Faithful Ruslan (19 page)

All this is only guesswork. But if we had met Ruslan returning from the forest, coming down the middle of the road at a steady, swinging trot, we would have seen in him the mature perfection of a magnificent animal. It was obvious, too, from the glint in his yellow eyes that he knew himself to be in
good shape, that he was proudly aware of the well-fleshed solidity of his paws, of the gleamingly healthy coat on his chest, and of how closely his collar now fitted his neck. When he entered the yard—with light and springy step, smelling of the forest, the earth and the blood of his prey—his hot breath terrified Stiura’s little dog Treasure, who bolted under the porch, genuinely afraid that Ruslan’s hunting activities might be continued in the yard with himself as the victim. He need not have worried: despite all the differences between them, Ruslan recognized Treasure as one of the same species, and he was forbidden by the law of his nature from killing his own kind—the favorite occupation of bipeds, so proud of their conquest of nature. To be more exact, due to his proud independence and preoccupation with his responsible job, there was no room in Ruslan’s mental horizon for Treasure and his petty concerns. It never occurred to Ruslan that he might in any way be making Treasure’s life more difficult—until Treasure himself pointed it out to him.

Stiura fed her chickens and went back indoors, leaving the door of the hen coop open. Ruslan heard the birds cackling and their gentle, sleepy murmur, and moved slowly toward the sound. He harbored no sinful intentions, but this particular breed of game was delicious to eat, as he had discovered when hunting wood grouse and heath hen. To his surprise, however, something suddenly blocked his path. He stopped and gazed in astonishment at the strange, ridiculous creature that said “Grrrrr” and bared its little teeth at him—at the same time wagging its tail and trembling in mortal terror. Weeping, Treasure implored him not to go any farther, and threatened him—but how? By telling Ruslan that he could only get into the hen coop over Treasure’s dead body. This, of course, was not necessarily so: Ruslan would
have simply flung him aside with a sweep of his paw, but he stopped all the same, hung his head in deep thought—and went back to where he had been lying. Perhaps he had reflected that there was such a thing as duty, for he had once been a sentry himself and could understand it when another dog had the same task, even when that other dog was so insignificant in appearance.

Treasure barely survived the experience. He flopped on his stomach, closed his eyes and took a long time to get his breath back, as though after an exhausting run. It was only from that moment onward that Ruslan really looked at Treasure, and he was amazed at the hellish difficulties of the little dog’s existence, at the countless tricks of cunning and, indeed, the courage that life demanded of him. For Treasure lived in a land where a love of animals is sometimes expressed with the aid of sticks, stones and kicks, and in which he had about as many chances of surviving in one piece as there were centimeters in his height. Despite this, he was not just a nonentity who hastened to lick the hand that beat him; never once did he react by wagging his tail when a human threw something at him, but barked furiously and “chased” the offender at least to the corner of the street, although he never dared to go any closer and attack. The fact was that he had many qualities in which he would have measured up well to some of Ruslan’s former comrades, and in some cases might have proved superior to them.

