Faithful Ruslan (20 page)

This time the Shabby Man could see a very clear mental picture of it as he described himself and Ruslan walking together as prisoner and escort. As a result, Ruslan, too, was able to envisage it—and at last he thought he realized what was weighing on his prisoner’s mind: he was longing to get back to the old times. Then Stiura witnessed something she thought she would never see: head lowered and wagging his tail, Ruslan came up to the Shabby Man and nuzzled his knee with his forehead. He pressed himself to that threadbare trouser-leg just as he used to rub against his master’s greatcoat when he wanted to remind him that he was by his side and ever ready to come to his aid; but now he was also making a confession and a plea—which as a rule no guard dog would dream of making to anyone but his master: “I’m tired of waiting, too, but be patient. Be patient!”

“Look, he’s beginning to get used to you!” said Stiura in amazement.

“Why not—he’s a living creature, isn’t he? It can’t be easy for him to say goodbye. He must have some idea of what’s happening. That animal has a good head on his shoulders. If I were you, I shouldn’t kick him out after I’ve gone; he’s a clever dog and he can still be retrained. Then when I come back—just see how he welcomes me.”

His hand lay on Ruslan’s closed eyes, smelling so strongly of that horrible, pungent stuff that it made Ruslan dizzy. This was too much of a liberty, even for a model prisoner, so Ruslan slipped away, went out and lay down outside the gate. He was, however, still full of kind thoughts for his prisoner, and he reproached himself for his absurd suspicions. He had been watching over this lost sheep for so long—and all the time the creature had been dreaming only of how he might return to the flock!

So for the whole of the next day Ruslan lifted his surveillance over the Shabby Man; finally the zealous guard allowed himself a completely free day. He went on a long and satisfying hunt, wore himself out running through the forest and lay in the sun to his heart’s content, occasionally glancing down from a hilltop with a proprietorial air at the town spread out below: somewhere down there, in one of those cozy little houses, his chief quarry, his priceless treasure, was obediently guarding itself. The clock mechanism in his brain, however, was not switched off; it was still counting out Ruslan’s free time, and at the uneasy hour before sunset, inexorable as ever, it gave Ruslan a faint signal, a scarcely perceptible jolt to the heart. Something was amiss; things were too good to be true.

As he came down the hill, he tried to think what might have caused his memory to give him a warning. Was it the unfamiliar blue color of Stiura’s dress? Her sad, wet-eyed
look of farewell? Yes, it was probably that tearful look—except that he now realized it had been a look not of farewell but of deception. For some reason, humans always felt a sort of remorse before committing some act of deceit or treachery. Ruslan remembered noticing a particular sadness in the eyes of prisoners whom the very next day he had had to chase when they attempted to escape: the villains had lulled him with that sad, caressing look in their eyes!

He did not have to turn off the main street, because their trail came out of an alley and down the main street toward the station. They had only recently passed that way, because the bitter reek of his polishing fluid and her strong flower scent had not had time to dissipate. They were obviously trying to cover their tracks with these smells—a clever plan, because they were stronger than tobacco. They had, however, made one mistake that would ensure that they did not get far: Stiura had put on new shoes, which like her dress were too tight for her, so that she found walking extremely difficult, and despite his nervous haste the Shabby Man had shortened his stride to keep pace with her.

He caught up with them at the very edge of the platform, and there much of his zeal for the pursuit faded away. He had expected to find them looking guilty and glancing around in fear, but instead they were just sitting hunched up and almost motionless on a bench. When Ruslan arrived, panting, they did not even notice him. Hidden from their view by a lamppost, he slunk along a silver-painted, wire-mesh fence and lay down behind their bench. From this position he could only see their feet—the Shabby Man was holding a tightly packed army duffel bag between his legs, while Stiura had kicked off her shoes and was wriggling her toes. He could, however, hear every sigh they uttered, even the slight
hoarseness in their voices—and he quickly realized that they were not planning to escape together.

“Don’t waste money on a telegram,” she said. “I hate telegrams, anyway. But write me a letter with all the news. Force yourself.”

“I’ll write as soon as I arrive.”

