VALENTIN KATAYEV
p Almost all the novels and stories by Valentin Katayev (b. 1897) are about the revolution and the Civil War. One of his most famous novels, A White Sail Gleams, has been translated into many languages and has also been filmed.
Katayev was born in Odessa, in the south of the Ukraine, and witnessed the stormy events of the revolution in that part of the country. In the early twenties, towards the end of the Civil War, Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army fought its way across the Ukraine; many stories and songs have been written about that famous army, and many legends have grown up around it. Katayev’s short story Sleep is written around an episode in the life of that army.
p Sleep takes up one-third of a man’s life, but scientists still cannot tell us exactly what sleep is. An old encyclopaedia says, "As regards the immediate cause of the onset of this condition, only assumptions exist".
p I was about to close that weighty volume since I could find nothing precise about sleep in it, when I saw in the neighbouring column a couple of delightful lines about sleep.
p “In art, sleep is depicted allegorically as a human figure with the wings of a butterfly on its shoulders and a poppy in its hand.”
p This naive but lovely metaphor fired my imagination.
p I want to relate an amazing case of sleep that deserves to go down in history.
p On July 30, 1919, Red Army units had left Tsaritsyn in disorder and had begun a retreat to the north. The retreat lasted forty-five days. The only efficient fighting force left was the Cavalry Corps of 5,500 men commanded by Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny. Compared with the forces at the disposal of the enemy, this Corps seemed insignificant.
p Budyonny, however, was ordered to cover the retreat and his Corps had to bear the brunt of all enemy attacks.
p It was really one long battle lasting many days and nights. In the short pauses in the fighting there was no time to eat properly, sleep, wash, or unsaddle the horses.
p It was an unusually hot summer. The fighting took place on a relatively narrow stretch of land between the Volga and the Don, but despite that, the troops were often without water for twenty-four hours on 167 end. The situation was such that they could not afford even half an hour to ride a few versts to the wells.
p Water was more valuable than bread. And time was more valuable than water.
p In the first three days and nights of the retreat they had to beat off twenty attacks.
p Twenty!
p The men lost their voices. They hacked with their sabres but were unable to force a sound out of their dry throats.
p It was a terrible scene—a cavalry charge, contact with the enemy, slashing sabres, distorted faces covered with dirty sweat and not a single human sound... .
p Soon the torment of combating sleep was added to the torment of thirst, hunger and excessive heat.
p A dispatch rider, who had galloped through the dust with a message, fell from his saddle and dropped off to sleep at the feet of his horse.
p When an attack was over, the men could scarcely keep their seats in their saddles. Sleep was irresistible.
p Evening came and their eyes were heavy with it. Their eyelids closed like magnets and would not open. The blood in their hearts grew as heavy and immobile as mercury. Pulses slowed, arms stiffened and then suddenly dropped heavily; fingers lost their grip, heads nodded and caps slipped forward on to foreheads.
p The blue haze of the summer night slowly enveloped five and a half thousand cavalrymen swaying in their saddles like pendulums.
p The commanders of the regiments rode up to Budyonny, expecting an order.
p “Everyone is to sleep,” said Budyonny, laying special stress on the word “everyone”. "I order rest for everyone.”
168p “But, Comrade General. . .. How. . .. What about pickets and sentries?. . .”
p “Everyone, everyone. . . .”
p “Who will. ...”
p “I will,” said Budyonny, turning up his left sleeve and peering at his wristwatch.
p He glanced at the face of the watch. The smoky phosphorus of the figures and hands gleamed out of the twilight.
p "Everyone is to sleep without exception, the whole Corps,” he said, raising his voice cheerfully. “You have exactly two hundred and forty minutes rest.”
p He did not say four hours. Four hours would be too little. He said two hundred and forty minutes. He allowed the maximum that could be allowed in the circumstances.
p “Do not worry about anything else,” he added. “I’ll stand watch over the troops. Personally. On my own responsibility. Two hundred and forty minutes, and not a second more. The signal for reveille will be a shot from my pistol.”
p He slapped the holster of his Mauser pistol and gave his roan horse Kazbek a light touch with the spur.
p One man stood guard over the sleep of the entire Corps, and that one man was the Corps commander. This was a monstrous contravention of army rules and regulations, but there was no other way. One for all and all for one—such was the unbreakable law of the revolution.
p Five thousand five hundred soldiers dropped like one man on to the rich grass of the gully. Some found strength enough to unsaddle and hobble their horses, after which they fell asleep with their heads on their saddles. The others collapsed at the feet of their saddled horses and, still holding the halter, 169 dropped off into a sleep that was more like sudden death.
p The gully, dotted with sleeping men, looked like the scene of a battle in which everyone had been killed.
p Budyonny rode slowly round the bivouac followed by his batman, the seventeen-year-old Grisha Kovalyov. That swarthy lad could barely keep his seat in the saddle; his head was nodding and he was making frantic efforts to hold it up, but it was as heavy as lead.
p And so they rode round the bivouac, circle after circle, the Corps commander and his batman, two men awake amidst five thousand five hundred asleep.
p At that time Semyon Budyonny was much younger. His peasant face with its high cheek-bones, long, thick, jet-black moustache and black brows was tanned almost orange by the sun.
p As he rode round the bivouac he now and again recognised some of the men in the light of the rising moon and, when he recognised them, he smiled with the tender smile of a father leaning over the cradle of his sleeping son.
p There was Grisha Waldmann, a ginger- whiskered giant, who lay, as he had fallen, on his back in the grass, his head resting on his saddle, his Mauser pistol grasped in a fist like a leg of mutton, the fingers of which could not be unclenched even when he was asleep. His chest was broad and capacious as a packing crate. And now it was tilted towards the stars. It rose and fell rhythmically, in time with the terrific snoring that set the grass waving all round him. The other huge hand lay spread on the warm earth— just try and take that land away from Grisha Waldmann!
