Faithful Ruslan (7 page)

He had reached the end of the town’s main street, with its high, solid fences and houses with tiny, little, blank windows
that seemed to have been made for any purpose except looking out of them. At this point Ruslan was stopped by a thought that came into his mind—a recollection of something that had happened not long ago but that had already grown blurred in his memory. Yet it would not allow him to go on and it filled him with a certain vague presentiment—not sad, but pleasant. He whined and circled around and around on the spot, like a puppy discovering his own tail for the first time, and suddenly he stood quite still with his paws spread wide on the ground. After standing like this for several moments, he lowered his head and slowly trotted back, not sure whether or not to believe his instinct. Here was the place that he had run past in such haste, preoccupied with his thoughts. Admittedly it was on the far side of the street, but he should have been able to pick up Master’s scent at that distance. He had, it seemed, been driven into town by car—curse that stinking rubber, curse that gasoline!—but he had got out and stamped his feet while they handed him his suitcase and duffel bag. There was no way of sniffing what was in the suitcase, which was coated with some sort of smelly glue, while the duffel bag contained clean laundry and soap (lilac-smelling, from the officers’ canteen), also Vaseline, smeared on preserving jars to make them airtight. Here he had lit a cigarette; the match still smelled of smoke and his fingers. Then he had picked up his suitcase and slung the bag over his shoulder, so that all smells stopped and the only clue was Master’s footsteps, firmly imprinted in the snow. Now Ruslan could not go wrong. Master’s legs were slightly bandy and perhaps a little short for his height, but he trod hard, putting down the whole of his boot sole at once, as though carrying a heavy weight. Today he was wearing his very best pair of leather boots—which were admittedly the
same that all masters wore—but then his feet inside them were wrapped in footcloths and they (as we have already explained) smelled of Master’s special character. It was a good thing, too, that his footsteps did not weave around among the tracks made by other people—Master never did like to take a wavering course—but went straight ahead without any deviations to either side.

Now the pedestrians shied away from Ruslan; they took him, in his frenzy of love, for a mad dog that had broken loose—and he really looked terrifying: so emaciated that his ribs showed, a yellow film over his eyes, panting hoarsely and with his loose collar clinking as he ran headlong with frightening single-mindedness toward his unknown goal. At the station his way was barred by a slowly maneuvering truck; Ruslan dived underneath it, hurting his back, but the scent made him ignore the pain and drew him on, through the doors and into the warmth and noise of the station building. There, on the slushy floor among the sweat-soaked felt boots, rotten sacking, rawhide straps, gobs of spittle, sodden cigarette butts and dirty, exhausted bodies, the thread of the scent was broken off—the thread that had been fastened to his nostrils and that he had been following like a bull running after the ring through its nose. He tried in vain to pick up its vital, magnetic pull, but there were food smells in the air, too, and their delicious, spicy odors drove him absolutely crazy. Then suddenly he heard his master’s voice, that inimitable, godlike voice—and although it was not calling him, it was somewhere nearby. He flew straight as an arrow in that direction, over benches and sacks, ready to knock down anybody who would not let him reach his master.

He was obliged, however, to contain his joy. As he burst into the restaurant, he was about to bark: “I’m here! Here
I am!” when he saw that Master was not alone but was sitting at a table and talking to another person, and Ruslan did not dare approach him. Standing timidly by the wall, he stared at Master and his companion—a fussy little man with a pink, sweaty bald patch on the top of his head, wearing an extremely shabby overcoat, with a green scarf draped over his chest that no doubt concealed either a dirty shirt or the absence of a shirt. Ruslan compared the two, and the comparison was wholly in favor of his young, strong, slim, utterly splendid master. He would have looked even more splendid if he had not forgotten to put on his epaulets and had not been sitting with his uniform collar unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up. Even so, his face was magnificent, godlike, with beautiful, godlike, saucer-round eyes, and he held himself in a magnificent and godlike way. The man facing him, on the other hand, was simply repulsive, with a pair of watery little eyes, an idiotic habit of giggling for no reason and of scratching his unshaven cheek with all five fingers as he did so. Both of them, it was true, gave off a smell that was not just unpleasant but sickening, and the source of this loathsome reek, as Ruslan suspected, was contained in the little decanter full of a clear, waterlike liquid. With a little effort, however, he was able to convince himself that his master smelled much less, in fact hardly at all, whereas the Shabby Man exuded an intolerable stench. Ruslan had already taken a dislike to the Shabby Man, because the fact that he was there prevented Ruslan from dashing up to Master, but especially because he was talking to Master in a strangely careless and disrespectful manner, failing to lower his eyes and, what was worse, with an obvious grin on his face. Just like that tractor driver.

