Dog Boy (18 page)

Soon he was drawn back to the station, tickets in pocket. He opened his ears, realising quickly that stations had names and learning the name of his. He found metro stations throughout his territory and bit by bit worked out how to catch the trains for one stop, then trot back home. Then two stops, and three. White Sister remained his sole companion, seasoned as she was in the underground trails and their dangers. The others accompanied him to the metro entrance but no further, and not even Black Sister showed any resentment. He quickly ran out of money, and life became more dangerous when the beggarmasters realised he had started collecting cash as well as scraps.

His exploration of the underground territory opened his ears and eyes to people, and with this came an awareness of the uses of money. He couldn’t enter shops, he knew that without trying. But street and metro kiosks were for everybody. So easy! He was amazed that he hadn’t considered it. You simply held out some coins and pointed. If they waited, or gestured, or said something, you pulled out one more coin.

He began buying hot food—stardogs, pirozhki, cheese-filled bread, boubliki and shaurma from the kiosks, which he and the dogs gulped down in ecstasy. Sometimes, if he pointed to the dogs, he would get some scraps too, especially if he bought food at the same time. He ran out of money as quickly as he got it.

Mamochka loved the new grease on his hands but hated him going down the escalator to the metro. She tried to steer him to hunt on the mountain or in the forest, but he went rarely these days. The metro pulled him into its arcades of glory, its bazaar of hot, greasy, pastry-covered foods and its enticing human world.

Mamochka watched him as he went, watched every move he made, troubled but passive. Sometimes she even sat on her haunches, immobile, and he mistook her silhouette for the old image of Golden Bitch at sentry. Her watching annoyed him. He would push her, pull her, cajole her to the nest. She licked him thoughtfully for a while, then stopped, preoccupied. Even after her two puppies were born, Mamochka worried. This autumn he made no move to suckle. He showed no interest in the puppies. He was out, always, at the metro. Long hours, returning late, sometimes even with no fruit of a hunt.

 

In the dark before a late autumn dawn, Mamochka entered the lair carrying a strange smell. Everyone looked up, noses and ears questioning the dark air. Her steps were awkward, slow, and it was clear from the broken rhythm that her legs were braced and splayed in the effort to carry something heavy and alive.

She stumbled and then dragged her burden over to the nest. Romochka sat up. She was carrying more than a strange smell. She was carrying—dragging—a whimpering human baby by the clothes at its scruff.

It was almost too heavy in her jaws for her to manage. Romochka growled before anyone else did, although his night vision was the worst and the others must have smelled it long before he did. Mamochka ignored him, plopped the child down and began to lick its face and hands. The two small sisters, Little Gold and Little Patch, tumbled and shoved around it. It began suddenly to sob and wail, thinly at first, then louder and through more jagged breaths. Everyone’s hackles rose. Even Romochka could smell the fear puffing into the dark lair from under their tails and necks.

Romochka couldn’t settle. His skin prickled and itched. Fleas annoyed him more than usual. He snapped at Black Sister and drove even White Sister from him. Then he suffered until dawn, proud and furious, too cold to snooze. His Mamochka didn’t even look his way in the dark.
Where have you been, Mamochka,
he sent out in the dark.
What have you done, bringing that here?
He would have felt better if he had sensed her looking his way, answering, but no answer came to explain her betrayal.

He could hear the new child suckling and mewling. At dawn he heard a sound, familiar yet alien to the lair: a baby chortling. He got up, stiff and cold, grabbed his club and stalked towards the daylight. Black Sister, White Sister and Grey Brother immediately followed him and he felt better. They went looking for trouble. Today, he thought angrily, they would steal shopping off someone. They hadn’t done this since the harsh winter before.

Romochka stayed away from Mamochka and her baby. She in turn ignored him. He hunted long hours and brought home shopping bags full of the fruits of daring theft. He remained proud and aloof, noting with wounded pleasure that Mamochka herself didn’t have to hunt: that she fed herself, the two puppies and this new boy with food he provided.

After two nights had passed, he missed Mamochka too much to keep it up. As late dawn seeped into the lair, he crept over to the side of the nest. Mamochka looked up from the two puppies and the boy and growled. He lay down. He tucked his threatening hands into his groin, kept his eyes low and waited. Sooner or later, he knew, she would stop and lick him.

