Faithful Ruslan (4 page)

Sooner or later it happened to all of them. Some lost their “nose” or went blind from old age; others got too familiar with the prisoners and began to make little concessions to them; others, from overlong service, were afflicted by a terrible clouding of the mind that made them growl and attack their own masters. The end was always the same—they all went the way of Rex, beyond the wire. There had only been one exception, when a dog called Buran had died in his own kennel. When Buran’s back had been broken from a blow with an iron pipe during a struggle with two escaping prisoners, the masters had carried him home from the forest on a greatcoat, had stroked him and tickled him behind the ear, saying, “Good dog, Buran.… Well done, Buran, you got him!” They did not know what to give him to eat, but that evening they put something into his food from which he died at once in convulsions.

It was thus the custom that a dog’s life in the Service always ended in death at the hands of his master. In all his eight years spent in the camp, Ruslan had never ceased to be aware that one day this would happen to him, too. It frightened him and gave him nightmares, from which he would wake up to the sound of his own eerie-sounding moans; gradually, though, he came to terms with the idea, realizing that although it could not be avoided altogether, it could be put off by showing enough zeal and exerting oneself to the utmost. He accepted his impending fate as the natural culmination of his life in the Service, as something that was proper, right and honorable—just like the Service itself. No dog, after all, would have wished for any other end—such as being chased out of the camp gates, for instance, and left to an existence of
begging and scrounging alongside the mangy mongrels who lurked around the kitchen trash chute, gobbling scraps of rotten meat. The thought of it horrified Ruslan.

Therefore he did not crawl, did not whine for mercy or try to run away. If his master could have seen Ruslan’s eyes—yellow, unblinking, with deep, clearly defined pupils, dark as burnished gun-barrels—he would have found not a trace in them of hatred, suffering or entreaty, but only humble expectation. His master, however, was looking somewhere above the top of Ruslan’s head, and he raised the muzzle of his submachine gun skyward. Something behind Ruslan was preventing him from opening fire. Ruslan looked around and saw what it was. He had noticed it earlier out of the corner of his eye, had listened with half an ear to its rumbling and clanking, but had forced himself to pay no attention, being wholly occupied in looking for a scent.

A tractor was coming up the white road to the camp. It was crawling slowly, looking as though it had been a part of these snowy fields and grayish-white sky for so long that the landscape was unimaginable without it. Nosing forward with two big, staring eyes on either side of its ribbed snout, all black soot and streaming exhaust, it was pulling a sledge behind it. On the sledge, making it sway and occasionally slither off the roadway, was a vast, reddish-brown object far bigger than the tractor itself; as it came closer, the thing turned out to be a railroad freight car without wheels, lashed onto the sledge with rusty hawsers.

Ruslan growled and moved out of the way. Tractors were nothing new to him. They were used to haul logs away from the lumber-felling site in the forest, and his experience of them had been wholly bad. The black smoke of their exhaust had caused him to lose his sense of smell for a long time, which
had made him the most helpless creature on earth. What was more, the men who drove the tractors were “free workers,” a tribe of people who were alien and strange to Ruslan; they wandered around everywhere unescorted and they treated the masters without proper respect. They also used to make their own way to the work site, so that by the time the column of prisoners was just marching into the forest, the free workers were already there and horsing around. A nasty bunch.

The tractor crawled forward and halted, but did not stop roaring; something inside it gave an indignant howl, and through the noise the driver bawled a greeting to Ruslan’s master. Ruslan was amazed by this. As far as he could remember, no other biped had ever spoken to his master like this:

“Hi there, soldier!”

The mere look of the driver was infuriating, too: an ugly, shiny, crimson-red mug slashed by a thick-lipped, fire-breathing maw that gaped in a cheeky grin from ear to ear. His cap, which he did not take off to Master, failed to cover a blond forelock that stuck wetly to his forehead, something that was unthinkable for a prisoner, as was the way he fired off a whole string of questions at Ruslan’s master:

“You weren’t waiting for me, were you? What? Can’t you hear what I’m saying? I’ve brought this boxcar for you; where d’you want me to put the damn thing? Or can’t you speak for your boss? Are you checking passes? Sorry, forgot to bring mine. Maybe you won’t let me out again, eh?”

