Faithful Ruslan (15 page)

Although it was retentive, Ruslan’s memory was also prone to reorder events into its own capricious sequence—which nevertheless had a sort of logic. Everything good and pleasant was relegated backward to the time when he was a puppy; there, in the cool, twilit storehouse of memory he would save up the sweet marrowbones to which he could return for consolation at moments of stress. Everything that was bad, on the other hand, all the hurts and afflictions, he kept close to the forefront of his mind as though surrounding himself with a crop of nettles ready to sting him at any moment with their ever-fresh venom. Thus in Ruslan’s private chronology, the day of his triumph in picking the suspect out of a crowd was somehow pushed back almost to the dawn of his life, together with the memory of “Put-yourself-in-my-position,” the prisoner who had been strangled by a length of steel hawser; on the other hand, because of its bad associations, he was unable to relate positively to the unfortunate dogs’ revolt, which seemed to have happened only yesterday. But when memories of the revolt did come flooding back with all their smells, sounds and colors, “Put-yourself-in-my-position” came back with them—alive again as he came into the warm guardhouse, blowing on his hands,
to give the masters some alarming news that caused them instantly to throw away their cigarettes and pick up their submachine guns and dog leashes.

The dogs, too, who had grown drowsy and stupefied by the warmth and the delicious odors given off by the masters’ sheepskin coats, leaped to their feet and rushed panting out-of-doors, completely forgetting why they had not been sent out on duty that day. God, how the frost gripped their muzzles with its sharp claws! It pierced their nostrils with red-hot needles, blinded them as it made their eyes water and gave them a dull pain in the forehead, as though they had dived headfirst into a hole in the ice. Ruslan could not remember what became of “Put-yourself-in-my-position” at this point; here his chronology lost sight of the man altogether. Either he had remained in the guardhouse, or perhaps it was he, looking frightened and nervous, who had eased the door open and slipped out to hide in the sentry box; or maybe he had vanished somewhere near the hut, had simply dissolved in the mist, crumbling into icy fragments that were blown away by the blizzard. When they saw the hut itself, the dogs began straining to go into action—whatever sort of work awaited them inside, at least it would be warm!—but the Chief Master, who had led the way, turning around every now and again to rub his red face with his mitten, stopped them all outside the door. Advancing stealthily, he opened the door without letting it creak, and bent forward to listen, raising one earflap of his fur cap.

The entranceway of the hut gave forth a gust of heat and the usual smell, together with a buzzing noise—the same sort of vaguely indignant buzz that arose in the dogs’ quarters when the food came late. Behind the thin inner door some large object could be heard bumping about, hitting the
walls or the floor with a dull thump, mingled with shouts, groans and rapid, angry muttering. It sounded like one of those brawls that humans were prone to start for no good reason, sparked off by a single word in a bad-tempered argument, which escalated furiously and inexorably into a fight, only to cool down as quickly as they had begun, after which all the people would disperse—though sometimes leaving one person lying on the ground clutching his stomach, doubled up in convulsions, or maybe not moving at all.

The Chief Master pushed open the inner doors, flinging them wide enough for a truck to drive through, and stood in the doorway with a visible cloud of cold air swirling up to his waist.

“Shut that door, you son of a bitch, or I’ll smash your head in!” This bestial yell, uttered from the murky depths of the hut, was followed by some heavy object flying through the air and hitting the doorpost right alongside the Chief’s ear.

The Chief Master waited calmly until the noise had died down.

“I see,” he said, rocking back and forth on his heels, hands clasped behind his back. “I see. So we are discussing the fate of the country again, are we?”

The hut was silent, but someone near the door spoke up eagerly:

“Of course we weren’t, Citizen Captain. We wouldn’t dare. We were just discussing things that we’re allowed to talk about in our free time.”

“Aha … But as I was walking past just now, it seemed to me that things were getting a bit heated in here. So I thought perhaps you people ought to be given a little work to do. Otherwise you might get bored.”

Again the hut answered back—with the same voice, this time accompanied by a faint chuckle:

“We’re always ready to work. With pleasure! Only the damn thermometer is showing minus forty-four.”

“Oh, you’ve had a look, have you? I haven’t seen it yet. Funny, but I had the impression it had got a bit warmer.”

