Faithful Ruslan (14 page)

“What’s the matter with you? You’re not a little kid, are you? Can’t you hear what crap you’re talking?” said Master, attempting to stop the flow. He was standing quite unmoved, in no way afraid that the man might pull him down or grab
his submachine gun; he knew how helpless any prisoner was against him and how swiftly Ruslan would spring to his help. If he had but known that Ruslan was in the grip of a kind of paralysis and could not even have moved from the spot! “You may get away for a while, but sooner or later you’ll be caught and they’ll line both of us together up against a wall. Where could you go? You would eat leaves and lizards for a bit, then after a while you’d have to kill somebody again. That’s the truth, isn’t it? You’re not the first, others have tried it.… So forget it. And get up, don’t torture yourself with any more false hopes. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you, like some others would. Come on, get up, that’s agreed—I’ll do it so it won’t hurt.”

The man stood up and wiped his face hard with his sleeve.

“All right, do your stuff. You wouldn’t even let me live a jackal’s life. You’ll remember that.…”

“I know,” said Master. “I already know everything you’re saying. Haven’t you said enough?”

He did not hurt the man, but the whole way back Ruslan could not stop trembling. He whined and tried to pull free from his collar, longing to go back and dig up with his paws the frozen lumps of earth that were pressing down on that white, unmoving face. He had never before behaved so badly and his master was obliged to give him a cruel whipping with the leash. Perhaps it was from that day on that his master stopped loving him.

Those frozen clods remained in Ruslan’s mind, weighing it down with fear and a sense of guilt, as if he had betrayed his master and disappointed his hopes; he also felt he had somehow revealed that he, Ruslan, was not truly serving as a guard dog but merely pretending—and a dog who did that was likely to be shot without delay, because at any moment he might let the Service down by doing something wrong
or refusing to do what he was told. And even though they escorted many more men into the forest, his master never again trusted Ruslan as completely as before.

In his youth Ruslan had been trained in all the skills for which a dog is born; he went through the course of general obedience-training—simple things like “Sit!” “Lie down!” “Heel!”—had passed his tests brilliantly in tracking, identification and sentry duty, but when he moved on to the highest level of training—escort duty—the Instructor had doubted whether Ruslan would pass his final examination. The test was not taken on the training ground, where there was always someone to correct your mistakes, but on real escort duty, where only one order was ever given: “Guard!” From then on the dog was on his own and had to think for himself. And the object to be guarded was not some storage dump, which would not run away and aroused no feelings in the dog, but it was the most temperamental and valuable of all things—people. The dog must always beware of them and must never feel pity for them; the best attitude to adopt toward them was not so much one of anger as of healthy mistrust. “He’ll be O.K.,” his master had said. “He’ll get used to the work. Ruslan won’t make any mistakes.” And many dogs did make mistakes; many were dismissed as unsuitable and taken away somewhere in a truck—and then only if they were young and might be retrained for some other form of service. Once a dog had served on escort duty, there was only one way to go if he failed—outside the wire.

INGUS DECEIVED EVERYBODY. HE SEEMED SO capable and learned everything so quickly. He captivated the Instructor at his first appearance on the training ground. The Instructor only had time to say, “All right. We will practice
the command ‘Heel!’ ” when Ingus immediately stood up and walked over to him. The Instructor was delighted, but insisted on repeating the exercise from the beginning. Ingus went back to his place and came to heel again on the command.

“Extraordinary!” said the Instructor. “And what about ‘Sit’?”

Ingus sat down, even though no one had pressed on his back.

“Stand up.”

Ingus stood up. The Instructor squatted down in front of him.

“Give me a paw.”

Ingus at once did so.

“Not that one—no one gives their left paw.”

Ingus apologized with a wag of the tail and changed paws. From then on he only held out his right paw.

“I don’t believe it,” said the Instructor. “Such dogs don’t exist.”

He checked Ingus’s record card, to confirm that the animal had not already been through a training course and only knew his name and the command “Place!”