“I see you had to stay behind for quite a while, Sergeant,” said the Shabby Man. “The others cleared off long ago.”

He kept addressing Master as “Sergeant,” whereas his real name was Corporal, and oddly enough Master seemed to prefer this new name. Ruslan didn’t like it at all. He liked names that contained the letter R; he liked his own name because it began with R, and in Corporal there were no less than two of them, and they both made a lovely growling sound, whereas the single
R
in Sergeant was hardly sounded at all.

Master did not answer immediately, because he did not like doing two things at once, so before replying he finished filling two glasses from the decanter—first one for himself, then another for the Shabby Man.

“There was a reason for it.”

“You don’t have to tell me, if it’s a secret.”

“Secret? No, it’s no secret any longer. I was guarding the camp records.”

“The re-ecords, eh?” drawled the Shabby Man. “You mean all the files on us? And aren’t they being guarded any longer, now that you’ve gone?”

“Not likely. They’ve been sealed up and taken away.”

“I see. But what for, Sergeant?”

“Whad’ya mean, ‘what for’?”

“Well, why do they have to be guarded and sealed at all? They should just be put in a stove and burned—and good riddance. And all that ‘secret’ stuff, too. Into the stove with it, till there’s nothing but ashes.”

Master gave him a pitying look.

“What are you, a kid? Or have you gone crazy? Don’t you know those records are to be kept forever?”

“There’s no such thing as forever, Sergeant. You’re an intelligent man, you ought to know that.”

Master sighed and picked up his glass. Immediately the Shabby Man picked up his; this was all he had been waiting for.

“Here’s luck,” said Master.

The Shabby Man stretched out his glass toward him, but Master beat him to it, raised his own slightly higher so that they could not clink glasses and quickly tipped it into his mouth. The Shabby Man slowly drew his hand back and drank. Then they both took a sip of yellow stuff out of mugs and stuck their forks into the food. Ruslan swallowed his saliva and couldn’t bring himself to look away.

“You still haven’t answered my question, Sergeant,” the Shabby Man reminded him.

Again Ruslan’s master sighed.

“What more can I say? I treat you like an intelligent person and you talk like a kid. I’ll try and give you an example to make it clearer. You’ve seen young kids collecting bugs and butterflies and so on, haven’t you? Well, when they’ve caught ’em, they stick a pin through the bugs and write something about ’em in a notebook. That’s what ‘keeping forever’ is like.”

“What’s ‘forever’ about it? In a year or so there’ll be nothing left of that bug except a bit of dust. Well, let’s say in ten years.”

“No, it won’t be just a bit of dust!” Master raised his finger. “ ’Cause it’s all been written down about it in a notebook. So that bug still exists. You may think it’s gone, but it hasn’t—it’s still there.”

Ruslan looked reproachfully at the Shabby Man. Master’s finger should have convinced him, but he just went on grinning and scratching his cheek.

“So we are just so many bugs, is that it?”

“That’s right,” said Master. Clasping his elbows with his hands, he leaned on the table and looked at his companion with a kindly smile. “You’ve flown away, spreading your wings and going wherever you please—but you’re all still
there in those records. At any moment you can be picked up again and questioned. If anyone has anything on his conscience, or has tried to duck out of sight for some reason, it’s all there …”

“But we’ve been declared not guilty and given a free pardon, after all …”

“Think so? Well, you can go on thinking it if you like. But I’d advise you to look at it a bit differently if I were you. You should tell yourself you’ve been … temporarily released. Got it? You’ve been temporarily entrusted with your freedom. Besides, that way you’ll appreciate it more. Because I’ve noticed the way you’ve been acting, now you’re free. Hanging around bars, getting a bit fond of drinking, aren’t you? Now back in camp your head was clear as a bell and your liver was in good shape. Isn’t that so?”

