads from there to the altar. And I see a lot of lights running in the height, near the dome. I see the military commissar, the head of the special department and the Cossacks with candles in their hands. They respond to my weak cry and take me out of the cellar.
The skulls, which turned out to be the carvings of a church hearse, no longer frighten me, and together we continue the search, because it was a search initiated after piles of military uniforms were found in the priest's apartment.
Glittering with the embroidered muzzles of our cuffs, whispering and rattling our spurs, we whirl around the echoing building with dripping wax in our hands. The Mothers of God, studded with precious stones, follow our path with pink, like those of mice, pupils, the flame beats in our fingers, and square shadows writhe on the statues of St. Peter, St. Francis, St. Vincent, on their ruddy cheeks and curly beards, painted with carmine.
The Soviet writer and playwright Isaac Babel became famous for his works. "Cavalry" (we will consider a brief summary below) is his most famous work. This is primarily due to the fact that it initially contradicted the revolutionary propaganda of that time. S. Budyonny and took the book with hostility. The only reason the work was published was the intercession of Maxim Gorky.
Babel, Cavalry: a summary
Cavalry is a collection of short stories that began to be published in 1926. The work is united by a common theme - the civil war of the early 20th century. The basis for writing was the author's diary entries during the service in which S. Budyonny commanded.
"My first goose"
The Cavalry collection opens with this very story. The main lyrical character and narrator Lyutov, who works in the newspaper "Red Cavalryman", falls into the ranks of the 1st Cavalry Army under the command of Budyonny. The 1st Cavalry is at war with the Poles, therefore it passes through Galicia and Western Ukraine. Next comes the image of military life, where there is only blood, death and tears. Live here for one day.
The Cossacks mock and mock the intellectual Lyutov. But the owner refuses to feed him. When he was starving to the point of impossibility, he came to her and demanded to feed himself. And then he went out into the yard, took a saber and cut down a goose. Then he ordered the hostess to cook it. Only after that, the Cossacks began to consider Lyutov almost their own and stopped ridicule.
"Death of Dolgushov"
The collection of stories by Isaac Babel continues the story of the telephonist Dolgushov. Somehow, Lyutov stumbles upon a mortally wounded colleague who asks to finish him off out of pity. However, the main character is not able to kill even to alleviate the fate. Therefore, he asks Afonka to approach the dying man. Dolgushov and the new assistant are talking about something, and then Afonka shoots him in the head. The Red Army soldier, who has just killed a comrade, rushes at Lyutov in anger and accuses him of unnecessary pity, from which only harm.
"Biography of Pavlichenko, Matvey Rodionich"
Much attention is paid to its main character Babel ("Cavalry"). The summary again tells about the spiritual anxieties of Lyutov, who secretly envies the decisiveness and firmness of the Cossacks. His main desire is to become his own among them. Therefore, he seeks to understand them, carefully listens to the general's story about how he dealt with master Nikitsky, whom he served before the revolution. The owner often molested Matvey's wife, therefore, as soon as he became a Red Army soldier, he decided to avenge the insult. But Matvey did not shoot Nikitsky, but trampled him in front of his wife. The general himself says that shooting is mercy and pardon, not punishment.
"Salt"
Reveals the fate of ordinary Red Army soldiers in his work Babel. "Cavalry" (a brief summary confirms this) is a kind of illustration of post-revolutionary reality. So, Lyutov receives a letter from the cavalryman Balmashev, who talks about the incident on the train. At one of the stations, the fighters picked up a woman with a child and let her into their car. Gradually, however, doubts began to creep in. Therefore, Balmashev rips off the diapers, but instead of a child, he finds a bag of salt. The Red Army soldier becomes furious, attacks the woman with an accusatory speech, and then throws her out of the train. Despite the fall, the woman survived. Then Balmashev grabbed a weapon and shot her, believing that in this way he washed away the shame from the working people.
"Letter"
Not only adult fighters, but also children are portrayed by Isaac Babel. Cavalry is a collection that contains a work dedicated to the boy Vasily Kurdyukov, who writes a letter to his mother. In the message, he asks to send some food and tell how the brothers fighting for the Reds are doing. It immediately turns out that Fedor, one of the brothers, was captured and killed by his own father, who was fighting on the side of the whites. He commanded a company of Denikin, and killed his son for a long time, cutting off the skin piece by piece. After some time, the White Guard himself was forced to hide, having repainted his beard for this. However, his other son Stepan found his father and killed him.
"Prishepa"
The next story was dedicated to the young Kuban Prischepa by Isaac Babel (“Cavalry” tells about this). The hero had to flee from the whites who killed his parents. When the enemies were driven out of the village, Prishchepa returned, but the neighbors managed to plunder all the property. Then he takes a cart and goes through the yards to look for his property. In those huts in which he managed to find things belonging to his parents, Prishchepa leaves hung dogs and old women over wells and icons polluted with droppings.
When everything was collected, he puts things in their original places and locks himself in the house. Here he drinks deeply for two days, cuts tables with a saber and sings songs. And on the third night, a flame engulfs his house. Clothespin goes to the barn, takes out the cow left by her parents, and kills it. After that, he sits on a horse and leaves wherever his eyes look.
"The Story of a Horse"
This work continues the stories of Babel "Cavalry". For a cavalryman, a horse is the most important thing, he is both a friend, a comrade, a brother, and a father. One day, Chief Division Savitsky took a white horse from Khlebnikov, commander of the first squadron. Since then, Khlebnikov harbored a grudge and waited for an opportunity for revenge. And as soon as Savitsky lost his position, he wrote a petition for the return of the stallion to him. Having received a positive answer, Khlebnikov went to Savitsky, who refused to give up his horse. Then the commander goes to the new chief of staff, but he drives him away. Then Khlebnikov sits down and writes a statement that he is offended by the Communist Party, which is unable to return his property. After that, he is demobilized, as he has 6 wounds and is considered disabled.
"Pan Apolek"
The works of Babel also touch upon the church theme. Cavalry tells the story of Bogomaz Apolek, who was entrusted with painting the Novgorod church in the new church. The artist presented his diploma and several of his works, so the priest accepted his candidacy without question. However, when the work was handed over, the employers became very indignant. The fact is that the artist made ordinary people into saints. So, in the image of the Apostle Paul, the face of the lame Janek was guessed, and Mary Magdalene was very similar to Elka, a Jewish girl, the mother of a considerable number of fenced children. Apolek was driven out, and another Bogomaz was hired in his place. However, he did not dare to paint over the creation of someone else's hands.
Lyutov, Babel's double from Cavalry, met the disgraced artist in the house of a runaway priest. At the very first meeting, Pan Apolek offered to make his portrait in the image of Blessed Francis for only 50 marks. In addition, the artist told a blasphemous story about how Jesus married a rootless girl Deborah, who gave birth to a son from him.
"Gedali"
Lyutov runs into a group of old Jews who are selling something near the yellowed walls of the synagogue. The hero sadly begins to recall the Jewish life, which is now destroyed by the war. He also recalls his childhood, his grandfather, who stroked the numerous volumes of the Jewish sage Ibn Ezra. Lyutov goes to the bazaar and sees trays locked with locks, which he associates with death.
Then the hero comes across the shop of the ancient Jew Gedali. Here you can find anything: from gilded shoes to broken pans. The owner himself rubs his white hands, walks along the counters and complains about the horrors of the revolution: everywhere they suffer, kill and rob. Gedali would like another revolution, which he calls "the international of good people." However, Lyutov does not agree with him, he claims that the international is inseparable from rivers of blood and powder shots.
The hero then asks where Jewish food can be found. Gedali reports that earlier this could be done in the neighborhood, but now there is only crying, not eating.
"Rabbi"
Lyutov stopped in one of the houses for the night. In the evening, the whole family sits down at the table, at the head of which is Rabbi Motale of Bratslav. His son Ilya is also sitting here, his face resembling Spinoza. He fights on the side of the Red Army. Despondency reigns in this house and death is near, although the rabbi himself calls on everyone to rejoice that they are still alive.
With incredible relief, Lyutov leaves this house. He goes to the station, where the First Cavalry train is already standing, and the unfinished newspaper "Red Cavalryman" is waiting in it.
Analysis
He created an indissoluble artistic unity of all the stories of Babel ("Cavalry"). The analysis of the works emphasizes this feature, since a certain plot-forming connection is revealed. Moreover, the author himself forbade interchanging stories when reprinting the collection, which also emphasizes the importance of their location.
