Just a quick procedural thought - it's totally fine not to like or get a story we work on here. Mostly, I love the stories I send out (and I love this one) but YOU don't have to love them, in order to work with them. (And I will be sending out stories I don't love, from time to time.) Think of these stories as cars, and we are mechanics. Any car will teach us about auto mechanics, since every car works on the same general principles. If we don't like something about a story and (very important) try to be specific about why - that is good work to do. The key is to be specific and couch the criticism in some larger notion - we want to avoid the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" approach.
So don't feel bad if you don't like a story - accept that and roll up your sleeves to see what benefit there is for you in investigating the "why" of your resistance.
Having said that, when I read a story that has withstood the test of time, and I don't like it, I remember that old story (or maybe it was a cartoon):
Guy in Museum, to Guard: I like this painting. Yeah, it's good.
Guard: Sir, the painting is not the thing being judged here.
Back when I didn't get Chekhov, my view was: "Well, these stories are still around after all these years. So let me be humble and see if I might be missing something."
Turns out, I was.
So, once we work through this, and some of us still don't like it, that is perfectly wonderful. That is, actually, you learning about your deep esthetic values.
The first pulse lets us know that the division commander is a violent, grandiose sociopath (who has eyes that glint with joy after demanding an inferior destroy the enemy and motivating him with threats of personally murdering him if he fails), but also that our narrator is seduced by his brutal power (he marvels at his beautiful huge body, taking in his cool, sweet perfume and describing his legs like girls in shiny jack boots). I learn that the commander gets to order others to do the dirty work while staying clean and fresh himself, and that the narrator doesn't seem to be judging him poorly for that fact, the opposite of my own reaction. The commander uses only his pen to write the violent decrees filled with threats, and slaps around his whip for effect. We learn that the narrator is not repulsed by the commander, but enamored of him. Also, we see that the commander has contempt for the four-eyed "pansy" he takes the narrator to be. His assertion to the commander that he can "get along", despite his glasses and learning, prepares me for his later choice to act violently in a specifically misogynist way, per the suggestion of the quartermaster, in order to be accepted by the guys. This first paragraph, filled with so much feminine imagery in such a hyper-masculine and violent setting, helps link us to the conclusion, when the narrator is literally sleeping with violent men, while dreaming of women, and imagining the evening laying motherly palms on his forehead. And of course there's the pivot moment in the middle, where beating an old lady and drawing blood are the price for receiving manly love of other manly men. I know, George, you said stick to the first pulse, but the first pulse front loads everything that spools out going forward. I guess that's one of the lessons of a great story. Stone Boy did this as well with Pulse 1.
I've found this to be a tremendously helpful strategy when suffering from *Writer's Block*(!!!) Take a story I love, break its beats or pulses down into a simple and objective choices/effects, then take those pulses and use them as the framework for a new story with new characters and situations. Essentially stealing the skeleton of another story and then dressing it up in new flesh and clothes. I also think it's an extremely useful way to deeply understand a story you already love, as was pointed out here and in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
Many of the commenters above have already done a masterful job of dissecting the first pulse and the narrator’s introduction into a society that values brute strength and violence over intellect and learning. There are a couple of things I would like to add that haven’t been mentioned... first, there is quite a bit of humor in this first pulse that creates an almost absurdist tone: Chesnokov (who is being sent off to either slaughter or be slaughtered) is loosely translated as “garlic” and the region he is being sent to is loosely translated as “pot of good vodka.” Second, and most important, there is the subtext of anti-semitism. The narrator isn’t just an intellectual with glasses, he is also a Jew so being accepted into his new surroundings requires a level of brutality that compensates for both “shortcoming”. My kids’ math professor, a Russian Jew, was a boxer at a young age and he would often explain that he had to learn how to box, and box well, for his own survival. He had to prove to the anti-semites and anti-intellectuals that he could take them down. It’s also not a a coincidence that the narrator eats pork at the end of the story. He has to prove that he’s not a real Jew, or at least not “that kind” of Jew.
