Faithful Ruslan (18 page)

From the height of the platform he could see the roofs of the town, spread out like a many-colored scab on the body of the landscape—there, too, was the bell tower of the church surmounted by a cross, which the setting sun always lit up with its last rays. It was at this hour, a time of melancholy and vague, disturbing thoughts, that Ruslan was often overcome with unease; he would begin to whine without cause, to sniff the air compulsively, and no sooner did he lay his head on his paws than he was surrounded by visions. They were strange visions. In all his years in camp they had only come to him in the darkness of his kennel, yet they were not ordinary dreams, because dreams never recurred so frequently and were never so memorable.

Sometimes he saw himself in a broad mountain valley, up to his belly in thick grass, rounding up a herd of sheep. The bluish, pink-tipped mountains were gradually fading into darkness, while a damp wind blew down from them, hinting at impending disaster; the sheep were huddling together and he was calming them by keeping up a low, hoarse, steady barking. Having completed a vast circle around the flock, he went over to a campfire where he sat down as an equal alongside the shepherds and stared long into the flames, unable to tear his gaze away from their mysterious, capricious flickering. The shepherds spoke to him just as they spoke to each other: “Ah, here’s Ruslan.… Take a rest, Ruslan, you must have run yourself off your feet.… Have a bite to eat, Ruslan, we’ve left you your share.…” And he accepted their respect as his due, because they could not manage without him. He would be the first to scent a wolf and would go to meet it as a
sheepdog should—not just by barking to show off his keenness, but head-on with his teeth, feeling behind him the heat of the campfire and the presence of men who would always come to his aid.…

 … In the sultry heat of midday he was running down to a river with a crowd of little barefoot boys; they threw a stick into the water and he swam after it, thrusting aside the dense, still water, and afterward he would lie stretched out as though dead, his eyes closed against the sunlight, while the boys lay prone on their wet stomachs beside him on the sand as they ruffled his coat and prized out a tick that had fastened itself into his hot, drooping ear. Having bathed until they were almost blue with cold, the boys climbed lazily back up the hill while he followed at a distance, satisfied and proud that as long as he was there no harm could come to them—be it from a snake, a charging cow or a rabid dog.

 … One blue, frosty morning in the Siberian taiga, he was floundering through a snowdrift to help his master, who was in trouble; sinking his teeth into the bear’s rump, Ruslan held on with a deathly grip, and when he in turn was in mortal danger his master saved him by dispatching the brute with knife and rifle butt. After he had received his reward of the first slice of meat, dripping with warm blood, they set off home with their heavy prey, both wounded but roughly bandaged up, and both full of love for one another.…

In all these visions Ruslan was aware of his love—for the shepherds in their shaggy black sheepskin hats, for the little boys, and for that slit-eyed, flat-faced Siberian hunter.

Where, though, had he seen them, whence did those visions come? At no time in his life until this spring had he ever seen mountains, or sheep, or a river shaded by weeping birches, or even any other animal larger than a cat. The
only things of which he had direct experience were regular rows of huts, barbed wire, machine guns atop watchtowers and his master’s left boot. Perhaps these visions, emerging unbidden from the deepest recesses of his memory, had been handed down to him by his ancestors—wolfhounds of the steppe, Eskimo trappers’ dogs, shaggy-haired sheepdogs of the mountain valleys—who were his ultimate begetters and who, together with his stature, his strength and his courage, had also bequeathed to him everything that they learned in their lives. Why, though, should it be his lot to be troubled and tormented by other lives that he had not lived through? Or was he merely a link in an endless chain, and these disturbing visions were not destined for him but for the puppies that had been born to him or were yet to be born?

These visions, however, also gave him pleasure; he carefully cherished them in his heart, fearing to upset their flow, and amid the trials of his daily life he savored in advance the moment when he would be alone with those live pictures that so delighted him. At times he felt it was all happening to him in some past time—a time before he came to the camp, before the breeding kennels, before he was even conscious of his own existence—and he would dream about it as if it were a part of his own life of which he could be justly proud. Yet he sometimes also dreamed about a future that one day would undoubtedly come to pass, and these simple reveries brightened his life, imbuing it with a higher significance. These were the visions that kept him going: it was thanks to them that he did not fly off the handle with frustration, did not chew his own paw with boredom, did not starve himself and had only once placed himself in danger from his masters’ bullets—which could have happened a hundred times
to him, the son and grandson of sheepdogs whom fate had chosen for the role of herding two-legged sheep.

