Faithful Ruslan (16 page)

Coarse and inadequate though human language may be, dogs understand such things—but which of them was in a fit state to behave sensibly and let go? Now and again one of the dogs would raise his muzzle to the cold, infinite sky and howl—not with pain but with anguish at his own sin, at the poverty of a brain that could not cope with madness. Anyone
able to interpret the dogs’ supplication would have found it to be their eternal complaint—an animal’s inability to penetrate the inscrutable workings of the human mind and discern its godlike intentions. For every beast knows how great man is, knows, too, that his greatness extends equally far in the direction of both Good and Evil; but that an animal, though prepared to die for man, cannot follow him all the way to the highest peak of Good nor beyond a certain threshold on the path to Evil—and that on that threshold the animal will stop and rebel.

Who could have imagined that Djulbars would save them all? Ignored by everyone, the only one to have kept calm, he suddenly stood up and stretched pleasurably as though preparing for a fight to defend his supremacy against all his rivals. No one noticed it when he bit through his leash—he was always chewing through it when there was nothing else to bite—but they all saw him trot forward with the loose end of his leash trailing in the snow. He walked right up to the Chief, faced the small, round, black gun-muzzle that was threatening the other dogs, and watched intently with his one and a half eyes to make sure that the Chief did not put his finger on the trigger: a small, scarcely noticeable movement but one that Djulbars recognized perfectly—the Instructor had demonstrated it so many times on the training ground—and that might be the last movement the Chief made in his life. The Chief dared not move his finger, knowing the temperament of this creature Djulbars, whom he had allowed to come so close. His self-confidence was shaken; this, too, Djulbars realized full well, and it was why he now allowed himself to take a small liberty: with his bearlike skull he nudged the black barrel and pushed it slightly upward. Although dumbfounded by
this piece of impertinence, the Chief also approved of it; his face softened, and wiping his forehead with his mitten, he said:

“O.K., let the dogs chew the hose if they want to. There’s plenty of water.”

Then Djulbars, calm as ever, turned and went back to his place.

The dogs’ attack of madness soon passed, and they all began to realize the real nature of this enemy they had attacked. It had punished them, and in a way they had not expected; Ruslan could not recall it even now without a shudder. He vividly felt again how he had choked on the jets of stinging cold water that spurted out of the holes in the hose, how the coat on his stomach—where it was so soft, long and fluffy—had frozen to the water-soaked snow, how he had twitched in pain as he tried to wrench himself free and found that he could not move. What a miserable bunch they were now, with their usually luxuriant coats sodden to the skin, suddenly reduced to such thin-looking, pitiful creatures, tearfully begging for mercy!

The masters used the same stream of hose water to wash them free from the icy surface, and then led them at a run back into the guardhouse, while some of the dogs, who could not even stand, had to be pulled along on sheepskin coats. There they all huddled into one corner, licking themselves and consoling each other for the disastrous incident. The masters pulled them apart, but they crawled back together again, for the law of their kind bade them comfort one another in misfortune and offer each other warmth and dryness in the cold.

There followed a terrible night, when they were led back to their kennels and each was left alone to reflect on his sin.
They could, of course, bark to each other through the thin walls, but this did not help to warm them up and they had nothing more to communicate than mutual recriminations and deathly forebodings. Many of them dreamed of Rex that night; they could even hear his voice, hoarse with cold and wind, as he lamented his solitude outside the wire and called upon them to join him. The older dogs remembered a certain Bairam whom Ruslan had never known, but who, it seems, had trodden that same path even before Rex, while the very oldest dogs recalled the famous Lady (the masters, for some reason, had nicknamed her “Lady Hamilton”) who had been the first of all that ill-starred company; further back than Lady the history of the camp was lost in obscurity.

Next morning the masters came at the usual time and brought food, but they did not touch the dogs. They cleaned out the kennels, shook out the bedding in the corridor and talked in angry voices, grumbling about the Chief Master; some said, “He’s fair, of course, but he’s a brute,” while others disagreed, saying, “He’s a brute, all right, but he’s fair.” Then the Chief himself appeared and ordered the masters to feel the dogs’ noses:

“Any dog with a warm nose can rest. The others are to go on duty. And that brute there is to stick close behind me, to make sure there are no more excesses like yesterday!”

