The Road (25 page)

Twilight set in. It grew quiet. The mule stood there, his head drooping, his tail limp. He neither looked at anything nor listened to anything. The artillery fire had long ago gone silent, but it was still rumbling on in the deserted and indifferent space of his head. From time to time he shifted his weight from one foot to another, then stood still once again.

All around lay the bodies of men and animals, along with trucks that had been overturned or smashed to pieces. Here and there rose lazy columns of smoke.

And beyond, without beginning or end, lay the misty, twilit, snow-covered plain.

The plain had swallowed up all his past life: the southern heat, the steepness of red roads, the smell of young mares, the noise of streams. Giu could now barely be distinguished from the stillness all around him; he was merging with it, becoming one with the misty plain.

But when the silence was violated by tanks, Giu heard them. Their iron sound filled the air; this sound entered the dead ears of both people and animals, and it penetrated the ears of the sad, living mule.

And when the plain’s great stillness was violated, when machines with guns and clanking, grinding caterpillar treads appeared, moving from north to south over the fresh snow, Giu saw them. The machines were reflected in the windscreens and mirrors of abandoned vehicles, and they entered the eyes of the mule standing stock-still beside an overturned cart.

Yet he did not start; he did not step to one side even when the treads passed close beside him, giving off a bitter warmth and a smell of burned oil.

White human figures detached themselves from the white plain. They moved quickly and silently,
more like predatory hunters than like people. Then they melted away and vanished, swallowed by the stillness of fresh fallen snow.

Next, also from the north, came a noisy torrent of people, trucks, guns, and creaking carts.

At first this torrent kept to the road, and the mule did not so much as turn his head to look at it, and the movement went on past him. Soon, however, the movement grew so vast that it flowed over onto the shoulder.

And then a man with a whip came up to Giu. He looked Giu over, and Giu smelled a smell of tobacco and rawhide.

Just like Niccolo, this man prodded Giu in the teeth, on his cheekbones, on his flanks.

The man pulled on Giu’s bridle and said a few words in a rasping voice. Involuntarily, Giu looked at Niccolo where he lay on the snow, but Niccolo said nothing.

The man pulled on the bridle a second time, but the mule did not move.

Then the man shouted and brandished his whip, and his threats were neither more nor less threatening than Niccolo’s threats; the only difference was in the sounds that conveyed these threats.

And then the man kicked the mule on the front leg. This hurt. It was the same sensitive bone that Niccolo used to kick.

Giu followed this new driver. They came to some carts. There a whole group of drivers gathered around them, laughing and flinging their arms about, clapping Giu on his back and his sides. He was given some hay, and he ate a little. Harnessed to the carts in pairs were horses with short ears and vicious eyes. There were no mules any longer.

The driver led Giu up to a cart with only one mare in the shafts.

The mare was small and dark, shorter than the tall mule. She glanced at him. She laid her ears back and pricked them up again. She tossed her head. Then she turned away and, ready to kick, lifted a back leg.

She was skinny and when she breathed in, her ribs moved like a wave beneath her hide. There were bleeding sores on her hide, the same as on Giu’s.

Giu stood there, hanging his head, as indifferent as before to the question of whether to be or not to be, calmly indifferent to the world because the world, this flat world of the plains, was indifferently, unconcernedly destroying him.

Just as he had done hundreds of times before, Giu thrust his head into the breastband. It was not made of leather, but that made no difference to how it felt against his worn, weary chest. It had a strange, unaccustomed smell, a smell of horse. But that made no difference to the mule.

The mare stood beside him, but the warmth from her hollow flank meant nothing to him.

She laid her ears back almost flat against her head, and her face looked vicious and predatory, not like that of a herbivore at all. She rolled her eyes, curled her upper lip, and bared her teeth, ready to bite; in his deep indifference, Giu did nothing to protect his cheek and neck. And when the mare began to edge around, pulling on the harness, wanting to turn her rump to him and give him a good, hard kick, he was not in the least concerned. He went on standing there, hanging his head, just as he had stood beside the smashed-up cart, his dead workmate, dead Niccolo, and the whip lying flat on the snow. But the driver gave a shout and struck the mare with his whip. Next he struck the mule with this whip—a twin brother to the whip left lying on the snow. The driver probably felt annoyed by the mule’s dejected bearing and, like Niccolo, he had the heavy hand of a peasant.

And Giu looked sideways at the mare, and the mare looked at Giu.

Soon the train of carts set off. The cart creaked in the usual way, and the road stretched out ahead of Giu, and there was a heavy weight behind him, and a driver, and a whip. But Giu knew that the road would not help him to escape from this weight; he trotted slowly along, and there was no beginning or end to the snowy plain.

But strangely, as he moved in his usual way through this world of indifference, he felt that the mare trotting beside him did not feel indifferent toward him.