“Why write so soon? Look around a bit and find your family first. You may not even find them—anything can happen. And if you do find them, you won’t be thinking much about me. But at least write before the month is out; otherwise I’ll start thinking you’ve fallen under a streetcar.”

“Sure, I’ll write, I’ll write,” he said dully. “And you won’t mope, O.K.?”

“I’ll try not to. Anyway, there won’t be much time to spare for moping. Didn’t I tell you? We’ve been officially notified that our whole office is being moved to where your camp used to be. There’s to be a big expansion program there. As of next month, they’re going to run a bus service out to the old camp. So what with traveling back and forth every day and straightening up the yard a bit, I soon won’t have much time on my hands. So if you come back and by any chance I’m not at home, you’ll know where to find me.”

As he listened he was scraping his shoe over the asphalt, and probably staring down at it.

“Stiura,” he interrupted her, “I was lying, you know, when I told you I’d had a dream.”

“What dream?”

“I said I’d dreamed that all my family were alive and were waiting for me. But there was no dream. I got a letter.”

She froze into stillness and stopped wriggling her toes.

“Remember I told you I met a man in a transit prison who used to be a neighbor of mine? We traveled here
together, all the way in the same railroad car. And we were in the camp together almost till the end—they released him six months earlier, because he had a disability. I’m not sure which of us was the luckier, though. His job was no use to him in the camps—he used to be a molder in a cast-iron foundry, and there’s no call for that sort of work in prison. He spent the whole of his stretch on general laboring, did nothing but stack lumber all the time and got a hernia for his pains. I was put on lighter work ’cause I’m a cabinetmaker by trade. Sometimes the officers needed a piece of furniture made, and I can do upholstery, too—so I got by without knocking myself out. Never did a decent job of work for them, though—any old crap was good enough for those bastards!”

“Forget about it. You’ve got to start living again, instead of raking up the past. Well, what about this neighbor of yours?”

“Well, you see, I wrote to him—and I got a reply.”

“The hell you did!” she said, deeply offended. “Why keep it secret, then? I’m not your enemy, am I? You should have told me right away you’d had a letter. Getting a letter makes it much better—it means you know for certain you won’t be making the trip for nothing.”

“No, I don’t know that. I told him he wasn’t to say I was alive, but just to drop a few hints, like: ‘It does happen, you know,’ and, ‘Sometimes they do come back.’ Well, he did as I told him. And they moaned and looked all upset.”

“Of course they did! They were so excited, so thrilled.”

“No, he didn’t exactly say they were thrilled in his letter. But he did warn me that my eldest girl was studying at the university.”

“Is she such a big girl? Well, congratulations. But what’s bad about it? Why did you say he ‘
warned
’ you?”

“Well, you know how students have to fill out a questionnaire before they can get into the university? And you have to say who your father is, where he works and so on. She can’t say I’ve been in a prison camp since 1946—they’d never let her in. Any sensible kid would write, ‘Father—Killed on active service at the front’—wouldn’t she? And for all she knows, that’s true. So it’s going to look a bit funny if I suddenly show up as large as life. See what I mean? Mind you, I don’t know for sure what she
did
say about me on her questionnaire. My neighbor couldn’t find out—or rather, they wouldn’t tell him.”

“Those questionnaires aren’t so important nowadays. They gave us a talk about it the other day at the office. They check them out, but they’re not nearly so tough about them as they used to be. So don’t worry. Tell me—what sort of welcome did your friend get when he came home?”

“Most of his letter was about himself. It was all in camp slang—I couldn’t repeat it in front of a lady. It wasn’t exactly a happy homecoming.”

“Pigs! That’s what they are—pigs!”

He gave a long-drawn-out sigh.

“I can understand their feelings, though. There they are, struggling with God knows how many problems already, and suddenly he turns up on the doorstep—an ex-con with a hernia. I don’t know which of those two is worse. But it made me think: I won’t go and drop on my family straight away, out of the blue. I’ll lay low for a bit, and watch to see how they’re getting on, without showing myself. And I’ll call on my neighbor and talk things over with him.”