Why did they take them out on duty on such a bitterly cold day? Why did they make them sit freezing in a semicircle around the same hut which, though now quite silent, caused the dogs to have such painful memories of the previous day’s episode? Surely it cannot have been simply to guard the huge box on wheels standing outside the hut, a wagon with high wooden sides that they always saw whenever there were deaths in the camp? Two wretched little horses, their
eyes rheumy with the cold, heads nodding up and down like mechanical hammers, dragged the cart wearily through the camp gates and from hut to hut; then, loaded sometimes to the very top, it would bump away over the ruts and potholes toward the forest. The dogs knew that no one would try to rob or attack this cart or the freight that was carried in it. The cart never needed to be guarded by an escort: in winter it frightened people with the rustling and bony creaking of its cargo, and in the summer heat, when it was always accompanied by a thick swarm of flies, its nauseating stench made you want to run as far away as possible. If Ruslan had been able to put names to smells, he would have said that the smell coming from the cart was the stink of hell. Like all his fellow dogs, he could not accept the idea of death as total extinction, a state where there was absolutely nothing at all and no smells whatsoever. He did, however, have a vague idea of what the dogs’ hell must be like: it was no doubt a huge, dim cellar where all of them, the Bairams and the Rexes, were chained to the wall. Huge hands gripped them by the muzzle, day in and day out they were whipped with leashes, stinging barbs were stuck into their ears and they were given nothing but mustard to eat. His picture of the human hell was rather less distinct, but no doubt it was not much fun there either, especially since people went there stark naked. The clothing of those who died was divided up among the living, and for a long while afterward Ruslan would confuse them with the dead, believing that the latter were still lurking somewhere nearby and might reappear at any moment. As far as he could remember, however, none of them had ever shown up again—they, too, were obviously confined to their cellar for a very long stretch, and there was as much likelihood of seeing them again as of meeting Rex alive and
in the flesh. There was, though, something in common between these two hells—a mysterious, insistent terror and a dull, aching misery that could not be repressed or evaded once you had become aware of that grim secret.

So still and windless was the silence that even the cold could be heard: the crackle of steam issuing from the horses’ nostrils, the crack of horse dung splitting, the creaking and groaning of the cart’s woodwork. Their manes and tails white with hoarfrost, the little horses stood motionless; the driver on the box hunched his head gloomily into his shoulders, as oblivious to the loud clatter behind his back as if the objects being manhandled onto his cart were large, white, freshly sawed logs. Only once did he turn around to see whether they were overloading him today, then muffled himself up again in his black sheepskin coat.

The Chief Master, who alone was pacing up and down inside the ring of dogs and guards, had no need to seem so nervous. He could be satisfied that everything was proceeding calmly and that the dogs were carrying out their duty so patiently, although their rumps were freezing in the snow and their teeth chattering convulsively. Behind them they could sense burning eyes staring out of the little misted-up windows of the other huts; occasionally they could not restrain themselves and turned around—although in such extreme cold, when all smells were deadened, according to their canine understanding nothing could possibly happen. And nothing did happen, except when one of the two men loading the cart thrust himself forward, shook his fist and shouted at the Chief: “You’ll answer for this!” But the other prisoner immediately stopped his mouth with a mitten and pulled him back into the dark interior. The Chief was standing with his back to the hut when this happened, and did not turn around.

All the dogs sat out this miserable spell of duty to the bitter end, as the Chief Master had wanted, and for this, presumably, they were all forgiven. No doubt if Ingus had been sitting there with them he would have sat it out and would have been forgiven, too. They were all very miserable at the absurd way in which Ingus had met his end; even Djulbars, his perpetual rival, could not make sense of it, and was convinced that it was his own fault for not having been sufficiently alert. The person who was most shocked of all, however, was the Instructor. After the dogs’ revolt he walked around as though stunned. He began to confuse the dogs’ names, and would say, for instance, to Baikal or Thunder: “Heel, Ingus!” and was amazed when they failed to obey him. He kept on thinking he could see Ingus everywhere, always seeming to notice him among the crowd, although the dogs had long since told the Instructor that Ingus was lying out there beyond the wire with a piece of canvas still clenched in his teeth. They had been obliged to cut it out of the hose, because Ingus’s “immature” teeth had refused to loosen their grip and the masters did not feel inclined to smash his jaw with a crowbar.

