Faithful Ruslan (5 page)

When that pole collapsed, too, Master finally turned to Ruslan as though seeing him for the first time.

“Still here, you stupid brute? I thought I told you to get lost.” He stretched out his hand that held the smoking cigarette, again pointing down the road and toward the forest. “And I don’t ever want to see you again—got it?”

It was not that Ruslan could not understand the order; he would not have accepted it for anything in the world. For the first time he was being ordered to go in quite the wrong direction. A human had gone up to the wire and broken it and … he had been forgiven, whereas others had been attacked without warning for trying to do the same thing. That was why he felt such a violent hatred for the grinning driver, whose shameless impertinence had saved not only Ruslan’s life but the lives of all the other dogs who were still in the kennels and awaiting their turn.

However, he obeyed and went. Having gone a little way he stopped to hear whether his master was following him, and looked around. Master was walking back into the camp through the gap made by the tractor, holding his submachine gun by its sling so that the butt almost trailed along in the snow. As he stared at his stooped back, Ruslan suddenly had a feeling that his master no longer needed either his dog or his gun. In despair and shame he wanted to sit down in the snow, raise his head toward the yellowish-gray disk of the sun and howl to it out of his boundless misery. The end
of his life in the Service had turned out to be even worse than he had always feared: he had been taken outside the wire simply to be kicked out, to be condemned to a life of undignified beggary alongside those lousy mongrels that he despised with all his soul and whom he hardly considered to be dogs. Why? What for? He had done nothing bad enough to warrant this special, unique form of punishment.

But an order from Master was an order, even if it was his last, so Ruslan trotted away along the white road toward the dark, jagged skyline.

He knew that he would follow that route for a long, long way—maybe for a whole day—through mile after mile of forest, and that at twilight, on a high hill, he would see through the trees the scattered, flickering lights of the town. In the town there would be wooden sidewalks smelling of pitch through the snow, and fences as high as the wooden barrier on the obstacle course at the training school; the town would smell of smoke, and delicious aromas would be coming out of the low, squat little houses, from which scarcely a gleam of light escaped past the thick shutters. Further on it would smell of trains and a different sort of smoke, and eventually he would reach the little square in front of the station. In the middle of the square there was something that Ruslan had also first seen at the training school: two men, who were the color of an aluminum feeding bowl and who did not move, had for some reason climbed up onto a pedestal and were acting: one, without a hat, had stretched out his arm and opened his mouth, as though he had just thrown a stick and was saying, “Fetch!” while the other, in a peaked cap, was not pointing anywhere but had thrust his hand inside his uniform jacket; his whole look made it clear that whatever was being fetched should be brought to him.

In a siding at the station there would be a broad platform, which was easily reached in one bound from the ground. The long ribbons of the tracks, curving and intertwining, flowed past the station, in daylight sometimes tinged blue and in the evening pink. But the tracks that led up to
the
platform were always rusty and came to a stop where the platform ended; their ends were turned upward and supported a black beam with a lantern on top of it, which always shone red for the arrival of the train they were waiting for. That train was sometimes green with slanting bars on the windows, sometimes red and completely closed up without so much as a chink in the blank wooden sides. This was the end of Ruslan’s route—the only one he knew.

He was running at a steady, unhurried trot, but then a sudden thought came to him and he quickened his pace. He had finally realized why he had been sent away: he was meant to be there, on the platform, when the red lantern was lit and the trainload of escaped prisoners would slowly steam into the siding.

NEXT MORNING THE RAILROAD MEN AT THE station saw a sight that probably would have surprised them if they had not understood its real meaning. About twenty dogs had gathered on the siding platform and were pacing up and down it or sitting down and barking in chorus at the passing trains. The timbre of their voices was clearly of solid metal. These dogs were almost all of the same coloring: a black stripe down the back divided the broad forehead in two and gave it a look of sullen menace, while the short ears and muzzle added to the impression of ferocity; the color of the flanks gradually shaded off from a steely, bluish-gray to rust-red or an incandescent orange, and the long hairs hanging down from the belly were shot with a shade that might have been called “the color of dawn.” Dawn-colored, too, was the thick ruff around the throat, the heavy, crescent-shaped tail and the big, muscular paws. The beasts were handsome enough to be worth admiring at close quarters, but no one dared go up to them on the platform, because informed people knew that it might be much more difficult to get off that platform again.

