E. G.'s Reviews > Red Cavalry and Other Stories

"Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the noonday wind is playing in the yellowing rye, the virginal buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn is curving. The Volyn is withdrawing from us into a pearly mist of birch groves, it is 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. A majestic moon lies on the waves. 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 get 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."