Faithful Ruslan (10 page)

Despite the assurances that he needed no feeding, Stiura nevertheless offered food to her new lodger—a bowlful of hot soup with bones in it. There followed several agonizing minutes in which Ruslan almost fainted with temptation and which consequently rather spoiled this little ceremony of induction. The bowl had to be removed untouched, at which the Shabby Man was triumphant and Stiura was offended, promising that she would send him to the knacker’s yard the very next day:

“And there,” she said, “they’ll make a lo-ot of soap out of you! You’ll see.”

Sustained by only the shakiest of hope, Ruslan went to sleep on the porch, feeling irritated and savagely hungry. More than once he was wakened during the night by a drowsy cackling that came from the hen coop, and each time he went and inspected it to make sure that the door on the hen coop was tightly shut and the bolt could not be pushed back with his paw. On each occasion he could hear, coming from under the house, a faint growl from the invisible Treasure, who had not yet dared to emerge and make his acquaintance.

Toward dawn Ruslan felt very bad, and he began to have the most grotesque dreams about mouse-hunting: mice the size of cats were actually leaping out of the snow, forming up
into ranks of five and marching, with squeaks of joy, into his open mouth. He growled and woke up.

The Shabby Man was not yet up and about, so Ruslan decided to make a brief trip to the forest. On his return, he ran around the entire block, in case the Shabby Man had slipped out by some escape hole or had climbed over a fence. It turned out, however, that he had not yet even come out onto the porch, although the sky had already turned pink and everything in the yard was glowing in bright colors. Then Ruslan remembered that yesterday evening his prisoner and Stiura had together drunk a great deal of that nasty clear liquid before collapsing, apparently dead. Before that he had talked very loudly with a stupid look on his face, waved his arms aimlessly and burst into song—in short, he stopped understanding what was what, just as dogs did. With dogs, however, this sad state came about by itself as a result of old age, whereas humans actually made a positive effort to induce it. This observation struck Ruslan as both interesting and hopeful: however much he might despise that disgusting liquid, it at least gave him the chance to go hunting. He even had time for another nice long sleep before his prisoner finally condescended to emerge—bad-tempered, with a puffy face, and exuding an even more revolting smell than on the previous evening. God’s good daylight did not please him at all; he pulled a face as he looked up at the sky, then spat and made off unsteadily for the little wooden shed in the yard.

At that moment Treasure appeared from beneath the house. He stretched, yawned pleasurably and then, in the middle of his yawn, wagged his little stump of a tail in greeting, as though seeing Ruslan for the first time. He turned out to be a totally insignificant dog, in appearance quite out of
keeping with two rumbling
Rs
in his name: squat, bandy-legged, with a distended stomach, permanently drooping ears and a coat dotted with random blobs of black, white and tawny red. Ruslan scarcely deigned to glance at him. By making his appearance so late in the morning, when the new canine lodger had already investigated the yard, Treasure thereby waived his own right to the territory, tacitly admitting that he was the junior. Ruslan, however, had no wish to lay any claim to the territory; all his behavior made it clear that he was only interested in the man who was hiding in the shed—and Treasure fully understood this. With a sidelong glance at the door of the little shed, he pulled a face with a very complicated set of meanings: it conveyed sympathy for Ruslan, together with utter scorn for the Shabby Man; it also described his own unappreciated qualities without false modesty, and included the eternal complaint, “What a life we lead, eh, neighbor?” If the Shabby Man had been a master instead of a prisoner, Treasure would undoubtedly have been made to pay for such a subversive remark, but now Ruslan simply turned away, not wishing to get drawn into conversation.

The Shabby Man spent a long time in the shed, grunting, groaning and snorting, obviously undecided about what to do and how to start the day; finally he came out and uttered his first articulate words:

“Where the hell did I put that canvas mitten? One of them’s here, but I seem to have dropped the other one somewhere. I suppose you haven’t seen it, have you, Ruslan?”

