Online reading of the book Cavalry Cavalry*
Pan Apolek*
The charming and wise life of Mr. Apolek went to my head like old wine. In Novograd-Volynsk, in a hastily crumpled city, among twisted ruins, fate threw the gospel, hidden from the world, at my feet. Surrounded by the simple-minded radiance of halos, I then made a vow to follow the example of Mr. Apolek. And the sweetness of dreamy malice, bitter contempt for the dogs and pigs of humanity, the fire of silent and intoxicating vengeance - I sacrificed them to a new vow.
* * *
In the apartment of the fleeing priest of Novograd, an icon hung high on the wall. There was an inscription on it: “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 there was the cobwebby silence of a summer morning. At the foot of the picture there was a direct ray of sunshine. Glistening dust swarmed in it. The long figure of John descended straight towards me from the blue depths of the niche. The black cloak hung solemnly on this inexorable body, disgustingly thin. Drops of blood glittered in the round clasps of the cloak. John's head was cut off at an angle from his flayed neck. She lay on a clay dish, firmly grasped by the warrior's large yellow fingers. The dead man's face seemed familiar to me. A foreshadowing of the mystery touched me. On a clay dish lay a death’s head, copied from Pan Romuald, the assistant to the fleeing priest. From his bared mouth, with colorfully shining scales, hung the tiny body of a snake. Her head, soft pink, full of animation, powerfully set off the deep background of the cloak.
I marveled at the painter’s art and his gloomy invention. The next day, the red-cheeked Mother of God, hanging over the matrimonial bed of Mrs. Eliza, the old priest’s housekeeper, seemed all the more amazing to me the next day. Both canvases bore the stamp of the same brush. The fleshy face of the Mother of God was a portrait of Mrs. Eliza. And then I came closer to the solution to the Novograd icons. The solution led to Mrs. Eliza's kitchen, where on balmy evenings the shadows of old servile Poland gathered, with the holy fool at their head. But was Pan Apolek a holy fool, who populated the suburban villages with angels and promoted the crippled cross Yanek to sainthood?
He came here with blind Gottfried thirty years ago on an invisible summer day. Friends - Apolek and Gottfried - approached Shmerel's tavern, which is located on the Rovno highway, two miles from the city limits. Apolek had a box of paints in his right hand, and with his left he was leading a blind accordion player. The melodious step of their German boots, bound with nails, sounded calm and hopeful. A canary scarf hung from Apolek's thin neck, and three chocolate feathers swayed on the blind man's Tyrolean hat.
In the tavern, on the windowsill, the aliens laid out paints and a 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 pink, narrow, frail body with cold water. Shmerel's wife brought the guests raisin vodka and a bowl of incense zraza. Having had his fill, Gottfried placed the harmony on his sharp knees. He sighed, threw his head back and wiggled his thin fingers. The sounds of Heidelberg songs filled the smoky walls of the Jewish tavern. Apolek sang along with the blind man in a rattling voice. It all looked as if an organ had been brought from the Church of St. Indegilde to Schmerel and the muses in colorful cotton scarves and shod German boots sat side by side on the organ.
The guests sang until sunset, then they put the harmonica and paints in canvas bags, and Pan Apolek, with a low bow, handed over a sheet of paper to Briana, the innkeeper’s wife.
“Dear Mrs. Brian,” he said, “accept from the wandering artist, baptized with the Christian name Apollinaria, this portrait of you 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 paint this portrait. Pearls will go with your hair, and we will put an emerald necklace on your chest...
On a small sheet of paper, with a red pencil, a pencil as red and soft as clay, was depicted the laughing face of Mrs. Briana, outlined with copper curls.
- My money! - Shmerel cried when he saw the portrait of his wife. He grabbed a stick and set off in pursuit of the guests. But on the way, Shmerel remembered Apolek’s pink body, drenched in water, and the sun on his yard, and the quiet ringing of the harmonica. The innkeeper was troubled 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 twelve paintings on the themes of the Holy Scriptures in front of him. These paintings were painted in oil on thin slices of cypress wood. The priest saw on his table the burning purple of robes, the glitter of emerald fields and flowery blankets thrown over the plains of Palestine.
The saints of Pan Apolek, this whole collection of jubilant and simple-minded elders, gray-bearded, red-faced, were squeezed into the streams of silk and mighty evenings.
On the same day, Pan Apolek received an order to paint the new church. And after Benedictine the priest said to the artist:
“Santa Maria,” he said, “desired Pan Apollinaris, from what wonderful regions did your such joyful grace descend 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 teats of cows. Buffaloes with worn skins were drawn in harness, 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 wise men was cut up with sparkling bald spots and wrinkles, bloody like wounds. In the crowd of wise men, the old woman’s face of Leo XIII flickered with a fox-like grin, and the Novograd priest himself, fingering a Chinese carved rosary with one hand, blessed the newborn Jesus with the other, free.