With this he burst into a horrible, disgusting guffaw, as he leaned out of the door and put his foot, clad in a felt boot, onto the track. Master made no reply to his laughter or his questions. Ruslan knew that he would not reply. This habit of the masters’ never ceased to thrill Ruslan: whenever a
prisoner asked them a question, they would either answer only after a long pause or not answer at all, but simply stare at him with a cold, impassive and sarcastic look. It did not take long before the eager questioner lowered his eyes and drew his head down between his shoulders; sometimes the man’s face would break out in a cold sweat. The masters caused the prisoners no harm by this treatment, yet their mere silence, combined with that stare, produced the same effect as a clenched fist raised to a man’s nose or the rattle of a rifle bolt. At first Ruslan thought that masters were born with this magic ability, but later he noticed that they answered each other readily enough, and if they were asked a question by the Chief Master, whom they addressed as “Comr’d Cap’n P’mission Tspeak,” they answered very promptly and held their hands straight down the sides of their pants. Hence he suspected that the masters, too, were specially taught how to behave toward prisoners—just like the dogs, in fact!

“What are you looking so miserable for?” asked the driver. He did not lower his eyes, did not hunch his head between his shoulders or break into a sweat, but merely put on a sympathetic expression. “Sorry to finish your spell in the service, are you? Don’t like the idea of starting life all over again, I suppose. Don’t worry, you’ll find your feet. Only I shouldn’t go back to your old village, though, if I were you. Heard about the plenum of the Central Committee? Not much to eat back on the farm these days, I hear.”

“Keep going,” said Master. “You talk too much.” He did not, however, stand aside for the tractor, and kept holding his gun firmly against his chest with both hands.

“Sure thing,” the driver agreed. “It’s a fact—can’t seem to stop my tongue from wagging. How can I help it, though, if it itches?”

“I’d give you something to stop it itching,” said Master.

The driver roared with laughter.

“You kill me, soldier! … Hey, but you look good with that gun. Had your picture taken for a souvenir? You’d better; otherwise your girl won’t have you. All those sluts want to see is a gun, they don’t care who’s behind it.” Master did not answer, and the driver expostulated: “See here—where the hell d’you want me to put this boxcar?”

“Put it where you like. It’s no business of mine.”

“Well, you’re standing in for the boss around here, aren’t you?”

“For all I care, you can chop it up for firewood. Why have you brought it here, anyway? Aren’t you going to live in the huts?”

“Hell, no! I’d rather live in a tent.”

Master shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“Please yourself.”

The driver nodded, still grinning all over his face, climbed back into the cab and was about to shut the door when he caught sight of Ruslan. He seemed to remember something; his forehead betrayed signs of thought and a furrow of sympathy appeared on it.

“You gonna shoot that dog? Thought at first maybe you were giving it some training. I saw you as I was driving up, and I wondered why the hell you were training the dog when it was time to put it out to grass. So you’ve got to bump it off.… Look, maybe you don’t have to do it. Couldn’t you leave him behind for us? A dog like that must be worth a fortune. He could guard our stuff for us.”

“He’d guard it all right,” said Master, “but you wouldn’t like the way he does it.”

The driver looked at Ruslan with respect.

“Couldn’t we retrain him?”

“Not this one. All the dogs that could be taught new tricks have been retrained already.”

“I see.” The driver shook his head sadly. “They sure have given you a shit job, soldier—shooting dogs. Well, it’s all in the line of duty, I suppose. What a reward for good service—nine grams of lead in the back of the neck. But why do only the dogs get that treatment? You served your time, too, didn’t you?”

“Are you going to drive on?” asked Master.

“O.K.,” said the driver, “I’m on my way.”

Their glances met head-on: Master’s rigid and ice-cold, the driver’s somewhat abashed but still carelessly cheerful. The tractor roared and enveloped itself in clouds of black smoke, Master stepped reluctantly aside, but the tractor did not go straight ahead; instead it gave a jerk, swiveled its nose away from the gates and crawled diagonally across the ground, churning up the soil of the No-Go zone between the inner and outer perimeter fences.