Ruslan merely looked at him with cold amazement. He was being asked to find something, and although he knew where it was, there was no question of his carrying out an order given by a prisoner. Using his own language, Ruslan
reminded the prisoner of this fact by getting up, but merely in order to move a short distance and lie down again.

Watching this scene with the keenest interest, Treasure dived headlong under the porch and dragged out the missing mitten. He did not, however, take it to the Shabby Man, but put it down close to Ruslan, so that Ruslan could have the chance to make himself useful. Ruslan did not even turn his head. The Shabby Man was finally obliged to walk over and bend down, wheezing, to pick up his mitten.

“O.K.,” said the Shabby Man, “I’m not proud. But one of us seems a bit stupid. That’s the trouble with these army dogs—all they understand is ‘woof, woof, fall in, dismiss.’ Even our little Treasure has more sense.”

This was too much for Ruslan to bear. He walked out of the yard, bounded over the step of the gateway and lay down in the street. He had to admit that he had thought better of his prisoner. In blaming Ruslan for being dull-witted, the Shabby Man had shown that he did not understand the reason why a guard dog should decline to obey him. And why had Treasure rushed to pick it up, anyway? Since it was he who had been playing with the mitten yesterday and had dropped it under the porch, it was only right that he should run and pick it up.

When the Shabby Man came out onto the street, with an old army belt around his waist and carrying a toolbox, he said, “Come on, soldier, let’s go.” This was the only order spoken by the Shabby Man that Ruslan would ever obey.

Thus began their journeys to the strange job with which the prisoner occupied his mornings—if they could be called mornings. Man and dog would set off for the station, where they would turn aside to walk down the tracks to some distant sidings that were a cemetery for old, derelict
passenger-cars. This, then, was their work area, just as the block was their new camp and Stiura’s yard was their accommodation zone. They would climb up into the cars—Ruslan leaping up in one bound, the Shabby Man clambering breathlessly up the steps—and move slowly from one compartment to another. The windows had all been smashed or removed, so that there was always a draft blowing; the floors and lower bunks were covered in several layers of snow, and there was a smell of rot, dust, rust, human excrement and every track and station where these cars had been. The Shabby Man would raise and lower the creaking bunks, wipe them clean with his sleeve and measure them with a rule, and then sigh, saying to Ruslan:

“Well, now, what about this little plank—shall we book it in? It’s kind of narrow, but it has quite a decent grain. Might do in a pinch, don’t you think?”

Ruslan had no objection, so the Shabby Man set about “booking it in.” Because his hands were shaking, it was a long time before the screwdriver would go into the groove on the screw head, and he lacked the strength and determination to unscrew the rusty screw in one go. Midway through the operation he took a long smoke break, trying to figure out how to apply a nail claw and lever out the plank without splintering it. Even when he had extracted a plank whole, the Shabby Man was not always interested in keeping it: after smoothing it with the palm of his hand and squinting along it against the light, sometimes even sniffing it, he might throw it out of the window. Then he would sit down for a long time, sighing gloomily, before starting to look for another one. And all the time he kept talking and talking:

“Say, Ruslan, how come you can never find a good plank of wood in the whole of Russia? And yet we’re surrounded by
forests. There’s lumber piled up all around us; that’s the reason why. If there was a bit less, we might take better care of it and not sell it to other people—then we’d have enough for ourselves. Guess I’d better stop saying these naughty things. It’s your job to see I don’t talk so much nonsense, Ruslan.”

Once a sly thought crept into his hazy mind, his watery eyes took on a lively glint and puckered with cunning as he stared into Ruslan’s sad yellow eyes.

“Hey, feller, why don’t we go over to the old prison-camp logging site? We know the way there, and we might pick up a plank or two of good quality lumber at the sawmill. We cut thousands of planks when we were working there.” Then he answered his own question: “No, we’d better not go. I’d start to feel afraid of you at the logging site. You and I are friends here, thick as thieves you might say, but out there you’d remember the old days and you might not even let me smoke. Anyway, why do I waste so much time talking to you like this? It’s time to bang the rail, like they did in camp for mealtimes, and we haven’t done a damn bit of work yet.”

