Faithful Ruslan (13 page)

Sometimes the dogs even used a little cunning: one of them would pretend not to understand, just so that they could enjoy the pleasure of watching the Instructor one more time and hear him say: “Attention! I will demonstrate!” How nimbly he ran along the beam—much better than on two legs! How elegant and lithe he looked as he did it, how attractively his sharp shoulder blades moved beneath his leather jacket, the red hairs bristling on the back of his neck; how neatly he bounded over a ditch or an obstacle or ran up the ladder in a single movement! And when he was really in form he could complete the whole obstacle course without stopping, the only sign of effort being a few drops of perspiration on his brow. At the end of the obstacle course one of the masters would be waiting, ready with his reward, and the Instructor would take the tidbit in his teeth, still on all fours, and devour it with obvious relish. Gulping down their saliva, the dogs were by then straining to imitate him and repeat the whole series of exercises at one go.

They would have followed him to the ends of the earth had he but summoned them. Even Djulbars let him do what he would not even allow his master to do—to give him a gentle cuff around the muzzle or open his mouth and feel his bite. The Instructor even put two fingers between Djulbars’s fearful teeth and asked him:

“Come on, old boy, bite. That’s right, harder …”

The masters could not believe it; they were sure the Instructor would lose his fingers.

“Never!” he replied to them. “A dog will never bite anyone who truly loves him. Believe me, I’m an old dog-trainer, a hereditary cynologist—if you’ll pardon the high-flown expression. Only man is capable of such a perverse act.”

Of Djulbars he said:

“He’s not really a ravening brute. He has simply been traumatized by the Service.”

The Instructor indeed loved the dogs with all his heart, but he was also slightly mistaken in his judgment of each of them. He regarded them all as traumatized, once they had been through such rigorous training. But the dogs themselves thought otherwise about Djulbars. He undoubtedly would have liked to bite the Instructor, too, but he was afraid that if he did the other dogs would tear him into little pieces.

And this is what the Instructor said one day to Ruslan—looking him straight in the eyes and in a quiet, sad voice:

“I understand his case, and I know just what is this dog’s misfortune. He thinks that the Service is infallible, that the code of the Service is always right. You mustn’t, Ruslan; if you want to survive, understand this: look on the whole business as a game. You’re too serious.”

The Instructor valued Ruslan very highly, even though he did not display the right amount of aggressiveness; in some things Ruslan could do better than Djulbars, and in one respect he was so gifted that even the Instructor could not explain how it was done. This was known as “picking a suspect out of a crowd,” and it was Ruslan’s crowning achievement, in which he had no equals.

This work—difficult but skilled, requiring thought and a minimum of noise and fuss—was what Ruslan had liked best of all. Yet he could not recall it now without feelings of guilt and sin—feelings that were as vague as his recollection
of the man himself who had been the cause of the whole grim business. On appearance alone, Ruslan could not have picked the man out of a crowd of prisoners, yet he sensed that the masters had somehow singled him out—perhaps by the very fact that they seemed to pay him no attention. Indeed, the lack of attention paid to the man was a little too obvious; this was something that would only be noticed by a dog who had been imperceptibly held back when a certain prisoner chanced to step out of line. One or two tugs on the leash were sufficient to accustom Ruslan to treat these particular prisoners with respect. Then one frosty day, when he and his master were freezing with cold at the logging site and had slipped into the mobile guard hut to warm up, Ruslan was amazed to see this same prisoner. He was sitting there, in a place that was strictly off limits to ordinary prisoners, smoking and talking with—of all people!—the Chief Master himself. “Comr’d Cap’n P’mission Tspeak” seemed dissatisfied about something and was giving the prisoner a sharp reprimand to which the latter replied insistently:

“But, Captain, you must put yourself in my position. Don’t you see? Put yourself in my position.”

He said this several times, pressing his hand to his chest, and Ruslan decided that it must be the man’s name. “Put-your-self-in-my-position” then went out in great anxiety, glancing nervously around, and a day or two later the dogs were all taken to look at him—lying a short distance away from the guard hut with a length of steel hawser twisted around his neck. When the man had been alive, Ruslan had never found him in any way memorable, but the sight of him as he lay dead etched itself into the dog’s memory: staring up at the sky with glazed, protruding eyes, a purplish-blue swollen face, one arm twisted behind his back and the other flung out to
the side, the rigid fingers of the hand clawing at the snow. This hand, the face, and the snow around the head were thickly strewn with flakes of coarse, homegrown tobacco.

