Dog Boy (17 page)

‘Why didn’t you shoot the dog? I ordered you to shoot the dog, Zolotukhin!’

The militzioner shrugged. ‘I like dogs.’

 

A revitalised bustle and noise rose in the main station, and the door to the cells opened. Noise of moving bodies and excited voices swelled around a man who entered the cell corridor. The pack leader, Romochka guessed. His companions fawned: eager, informative. Romochka heard his own incredible hairiness, vicious nature, strange gait, amazing reflexes and stench—and their triumph in capturing him—all made into words and passed to the leader. He felt afraid. The leader came up to the bars and stared at him, unsmiling. Romochka stared back, equally formally, his spine stiff.

The leader turned and said in a cold, gravelly voice, ‘What the hell do you think you are doing? It’s just a kid. Get those cuffs and the gag off him.’

‘It bites, Major Cherniak.’

‘Get them off!’

The pack held back, and they all burst out laughing. The leader growled in exasperation. He unlocked the cell and marched up to Romochka, who crouched more tightly into his corner. The major leant down, holding his nose with one hand, and untied the gag. Romochka waited a second, and then bit as hard as he could, holding and grinding his teeth into a soapy wrist. The leader straightened, yelling, shaking him by the hair and wrestling his hand free as Romochka tried to get more wrist in gobbling snaps.

‘Give us a hand,’ the major grunted, and the laughing men yanked Romochka’s head back while Cherniak extracted himself. Romochka gave a choking growl.

‘Just a kid, just a teeny kid,’ one sang and pouted his lips.

The leader sighed, nursing his hand as they relocked the cell. ‘That
is
just a kid, and a really little one too. What is the world coming to?’

The mean one snorted. ‘Feral kids are worse than rabid dogs. Worse than adults too, and they reckon there’s millions. Never solve anything unless we get rid of them. Put it down, I say.’ He made a flicking hand gesture, pointing at Romochka’s head. Romochka understood: he had seen guns. He snarled.

‘God, Belov, you got kids. How can you say that?’

‘That’s no kid. That’ll kill my kids given half a chance.’

The leader turned away and snapped at the others, ‘Get him out of restraints by dinnertime. And don’t cut his hair—you’ll need it.’ He stalked off.

 

As evening fell five militzi entered Romochka’s cell. They took off the handcuffs and shackled his wrist to a ring in the wall. While two held him down by the hair, another untied his feet and ungagged him. He kept them at bay with his best performance, but was bewildered when they put a huge bowl of hot soup and half a loaf of bread down on the floor beside him, and left.

Next morning he was held down and stripped. Then, as he yowled in pain and scrambled back and forth as far as his handcuff would let him, he was pressure hosed with cold water and left naked for a few hours until he and his cell were fairly dry. The station wasn’t cold; he warmed up bit by bit and later they threw him a blanket.

Over the following days Belov’s Dog became an attraction at the station. Officers from other precincts came, paid money and laughed loudly while Romochka was held down, pushed and goaded, poked and mimicked—his savage bite, raking claws and incredible speed shown off to a never-ending stream of amused militzi. They gathered to watch him eat, laughing, and they watched when he used the toilet, exclaiming over the fact that Belov had managed to train him. Belov said there was nothing like a high pressure water hose—it should be in the dog training manual.

Romochka kept within the boundaries of his dog self and never let on that he heard them. He was in disguise in the hope of some unknown future advantage it might give him. He lurked malevolently within himself, watching them, hating them and, bit by bit, despising them for what they didn’t know. Days passed.

Hiding inside his dog self insulated him to a degree from his own thoughts and feelings. He was a dog: words meant nothing. He was a dog: numb grief and wild joy were the boundaries within which all feeling was stretched. His self was a dog’s self, a set of known trails, ways and places to be, between these boundaries. The present was not good. He thought about it little. He ate glumly, fought when there was opportunity and snarled to comfort himself. Despite this retreat, however, another feeling crept over him, like the season tipping from summer to autumn. It seeped into him, quelling all other feelings. It was sadness and with it came, first in moments, then more often, the snowfall of despair.

Belov’s business died when the dog became too quiescent to retaliate with any conviction. Officers no longer found the sight of a disconsolate naked boy with an adult’s hairy body and a huge black mane all that funny. Some asked for their money back. Belov’s loudly vaunted idea of bringing in another dog to stage fights never eventuated.

Romochka wished bitterly for this dog, and for true doghood. Were he really a dog, he would understand only their bodies, not their words. Were he really a dog, he wouldn’t know all their names, and their kids’ names. He wouldn’t know and remember every word and phrase, and be paralysed by these lives that stretched before and after the station: he would know only their smell, only their aggression and torments; and what they ate.

The fight went out of him altogether. He stared dumbly, balefully without growling or snapping, unresistant even when he was pushed around. He was no longer sure that hiding his human side would get him released, but he remained a dog, unable to climb back to his boy self at will. Boy worries crept into him only gradually, flittering in pictures across his mind. Mamochka carrying a white hare, head held high. Black Dog looking guilty with Romochka’s blue coat between his paws. White Sister lapping from cupped hands under a silver drainpipe. His hands. White Sister all friendly, begging from strange people. White Sister crumpling on the road.

Had he seen her stand up again?

 

Major Cherniak reappeared a week later. Romochka was crouching in the corner of his cell, crying softly to himself, hugging his naked knees.

‘Why’s this kid still here? He’s crying. Have you idiots been feeding him?’ There were murmurs of assent. ‘Has anyone got in touch with child protection?’ Every man looked at the next, and eventually there was a collective shaking of heads.

