The Dogs of Winter

by Bobbie Pyron

  Viktor leapt to his feet. His dirty, tattered coat swirled out around him as he spun and spun. “We are the law!” he sang at the top of his lungs. “The streets are the law!”

  “The vodka is the law!” sang out Yula.

  “Glue is the law,” Pasha mumbled from his cardboard mat.

  “Stealing, surviving is the law,” said Tanya.

  “Money and only money,” Rudy intoned, “is the law.”

  Everyone nodded.

  A traveler from the train tossed a half-eaten sandwich in the trash can. Yula and Viktor dashed to the trash can, sliding and slipping on the marble floors. Viktor grabbed for the sandwich, knocking Yula to the ground. Yula jumped onto Viktor’s back and clawed and screamed, “It’s mine! Give it to me!” Viktor slapped at her like an annoying fly.

  Tanya and Pasha laughed. “Ride ’em, cowboy,” Tanya called.

  Rudy blew long streams of smoke from his nose. “Filthy animals,” he muttered. “They’re no better than dogs fighting in the streets.”

  I had seen dogs in the streets during the day, many of them. Sometimes they growled, sometimes they flashed their teeth. None fought each other.

  Rudy stood and strolled over to Viktor and Yula, who were rolling, biting, punching on the train station floor. All the people coming and going, going and coming from the trains streamed past them. Surely someone would tell them to stop. Someone would call the police.

  Rudy flicked his cigarette onto the floor. Then he kicked Viktor in the side with his black, pointed-toe boot. “Get up,” he commanded. Yula grabbed a fistful of Viktor’s hair and yanked hard. Rudy’s boot toe found her backside. Yula screamed in pain and rolled away. Viktor grabbed for her leg. Before he could reach it, Rudy kicked him in the bum too. His face slapped the ground. A puddle of blood spread across the cold gray floor.

  Rudy picked up the half-eaten sandwich, still wrapped like a gift in white paper now spattered with blood.

  He presented it to Tanya and bowed. “For you, fair princess.”

  He sat down next to me as Tanya wolfed down the sandwich. My stomach grumbled even though I felt sick, sick and cold. The red blood on the floor. There had been that red patch on our floor too. I had touched it. I had wondered if it could be —

  Rudy jabbed me hard in the side with his elbow. He pointed at the bleeding Viktor and the crying Yula with an unlit cigarette. “That’s all the education you need, Mish.”

  I crawled to the long bench above the heat vent. I curled up under the bench and turned my back to all the people coming and going to and from the trains. The people who never stopped, who looked through us like ghosts. The people in their brown coats, black coats, and gray coats, never red coats.

  I turned my back on these motherless children, for children was what they were. None of them, not even Rudy, I would learn, was older than fourteen.

  I closed my eyes against the bright lights that lit the soaring marble arches, the grimy gray floor, the cold statues of men on horses, the sad ghost children of Leningradsky Station. I was not lulled to sleep by my mother’s fairy tales. I did not feel her kiss good night or the press of her warm body next to mine. I was lulled to sleep by the clacking of trains in the station and the click of boot heels on the hard floor.

  And so days and nights and days passed. Tanya and I wandered the busy streets and plazas playing the different pretend games she made up to get money and food. She knew many pretend games. Some of the games left me feeling ashamed.

  And every evening we all huddled together in the train station. They would argue and swap cigarettes, tubes of glue, bottles of drink that smelled like the bad man. Most of the time Rudy was there, but sometimes he was not. But always, the money went to Rudy. If he suspected you kept money from him, he beat you bloody.

  On one particular day, Tanya was too sick to go out above ground. “You go with Pasha today,” Rudy said to me. He cuffed Pasha hard on the side of the head. “And keep your head out of the bag and bring back some money. You’re behind.”

  I trotted after Pasha up the stairs that rose and rose up to the daylight. “What pretend games do you know?” I asked him. “I’m tired of Tanya’s pretend games.”

  Pasha shrugged, squinting in the sun. “I don’t know pretend games,” he said. “Only girls and babies play pretend.”

  “I’m not a baby,” I said. “I’m old enough to go to kindergarten.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Pasha said. His dark eyes scanned the streets. “I’m almost ten and I know more about things than any of those kids in school.”

  He dashed across the street. Against a tall iron gate sat a child with a puppy in her lap. “Where are the puppies today?” he asked.

  “In that burned-out dance club,” she said.

  Pasha grabbed the collar of my sweater. “Come on. Let’s go get a puppy.”

  My heart leapt to the sky. A puppy! I had always wanted a puppy, had begged and begged my mother for one. “I will be the best boy in the world,” I had promised her, “if I can have a puppy.”

  And always she would say, “We can barely feed ourselves, Little Bear. How could we feed a growing puppy?”

  Now I skipped behind Pasha, singing, “A puppy! A puppy! I want a puppy!”

  Pasha stopped in front of a tumbledown building that smelled like smoke. “Shut up,” he said. He cocked his head to one side. “Listen,” he whispered.

  We heard soft mewling sounds coming from one corner of the rubble.

  “This way,” Pasha said.

  I stumbled behind Pasha over broken bottles, charred boards, legless tables, and piles of bricks until we found an overturned crate. Inside were two puppies.

