Dog Boy (26 page)

Romochka ran all the way, rather than catching the metro. White Sister loped along beside him. He needed the singing of his blood and muscles, the air washing through him, and the exhaustion at the end. He ran on and on along a route he now knew so well that its little detours and shortcuts took no thought. The rain pelted down and his feet splattered as he ran. Puppy’s things swirled through his mind: the squishy patterned mat that smelled like a car window frame; the hard coloured animals; the red, yellow, blue shapes, all clean and unchewed; the smooth, pale yellow walls, and the watery glass of the windows. The smell of Dmitry. Natalya’s voice. He wanted to be home.

But the next day he wanted to go again.

Dmitry, Natalya and Anna Aleksandrovna got used to Romochka’s sudden appearances in reception and built his visits into Puppy’s rehabilitation program. Anna Aleksandrovna had instructions to call Natalya at the clinic if Romochka appeared, whereupon she would finish with the child at hand and cancel bookings for the next couple of hours. Natalya began an observation diary for her own interest while Dmitry was writing up his revised preliminary findings for the
Journal of Advances in Neuropsychology
.

She found the older boy fascinating and appalling; and, like any bomzh, an indictment of society, a walking human tragedy. Natalya had some firm principles. She had once ended up as the only other person in a carriage with a great reeking lump of a man sleeping on the seat opposite. She’d sat, shallow-breathing, fighting down waves of nausea, almost in tears.
This man is Russian
, she told herself.
This man is my brother.

At first, she attached herself to Romochka with a similar feeling—but somehow the shock value of his appearance and smell wore off, and her repulsion faded. Romochka was compelling as a human subject, quite a character. The appearance, she decided one day, was not a reliable marker of everything there was to this boy; it was even a bit theatrical. A disguise, an inadvertent dress-up.

 

Today is the 17th of July, week two of watching Romochka and Marko. What to make of the two boys together? Romochka, dark, fiery as a furnace. The child warrior. Radiating black hair and black moods. Marko, so fair, pale, frail: a snowflake who fades, retreats into passive, and yes,
melting
, adoration next to his dark brother. Romochka looks indestructible. He has the most horrible fingernails—talons would be a better word. He looks like a nuclear holocaust survivor in an American movie (costume to match). Marko looks as though he might vanish as mysteriously as he came, as if he is transparent, somehow—not quite here. His health is now acceptable, but there is something beyond physical health that holds us in life or lets us go, as doctors all know (should know). What a sight these two are. If they were in a painting, they’d look like archetypes. Funny!

 

18th July. A hot sultry day, with Romochka’s mood to match. Romochka has something in common with professional beggar children. He is impervious and self-contained, but I think I understand him quite well now. We have little to offer him: we can feed him, but he is too wily and experienced to form an attachment. I don’t pity him or want to rescue him, anyway. Although I am convinced he is smart—despite the fact that he stands out clearly as a defective. His body language, his manner, everything is that teensy fraction out of sync, the fraction all normal humans recognise immediately. Perhaps it is his self-esteem that repels pity. He likes himself. Sees no reason why we shouldn’t like him too. No, that’s not the right word—
admire
, more like. It is also disconcerting—self-confidentc defectives are not usually appealing, except to their mothers, and then only if the mothers themselves are not hopelessly degraded. Marko is the victim child, the one we all must rescue. Romochka is something much more romantic and awful. And he’s proud of those hellish talons. He uses them for everything, including to scare other children—and I caught him carefully filing them on the bricks of the garden wall. I should give him a nail file so he can do his manicure in style! He is vain!

 

28th July. Romochka is speaking a lot now, both with us and with Marko. He talks to Dmitry, but with far more reserve than with me, I believe. He is quite eloquent in a bizarre way. He said to me this morning in his odd little voice, ‘I can get you a bird. Today is sunny, it’s not fuckin easy, but I can get you a bird.’ This is the longest sentence I have heard him utter. A pity I don’t know all that much about language acquisition. Dmitry does, though. He thinks it is a mental or speech impediment in Romochka’s case, but I’m not convinced. Dmitry doesn’t do intuition—data and data only. I’ll have to show him this sequence. This boy’s not an imbecile, I’d bet my professional reputation on it. He is something else. Intonation is spare and flat, but his speech is nonetheless vivid and elliptical. Sometimes his language is colourful and very local. I dropped a plate when heating something for him in the microwave, and he said sagely, very comically: ‘But for some piss, the world’s full of shit.’ He sounded rather like a little old drunken moujik. He grinned ridiculously for a fleeting second when I laughed. He was showing off. At other times he sounds like a migrant using Russian as a second language. He reuses what he hears and cobbles together phrases, manufacturing meanings on the spot. Today he said a couple of things that sounded just like Dmitry: ‘What does that really mean?’ and ‘the human animal’. I’ll show those to Dmitry too—I’d like to see him try to call
that
echolalia! And, somehow, he has picked up bits of Italian. He uses Italian endearments with Marko, or a funny mixture. He got up to leave, today, and said ‘Scram, caro’ as he pushed Marko off his lap.

