The prisoners in “Ruslan’s” camp would have been a mixture of real criminals with totally innocent politicals, the latter greatly predominating in numbers. The criminal prisoners generally despised and bullied the politicals, and this fact was cynically exploited by the prison authorities; by giving minor privileges to the criminal element, they were utilized to keep the politicals in subjection. Another universally applied policy was to blackmail or bribe prisoners into acting as informers; in any group, such as a work team or a camp hut, at least one inmate was bound to be working as an informer to report on any subversive talk or behavior. These men were naturally feared and loathed by their fellow prisoners, and it was by no means uncommon for informers to be beaten up, mutilated or murdered when their role was discovered. A striking episode in Faithful Ruslan depicts the fate of just such an informer.
During the period covered by the novel, a prisoner could be serving a sentence of anything from five to twenty-five years. It was also very common for sentences to be extended as punishment for some real or trumped-up breach of regulations, so that a prisoner might serve for double the original length of his sentence, or more, without leaving the camps. The ex-prisoner who is one of the main characters in Faithful Ruslan—Vladimov gives him no name but simply calls him “the Shabby Man”—belonged to the large category of camp inmates, several millions of them, who were automatically imprisoned on being repatriated to the USSR from German prisoner-of-war camps in 1945. Formally, his release from the Soviet prison camp was due to a blanket “amnesty” extended by Khrushchev to all such ex-POWs; this term was distinct from the procedure known as “rehabilitation,” which was granted to civilians or soldiers who had been imprisoned for a specifically political offense under Stalin (the “offense” was, of course, fictitious and no more than a pretext by which the security forces fulfilled their quota of arrests). Rehabilitation carried with it certain privileges, such as a right to proper housing for victim and family, and a right to reinstatement in a job appropriate to his qualifications. Prisoners like “the Shabby Man” who were merely amnestied had no such rights of restitution; when freed, they had to fend for themselves, find whatever work was available for a man who might have lost his health or his skills, and reestablish a home without any special state assistance at a time when there was still a drastic housing shortage due to war damage. Thanks to yet another rotten deal from life’s deck of cards, “the Shabby Man” therefore finds himself in the worst possible category of the released prisoners; it is important for the reader to be aware of this in order to understand the motivation for his behavior in the story.
Any further explanation would usurp the author’s rights. Faithful Ruslan must from here on speak for itself, and it is to be hoped that the reader will gain as much pleasure from reading it as did the translator from putting it into English.
MICHAEL GLENNY
* An abridged English translation of Vladimov’s letter was published in the New York Review of Books, issue of May 4, 1978, p. 47.
* The most complete available account of the Soviet prison-camp system is to be found in A. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
† Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 708.
* R. Medvedev and Z. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power (New York: 1976), p. 20.
1
ALL NIGHT IT HOWLED, THE LAMPS CREAKING and swinging, the outside latch rattling; then toward morning it subsided, grew quiet and Master came. He sat on a stool and smoked, waiting for Ruslan to finish his broth. Master had brought his submachine gun with him and hung it on a hook in the corner of the kennel, which meant that there was to be duty, after a long time in which there had been none; therefore he must eat without hurrying, but without lingering either.
Today the feed included a large marrowbone, so enticing that he felt like taking it away immediately into a corner and pushing it under the bedding. Later he would be able to gnaw at it in the proper way—in the dark and alone. With Master there, however, he felt shy of pulling it out of the feeding bowl, and contented himself with stripping all the meat off it, just in case; experience told him that when he came back the bone might not be there. Carefully pushing it aside with his nose, he lapped up the fatty juice and had started gulping down the lumps of warm, meaty stew, dropping them and picking them up again, when suddenly Master shifted on his seat and asked impatiently:
“Ready?”
As he stood up, he dropped his cigarette butt, which fell into the feeding bowl with a hiss. This had never happened before, but Ruslan did nothing to show that it surprised or upset him. He merely looked up at Master and wagged his heavy tail in a token of gratitude for the food and of his readiness to earn it by a spell of duty. He refrained from even glancing at the bone, instead only hastily lapped up some more juice. And with that he was quite ready.
“O.K., let’s go.”
As Master held out his collar, Ruslan willingly stretched out his neck to take it; he wriggled his ears in response to the touch of his master’s hands as they fastened the buckle, tested to see that it was not too tight and secured the spring clip to the ring. Master wound some of the leash around his hand and fastened the very end of it to his belt, so that throughout their spell of duty they were joined together and could not lose one another. Then with his free hand he threw up his gun, caught it by the sling and hung it over his shoulder with the sweating barrel pointing downward. Ruslan took up his usual position beside Master’s left leg.
They walked down the gloomy corridor into which all the kennel doors opened. Behind their heavy wire mesh gleamed moist, slanting eyes; the dogs who had not yet been fed whined and butted the grilles with their bony foreheads, while at the far end, one dog, burning with envy, was giving tongue in a sobbing bark. Ruslan felt proud that today he was the first to be taken out on duty.
The moment the outer door was opened he was dazzled by a blinding white light, and recoiled with a start, blinking and growling.