“Citizen Captain!” The voice was irrepressible, seemingly ready to go on chattering forever. “Why do we respect you so much? It’s because you have such a nice sense of humor. Come inside, please, so that I can shut the door.”

A vague shadow moved toward the cloud and merged with it, but the Chief pushed the shadow away with his hand.

“Sure, I don’t mind jokes. I’ll even allow debates—when they’re orderly and well-behaved. But if the work suffers, then that’s bad.”

The buzzing started up again in the semidarkness inside the hut, and another voice—hoarse, redolent with sleepy warmth and reluctance to come out into the cold—asked with glum despondency:

“Will you shoot?”

“What d’you mean—‘shoot’?” retorted the Chief in amazement. “Why should I shoot, unless there’s a mutiny in camp? There’s no mutiny.”

“That’s right!” The whole hut sighed with relief. “There’s no mutiny!”

“You see? So why should I shoot? I’d much better make you a skating rink!”

“What sort of skating rink?”

“The usual sort. Never seen a skating rink? Anyone who has a pair of skates can go skating.”

The timid shadow approached again, tried to slip through the doorway and was pushed back by the Chief.

“No, it’s not good enough if just one or two of you come out. I want all of you out, together.”

Silence fell on the hut for a moment, just long enough for someone to cry out in an urgent, pleading voice:

“Come on, fellers, let’s go out. It’s our own fault, after all.”

Immediately the many-tongued brute inside the hut started banging, rumbling and shrieking again:

“Lie down, you son of a bitch, or I’ll kill you!”

“There’s a law against it!”

“The law says you can’t send us out to work when it’s minus forty or below!”

“Everybody lie down … !”

“It’s the law!”

They did not see that a fire hose was already being unreeled from the water tower. Leaning against the crowbar stuck through the middle of the reel, two of the masters pushed it until they were just short of the door of the hut, where they dropped it onto the snow. Two more rushed and straightened out the kinks in the hose, seized the gleaming yellow nozzle and ran with it up to the doorway. The Chief Master moved aside with a glum look on his face, sadly let out a cloud of steam from his mouth and waved his mitten as a signal to someone in the distance. From the water tower came a barely audible rustle; the flattened canvas of the hose started to come alive, to fill and grow round, a gurgling, high-pitched hiss came out of the nozzle and the two masters in the entranceway staggered slightly. A thick blue jet struck the ceiling inside the hut, then moved lower down, sweeping away a man lying on an upper bunk, together with all his belongings, and forced back into the hut a number of timid shadows who tried to run forward through the door. The two masters, jamming down their boot heels to keep a
foothold in the slippery doorway, could hardly control the heavy nozzle as the jet of water sprayed from side to side, striking blows that were as hard and resonant as the blows of a club. A white cloud poured out of the hut above their heads, and along with the hot, stuffy air there came not a scream, not a shriek but a gasping, long-drawn-out sigh, such as a man gives before a long plunge into the water.

Ruslan’s ears were so filled with the sound of that sigh that he hardly heard the windowpanes shatter and the frames crack, and at first he did not realize what the gray, smoking foam was that was crawling out of the windows and onto the snow; he only understood it when the foam began to separate out into men, who struggled to get up while others fell on top of them. The Chief Master raised his hand from behind his back and pointed in their direction, at which the hissing jet was aimed at them in a smoothly curving arc and was held there for a long time before being directed back into the hut. By then the men who had fallen out of the windows no longer attempted to get up but simply twitched feebly as they lay on the snow—and turned white in front of the watching eyes.

Unable to sit still, Ruslan fidgeted and yelped, nervously lifting one paw after the other. As those white spangles encrusted the men’s clothing like chain mail, he seemed to feel them on his own coat, thick, furry and warm despite the ice-cold wind blowing through it. Gradually the white spangles started to turn yellow, which happened to Ruslan whenever he got very angry, until the only thing that he could see clearly through the yellow film was the thick hose wriggling in the snow. As this reptile crept toward his paws, it squirted water out of small holes in its side, and in one place, where the masters had been unable to straighten it out, it was
twisted into a crease that had risen up and was now swaying right in front of Ruslan’s nose, threatening to attack him but always falling back whenever Ruslan made a dart at it.

