The Dogs of Winter (5 page)

I sat huddled on the bench inside the rocking, clacking train. I hadn't had to wait long before I saw a train with the name of our village on the front. I just stepped onto the train. I didn't even say good-bye to Tanya, Yula, Pasha, or Rudy, and especially not Viktor.

I watched all the different colored coats come into the train and leave the train. Some people read, others slept. One woman smelled of onions and had tired eyes. Another tossed her long black hair. None of them noticed me there on the bench on my way home.

There were many stops on our way out of The City. A few other children rode the trains, most with grown-ups. The grown-ups read their papers or gazed at nothing out the windows. A man in a fine hat collected tickets; he looked through me too. But the children saw me. They looked at me with wide eyes. I made myself small.

And then, at one stop, the doors to the train slid open and in walked two dogs. I sat up straighter.

The dogs sniffed their way down the aisle, their tails wagging. I waited for someone to shout at the dogs, to drive
them off the train. But no one did. The people read their books and newspapers, and snored with their weary heads against the train window. No shouting. No chasing.

The dogs finally settled near a child and mother. They circled three times and lay down with a sigh. I watched them as they dozed. I could barely breathe for the wonder of dogs on the train.

When next the train stopped, the larger dog, with fur like a bear, sat up and searched the air from the open train door with his nose. He lay back down and resumed his nap. At the next stop, he did the same thing. But this time, he nipped the smaller dog on the ear. They trotted out the train door and disappeared into the crowd.

My hunger woke me. I sat up and looked out the train window. We were no longer in The City.

Just as I began to worry I'd slept past my stop, the man on the loudspeaker called the name of my village, Ruza.

I scrambled down from my seat and off the train.

I pushed my way through the forest of legs and bags and satchels. Surely my mother would be there in the train station watching for me in her red coat with the one black button missing. Surely she had been there every day, meeting every train, watching for her Mishka.

But no one was there watching for me and smiling when
she set eyes on her smart, beautiful boy. There was no red coat or chestnut hair.

I walked through the village, past the school and the butcher shop and the fabric shop and across the street to the bakery where my mother had worked. A cold wind blew through my thin sweater. The bakery was dark.

I walked up the long, low hill to the apartment building squatting at the top. Nothing stirred from within or from without. But surely she was there, waiting for me. Watching for me.

I ran up the stairs two by two to the third floor. My heart flew ahead of me.

The door stood ajar. I started to push it open, then stopped. What if
he
was there? What if he was there with his big, ugly feet and rotten teeth and bottles of vodka? The stench of his sweat, the red smear on the floor —

The door flew open. I jumped back.

“Who the hell are you?” A large, doughy-faced woman in a black coat and dirty head scarf loomed in the doorway.

“I am Mishka, Ivan Andreovich,” I whispered around my pounding heart. “I live here. With my mother, Anya Andreyevna.”

The woman snorted and began picking up bottles. “Then your mother is a pig,” she said.

Anger flamed in my face. “My mother is
not
a pig!” I said. “
He
is the pig.” My stomach churned at the thought of him. “He is a
bad man
,” I said.

She shrugged. “Whatever. They aren't here now. No one has been here for weeks. I'm stuck with months of no rent and cleaning this pigpen for new tenants.”

“But we live here,” I said. “She just went away for a while.”

She stood and eyed me wearily. Her face softened a bit. “She's not here, boy. Do you not know where she is?”

I shook my head.

The woman began stuffing garbage into bags. “Some of the neighbors said they heard screams. As you say, he was no good. She may have come to a bad end.”

She straightened, her face closed. “Whatever happened is not my concern. You don't live here anymore. You'll have to find another place to live. Don't you have family somewhere?”

I shook my head again.

The woman — she was a pig-faced woman — sighed and threw up her hands. “I don't know what's become of us, living like dogs, leaving our children to run wild.”

“But my mother would never leave me. She —”

The pig-faced woman talked into a bag of garbage. “If you were to ask me, which no one has, we were better off in the old days. Things ran right as a train back then.” She tied off the top of the garbage bag. She pointed a stubby finger at me and shook it. “Say what you want about Gorbachev and Communism, but since the Soviet Union fell, this country's gone to hell in a handbasket.”

She slung two bags of garbage over her shoulder. “I want you gone when I get back.”

I listened to her clomp down the hallway.

I walked slowly from one room to another. Stinking garbage fouled my mother's tidy kitchen. The refrigerator door stood open. There was nothing except a hunk of molded cheese and a half-eaten, sour-smelling sausage. I stuffed them greedily in my mouth as I wandered in the bedroom. Everything was gone … my mother's clothes, the wooden icon of a saint she kept over the bed. Even her smell of cigarettes and lavender — gone.