“Come on!” said Master, giving the leash a jerk. “You’ve had it easy for too long, you idle brute. What’s the matter—never seen snow before?”
So that was what had been howling all night. It had settled like a thick, fluffy blanket all over the deserted parade ground, on the roofs of the barracks, storehouses and garages, forming white hats on top of all the lampposts and covering the benches grouped around a trash can. Snow had fallen many times in Ruslan’s lifetime, but it always came as a shock to him. He knew that the masters called it “snow,” but to him it was not something that had a particular name; to Ruslan it was simply whiteness. Because of it, everything changed and lost its normal meaning, the world to which his eyes and nose were accustomed became void and dull, and all tracks were hidden. The only thing visible was a clear double line made by his master’s boots, leading from the kitchen to the doorway. Next moment the whiteness struck his nostrils, and he was overcome with nervous excitement; he dipped his muzzle into it up to the eyebrows, plowed a furrow and crammed his mouth full with it. Snorting, he even gave a silly, cheerful sort of bark, which meant roughly: “You fraud, I know you!” Master was not holding him in, but had unwound the leash to its full length. With a white beard and white eyelashes, Ruslan would sometimes hang back, sometimes run ahead; keyed up, he avidly gulped the air and sniffed around in vain for scents.
This was the reason why he committed a minor blunder—he failed to look about him in the regulation manner required when on duty. Yet something alerted him; he pricked up his ears and stopped, rooted to the spot, feeling a vague sense of unease. To the right were the bare poles and the barbed wire; beyond that were the deserted fields and the dark, jagged-topped edge of the forest; to the left were the same poles and wire and another stretch of field, but dotted with huts—squat and low, almost like underground storage-cellars, built of untrimmed logs that had turned black with age. And as always their little windows stared at him, covered now with hoarfrost and
as blank as blind eyes. Everything was in place, nothing had moved, but a strange, unprecedented silence had settled on the world; his master’s footsteps were muffled as though he were walking on a layer of felt bedding. Strangely, too, there were no eyes peering out of those windows; no one was showing any curiosity to see what was going on in the world (a habit in which people were no different from dogs!). What was more, the huts themselves looked oddly flat, as though merely painted on a white background, and not a sound came out of them. It was as if the horde of noisy, smelly people who lived in them had all suddenly died in the night.
But if they had died, he would surely have sensed it, and if not he, then some of the other dogs would undoubtedly have dreamed about it and waked up the others with their barking. They’re not here, thought Ruslan. Where can they have gone? He immediately felt ashamed at being so slow-witted. They hadn’t died—they had escaped. He began to quiver with excitement, breathing hotly and noisily; he wanted to pull at the leash and drag Master after him, as had happened on those rare and unusual occasions when they had run for miles and finally caught their quarry—and never once had they failed to catch him! This had marked the start of his real life in the Service; it was the best thing that Ruslan had ever known.
Yet not everything fitted into that rare and unusual pattern either. He knew the word “escape,” and could even distinguish between “single escape” and “group escape,” but at such times there had always been a great deal of noise and nervous bustle; for some reason the masters had shouted at each other a lot and had lashed out at the dogs for no reason at all, while the dogs themselves, confused and jittery, had always started fighting and snapping at each other and could not be calmed down until the chase began. He had never known silence like this before, and it aroused the most frightening suspicions. Not only had all the inmates of the huts broken out in a mass escape, but all the masters seemed to have gone after them, too, and in such a hurry that they had not even had time to take the dogs with them—and without the dogs, of course, what sort of a chase could there be? So now just the two of them, Ruslan and his master, had to find all the runaways and chase them back—the whole stinking, howling, maddened herd of them.
He felt a wave of fear that made the pit of his stomach turn cold, and he ran forward to look up at Master’s face. Something was wrong with his master: he was walking with a wholly unaccustomed stoop, glancing morosely from side to side, and his right hand was not holding the sling of his submachine gun, as it always did, but was thrust into the pocket of his greatcoat. It occurred to Ruslan that Master looked as if he had a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach, too, which in view of the task facing them today was not surprising. He pressed against Master’s greatcoat and rubbed him with his shoulder, which meant that he understood everything and was ready for anything, even to die if need be. Ruslan had not yet had to face death himself, but he had seen men and dogs die. There was nothing more terrible, but if he was with Master, it was another matter: that he could stand. This time, however, Master did not notice Ruslan touching him, did not give him a reassuring pat on the head in return, as he always did, and this was a really bad sign.
