“I’m sorry we don’t have any Russian propaganda posters,” the coordinator said. “I’m afraid it’s a bit one-sided.”
“But look,” I said, noticing some Cyrillic script in the stack. “Here is one in Russian.” I drew out an enormous poster showing a slavering bulldog wearing a king’s crown: “Majestic Poland: Last Dog of the Entente.”
“Oh, sure,” said the coordinator, “there are posters in Russian, but they aren’t pro-Bolshevik. These are all Polish posters.”
I stared at the poster, wondering why Polish people had chosen that terrifying, wild-eyed dog as a representation of “Majestic Poland.” Then I spotted a second poster in Russian, with a picture of a round little capitalist with a mustache and a derby hat—like the Monopoly man, but holding a whip.
“ ‘The Polish masters want to turn the Russian peasants into slaves,’ ” I read aloud. I suggested it was difficult to interpret this as a pro-Polish poster.
The coordinator nodded enthusiastically: “Yes, these posters are full of ambiguous imagery.”
Back upstairs in the reading room, I put on my gloves—everyone in the archive had to wear white cotton gloves, like at Alice’s mad tea party—and turned to a box of 1920 Polish war memorabilia. My eye was caught by a single yellowed sheet of paper with a printed Polish text signed by Commander in Chief Józef Piłsudski, July 3, 1920, beginning with the phrase “Obywatele Rzeczpospolitej!” I recognized the phrase from Babel’s diary entry of July 15. He had found a copy of this very proclamation on the ground in Belyov: “ ‘We will remember you, everything will be for you, Soldiers of the Rzceczpospolita!’ Touching, sad, without the steel of Bolshevik slogans . . . no words like order, ideals, and living in freedom.”
In Red Cavalry, the narrator discovers this same proclamation while accidentally urinating on a corpse in the dark:
I switched on my flashlight . . . and saw lying on the ground the body of a Pole, drenched in my urine. A notebook and scraps of Piłsudski’s proclamation lay next to the corpse. In the . . . notebook, his expenses, a list of performances at the Krakow Dramatic Theater, and the birthday of a woman by the name of Maria-Louisa. I used the proclamation of Piłsudski, marshal and commander-in-chief, to wipe the stinking liquid from my unknown brother’s skull, and then I walked on, bent under the weight of my saddle.
To think this was the very document I was holding in my hands! I wondered whether it was really such an unlikely coincidence. Probably thousands of copies had been printed, so why shouldn’t one of them have ended up in the archive—it’s not as if the Hoover had received the exact copy with Babel’s urine on it, although Freidin did start making jokes to the effect that we should exhibit the proclamation “side by side with a bottle of urine.” The joke was directed at the Hoover staff, who kept hinting that the exhibit would be more accessible to the general community if all those books and papers were offset by “more three-dimensional objects.” Somebody suggested we construct a diorama based on the ending of “The Rabbi’s Son,” with pictures of Maimonides and Lenin, and a phylactery. Freidin maintained that if we included the phylactery, we would have to have “the withered genitalia of an aging Semite,” which also appear at the end of the story. The diorama idea was abandoned.
Finding the Piłsudski proclamation made me realize that, even if the withered genitalia were lost to posterity, textual objects related to Babel’s writings might still be uncovered. I decided to look for materials related to my favorite character in the 1920 diary, Frank Mosher, the captured American pilot whom Babel interrogates on July 14:
A shot-down American pilot, barefoot but elegant, neck like a column, dazzlingly white teeth, his uniform covered with oil and dirt. He asks me worriedly: Did I maybe commit a crime by fighting against Soviet Russia? Our position is strong. O the scent of Europe, coffee, civilization, strength, ancient culture, many thoughts. I watch him, can’t let him go. A letter from Major Fauntleroy: things in Poland are bad, there’s no constitution, the Bolsheviks are strong . . . An endless conversation with Mosher, I sink into the past, they’ll shake you up, Mosher, ekh, Conan Doyle, letters to New York. Is Mosher fooling—he keeps asking frantically what Bolshevism is. A sad, heartwarming impression.
I loved this passage because of the mention of Conan Doyle, coffee, someone called Major Fauntleroy, and the “sad, heartwarming impression.” Furthermore, “Frank Mosher” was the alias of Captain Merian Caldwell Cooper, future creator and producer of the motion picture King Kong. This really happened: in Galicia in July 1920, the future creator of King Kong was interrogated by the future creator of Red Cavalry. And when I looked up Merian Cooper in the library catalogue, it was like magic: Hoover turned out to hold the bulk of his papers.
Merian Cooper, I learned, was born in 1894, the same year as Babel. He served as a pilot in the First World War, commanded a squadron in the battle of St.-Mihiel, was shot down in flames in the Argonne, and spent the last months of the war in a German prison, where he “was thrown with Russians a good deal” and developed a lifelong aversion to Bolshevism. In 1918 he was awarded a Purple Heart. In 1919 he joined nine other American pilots in the Kosciuszko Air Squadron, an official unit of the Polish Air Force, to combat the Red menace under the command of Major Cedric Fauntleroy. Cooper took his pseudonym, Corporal Frank R. Mosher, from the waistband of the secondhand underwear he had received from the Red Cross.
On July 13, 1920, the Associated Press reported that Cooper had been “brought down by Cossacks” behind enemy lines in Galicia. According to local peasants, Cooper had been “rushed by horsemen of Budyonny’s cavalry,” and would have been killed on the spot, had not an unnamed English-speaking Bolshevik interfered on his behalf. The next day, July 14, the Frank Mosher entry appears in Babel’s diary.
Although Cooper left a “sad, heartwarming impression” on Babel, Babel seems to have left no particular impression on Cooper, who recorded nothing of their “endless conversation.” Of his time in the Red Cavalry, he has written only of his interrogation by Budyonny, who invited him “to join the Bolshevist army as an aviation instructor.” (Babel was right, by the way; Mosher was fooling when he pretended to wonder whether he had committed “a crime by fighting against Soviet Russia.”) Refusing to become a flight instructor, Cooper found himself “the ‘guest’ of a Bolshevist flying squadron for five days. I escaped, but was recaptured after two days, and taken under heavy guard to Moscow.” He spent the winter shoveling snow from the Moscow railway line. In the spring, he escaped Vladykino Prison in the company of two Polish lieutenants, and hopped freight trains up to the Latvian frontier (“We adapted the American hobo methods to our circumstances”). At the border, they were obliged to bribe the guards. Cooper handed over his boots, and made another barefoot entrance in Riga.
One of Cooper’s fellow pilots, Kenneth Shrewsbury, had kept a scrapbook—and, by a marvelous stroke of luck, it had also ended up at Stanford. Using a dry-plate camera, Shrewsbury had documented the entire Polish campaign, as well as an initial stopover in Paris. (There was a group portrait of the entire Kosciuszko squadron standing outside the Ritz; a long shot of the Champs-Élysées, eerily deserted except for a single horse-drawn carriage and two automobiles; and a close-up of a swan in what looked like the Tuileries.) For weeks I had been looking at 1920s photographs of Galicia and Volhynia, but these were the first that looked like the same place Babel was describing. Everything was there: a village clumped at the foot of a medieval castle, a church “destroyed by the Bolsheviks,” airplanes, the handsome Major Fauntleroy, “Jews leveling a field,” “Polish mechanics,” mounted troops riding past a pharmacy in Podolia—and Cooper himself, looking just like Babel described him, big, American, with a neck like a column. In one photograph he was smiling slightly and holding a pipe, like Arthur Conan Doyle.