Babel starts off his story by showing us the manner in which the narrator received his assignment. Among his many choices for recounting this moment, Babel could have had his narrator receive papers in the mail. Or, he could have been handed his papers in a quiet office by a kindly, elderly statesman. He could have gone to an office to volunteer. Babel could have skipped this scene altogether and begun with our narrator walking with his trunk. And on and on. But, no. None of those would be indicative of where this story is going—of what its purpose is. And so Babel’s choice is to start his story—which is about an outsider—by establishing immediately the narrator's outsider status. To do this, he presents a Commander who is much larger in physical stature than our narrator, who is highly decorated, who is mad with power, whose eyes dance when signing an order of destruction, who calls our narrator a pansy and a little louse. And all of this points in only one direction, which can be found at the end of Pulse One when the Commander asks, “Think you’ll get along do you?” In this way, Babel says “Jew” without saying “Jew.” For this is a story of a Jewish man being thrown to the wolves and seeing if he can survive.
And that is the crux of it—the story’s purpose. Will the narrator “get along”? And if so, how will he do it? What will he have to sacrifice?
I think Babel may have chosen to fulfil the purpose of this first “pulse” in the way he did because he wanted to accomplish several things as concisely as possible.
• Put us in a world of brutality – Savitsky’s ordering Chesnokov to destroy the enemy or be destroyed himself, and that his “eyes were dancing with joy” as he makes the order.
• Introduce the question of what kind of person the narrator might be and of how others see him. The narrator marvels at the beauty of Savitsky’s “gigantic body” and envies “the iron and flowers of his youth”, and then, by this very man that he’s marvelling at and is envious of, he is described as a pansy, and that his glasses will result in him getting “cut to pieces”.
• This question of who the narrator might be leads to the possibility of conflict – will he be cut to pieces because of his glasses? Is he a pansy? Babel has raised the question and we want to find out what happens next.
How he does this is with language that inspires me to see what is possible. His description of Savitsky in both how he looks and how he smells is striking, and then this line. “His legs looked like a pair of girls clad in shoulder-length jackboots.” This sentence floored me. I don’t know what it means, but this kind of idiosyncratic description is fascinating and invites me not only to find out what happens next, but how this writer is going to describe it.
For what it's worth, my model is structured very differently :) This piece took me longer than usual to get into and I had to work hard for it to open up its secrets to me (so I was grateful for the extra (extra) time I had with it). After all of this reading and reflection, the thing that stood out most to me was the theme of division/duality - it's almost oppressive in that first pulse with Savitsky (introduced with the 'gigantic beauty' and the 'decorations hammered into his chest' (the medals both a nod to pageantry and war) and neatly summed up by the 'iron and flowers of his youth') and continues throughout the story to the very end.
My one-liner summary is: a man becomes one of learning *and* violence
And from this, my model (which centres on this theme/conundrum), asks not 'why does Babel show the narrator getting his assignment in this way?', but 'why does Babel introduce this reflection on division/duality in this way? Why start with Savitsky (and not, for example, the Cossacks)?'
In this model, the pulses look like this:
1. Savitsky
2. Quartermaster
3. Cossacks (close - 'not one of us') - making fun
4. Landlady and Goose
5. Cossacks (at a distance - 'our kind of lad') - sitting around their pot
7. Cossacks (close (reversal of reversal) - 'they join him') - reading Lenin
8. Conclusion - what it means to hold two contradictory realities in one person - legs tangled
I'm really interested to see whether the two different models lead to the same answers, or whether they uncover different but convergent ideas...
I'm also wondering whether approaching this deconstruction from a thematic perspective/starting point is dangerous? What if I've misconstrued the author's theme? Is it better to focus on the facts (as they were)? Or can you slice and dice a story to its component parts however they present themselves to you?
For me, even the story's title does significant work to set the tone. It is the narrator's FIRST goose. There will be more! And will they all be (gulp) geese?
I like that you're spreading it out for the story's sake but also because I want to better know who is here and what we think and feel.
In this expanding approach, perhaps we can include discussions about the translation's compositions and how that transforms the story? Dralyuk's sentences are such a joy they're visceral.
It feels like that collection's going to be a book for readers to love and a primer for writers fascinated with language and with making the sentence a thing of beauty.
So, George, you mentioned in a recent post this idea of the "load-bearing" moment which is the key to a story's identity. Would you call the one-line "Hollywood Version" the story's identity? Hence we need to look at how each scene not only moves the story along, but how it plays with/reinforces/resonates that identity? Which also would, perhaps, help us to find that load-bearing moment in our own work? This exercise feels very important.