‘He shouldn’t be here. Get him dressed, tell them they can come and get bitten too. We’ve done our bit picking him up, more than our bit cleaning him up. He’s their problem, not ours. And when he’s gone, get this cell steam cleaned. That smell is horrible.’

Next morning Romochka was held down and forcibly dressed in some soapy clothes that smelled of Belov’s tobacco and were too big for him.

Belov laughed. ‘Give him to that idiot at the Anton Makarenko Centre.’ He made a rude gesture. ‘Rehabilitate this, dickhead!’

Cherniak laughed with the rest. ‘Just call the usual number. If they want the Makarenko people involved, that’s their business.’

 

Romochka considered he had been amazingly well fed in the cell and felt physically strong. He understood from their talk that he was to be moved, and his spirit rose like the sap in spring. He took pains to be particularly docile all morning, retrieving his boy self as consciously as he could. He stood on his feet, eyes cast down, never growling or baring his teeth.

It worked. He was marched quietly out to a white van without manhandling, flanked by three militzi and two paramedics who spoke gently to him. At the moment when the paramedics went to take over and load him in, he ducked, slipped his hands from their grasp and bolted, sprinting as hard as he could while holding his overlong trousers up. There was uproar behind him as they gave chase, but he was faster.

After a little while their shouts and exclamations, their heavy steps, receded behind him. He heard a siren and shot off the road into a winding lane, then darted into an alley. He found himself, still running top speed, on another road with a wide footpath and many people. He left that too, as soon as a likely alley joined it, then zig-zagged through a sequence of laneways and passages until he was sure he had lost them.

He quietened down to a trot, his heart still hammering. He scented his way to the river. He was on the home side, upriver from the bridge, and, to his great joy, he could see it. He made his way steadily back and began to trot along the cold trail he and White Sister had taken more than a week before.

He sweated with the horrors of that place. He looked around. There was no mark to show what had happened, and his ridiculous boy-nose would never be able to find White Sister. Despair flooded back. He was alone, his family lost, his sister hurt: all his doing. And he didn’t know how to get home. His ears buzzed and his sight blackened, shutting the world out.

Then, as suddenly as he had been caught, he was knocked down by the squealing, wriggling, yabbering force of White Sister. Chewing and slobbering his face and arms, shoving her head into his belly, throwing herself bodily at his chest for the embrace. He sobbed in happiness into her neck and held her so tight she snapped this way and that, struggling to be free. Then she capered around him in wild joy, her eyes shining. At last she sprang up with buoyant purpose, looking back at him repeatedly:
Let’s get out of this horrible city, now!

 

At dusk it began to rain, and, to his delight, a trickle ran onto the footpath from the wide silver drainpipes that ran down the outside of the older buildings. He scampered over, bent down and put his open mouth under one of them, then cupped his hands for White Sister. They trotted on through the evening and the first part of the night, winding in and out of lanes and roads, backtracking from each cul-de-sac, waiting fearful in the rain for traffic to clear on roads they had to cross, but angling always back to White Sister’s point of certainty, then heading off again at a run. White Sister was thinner even than before but, to Romochka’s relief, her interest in people had been snuffed out. She turned to him, insistently, repeatedly, and to him alone. They stopped only to check dumpsters for food.

They slept in a large railway station that sheltered more bomzhi than Romochka had ever seen. Then, just before dawn, Romochka gave White Sister a chunk of bread from his pocket and they were off again, running into a wind-driven rain, but warming up. He ate as he ran.

At midmorning, they found themselves around the corner from the Roma. Romochka yipped and White Sister jumped for joy. They ran round the back. They had never been there in daylight; the lane was deserted and the restaurant shut. White Sister coursed about, whimpering with happiness as she smelled a cold trail of the family. Romochka scratched and whined quietly at the locked door but there was no sound inside. Laurentia wasn’t there.

Hungry as they were, they felt they were as good as home, and they set off on the familiar path as though it in itself were food and could give them the energy to keep going.

By late afternoon, they were in the allotment, trotting wearily with glazed but expectant eyes. No one was home in the lair, so they threw their aching bodies down on the bed and slow-licked each other’s faces while they waited. Bliss and weakness filled Romochka. White Sister was so much bonier than when they were here last. He ran his fingers over her. It seemed a long time ago. It seemed just this morning.

They heard the joyous crescendo of the clan as their trail was found, swelling to a scrambling, yelping climax in the courtyard, and then dog after dog piled upon him and White Sister, whining and wriggling and squealing. Even Black Sister, her reserved body swaying in delight, approached both of them with teeth low and, when Romochka threw his arms about her and licked her face, she shuddered. Held in his arms, she licked his ear, and then reached out to lick White Sister’s face too, once. Black Dog and Grey Brother capered madly around the cellar, ears back and haunches low, then chased each other just to have something to do with their happiness. Pregnant Mamochka wriggled her surprising big belly into Romochka’s arms and kept biting his face through her yabbering, as if she had to do more than lick to believe she had him back.

They had food. They had dropped it outside out in the allotment as their excitement took them over. They raced out once everyone settled and returned with a soft summer hare and three stiff ravens.

Romochka could not stay away from the metro for long. He was wary since it had kidnapped him but unbearably curious. He hunted with the dogs around the mountain for a few days, but his ears were tuned to people more than ever before. He scavenged for clues about the wider world and was astonished: that world had been here all the time, inaudible to him. People here knew Belov. ‘Major Belov,’ he heard the one-legged man say, ‘pimps, beggarmasters, baby trade, you know…the Roof. He’s the one you got to talk to.’

He changed most of his coins for a precious collection of tickets. At rest in the lair, he played with them, shuffling them into patterns and getting the family to smell them.