She flicked Giu with her tail. Her silky, slippery tail was not in the least like either the driver’s whip or his old workmate’s tail; it slid caressingly over his hide.

After a while, the mare gave another flick of her tail, even though there were certainly no flies, gadflies, or mosquitoes anywhere on this snow-covered plain.

And Giu looked out of the corner of one eye at the mare trotting beside him, and she glanced at him at the same moment. Now there was no viciousness at all in her eye; it was just a little sly.

In the blank wall of the world’s indifference there had appeared a tiny snakelike fissure.

As they moved, their bodies got warmer. Giu could smell the mare’s sweat, and the mare’s breath, imbued with moisture and the sweetness of hay, was affecting him more and more deeply.

Not knowing why he was doing it, Giu began to pull harder on the traces. The bones of his rib cage sensed the weight and the pressure, while the mare’s breastband slackened and the cart grew lighter for her.

So they trotted on for a long time. Then the mare whinnied. It was a quiet little whinny, too quiet for the driver or anything around them to hear.

It was a very quiet whinny, because she wanted only the mule trotting beside her to hear it.

Giu did not answer, but it was clear from the way he flared his nostrils that he had heard.

They trotted on for a long, long time, until it was time to stop for the night. They trotted beside each other, their nostrils flared, and their two smells, the smells of a mule and a mare pulling the same cart, merged into a single smell.

The train of carts stopped. The driver unharnessed the mule and the mare, and they ate together and drank water from the same bucket. The mare went up to the mule and laid her head on his neck. Her soft, gently moving lips touched his ear and he looked trustfully into the sad eyes of this collective-farm mare, and his breath mingled with her breath, which felt warm and kind.

In this good, kind warmth all that had gone to sleep awoke again. All that had long been dead came back to life: milk from his mother, the sweet milk that a newborn being so loves; his very first blade of grass; the cruel red stone of the mountain roads of Abyssinia; fierce summer heat in the vineyards; moonlit nights in orange groves; and the terrible labor, the labor beyond labor that seemed to have destroyed him with its indifferent weight but which, in the end, evidently had not quite destroyed him.

Through their warm breath and their weary eyes, Giu the mule and the mare from Vologda spoke clearly to each other of their life and fate, and there was something charming and wonderful about these trustful, affectionate beings standing beside each other on the wartime plain, under the gray winter sky.

“The donkey, I mean the mule, seems to have turned quite Russian,” one of the drivers said with a laugh.

“No, look—they’re both of them weeping,” said another driver.

And it was true; they were weeping.

1.

Her childhood
was hungry and homeless; nevertheless, childhood is the happiest time of life.

Her first May—those spring days on the edge of town—was especially good. The smell of earth and young grass filled her soul with happiness. She felt a piercing, almost unbearable sense of elation; sometimes she was too happy even to feel like eating. All day long there was a warm green mist in her head and her eyes. She would drop down on her front paws in front of a dandelion and let out happy, angry, childish, staccato yelps; she was asking the flower to join in and run about with her, and the stillness of its stout little green leg surprised her and made her cross.

And then all of a sudden she would be frenziedly digging a hole; clods of earth would fly out from under her little belly, and her pink-and-black paws would get almost burned by the stony earth. Her little face would take on a troubled look—she seemed not to be playing a game; she seemed to be digging a refuge, digging for dear life.

She had a plump, pink belly and her paws were broad, even though she ate little during that good time of her life. It was as if she were growing plump from happiness, from the joy of being alive.

And then those easy childhood days came to an end. The world filled with October and November, with hostility and indifference, with icy rain and sleet, with dirt, with revolting slimy leftovers, the smell of which was nauseating even to a hungry dog.

But even in her homeless life there were good things: a compassionate human face, a night spent close to an underground hot-water pipe, a sweet bone. There was room in her dog’s life for passion, and dog love, and the light of motherhood.

She was a small bandy-legged mongrel living out on the streets. But she got the better of all hostile forces because she loved life and was very clever. She knew from which side trouble might creep up on her. She knew that death did not make a lot of noise or raise its hand threateningly, that it did not throw stones or stamp about in boots; no, death drew near with an ingratiating smile, holding out a scrap of bread and with a piece of net sacking hidden behind its back.

She knew the murderous power of cars and trucks and had a precise knowledge of their different speeds; she knew how to wait patiently while the traffic went by, how to rush across the road when the cars were stopped by a red light. She knew the forward-sweeping, all-destroying force of electric trains and their childish helplessness: as long as it was a few inches away from the track, even a mouse was safe from them. She knew the roars, whistles, and rumbles of jet and propeller planes, as well as the racket of helicopters. She knew the smell of gas pipes; she knew where she might find the warmth given off by hot-water pipes running under the ground. She knew the work rhythm of the town’s garbage trucks; she knew how to get inside garbage containers of all kinds and could immediately recognize the cellophane wrapping around meat products and the waxed paper around cod, rockfish, and ice cream.