I am so grateful for a chance to learn how to get inside Babel's stories.
This struck me as powerful - the translation works on me much better than an old translation I have in a book I'd dipped into before.
The inner truth of the story rings painfully true: what is at stake here? Survival in a male society.
Specifically the narrator who shows signs of being from outside the brutal norms of male society - glasses implies academic, implies weak - who must therefore work out how to be accepted into the inside of one such system.
The story depicts a horrible perversion of the way social acceptance ought to be won: ought in the moral sense, and ought in the logic of story world. The latter is, I would say, a complete success - the story chooses a more interesting path than: he fights one of the Cossacks and wins their admiration in combat, or through force of personality [hero overcomes adversity through strength]. But this isn’t cheap music.
The moral world - who would argue that this is how we ought to win favour through crushing the weak and defenceless and already defeated? But is this how we win favour? Oh yes. In male society, still now in male friendship groups in comfortable western schools of the 21st century, this is indeed how the rules often work. Not how they ought to work, but how they do.
And… I write this observation as news lands of Russian bombs striking a Maternity and Children’s hospital in Mariupol.
Might I ask (and I really really really do not know the answer or even have a way to think about it I'd feel confident in): is it enough that this story depicts the awful truth and soul-rending of one who gains entry to this brutal world? Or, is there a moral imperative to go further, and to explore the truth for those that remain outside, who are in turn brutalised and suffer unimaginably?
The description of Savitsky is fantastically bonkers. “the decorations hammered into his chest,” “cut the hut in half, as a banner cuts the sky,” “His long legs…like a pair of girls clad in shiny shoulder-length jackboots.” It’s apotheosis crossed with the absurd, the ridiculous and the sublime. He’s heroic and erotic and terrifying. Reminded of Plath’s “Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.”
It sets the tone in an amazing way. The tone and pacing of this first pulse are lively and brisk, and read almost like satire or comic opera. Dr. Strangelove maybe. But extreme violence and brutality are also introduced up front. To me, the almost comical tone makes the underlying menace feel even more ominous and unsettling. You feel the terrible vulnerability of the narrator, and that something awful could happen to him at any moment.
My first reaction to the story content was disgust. And then fear as I tried to think of a war time situation, and how everything changes, and how to preserve yourself above others, and where to align your loyalties. The handsome man, leader, commander, with his clean perfume and sweet smell of soap! Power endears one. The old woman with her strange eyes creeped me out, her presence like conscience. And the poor goose who took the full brunt of everything that was wrong. A small scene in a lawless war, thats all it takes to throw everything that we hold true. Brutal. That coward who narrates it all, could well have been me, had to look at that squarely.
This has totally clarified for me how to do the “elevator pitch” for my historical novel: leave out the history! Get to to the human emotional heart of it. So obvious, now I’ve seen your example!
As far as I know there are enormous groups of people, throughout the world, who each day earnestly commute to a Department of War and clock in and do their job. There also are plenty of war colleges available for those who want to be educated and learn the subject. Books, too, like the The Art of War, ancient as a religious text, in which we acquire with the zeal of testimony the variety of ways in which we can defeat, demoralize, devastate our opponents. But despite all the effort to administrate, teach, and learn the subject, war to me seems an utter mobilization of failure, the point at which humans have quit the often difficult, complicated, frustrating effort to communicate and just said, essentially, Shut up or I effing kill you. Babel's initiation story feels to me one in which communication and language matter. The narrator is some twerp with glasses, the college kid working in the warehouse for the summer, capable of reading, writing, thinking, feeling, and so when at the end of the first pulse Savitsky asks, You think you can live with us, this feels to me a profound and loaded question. In the first pulse, Babel seems to signal both the importance of language and communication and also that a choice will be made. It's striking that in the first passage, it's either the narrator describing Savitsky, or Savitsky himself speaking, which for me created a contrast: when Savitsky talks, he's shown to be a loud, coarse guy with a whip; but as the narrator describes Savitsky to us, the language is big and amped up. "Savitsky rose...a banner splitting the sky." We get what he wears, how he wears it, where he wears it, we even get a good sniff of him, and in all of the language we gain the perspective of how desirable Savitsky is to the narrator.
