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10. At Home with Pani Eliza: Isaac Babel and His Polish Encounters
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160 ten At Home with Pani Eliza Isaac Babel and His Polish Encounters Judith Deutsch Kornblatt In the second story of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (Konarmiia), titled ‘‘The Catholic Church of Novograd’’ (‘‘Kostel v Novograde’’) after the location of its action, the narrator seeks out his military commander at the latter’s current billet. While waiting for the commissar’s return from headquarters, Liutov— the name of the narrator as well as the pseudonym of Babel himself during the months he participated as propagandist in the Soviet-Polish campaign of 1920—rests for a few moments from the murder and destruction of the war around him. In the parsonage’s kitchen, he is served ‘‘some amber tea and biscuits’’ (iantarnogo chaiu s biskvitami) by Pani Eliza, the housekeeper that the ‘‘absconded priest’’ has recently left behind (2:8/93).1 The pani and her hospitality appear twice more in the cycle of thirty-five stories, once in ‘‘Pan Apolek’’ and again in the opening of the following story, ‘‘The Sun of Italy’’ (‘‘Solntse Italii’’). She is merely a brief memory in ‘‘Pan Apolek,’’ provoked in Liutov by the portrait of a ‘‘remarkable red-cheeked Holy Virgin that hung above the matrimonial bed of Pani Eliza,’’ painted by the eponymous hero of the story. She has a larger role in the next story, the inner narrative of which reproduces a heartrending letter by the ‘‘depressed killer,’’ the Cossack Sidorov At Home with Pani Eliza 161 (2:26/113). In the opening frame of this story of anguish, however, Liutov again spends a comfortable evening in Pani Eliza’s kitchen, sitting by the ‘‘warm, living, querulous stove’’ (u teploi, zhivoi, vorchlivoi pechi) (2:26/112). Pani Eliza and her Polish domesticity are introduced in the stories with strikingly evocative descriptions, such as that of her biscuits that ‘‘smelled like the crucifixion. A cunning juice was contained within them, the fragrant fury of the Vatican’’ (2:8/93).2 The only other character in Pani Eliza’s kitchen, Pan Romuald, is described in equally curious fashion; he is a ‘‘nasal eunich with the body of a giant,’’ whose ‘‘narrow soutane rustled at every threshold, furiously swept every path, and grinned at anyone who wanted to drink vodka’’ (2:8/94). Liutov meets analogously expressive, if minor Polish characters in ‘‘At St. Valentine’s’’ (‘‘U Sviatogo Valentina’’), a curiously similar story that takes place not in Novograd, however, but in Beresteczko, another stop on the route of the First Cavalry Army in the ill-fated campaign of the spring and summer of 1920. In both ‘‘The Catholic Church in Novograd’’ and ‘‘At St. Valentine ’s,’’ the priest has fled the advancing Cossacks (in the later story, curiously ‘‘dressed up like a woman [2:86/177]), and Liutov is at once seduced and aghast at the desecration of the now empty churches by his fellow soldiers.3 Both stories describe the secularized, even domesticated religious paintings of Pan Apolek, whose aesthetic ‘‘gospel’’ Liutov vows to follow (‘‘Surrounded by the guileless radiance of haloes, I took a vow that day that I would follow the example of Pan Apolek’’ [2:18/104]). And both, again, sport unusual Polish characters: Pani Eliza in the first with her ‘‘attentive gray locks’’ (2:8/ 93), and, in the second, Pan Ludomirski and his wife, who moves ‘‘like a dog with a broken paw,’’ and wipes away tears with her flowing yellow hair (2:86–87/178). Although the roles of these caretakers are minor and their tasks in the church are menial, their descriptions in the stories are far from mundane. Scholars have rarely concentrated on Liutov’s relationship with his temporary Polish hosts, choosing instead to explore Babel’s attitude toward the Cossacks with whom he travels or toward the Jews he encounters along the way or both.4 If anything, Liutov’s attraction to Poles in these stories (and the narrator speaks of the ‘‘insinuating temptations’’ of the priest’s house [vkradchivye ego soblazny; 2:8/94]) has been easily dismissed as Babel’s indiscriminate sympathy for all victims. Commenting on references to Poles in the diary Babel kept during the summer of 1920, and on which Red Cavalry is quite transparently based, Carol Avins claims that ‘‘Babel, always alert to otherness, was intrigued by what he saw of Polish culture and quick to draw conclusions about it (often falling into cliché).’’5 As suggested above, however, Pani Eliza and her fellow Poles are not...