Tired of waiting for his favorite to reappear, the Instructor thought up a game: he himself started to imitate Ingus. He actually developed some of Ingus’s characteristics: he adopted the same dreamy, reflective air and careless behavior, and now when he ran around on all fours he displayed Ingus’s special prancing gait. The Instructor became more and more obsessed with this game. Much oftener than before, he would say, “Attention! I will demonstrate!” and he did it better and better, until one day he put on an amazing act in the guardhouse: when arguing about something with the masters he suddenly dropped on all fours and barked at the
Chief. Still barking, he loped over to the door and pushed it open with his forehead. This made the masters laugh till they cried, but when they had stopped laughing and wanted to go and look for the Instructor—where should they find him but in Ingus’s kennel. There he snarled at them from the doorway, growling and baring his teeth:

“I’m Ingus, don’t you see? I’m Ingus,” he yelled at them, speaking his last words in human language. “I’m not a dog trainer, I’m not a cynologist, I’m not even a man any longer. I’m Ingus! Woof, woof!”

It was then that the dogs for the first time understood
what he was barking about
. The soul of Ingus had taken possession of him—Ingus, who had always longed to break out and away, and was now calling on them to follow him.

“Let’s run away from here!” barked the Instructor-Ingus. “Let’s all escape! This is no sort of life for us!”

The masters tied him up with leashes and left him in the kennel for the night, but this did not quiet him; he made all the dogs restless with his frenzied summons, tearing at their heartstrings with a great, tempting vision of dense forests splashed with sunlight filtering through the branches and heavy with delicious coolness, promising them glades where the grass grew higher than the crown of their heads and the tops of their cocked-up ears, rivers whose water was as pure as tears, air that they would drink rather than breathe, and where the loudest noise in that air was the sleepy buzzing of a bumblebee; there in this promised haven they would live as free animals, inseparable, in one community according to the laws of brotherhood—and never, never, never again would they serve man! The dogs fell asleep and awoke again with a sense of longing, in happy anticipation of the long journey on which they would set off in the morning under
the leadership of the Instructor—for it was spontaneously understood by all that he would be their leader, to which even Djulbars did not object, agreeing to take second place. Next morning, however, they saw the Instructor for the last time in the exercise yard. The masters carried him out, still bound, and tied him firmly into the backseat of a jeep. He continued to bark without cease, so they gagged him by stuffing an old forage cap into his mouth. The dogs sat in front of him, waiting for him to show them what he could do—perhaps he might push out the gag or free himself from the ropes, but he showed them nothing, only staring at them with tears running down his face. The dogs, too, were on the point of weeping; they had not suffered so much since, as dim-eyed, senseless little puppies, they had been torn from their mothers—until now, when a new life had just beckoned to them, when they had discovered a new aspect of the Instructor and loved him for it. Now this hope was dashed, and the only prospect that remained was the dreary, cheerless round of their familiar, everyday life. After that the training ground seemed empty and the dogs felt orphaned. The training ground ceased to be a place of excitement and pleasure, becoming instead a place of cruelty and sour bad temper. The new instructor, who arrived soon afterward, never demonstrated anything to them, but made much use of the whip.…

AH, IT WAS BETTER NOT TO AWAKEN SUCH memories. Sighing noisily, Ruslan moved out of the lamplight onto the dark porch, where he took a long time to settle down, grunting and making the floorboards squeak a great deal before he was finally still, ears attentive to every sound as the world around him quieted down. As the night thickened
into blackness and cold, more and more stars came out, glittering like the eyes of fabulous monsters. While he hated the moon so much that it somehow even smelled of carrion, he felt comforted by these bright, twinkling little lights. He could stare at them for hours, and had noticed an interesting fact about them: if you dozed off and then opened your eyes later, you found that the stars had moved. Thus he was able to observe the passing of time—and all his troubles were reduced to their proper perspective when measured against this celestial clock.