Dog Boy (27 page)

Romochka was delighted with Puppy’s progress. Being a boy himself so much of the time made him value boyness far more than he ever had. The challenge to improve drew him on, and Puppy followed. He was standing and walking most of the time now, and even making voiced noises a lot. None of them real words, but all rather like words. Dmitry praised Romochka for all this, suggesting that it was Romochka who was responsible. Romochka added Dmitry and Natalya to his clan of human people he liked. Laurentia, the Singer, Dmitry, Natalya—in that order. He murmured their names in human voice and loved the music of it. He sang them, along a melody line that rose and fell like a dog’s howl. Until then it had been just Laurentia and the Singer.

He didn’t count Puppy as a human. Schenok in voice was, after all, a game. Puppy’s real name lived in silence in his smell, in the woven breath of the lair. And inside Romochka.

He thought now and then about breaking Puppy out of the centre and taking him back home. How happy all the dogs would be! He pictured Puppy scampering about to revisit every smell and every game. They could go back to being a proper family again. But he worried, too. Puppy was so clean and soft now. The hardened muscles and the calluses on his hands and feet were gone. He ate a lot of different things here, hot things, soups and pies and meat stews in huge amounts. Much more than Romochka ate. Would he be able to find enough food for Puppy? He coughed these days, too, all the time. Maybe he wasn’t strong enough to go back to that life. He asked Dmitry eventually, with what he thought were well-masked intentions, what would happen if Puppy escaped.

Dmitry looked at him thoughtfully.

‘You know, Romochka, it is lucky we rescued Marko when we did. He was a very sick little boy. He needs to live here, or he might not survive.’

Romochka must have looked doubting. Dmitry walked over to a drawer and took out a small disc. He held it up between thumb and forefinger.

‘But don’t worry. See this? We put one of these inside Marko’s body. It sends a signal, like a little beeping that you can’t hear. If he got lost the militzia could find him wherever he goes just by following the signal.’

Romochka held out his hand for the disc. It was smooth and shining. He turned his back on Dmitry and surreptitiously bit it. He handed it back to Dmitry with a metal and plastic taste in his mouth. He didn’t understand what Dmitry meant but it was clear that Puppy as good as had Dmitry’s rope around his neck.

 

Dmitry stood at the window of his fourth-floor office and watched the boy leave. He hoped the attachment Romochka had formed with Natalya wasn’t going to cause problems. Kids got attached to her all the time, of course, and she was professional about it. But this time she seemed to see Romochka as a kid she could befriend, perhaps just because he wasn’t an inmate. She went out of her way to flatter the boy and was clearly, to Dmitry’s thinking, herself flattered by Romochka’s attachment. Now that
was
unprofessional. He was particularly annoyed today because he had seen a loyal glower beamed his way from under Romochka’s hair when he snapped at Natalya about taking Romochka upstairs. But really, how could she? Even if it hadn’t been against the rules, it would have been ill-advised. It did children no good at all to know that they were watched twenty-four hours a day. Not to mention that it would vitiate any future data if Romochka took it upon himself to tell the others.

That one was a mystery, unlike any child he had come across. Definitely some kind of intellectual disability. Nonetheless, the way he interacted with Marko was fluent, wordless, authoritative. Solicitous. Romochka was always pleased by Marko’s progress, pleased to hear that he was sometimes walking rather than four-footing it. Romochka could make Marko do anything, and initially Dmitry had been delighted.

These days, however, he noted there was still a canine element in Marko’s eagerness and aptitude, and wondered in more jaundiced moments whether Romochka was teaching him tricks for their benefit. At other times Romochka simply sang to his little brother, and Dmitry put aside his doubts. He sang snatches of songs that were all, oddly enough, Italian. He had a raw yet musical voice. It was Romochka who managed to get Marko to make a word, repeating his own name over and over to his younger brother.

‘Romochka, Romochka, Romochka, Romochka.’

Then Marko’s startling sound, his only human syllable:

‘Rom…Rom…’

Dmitry watched Romochka saunter along the drive below, swinging that club. That was one tough kid. Romochka was bomzh and an orphan, and well past the age to form attachments, yet he was developing a relationship with them. Maybe the idea of foster care was not hopeless after all. Their hands-off approach to Romochka’s life still troubled him, especially as he observed the boy’s growing attachment to Natalya. He was fairly sure Natalya was no longer so certain in her views either. In fact there was a good chance, he thought with a wry smile, she would deny ever having held them.

There was no doubt the two brothers loved each other, but Dmitry was beginning to suspect that Romochka’s visits had something to do with the younger child’s slight regression and physical deterioration; perhaps also with Marko’s complete failure to learn to speak. He couldn’t explain it. Marko’s play indicated the cognitive parallel for language. He had arrived with all the preconditions for language acquisition to be rapid, but there was little sign of it. Romochka spoke, yet Marko barely noticed it. However, if Romochka grumbled or murmured, Marko reacted immediately. At one point Dmitry had annotated this, relating first the story of Viktor, the wild boy of Aveyron, who didn’t notice a pistol shot but showed animated interest at the sound of a nut cracking. At the very least Marko was missing his older brother more and more during Romochka’s absences. Dmitry was unsure what to do about it, other than take the older boy into care too.

Below, Romochka was joined at the end of the driveway by that big white dog. Natalya had said she would get rid of it more than a week ago. The dog licked the boy’s hand, which he didn’t seem to notice, and fell back to trot along at his heels. Romochka stopped by the gate, bent and sniffed it. Then, without looking around, he casually urinated, out in the open, on the gatepost. Odd.

It had been staring him in the face from the beginning. Two of them. He felt dizzy.

Dmitry had been walking for more than an hour, energetic, apparently purposeful, but without any destination. How did two brothers become dogboys, wolf-children? Who were they, these two, one so dark and one so fair? The memory of his own excitement over the discovery of Marko brought with it a sharp flicker of shame. It wasn’t just that Romochka’s existence devalued and tainted all the data. His groundbreaking studies on Marko seemed now some unwitting part of a sick experiment, larger than the ‘linguistic thresholds’, ‘non-canine zones of proximal development’ and ‘compulsive human-ness’ of his published papers, way beyond debunking the twenty-first-century vestiges of a belief in
Homo ferus
.