Faithful Ruslan

by Georgi Vladimov

  So still and windless was the silence that even the cold could be heard: the crackle of steam issuing from the horses’ nostrils, the crack of horse dung splitting, the creaking and groaning of the cart’s woodwork. Their manes and tails white with hoarfrost, the little horses stood motionless; the driver on the box hunched his head gloomily into his shoulders, as oblivious to the loud clatter behind his back as if the objects being manhandled onto his cart were large, white, freshly sawed logs. Only once did he turn around to see whether they were overloading him today, then muffled himself up again in his black sheepskin coat.

  The Chief Master, who alone was pacing up and down inside the ring of dogs and guards, had no need to seem so nervous. He could be satisfied that everything was proceeding calmly and that the dogs were carrying out their duty so patiently, although their rumps were freezing in the snow and their teeth chattering convulsively. Behind them they could sense burning eyes staring out of the little misted-up windows of the other huts; occasionally they could not restrain themselves and turned around—although in such extreme cold, when all smells were deadened, according to their canine understanding nothing could possibly happen. And nothing did happen, except when one of the two men loading the cart thrust himself forward, shook his fist and shouted at the Chief: “You’ll answer for this!” But the other prisoner immediately stopped his mouth with a mitten and pulled him back into the dark interior. The Chief was standing with his back to the hut when this happened, and did not turn around.

  All the dogs sat out this miserable spell of duty to the bitter end, as the Chief Master had wanted, and for this, presumably, they were all forgiven. No doubt if Ingus had been sitting there with them he would have sat it out and would have been forgiven, too. They were all very miserable at the absurd way in which Ingus had met his end; even Djulbars, his perpetual rival, could not make sense of it, and was convinced that it was his own fault for not having been sufficiently alert. The person who was most shocked of all, however, was the Instructor. After the dogs’ revolt he walked around as though stunned. He began to confuse the dogs’ names, and would say, for instance, to Baikal or Thunder: “Heel, Ingus!” and was amazed when they failed to obey him. He kept on thinking he could see Ingus everywhere, always seeming to notice him among the crowd, although the dogs had long since told the Instructor that Ingus was lying out there beyond the wire with a piece of canvas still clenched in his teeth. They had been obliged to cut it out of the hose, because Ingus’s “immature” teeth had refused to loosen their grip and the masters did not feel inclined to smash his jaw with a crowbar.

  Tired of waiting for his favorite to reappear, the Instructor thought up a game: he himself started to imitate Ingus. He actually developed some of Ingus’s characteristics: he adopted the same dreamy, reflective air and careless behavior, and now when he ran around on all fours he displayed Ingus’s special prancing gait. The Instructor became more and more obsessed with this game. Much oftener than before, he would say, “Attention! I will demonstrate!” and he did it better and better, until one day he put on an amazing act in the guardhouse: when arguing about something with the masters he suddenly dropped on all fours and barked at the Chief. Still barking, he loped over to the door and pushed it open with his forehead. This made the masters laugh till they cried, but when they had stopped laughing and wanted to go and look for the Instructor—where should they find him but in Ingus’s kennel. There he snarled at them from the doorway, growling and baring his teeth:

  “I’m Ingus, don’t you see? I’m Ingus,” he yelled at them, speaking his last words in human language. “I’m not a dog trainer, I’m not a cynologist, I’m not even a man any longer. I’m Ingus! Woof, woof!”

  It was then that the dogs for the first time understood what he was barking about. The soul of Ingus had taken possession of him—Ingus, who had always longed to break out and away, and was now calling on them to follow him.

  “Let’s run away from here!” barked the Instructor-Ingus. “Let’s all escape! This is no sort of life for us!”