As the hours passed and the trains passed—red freight trains and green expresses—the dogs’ voices became shriller, the metal in them grew noticeably less thick and by twilight was as thin as tinplate. Fewer and fewer dogs paced the platform,
more and more frequently they sat or lay down, staring dully at the tracks as the narrow strips of steel turned pink. Having waited on the platform in vain for their train, when darkness fell they gathered together, jumped down to ground level in a pack and dispersed into the streets of the town.

The same scene was repeated on the following days, but an attentive observer might have noticed that day by day fewer dogs came, that they left earlier and that cracks could be detected in the metal of their voices. Soon they fell silent altogether, and the five or six dogs who still kept to the schedule no longer barked or whined at passersby, merely sitting out their hours of duty in subdued passivity.

In the town itself, their appearance caused some alarm at first. There was something too menacing in the zeal with which they patrolled the streets, padding through them at a steady gait with their steaming, pale-mauve tongues lolling out of gaping mouths. Yet not once did they ever touch anybody. Soon people noticed how the dogs gathered into groups as though to hold a sort of conference, frequently glancing over their shoulders and keeping outsiders out of their circle; it was obvious that they lived their own, separate existence and were not going to interfere in other people’s lives. They never noticed children or women, even when one of these occasionally bumped into a dog by mistake, but merely showed surprise at this strange object moving through space. Men alone attracted their attention, and after a while it was men who provided the dogs with a definite occupation: they would follow men whenever they went anywhere on foot—visiting, shopping or to work. When they saw a pedestrian and spotted at half a block’s distance that he belonged to the male sex, one or another of the dogs would break away from the pack and take up his station a little way
behind him. Having escorted him to his destination the dog would return, asking nothing in reward. Whenever a person threw them something edible, the dog would growl and turn aside, convulsively gulping down the sudden flow of saliva. Nobody knew what they lived on; this, too, was a concern that they revealed to no one. There was only one disturbing feature of their behavior: they did not like it when more than three men formed into a group. A party of three was the legal limit in Russian prison camps, but fortunately in the cold winter of Siberia larger gatherings did not occur very often. Gradually the people got used to the dogs, and the dogs in turn presumably grew accustomed to the town; at any rate, they showed no sign of wanting to leave it.

The only one who could not get used to town life was Ruslan; in any case, he had no time to spare for such things. Each morning he would set out along the white road to the camp and sit for hours outside the barbed wire. He had a great many important things to tell Master: that the train had not come yet, but that when it did come at least one of the dogs would certainly be on duty to meet it; that in general the dogs had settled down fairly well for the time being and were keeping together … and a few other more trivial matters. It never occurred to Ruslan to worry about how he would communicate all this; somehow his master had always managed to grasp whatever Ruslan was trying to convey. He was worried and upset by something different, however—namely, what was happening to the camp. Many more fence poles had been knocked down, huge ugly holes and openings in the wire gaped between the poles that were still standing, and some strange newcomers had lit bonfires alongside the huts. They were unloading bricks from trucks and stacking them in piles, though they seemed to be doing it
very casually and in between other activities, on which they preferred to spend more time, such as wrestling in the snow, lounging around and smoking for an hour or so at a time, or singing in chorus while seated on logs—sitting, in fact, on those same sacred fence poles! They took special pleasure in doing body searches on the women, slapping them on the seat of the pants or the chest, and while they were being frisked, the women roared with laughter or squealed like stuck pigs. None of this was anything like the life the real prisoners had led, and Ruslan began to feel an ever-growing fondness for those runaways. He would, he thought, forgive them for their stupid escape if only they would come back and would stand again in beautiful straight ranks with the masters and the dogs posted alongside them.