His master, who knew Ruslan well and knew his disposition and abilities, had never managed to fathom the chief riddle of his character, the secret held in his heart of hearts that Ruslan would not have dreamed of telling him even had he been able to. When the Instructor had said that the Service wasn’t always right and that Ruslan should treat the whole thing as a game, he had come nearer to the truth, but only halfway. For the whole truth and the whole answer to the riddle of Ruslan’s character lay not in his believing that the rules of the Service might in some way or another be wrong, but in that he did not regard his sheep as being
guilty
of anything, as did the Corporal and the other masters.

Certainly all his training told him that those people divided from him by barbed wire were wicked, hostile and bad; he was also used to hearing them called “sons of bitches,” “swine,” “bastards” and “fascists,” and the whistling, hissing and roaring sounds made by these words were enough to make his hackles rise and a growl to start rattling in his throat. He well remembered, too, how when he was little more than a puppy these people had given him mustard to eat, had stung his ear with a needle, had fired at him with a big, stupid pistol, and had thrashed him across the back with a bamboo cane. They had, in fact, made his youthful days a misery and he had longed only to be grown up and get his own back. Yet when he did grow up and he could have brought any of them to the ground, he somehow never managed to find his tormentors among the crowd of prisoners—and he only wanted to find precisely those whom he remembered as having done him harm. Although similar to those particular villains, the other prisoners aroused his
ire to a much lesser degree, and they were such cretins that his reactions to them gradually cooled off; try as he might to whip up his bad temper by recalling evil memories, his attitude became more and more one of astonishment as he realized just how stupid and pathetic their nasty little tricks really were, simply unworthy of the biped species. One of them tweaked your tail, while another snatched your food from under your nose—why, he wondered? Because they wanted to eat the food themselves? If so, he could have understood it.… But he had already begun to guess that they were not quite right in the head and that perhaps the masters had good reason to regard them as less than human. So what else could you expect of these poor, dim-witted creatures? How could you hate them? They were rather to be despised—because of their ceaseless squabbling, because of their fear of each other, because of never being satisfied with anything—and because they nevertheless submitted to intolerable treatment; because even at the very edge of the grave they lacked the spirit to fling themselves at their executioner’s throat. But did Ruslan actually pity them at those moments when they meekly allowed themselves to be tormented or killed? To find the answer to that question, ask a sheepdog who has witnessed the slaughter of one of the sheep he has been so carefully guarding. He no doubt finds the sight depressing, but he does not love his master any the less for it. After all, the sheep never object—they hold out their heads with such enlightened resignation, such gentle weariness, such sublime sadness in their eyes as they offer their throats to the knife.…

Did all the other dogs share Ruslan’s feelings in this? He did not know. When the whole pack of dogs is zealously serving the common cause, they are unlikely to be frank on
such matters. Perhaps Djulbars, the fiercest of the fierce, if given the chance, would no doubt have cheerfully bitten a prisoner to death. Yet would he? Who knows? … After the dogs’ revolt he had been separated from all the others and permanently led around on a steel chain—the most glorious reward that Djulbars could have wanted! Now this fettered giant took every possible opportunity to shake his head, making the chain ring like a peal of bells as an audible reminder of his special status. Strangely enough, however, either because he had mellowed or because he had attained the ultimate, incontestable distinction, he somehow stopped showing his notorious bad temper. Indeed, why should he bother to wear himself out with ranting and roaring, now that the sound of his chain spoke volumes for his reputation?