  The masters tied him up with leashes and left him in the kennel for the night, but this did not quiet him; he made all the dogs restless with his frenzied summons, tearing at their heartstrings with a great, tempting vision of dense forests splashed with sunlight filtering through the branches and heavy with delicious coolness, promising them glades where the grass grew higher than the crown of their heads and the tops of their cocked-up ears, rivers whose water was as pure as tears, air that they would drink rather than breathe, and where the loudest noise in that air was the sleepy buzzing of a bumblebee; there in this promised haven they would live as free animals, inseparable, in one community according to the laws of brotherhood—and never, never, never again would they serve man! The dogs fell asleep and awoke again with a sense of longing, in happy anticipation of the long journey on which they would set off in the morning under the leadership of the Instructor—for it was spontaneously understood by all that he would be their leader, to which even Djulbars did not object, agreeing to take second place. Next morning, however, they saw the Instructor for the last time in the exercise yard. The masters carried him out, still bound, and tied him firmly into the backseat of a jeep. He continued to bark without cease, so they gagged him by stuffing an old forage cap into his mouth. The dogs sat in front of him, waiting for him to show them what he could do—perhaps he might push out the gag or free himself from the ropes, but he showed them nothing, only staring at them with tears running down his face. The dogs, too, were on the point of weeping; they had not suffered so much since, as dim-eyed, senseless little puppies, they had been torn from their mothers—until now, when a new life had just beckoned to them, when they had discovered a new aspect of the Instructor and loved him for it. Now this hope was dashed, and the only prospect that remained was the dreary, cheerless round of their familiar, everyday life. After that the training ground seemed empty and the dogs felt orphaned. The training ground ceased to be a place of excitement and pleasure, becoming instead a place of cruelty and sour bad temper. The new instructor, who arrived soon afterward, never demonstrated anything to them, but made much use of the whip.…

  AH, IT WAS BETTER NOT TO AWAKEN SUCH memories. Sighing noisily, Ruslan moved out of the lamplight onto the dark porch, where he took a long time to settle down, grunting and making the floorboards squeak a great deal before he was finally still, ears attentive to every sound as the world around him quieted down. As the night thickened into blackness and cold, more and more stars came out, glittering like the eyes of fabulous monsters. While he hated the moon so much that it somehow even smelled of carrion, he felt comforted by these bright, twinkling little lights. He could stare at them for hours, and had noticed an interesting fact about them: if you dozed off and then opened your eyes later, you found that the stars had moved. Thus he was able to observe the passing of time—and all his troubles were reduced to their proper perspective when measured against this celestial clock.

  Divided, cut up by borders, frontiers, fences and prohibitions, our wretched planet flew on, spinning into the icy emptiness of space, toward the sharp pinpoints of those stars—and nowhere on its surface was there a place where someone was not keeping someone else behind bars; where one lot of prisoners, helped by other prisoners, was not guarding a third set of prisoners—and themselves—against the risk of taking an undesirable, lethally dangerous gulp of the bright blue air of freedom. In obedience to that law—the second after the law of universal gravitation—Ruslan guarded his prisoner, a sentry who would never be relieved from his voluntary post.

  He slept with eyes and ears half open, never allowing himself to drop into insensibility. With his head resting on his paws, he occasionally twitched with fright, and another wrinkle was added to his steeply sloping forehead. His memories only released him from their hold when they were replaced by worries about the day to come.

  * At the famous frontier post of Karatsupa, where five hundred illegal border-c
rossers were arrested, all the dogs were called Ingus. (Author’s note.)

  4

  SOMETIMES THEIR USUAL ROUTE WAS SLIGHTLY changed. When he reached the station and before turning off along the tracks toward the derelict passenger cars, the Shabby Man suddenly stopped, took off his mitten, scratched his cheek with all five fingers and said hesitantly to Ruslan:

  “Shall we go in and see? Maybe they haven’t forgotten about us.…”

  Ruslan agreed unwillingly, and they turned toward the station—not to its main entrance, but to a side door, on either side of which two blue boxes were fixed to the wall. Here the Shabby Man carefully scraped the snow off his shoes and gave a sidelong glance at Ruslan’s paws to see whether they were clean. On the first few occasions he tried to leave his escort out on the street to guard his toolbox, but Ruslan would have none of it. He followed the Shabby Man up the steps, entered and stood waiting sternly for him inside the premises, disdaining to sit on the slushy, dirty floor. The air inside was thick and enervatingly hot, thanks to a round blue stove that took up the whole of one corner and helped to support the ceiling; in the barred windows, the one small pane that could be opened was kept tightly shut, while the two heads behind the counter were swathed in thick gray scarves. These astonishing heads chattered to each other unceasingly, performing actions of which each was the symmetrical mirror-image of the other as they caught sunflower seeds in midair from fists that moved up and down with machine-gun-like rapidity, tossing up the seed and then, on the downward movement, catching the ejected husk.

