Fame & Folly (23 page)

True: everything that is in the stories is in the
Diary
—priest, painter, widow, guncart, soldier, prisoner; but the heart of the
Diary
remains secreted in the
Diary
. When all is said and done—and much is said and done in these blistering pages: pillaged churches, ruined synagogues, wild Russians, beaten Poles, mud, horses, hunger, looting, shooting—Babel’s journal is a Jewish lamentation: a thing the Soviet system could not tolerate, and Ehrenburg was too prudent to reveal. The merciless minds that snuffed the identities of the murdered at Babi Yar would hardly sanction Babel’s whole and bloody truths.

Nor did Babel himself publicly sanction them. The
Red Cavalry
narratives include six stories (out of thirty-five) that touch on the suffering of Jews; the headlong
Diary
contains scores. An act of authorial self-censorship, and not only because Babel was determined to be guarded. Impersonation, or call it reckless play, propelled him at all points. The
Diary
can muse: “The Slavs—the manure of history?”—but Babel came to the Cossacks disguised as a Slav, having assumed the name K. L. Lyutov, the name he assigns also to his narrator. And in the
Diary
itself, encountering terrified Polish Jews, he again and again steers them away from the knowledge that rides in his marrow, and fabricates deliberate Revolutionary fairy tales (his word): he tells his trembling listeners how “everything’s changing for the better—my usual system—miraculous things are happening in Russia—express trains, free food for children, theaters, the International. They listen with delight
and disbelief. I think—you’ll have your diamond-studded sky, everything and everyone will be turned upside down and inside out for the umpteenth time, and [I] feel sorry for them.”

“My usual system”: perhaps it is kind to scatter false consolations among the doomed. Or else it is not kindness at all, merely a writer’s mischief or a rider’s diversion—the tormented mice of Galicia entertained by a cat in Cossack dress. Sometimes he is recognized as a Jew (once by a child), and then he half-lies and explains that he has a Jewish mother. But mainly he is steadfast in the pretense of being Lyutov. And nervy: the
Diary
begins on June 3, in Zhitomir, and on July 12, one day before Babel’s twenty-sixth birthday, he notes: “My first ride on horseback.” In no time at all he is, at least on horseback, like all the others: a skilled and dauntless trooper. “The horse galloped well,” he says on that first day. Enchanted, proud, he looks around at his companions: “red flags, a powerful, well-knit body of men, confident commanders, calm and experienced eyes of topknotted Cossack fighting men, dust, silence, order, brass band.” But moments later the calm and experienced eyes are searching out plunder in the neat cottage of an immigrant Czech family, “all good people.” “I took nothing, although I could have,” the new horseman comments. “I’ll never be a real Budyonny man.”

The real Budyonny men are comely, striking, stalwart. Turning off a highway, Babel catches sight of “the brigades suddenly appear[ing], inexplicable beauty, an awesome force advancing.” Another glimpse: “Night … horses are quietly snorting, they’re all Kuban Cossacks here, they eat together, sleep together, a splendid silent comradeship … they sing songs that sound like church music in lusty voices, their devotion to horses, beside each man a little heap—saddle, bridle, ornamental saber, greatcoat, I sleep in the midst of them.”

Babel is small, his glasses are small and round, he sets down secret sentences. And meanwhile his dispatches, propaganda screeches regularly published in
Red Cavalryman
, have a different tone: “Soldiers of the Red Army, finish them off! Beat down harder on the opening covers of their stinking graves!” And: “That
is what they are like, our heroic nurses! Caps off to the nurses! Soldiers and commanders, show respect to the nurses!” (In the
Diary
the dubious propagandist writes satirically, “Opening of the Second Congress of the Third International, unification of the peoples finally realized, now all is clear … We shall advance into Europe and conquer the world.”)

And always there is cruelty, and always there are the Jews. “Most of the rabbis have been exterminated.” “The Jewish cemetery … hundreds of years old, gravestones have toppled over … overgrown with grass, it has seen Khmelnitsky now Budyonny … everything repeats itself, now that whole story—Poles, Cossacks, Jews—is repeating itself with stunning exactitude, the only new element is Communism.” “They all say they’re fighting for justice and they all loot.” “Life is loathsome, murderers, it’s unbearable, baseness and crime.” “I ride along with them, begging the men not to massacre prisoners … I couldn’t look at their faces, they bayoneted some, shot others, bodies covered by corpses, they strip one man while they’re shooting another, groans, screams, death rattles.” “We are destroyers … we move like a whirlwind, like a stream of lava, hated by everyone, life shatters, I am at a huge, never-ending service for the dead … the sad senselessness of my life.”

The Jews: “The Poles ransacked the place, then the Cossacks.” “Hatred for the Poles is unanimous. They have looted, tortured, branded the pharmacist with a red-hot iron, put needles under his nails, pulled out his hair, all because somebody shot at a Polish officer.” “The Jews ask me to use my influence to save them from ruin, they are being robbed of food and goods … The cobbler had looked forward to Soviet rule—and what he sees are Jew-baiters and looters … Organized looting of a stationer’s shop, the proprietor in tears, they tear up everything … When night comes the whole town will be looted—everybody knows it.”