Of course there were moments when the dogs loathed their human flock and feared them almost to the point of panic. This happened in the morning, when the main gates of the camp were opened and the camp guard handed over the column of prisoners to the outside escort squad. Seized by a nervous tremor, the dogs would grow hysterical, barking themselves hoarse. After all, they were only a tiny handful against this huge, hostile mob, which could easily have scattered and run in all directions—in the open fields or on the path through the forest. “Escape, escape!”—the thought was stamped out in the rhythm of their marching feet, exuded in the sweaty reek of their pants and armpits and it hovered over the column like a menacing cloud; awareness of it charged every hair on Ruslan’s body with electricity until his coat was ready to crackle with sparks. Any moment now it might happen, at any moment they might break out in all directions—and he might do something wrong, make some fatal blunder. Gradually, though, the masters’ calmness
transmitted itself to the dogs; they were superior beings, and although they lacked a sense of smell, they knew everything in advance—so nothing would happen, or at least nothing that could not be kept under control. Sure enough, the smell that signaled the prisoners’ urge to escape was soon dissipated, to be replaced by another scent, at first barely detectable, but gradually thickening and growing in pungency—the garlicky smell of fear. It seemed to come from low down, from legs that were beginning to stumble, refusing to run, refusing to carry bodies weakened and fettered by indecision. Ruslan felt relief in his heart, the dogs exchanged cheerful glances, letting their long tongues loll out, making no effort to conceal that they were panting from heat induced by nervous tension—the danger was past! It was just that these sick people had once again been deluding themselves with their invented notions of some kind of better life; it would soon pass—by evening, when work was over, there would be no more thoughts of escape and their only wish would be to get back into the warmth. Yet there was no end to the trials and tribulations that they caused their long-suffering nurses, armed with submachine guns, and their four-footed auxiliaries.

Rare were the patients who recovered, although on occasion Ruslan had noticed how they looked when they were discharged from this sanitarium: subdued, but emanating a steady aura of suppressed excitement. They left their ill will and rebelliousness behind them at the gate and always gave a weak smile as they made the same farewell remark, like a password, to the sentry:

“Here’s hoping we never meet again!”

“So long!” came back the reply, as abrupt and clear-cut as a command, expressing certainty that the departing patient’s
disease would never recur. “Keep on the straight and narrow, and you’ll be O.K.!”

And yet—just now, when an increasing number of patients were being cured, arousing hope that the inmates might abandon their unruliness, their fights and their stupid delusions and turn into a body of quiet, sensible people—they had all suddenly escaped at once. The thought of their perfidy no longer angered Ruslan; he merely pitied them for behaving so irrationally and for being unable to realize where they were truly well off. He, after all, had nothing but happy memories of the camp, and having now spent some time “outside,” he could make some comparisons between the two. In the camp people had not been coldly indifferent to one another, but always kept both eyes on their neighbors’ doings; what was more, a human being was regarded as something of the greatest value—of greater worth, in fact, than they knew—and that value had to be protected from the man himself by punishing him, wounding him and beating him if he tried to waste it by escaping. For there really is such a thing as being cruel to be kind: after all, they cut down the masts of a ship when this is essential to save it, and a surgeon has to slice up our body in order to cure it. Ruslan, too, had suffered—even to the point of bloodletting—in the harsh service of love; he had done his duty to that service day in and day out without respite, and in consequence it now seemed to him all the sweeter.

THE TRAINS, HOWEVER, WERE STILL AN UNCEASING disappointment to him—and at some point even the most ardent faith will burn itself out. If we try and correlate the long, drab, boring years of our human existence with the short and infinitely more eventful life span of a dog, then a
true equivalent of the time Ruslan spent waiting for the Service to return would not be one winter and one spring, but perhaps four or five of our winters and springs. Hunting, for instance, very rapidly became an essential part of his life—he pursued it with a passionate intensity amounting almost to madness. In the twilit forest, with its voices and smells, he became a different creature, a stranger even to himself; and who knows? If it had ever occurred to the Shabby Man to pick up a gun one day and follow Ruslan into the forest, perhaps everything would have turned out differently between the prisoner and his canine escort: there in the woods, where the clumsy farce that we call life begins to seem so ridiculous, they might have abandoned those roles and become simply Man and Dog, in large degree equal to one another. But either because the Shabby Man never thought of it or because he had no gun, he just went on building his interminable dresser and showed no intention of changing his relationship with his escort. At about the same time, a longing of another, more intimate nature seized Ruslan with an unexpected, long-forgotten intensity—he sought out Alma and induced her to go hunting with him. Alma went with him as far as the edge of the forest, but there she stopped and turned back, for she had her own responsibilities now—her puppies, fathered by the mongrel with white-ringed eyes. If she had not had this commitment to keep her in the town, then perhaps the forest might have swallowed them both up and kept them forever.