simply as a familiar face in the Red Army ranks or at a deputy’s desk. One of the most celebrated books about the civil war was Babel’s Red Cavalry , an inside story of the painful and never completed transformation of a hiccuping Jewish boy with a swollen blue head into a Cossack hero without fear or mercy. The force that moved him was love—the bitter, ardent, and hopeless first love of a Mercury for an Apollo. Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, stood up when he saw me, and I was struck by the beauty of his huge body. He stood up, and with the purple of his riding breeches, the crimson of his rakish little cap, and the decorations hammered onto his chest he sliced the hut in two, the way a standard slices the sky. He smelled of perfume and the cloying freshness of soap. His long legs looked like girls sheathed to the neck in shiny riding boots. He smiled at me, struck the desk with his whip, and drew toward himself an order that the chief of staff had just finished dictating. 129 The order was to “destroy the enemy,” and the punishment for noncompliance was summary execution administered “on the spot” by Savitsky himself. The commander of the Sixth signed the order with a flourish, tossed it to his orderlies, and turned his gray eyes, dancing with merriment, toward me. I handed him the paper with my appointment to the divisional staff. “Put it down in the order of the day!” said the commander. “Put him down for every satisfaction except the front one. Can you read and write?” “Yes, I can,” I replied, envying the iron and flower of his youthfulness. “I am a law graduate from St. Petersburg University . . .” “So you’re one of those little geniuses,” he shouted, laughing. “And with a pair of glasses on your nose. A little on the mangy side too. They send you fellows down without asking first . . . People have gotten carved up around here for wearing glasses. So, do you plan to stay with us?” “Yes, I plan to stay with you,” I replied before setting off for the village with the quartermaster, to find a place for the night. 130