An instant flash of anger sent Ruslan across the road in one bound. The reddish-brown color of the boxcar and the squeak of the sledge runners as they forced a dirty track through the snow combined to whip him into a frenzy, so that he could only see one thing clearly—the driver’s big, bony elbow sticking out through the window of the cab door; he longed to sink his teeth into it and bite through to the bone. Ruslan growled and whined, dripping saliva and looking imploringly at his master, begging him to say, “Get!” He was bound to give the command: Master’s face had turned pale and he had clenched his teeth—Ruslan was sure he would hear it any moment now, flashing out like a red spark and seeming not to come from the mouth but from the hand flung forward to point: “Get him, Ruslan! Get!”

Then the real business of the Service would begin. The joy of obeying orders, the furious headlong dash, the feinting leaps from side to side—and the Enemy would dither in confusion, not knowing whether to run or to stand and defend himself. Then the final leap, forepaws tucked into the chest, when you would knock him to the ground and fall with him, growling furiously into his distorted face, but you would only seize his right arm, because he was gripping something in his right hand and you would hang on and hang on, listening to him shouting and thrashing about, and a warm, thick, intoxicating liquid would fill your mouth—until Master forcibly dragged you off by the collar. Only then did you start to feel all the blows and wounds you had received.… The time was long past when they had given him a piece of meat or a biscuit for doing this, and even then he had taken it more out of politeness than as a reward, because he was in any case too strung up to be able to eat at such moments. Nor was there any need for a reward when later, back in camp, in front of the sullen ranks of prisoners, he was urged to attack and harass the captured prisoner, who no longer resisted but could only shriek pathetically, although this time Ruslan ripped his clothes more than his body. The greatest reward for Service was the Service itself—yet strangely enough, for all their intelligence, the masters never understood that and thought they had to offer the dog something by way of encouragement. Somewhere at the very edge of his consciousness, in a yellow mist, there still lodged the black thought of what his master had intended to do to him, but he was even prepared to accept that, provided he could first have this final reward of the Service, provided Master would only say, “Get!” He felt strong and fearless enough to leap up onto the clanking tracks, drag the Enemy out of his cab and wipe the grin off
his cheeky face, the grin that even his master’s all-powerful look had been unable to efface.

His jaws convulsed with impatience, Ruslan shook his head from side to side and whined, but Master still delayed and would not shout “Get!” There then occurred the terrible, shameful thing that should never have been done. With a hoarse rumble, the tractor’s snout nudged a fence pole as though sniffing it, and gave a savage roar. It did not move, but the caterpillar tracks churned and churned and the pole creaked in response; it tried desperately to stay upright, but was already keeling over slightly, tightening the twanging strands of wire, and then suddenly it snapped with a bang like a round of gunfire. Only the wire now held it up and prevented it from falling over completely, but the snout crawled relentlessly forward and strand by strand the wire fell into the snow. The tracks crushed it into the ground, wound it into tangled plaits, and then the sledge runners crawled over it with a protesting screech. When the pole reappeared behind the sledge, it was lying flat, like a man spread-eagled on the ground.

Grunting with satisfaction, the tractor halted inside the No-Go zone. The driver climbed out to inspect his handiwork. He, too, looked satisfied and bawled out to Master:

“What would you do without me, soldier? You ought to learn to do a job like mine. And all you can do is shoot dogs.”

In its wide-open quilted jacket, his chest was a perfect target for a shot; but Master had already rested his submachine gun in the crook of his elbow, extracted his cigarette case from inside his greatcoat and was tapping a cigarette on the lid. He looked at the picture on the lid, which he had engraved himself with a shoemaker’s awl, and grinned. He liked looking at his own work and always smiled as he did so, and whenever he showed it to other masters they would
almost fall over with raucous laughter. Having put the cigarette case away, with the same sarcastic grin he watched the tractor making its terrible way toward the inner line of fencing; there it again attacked a pole, which proved to be somewhat tougher, so that the tractor had to butt the pole several times after backing away to get a run at it.