“Well, I suppose you might say so.” The Shabby Man seemed to be agreeing with him. “But in that case, what is there worth knowing about us? We’re pretty well washed up. The stuffing’s coming out of us. Now take them, fr’instance”—he nodded toward the people sitting at the two nearby tables—“what d’you know about them?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get them, too, if need be. There’s plenty about them in the records.”

The Shabby Man also leaned on the table, and for a long time they stared into each other’s eyes, grinning cheerfully.

“By the way,” said the Shabby Man. “I noticed your finger was twitching, Sergeant. Your hands are shaking, even more than mine. You’re twitching all over, brother. Is that ‘forever,’ too?”

Master frowned, took his hands off the table and reached for the decanter. He poured an equal amount into each glass and held the decanter’s mouth over the Shabby Man’s glass
so that he would get the last drops. The Shabby Man watched his hand. Master noticed this and shook the decanter, although there was nothing left in it to shake out.

They drained their glasses again and sipped some more yellow stuff, after which they grew more friendly, and the Shabby Man no doubt felt embarrassed at his question.

“But you can’t say I was a monster,” said Master. “Did I ever once touch you, for instance?”

“No, you never touched me.”

“There you are. And the reason was that you’d got the message. If the gov’ment thought you ought to be punished, that means there was a reason for it. They don’t punish people for nothing. Once you understood that, then it’s O.K.—I’m human, and I treat you like a human being, too. That’s my rule. Of course, if I’m ordered to lay hands on you, that’s another matter. I took the oath of allegiance when I joined the army, didn’t I? But if I get no such order … Get me?”

“I get you, brother.”

“O.K., then. But the ones we roughed up, they were the ones who never got that message. They just didn’t understand people like you and me. But you and I—we understood each other, isn’t that right? Right. That’s why I sat down with you here.”

Either the Shabby Man could finally stand Master’s look no longer or he was tired of arguing with him, but for whatever reason, he lowered his eyes.

Ruslan, too, was growing tired of waiting for Master to notice him amid the noise and bustle of the restaurant. People going in and out jostled him, and he pressed himself pathetically against the wall until he thought of a good way to occupy himself and to be of use to his master: he would guard his suitcase and bag and the greatcoat thrown on top
of them. With a gentle, inward reproach to Master for being careless, he lay down beside the luggage with dignity, taking up the position that always inspires us with respect for a four-footed sentry and prevents us not merely from approaching him but from coming closer to him than one pace. The position was also a good one in that it allowed him to watch his master’s face. He was slightly disturbed by the drops of sweat that had broken out on Master’s forehead and upper lip, but even so it was a splendid, godlike face.

Ruslan had long since observed that, despite their obvious differences, all masters’ faces were in some respects alike. A face might be broad or narrow, might be pale or dark, but all of them invariably had a slightly cleft chin, tightly closed lips, a small nose, prominent cheekbones and honest, piercing eyes from which it was hard to discern whether they were angry or laughing, but which could keep up a stare for a long time and could command without using words. Faces like this could only belong to the most superior breed of bipeds, to the most intelligent, priceless and select race, but he had always been curious to know one thing about them: were these faces purposely selected for the Service or was it the Service itself that made them look as they did? With dogs it was simpler: Toby, a black dog with one white ear, who spent all his time hanging around the kitchen, had belonged to the Service as much as any of them, otherwise he would not have been kept on strength, but for the whole of his mysterious career in the Service, he had never grown an inch in size, had never changed his coloring and had never changed in character—always remaining a scrounger and a windbag; he would even bark at a fly, whereas to prisoners—through the wire—he simply wagged his tail. The dogs, of course, were specially selected; they were obviously not
picked up off the street, but bought from breeders, but how the masters were selected remained a mystery. Of one thing, however, Ruslan was certain: with a face like his, Master had no need to waste so many words on the Shabby Man, and the latter should long since have been made to stand at attention with his hands down the sides of his pants and sent off to work.