Ruslan saw his fellow guard dogs less and less, but he did not have to meet them to learn their news: the dogs’ newspaper is written in the air and printed on lampposts and fences, and there was no end to the trivia and bitchy gossip to be read in it! Dick had turned to thieving again and had been beaten with the axle pin of a wheelbarrow used
for carting manure, while the blinded Asa felt no shame in begging outside the bakery. Baikal had fixed himself a nice job in the meat department of a delicatessen, but if any other dog showed his nose inside the store, Baikal would tear him to pieces … and so on and so forth. At first their petty squabbling infuriated Ruslan and drove him to despair, but in time he ceased to react to it. Their behavior was really quite natural and explicable in canine terms. The fact was that however they might strut around and boast about how useful they were in their new jobs, in reality they did these jobs thoroughly badly. And they weren’t such fools as not to realize this. Their new masters kept them because they looked fierce, because of the metal in their voices, for the crystal-clear look in their eyes and their readiness to attack anyone when ordered—the only trouble with them was that to do anything they needed to be given an order, whereas the insignificant-looking Treasure, with his yapping voice, knew quite well what to do without having to be told. The guard dogs, for instance, only acknowledged one master and that had to be a man—his wife and family could not even come near the dog—whereas Treasure, although he acknowledged Stiura to be his mistress, was not loath to serve the Shabby Man, too, as long as he had some influence in the household. Treasure tactfully pretended not to notice any of the men who had lived with Stiura before the Shabby Man; he could also distinguish—better even than Stiura herself—between those women who were her true friends and those who were her covert enemies: each one was welcomed with the proper greeting due to her, or was not greeted at all; he could tell the difference between evasive debtors and importunate creditors—the former were to be enticed into the yard by cheerful, friendly yapping, while the latter were to be ignored at
all costs. No one had ever explained all this to Treasure; he was simply doing what came naturally to him. All the former guard dogs would devour chicks without a twinge of conscience, and only after getting beaten did they understand it was a sin and never looked at the hen coop again; Treasure, on the other hand, though he might cast longing glances at the birds, never harmed a single chick, because he realized he would be the first to be suspected. Knowing that honesty was the best policy, he also knew that honesty was not enough—you had to be above suspicion. He understood that if you were unexpectedly allowed indoors, you might equally unexpectedly be chased out again; therefore you must neither loll around and outstay your welcome nor scratch your fleas when there was company present, and if the itching grew unbearable, you should start barking and run out-of-doors as if you had heard something suspicious. Treasure had learned his lessons in the school of life, where he had been thrashed and scolded, and frightened out of his wits by having tin cans tied to his tail. The experience had been tough and at times terrifying, but on the other hand it was his own, directly acquired experience; Treasure had never borrowed his intelligence from anyone else, had never been misled by the kind of training that humans dispensed purely for
their
advantage, and as a result he had kept his self-respect, his common sense, his equable temperament and an unfeigned sympathy for all the other mutts and underdogs of this world. He was a gossip and a braggart—none worse—but at the same time, he would not have dreamed of keeping it a secret if he knew where there was a tasty bit of food to be found, for instance. Yet Ruslan had never invited anyone except Alma to join his hunting expeditions. They, like all guard dogs, were used to always being given enough food and they had never had to
share a feeding bowl—which, although it is upsetting to a dog at first, is a good lesson in solidarity.

Inscrutable are the ways of our four-footed friends, and it was by no means unlikely that if Ruslan had lived here for another summer he would have learned a great deal that he had never suspected during his isolated life in the Service, and he might well have woken up one morning to feel himself completely at home with this yard, this town, with the Shabby Man and Stiura. If Stiura, too, had persevered in her attempts to feed him with hot soup and bones, she might, no doubt, have been successful. He could not, after all, have kept up his suspicious attitude forever, since he might at long last have noticed that her broth caused Treasure no harm whatever.

Inscrutable, too, are our human ways. One day the two chatterboxes, who usually told the Shabby Man that his letter must be on the way, stopped saying that and instead handed him across the counter a well-thumbed, dirty-white triangle of paper. Ruslan’s prisoner took it cautiously in both hands as though it contained something that might blow up in his face; Ruslan himself had learned a lot about such practical jokes in the training exercises to teach the dogs to be wary of inedible objects. Out on the street, the little triangle was unfolded into a tattered sheet; there was nothing terrible inside it, but it had an astonishing effect on the Shabby Man—he seemed to crumple up, and collapsed onto the step.

“Well I’m damned!” he said to Ruslan, who could see that, for all his shock, the Shabby Man’s eyes had lit up. “You’d never believe it …”

What was it that could transform these dimwits so suddenly? You could shout and bark at them as much as you liked and they wouldn’t move; perhaps it would have been more effective to give them each a scrap of paper covered in
mauve squiggles, because this seemed a sure way to make them laugh and sob, bite their lips and slap their knees and then to display an unheard-of burst of energy. By all the rules—and for Ruslan anything repeated more than once became a rule—the prisoner should have stood up from that step, rushed straight to the station buffet and gulped down yellow liquid until he started to hiccup; yet instead he set off for his work site—and fast!—where he performed absolute miracles of conscientious hard work: the planks of wood flew out as he prized them loose, he did not even stop working to smoke, and when it was time to go home he positively galloped along the railroad ties with a huge bundle on his shoulder, singing a cheerful new song in time to his bounding stride:

