Faithful Ruslan (9 page)

Now he was being made to take poison from Master’s hand, too. And he knew he would have to take it. He had
seen his master’s face in every kind of mood, but he had never before seen it looking pitiable as it was now. The joke had gone on too long and Master would have been glad to have put an end to it, but this was exactly what all these strangers wanted and Rush could never obey
them
on any account. If this had been happening somewhere else, Ruslan would have disobeyed; he knew his rights, and he had a way of insisting on them with a low but menacing growl, mouth shut and eyes half closed, while turning himself into a block of stone that would yield neither to threats nor blows. In front of strangers, though, he would never do this, and however stupid the joke might be, Ruslan was obliged to go through with it. Reluctantly opening his teeth, he took the bread, while glancing around for a suitable place where he could take it and drop it.

Master took Ruslan’s jaws in both hands and clamped them forcibly together. Ruslan jerked backward, but the hands held him fast, and soon he felt a burning pain in his gums. He tried to unclench his jaws and push out the poison with his tongue, which only made it worse as the fire enveloped his tongue and palate and even seemed to penetrate his ears with a ringing noise. Everything—the dimly lit restaurant wreathed in blue tobacco smoke, his master’s pink face—grew blurred in a flood of stinging tears. In order not to prolong the torture he started to swallow convulsively, but the fire only broke out more violently in his stomach, which was already tender from the nausea brought on by hunger. Frightened to death, reduced instantly to sick helplessness, the thought of biting those hands did not even occur to Ruslan; instead he simply staggered backward in an attempt to get away from them, his claws slipping on the floor, with a single idea in his mind—the same idea that had possessed
his ancestors whenever wounds or illness had made them suffer: to escape, to crawl away to some dark lair or corner, into the forest undergrowth, into reeds or dense grass, and there to endure his agony alone until he either recovered or died.

Eventually another pair of hands seized him by the collar and dragged him away from Master’s grip. Ruslan now moved purely instinctively toward the source of the light and the frosty air, which he gulped hungrily with all the power of his lungs, gasping for breath as he was wracked by a violent, exhausting spasm of hiccups.

“O.K., Ruslan, let’s make up and be friends,” he heard Master say with unusual affection but in a voice apparently muffled in wadding. “Where are you going? Come here!” With a shudder Ruslan turned and glanced all around the restaurant with streaming eyes. The faces swam, shimmered and went double. Among them he was just able to recognize Master’s face—no, there were two Masters there at once, both smiling guiltily, both pink with lackluster eyes. Both faces gave an order in the same voice, saying, “Heel, Ruslan!” And he tried hard to decide which of the two he was supposed to obey. Which of them was his erstwhile, beloved master, and which was the traitor whom he should attack? Unable to solve this dilemma, he decided to leave them both.

Even before he was out of the doorway he heard the people start angrily shouting at Master, who replied in a voice that ended in a shriek: “You mind your own business—I know what I’m doing! It was time to wean him away from the Service. Everyone says they pity the animal—but no one has enough pity to kill him!” Ruslan stopped and thought for a moment: those people might attack Master, and he didn’t have his gun. But the suspicion Ruslan had harbored on that
first snowy morning, that Master no longer needed either his gun or his dog, had now only been confirmed in bitter and humiliating fashion. Master knew best how to live his life from now on; let him fend for himself. In any case, no one in the restaurant was attacking him.

Head lowered, Ruslan again crossed the main station hallway, cautiously went down the steps and moved along the frostbound wall of the building, trying to keep as close to it as possible. Turning the corner, he took a mouthful of snow. The cold made his gums ache, but it also began to quench the burning sensation. He regurgitated a lump of frozen snow mixed with bread and clots of mustard and noisily retched up the rest of the fiery poison. Still tormented by hiccups, however, and feeling very sick, he looked for somewhere to hide. The pathway led to the same garbage cans where the hunger-maddened Thunder had met his end, behind which was the yellowish-white wooden shed housing the toilet, and there, in the narrow gap between them, he lay down and rested his head on his forepaws. The stench did not bother him, because he could no longer smell anything, and he welcomed the comforting warmth given out by the toilet and the garbage cans. Soon Ruslan felt pleasantly warm; he ceased to toss and turn, and only his eyebrows twitched occasionally at the sound of a voice, the crunch of footsteps in the snow or a locomotive whistle.