He combined the cycle with one composition Babel. Cavalry (the analysis allows us to verify this) is an inextricable epic-lyrical narrative about the times of the Civil War. It combines both naturalistic descriptions of military reality and romantic pathos. There is no author's position in the stories, which allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. And the images of the hero-narrator and the author are so intricately intertwined that they create the impression of the presence of several points of view.
Cavalry: heroes
Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov is the central character of the entire collection. He acts as a narrator and as an unwitting participant in some of the events described. Moreover, he is a double of Babel from Cavalry. Kirill Lyutov - this was the literary pseudonym of the author himself when he worked
Lyutov is a Jew who was abandoned by his wife, he graduated from St. Petersburg University, his intelligence prevents him from intermarrying with the Cossacks. For the fighters, he is a stranger and causes only indulgence on their part. In essence, he is an intellectual who is trying to reconcile humanistic principles with the realities of the revolutionary era.
Pan Apolek is an icon painter and an old monk. He is an atheist and a sinner who blasphemously treated the painting of the church in Novgorod. In addition, he is the bearer of a huge stock of distorted biblical stories, where the saints are portrayed as subject to human vices.
Gedali is the owner of an antiquities shop in Zhytomyr, a blind Jew with a philosophical disposition. He seems to be ready to accept the revolution, but he does not like that it is accompanied by violence and blood. Therefore, for him there is no difference between counter-revolution and revolution - both bring only death.
Cavalry is a very frank and merciless book. The reader finds himself in the usual harsh military reality, in which spiritual blindness and truth-seeking, tragic and funny, cruelty and heroism are intertwined.
The writing
Babel became known to a wide circle of readers in 1924, when Mayakovsky published several short stories by the young author in Ledoy. Shortly thereafter, Cavalry came out. It was translated into twenty languages, and Babel became known far beyond the borders of the country. For Soviet and foreign readers, he was one of the most remarkable writers of his time. Babel was like no one, and no one could be like him. He always wrote about his own and in his own way; He was distinguished from other authors not only by a peculiar writing style, but also by a special perception of the world. All his works were born of life, he was a realist in the most precise sense of the word. He noticed what others passed by, and spoke in such a way that his voice surprised. Babel spoke unusually about the unusual. The long life of a person, in which the exceptional, like the essence of water, is diluted with everyday life, and the tragedy is softened by habit, Babel showed briefly and pathetically. Of all the literary genres, he chose the short story. He seemed to shine a spotlight on
one hour, sometimes one minute of human life. He chose those positions when a person is most exposed, which may be why the themes of love passion and death are repeated with such persistence in his books.
With a few exceptions, his books show two worlds that struck him - pre-revolutionary Odessa and the campaign of the First Cavalry Army, in which he was a participant.
In 1920, Babel was in the First Cavalry Army. The young author entered his military impressions into a notebook. There is a short story “Gedami” in the Cavalry, in which a junk-philosopher is shown. To some reader this novella may seem like a romantic fiction, but the diary explains the origin of the Gedami. In 1920, Babel met the hero of his novel and wrote: “A little Jewish philosopher. Unimaginable shop - Dickens, brooms and golden shoes. His philosophy: everyone says they are fighting for the truth, and everyone is looting.”
Gorky spoke about Cavalry: “I don’t know such a colorful and lively image of individual fighters, which would give me an idea of the psyche of the team, the entire mass of the Cavalry, and could not see and understand the force that allowed her to make her historical campaign - I don’t know in Russian literature."
At the center of Cavalry is one of the fundamental problems of Babel's realism: the problem of a man in a revolution, a man who has entered the struggle for a new beginning. The desire to understand the human in the revolution, its humanistic content, is imbued with many pages of Cavalry. Man and struggle, freedom and revolutionary necessity, violence and the so-called “socialist legality”, proletarian dictatorship and proletarian humanism, the sublime and the base in man - these are, perhaps, the main core questions that are present in one way or another in each short story of the cycle. "Cavalry".
There is no advocate defense of the revolution in Cavalry. The heroes of Cavalry are sometimes cruel, sometimes funny; they have a lot of stormy, military overflow. However, the whole book is imbued with the rightness of the cause for which they die and fight, although neither the author nor the characters talk about it. For Babel, the fighters of the Cavalry were not those schematic heroes that we meet in our literature, but living people with dignity and vices. In Cavalry there is a stream, an avalanche, a storm, and in it each person has his own appearance, his own feelings, his own language.
Other writings on this work
In civil wars, the eternal law of being is violated - “Do not shed the blood of your neighbor” (according to the stories of I. Babel) The greatness and horror of the civil war in the stories of I. Babel. Heroes of the Civil War to the book "Cavalry" The depiction of the horrors of war in the book by I. E. Babel "Cavalry" The problem of violence and humanism in Russian literature of the 20th century Review of Babel's story "Salt" Review of I. Babel's story "Salt" Man in the fire of revolution “I don’t want and can’t believe that evil is the normal state of people ...” (According to Babel’s book Cavalry) Characteristics of the image of Dyakov An essay on all the stories of Babel's Cavalry Humanism and cruelty in the Cavalry by I.E. Babel (on the example of the story "Salt") Presentation of the short story "Treason" from Babel's work "Cavalry" Characteristics of the image of Lutov Intelligentsia and revolution in the work of I. Babel "Cavalry" The revolution and its heroes in Soviet literature (based on the works of I. Babel "Cavalry" and A. Fadeev "Rout") Characteristics of the image of Ivan Akinfiev Characteristics of the image of Galin Characteristics of the image of Gedali Characteristics of the image of Lyovka "Cavalry" by I. Babel The problem of the relationship between the intelligentsia and the people in the Cavalry by I. E Bbel ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL "AT SAINT VALENT" FROM BABEL'S NOVEL "CONARMY" Cavalry "Cavalry" as a mosaic of the civil war The author's position in I. Babel's novel "Cavalry" and ways of its expressionIsaac Babel
CONARMY
Crossing the Zbruch
The commander of six reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn. The headquarters set out from Krapivno, and our wagon train stretched like a noisy rearguard along the highway that goes from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of men by Nicholas the First.
Fields of purple poppies bloom all around us, midday wind plays in the yellowing rye, virgin buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. Quiet Volyn bends, Volyn leaves us in the pearly fog of birch groves, it creeps into the flowery hillocks and with weakened hands gets tangled in the thickets of hops. The orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head, a gentle light lights up in the gorges of the clouds, the standards of sunset blow over our heads. The smell of yesterday's blood and dead horses drips into the evening coolness. The blackened Zbruch makes noise and twists the foamy knots of its rapids. The bridges have been destroyed and we are fording the river. The majestic moon lies on the waves. Horses go into the water up to their backs, sonorous streams ooze between hundreds of horse legs. Someone drowns and loudly denigrates the Virgin. The river is littered with black squares of carts, it is full of hum, whistle and songs rattling over moon snakes and shining pits.
Late at night we arrive in Novograd. I find a pregnant woman in the apartment allotted to me and two red-haired Jews with thin necks; the third sleeps with his head covered and leaning against the wall. I find torn cabinets in the room allotted to me, scraps of women's fur coats on the floor, human feces and shards of sacred dishes used by Jews once a year - at Easter.
Take it away, I tell the woman. - How dirty you live, owners ...
Two Jews are removed from their seats. They hop on felt soles and clear debris from the floor, they hop in silence, monkey-like, like the Japanese in the circus, their necks swollen and twisting. They put an open feather bed on the floor, and I lie down against the wall, next to the third, asleep Jew. Fearful poverty closes over my bed.
Everything is killed by silence, and only the moon, clasping its blue hands around its round, shining, careless head, wanders under the window.
I stretch my stiff legs, I lie on an open feather bed and fall asleep. Having started six, I dream. He chases the brigade commander on a heavy stallion and puts two bullets into his eyes. Bullets pierce the brigade commander's head, and both his eyes fall to the ground. "Why did you turn the brigade around?" - Savitsky shouts to the wounded man, having started six, - and then I wake up, because the pregnant woman is rummaging her fingers over my face.
Pane, - she says to me, - you scream from sleep and you rush. I'll make a bed for you in the other corner because you're pushing my dad...