“I thought so,” said the Instructor. “He has, of course, a unique pedigree. Amazingly successful breeding. What parents! I remember his sire, Remus—a dog of the rarest intelligence. And his dam Naida, of course—a four-time champion. He was bred by Kamil Ikramov, a great expert, who knew how to choose good parents for a dog. Obviously their son was being prepared for Karatsupa, hence his name.
^*

And still I say, ‘I don’t believe it.’ ”

He called all the masters together to admire Ingus’s unusual abilities, and asked them if they had seen anything like it before. None of them had ever seen his equal. He asked whether they didn’t think a man was hidden beneath this dog’s skin. The masters did not think so; whatever skin he might put on, no man could conceal himself from them.

“What do I mean by that question?” said the Instructor. “I mean that if such a dog existed in reality, I would not be working here. I would be touring the world with him, and everyone would be amazed at the success achieved by Soviet dog-training, by our humane, progressive methods. Because dogs like this can only be found in our country!”

Ingus listened attentively with his head cocked to one side, as was natural for a young dog, but his eyes were serious beyond his years. From Ingus’s very first day at the training school, people noticed a look of melancholy in those amber eyes.

He grew up, and his fame grew with him. With extraordinary ease he progressed from one phase of training to the next, advancing by leaps and bounds. Lean, elegant and graceful, he flew unerringly along the beam, overcame the barriers and mounted the ladder as though it were child’s play, jumped first time through the “burning window” (a steel frame soaked in gasoline and lit), while in tracking he displayed an excellent “nose” both on the ground and in the air. He also acquitted himself well enough in the training for guard duty, although he was somewhat lacking in aggression and seemed embarrassed by the antics of the fools in gray overalls trying to snatch the rag-stuffed sack given to him to guard. Although Ingus fully realized that the sack was a worthless dummy, no one ever managed to distract his attention from it, sneak up unnoticed or crawl through the
bushes to attack him from behind. He showed that he could see through all their tricks, and even the men in gray overalls felt uncomfortable at his sad, reproachful gaze.

Djulbars began to be seriously alarmed. The acknowledged champion in aggression and mistrust, his ambition was to be first in everything else, even though his nose was mediocre and in picking out a suspect from a crowd he was completely hopeless: whenever he was led up to a group of prisoners, he grew so violently aggressive that he could not tell one man’s scent from another and simply made a grab at the one who was nearest. His attitude was that if a dog could not stand up for himself in a fight, then all his other skills were useless, so he tried to savage any young novice dog who threatened to excel him. Ruslan did not escape being challenged by Djulbars, and he felt the onslaught of that broad chest and that battering ram of a head. Although twice brought to the ground, Ruslan not only refused to let himself be bitten but added yet another scar to Djulbars’s muzzle—which Djulbars took in good part, even wagging his tail to encourage the young fighter. Ingus reacted quite differently: he simply turned aside, exposing his thin neck to the attack with a mocking smile to show that he saw no sense in this horseplay. The old ruffian, of course, sank his teeth into Ingus’s neck without a second thought and would have drawn blood had he not remembered that he was breaking the first rule of a good fight: “bite, but don’t kill”—and stopped in time, before the dogs all went for him at once.

Djulbars, however, was soon appeased: he realized (which the other dogs had noticed already) that Ingus was no threat to him. He was not born to be a champion, despite the ease with which he did everything. He had no real drive, no competitive urge. Instead, his eyes betrayed a certain
boredom, an enigmatic sadness, and his mind seemed preoccupied with thoughts that were his alone. Soon they noticed something else about him: while Ingus might faultlessly carry out an order ten times, his master could never be quite sure that he would obey for the eleventh time. However much they might shout at him or beat him, he would sometimes refuse completely, and nobody could understand why this happened or when to expect it. He would suddenly fall into a kind of stupor, in which he saw nothing and heard nothing, and only the Instructor could bring him out of this state.

The Instructor would go up to Ingus and squat down in front of him:

“What’s the matter, old fellow?”

Ingus would close his eyes, give a faint shiver and whimper slightly.