By midmorning, after Mamochka had cleaned his face and ears, he was able to sidle in and have a close look. It was very small. Much smaller, he was sure, than he had ever been himself. In the gloom of the lair he could see that it had pale eyes in a moony face, light coloured hair and the tiniest most useless nose he had seen up close. It was hairless and chubby, dressed in padded fluffy stuff under the ripped jumpsuit by which Mamochka had carried it. It smelled too dirty for the nest, but interesting dirty. It clearly made a very special poo, sealed in by its clothes. It would have to learn not to poo while in the nest, nevertheless: everyone knew not to poo in the nest.

He pulled the jumpsuit off it to have a closer look at what was underneath. He undressed it completely, garment after garment, while it squealed and giggled and pulled at his hair with hands surprisingly strong for their size. Mamochka was very interested in getting at the skin underneath too, and every bit Romochka uncovered she licked clean. Once the sodden clothes were off, it was even clearer that the little boy was not wise about poo. Mamochka cleaned it all off painstakingly, with Romochka helping her by pulling limbs and skin this way and that to expose dirty and sore bits. The little boy screamed and his skin turned a fascinating purple in the gloom. They ignored him. The puppies tumbled about, chewing hands and feet, and the little boy screamed harder, kicking furiously. Romochka pinned him down and shoved the puppies off.

When they were finished, the little boy was shivering and whimpering, but clean and nice spit-smelling. Romochka felt a rush of pride. The little one looked much better. Now to dress it. The pooey clothes and nappy were no good. He pushed them into one of the many plastic bags lying around and hurled them into a far corner of the lair. Better there than outside for some stranger to sniff. He got one of his old jumpers from his bower and dressed the little boy in it. This new puppy would need clothes if he was going to be so hairless. Then Mamochka curled around Little Patch and Little Gold and the boy. They drank, tugging and making loud sucky noises. The boy looked funny in Romochka’s clothes. A bit like him but much smaller, much weaker. He can’t even fit into that old thing! Romochka thought to himself as he lay down beside them and licked over his own hands and forearms happily. It would need a name, this human puppy.

 

Puppy settled in quickly. He learned to poo outside the nest for Mamochka to clean up the same way she did with the other puppies. He rolled about in rags Romochka had long outgrown. When the dogs were out, he made tunnels under the blankets in the nest and curled up in them with Little Gold and Little Patch. He could stand up and walk the way Romochka did, but without grace or speed. He fell over a lot.

Romochka watched him closely, pleased with every sign that showed Puppy to be weaker and younger than himself. He wasn’t very gentle with Puppy; he enjoyed making him yelp in pain or scream with fury. He hated the way Puppy fled to Mamochka for protection and he smarted from the nips Mamochka had begun to give him. He had not been nipped so much for a long time. Not since he was new and didn’t know anything. He hated the way Puppy always forgot and forgave him, and crept into his arms when they were all asleep on the nest. But he never threw Puppy off. There was something tantalising in Puppy’s smell and his hairlessness. Romochka liked to slip his own arms under Puppy’s clothes and sleep with his bare skin against Puppy’s, and he liked to breathe in the smell from the top of Puppy’s head, even though it made him uneasy. Puppy sometimes murmured simple words in his sleep,
Dyedou, Baba
, and Puppy had nightmares no dog would ever have. Romochka would lie awake, holding onto the sleeping boy with a bad feeling in his stomach.

Everything about Puppy filled him with unease. He slowly began to accept that Puppy was a member of the family, to be hunted for and looked after, but the sight of him still made Romochka itchy with annoyance. He started to treat Little Patch and Little Gold too with a degree of distance as he saw how attached they were to their litter-mate. He hoped they would grow up soon and join the real dogs.

One day he entered and Puppy was nowhere to be seen. He looked around, vaguely disappointed. Then Puppy and the two little sisters pounced on him from behind the woodpile, barking and yelling. He growled at Puppy and tried to grab him, but Puppy was off, laughing infectiously and something in Romochka gave way. He would play, he decided, now and then. When he felt like it.

 

The snow came in surreptitiously, without wild storms. One day the air chilled, and the snow, seeming to fall upwards more than down, dusted everything and didn’t melt again. Then the next day there it was, gentle, swirling, filling up all holes and blemishes and making everything smooth and mysterious. Squirrels became more visible overnight. None of them had ever caught a squirrel, so they didn’t try. That little flash of red and grey movement turned their heads, but Romochka knew only baby dogs would give chase.