She lifts her thin legs and round belly from the floor and removes the blanket from the sleeping man. The dead old man lies there, thrown back. His throat is torn out, his face is cut in half, blue blood lies on his beard, like a piece of lead.
Pane, - says the Jewess and shakes the featherbed, - the Poles cut him, and he prayed to them: kill me in the black yard so that my daughter does not see how I die. But they did what they needed, - he ended up in this room and thought about me ... And now I want to know, - the woman suddenly said with terrible strength, - I want to know where else on earth you will find such a father, like my father...
Church in Novograd
Yesterday I went with a report to the military commissar, who was staying at the house of a fugitive priest. Pani Eliza, the Jesuit's housekeeper, met me in the kitchen. She gave me amber tea with biscuits. Her biscuits smelled like a crucifix. The evil juice was contained in them and the fragrant fury of the Vatican.
Near the house in the church bells roared, wound by a distraught bell ringer. It was an evening full of July stars. Pani Eliza, shaking her attentive gray hair, poured me cookies, I enjoyed the food of the Jesuits.
An old Polish woman called me "pan", gray old men with ossified ears stood at attention at the threshold, and somewhere in the serpentine twilight a monk's cassock writhed. Pater fled, but he left an assistant - Pan Romuald.
A nasal eunuch with the body of a giant, Romuald called us "comrades." With a yellow finger he ran across the map, pointing out the circles of the Polish rout. Overwhelmed by hoarse delight, he counted the wounds of his homeland. Let meek oblivion absorb the memory of Romuald, who betrayed us without regret and was shot in passing. But that evening, his narrow cassock moved at all the curtains, furiously swept all the roads and grinned at everyone who wanted to drink vodka. That evening the monk's shadow followed me relentlessly. He would have become a bishop - Pan Romuald, if he had not been a spy.
I drank rum with him, the breath of an unprecedented way of life flickered under the ruins of the priest's house, and his insinuating temptations weakened me. Oh crucifixes, tiny as courtesan talismans, parchment of papal bulls and an atlas of women's letters, decayed in the blue silk of waistcoats! ..
I see you from here, unfaithful monk in a purple cassock, the swelling of your hands, your soul, tender and ruthless, like the soul of a cat, I see the wounds of your god, oozing with semen, a fragrant poison that intoxicates virgins.
We drank rum, waiting for the military commissar, but he did not return from headquarters. Romuald fell into a corner and fell asleep. He sleeps and trembles, and outside the window in the garden, under the black passion of the sky, an alley shimmers. Thirsty roses sway in the dark. Green lightning blazes in the domes. The undressed corpse lies down a slope. And the moonlight streams down the dead legs sticking out apart.
Here is Poland, here is the arrogant sorrow of the Commonwealth! Violent stranger, I scatter a lousy mattress in the temple left by the clergyman, put under my head folios in which hosanna is printed to the illustrious and most luminous Head of the Pandom, Joseph Pilsudski.
The impoverished hordes are rolling on your ancient cities, O Poland, the song of the unity of all serfs thunders over them, and woe to you. The Commonwealth, woe to you, Prince Radziwill, and to you, Prince Sapieha, who stood up for an hour! ..
Still not my military commissar. I'm looking for him at headquarters, in the garden, in the church. The gates of the church are open, I enter, towards me two silver skulls flare up on the lid of a broken coffin. Frightened, I rush down into the dungeon. An oak staircase leads from there to the altar. And I see a lot of lights running in the height, near the dome. I see the military commissar, the head of the special department and the Cossacks with candles in their hands. They respond to my weak cry and take me out of the cellar.
The skulls, which turned out to be the carvings of a church hearse, no longer frighten me, and together we continue the search, because it was a search initiated after piles of military uniforms were found in the priest's apartment.
Glittering with the embroidered muzzles of our cuffs, whispering and rattling our spurs, we whirl around the echoing building with dripping wax in our hands. The Mothers of God, studded with precious stones, follow our path with pink, like those of mice, pupils, the flame beats in our fingers, and square shadows writhe on the statues of St. Peter, St. Francis, St. Vincent, on their ruddy cheeks and curly beards, painted with carmine.
We circle and search. Bone buttons jump under our fingers, icons cut in half move apart, opening dungeons into moldy caverns. This temple is ancient and full of mystery. It hides in its glossy walls secret passages, niches and shutters that swing open silently.
O foolish priest, who hung the bras of his parishioners on the nails of the savior. Outside the royal gates, we found a suitcase with gold coins, a morocco bag with credit cards and cases of Parisian jewelers with emerald rings.
And then we counted the money in the military commissar's room. Pillars of gold, carpets of money, a gusty wind blowing on the flame of candles, the crow's madness in the eyes of Pani Eliza, the thunderous laughter of Romuald and the endless roar of bells wound by Pan Robatsky, the distraught ringer.
Away, - I said to myself, - away from these winking Madonnas, deceived by soldiers ...
Here is a letter to my homeland, dictated to me by a boy of our expedition, Kurdyukov. It doesn't deserve to be forgotten. I rewrote it without embellishment, and I convey it verbatim, in accordance with the truth.
“Dear mother Evdokia Fedorovna. In the first lines of this letter, I hasten to notify you that, thanks to the Lord, I am alive and well, which I wish to hear the same from you. And I also bow down to you from the white face to the damp earth ... "
(A list of relatives, godparents, godfathers follows. Let's omit this. Let's move on to the second paragraph.)
“Dear mother Evdokia Fedorovna Kurdyukova. I hasten to write to you that I am in the Red Cavalry Army of Comrade Budyonny, and also your godfather Nikon Vasilyich, who is currently a red hero, is here. They took me to their place, on the expedition of the Political Department, where we deliver literature and newspapers to the positions - Moskovsky Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee, Moskovsky Pravda and their own merciless newspaper Red Cavalryman, which every soldier on the front line wants to read, and after that, with a heroic spirit, he cuts the vile the gentry, and I live very splendidly under Nikon Vasilyevich.
Dear mother Evdokia Feodorovna. Send what you can from your power-opportunity. I ask you to kill a pockmarked boar and send me a parcel to the Political Department of Comrade Budyonny, to receive Vasily Kurdyukov. Every day I go to bed without eating and without any clothes, so it is very cold. Write me a letter for my Styopa, whether he is alive or not, I ask you to inspect him and write to me for him - is he still detectable or has stopped, and also about scabies in his front legs, have he been shod or not? I ask you, dear mother Evdokia Fedorovna, to wash his front legs without fail with the soap that I left behind the icons, and if daddy has exterminated the soap, then buy it in Krasnodar, and God will not leave you. I can also describe to you that the country here is completely poor, the peasants with their horses are buried from our red eagles through the forests, wheat, you see, is scarce and it is terribly small, we laugh at it. The owners sow rye and the same oats. Hops grow on sticks here, so it comes out very neat; moonshine is made from it.
In the second line of this letter, I hasten to describe to you for daddy that they chopped up Fyodor Timofeyich Kurdyukov's brother about a year ago. Our Red Brigade of Comrade Pavlichenko was advancing on the city of Rostov when a betrayal occurred in our ranks. And dad was at that time with Denikin for the company commander. When people saw them, they said that they wore medals, as in the old regime. And on the occasion of that betrayal, we were all taken prisoner and brother Fyodor Timofeich caught my father's eye. And papa began to cut Fedya, saying - the skin, the red dog, the son of a bitch and various things, and they cut until dark, until brother Fyodor Timofeich was finished. I wrote a letter to you then, how your Fedya is lying without a cross. But papa poked me with a letter and said: you are your mother’s children, you are her root, you bastard, I belly your uterus and I will be belly, my life is lost, I will exhaust my seed for the truth, and more. I accepted suffering from them as the savior Jesus Christ. Only soon did I run away from my father and nailed myself to my unit, Comrade Pavlichenko. And our brigade was ordered to go to the city of Voronezh to replenish, and we received reinforcements there, as well as horses, bags, revolvers, and everything that belonged to us. For Voronezh, I can describe to you, dear mother Evdokia Fyodorovna, that this is a very magnificent town, it will be bigger than Krasnodar, the people in it are very beautiful, the river is capable of swimming. They gave us two pounds of bread a day, half a pound of meat, and a suitable amount of sugar, so that when we got up we drank sweet tea, we ate the same thing and forgot about hunger, and at dinner I went to my brother Semyon Timofeich for pancakes or goose, and after that I went to bed to rest. At that time, Semyon Timofeich, for his desperation, the whole regiment wanted to have a commander and Comrade Budyonny issued such an order, and he received two horses, proper clothes, a cart for junk separately and the Order of the Red Banner, and I was considered a brother. What kind of neighbor starts to beat you up - then Semyon Timofeich can completely kill him. Then we started chasing General Denikin, slaughtered thousands of them and drove them into the Black Sea, but only dad was nowhere to be seen, and Semyon Timofeich was looking for them in all positions, because they really missed their brother Fedya. But only, dear mother, as you know for dad and for his stubborn character, he did what he did - impudently dyed his beard from red to black and was in the city of Maykop, in free clothes, so that none of the inhabitants knew that he there is the most that neither is the guard under the old regime. But only the truth - she will do herself, your godfather Nikon Vasilyich happened to see him in the hut of a resident and wrote a letter to Semyon Timofeich. We sat on the horses and ran two hundred miles - me, brother Senka and willing guys from the village.