170p And there was Ivan Belenky, a Don Cossack with a forelock over his eyes, sleeping, like the dead; instead of the sharp Cossack sabre at his side he wore a huge, old sword that he had requisitioned from the house of a landowner who was a lover of ancient weapons. For hundreds of years that sword had hung against a Persian carpet on the wall of a nobleman’s study. Now it had been taken by Ivan Belenky, a Don Cossack who had sharpened it properly and was using it in battles against the Whites. No one else in the whole Corps had such long and strong arms as Ivan Belenky. This is what once happened. Ivan went to a rich farmstead for forage for his horse. He asked them to sell him some hay.
p “We haven’t got any, there’s only one small haycock left,” the woman there told him.
p “I don’t want much,” Ivan said plaintively, "only enough for my horse, just an armful.”
p “All right, you can take an armful, I suppose,” said the woman, "go and take it.”
p “Thanks, missus.”
p And Ivan Belenky, a Don Cossack, went up to the haycock and took it all up at once in his long arms. The woman gasped—never before had she seen such long arms. There was nothing she could do, however, and Ivan merely grunted and carried the haycock away towards the camp. He arrived at the camp, however, more dead than alive, and without any hay. His hands were trembling, his teeth were chattering, and he was panting so hard he could scarcely speak.
p “What’s wrong, Ivan?”
p “Oh . . . don’t ask me. I got so scared. . . . Damn the fellow....”
p The soldiers were astounded—what could it have 171 been that the most fearless of them, Ivan Belenky, had been frightened by?
p He just stood there unable to gather his wits.
p “To hell with him!. . . A blasted deserter scared me, may he burn in hell!”
p “What are you talking about? What happened?”
p “I’m telling you ... a deserter.... I took that damned hay, may it burn, and started carrying it... and then something began wriggling in the middle of it—may his soul go to hell, the damned deserter!”
p It seemed that a deserter had hidden in the haycock, and Ivan had carried him away together with the hay. On the way the deserter had started wriggling in the hay like a mouse, then he had jumped out and scared the fearless warrior Belenky almost to death.
p How they all laughed!
p And again Budyonny smiled, a tender manly smile, as he rode carefully past the head of his soldier Ivan Belenky, past his sharp sword that reflected the blue full moon like a mirror.
p The night was passing. The starry clock of the steppeland night was moving overhead. Soon it would be time to rouse the men.
p Suddenly Kazbek stood ’still and pricked up his ears. Budyonny listened keenly. Then he straightened his khaki cap, which had been scorched on the side by camp-fires.
p Several horsemen were making their way along the top of the gully. One after another their shadows covered the moon. Budyonny kept very still. The horsemen rode down to the bivouac. The one in the lead reined in his horse and bent down to a soldier who had not slept quite the allotted time and was changing his footcloths in front of a dimly glowing fire. The horseman held a cigarette in his fingers and wanted a light.
172p “Hi,” said the horseman, “what village are you from? Give me a light/’
p “And who may you be?”
p “Can’t you see?”
p The horseman lowered his shoulder for the soldier to look. On his shoulder-strap the insignia of a colonel gleamed in the moonlight. An officers’ patrol had blundered into the Red Army bivouac and mistaken it for their own. The Whites must be very close. There was no time to lose. Budyonny rode cautiously out of the shadow and raised his Mauser. A shot rang out in the silence. The colonel fell. Budyonny’s men jumped to their feet. The officers’ patrol was taken prisoner.
p “Mount!" shouted Budyonny.
p In a minute five thousand five hundred men were in their saddles. And in another minute, in the first rays of the dewy steppeland sun they saw the dust cloud raised by the approaching White cavalry. Budyonny ordered his Corps to turn about. Three horse artillery batteries opened fire. The battle had begun.
p .. .Budyonny told me that story himself.
p “Five and a half thousand men slept like one, where they fell,” he said, smiling pensively. “And you should have heard the snores! They even set the grass waving, those snores did!”
p He squinted at the map hanging on the wall, and then with special pleasure repeated, “Set the grass waving, they did!”
p I was sitting with him at the time in his office at the Military Revolutionary Council. Outside one of those businesslike Moscow snow showers was covering the city.
p But I could picture that wonderful scene. Steppe. Night. A moon. A sleeping bivouac. Budyonny on 173 his Kazbek. ’And behind him, grappling with irresistible sleep, trots a swarthy boy with a bunch of faded poppies behind his ear and a butterfly asleep on his hot, dusty shoulder.
Notes
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