For five months Apolek crawled, imprisoned in his wooden seat, along the walls, along the dome and in the choir.
“You have a predilection for familiar faces, dear Pan Apolek,” said the priest one day, recognizing himself in one of the Magi and Pan Romuald in the severed head of John.
He smiled, the old priest, and sent a glass of cognac to the artist working under the dome.
Then Apolek finished the Last Supper and the stoning of Mary of Magdala. One Sunday he discovered the painted walls. Eminent citizens invited by the priest recognized in Apostle Paul Janek, a lame cross, and in Mary Magdalene - the Jewish girl Elka, the daughter of unknown parents and the mother of many children taken from the fence. Eminent citizens ordered the blasphemous images to be covered up. The priest hurled threats at the blasphemer. But Apolek did not cover the painted walls.
Thus began an unheard-of war between the powerful body of the Catholic Church, on the one hand, and the careless Bogomaz, on the other. It lasted three decades - a war as ruthless as the passion of a Jesuit. 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 blissful intoxication, walked 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 customer’s relatives. The customer’s enemy 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 kicked out of the temple under construction.
He had 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 Zhitomir, it found these monstrous family portraits, sacrilegious, naive and picturesque, in the most run-down and smelly huts. Josephs with their gray heads combed in two, pomaded Jesuses, multiparous village Marys with their knees set apart—these icons hung in red corners, surrounded by crowns of paper flowers.
- He made you saints during your lifetime! - exclaimed the vicar of Dubno and Novokonstantinovsky, answering the crowd defending Apolek. “He surrounded you with the indescribable paraphernalia of the shrine, you who fell thrice into the sin of disobedience, secret distillers, ruthless lenders, makers of counterfeit scales and sellers of the innocence of your own daughters!”
“Your priesthood,” the lame-legged Witold, a buyer of stolen goods and a cemetery watchman, then said to the vicar, “what does the most merciful Pan God see as the truth, who will tell the dark people about this?” And isn’t there more truth in the pictures of Mr. Apolek, who pleased our pride, than in your words, full of blasphemy and lordly anger?
The cheers of the crowd caused the vicar to flee. The state of minds in the suburbs threatened the safety of church workers. The artist invited to take Apolek’s place did not dare to paint over Elka and the lame Yanek. They can still be seen now in the side chapel of the Novograd church: Janek - the Apostle Paul, a timid lame man with a black scraggly beard, a village renegade, and her, the harlot from Magdala, frail and insane, with a dancing body and sunken cheeks.
The fight against the priest lasted three decades. Then the Cossack flood drove the old monk out of his stone and odorous nest, and Apolek - oh, the vicissitudes of fate! - settled into Mrs. Eliza's kitchen. And here I am, an instant guest, drinking the wine of his conversation in the evenings.
Conversations - what? About the romantic times of the nobility, about the fury of womanish fanaticism, about the artist Luca del Robbio and about the family of a carpenter from Bethlehem.
“I have something to say to Mr. Clerk...” Apolek mysteriously tells me before dinner.
“Yes,” I answer, “yes, Apolek, I’m listening to you...
But the church servant, Pan Robatsky, stern and grey, bony and big-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 girl of humble birth...
- Oh, ten man! - Pan Robatsky shouts in despair. - That man will not die on his bed... That man will be beaten to death by the people...
“After dinner,” Apolek rustles in a fallen voice, “after dinner, if the clerk pleases...”
I like it. Ignored by the beginning of Apolek’s story, I pace around the kitchen and wait for the cherished hour. And outside the window the night stands like a black column. Outside the window, a lively and dark garden stood numb. The road to the church flows like a milky and glittering stream under the moon. The ground is lined with a gloomy glow, necklaces of luminous fruits hang on the bushes. The smell of lilies is pure and strong, like alcohol. This fresh poison bites into the greasy, stormy breath of the stove and kills the resinous stuffiness of the spruce scattered around the kitchen.
Apolek, wearing a pink bow and worn pink pants, scurries 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 beat comes from his corner. Old Gottfried knocks it out with his trembling fingers. The blind man sits motionless in the yellow and oily shine 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 tell the sir is not the truth... But the truth can be revealed to the sir clerk, for whom, for fifty marks, I am ready to make a portrait under the guise of blessed Francis against the backdrop of greenery and the sky.” It was a very simple saint, Pan Francis. And if Mr. Clerk has a bride in Russia... Women love Blessed Francis, although not all women, Mr....