“Much good his advice will be! I’m not stupid, you know, and I had my reasons when I asked you what sort of a welcome he got. He’s frightening you on purpose, so that he’ll
have you for company. He has his own problems—it’s not your job to sort them out. Look after yourself.”

“No, that’s how it used to be: to each his own. But now, since he and I have been in the camps together, we share our troubles and help each other out; it’s different for everyone else—they can cope; they didn’t go through what we went through.”

From what was said, Ruslan deduced that the Shabby Man was already repenting of his attempt to escape, and would probably have turned back by now if she had not been egging him on—and how right Ruslan himself had been to resist the temptation of her bowls of soup! But either she was not being very successful in urging him to go or she did not really want him to go either. Whatever the reason was, the Shabby Man felt himself overcome by a familiar dread and growing weaker by the minute: the nervous movements of his shoe gave him away.

“If only it had happened earlier, Stiura! If only I’d known a bit earlier.… It’s funny: when I got the letter, I was thrilled, but then I realized that I’d put so much of myself into making a life here … into that dresser, for instance.”

“What on earth’s the dresser got to do with it? To hell with the damn thing.…”

“No, I don’t mean that. Earlier still.”

“Earlier still? You mean when you were released? I’m sorry, but if you had turned up then and said, ‘Any work you need doing, ma’am?’ I’d have bawled you out and said, ‘Shove off! There’s all the money you need for your ticket. If you drink it all, don’t bother to come back ’cause I’ll kill you with the poker!’ ”

“When I said ‘earlier still,’ I meant I should have gone over the wall when I was halfway through my stretch. People
did it, you know. Not all of them came back and not all of them got caught.”

“I’ll bet you’d have been caught.”

“It wasn’t getting caught that worried me—it was the thought of not making it all the way. The thought of dying in vain, like some wild animal in the forest. No one could make it home in one go, you had to make a stopover somewhere, but all I wanted to do was to get home—nowhere else. Just to see my family again with my own eyes. I wrote letters to them, but never got an answer. Later I found out they’d changed the name of the street, Goddammit—used to be Ovrazhnaya Street; now it’s Marshal Choibalsan Street. And the number of the house was changed, too, because half the houses were burned down under the German occupation. I told myself: if I can only see my family, that’s all I need. Then they can arrest me, double my sentence, even shoot me if they want to, I won’t mind! But the problem was: where to stop on the way, who would give me food, who would give me a little cash for the journey—even though I would have worked for it? You can’t knock on every door—and when you do, will there be a kind soul behind it? If only I’d known that you were living right nearby, almost in my pocket so to speak … !”

“You’re talking nonsense again,” she said with the same boiling irritation that heralded one of their quarrels that always ended in shouting. “Now that’s all a lot of crap. Want me to tell you? Sure I was living here—but with somebody else. O.K., I would have let you in. And I’d have fed you and given you a drink. And you could have slept in the warm. But I’d have gone straight and told the police—they were on duty here at the station day and night.”

“Would you really have gone to the police?”

“What else could I have done? The neighbors are all
good Soviet citizens; how can you keep anything secret? Yes, they’ve made us into a nation of stool pigeons—what a lovely thought.”

“Who did that, Stiura? Who could do it?”

“Don’t ask me, because I won’t tell you. I’ve told you what would have happened and that’s enough. I told you so as you’d know that if you had tried to get away earlier, nothing would have come of it. Does that make you feel better? Now you can cheer up and go.”

The train had already come into sight in the twilit distance. A few travelers were moving to the edge of the platform and a warning bell rang in the station.

Stiura was the first to get up, and stamped hard on the ground with her shoes. The Shabby Man stood up slowly as though ungluing himself from the bench, rising with the same reluctance in his legs that a prisoner feels when forced to leave a campfire and go back to work in the cold. He even looked as if he were freezing, since he was wearing his winter cap and overcoat and was wrapped up to his ears in a scarf. She helped him with his duffel bag and hastily kissed him three times. He embraced her convulsively, letting the cord of his duffel bag slip down from his shoulder to his elbow. No sooner had he mounted the steps than the couplings jerked all along the train and the car started to move. The Shabby Man turned around—his face white with fear, sweat on his temples, an insane look in his eyes.