  “Oh,” I gasped, falling to my knees, not caring about the broken glass. I could not believe my good fortune. Finally, I would have a puppy.

  Pasha grabbed a brown and white puppy by the scruff of the neck. The puppy yelped. “Grab the other and let’s go,” he said.

  I picked up the other puppy — brown and white like its brother — very gently and held it in my arms. The puppy whimpered and trembled. “I won’t hurt you, little one,” I said into its ear. “I’ll take good care of you forever and ever.”

  “Come on, Mishka,” Pasha called from the street.

  I hugged the puppy to me as we crossed the street again to a park. A park would be the perfect place for my new puppy and me, I thought.

  Pasha sat down on a sunny patch of cement not far from a man and his cart selling hot potatoes. “Business people come here for lunch,” Pasha said. “They always give more money if you have a puppy or a kitten.”

  My puppy chewed on my finger. “I’ll use my money to buy my puppy the very best food,” I said.

  Pasha sighed.

  “And I’ll buy her a beautiful collar and a soft bed and a leash so that she’ll never leave me.” I kissed my new puppy on the top of the head. “What should we name our puppies?” I asked Pasha.

  A woman dropped two coins at my feet. Another woman dropped a coin in Pasha’s outstretched hand.

  “Name them?” Pasha snorted. “We don’t name them. We use them to get money, that’s all.”

  I clutched my puppy to my chest. “But she’s my puppy!”

  Just as Pasha said, the park filled with people. Legs walked past, hands dropped coins and even bills on the ground in front of us. The puppy wiggled in my lap.

  “I don’t care about the money,” I said, sweeping my coins into Pasha’s pile. “I’m going to keep her. I’ll take her back to the station and everyone will love her.”

  “You better not,” Pasha said. “Rudy will kill it. Don’t think he won’t.”

  I jumped to my feet and clutched the puppy to my chest. “I’ll keep her, then,” I shouted. “I won’t go back!”

  Pasha eyed me for a long moment. “You’ll never survive out here on your own, Mishka. There are people who do terrible things to kids like us.”

  The puppy wriggled out of my arms and slid to my feet. I watched as she snapped up
a chunk of dirty potato. “Rudy is a bad person,” I said, not looking at Pasha. “He beats his friends and he takes our money.”

  “But he protects us, Mishka. We’re safer with Rudy than out here on our own. We all know that. That’s why we put up with his beatings.”

  In a voice that was almost kind, Pasha patted the ground next to him. “Come enjoy the sun and the puppy.” I looked away, fighting tears.

  Pasha sighed. He handed me some coins. “Here, go buy yourself and the puppy a potato,” he said.

  I scrubbed the tears trickling down my face. I held out my hand. A passerby dropped three glittering coins into my palm.

  Tanya and Yula giggled in the train station bathroom.

  “Let’s try your hair this way,” I heard Yula say to Tanya. “This is the way the boys like it.”

  Soon, they paraded out of the bathroom, their greasy hair piled high on their heads. They wobbled on someone’s cast-off, high-heeled shoes. It was the first time I’d seen Yula without her baseball player hat on and a cigarette tucked behind one ear.

  “What’re you looking at?” she snapped.

  “You don’t look like Yula,” I said.

  She grinned and twirled. “I look like a movie star, right?”

  I shook my head. “You look like a scarecrow on stilts,” I said.

  Before I could blink, she reached out and slapped me to the floor. “You think you’re your mother’s precious little Mishka?” She kicked me in the shin. “You should go take a look at yourself in the mirror, runt.”

  “I’m not tall enough to see in the mirror,” I pointed out. Besides, I would always be my mother’s fair-haired, moon-faced boy. She’d told me that.

  Yula kicked off the very high shoes. She grabbed me by the arm with one hand and grabbed a wooden box with another. She pushed me through the bathroom door. She threw the wooden box down in front of a sink, and then shoved me on top of the box.

  Yula grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a hard shake. “Take a good look, runt.”

  The boy who stared back from the mirror was not me. This boy in the mirror was filthy. His eyes were eclipsed by dark half-moons beneath. His hair stood up this way and that in ragged, greasy spikes. This boy in the mirror had gray skin beneath the filth and bruises on his too-thin face. The eyes were the eyes of a ghost.

  My mother would not know this boy looking back from the mirror if she passed him on the street.

  That night, under the long bench over the heating vent, I did not tell myself stories memorized from my fairy tale book. I did not imagine my mother kissing me good night. I rubbed the black button from her coat over and over and over with my dirty thumb and thought.

  If I came to The City on a train from my village, then certainly I could take one back. I had seen trains with the name of my village in big letters on the front. Why, I asked myself, did I think she was here in The City looking for me? How did I know she wasn’t back at our little apartment, waiting and watching out the window for her little bear to come home?

  I thought and I thought throughout the night as the trains came and went, as the other children laughed and cried and fought. I thought about going back home. I thought about the warm bed that my mother and I shared and her beautiful white hands slipping in and out of the hot, steamy water in the kitchen sink and the something good bubbling on the stove and her smiling mouth and her voice saying, “My little bear. My smart, beautiful boy.”

  And then I thought about that boy in the mirror, and I knew I had to go.

  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.