He very much wanted to go into the camp and have a good bark at these intruders, as a reminder that the camp did not belong to them and they had no right to run things according to
their
rules. But Master had forbidden him to pass through the wire, and only he could lift that ban. Twilight was falling, and still his master had not shown up. Not once had Ruslan picked up his scent or sniffed that beloved, manly smell—a mixture of rifle oil, tobacco and strong, well-scrubbed youth. All masters smelled like that, but Ruslan’s master also liked to put on eau de cologne, which he bought at the officers’ canteen, and besides that there was an entire bouquet that belonged to him alone, to his
character
. Ruslan knew well that humans differed from one another in character as much as dogs did. That was why each person smelled differently; you only had to take one sniff and there was no doubt about their character. His master, for instance, to judge by that bouquet, was perhaps not particularly brave, but in compensation he was totally without pity;
he was not, perhaps, overly clever, but on the other hand he never trusted anyone; his friends, perhaps, were not all that fond of him, but he made up for that by being quite prepared to shoot any one of them if the Service should ever require it of him. Knowing all this about his master, Ruslan could vividly imagine how he was feeling there in the camp among all those strangers, how he must suspect them and hate them, how his mind must be occupied with thoughts of catching and bringing back the runaway prisoners and how to punish the other masters for letting them escape. And all the while the only creature who could help him in this was sitting close by, just waiting to be called! In Ruslan’s conception, his master was great, all-powerful, endowed with rare qualities—and with only one weakness: he was permanently in need of Ruslan’s help. Otherwise what was the point of coming out to the camp every day, growing numb with sitting in the cold for hours and suffering the pangs of hunger?

For since that morning when he had been fed for the last time, he had not managed to procure much to eat. There was a burning sensation in his stomach, nausea was wearing him out to the point of faintness, and it was becoming more and more difficult to make the daily journey to the camp and back. Yet he had still taken no food from strange hands nor picked up anything from the ground.

Some secret, hateful enemy had put a bakery on his route, and Ruslan had to make his way through a thick, intoxicating smell that poured out of the doors every time they opened or shut, and this slowed him down. One day a woman came out of those doors and threw him the scraps of bread that the baker had given her as make-weight, Ruslan felt as if he had run straight up against a brick wall. He hardly had the strength to turn around and snarl.

“Bet you he won’t take it,” said the man who had come out with the woman. “That’s a camp dog; they’ve been specially trained.”

“Why? Is he afraid of being poisoned? But I’m eating it and nothing’s happened to me!” With a kindly, tender expression she took a bite out of the loaf and chewed it, smacking her lips, “You see, doggy, I’m all right. What a silly dog you are!”

Ruslan looked away with indifference. He knew that trick, too: they took a bite and they came to no harm because they knew the right bit of the food to eat, but then if you ate some, your mouth would burn like fire and your whole belly would be turned inside out.

“Told you so,” said the man.

Picking up the scraps, he held them with malicious glee right under Ruslan’s nose. It never occurred to the stupid tease that if a dog refused food from a woman, a creature of no account, he was even less likely to take it from a man. It only aroused his suspicions. Ruslan followed the man home—and remembered the house.

Ruslan was saved by an unexpected thought that had been dormant in his memory for years but that now awoke and came to the surface—namely, that the only safe thing for him to eat was live food. Anything that was running, jumping or flying around could not have been tampered with by humans, and therefore could not have been poisoned; otherwise it would not be alive. From those far-off days when he had chased prisoners, he still had memories of animal tracks leading away from the forest paths, of bloodstained feathers, lumps of fur, bones—the remnants of other animals’ prey. He tested himself on his next journey to the camp, and he was not mistaken. He turned off the path, plunged deep into the
forest and within a minute he became a hunter. As though he had been doing it all his life, he immediately learned how to sniff out the runs that field mice made for themselves under the snow and to thrust his paw through the snow at the very place where a mouse was running or taking refuge. This rather meager game did not satisfy his hunger altogether, but it calmed his anxiety and inspired hope. And it enabled him to go on with his duties.