 

‘Schenok!’ All the dogs looked up in surprise at the sound of Romochka calling his brother the way a human calls a dog. Romochka was pleased: they’d see that Puppy was not one of them. Puppy slunk to his hands, body wriggling, eyes hopeful. He licked Romochka’s fingers, arms, cheek. Romochka pushed him down and over, growling nastily, and Puppy lay completely still, eyes almost closed, body braced passively, ready to receive whatever punishment Romochka wished to inflict. Romochka sighed in exasperation and lay down next to him. Puppy slowly relaxed and began to whimper softly. Romochka felt like crying or screaming. He reached out his hand and stroked Puppy, feeling the happiness course through his little brother, and then feeling that small body settle into sleep.

Romochka refused to smell Puppy. He refused to lick Puppy. But it wasn’t working. Even Romochka could see that the little boy was becoming a dog, and the more he tried to prove to Puppy that it was not so, the more he, Romochka, seemed to become human.

He was keenly aware of just how perfect Puppy was. Puppy spoke only the language of dogs. Puppy seemed able to smell out everything there was to know. Puppy would smell and smell at something, standing long in contemplation. Puppy would wake up and smell every corner, quickly, appraisingly, for all that had happened in his absence. Puppy ran, fleet and fluid, on four legs.

The more Romochka noticed Puppy’s transformation, the more irritable and snappy he became with everyone. He became aware that he, Romochka, used sounds no dog ever used, that he used sticks and nailboards and clubs in fights more than his teeth, that he used his hands to eat: most of all that he was a boy, a human boy, and he walked upright exactly as one of
them
. These things—his words, his grasping hands and his carriage, all things that had made him so formidable in the family, and so useful in being the one unnoticed by
them
, now stood out to him as unbearable defects.

One day he tried to run with four legs, but it was a terrible mistake. He hadn’t run like this for more than a year, and Puppy was, for all his bumbling, floppy gait, more doglike, more at ease in a dog’s form. Romochka felt unnatural, hampered, with his hands to the floor, as if he had grown out of precisely what Puppy was so rapidly growing into. He slunk to his mother’s bed and growled when she came to lie down. She licked him in his bad temper, and then went and lay down near the entrance.

He lay on the bed alone for a whole day and a night and refused to go hunting. He snarled and swung his club at anyone who came near. If Puppy had approached, he might have really hurt him. But Puppy stayed gambolling by the entrance with their mother and the other puppies while Romochka watched him balefully, chin on hands. He is a boy, not a dog.

A boy, not a dog, he thought miserably. Even thinking it, he knew that this was true of them both. He watched Puppy in a slowly spreading despair. Puppy had Little Patch by the ear and was shaking, tugging, rolling over. Romochka remembered that some time ago Puppy would also have been giggling. Now he just gurgled and growled.

Perhaps Puppy was not a boy anymore.

Romochka turned to the wall, curled up and tried to sleep, with Puppy’s voice in his ears and Puppy’s distinctive smell in his nostrils.

 

It was a remarkably easy winter and Romochka’s memories of the two winters before became dreamy and remote. If it hadn’t been for the desiccated carcasses he and Puppy played with in the lair, he would have forgotten the Strangers altogether. It wasn’t just that the winter was milder: Romochka was bigger and knew a lot more. He was well dressed this winter. He had to seek out and steal clothes for Puppy whenever he could, and took the opportunity to clothe himself too. He had a hard time begging, as other beggars now reported him on sight either to their masters or to the militzia who protected their territory, and his begging for scraps suffered too because of this.

Food was nonetheless plentiful, if monotonous. A craze for shooting ravens swept Moscow, rapidly escalating into an unregulated winter sport. Young house men cruised around in their cars, looking for the grey and black birds. Around the mountain and in the forest, people and dogs fled and hid at the sound of gunshots, but the steady supply of dead and injured ravens drew them all into the city. Romochka so wanted warm bird that he would go to where he could hear the gunshots, hoping to find something wounded or just killed. When he found a warm one, he would stuff it under his shirt and race home to eat in peace in the lair, sharing it with Puppy before it froze. The dogs brought home so many ravens that Romochka was able to make a raven bower for Puppy at the other end of the lair.