His master no longer loved him. This is always a shattering discovery for a dog, filling his whole being with misery and taking away his will to live. It shattered Ruslan, too, even though it might seem that he had grounds enough to guess at it earlier. Perhaps he had indeed guessed it already, but it had somehow been easier to eat a whole jar of mustard rather than acknowledge that he no longer loved Master. For
what was it, if not love, that had enabled him to endure the intolerable life of the Service? What was it that had helped them, a fearless handful of masters and dogs, to hold down the thousands-strong herd of prisoners when, had they only combined and mutinied all at once, no amount of machine guns and barbed wire could have kept them under control? What was it that had flung Ruslan into the thrilling pursuit of an escaping convict, into the dangers of close combat? Was not his sole reward to please his master? And was it only because he fed him that Ruslan forgave the Corporal for all those undeserved kicks and shouts? Everything unpleasant that had happened in those days had happened between “us”; no strangers from the world of “them” were ever allowed to witness the humiliations of the Service. Therefore to belittle Ruslan in public could only have been done by someone who did not love him, someone who had betrayed everything that bound them together, who had even betrayed the Service itself, which could not have existed without love. Those hands had made him take something that he was trained to expect only from an enemy; therefore his former master had become an enemy. Master could live the rest of his life as he thought fit; but how was Ruslan to go on living?

One thought occurred to Ruslan: a dog sometimes changed masters. Thunder had had three of them and it did not seem to matter; twice he had grown accustomed to a new master and had loved them both almost as much as the first one, whom he had been given at birth. Other dogs, too, had adapted to new masters, although the results had not always been entirely happy. But above and beyond it all there was the Service. Masters might come and go, but the Service went on forever, for as long as there existed that world surrounded by double rows of barbed wire with watchtowers
at the corners, bathed in the glare of floodlights, echoing to the sound of music and voices from black bell-mouthed horns that seemed to dangle from the sky on invisible wires. Ruslan did not know when that world had begun—and he could not imagine it ending. But there must be an end to this terrible stage of homelessness, and he did not care how that end came; amid the mass of small gray details that made up his present existence, Ruslan was kept going by a dream and could already envisage its final glorious outcome: one day the door of his kennel would be open and “Comr’d Cap’n P’mission Tspeak” would bring him a new master—wearing squeaky new boots, carrying a feeding bowl full of delicious-smelling broth and marrowbones; he would put his offering on the floor and say in an unfamiliar but godlike voice, “O.K., Ruslan, let’s get to know each other,” and Ruslan, wagging his tail, would start eating the food—in token of his absolute trust.…

The sound of someone’s hesitant, searching footsteps disturbed his thoughts. He noticed that the twilight had deepened, and decided not to go out but to stay hidden, screwing up his eyes in order to be completely invisible. But that someone, whoever it might be, had apparently spotted him, because he stopped and took a timid step toward Ruslan.

“So there you are,” said the Shabby Man in astonishment. “What are you doing among all these nasty smells? Lost your nose? Or have you come here to die, Ruslan?” He took another step forward and cautiously squatted down on his haunches. “God, was he cruel to you, that monster! You can never trust a screw. They’re all born godless bastards and godless they’ll die, with nasty little plywood pyramids over their graves and never a cross. Come on, get up, old boy—no sense in lying here. He’s gone now, your beloved master.
Gone away—whoo-whoo—and won’t come back. Why don’t you come along with me, eh?”

The words flowed toward Ruslan, poured into his keen ears and suspicious heart, and from their general tenor he gathered the fact, floating like a chip of wood on a bubbling stream, that his master was gone forever. Ruslan took this news calmly, even with indifference; having come down from the firmament of his dream to the dirty, stinking earth, he found to his amazement that he now felt a far greater interest in the person who was squatting in front of him. To Ruslan his master was now dead, and this man, his beetling brows topped by a dirty cap with dangling earflaps, was alive and was inviting Ruslan to go with him. For a start, Ruslan would have liked to sniff that cap and the frayed sleeve of his patched overcoat.