Romochka and Puppy worked together to convince Dmitry and Natalya that Romochka was a boy. Romochka picked up that Puppy was special to them because of the dogs, and he felt big with secrets. He could make himself special to them any time he wanted, but he didn’t want to be locked away from his family, and that was clearly what they would do. Being a dog had kept him in that cell as Belov’s begging tool. Being a child now seemed to keep him free. So for the second time in his relationship with Puppy he played the human role but not, this time, to intimidate; and this time it filled them both with glee.

From that first day, he didn’t lick Puppy. Nor did he yelp or whimper or ask for Puppy’s belly. He was careful to avoid sniffing things. He watched other small boys in the metro stations and on the streets, and copied some of their mannerisms. He passed these, too, on to Puppy, who mimicked him in everything. One day his special performance piece would be slapping his thigh and laughing loudly; another day it might be spitting in his hands and combing his fingers through his hair. He loved this pretence.

He terrorised the other children in the centre in subtle ways, growling and snarling at them when no one would see, but he lost interest quickly. He gave his attention to Dmitry and Natalya, and to Puppy. For his part, Puppy knew what Romochka was doing and backed him up with his characteristic joyous inventiveness.

Dmitry was careful of asking too much. He could only imagine what their home might have been like. Romochka was silent on the subject. He was silent too, on how his younger brother might have been lost and have come to live in the care of dogs, or how Romochka had found him. Maybe, as was the case with that Ukrainian girl Oksana, everyone knew about the child with the dogs. Dmitry tried once to ask about Marko’s parents, and Romochka said the oddest thing.

‘I am the only dish on the table.’ He said it with quiet confidence, even pride. Dmitry was startled. The phrase stuck with him. He assumed it meant they were orphans, a revelation that pleased and troubled him. On the one hand, no more family members were likely to pop up, and that meant no more nasty surprises for his research to accommodate. He couldn’t hide from himself how delighted that made him. This had been a nagging fear—at its worst the threat of an emotional claim made by an adult who might legally be able to take Marko away, at least until he proved her unfit, and who would taint all his painstakingly reconstructed data. But if Romochka was alone in the world, shouldn’t they take him in too? Wasn’t there some moral aspect independent of policy, independent of the five million homeless?

Natalya, surprisingly, reassured him.

‘Romochka’s lucky we let him in and feed him, and we only do that because he’s harmless, interesting and unusual. We can only do so much, Dmitry. You think the rest of the children we have here don’t all have siblings in horrible situations? Nadezhda has five. All drug addicted, and one who sexually abuses her. Half these children’s relatives are psychopaths who belong in corrective institutions for the sake of society as a whole. Do you want them here too? The gangs, the rapes, drugs and violence—and don’t even get me started on the parents.’

Natalya, Dmitry guessed, didn’t want Romochka on their hands either.

 

The food they gave Romochka at the centre was cooked, hot, and they gave him nearly as much as he asked for. But he was hunting less and what he took home was never enough. He worried about the dogs when he spent too much time with Puppy, and he worried about Puppy when he hunted with the dogs. He began to notice weekdays and weekends because the centre was shut two days a week.

He began to look forward to walking with Dmitry, talking about this and that, mostly about Puppy. He liked to try to match his stride to Dmitry’s long legs, and he liked the way Dmitry’s large adam’s apple moved up and down his neck. He liked those kind grey eyes, and that Dmitry didn’t mind being stared at. Dmitry thought nothing of holding his nose to bring his face in close and make eye contact. Dmitry never laughed, but was funny. He was comfortable with Dmitry; Natalya was a different matter. He felt a little sorry for Dmitry: he could see that he too feared Natalya.

Dmitry didn’t know everything but was trying to find out so he could help Puppy. Romochka found that dry voice, telling him these dry truths, comforting, but most of all, he liked Dmitry’s smell.

He watched Dmitry and Natalya, noting the kisses and endearments; and the fights. Dmitry, Romochka knew, was most interested in Puppy. But to his huge gratification, he began to notice that Natalya was more interested in him. He frowned whenever she came near him. He imagined pulling her long brown hair. She smelled of slightly rotten flowers, of Dmitry, hair, soap and girl sweat. He could smell her vulva, too—spring mud and cut grass; so different from the musk and pungent anus smell of full-grown men. Very different from the cosy, sweet smell of Mamochka. He kicked chairs over and tried to bend or break things when she came near in order to show her how strong he was. He began to perform the boy most of all for Natalya. Her body-smell seeped into his dreams.

Yet he felt safer with Dmitry.