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 overcome with fear when she saw her husband approaching her bed. Hiccups swelled her throat. She vomited up everything she had eaten at the wedding meal. Shame fell on Deborah, on her father, on her mother and on her entire family. The groom left her, mocking, and called all the guests. Then Jesus, seeing the yearning of the woman who longed for her husband and feared him, put on the newlywed's robe and, full of compassion, united with Deborah, who was lying in the 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 appeared on his body, the bee of sorrow stung him in the heart. Unnoticed by anyone, he left the banquet hall and withdrew into the desert country, east of Judea, where John was waiting for him. And Deborah’s first child was born...
- Where is he? - I cried.
“The priests hid it,” Apolek said with importance and brought a light and chilly finger to his drunkard’s nose.
“Mr. artist,” Robatsky suddenly cried out, rising from the darkness, and his gray ears began to move, “what are you filming?” The same is unthinkable...
“Well, well,” Apolek cringed and grabbed Gottfried, “well, well, sir...”
He dragged the blind man towards the exit, but at the threshold he paused 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, stupidity! - said then Robatsky, the church servant. - This 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 home, with my robbed Jews.
A homeless moon wandered around the city. And I walked with her, warming up within myself unfulfilled dreams and discordant songs.
Cavalry
How Babel’s attitude towards the cavalrymen changed can be judged from his diary. At first, he tried to find in them the features of a new, spiritually reborn people, but gradually became disillusioned, called the fighters “a beast with principles” and awarded them with a whole cloud of unflattering associations: “junk, daring, bestial cruelty, velvet caps, rape, forelocks, battles, revolution and syphilis." The Cossacks who joined Budyonny were particularly cruel, and in addition, they had to get their own horses, weapons and food. Once in peaceful settlements, they robbed, burned houses and killed anyone who tried to resist them. At the same time, Babel’s cavalrymen are both robbers and heroes, not devoid of peculiar ideas of honor, which partly compensate for causeless cruelty. Mikhail Weiskopf even claims that “under the pressure of censorship and self-censorship, he incredibly ennobled the cavalrymen”
6 Weiskopf M. Between the walls of fire. Book about Isaac Babel. M.: Knizhniki, 2021. P. 427. .
The best illustration of who Babel’s character is is the story “Salt,” written in the form of a letter from a cavalryman to a newspaper (“Dear comrade editor. I want to describe to you the women who are harmful to us for their lack of consciousness”). He talks about how the soldiers let a woman with a baby on the train and treat her with unusual respect, as if they were the collective mother figure that every Bolshevik has. However, it turns out that the woman is not carrying a child, but contraband - a bag of salt. Having discovered the deception, the soldiers throw the woman off the train and kill her with a rifle. The main principle of the cavalrymen is revolutionary justice, understood, of course, in its own way. Everything that benefits the revolution deserves life, but beyond this usefulness, human personality and life, including their own, are worth nothing. Another striking illustration of the cavalrymen’s ideas about the value of human life is the “Letter,” in which a boy, interspersed with everyday details and concern about his horse’s mange, talks about the murder of his White Guard father (“... and Semyon Timofeich sent me away from the yard, so I can’t , dear mother Evdokia Fedorovna, to describe to you how they killed dad, that’s why I was sent away from the yard. <...> I remain your dear son Vasily Timofeich Kurdyukov. Mom, look until Styopka, and God will not leave you"). Another important story is “The Death of Dolgushov,” in which Lyutov does not dare to finish off a mortally wounded soldier, although this is necessary so as not to leave him to be torn to pieces by the Poles: “Afonka... shot Dolgushov in the mouth. “Afonya,” I said with a pitiful smile and drove up to the Cossack, “but I couldn’t.” “Go away,” he answered, turning pale, “I’ll kill you!” You, bespectacled ones, pity our brother like a cat does a mouse...” Here Babel clearly contrasts the humanism of his alter ego with the cavalry soldiers in such a way that it becomes clear: the destruction of the value system that the revolution brings requires a deeper analysis; values are no longer universal - principles are more important. The “economic justice” of the cavalrymen is reflected in the stories about how they get their horses: “There is a groan in the village. The cavalry poisons grain and changes horses. In return for the attached nags, the cavalrymen take the draft animals. There is no one to scold here. There is no army without a horse” (“Chief of the Reserve”). In the story “The Story of One Horse,” you can also see how the fighters understand communism: “The Communist Party... was founded, I believe, for joy and solid truth without limit.” Their ideas about honor are reflected in their own way in the story “Prischepa”, in which a fighter who fled from the whites massacres the entire village for plundering the property in his house, and then burns the house.