A black electric cable sticking up out of the earth was more horrifying to her than a viper; once she had put a damp paw on a cable with a broken insulating jacket.

This dog probably knew more about technology than an intelligent, well-informed person from three centuries before her.

It was not merely that she was clever; she was also educated. Had she failed to learn about mid-twentieth-century technology, she would have died. After all, dogs that wandered into the city from some village or other often lasted only a few hours.

But technological knowledge and experience were not enough; no less crucial for her struggle was an understanding of the essence of life. She could not have survived without worldly wisdom.

This clever, nameless mongrel knew that the foundation stone of her life was vagrancy—perpetual change.

Now and again some tenderhearted person would show pity to the four-legged wanderer. They would give her scraps of food and find her somewhere to sleep on the back stairs. But if she were to betray her vagrant ways, she would have to pay with her life. Were she to settle down, the dog would make herself dependent on one kindhearted person and a hundred unkind people. And then death would creep up on her, with a scrap of bread in one hand and a piece of net sacking in the other. A hundred unkind hearts have more power than one kind heart.

People thought that the canine wanderer was incapable of devotion, that vagrancy had corrupted her.

They were wrong. It was not that her difficult life had hardened the heart of the wandering dog; it was simply that no one needed the good that lived in this heart.

2.

She was caught at night, while she was asleep. Instead of being killed, she was taken to a scientific institute. She was bathed in some warm, stinking liquid; after this, she had no more trouble from fleas. For several days she lived in a basement, in a cage. She was fed well, but she did not feel like eating. She missed her freedom, and she was haunted by a sense of imminent death. Only here, in this cage with warm bedding, with tasty food in a clean bowl, did she first truly value the happiness of her days of freedom.

She felt irritated by the stupid barking of her neighbors. People in white gowns examined her at length. One of them, a thin man with bright eyes, flicked her on the nose and patted her on the head. Then she was taken to another, quieter room.

She was about to be introduced to the most advanced technology of the twentieth century; she was about to be prepared for something momentous.

She was given the name Pestrushka: “Speckles.”

Probably not even sick emperors or prime ministers had ever undergone so many medical tests. Thin, bright-eyed Aleksey Georgievich learned everything there was to know about Pestrushka’s heart, lungs, liver, pulmonary gas exchange, blood composition, nervous reflexes, and digestive juices.

Pestrushka realized that neither the cleaners, nor the laboratory assistants, nor the generals covered in medals were the masters of her life and death, of her freedom, of her last agony.

She understood this, and her heart gave all its still-unspent love to Aleksey Georgievich, and no horror from her past or present could do anything to harden her against him.

She understood that everything—the injections and abdominal taps, the dizzying and nauseating journeys in centrifuges and vibration chambers, the aching sense of weightlessness that suddenly poured into her consciousness, into her front paws and her tail, into her chest and her back paws—she understood that all of this was the doing of her master, Aleksey Georgievich.

But this understanding made no difference. She was always waiting for the master she had found; she pined when he was not there; she was overjoyed to hear his footsteps; and when he went away in the evening her brown eyes seemed to moisten with tears.

After an especially difficult morning training session Aleksey Georgievich usually visited Pestrushka’s living quarters. Panting, her tongue hanging out, her large head resting on her front paws, Pestrushka would look meekly up at him.

In some strange and incomprehensible way this man who had become the master of her life and fate was mixed up with her sense of that green spring mist, with the sensation of freedom.

She looked at the man who had doomed her to imprisonment and suffering, and what sprang up in her heart was hope.

Aleksey Georgievich took some time to realize that he felt pity and tenderness toward Pestrushka, that he was not simply taking his usual interest in a project’s practical details.

Once, looking at a laboratory dog, he had thought how crazy and absurd it was that people who rear animals—millions of them, all over the world—should feel devoted love for the pigs and chickens they were preparing for execution. Now he felt that these kind eyes, this damp nose pressed trustfully into the hand of a murderer, were no less crazy and absurd.

Time passed; soon it would be the day of Pestrushka’s journey. She was now undergoing experiments in the space capsule itself. A four-legged creature was preparing the way for man; her journey into the far distance was a rehearsal for man’s farthest and longest flight.

Aleksey Georgievich was disliked by all his subordinates. Some were extremely frightened of him; he was short-tempered, and he often treated his laboratory assistants harshly. His superiors also disliked him—because of his rancor and his fondness for protracted disputes.