And what did we see in the city of Maikop? We saw that the rear did not sympathize with the front in any way, and that there was treason everywhere and full of Jews, as under the old regime. And Semyon Timofeich in the city of Maykop had a great argument with the Jews, who did not let their father out of themselves and put him in prison under lock and key, saying - the order came not to cut the prisoners, we will judge him ourselves, do not be angry, he will get his own. But only Semyon Timofeich took his own and proved that he was the commander of the regiment and had all the Orders of the Red Banner from Comrade Budyonny, and threatened to chop up everyone who argued for dad's personality and did not give it away, and the guys from the village also threatened. But as soon as Semyon Timofeich received their father, they began to whip the father and lined up all the soldiers in the yard, as they belong to the military order. And then Senka splashed father Timofey Rodionich with water on his beard, and paint flowed from his beard. And Senka asked Timofey Rodionich:
Are you okay, daddy, in my arms?
No, - said the father, - it's bad for me.
Then Senka asked:
And Fede, when you cut him, was it good in your hands?
No, - said dad, - it was bad for Fedya.
Then Senka asked:
Did you think, father, that it would be bad for you too?
No, - said dad, - I didn’t think that it would be bad for me.
Then Senka turned to the people and said:
And I think that if I fall into yours, then there will be no mercy for me. And now, dad, we will finish you ...
And Timofey Rodionich began impudently scolding Senka after mother and mother of God and hitting Senka in the face, and Semyon Timofeyich sent me away from the yard, so I can’t, dear mother Evdokia Fyodorovna, describe to you how they ended up papa, because I was sent away from the yard.
After that, we got a parking lot in the city in Novorossiysk. For this city, you can tell that there is no more land behind it, but only water. The Black Sea, and we stayed there until May, when we went to the Polish front and beat the gentry for good reason ...
I remain your gracious son, Vasily Timofeevich Kurdyukov. Mom, keep an eye on Styopka, and God will not leave you.”
Here is Kurdyukov's letter, not changed in a single word. When I had finished, he took the sheet of paper with writing on it and hid it in his bosom, over his naked body.
Kurdyukov, - I asked the boy, - did you have an evil father?
My father was a dog, - he answered sullenly.
Is mother better?
Suitable mother. If you want - here is our name ...
He handed me a broken photograph. It depicted Timofey Kurdyukov, a broad-shouldered guard in a uniform cap and with a combed beard, motionless, with high cheekbones, with a sparkling gaze of colorless and meaningless eyes. Next to him, in a bamboo armchair, sat a tiny peasant woman in a loose jacket, with stunted, bright and shy features. And against the wall, next to this miserable provincial photographic backdrop, with flowers and doves, towered two guys - monstrously huge, stupid, broad-faced, goggle-eyed, frozen as if in training, the two Kurdyukov brothers - Fedor and Semyon.
Chief of stock
There is a groan in the village. The cavalry poisons the bread and changes horses. In exchange for the nags that have stuck, the cavalrymen take the working cattle. There is no one to scold here. There is no army without a horse.
But the peasants are not relieved by this consciousness. The peasants are relentlessly crowding in front of the headquarters building.
They drag on ropes resting, sliding from weakness odrov. Deprived of breadwinners, the peasants, feeling a surge of bitter courage in themselves and knowing that courage will not last long, rush without any hope to taunt the authorities, God and their miserable lot.
Chief of Staff J. in full uniform stands on the porch. Closing his inflamed eyelids, he listens with visible attention to the men's complaints. But his attention is nothing more than a welcome. Like any well-trained and overworked worker, he knows how to completely stop brain work in the empty moments of his existence. In these few moments of blissful nonsense, our chief of staff shakes up the worn-out machine.
So this time with the men.
To the soothing accompaniment of their incoherent and desperate rumble, Zh. watches from the side that soft pounding in the brain, which portends the purity and energy of thought. Having waited for the necessary interruption, he seizes the last masculine tear, snaps authoritatively and goes to his headquarters to work.
This time, there was no need to yell. On a fiery Anglo-Arab, Dyakov, a former circus athlete, and now the head of the horse reserve, galloped up to the porch - red-skinned, gray-whiskered, in a black cloak and with silver stripes along his red trousers.
Honest bitches abbess blessing! - he shouted, reining his horse in the quarry, and at the same moment a mangy horse, one of the exchanged Cossacks, crawled up to him under the stirrup.
There, comrade chief, - the man yelled, slapping his pants, - there is what your brother gives to our brother ... Did you see what they give? Manage her...
And for this horse, - then Dyakov began separately and weightily, - for this horse, respected friend, you have every right to receive fifteen thousand rubles in the horse reserve, and if this horse were more fun, then in that case you would receive a welcome friend, twenty thousand rubles in horse stock. But, however, that the horse fell is not hvakt. If a horse has fallen and rises, then it is a horse; if, in reverse, he does not rise, then this is not a horse. But, by the way, this competent filly will rise with me ...
Oh my God, you are my all-merciful mother! The man waved his hands. - Where can she, an orphan, rise ... She, an orphan, will die ...
You offend the horse, godfather, - Dyakov answered with deep conviction, - you are downright blaspheming, godfather, - and he deftly removed his stately body of an athlete from the saddle. Spreading his beautiful legs, seized at the knees by a strap, magnificent and dexterous, as on a stage, he moved towards the dying animal. It stared dejectedly at Dyakov with its sharp deep eye, licked some invisible command from its crimson palm, and immediately the exhausted horse felt the skillful strength flowing from this gray-haired, blooming and valiant Romeo. Moving her muzzle and sliding her legs, feeling the impatient and imperious tickling of the whip under her belly, the nag slowly, attentively got to her feet. And then we all saw how a thin brush in a fluttering sleeve patted the dirty mane and the whip with a groan clung to the bleeding sides. Trembling all over, the nag stood on her fours and did not take her dog's, fearful, falling in love eyes on Dyakov.
It means that the horse, - said Dyakov to the peasant and added softly: - and you sting, dear friend ...
Throwing the reins to the orderly, the head of the reserve took four steps with a flurry and, throwing up an opera cloak, disappeared into the headquarters building.
Pan Apolek
The charming and wise life of Pan Apolek hit me in the head like old wine. In Novograd-Volynsk, in a hastily crumpled city, among twisted ruins, fate threw under my feet the gospel, hidden from the world. Surrounded by the ingenuous radiance of haloes, I then vowed to follow the example of Pan Apolek. And the sweetness of dreamy malice, bitter contempt for the dogs and pigs of mankind, the fire of silent and intoxicating vengeance - I sacrificed them to a new vow.
In the apartment of a fugitive Novograd priest, an icon hung high on the wall. On it was the inscription: "Death of the Baptist." Without hesitation, I recognized in John the image of a man I had once seen.
I remember: between the straight and light walls stood the cobweb silence of a summer morning. At the foot of the picture was placed by the sun a direct beam. Glittering dust swirled in it. Directly at me from the blue depths of the niche descended the long figure of John. A black cloak hung solemnly on this inexorable body, disgustingly thin. Drops of blood glittered in the round clasps of his cloak. John's head was cut obliquely from the skinned neck. She was lying on an earthenware dish, firmly grasped by the warrior's big yellow fingers. The dead man's face seemed familiar to me. The harbinger of the mystery touched me. On an earthenware platter lay a dead head, written off from Pan Romuald, an assistant to a fugitive priest. From its bared mouth, scales flashing flowery, hung the tiny torso of a snake. Her head, soft pink, full of animation, powerfully set off the deep background of the cloak.