I went back to the kitchen pantry, where I had slept after he came. Everything was gone there too — my clothes, my blankets, my radio with the shiny antenna and knobs.

But then I saw it: There, pushed in a dusty corner, lay the book of fairy tales. I ran my hand over the greasy cover, a firebird flying over a frozen kingdom, above glittering spires that soared forever above golden, onion-shaped domes.

I held the book to my chest and looked one last time around my mother's kitchen. A broken plate rested in the sink. How long had it been since I had eaten from a plate, a bowl, or drunk from a cup?

I walked to the corner in the bedroom and knelt. I touched my finger to the red stain the pig-faced woman had not been able to scrub away. The stain was larger, much larger than I remembered.

A cold sweat battled a heat that swept through me. I vomited on the floor.

I passed the woman in the stairwell as I walked down one flight, then two. She muttered something I could not understand.

I stood at the top of the low hill. One raindrop, then many, pelted my face. I slid my book under my sweater. I pointed the toes of my Famous Basketball Player shoes down the hill and followed them back to the train station and The City and Leningradsky Station.

It rained for days. Some days the rain was cold and thin; other days it drowned out the sounds from the street above the train station. The rain kept us below ground, away from begging and stealing and food and drink.

The first day, we slept on our beds of newspaper and cardboard. Even Rudy slept when he was not playing some trick on Yula or Viktor. I watched for red coats, chestnut hair, and dogs.

The second day, Tanya refused to steal a woman's purse and Rudy beat her. Yula left with a man in a gray suit. When she returned later, she had clean hair, a bag of food and beer, and bruises on her neck.

On the third night, I read to everyone from my book of fairy tales. True, I could not read all of the words, but I heard my mother's voice reading the stories to me well enough. The only sound as I read the story of the Little Match Girl was the clack of the trains and the scrape of Pasha's cough. Rudy cleaned his fingernails with the tip of a switchblade.

“She was just like us.” Tanya sighed, wiping away a tear when I closed the book. “No one cared, even then.”

“Someone did, though,” said Pasha. “There was that light that lifted her up and took her away.”

“It was God,” Yula said. “It was God who took her away.”

“Or angels,” said Tanya. “It could have been one of God's angels come to take her away.”

Viktor snorted. “Where were the angels, where was God when she was starving and freezing? Where were they when she was turned out on the street?”

Everyone looked at the floor.

“I'll tell you where the angels are,” he said, snatching my book from my hands. “They're in here with all the other fairy tales. That's all they are: fairy tales!”

I jumped at his outstretched arm. “Give me back my book,” I cried.

He held the book higher. “Jump, little mouse,” he sneered.

I jumped and I jumped as high as my Famous Basketball Player shoes would take me.

“Look, he's a circus mouse,” Viktor said. “A stupid, little circus mouse!”

Tanya leapt to her feet. “Give Mishka back his book, Viktor, or I swear to God —”

“Swear to God all you want, Tanya,” Viktor said. His face was twisted in a way I had never seen. “It won't make any difference.” His face glistened in the light of an oncoming train.

“God's not here,” he went on. “God is just a stupid, stupid fairy tale.” And with that, he flung the book high. It
soared above our heads and our outstretched hands. It flew through the air, the pages lifting like lovely white wings. The book was an angel, a firebird. It hung for an instant in the shining white light of the train and then fell beneath its wheels.

Tanya punched and kicked Viktor. “See what you've done!” And because Yula does what Tanya does, she took off her shoe and smacked Viktor in the face. Pasha retreated to his bag of glue.

After the train pulled away, I crawled over to the edge of the platform. There, in a heap, lay the remains of my book.

I started to scramble down to the dirt when a hand grabbed the collar of my sweater and pulled me back.

“No,” Rudy said. “Are you too stupid to see? A train's coming.” And indeed there was.

Rudy leapt down to the dirt. His boots sent up little puffs of dust. The eye of the train grew larger and larger.

As if he had all the time in the world, Rudy picked through the remains of the book. He examined pages as if he were shopping for vegetables on a summer afternoon. He squinted at the pages through the smoke of his cigarette.

The light of the train grew brighter and brighter. The whistle screamed.

“Rudy! Get out of there!” Tanya cried. Viktor's eyes were as big as the train's headlight. My heart thundered down the tracks with it.

Rudy stuffed a handful of pages in his coat pocket. The
train was now in the station entrance. The whistle shrieked again. The brakes screamed.

Rudy flicked his cigarette at the rushing light. And with all the grace and disdain of a put-upon cat, he leapt to the platform. He dusted off the knees of his black pants. Without a word, he pulled out the pages from my book of magnificent tales and handed them to me.

“Screw the rain,” he said. He took Tanya's hand and they disappeared into the crowd.