“Crossing the Zbrucz”
Isaac Babel
Nachdiv 6* has reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken at dawn today. The staff has moved out of Krapivno, and our transport is strung like a noisy rearguard along the high road, along the unfading high road that goes from Brest to Warsaw and was build on the bones of muzhiks by Nicholas I.
Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the noonday wind is playing in the yellowing rye, and virginal buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn is withdrawing from us into a pearly mist of birch groves, it si creeping away into flowery knolls and entangling itself with enfeebled arms in thickets of hops. An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, a gentle radiance glows in the ravines of the thunderclouds and the standards of the sunset float above our heads. The odour of yesterday’s blood and of slain horses drips into the evening coolness. The Zbrucz, now turned black, roars and pulls tight the foamy knots of the rapids. The bridges have been destroyed, and we ford the river on horseback. The horses sink into the water up to their backs, the sonorous currents ooze between hundreds of horses’ legs. Someone sinks, and resonantly defames the Mother of God. The river is littered with the black rectangles of carts, it is filled with a rumbling, whistling and singing that clamour above the serpents of the moon and the shining chasms.
Late at night we arrive in Novograd. In the billet that has been assigned to me I find a pregnant woman and two red-haired Jews with thin necks: a third is already asleep, covered up to the top of his head and pressed against the wall. In the room that has been allotted to me, I find ransacked wardrobes, on the floor scraps of women’s fur coats, pieces of human excrement and broken shards of the sacred vessels used by the Jews once a year, at Passover.
‘Clear up,’ I say to the woman. ‘What a dirty life you live, landlords&’
The two Jews got up from their chairs. They hop about on felt soles, clearing the detritus off the floor, they hop about in silence, monkey-like, like Japanese in a circus; their necks swell and revolve. They spread a torn feather mattress for me, and I lie down facing the wall, alongside the third, sleeping, Jew. A timid destitution immediately closes over my place of rest.
All has been murdered by silence, and only the moon, clasping her round, shining, carefree head in blue hands, plays the vagrant under the window.
I stretch my numbed legs, I lie on the torn mattress and fall asleep. I dream of nachdiv 6. He is pursuing the kombrig* on a heavy stallion, and puts two bullets in his eyes. The bullets penetrate thekombrig’s head, and both his eyes fall to the ground.
‘Why did you turn the brigade about?’ Savitsky—nachdiv 6—cries to the wounded man, and at that point I wake up because the pregnant woman is fumbling with her fingers in my face.
‘Panie*,’ she says, ‘you are shouting in your sleep, and you’re throwing yourself about. I’m going to make your bed up in the other corner, because you’re pushing my Papasha*&’
She raises thin legs and a round belly from the floor and removes the blanket from the man who had fallen asleep. And old man is lying there, on his back, dead. His gullet has been torn out, his face has been cleft in two, dark blue blood clings in his beard like pieces of lead.
‘Panie,’ the Jewess says, and she shakes up the feather mattress, ‘the Poles were murdering him, and he begged them: “Kill me out in the backyard so that my daughter doesn’t see me die.” But they did what suited them. He died in this room, thinking about me. And now tell me,’ the woman said suddenly with terrible force, ‘tell me where else in all the world you would find a father like my father?’
*nachdiv 6—abbreviation of nachal’nik divizii—‘divisional commander’. The ‘6’ refers to the number of the division; i.e. ‘the commander of the sixth division’.
*kombrig—abbreviation of komandir brigady—‘brigade commander’.
*Panie—‘Sir’ (Polish)
*Papasha—‘papa’,‘Daddy’.
留言列表