I marveled at the art of the painter, at his gloomy invention. All the more surprising the next day seemed to me the red-cheeked Mother of God, hanging over the matrimonial bed of Mrs. Eliza, the housekeeper of the old priest. Both canvases were printed with the same brush. The fleshy face of the Mother of God - it was a portrait of Pani Eliza. And then I came close to unraveling the Novograd icons. The clue led to the kitchen to Mrs. Elise, where the shadows of old servile Poland gathered in fragrant evenings, with a foolish artist at their head. But was Pan Apolek a holy fool, who populated the suburban villages with angels and made the lame conversion of Janek a saint?
He came here with the blind Gottfried thirty years ago on an invisible summer day. Friends - Apolek and Gottfried - approached Shmerel's tavern, which stands on the Rovno highway, two versts from the city limits. In his right hand Apolek had a box of paints, with his left hand he led a blind harmonist. The melodious step of their German nailed shoes sounded calm and hopeful. A canary scarf hung from Apolek's thin neck, and three chocolate feathers dangled from the blind man's Tyrolean hat.
In the tavern on the windowsill, the aliens laid out paints and an harmonica. The artist unwound his scarf, endless, like a fairground magician's ribbon. Then he went out into the yard, stripped naked and doused his rosy, narrow, frail body with icy water. Shmerel's wife brought raisin vodka and a bowl of zrazy to the guests. Satisfied, Gottfried laid the harmony on his sharp knees. He sighed, threw back his head, and wiggled his thin fingers. The sounds of Heidelberg songs filled the walls of the Jewish tavern. Apolek sang along with the blind man in a rattling voice. All this looked as if an organ had been brought to Schmerel from the church of St. Indegilda, and the muses sat side by side on the organ in colorful wadded scarves and shod German shoes.
The guests sang until sunset, then they put the harmonica and paints in linen bags, and Pan Apolek with a low bow handed over to Bryna, the innkeeper's wife, a sheet of paper.
Gracious Pani Brian, he said, accept this portrait of yours from a wandering artist, baptized with the Christian name Apollinaris, as a sign of our servile gratitude, as evidence of your luxurious hospitality. If God Jesus prolongs my days and strengthens my art, I will return to repaint this portrait with paints. Pearls will suit your hair, and on your chest we will attribute an emerald necklace ...
On a small sheet of paper, in red pencil, a pencil as red and soft as clay, Pani Brayna's laughing face was drawn, outlined with copper curls.
My money! Shmerel exclaimed when he saw the portrait of his wife. He grabbed a stick and started chasing the guests. But on the way, Shmerel remembered the pink body of Apolek, flooded with water, and the sun in his courtyard, and the quiet ringing of the harmonica. The innkeeper was confused in spirit and, putting down his stick, returned home.
The next morning, Apolek presented the Novograd priest with a diploma of graduation from the Munich Academy and laid out in front of him twelve paintings on themes from the Holy Scriptures. These paintings were painted in oil on thin plates of cypress wood. The Pater saw on his table the burning purple of the robes, the gleam of the emerald fields, and the flowery veils thrown over the plains of Palestine.
Saints of Pan Apolek, this whole set of jubilant and rustic elders, gray-bearded, red-faced, was squeezed into the streams of silk and mighty evenings.
On the same day, Pan Apolek received an order to paint a new church. And behind the Benedictine, the father said to the artist.
Santa Maria, - he said, - the desired Pan Apollinaris, from what wonderful regions did your so joyful grace come down to us? ..
Apolek worked diligently, and within a month the new temple was full of the bleating of herds, the dusty gold of sunsets, and the fawn of cow's nipples. Buffaloes with frayed skins were drawn in a team, dogs with pink muzzles ran ahead of the flock, and fat babies rocked in cradles suspended from straight palm trunks. The brown rags of the Franciscans surrounded the cradle. The crowd of Magi was cut with gleaming bald heads and wrinkles as bloody as wounds. In the crowd of wise men, the old woman's face of Leo XIII flickered like a fox's grin, and the Novograd priest himself, fingering a Chinese carved rosary with one hand, blessed the free, newborn Jesus with the other.
For five months, Apolek, enclosed in his wooden seat, crawled along the walls, along the dome and in the choir stalls.
You are addicted to familiar faces, dear Pan Apolek, - once said the priest, recognizing himself in one of the Magi and Pan Romuald - in the severed head of John. He smiled, old priest, and sent a glass of cognac to the artist who worked under the dome.
Then Apolek finished the Last Supper and the stoning of Mary of Magdala. One Sunday he opened the painted walls. Eminent citizens, invited by the priest, recognized in the Apostle Pavel Janek, a lame cross, and in Mary Magdalene - the Jewish girl Elka, the daughter of unknown parents and the mother of many children under the fence. Eminent citizens ordered to close blasphemous images. The priest brought down threats on the blasphemer. But Apolek did not close the painted walls.
Thus began an unprecedented war between the powerful body of the Catholic Church, on the one hand, and the careless Bogomaz, on the other. It lasted three decades. Chance almost elevated the meek reveler to the founders of a new heresy. And then he would have been the most intricate and ridiculous fighter of all that the evasive and rebellious history of the Roman Church has known, a fighter who, in a blissful drunk, went around the earth with two white mice in his bosom and with a set of the finest brushes in his pocket.
Fifteen zlotys for the Mother of God, twenty-five zlotys for the holy family and fifty zlotys for the Last Supper with the image of all the relatives of the customer. The enemy of the customer can be depicted in the image of Judas Iscariot, and for this an extra ten zlotys are added, - this is what Apolek announced to the surrounding peasants after he was expelled from the temple under construction.
He knew no shortage of orders. And when a year later, prompted by the frantic messages of the Novograd priest, a commission arrived from the bishop in Zhytomyr, she found in the most rundown and stinking huts these monstrous family portraits, blasphemous, naive and picturesque. Josephs with a gray head combed in two, pomaded Jesuses, rural Marys with multiple births with their knees apart - these icons hung in red corners, surrounded by crowns of paper flowers.
He made you saints during your lifetime! - exclaimed the vicar of Dubensky and Novokonstantinovsky, answering the crowd defending Apolek. “He has surrounded you with the ineffable paraphernalia of the sacred, you who have fallen into the sin of disobedience three times, secret distillers, ruthless lenders, makers of false scales and sellers of the innocence of your own daughters!”
Your priesthood, - then the shaky-legged Vitold, a buyer of stolen goods and a cemetery watchman, said to the vicar, - what the most merciful pan God sees the truth in, who will tell the dark people about this? And isn't there more truth in the pictures of Pan Apolek, who pleased our pride, than in your words, full of blasphemy and lordly wrath?
The cheers of the crowd sent the vicar to flight. The state of mind in the suburbs threatened the safety of church ministers. The artist, invited to take the place of Apolek, did not dare to cover up Elka and the lame Janek. They can still be seen in the side aisle of the Novograd church: Janek - the Apostle Paul, a timid lame man with a black ragged beard, a village renegade, and her, a harlot from Magdala, frail and insane, with a dancing body and sunken cheeks.
The struggle against the priests lasted three decades. Then the Cossack overflow expelled the old monk from his stone and odorous nest, and Apolek - about the vicissitudes of fate! - settled in the kitchen of Mrs. Eliza. And here I am, an instant guest, drinking the wine of his conversation in the evenings.
Conversations - about what? About the romantic times of the nobility, about the fury of the woman's fanaticism, about the artist Luca del Rabbio and about the family of a carpenter from Bethlehem.
I have to tell the clerk ... - Apolek mysteriously informs me before dinner.
Yes, - I answer, - yes, Apolek, I am listening to you ...
But the church servant, Pan Robatsky, stern and gray, bony and eared, sits too close to us. He hangs before us faded canvases of silence and hostility.
I have to tell the sir, - Apolek whispers and takes me aside, - that Jesus, the son of Mary, was married to Deborah, a Jerusalem maiden of an humble family ...
Oh ten man! Pan Robatsky shouts in despair. - Ten man will not die on his bed ... That man will be beaten by people ...