Just a quick procedural thought - it's totally fine not to like or get a story we work on here. Mostly, I love the stories I send out (and I love this one) but YOU don't have to love them, in order to work with them. (And I will be sending out stories I don't love, from time to time.) Think of these stories as cars, and we are mechanics. Any car will teach us about auto mechanics, since every car works on the same general principles. If we don't like something about a story and (very important) try to be specific about why - that is good work to do. The key is to be specific and couch the criticism in some larger notion - we want to avoid the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" approach.
So don't feel bad if you don't like a story - accept that and roll up your sleeves to see what benefit there is for you in investigating the "why" of your resistance.
Having said that, when I read a story that has withstood the test of time, and I don't like it, I remember that old story (or maybe it was a cartoon):
Guy in Museum, to Guard: I like this painting. Yeah, it's good.
Guard: Sir, the painting is not the thing being judged here.
Back when I didn't get Chekhov, my view was: "Well, these stories are still around after all these years. So let me be humble and see if I might be missing something."
Turns out, I was.
So, once we work through this, and some of us still don't like it, that is perfectly wonderful. That is, actually, you learning about your deep esthetic values.
Onward!
All I can think about is we almost got a TV show by George, directed by Hiro Murai.
Damn.
The first pulse lets us know that the division commander is a violent, grandiose sociopath (who has eyes that glint with joy after demanding an inferior destroy the enemy and motivating him with threats of personally murdering him if he fails), but also that our narrator is seduced by his brutal power (he marvels at his beautiful huge body, taking in his cool, sweet perfume and describing his legs like girls in shiny jack boots). I learn that the commander gets to order others to do the dirty work while staying clean and fresh himself, and that the narrator doesn't seem to be judging him poorly for that fact, the opposite of my own reaction. The commander uses only his pen to write the violent decrees filled with threats, and slaps around his whip for effect. We learn that the narrator is not repulsed by the commander, but enamored of him. Also, we see that the commander has contempt for the four-eyed "pansy" he takes the narrator to be. His assertion to the commander that he can "get along", despite his glasses and learning, prepares me for his later choice to act violently in a specifically misogynist way, per the suggestion of the quartermaster, in order to be accepted by the guys. This first paragraph, filled with so much feminine imagery in such a hyper-masculine and violent setting, helps link us to the conclusion, when the narrator is literally sleeping with violent men, while dreaming of women, and imagining the evening laying motherly palms on his forehead. And of course there's the pivot moment in the middle, where beating an old lady and drawing blood are the price for receiving manly love of other manly men. I know, George, you said stick to the first pulse, but the first pulse front loads everything that spools out going forward. I guess that's one of the lessons of a great story. Stone Boy did this as well with Pulse 1.
I've found this to be a tremendously helpful strategy when suffering from *Writer's Block*(!!!) Take a story I love, break its beats or pulses down into a simple and objective choices/effects, then take those pulses and use them as the framework for a new story with new characters and situations. Essentially stealing the skeleton of another story and then dressing it up in new flesh and clothes. I also think it's an extremely useful way to deeply understand a story you already love, as was pointed out here and in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
Many of the commenters above have already done a masterful job of dissecting the first pulse and the narrator’s introduction into a society that values brute strength and violence over intellect and learning. There are a couple of things I would like to add that haven’t been mentioned... first, there is quite a bit of humor in this first pulse that creates an almost absurdist tone: Chesnokov (who is being sent off to either slaughter or be slaughtered) is loosely translated as “garlic” and the region he is being sent to is loosely translated as “pot of good vodka.” Second, and most important, there is the subtext of anti-semitism. The narrator isn’t just an intellectual with glasses, he is also a Jew so being accepted into his new surroundings requires a level of brutality that compensates for both “shortcoming”. My kids’ math professor, a Russian Jew, was a boxer at a young age and he would often explain that he had to learn how to box, and box well, for his own survival. He had to prove to the anti-semites and anti-intellectuals that he could take them down. It’s also not a a coincidence that the narrator eats pork at the end of the story. He has to prove that he’s not a real Jew, or at least not “that kind” of Jew.