Nobody here banged a rail, but by some instinct he guessed—and after the second day Ruslan began to guess, too—that it was time for them to go home. By now he had collected three or four planks, of which he said, “Not much good, but they’ll do,” although in Ruslan’s opinion they were little different from the rejected planks, except that perhaps they smelled a little less moldy. The Shabby Man tied them together with a piece of string and carried them off under his arm. By this time of day the effect of the colorless liquid had worn off, his breath smelled less unpleasant and he strode away along the railroad ties quite briskly, as a prisoner should when returning from work. The only thing that aroused his escort’s displeasure was his idiotic singing.
He always sang the same song, in an awful plaintive whine, which made Ruslan want to whine, too:

In the streets, thank God, he stopped this dreadful caterwauling; if he had done it in front of other people, Ruslan would have died with shame.

The planks were put into a shed. There the Shabby Man, humming to himself, sawed them, planed them, took them out one after another and inspected them in the light, then finally took them indoors—by now much thinner, paler in color and even giving off a pleasant smell. Ruslan escorted him into the house, stretched out in the doorway and lay so quietly that they forgot he was there. From Ruslan’s viewpoint, the thing that was being put together in Stiura’s room and that took up almost the whole of one wall simply looked like a huge box. The Shabby Man called it a “three-door sideboard-dresser.” Seated on a stool, he fitted the new planks up against the ones that were already in position, changed them around this way and that and asked Stiura whether she liked the way it looked “like this!” Stiura was ironing a tablecloth on the table, and answered after a brief glance around, or without looking at all:

“Yes, it’s fine. What do you mean ‘like this’?”

“You always say everything’s ‘fine,’ ” said the Shabby Man indignantly. “All you want is somewhere to put your junk.
Can’t you see that this plank is upside down? It looks all wrong.”

“How can it be ‘upside down’?”

“Can’t you tell from the grain that the butt end of the wood is at the top? Whoever saw a tree growing with its butt end upward?”

Stiura glanced at it again, knitting her pale eyebrows as though agreeing with him, but she still made objections:

“O.K., so that’s how a tree grows. But a plank—what difference does it make which way up it stands?”

This gave him cause for more indignation:

“I know you can’t tell the difference, but the plank can. It remembers the way it grew when it was a tree, so it’ll dry up with misery and then the whole panel will warp.”

“Well, I suppose you must be right,” said Stiura.

Triumphantly he replaced the plank in the right position and showed Stiura how this was now “quite a different kettle of fish,” and he babbled on while the plank was shaved down until it fitted, then smeared with glue and held in place with clamps:

“Just you wait, Stiura, till we get to the varnishing—then you’ll see whether I’m a cabinetmaker or a fraud. You’ll see that I never use a pad, only the palm of my hand. You have to rub in the varnish with your skin; otherwise it’ll just be dead. Why, before the war I was the only person in the Pervomaisky District of Moscow who could make a dresser in the old Russian peasant style. Or a bureau with a secret drawer. When I’ve finished this, I’ll make you a bureau with a secret drawer. I was famous, Stiura! Two furniture factories competed for me; each one wanted me to go there and pass on my experience to the young apprentices. I went and had a look, but there wasn’t a scrap of handwork for me to
do at either of them. Know what they were doing? They used hardly any solid hardwood, just took trashy old planks straight off the circular saw and glued them together. And they used compressed wood-shavings, too. All I was supposed to do was to make a few drawings for them and select plywood for the veneers. No, thank you, not for me. My sort of work’s different. My work, if you want to know, was shown at the National Handcrafts Exhibition; they were even going to send it abroad, but then they changed their minds—’cause of politics. Know where they put my dresser? In the council chamber of the District Soviet building, right under Stalin’s portrait. There’s fame for you!”

The next plank proved even harder to fit, so after trying it first one way and then another, he gave up and took a long smoke. Inhaling greedily, which made his prominent Adam’s apple slide up and down his unshaven neck, he squinted at the tip of the faintly crackling cigarette and his face was suddenly warmed by a smile.