I please. Ignited by the beginning of the Apolek story, I pace the kitchen and wait for the cherished hour. And outside the window stands the night, like a black column. Outside the window, a living and dark garden froze. The road to the church flows like a milky and shining stream under the moon. The earth is paved with a gloomy radiance, necklaces of luminous fruits hung from the bushes. The smell of lilies is pure and strong, like alcohol. This fresh poison digs into the greasy turbulent breath of the stove and deadens the resinous stuffiness of spruce scattered in the kitchen.
An apolek in a pink bow and worn pink trousers is scurrying around in his corner like a kind and graceful animal. His table is smeared with glue and paints. The old man works with small and frequent movements, the quietest melodic fraction comes from his corner. Old Gottfried knocks it out with his trembling fingers. The blind man sits motionless in the yellow and oily sheen of the lamp. Bowing his bald forehead, he listens to the endless music of his blindness and the muttering of Apolek, his eternal friend.
- ... And what the priests and the evangelist Mark and the evangelist Matthew say to the sir is not the truth ... But the truth can be revealed to the clerk, to whom for fifty marks I am ready to make a portrait under the guise of blessed Francis against the backdrop of greenery and sky. That was a very simple saint, Pan Francis. And if a pan clerk has a bride in Russia... Women love Blessed Francis, although not all women, sir...
Thus began, in a corner that smelled of fir, the story of the marriage of Jesus and Deborah. This girl had a fiancé, according to Apolek. Her fiancé was a young Israeli who traded in elephant tusks. But Deborah's wedding night ended in bewilderment and tears. The woman was seized with fear when she saw her husband approaching her bed. A hiccup swelled her throat. She vomited up everything she ate at the wedding meal. Shame fell on Deborah, on her father, on her mother, and on her whole family. The groom left her, mocking, and called all the guests. Then Jesus, seeing the languor of a woman who longed for her husband and feared him, put on the clothes of the newlywed and, full of compassion, united with Deborah, who was lying in vomit. Then she went out to the guests, noisily triumphant, like a woman who is proud of her fall. And only Jesus stood aside. Deadly perspiration broke out on his body, the bee of sorrow stung him in the heart. Unnoticed by anyone, he left the banquet hall and retired to a desert country, east of Judea, where John was waiting for him. And Deborah's firstborn was born ...
Where is he? I cried.
The priests hid him, - Apolek said with importance and brought a light and chilly finger closer to his drunkard's nose.
Sir artist, - Robatsky suddenly cried, rising from the darkness, and his gray ears moved, - what are you talking about? The same is unthinkable...
So, so, - Apolek cringed and grabbed Gottfried, - so, so, sir ...
He dragged the blind man to the exit, but on the threshold he hesitated and beckoned me with his finger.
Blessed Francis,” he whispered, blinking his eyes, “with a bird on his sleeve, with a dove or a goldfinch, as the clerk pleases ...
And he disappeared with his blind and eternal friend.
Oh foolishness! - said then Robatsky, the church servant. - Ten man will not die on his bed ...
Pan Robatsky opened his mouth wide and yawned like a cat. I said goodbye and went to spend the night at my house, to my robbed Jews.
A homeless moon roamed the city. And I walked with her, warming in myself unfulfillable dreams and discordant songs.
Sun of Italy
Yesterday I again sat in the servants' room at Pani Eliza's under a heated crown of green spruce branches. I sat by the warm, lively, grumbling stove and then returned to my room in the dead of night. Below, at the edge, the noiseless Zbruch rolled a glassy dark wave.
The charred city - broken columns and hooks of evil old women's little fingers dug into the ground - seemed to me lifted into the air, comfortable and unprecedented, like a dream. The naked brilliance of the moon poured on him with inexhaustible force. The damp mold of the ruins bloomed like the marble of an opera bench. And I waited for a disturbed Romeo to come out from behind the clouds, a satin Romeo singing about love, while backstage a downcast electrician holds his finger on the switch of the moon.
Blue roads flowed past me like jets of milk from many breasts. Returning home, I was afraid of meeting Sidorov, my neighbor, who lowered the hairy paw of his melancholy at night. Fortunately, on this night, torn to pieces by the milk of the moon, Sidorov did not utter a word. Surrounded by books, he wrote. A humpbacked candle was smoking on the table - the ominous fire of dreamers. I sat aside, dozing, dreams jumping around me like kittens. And only late at night I was awakened by an orderly who called Sidorov to headquarters. They left together. I then ran up to the table on which Sidorov wrote and leafed through the books. It was an Italian language tutorial, a picture of the Roman forum and a plan of the city of Rome. The plan was all marked with crosses and dots. I leaned over the written sheet and, with a sinking heart, wringing my fingers, read someone else's letter. Sidorov, the yearning killer, tore apart the pink cotton wool of my imagination and dragged me into the corridors of his sane madness. The letter began on the second page, I did not dare to look for the beginning:
“... a lung was pierced and a little crazy, or, as Sergey says, he went crazy. Do not go with him, in fact, with this fool crazy. However, the tail is on one side and jokes aside ... Let's turn to the agenda, my friend Victoria ...
I did a three-month Makhnovist campaign - a tiresome swindle, and nothing more ... And only Volin is still there. Volin dresses up in apostolic robes and climbs into Lenin from anarchism. Terrible. And the father listens to him, strokes the dusty wire of his curls and passes his peasant smile through his rotten teeth. And now I don’t know if there is a not weedy grain of anarchy in all this and whether we will rub your happy noses for you, home-made Central Committee members from a home-made Central Committee, made in Kharkov, in a self-made capital. Your shirt-boys now do not like to remember the sins of their anarchist youth and laugh at them from the height of state wisdom - to hell with them ...
And then I ended up in Moscow. How did I get to Moscow? The guys offended someone in the sense of requisition and otherwise. I, drooling, stood up. I was combed - and for the cause. The wound was trifling, but in Moscow, ah. Victoria, in Moscow I was numb from misfortunes. Every day the hospital nurses brought me a grain of porridge. Ridden with reverence, they dragged her on a large tray, and I began to hate this shock porridge, unscheduled supplies and planned Moscow. In the council he later met with a handful of anarchists. They are dudes, or half-crazed old men. I poked myself into the Kremlin with a plan of real work. They patted me on the head and promised to make me a deputy if I corrected myself. I didn't get better. What happened next? Next was the front, the Cavalry and soldiers, smelling of raw blood and human ashes.
Save me Victoria. State wisdom drives me crazy, boredom intoxicates. You will not help - and I will die without any plan. Who would want an employee to die in such a disorganized way, not you, Victoria, the bride who will never be a wife. Here is sentimentality, well, to such a mother ...
Now let's talk business. I'm bored in the army. I can't ride because of the wound, so I can't fight either. Use your influence, Victoria - send me to Italy. I am studying the language and in two months I will speak it. In Italy, the earth is smoldering. Much is ready. Missing a couple of shots. I will make one of them. There you need to send the king to the forefathers. It is very important. Their king is a glorious uncle, he plays popularity and is filmed with tame socialists for reproduction in family reading magazines.
In the Central Committee, in the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, you don't talk about shooting, about kings. You will be patted on the head and mumbled: "romantic." Simply say - he is sick, angry, drunk with longing, he wants the sun of Italy and bananas. Deserved after all, or maybe not deserved? To be treated - and that's it. And if not, let them send them to the Odessa Cheka ... It is very sensible and ...
How stupid, how undeserved and stupid I write, my friend Victoria...
Italy entered the heart as an obsession. The thought of this country, never seen before, is sweet to me, like the name of a woman, like your name, Victoria ... "
I read the letter and began to lie down on my sagging unclean bed, but sleep did not come. Behind the wall, a pregnant Jewish woman was sincerely crying, she was answered by the groaning muttering of her lanky husband. They reminisced about the things they had robbed and were angry at each other for being unlucky. Then, before dawn, Sidorov returned. A burnt-out candle was suffocating on the table. Sidorov took out another stub from his boot and, with extraordinary thoughtfulness, pressed it down on the swollen wick. Our room was dark, gloomy, everything in it breathed the damp night stink, and only the window, filled with moonlight, shone like deliverance.
He came and hid the letter, my weary neighbor. Stooping, he sat down at the table and opened the album of the city of Rome. A sumptuous, gold-edged book stood before his olive, expressionless face. Above his round back, the jagged ruins of the Capitol and the circus lit up by sunset gleamed. The photograph of the royal family was laid right there, between large glossy sheets. On a piece of paper torn from a calendar was a picture of the affable, puny King Victor Emmanuel with his black-haired wife, Crown Prince Umberto, and a whole bunch of princesses.