First thoughts on Pulse One:
Babel starts off his story by showing us the manner in which the narrator received his assignment. Among his many choices for recounting this moment, Babel could have had his narrator receive papers in the mail. Or, he could have been handed his papers in a quiet office by a kindly, elderly statesman. He could have gone to an office to volunteer. Babel could have skipped this scene altogether and begun with our narrator walking with his trunk. And on and on. But, no. None of those would be indicative of where this story is going—of what its purpose is. And so Babel’s choice is to start his story—which is about an outsider—by establishing immediately the narrator's outsider status. To do this, he presents a Commander who is much larger in physical stature than our narrator, who is highly decorated, who is mad with power, whose eyes dance when signing an order of destruction, who calls our narrator a pansy and a little louse. And all of this points in only one direction, which can be found at the end of Pulse One when the Commander asks, “Think you’ll get along do you?” In this way, Babel says “Jew” without saying “Jew.” For this is a story of a Jewish man being thrown to the wolves and seeing if he can survive.
And that is the crux of it—the story’s purpose. Will the narrator “get along”? And if so, how will he do it? What will he have to sacrifice?
I think Babel may have chosen to fulfil the purpose of this first “pulse” in the way he did because he wanted to accomplish several things as concisely as possible.
• Put us in a world of brutality – Savitsky’s ordering Chesnokov to destroy the enemy or be destroyed himself, and that his “eyes were dancing with joy” as he makes the order.
• Introduce the question of what kind of person the narrator might be and of how others see him. The narrator marvels at the beauty of Savitsky’s “gigantic body” and envies “the iron and flowers of his youth”, and then, by this very man that he’s marvelling at and is envious of, he is described as a pansy, and that his glasses will result in him getting “cut to pieces”.
• This question of who the narrator might be leads to the possibility of conflict – will he be cut to pieces because of his glasses? Is he a pansy? Babel has raised the question and we want to find out what happens next.
How he does this is with language that inspires me to see what is possible. His description of Savitsky in both how he looks and how he smells is striking, and then this line. “His legs looked like a pair of girls clad in shoulder-length jackboots.” This sentence floored me. I don’t know what it means, but this kind of idiosyncratic description is fascinating and invites me not only to find out what happens next, but how this writer is going to describe it.
For what it's worth, my model is structured very differently :) This piece took me longer than usual to get into and I had to work hard for it to open up its secrets to me (so I was grateful for the extra (extra) time I had with it). After all of this reading and reflection, the thing that stood out most to me was the theme of division/duality - it's almost oppressive in that first pulse with Savitsky (introduced with the 'gigantic beauty' and the 'decorations hammered into his chest' (the medals both a nod to pageantry and war) and neatly summed up by the 'iron and flowers of his youth') and continues throughout the story to the very end.
My one-liner summary is: a man becomes one of learning *and* violence
And from this, my model (which centres on this theme/conundrum), asks not 'why does Babel show the narrator getting his assignment in this way?', but 'why does Babel introduce this reflection on division/duality in this way? Why start with Savitsky (and not, for example, the Cossacks)?'
In this model, the pulses look like this:
1. Savitsky
2. Quartermaster
3. Cossacks (close - 'not one of us') - making fun
4. Landlady and Goose
5. Cossacks (at a distance - 'our kind of lad') - sitting around their pot
-- [Break - went out, came back]
6. Cossacks (close (reversal of attitude) - 'join us') - eating
7. Cossacks (close (reversal of reversal) - 'they join him') - reading Lenin
8. Conclusion - what it means to hold two contradictory realities in one person - legs tangled
I'm really interested to see whether the two different models lead to the same answers, or whether they uncover different but convergent ideas...
I'm also wondering whether approaching this deconstruction from a thematic perspective/starting point is dangerous? What if I've misconstrued the author's theme? Is it better to focus on the facts (as they were)? Or can you slice and dice a story to its component parts however they present themselves to you?
Looking forward to the next few weeks!
For me, even the story's title does significant work to set the tone. It is the narrator's FIRST goose. There will be more! And will they all be (gulp) geese?
I like that you're spreading it out for the story's sake but also because I want to better know who is here and what we think and feel.
In this expanding approach, perhaps we can include discussions about the translation's compositions and how that transforms the story? Dralyuk's sentences are such a joy they're visceral.
It feels like that collection's going to be a book for readers to love and a primer for writers fascinated with language and with making the sentence a thing of beauty.
So, George, you mentioned in a recent post this idea of the "load-bearing" moment which is the key to a story's identity. Would you call the one-line "Hollywood Version" the story's identity? Hence we need to look at how each scene not only moves the story along, but how it plays with/reinforces/resonates that identity? Which also would, perhaps, help us to find that load-bearing moment in our own work? This exercise feels very important.