Luckily for him, there was another dog, younger and rasher, who was the first to lose patience. Ruslan heard a spine-tingling growl, and across the edge of the yellow film there flashed the dog himself—dark gray and slim, body extended in a flying leap. In midair Ingus seized the thing that was threatening Ruslan, sank his teeth into the hose and pressed it down with his paws. The hose immediately began to struggle free, and this infuriated Ingus even more; snarling with frenzy and shaking his head from side to side, he tore at his enemy, water squirting out of his mouth in a rainbow-colored spray. The two masters holding the nozzle shouted and pulled the hose toward them, pulling Ingus with it. At the same time his leash pulled him backward, throttling his slender neck. A haze came over Ingus’s bloodshot eyes, but he would not let go of his prey.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked the Chief Master. He walked slowly over, a demigod with terrible blue eyes and an angry face, holding up the blue vault of heaven with his fur cap. But Ingus was too preoccupied to give him more than a glance. “What’s the matter with him, I say? Has he gone crazy?”

“God knows, Comr’d Cap’n,” said Ingus’s master. He was in despair. He kicked Ingus in the flank. The dog squealed painfully, but would not open his teeth. “Why does he always give trouble? You know what he’s like.…”

“O.K., give it here.” The Chief Master stretched out his hand and one of the masters hastened to give him a crowbar. The Chief frowned with irritation. “No, not that. That’s not what I want.”

He reached instead for the submachine gun. Hurriedly and clumsily Ingus’s master pulled the sling over his head. With a stab of the pain that was always lurking in his consciousness, Ruslan saw at last what happened when a dog was taken outside the wire. The pierced, blued-steel barrel casing was pointed downward, swaying above Ingus’s head as though choosing a spot to thrust itself between the hemispheres of the sloping forehead and the ears that were laid back in fury. The muzzle was not thrust down, but something jerked rapidly inside the barrel casing and an orangered halo flashed out around the slanting black muzzle, while out of Ingus’s head … out of the black-edged, lacerated hole spurted something hot and pink mixed with slivers of white. With a convulsive movement, Ingus stretched himself out with his head at the Chief Master’s feet as though striving at last to lay the chewed hose on his boots.

As his master tried to straighten out the hose, Ingus’s head was wrenched backward with it; there was still life in him—but only in his jaws, clenched in their last bite. His master threw down the hose and straightened up. He watched and the Chief Master and the other masters watched as the thick, gray snake thrashed around, flinging Ingus’s head back and forth across the snow. But no animal could stand by and watch this; Ruslan could not watch it, and he flung himself down alongside Ingus. Even now, remembering how it had all happened, he could feel the plywoodlike firmness of the hose and the icy cold that set his teeth on edge. With a sinking heart he realized the hopelessness of trying to bite through that canvas neck—all he could do was bite some more small holes, from which stinging little jets of water came hissing out—while his ruff, his defenseless ruff stood up on end at the closeness of that black gun-muzzle, from
which retribution was bound to roar out at any moment. And yet each time that he relived this unfortunate episode, he still could not feel that he was wholly guilty. The masters, after all, had done something that even humans should never do to each other, and Ruslan was not the only dog to follow Ingus’s lead: Ruslan’s lone misdemeanor lasted only a moment before the others joined in. Something large, gray and powerful flew over Ruslan, somersaulted and crashed heavily to the ground. Glancing sideways, he saw Baikal, always so placid and obedient; a moment later the cunning Alma flung herself at the hose, then the shaggy jaws of Dick—champion at guarding prisoners!—sank themselves into the hose right beside Ruslan, and in a moment the entire pack was biting and worrying the detested hose. Scorning duty and orders, all of them had cast off the restraints of obedience, and had forgotten their permanent fear of those black-muzzled guns, while the masters were forced to realize that they could only make their dogs obey them as long as the animals did not object too strongly. Right now they were insensible to the furious tugging at their leashes, which almost broke their necks, to the boots kicking at their stomachs and to the fact that the Chief Master himself was angrily waving a submachine gun and shouting at the others to get out of the way so that he could slaughter all these beasts with a single burst of fire—they were all useless now, anyway, and new ones would have to be found!