... And here is the night, full of distant and painful ringing, a square of light in damp darkness - and in it is the dead face of Sidorov, a lifeless mask hanging over the yellow flame of a candle.
On Saturday eve I am tormented by the thick sadness of memories. Sometime in these evenings my grandfather stroked the volumes of Ibn Ezr with his yellow beard. An old woman in a lace cap was telling fortunes with her knotted fingers over the Sabbath candle and sobbing sweetly. The children's heart swayed in these evenings, like a boat on enchanted waves ...
I circle around Zhytomyr and look for a timid star. At the ancient synagogue, near its yellow and indifferent walls, old Jews sell chalk, blue, wicks - Jews with the beards of the prophets, with passionate rags on their hollow chest ...
Here before me is the bazaar and the death of the bazaar. Killed the fat soul of abundance. Silent locks hang on trays, and the pavement's granite is as pure as a dead man's bald head. It blinks and goes out - a timid star ...
Luck came to me later, luck came just before sunset. Gedali's shop hid in tightly closed trading rows. Dickens, where was your shadow that evening? In this antiques shop you would see gilded shoes and ship ropes, an antique compass and a stuffed eagle, a hunting winchester engraved with the date "1810" and a broken saucepan.
Old Gedali paces around his treasures in the rosy void of the evening, a small master in smoky spectacles and a floor-length green frock coat. He rubs his white hands, he plucks his gray beard and, bowing his head, listens to the invisible voices that have flocked to him.
This shop is like a box of an inquisitive and important boy, from which a professor of botany will emerge. This shop has both buttons and a dead butterfly. Her little master is called Gedali. Everyone left the market, Gedali remained. It winds its way through a labyrinth of globes, skulls, and dead flowers, swinging a motley rooster-feather duster and dusting dead flowers.
We sit on beer kegs. Gedali rolls and unrolls his narrow beard. His top hat sways above us like a black turret. Warm air flows past us. The sky changes colors. Tender blood flows from an overturned bottle up there, and a faint smell of smoldering envelops me.
Revolution - let's say "yes" to it, but will we say "no" to Saturday? - so begins Gedali and wraps around me the silk straps of her smoky eyes. “Yes,” I shout to the revolution, “yes,” I shout to her, but she hides from Gedali and sends forward only shooting ...
The sun does not enter the closed eyes, - I answer the old man, - but we will open the closed eyes ...
The Pole closed my eyes,” the old man whispers in a barely audible voice. - The Pole is an evil dog. He takes a Jew and pulls out his beard - oh, dog! And now they beat him, an angry dog. It's wonderful, it's a revolution! And then the one who beat the Pole says to me: “Register your gramophone, Gedali ...” - “I love music, ladies,” I answer the revolution. - “You don’t know what you love, Gedali, I will shoot at you, then you will know it, and I cannot help but shoot, because I am a revolution ...”
She cannot stop shooting, Gedali, I tell the old man, because she is a revolution...
But the Pole fired, my gentle sir, because he is a counter-revolution. You shoot because you are the revolution. And revolution is fun. And pleasure does not like in the orphanage. Good things are done by a good person. Revolution is a good thing for good people. But good people don't kill. So, the revolution is made by evil people. But the Poles are also evil people. Who will tell Gedali where is the revolution and where is the counter-revolution? I once studied the Talmud, I love Rashe's commentaries and the books of Maimonides. And there are other understanding people in Zhytomyr. And here we are all, learned people, we fall on our faces and shout out loud: woe to us, where is the sweet revolution? ..
The old man was silent. And we saw the first star making its way along the Milky Way.
Saturday is coming, - Gedali said with importance, - the Jews need to go to the synagogue ... Panya comrade, - he said, getting up, and the cylinder, like a black turret, swayed on his head, - bring some good people to Zhitomir. Ay, there is a shortage in our city, ah, a shortage! Bring good people, and we will give them all the gramophones. We are not ignorant. The International... we know what the International is. And I want an International of good people, I want every soul to be registered and given rations in the first category. Here, soul, eat, please, have your pleasure from life. Internationale, sir comrade, you don’t know what they eat it with ...
They eat it with gunpowder, - I answered the old man, - and season it with the best blood ...
And so she rose to her chair from the blue darkness, young Saturday.
Gedali, I say, today is Friday and it is already evening. Where can I get a Jewish shortcake, a Jewish glass of tea, and a little bit of this retired god in a glass of tea? ..
No, - Gedali answers me, putting a lock on his box, - no. There is a tavern nearby, and good people traded in it, but they don’t eat there anymore, they cry there ...
He buttoned his green frock coat with three bone buttons. He fanned himself with rooster feathers, splashed some water on his soft palms, and departed, tiny, lonely, dreamy, in a black top hat and with a large prayer book under his arm.
Saturday is coming. Gedali - the founder of the unrealizable International - went to the synagogue to pray.
My first goose
Savitsky, having started six, got up when he saw me, and I was surprised at the beauty of his gigantic body. He stood up and, with the purple of his breeches, his crimson cap knocked to one side, and the orders hammered into his chest, cut the hut in half, as a standard cuts the sky. He smelled of perfume and the cloying coolness of soap. His long legs looked like girls, clad to the shoulders in shiny boots.
He smiled at me, hit the table with his whip, and pulled towards him the order that had just been dictated by the Chief of Staff. It was an order to Ivan Chesnokov to set out with the regiment entrusted to him in the direction of Chugunov - Dobryvodka and, having come into contact with the enemy, to destroy such ...
“... What destruction,” the division commander began to write and smeared the entire sheet, “I place the responsibility of the same Chesnokov up to the highest measure, whom I will slap on the spot, in which you, Comrade Chesnokov, having been working with me at the front for more than a month, cannot doubt…"
Having started six, he signed the order with a curlicue, threw it to the orderlies and turned his gray eyes to me, in which merriment danced.
I gave him a paper about seconding me to the headquarters of the division.
Carry out the order! - said the chief. - Carry out by order and enroll for any pleasure, except for the front one. Are you literate?
Competent, - I answered, envying the iron and flowers of this youth, - Candidate of Laws of St. Petersburg University ...
You are from kinderbalms, - he shouted, laughing, - and glasses on his nose. What a lousy one! .. They send you without asking, but here they cut you for glasses. You will live with us, right?
I'll live, - I answered and went with the lodger to the village to look for an overnight stay.
The lodger carried my chest on his shoulders, the village street lay before us, round and yellow like a pumpkin, the dying sun emitted its pink spirit in the sky.
We went up to the hut with painted crowns, the lodger stopped and suddenly said with a guilty smile:
The gimp here with our glasses and cannot be appeased. A man of the highest distinction - the soul is out of him here. And if you spoil a lady, the cleanest lady, then you will get caress from the fighters ...
He hesitated with my chest on his shoulders, came very close to me, then jumped back in despair and ran into the first courtyard. The Cossacks sat there on the hay and shaved each other.
Here, fighters, - said the lodger and put my chest on the ground. “According to the order of Comrade Savitsky, you are obliged to take this person to your premises and without stupidity, because this person has suffered from the scientific part ...
End of free trial.
The correspondent of the newspaper "Red Cavalryman" Lyutov (narrator and lyrical hero) finds himself in the ranks of the First Cavalry Army, led by S. Budyonny. The First Cavalry, fighting with the Poles, makes a campaign in Western Ukraine and Galicia. Among the Cavalrymen, Lyutov is a stranger. A bespectacled man, an intellectual, a Jew, he feels a condescending, mocking, and even hostile attitude on the part of the fighters. “You are from kinderbalms ... and glasses on your nose. What a lousy one! They send you without asking, but here they cut you for points, ”Savitsky, the sixth commander, tells him when he comes to him with a paper about secondment to the division headquarters. Here, at the front, horses, passions, blood, tears and death. Here they are not accustomed to stand on ceremony and live one day at a time. Making fun of the arrived literate, the Cossacks throw out his chest, and Lyutov pitifully crawls along the ground, collecting scattered manuscripts. In the end, he, starving, demands that the hostess feed him. Without waiting for a response, he pushes her in the chest, takes someone else's saber and kills the goose staggering around the yard, and then orders the mistress to fry it. Now the Cossacks no longer taunt him, they invite him to eat with them. Now he is almost like his own, and only his heart, stained with murder, “creaked and flowed” in a dream.