Just then the Shabby Man, as though responding to Ruslan’s wish, stretched out his hand toward him—slowly, and ready at any second to pull it back again. He did not know that he would never manage to do it quickly enough; nor did he know that the only way to stroke Ruslan was to spread all the fingers open wide to show him that the hand was harmless, and for a start the hand was pushed away by a blow from the dog’s bony muzzle. The Shabby Man did not risk a second attempt. Suddenly Ruslan himself stretched out toward him. Rising up on his forelegs, he slowly and deliberately sniffed at the man’s cold knee, then caught his wrist, held it gently in his teeth while for several long (and to the man, agonizing) moments he inhaled the warmth and the smell of the coat sleeve. He wanted to make sure that he had not been mistaken, when earlier, in the restaurant, that hand had put food in front of him.

No, he had not been mistaken. The Shabby Man’s clothes
might rot away and he might change them for others, but he could not change his skin, and until the skin itself perished it would probably secrete in its pores that impenetrable, irremovable smell—the smell of clothes baked in a prison delousing chamber, of underwear soaked a hundred times in the copious sweat of fear and weakness; the smell of illness and of medicines that never cured them because they all had the same name—“hopeless expectation”; the smell of a bonfire, at which the man had stared with dilated pupils as he tried to keep alive a sudden upsurge of hope, and the smell of that hope as it faded away in flabby muscles; the smell of wooden bunks, hard, but that gave sleep as deep as death; the smell of terror, of longing, of yet more hopes, and the smell of tears that the man had sobbed into his mattress, pretending he was coughing.

Having breathed in this bouquet, Ruslan stood up and allowed the Shabby Man to stand up, and they set off side by side to where the Shabby Man wanted to go—both comforted that they had found each other. The Shabby Man, no doubt, was thinking how easily, by what a lucky chance he had acquired this handsome dog, strong and naturally loyal, who needed no training and who from henceforth would be his companion and defender.

As for Ruslan, this new acquaintance had a different meaning. Although not foreseen by the regulations of the Service, what had happened by no means ran counter to its principal rule: an inmate of the camp had himself asked a guard dog to act as his escort. Although he had been released, the man obviously wanted to return to the shelter of the old, familiar abode. There was nothing surprising in this; it had happened before that runaways had voluntarily returned, half dead with hunger and scarcely able to stand,
after spending a whole summer wandering in the forest. When these men came back to camp, the masters generally refrained from beating them up and did not set the dogs on them, but merely gave them a long, cold, mocking stare until, as often as not, the wretch collapsed as though dead at their feet.

The Shabby Man was clearly on the way to going back, and Ruslan regarded it as his duty to guard him until the masters should return. When they did come back, they would replace the overturned fence poles and the torn barbed wire; the black-ribbed machine-gun barrels would be put back in the watchtowers, the red banner with its mysterious white markings would blaze across the gateway in the glare of searchlight beams again … and then the Shabby Man would go where Ruslan wanted him to go.

AT THE VERY START OF HIS NEW SPELL OF DUTY, Ruslan discovered that his prisoner had managed to acquire a master, for the first thing the Shabby Man had to do when he walked into the yard was to ask permission from him (or rather from
her
, since this master wore a skirt and a fluffy headscarf) to bring Ruslan home with him:

“Hey, Stiura, where are you? … Look at the fine guard that I’ve brought you. You won’t chase us out, will you?”

Stiura, a large and portly lady who shut out almost all the light when she stood in the doorway, inspected Ruslan from the porch and was not pleased.

“I’m not sure whether you brought the dog or he brought you. And what are we supposed to feed the brute on?”

“That’s the good thing about him—on nothing. He doesn’t need feeding. He’s funny that way, but he won’t be any trouble to you.”

The last remark completely reassured Stiura.

“O.K., he can live here—provided he doesn’t gobble up my little Treasure.”

Ruslan did not wait to be invited indoors. Squeezing past the landlady, he went through to the living room and soon returned. Stiura owned one half of the house, and Ruslan had to check that the windows of her two rooms and kitchen
gave onto the fenced yard, so that there was no way for his prisoner to slip out of the house unnoticed. There was one thing, however, that Ruslan was surprised to find—obvious traces of the quite recent presence of the Chief Master, “Comr’d Cap’n P’mission Tspeak.” This familiar scent reassured him; besides which, the fact that the boss had personally visited and inspected this place relieved Ruslan, as his subordinate, of any responsibility,