Nor was he easy to get on with at home; often he had severe headaches and would feel irritated by the slightest noise. He also suffered from heartburn and he believed that his wife did not give him the right diet, that instead of taking proper care of her husband she was secretly doing all she could for her countless relatives.

His friendships were no easier; he was always losing his temper, suspecting friends of envy and indifference. He would quarrel with them, feel upset, and then have to struggle to make peace with them again.

Aleksey Georgievich was no less harsh with regard to himself. Sometimes he would mutter sourly, “Yes, everybody’s fed up with me, and there’s nobody more fed up with me than I am myself.”

The bandy-legged mongrel took no part in laboratory intrigues, could not be accused of failing to look after Aleksey Georgievich properly, and seemed free of envy.

Like Christ, she returned good for evil, paying him back with love for the suffering he caused her.

He examined electrocardiograms, or analyses of blood pressure or reflexes, and the dog’s brown eyes gazed at him devotedly. Once he began explaining out loud to her that people went through the same training and that they found it difficult too. It was true, he went on, that the risks she was being exposed to were greater than the risks to which a human being would be exposed; nevertheless, she was infinitely better off than poor Laika, whose death in space had been
a foregone conclusion.

Once he said to Pestrushka that she would be the first creature, since life had begun on earth, to glimpse the true depth of the cosmos. A wonderful fate had befallen her. She was about to penetrate cosmic space—the first envoy of free reason to be sent out into the universe.

The dog seemed to understand him.

She was unusually clever—in her canine way, of course. The laboratory assistants and cleaning staff used to joke: “Our Pestrushka must have completed elementary technology!” Life amid scientific apparatus was not difficult for her; it was as if she understood the principles behind the various appliances and therefore had no trouble finding her bearings in a world of clamps, screens, electron tubes, and automatic feeders.

More than anyone, Aleksey Georgievich had the ability to summon up a complete picture of the vital functions of an organism flying through empty space, thousands of miles from any terrestrial laboratory.

He was one of the founders of a new science: cosmic biology. This time, however, he was not just entranced by the complexity of the project; bandy-legged Pestrushka had somehow made everything a little different.

He would look into the dog’s eyes. These kind eyes, not the eyes of Niels Bohr, would be the first to look into the cosmos, to see cosmic space that was not limited by the earth’s horizon. A space with no wind and only weak gravitational forces, a space where there was no rain, no clouds, no swallows, a space of photons and electromagnetic waves.

And it seemed to Aleksey Georgievich that Pestrushka’s eyes would be able to tell him what they had seen. And he would read and understand that most arcane of cardiograms, the secret cardiogram of the universe.

The dog seemed to understand by instinct that this man was allowing her to take part in the greatest event in earth’s history, that he was allowing her the leading role in a drama of unparalleled importance.

Everyone who knew Aleksey Georgievich—superiors and subordinates, family and friends—everyone was aware of strange changes in him; never had he been so easy, so gentle, so sad.

This new experiment was special. It was not merely that the capsule, disdaining the ease of orbit, would pierce deep into space and leave the earth a hundred thousand kilometers behind. No, what was special was the presence of a living being, penetrating the cosmos with her psyche. Or rather the other way around—the cosmos would penetrate the psyche of a living being. This was what mattered—not just questions of overload, vibrations, the sensation of weightlessness.

Before these very eyes the earth’s flat surface would begin to curve; the eyes of an animal would confirm the truth of Copernicus’s vision. A globe! A geoid! And more, much more. A younger sun, throwing off the weight of two billion years, would rise up out of black space before the eyes of a small, bandy-legged bitch. Earth’s horizon would slip away—in orange, lilac, and violet flame. That miraculous globe covered in snow and burning sand, full of wonderful, restless life, would not only slip away from under the dog’s feet—it would slip right out of her field of sensual awareness. Then the stars would acquire body; they would grow thermonuclear flesh—brilliant, burning substance.

The psyche of a living creature would be penetrated by another kingdom—a kingdom not covered by the warmth of the earth, by soft cumulus clouds, by the damp power of
phlogiston. Living eyes would see for the first time the airless abyss, the space of Kant, the space of Einstein, the space of philosophers, astronomers, and mathematicians; they would see this space not through speculation, not in the guise of a formula, but as it truly is—without mountains or trees, without skyscrapers or village huts.

No one around Aleksey Georgievich could understand what was happening to him.

To Aleksey Georgievich it seemed that he was discovering a new form of knowledge, higher than the knowledge derived from differential equations and the testimony of instruments. This new knowledge was transferred from soul to soul, from living eyes to living eyes. And everything that disturbed or angered him, that aroused his suspicion or spite, had somehow ceased to matter.

It seemed to him that a new quality was about to enter the life of terrestrial beings, enriching this life and elevating it—and that this new quality would bring with it forgiveness and justification for Aleksey Georgievich himself.