Dolgushov's death
Even after fighting and having seen enough of death, Lyutov still remains a "soft-bodied" intellectual. One day, after a battle, he sees Dolgushov, a telephone operator, sitting near the road. He is mortally wounded and asks to finish him off. “The cartridge should be spent on me,” he says. - The gentry will jump in - they will make a mockery. Turning off his shirt, Dolgushov shows the wound. His stomach has been torn out, his intestines are crawling onto his knees and heartbeats are visible. However, Lyutov is unable to commit the murder. He drives off to the side, pointing at Dolgushov to the galloping platoon commander Afonka Bide. Dolgushov and Afonka briefly talk about something, the wounded man hands the Cossack his documents, then Afonka shoots Dolgushov in the mouth. He seeths with anger at the compassionate Lyutov, so in the heat of the moment he is ready to shoot him too. "Go away! he tells him, turning pale. - I'll kill you! You, bespectacled, pity our brother, like a cat a mouse ... "
Biography of Pavlichenko, Matvey Rodionich
Lyutov envies the firmness and determination of the fighters who, like him, do not experience false, as it seems to him, sentimentality. He wants to be his. He is trying to understand the "truth" of the Cavalry, including the "truth" of their cruelty. Here is a red general talking about how he settled accounts with his former master Nikitinsky, who pastured pigs before the revolution. The master molested his wife Nastya, and now Matvey, having become a red commander, came to his estate to avenge the insult. He does not shoot him right away, even though he asks for it, but in front of Nikitinsky's crazy wife, he tramples him for an hour or more and thus, according to him, fully recognizes life. He says: “Shooting from a person ... you can only get rid of it: shooting is a pardon for him, but it’s a vile lightness for yourself, you won’t reach the soul with shooting, where a person has it and how it is shown.”
Salt
Soldier Balmashev, in a letter to the editor of the newspaper, describes an incident that happened to him on a train moving towards Berdichev. At one of the stations, the fighters let a woman with a baby into their car, allegedly going on a date with her husband. However, on the way, Balmashev begins to doubt the honesty of this woman, he approaches her, tears off the diapers from the child and finds “a good pood of salt” under them. Balmashev pronounces a fiery accusatory speech and throws the sackbag on the move down a slope. Seeing her remaining unharmed, he removes the “right screw” from the wall and kills the woman, washing away “this shame from the face of the working land and the republic.”
Letter
The boy Vasily Kurdyukov writes a letter to his mother, in which he asks to send him something to eat and talks about his brothers, who, like him, are fighting for the Reds. One of them, Fyodor, who was taken prisoner, was killed by a White Guard father, a company commander at Denikin, "a guard under the old regime." He cut his son until dark, "saying - the skin, the red dog, the son of a bitch and various things," "until brother Fyodor Timofeich ran out." And after some time, dad himself, who tried to hide by repainting his beard, falls into the hands of another son, Stepan, and he, having sent his brother Vasya out of the yard, in turn ends dad.
Prishchepa
At the young Kuban Prishchepa, who fled from the whites, they killed their parents in retaliation. The property was stolen by neighbors. When the whites were driven away, Prishchepa returns to his native village. He takes a cart and goes from house to house to collect his gramophones, jugs for kvass and towels embroidered by his mother. In those huts where he finds the things of his mother or father, Prishchepa leaves old women stabbed, dogs hung over a well, icons polluted with droppings. Having put the collected things in their places, he locks himself in his father's house and drinks, cries, sings and cuts tables with a saber for two days. On the third night, the flames engulf his hut. Clothespin takes a cow out of the stall and kills her. Then he jumps on his horse, throws a lock of his hair into the fire and disappears.
Squadron Trunov
Squadron Trunov is looking for officers among the captured Poles. He pulls out an officer's cap from a pile of clothes deliberately discarded by the Poles and puts it on the head of a captive old man who claims that he is not an officer. The cap fits him, and Trunov stabs the prisoner. Andryushka Vosmiletov, a cavalry marauder, immediately approaches the dying man and pulls off his pants. Grabbing two more uniforms, he heads for the wagon train, but the indignant Trunov orders him to leave the junk, shoots at Andryushka, but misses. A little later, together with Vosmiletov, he enters into battle with American airplanes, trying to shoot them down with a machine gun, and both die in this battle.
History of one horse
Passion rules in the artistic world of Babel. For a cavalry soldier, "a horse is a friend ... a horse is a father ...". The division chief Savitsky took away the white stallion from the commander of the first squadron, and since then Khlebnikov has been hankering for revenge, waiting in the wings. When Savitsky is removed, he writes to the army headquarters a petition for the return of his horse. Having received a positive resolution, Khlebnikov goes to the disgraced Savitsky and demands to give him the horse, but the former commander, threatening with a revolver, resolutely refuses. Khlebnikov again seeks justice from the chief of staff, but he drives him away from himself. As a result, Khlebnikov writes a statement where he expresses his resentment at the Communist Party, which cannot return "his hard-earned money", and a week later he is demobilized as an invalid with six wounds.
Afonka Bida
When Afonka Bida's beloved horse is killed, the frustrated cavalryman disappears for a long time, and only a formidable murmur in the villages points to the evil and predatory trace of the robber Afonka, who is getting himself a horse. Only when the division enters Berestechko does Afonka finally appear on a tall stallion. Instead of a left eye, there is a monstrous pink swelling on his charred face. The heat of the freemen has not yet cooled down in him, and he destroys everything around him.
Pan Apolek
The icons of the Novograd church have their own history - "the history of an unheard-of war between the powerful body of the Catholic Church, on the one hand, and the careless Bogomaz, on the other", a war that lasted three decades. These icons were painted by the foolish artist Pan Apolek, who, with his art, made ordinary people into saints. Having presented a diploma of graduation from the Munich Academy and his paintings on the themes of the Holy Scriptures (“burning purple mantles, the brilliance of emerald fields and flowery bedspreads thrown over the plains of Palestine”), the Novograd priest was entrusted with painting the new church. What is the surprise of eminent citizens invited by the priest when they recognize in the apostle Paul on the painted walls of the church the lame cross of Janek, and in Mary Magdalene - the Jewish girl Elka, the daughter of unknown parents and the mother of many children under the fence. The artist, invited to take the place of Apolek, does not dare to cover up Elka and the lame Janek. The narrator meets Pan Apolek in the kitchen of the runaway priest's house, and he offers to make his portrait under the guise of Blessed Francis for fifty marks. He also conveys to him the blasphemous story of the marriage of Jesus and the humble maiden Deborah, to whom his first child was born.
Gedali
Lyutov sees old Jews trading near the yellow walls of the ancient synagogue, and sadly recalls Jewish life, now dilapidated by the war, recalls his childhood and his grandfather, stroking the volumes of the Jewish sage Ibn Ezra with his yellow beard. Passing through the bazaar, he sees death - dumb locks on stalls. He enters the antiquities shop of the old Jew Gedali, which has everything from gilded shoes and ship's ropes to a broken pan and a dead butterfly. Gedali paces, rubbing his white hands, among his treasures and laments the cruelty of the revolution, which robs, shoots and kills. Gedali dreams of "a sweet revolution", of an "International of good people". The narrator confidently instructs him that the International "is eaten with gunpowder ... and seasoned with the best blood." But when he asks where he can get a Jewish shortbread and a Jewish glass of tea, Gedali ruefully answers him that until recently it could have been done in a nearby tavern, but now "they don't eat there, they cry there...".
Rabbi
Lyutov is sorry for this life swept away by the whirlwind of the revolution, trying with great difficulty to save itself, he participates in the Saturday evening meal led by the wise Rabbi Motale of Bratslav, whose rebellious son Ilya "with the face of Spinoza, with the powerful forehead of Spinoza" is also here. Ilya, like the narrator, is fighting in the Red Army, and soon he is destined to die. The rabbi urges the guest to rejoice that he is alive and not dead, but Lyutov leaves with relief to the station, where the propaganda train of the First Cavalry stands, where the radiance of hundreds of lights, the magical brilliance of the radio station, the stubborn running of cars in the printing house and an unfinished article in the newspaper " Red Cavalry.
retold