“Don’t overstrain him,” the Instructor said to the masters. “This is a rare case, but it crops up occasionally. He already knew all this in his mother’s womb before he was born. Now he is simply bored; he could even die with boredom. Let him take a rest. Off you go, Ingus—take a walk.”

Thus Ingus alone was allowed to wander freely about the training ground while all the other dogs trained and trained until they were nearly driven mad. It was not hard to predict the outcome: one day Ingus simply ran away from the training ground—and vanished from the camp altogether.

He was supposed to go over the obstacle course—with his master but without a leash. Together they ran along the beam, bounded over the ditch and the barrier, and dived through the “burning window”; next they were supposed to crawl beneath rows of barbed wire stretched parallel to the ground on pegs—but only Ingus’s master crawled under the
wire, while Ingus himself raced ahead, leaped over a stone wall and galloped away in long, bounding strides across the parade ground. Not even the camp’s perimeter fence stopped him; it was easy enough for a dog to crawl under the wire—but how did he pass through that other invisible, psychological barrier standing ten paces in front of the outer wire and as solid as the pane of glass hit by a bird which tries to fly through a closed window? And what was the matter with the machine gunner, whose orders were to fire at any living creature that violated the No-Go zone?

When the masters finally set off in pursuit of Ingus, he had already crossed the open fields and disappeared into the forest. He might have escaped altogether—he could run faster than all the others and he did not have to drag a master behind him on a leash—but here, too, an inclination to daydream was his downfall. What was he doing in the forest when they found him? He was rolling on his back in the grass, smelling the flowers, watching a bug climb up a stalk and following its flight with longing eyes as though entranced.… He did not even notice when the search party surrounded him with shouting and barking, and the spring clip was fastened to his collar with a click; only when his master began to whip him did Ingus finally come to his senses and look at him—with amazement and pity.

Grave doubts were expressed when the time came for Ingus to be mustered for escort duty. The Instructor did not want to let him go, saying that Ingus’s teeth were not yet fully grown and it would be better to leave him in the training school to demonstrate the exercises to the novice dogs. But the Chief Master noticed that Ingus savaged the dummy (known affectionately as “Ivan Ivanovich”) quite as well as the other dogs, and as for acting as a demonstrator,
the Chief Master pointed out that the Instructor was quite capable of doing this himself—that was what he was paid to do—and no funds were available to feed a supernumerary canine member of the instructing staff. The Chief Master decided that he personally would put Ingus through his tests. Everyone grew nervous, most of all the Instructor, who was very proud of his favorite pupil and wanted him to show up to his best advantage. And something came over Ingus: perhaps because he did not want to disappoint the Instructor or because he was inspired by everyone’s attention being concentrated on him. Whatever the reason may have been, his performance was unique and magnificent on that day. He escorted three prisoners at once; two tried to run away in different directions, but he brought both of them to the ground without allowing them even to raise their heads, and he did not let up until help came and all three were handcuffed. For five whole minutes he was master of the situation; the Chief Master himself timed it with his watch and said afterward to the Instructor:

“You were wrong to doubt me. It’s time for this dog to be working, not sniffing the flowers.”

When Ingus was put on escort duty, however, it became obvious that he did not really want to work. Other dogs had to do his job for him. The column of prisoners went its own way, while Ingus pranced along at a distance as though out for a stroll, ignoring obvious breaches of the regulations. A prisoner might step half a pace out of line, might unclasp his hands from behind his back or exchange a few words with his neighbor in the next rank—and at that very moment something would distract Ingus and he would look away. Yet the masters remembered how Ingus had performed at his final test and how the Chief Master had praised him;
that, presumably, was the reason why Ingus was forgiven for things that would have earned another dog a good whipping with the leash. Only the dogs sensed that he was just phenomenally lucky, and that a real emergency, such as an attempted escape, would mean the end for Ingus.

And so he lived on with his inscrutable dreams or, as the Instructor put it, “the poetry of instinct,” always likely to join Rex at any time. Yet he did not die outside the wire but in the camp, by the doorway of a prison hut—where he died as the instigator of a dogs’ revolt.