One after another the dogs approached the body but could only turn away, blinking and whining guiltily. When it was Ruslan’s turn, he had already worked out why they were unable to pick up any scent. They had started from the dead man’s head, first sniffing his horrible pale-purple neck with its twisted furrows caused by the steel noose and its lumps of flayed skin, then sniffing the free ends of the hawser stretched out on either side like an unwound scarf; in doing so the dogs had inhaled nothing but tobacco, after which all their efforts were useless. Ruslan began with the hands. Cautiously approaching the extended hand and backing off in time, he next prodded the stiff body with his muzzle to ask for the dead man to be turned over, then carefully sniffed the other hand, which had been clenched so violently that the nails had dug into the flesh of the palm. Here he saw not only the dark-blue blood from the nails, but also the tiny drops of sweat that had exuded all over the hand before death. They had frozen and grown opaque, like spattered drops of lime, but if they could be slightly thawed out by breathing on them …

Closing his eyes, he exerted all his faculties in an intense effort. The masters were meanwhile devising theories as to who might have done it; each one of them had personal scores to settle with various prisoners and their guesses corresponded closely with those particular antipathies, but they were mainly concerned with guessing at how many men had been involved. Three? Four? In so thinking, they were misleading themselves, because one should always start from one. They had eyes to see, and had noticed the tobacco,
which had been sprinkled for the very purpose of attracting attention and neutralizing the dogs’ sense of smell; but they did not notice, for instance, some tiny scales of tree bark alongside the steel hawser, which was the first thing that Ruslan had spotted. The masters, in general, speculated too much. Ruslan, on the other hand, did not speculate at all, having neither scores to settle nor theories to propound; instead, he simply saw exactly what had happened—in the way that one sees a hallucination or a lucid, coherent dream—and heard the squeak of snow beneath the victim’s boots and the nervous breathing of the murderer lurking in ambush.

In the bluish twilight, “Put-yourself-in-my-position” had come out of the guard hut—the very place where the masters used to give him cigarettes—and as he had walked along this pathway, passing between two fir trees, he had not noticed the looped hawser fastened to one of the trees at a level slightly higher than his head. The other end of this noose was held by the murderer, who had swiftly lowered the heavy steel loop, smooth with frequent use and lubricated with axle grease, onto the shoulders of “Put-yourself-in-my-position,” and turned around; with the free end of the hawser now over his shoulder, the murderer gripped it with both hands, laid the whole weight of his body against it and took, at the most, half a step forward. The noose tightened, and the murderer could feel the hawser twitching—that was the victim’s hands, trying to unfasten the noose with a sudden access of strength brought on by mortal terror and a violent craving for air. Then summoning up all his strength, all his fear and his deadly hatred for the victim who was taking so long to die, the murderer lashed out backward with his boot at the man’s legs and kicked them free from the supporting ground. For a further eternity he stood there, close
to exhaustion from the strain of acting as both hangman and gibbet, while “Put-yourself-in-my-position” croaked and twitched behind his back, still grasping hopelessly at the steel rope. Once or twice, though, he happened by chance to clutch at the murderer’s reefer jacket with the weak, helpless grasp of hands already damp with the sweat of death, a touch so slight that his murderer did not even feel it. But when later the murderer untied the hawser and dragged the strangled corpse away from the tree, when he sprinkled the tobacco and thought how silently and successfully the job had been done, he did not know that along with some minute threads from the hem of his reefer jacket his whole self was held in that clutching fist and in those droplets of frozen sweat; for that hem had rubbed a thousand times against his face and hands, had often covered his feet as they lay freezing at night under a thin blanket—and it was a stroke of luck for Ruslan that a spasm had twisted the victim’s hand behind his back, leaving it underneath the body. The clues were found. Ruslan stepped briskly back and nudged his master’s knee with his nose, which meant, “I don’t promise anything, but I’ll try. Lead me quickly.”