The Jews at the hands of the Poles: “A pogrom … a naked, barely breathing prophet of an old man, an old woman butchered, a child with fingers chopped off, many people still breathing, stench of blood, everything turned upside down, chaos, a
mother sitting over her sabered son, an old woman lying twisted up like a pretzel, four people in one hovel, filth, blood under a black beard, just lying there in the blood.”

The Jews at the hands of the Bolsheviks: “Our men nonchalantly walking around looting whenever possible, stripping mangled corpses. The hatred is the same, the Cossacks just the same, it’s nonsense to think one army is different from another. The life of these little towns. There’s no salvation. Everyone destroys them.” “Our men were looting last night, tossed out the To-rah scrolls in the synagogue and took the velvet covers for saddlecloths. The military commissar’s dispatch rider examines phylacteries, wants to take the straps.” The
Diary
mourns, “What a mighty and marvelous life of a nation existed here. The fate of Jewry.”

And then: “I am an outsider.” And again: “I don’t belong, I’m all alone, we ride on … five minutes after our arrival the looting starts, women struggling, weeping and wailing, it’s unbearable, I can’t stand these never-ending horrors … [I] snatch a flatcake out of the hands of a peasant woman’s little boy.” He does this mechanically, and without compunction.

“How we eat,” he explains. “Red troops arrive in a village, ransack the place, cook, stoves crackling all night, the householders’ daughters have a hard time” (a comment we will know how to interpret). Babel grabs the child’s flatcake—a snack on the fly, as it were—on August 3. On July 25, nine days earlier, he and a riding companion, Prishchepa, a loutish syphilitic illiterate, have burst into a pious Jewish house in a town called Demidovka. It is the Sabbath, when lighting a fire is forbidden; it is also the eve of the Ninth of Av, a somber fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Prishchepa demands fried potatoes. The dignified mother, a flock of daughters in white stockings, a scholarly son, are all petrified; on the Sabbath, they protest, they cannot dig potatoes, and besides, the fast begins at sundown. “Fucking Yids,” Prishchepa yells; so the potatoes are dug, the fire to cook them is lit.

Babel, a witness to this anguish, says nothing. “I keep quiet, because I’m a Russian”—will Prishchepa discover that Lyutov is only
another Yid? “We eat like oxen, fried potatoes and five tumblersful of coffee each. We sweat, they keep serving us, all this is terrible, I tell them fairy tales about Bolshevism.” Night comes, the mother sits on the floor and sobs, the son chants the liturgy for the Ninth of Av—Jeremiah’s Lamentations: “they eat dung, their maidens are ravished, their menfolk killed, Israel subjugated.” Babel hears and understands every Hebrew word. “Demidovka, night, Cossacks,” he sums it up, “all just as it was when the Temple was destroyed. I go out to sleep in the yard, stinking and damp.”

And there he is, New Soviet Man: stinking, a sewer of fairy tales, an unbeliever—and all the same complicit. Nathalie Babel said of her father that nothing “could shatter his feeling that he belonged to Russia and that he had to share the fate of his countrymen. What in so many people would have produced only fear and terror, awakened in him a sense of duty and a kind of blind heroism.” In the brutal light of the
Diary
—violation upon violation—it is hard not to resist this point of view. Despair and an abyss of cynicism do not readily accord with a sense of duty; and whether or not Babel’s travels with the Cossacks—and with Bolshevism altogether—deserve to be termed heroic, he was anything but blind. He saw, he saw, and he saw.

It may be that the habit of impersonation, the habit of deception, the habit of the mask, will in the end lead a man to become what he impersonates. Or it may be that the force of “I am an outsider” overwhelms the secret gratification of having got rid of a fixed identity. In any case, the
Diary
tells no lies. These scenes in a journal, linked by commas quicker than human breath, run like rapids through a gorge—on one side the unrestraint of violent men, on the other the bleaker freedom of unbelonging. Each side is subversive of the other; and still they embrace the selfsame river.

To venture yet another image, Babel’s
Diary
stands as a tragic masterwork of breakneck cinematic “dailies”—those raw, unedited rushes that expose the director to himself. If Trilling, who admitted to envy of the milder wilderness that was Hemingway, had read Babel’s
Diary
—what then? And who, in our generation, should read the
Diary
? Novelists and poets, of course; specialists in Russian literature, obviously; American innocents who define the
world of the Twenties by jazz, flappers, and Fitzgerald. And also: all those who protested Claude Lanzmann’s film
Shoah
as unfair to the psyche of the Polish countryside; but, most of all, the cruelly ignorant children of the Left who still believe that the Marxist Utopia requires for its realization only a more favorable venue, and another go.

No one knows when or exactly how Babel perished. Some suppose he was shot immediately after the NKVD picked him up and brought him to Moscow’s Lyubanka prison, on May 16, 1939. Others place the date of his murder in 1941, following months of torture.
^*
More than fifty years later, as if the writer were sending forth phantoms of his first and last furies, Babel’s youthful
Diary
emerges. What it attests to above all is not simply that fairy tales can kill—who doesn’t understand this?—but that Bolshevism was lethal in its very cradle.

Which is just what S., my ironical Muscovite cousin, found so pathetically funny when, laughing at our American stupidity, she went home to Communism’s graveyard.

GEORGE STEINER AND THE ERRATA OF HISTORY