Suddenly he saw something which made his hackles rise and a growl start rumbling in his throat. Although not distinguished for his good eyesight—aware of this failing, he did his utmost to make up for it by diligence and a keen nose—Ruslan immediately caught sight of the main gates of the camp as Master and he passed through the small wicket gate into the outer perimeter. The gates looked so strange that Ruslan could not believe his eyes: they were wide open, creaking in the wind on their long rusty hinges, yet no one was running toward them with shouts and rifle fire to hasten to shut them. What was more, the other gates, on the outer side of the perimeter zone, were never supposed to be opened at the same time as the inner gates, and now they were open, too; the white road between the inner and outer perimeter fences simply led straight out of the camp, no longer fenced in, no longer blocked by the bars of the gate, but it simply faded away toward the forest on the dark horizon.…
And what on earth had happened to the watch-tower? It had been completely blinded: one searchlight was covered in snow and pointing straight down, the other, its broken glass looking like a jagged grin, was dangling by a wire. Gone were the white sheepskin coat and the fur hat, gone, too, the long, ribbed machine-gun barrel that was always aimed downward. The faded red banner above the gates was still there, but someone had torn it so that it was hanging down in disgraceful tatters, blown about by the wind. That strip of red cloth, with its mysterious white markings, had always had a special significance for Ruslan: etched into his mind was the memory of the scene when, on dark evenings after work, in every kind of weather—frost, snowstorm or pouring rain—flanked by masters and dogs, the column of prisoners had halted in front of the banner, when both searchlights had suddenly flared into life and their two, long, smoky beams had joined at the banner; as it hung there, blazing across the entire width of the gateway, the prisoners would involuntarily jerk their heads up and stare, shivering, at its dazzling white markings. Ruslan was not able to interpret the full, hidden wisdom of those markings,* but they somehow stung his eyes until tears came, and he, too, would feel a sudden tremor, a thrill of sadness mixed with an excitement that produced a delicious sinking feeling inside him.
All this damage and vandalism stupefied Ruslan. He was amazed at the impudence of the escaping prisoners, who must have been quite convinced that no one would chase them. It was as if they had known it all in advance—that snow would fall and cover all their tracks, that it was difficult for a dog to work in the cold. But worst of all was the fact that they had made no particular effort to conceal their intentions: he well remembered how the prisoners had behaved throughout those last, incomprehensible days when the dogs had languished with nothing to do and only Ruslan’s master had come—without his gun—to feed them and take them out to stretch their legs a little in the exercise yard. It had been puzzling in the extreme. The prisoners had wandered freely around the accommodation zone in herds, had played their squeaky accordions, bawled songs, and even started to tease the dogs; their extraordinary behavior had made no sense at all at the time. But how had the masters failed to notice anything, when literally all the dogs had sensed that something was amiss and had gnawed at their bedding in angry frustration?
Ruslan did not blame his master or reproach him. He was no longer young, and he knew that masters sometimes made mistakes. But then, they were allowed to. It was not permitted, however, to dogs and prisoners, who always had to answer for their mistakes and often for the masters’ mistakes, too. If his master ever committed a blunder, Ruslan knew that he must share the responsibility with him and help him to put it right at any cost. As he thought how skillfully the runaways had fooled his master, he began working himself up into the right frame of mind for the job in hand and stimulating his bad temper to the point where he got genuinely angry. His bad temper was colored yellow. The sky and the snow took on a yellow tinge, the faces of the escaping prisoners looked yellow as they glanced around in terror on the run, and the soles of their boots flashed like yellow specks. As he vividly imagined the scene, Ruslan burst uncontrollably into furious barking, tugged at the broad rawhide leash and pulled Master after him toward the gates.
“Hey, what the hell’s the matter with you?” Master could hardly keep on his feet. He pulled Ruslan toward him and did his usual trick to calm him down: hauled him up by the collar so that his front paws dangled in the air. Unable even to growl, Ruslan could only wheeze. “Where are you going in such a hurry? Afraid you won’t be in time to get to heaven? Don’t suppose they need your kind there!” Then he let him down, unfastened the spring clip, coiled up the leash and put it into his pocket. “Off you go, now. Just keep on straight ahead; you can’t go wrong.”
He pointed along the white road and into the fields. This could only mean one thing: “Scent, Ruslan.” This was work that Ruslan could do without
any orders. The trouble was that he could not pick up so much as the hint of a scent.
He gave Master a quick, anxious glance that was close to despair, lowered his head and began plowing the snow with his nose as he made a circle in the prescribed manner. It smelled of dried-out moldering grass, mice and ashes—but not of people. Without pausing, he made a second and wider circle. Again nothing. It was so long since the prisoners had passed this way that it was stupid even to try to pick up any meaningful scent. And he never allowed himself to play false by setting off at random, pretending he had picked up a real scent, and then putting on a hysterical act as though his master had made a mistake. In any case, Master could not have made a mistake: it was as clear as could be that the prisoners had walked out through the gates, as free as air. Soon he grew exhausted, feeling as if his guts had somehow dropped out, and he sat heavily down in the snow on his behind. With his steaming tongue lolling to one side, blinking guiltily, twitching his ears, Ruslan honestly admitted that he was helpless.
Master was looking at him, his mouth twisted into an unpleasant grimace. Nor did Ruslan find any sympathy in his eyes, those two entrancing round saucers suffused with dull blue—they showed only coldness and mockery. It made him want to flatten himself on the ground and crawl on his belly, although he knew that entreaties or complaints were useless. Whatever those beloved eyes wanted to be done was always done, no matter how much Ruslan might whine or even lick his boots, smeared with pungent-smelling boot polish. There had been a time when Rush had tried licking Master’s boots, but then one day he had seen a man lick them—and it had done the man no good.
Faithful Ruslan Page 2
