Savitsky was to be the Jewish boy’s last tutor. The boy had been taught Hebrew, Russian, French, music, and the law, among many other things. His other teachers had included Pushkin, of course, and Zagursky, and Galina Apollonovna, and Efim Nikitich Smolich, who had taught him the names of the birds and the trees, and the Russian prostitute, Vera, who had “taught him her science” in payment for his first story (in “My First Fee”). The job of Savitsky and his beautiful and terrifying Red Cavalrymen was to teach him “the simplest of skills—the ability to kill a man.” 131 One lesson took place in the town of Berestechko, where he saw Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s watchtower and heard an old man singing in a childlike voice about bygone Cossack glory. Right under my window several Cossacks were preparing to shoot a silver- bearded old Jew for spying. The old man was squealing and struggling to get away. Then Kudria from the machine-gun detachment took hold of the old man’s head and tucked it under his arm. The Jew grew quiet and stood with his legs apart. With his right hand Kudria pulled out his dagger and carefully slit the old man’s throat, without splashing any blood on himself. Then he knocked on the closed window. “If anyone’s interested,” he said, “They can come and get him. He’s free for the taking . . .” 132 The narrator’s name—and Babel’s civil war pseudonym as a reporter—was Liutov (“the Ferocious One”). His lessons in killing were numerous, relentless, and multiform. His first prey, soon after Savitsky’s welcome, was a goose. A stern-looking goose was wandering about the yard, serenely preening its feathers. I caught up with it and pressed it to the ground; the goose’s head cracked under my boot—cracked and spilled out. The white neck was spread out in the dung, and the wings flapped convulsively over the slaughtered bird. “Mother of God upon my soul!” I said, poking around in the goose with my saber. “I’ll have this roasted, landlady.” 133 Liutov was rewarded with a place by the fire, the title “brother,” and a bowl of homemade cabbage soup with pork. He did not become one of the Cossacks, though. His job was to read Lenin aloud to them, and his heart, “stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed.” He would never master the simplest of