The actual identification of the suspect proved to be astonishingly easy. Any one of the other dogs, who had given up at the very beginning, could have carried it out—if they had merely had the effrontery to try. Ruslan did not even get very close to the crowd of prisoners, who had been rounded up and made to stand on the open ground in front of the camp gates. As soon as they saw the line of masters slowly approaching, headed by a dog straining at the leash, the entire mob retreated with a roar—leaving behind a single man in a black reefer jacket. Hunched up, his hands thrust under his armpits, he fell forward on his face, shouting hysterically:

“No, not the dog! I’ll tell everything. Only don’t let that brute get at me.…”

Ruslan did not savage the man, but merely gave a gentle bite on the hem of his jacket—in the place where the murdered man had snatched at it—and wagged his tail to show that the search was over. For this he received an unprecedented reward—from the hands of the Chief Master himself—and from that day onward he was acknowledged the champion at “picking a suspect out of a crowd.”

Starting from that day of his triumph, there stretched in Ruslan’s memory a broad, straight path cut through the forest, along which Ruslan and his master were escorting the man in the black reefer jacket. The wind was sighing in the tops of the great pine trees, and as their branches touched they let fall armfuls of snow, which scattered like iridescent powder. All was silence and peace, and the man walked the whole way calmly and without hurrying, a spade carried on his shoulder or making zigzags in the snow as he trailed it behind him. Now and again he would whistle a tune.

It was obvious to Ruslan that the man was so overawed by the stillness of the forest that there was no possibility of his making a sudden leap to one side in a dash to escape. Still in silence, they turned aside down a narrow pathway to a clearing that had been blackened and charred by a log fire. In the middle yawned a shallow pit, its brownish-red sides still showing the smooth, semicircular marks made by crowbars and the sharp triangles of a wedge. Here the man spoke for the first time, turning toward Master with an angry white face that bore several tiny little scars on the cheek and forehead. He did not like the pit. When he stepped into it, it only came up to his knees and he was so angry that he spat into it.

“I did it by myself, but I did it for them all,” he said to Master. “They might have shown me some respect.”

“What do you mean—respect?” asked Master.

“I don’t mind about the worms, because the worms get everybody in the end—they’ll get you when your time comes—but I don’t deserve to be dug up and eaten by the wolves. There was nothing about wolves in my sentence.”

Ruslan’s master very much wanted to smoke. He took out his cigarette case, then put it back into the pocket of his white sheepskin jerkin. Even more than a smoke, he wanted the business to be over.

“You mean, you want to make a complaint against your own work team?” said Master. “There’s nothing to discuss about your sentence.”

The man spat again, clambered out of the pit and rammed the spade into the pile of freshly dug earth.

“O.K. But just promise me you’ll stamp it down good and hard afterward. I don’t have any complaints about anybody—it’s just that after knocking off that stool pigeon, I don’t deserve to be buried so shallow that the wolves will come and chew me up. Will you take back my jacket to them? They can draw lots for it. I’ll take it off now to save you the trouble.”

Without replying, Master unslung the submachine gun from his shoulder.

“Why don’t you answer?” asked the man. “Don’t I have any rights at all—even now?”

It was all taking an agonizingly long time. Ruslan was shivering all over and had to clench his teeth to stop himself from howling. Then something went wrong with his master’s gun. Try as he might, he could not push the bolt home, and this man was so hoping that on this one occasion it would jam completely; but Master said: “I’ll fix it right away, don’t
worry”—and he did fix it. He extracted the damaged cartridge, the bolt went home with a click and by mistake the gun fired a single round into the air. It was then that the man embraced Master’s boots. He crawled up on all fours and pressed his face against them so hard that when he looked up there were black smears on his forehead and lips. He smiled a pale, ingratiating smile and spoke quite differently from the way he had spoken before the crack of the shot and the blue puff of bitter, acrid powder-smoke. He said that the people back at camp would have heard the shot, they would think the job was done and now Master could let him go; he would crawl away into the forest and live there like a snake or a rat without seeing another human being for the rest of his days—of which he probably hadn’t many left to live, anyway—and there would only be one person—Master—whom he would consider his brother; he would always pray for him and remember him with gratitude, he would love him more than his mother and father, more than his wife and the children he had never had. Unable to distinguish the words, Ruslan heard more than words: he heard a passionate promise of love, of ultimate true love, the tears of love, and the pounding of blood in the temples—and he felt with horror that he was being filled with an answering love for this man; he believed in his face, with its deep-set, smoldering eyes, in which there burned the fire of pure, unclouded reason. This man did not crave some other, better life that had never existed, but simply the allotted span that is sufficient to every living being on earth.