I am so grateful for a chance to learn how to get inside Babel's stories.
This struck me as powerful - the translation works on me much better than an old translation I have in a book I'd dipped into before.
The inner truth of the story rings painfully true: what is at stake here? Survival in a male society.
Specifically the narrator who shows signs of being from outside the brutal norms of male society - glasses implies academic, implies weak - who must therefore work out how to be accepted into the inside of one such system.
The story depicts a horrible perversion of the way social acceptance ought to be won: ought in the moral sense, and ought in the logic of story world. The latter is, I would say, a complete success - the story chooses a more interesting path than: he fights one of the Cossacks and wins their admiration in combat, or through force of personality [hero overcomes adversity through strength]. But this isn’t cheap music.
The moral world - who would argue that this is how we ought to win favour through crushing the weak and defenceless and already defeated? But is this how we win favour? Oh yes. In male society, still now in male friendship groups in comfortable western schools of the 21st century, this is indeed how the rules often work. Not how they ought to work, but how they do.
And… I write this observation as news lands of Russian bombs striking a Maternity and Children’s hospital in Mariupol.
Might I ask (and I really really really do not know the answer or even have a way to think about it I'd feel confident in): is it enough that this story depicts the awful truth and soul-rending of one who gains entry to this brutal world? Or, is there a moral imperative to go further, and to explore the truth for those that remain outside, who are in turn brutalised and suffer unimaginably?
The description of Savitsky is fantastically bonkers. “the decorations hammered into his chest,” “cut the hut in half, as a banner cuts the sky,” “His long legs…like a pair of girls clad in shiny shoulder-length jackboots.” It’s apotheosis crossed with the absurd, the ridiculous and the sublime. He’s heroic and erotic and terrifying. Reminded of Plath’s “Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.”
It sets the tone in an amazing way. The tone and pacing of this first pulse are lively and brisk, and read almost like satire or comic opera. Dr. Strangelove maybe. But extreme violence and brutality are also introduced up front. To me, the almost comical tone makes the underlying menace feel even more ominous and unsettling. You feel the terrible vulnerability of the narrator, and that something awful could happen to him at any moment.
My first reaction to the story content was disgust. And then fear as I tried to think of a war time situation, and how everything changes, and how to preserve yourself above others, and where to align your loyalties. The handsome man, leader, commander, with his clean perfume and sweet smell of soap! Power endears one. The old woman with her strange eyes creeped me out, her presence like conscience. And the poor goose who took the full brunt of everything that was wrong. A small scene in a lawless war, thats all it takes to throw everything that we hold true. Brutal. That coward who narrates it all, could well have been me, had to look at that squarely.
This has totally clarified for me how to do the “elevator pitch” for my historical novel: leave out the history! Get to to the human emotional heart of it. So obvious, now I’ve seen your example!
As far as I know there are enormous groups of people, throughout the world, who each day earnestly commute to a Department of War and clock in and do their job. There also are plenty of war colleges available for those who want to be educated and learn the subject. Books, too, like the The Art of War, ancient as a religious text, in which we acquire with the zeal of testimony the variety of ways in which we can defeat, demoralize, devastate our opponents. But despite all the effort to administrate, teach, and learn the subject, war to me seems an utter mobilization of failure, the point at which humans have quit the often difficult, complicated, frustrating effort to communicate and just said, essentially, Shut up or I effing kill you. Babel's initiation story feels to me one in which communication and language matter. The narrator is some twerp with glasses, the college kid working in the warehouse for the summer, capable of reading, writing, thinking, feeling, and so when at the end of the first pulse Savitsky asks, You think you can live with us, this feels to me a profound and loaded question. In the first pulse, Babel seems to signal both the importance of language and communication and also that a choice will be made. It's striking that in the first passage, it's either the narrator describing Savitsky, or Savitsky himself speaking, which for me created a contrast: when Savitsky talks, he's shown to be a loud, coarse guy with a whip; but as the narrator describes Savitsky to us, the language is big and amped up. "Savitsky rose...a banner splitting the sky." We get what he wears, how he wears it, where he wears it, we even get a good sniff of him, and in all of the language we gain the perspective of how desirable Savitsky is to the narrator.