Now this was the sort of prisoner guard dogs only dreamed of—if only all prisoners were like this, life would be pure joy! Unfortunately their daily journeys were soon to come to an end. Twice more they went out and brought back a couple of good armfuls, after which the Shabby Man
stayed firmly at home and started working on some mysterious task, which it was impossible to inspect because of the disgusting smell that came wafting out of the living room—a sickly, intoxicating reek that made your eyes smart and tickled your throat. Stiura flung open all the windows, so that the stench flooded out into the yard. Treasure sneezed and his eyes watered as he ran away to breathe more freely in someone else’s yard, but Ruslan preferred to shift his post to the other side of the street. There were, of course, areas of the yard that were hidden to him from there, and under cover of that stink the prisoner might easily slip over the fence, but fortunately he always gave himself away by his voice.

Alone in the house from early morning, he could be heard bleating, grunting, groaning and asking himself threatening questions: “Who did that? I’m asking you—who primed that panel? So you won’t own up, you rat? You should have your hands chopped off!” At other times, obviously satisfied, he would sing in a quavering, incredibly unpleasant tenor voice: “ ‘Your wife, you see, has two legs, like a proper woman should!’ …” When Stiura came home from work, they immediately started shouting at each other:

“How many coats are you putting on? Is that the tenth—or the fifteenth? Stop it, throw the filthy muck away, we can’t breathe in here!”

“You’ll see, Stiura!” he shouted triumphantly. “You’ll see: you and I will rot away in our graves, but this dresser will last forever when I’ve finished French-polishing it—so my old bones won’t need to feel ashamed!”

Later in the evening the two would fall into their customary silence; they liked to stand for a long time side by side on the porch, leaning on the railing, occasionally exchanging a few fragmentary words that died away into whispers, like a
pair of conspirators. These two were up to something—and Ruslan racked his brains to guess what it might be.

Then one day he had a chance to approach and learn what they were planning. The Shabby Man’s great work had been completed in a positive landslide of furious, lastminute activity, and he now sat there looking like a human fragment of that landslide—worn out but happy, with a pale, pinched face, slowly kneading a cigarette between his sticky fingers; under the torn collar of his shirt, stained reddish-brown, could be seen his sweaty, protruding collarbones. Her hand laid firmly on his shoulder, Stiura towered over him—majestic but a little sad, with a strange moist gleam in her eyes. She was wearing a smart blue dress, which Ruslan had never seen before, with short sleeves and trimmed with lace across the bust. The dress was too tight for her, and now and again she would pull it down and wriggle her shoulders. Stiura was also exuding a powerful smell of flowers.

“Still alive, eh, Ruslan?” asked the Shabby Man, as though Ruslan might not have survived the stench of that disgusting liquid. “Like it or not, it’s time for you and me to say goodbye. I’m taking the train tomorrow—whoo-whoo! … Hey, maybe you could come with me? Don’t suppose they’ll ask you for a ticket. It’s a long trip, to somewhere you’ve never been before. In three days you’ll see more than you’ve ever seen in your life. How do you like the idea?”

As he said it, though, the Shabby Man was not seeing the train or the journey in his mind’s eye, therefore Ruslan did not see it either, and so to the dog his prisoner’s words remained no more than an empty string of meaningless sounds.

“The very idea!” said Stiura. “Taking a dog with you! And you don’t even know whose he is.”

“Don’t know whose he is? He belongs to the government,
that’s who. I’ll take him home as a sort of souvenir. Other people brought back souvenirs from the war, accordions and stuff like that, so I don’t see why an ex-con shouldn’t bring back a trophy from the camps. Like to come, eh, Ruslan?” A crafty thought had crept into his mind, which was as yet unclouded with drink. “When we get home, we’ll give people a treat, and show them how you and I used to walk together, with you guarding me. We’ll show them just how we passed the time all those years. The folks back home have never seen anything like it in their lives—if I described it to them in the bathhouse they’d never believe me, they’d throw their washtubs at me. You must escort me strictly according to regulations: if I take one pace to right or left, you must growl; don’t make any allowances—and if I make a false move, you can grab me by the leg.”