  The Shabby Man sidled up to the counter, retrieved a crumpled piece of paper from deep down in his shirt front, smoothed it out and cleared his throat with a timid cough. For a long time they paid no attention to him until finally the symmetry was painfully interrupted, and one of the heads, frozen in the act of catching a seed, looked at him with a rigid, unblinking stare, while the other, who had been caught at the moment of spitting out a husk, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and bent down under the counter, starting almost simultaneously to wag her head from side to side in a gesture of negation.

  “Ah, well, I guess the letter’s probably on its way,” the Shabby Man said apologetically in answer to his own question, and put his scrap of paper back into his shirt front.

  With time, the two heads learned this expression, and they would use it to rivet the Shabby Man to the spot as he came through the doorway, depriving him of a pretext to enter:

  “Guess your letter’s on its way!”

  In fact he only went there to hear those words said, and for no other reason, but he would spend a long time strolling back and forth, hands clasped behind his back, reading everything that happened to catch his eye:

  “A money order by telegraph—hear that, Ruslan?—costs seven rubles per hundred, but by mail it only costs two rubles. Well, I guess that’s only right—time costs money. A phone call to Moscow is two-sixty a minute. Pity I don’t have anyone in Moscow to talk to. And I guess you haven’t either, have you, Ruslan? Otherwise you might like to have five kopecks’ worth and bark down the line to one of your friends.”

  He spent an especially long time in front of a poster from which stared a fat-faced, ruddy-cheeked young man with a sarcastic smile on his lips, holding a little gray booklet in one hand and with the thumb of the other hand pointing over his shoulder at a heap of various objects, among which Ruslan could vaguely recognize only two—a car and a bed.

  “ ‘I save and I look,’ ” read the Shabby Man, “ ‘in my Savings Book …’ Well, now! ‘… To see how my rubles are growing. If they are not spent, they earn five percent—It’s the best deal of any that’s going!’ What lovely poetry. All those years in camp—and we never guessed. What did we save? We saved up days, yet it seems we should have been saving rubles. And five percent a year is not to be sneezed at, either.…”

  Ruslan, his head already at the door, would be baring his teeth in a frenzy of impatience and waving his tail—hurry up, time to go! But even when the Shabby Man did leave, it was not always to go to work. After these distractions the prisoner went to the station restaurant, gulped down a couple of mugs of that disgusting, foam-covered yellow liquid on top of what he had been drinking the night before, which made his breath stink like a cesspit, and then, only if he failed to find someone to talk to, would he finally set off for his work site. Sometimes he did not go to work at all; instead, he would drink a third mugful and go home, explaining guiltily to Stiura:

  “Hell, couldn’t seem to find a damn thing today. Nothing worth booking in—Ruslan will tell you the same. Still, we’ve enough to be going on with—should be a couple of planks left over from yesterday.”

  “Good,” said Stiura approvingly, herself no great advocate of hard work. “Better to have you sitting at home than prowling around God knows where.”

  This slack behavior infuriated Ruslan. He could not bear irresponsibility. He himself was always preoccupied, always on the go: snatch forty winks, hunt for food at least once a day, escort the prisoner to work and back, run over to the platform to sniff out which dogs had been there and what had happened in the last twenty-four hours, visit the dogs in other backyards, find out the news, discover if any of them had any premonitions of change. Whereas these two humans slept as much as they liked, went no farther than the cellar or the hen coop to fetch their food, and nothing else bothered them—such as the fact that the train still hadn’t come, that the work wasn’t progressing and that Ruslan’s days were just being frittered away to no purpose. But what could he do about it? Goad the Shabby Man into activity, urge him on? This had never been part of a dog’s duties; it was the masters who set the tempo of work, who ordered the column to speed up to a trot or told the dogs to sit down in the snow. Ruslan was afraid that if he took this sort of thing on himself, he would be overstepping the bounds of the Service. There was only one thing to do: keep active and wait—to wait without losing faith, without falling into despair—and to husband his strength for the changes that were to come.

  Meanwhile the snow was gradually beginning to look dirty and porous, and to give off a faint smell of something inexplicably delightful, something that caused stirrings of both hope and uneasiness. The air grew damper all the time, and on sunny days the roofs would drip steadily. Then they started to drip at night, too, disturbing Ruslan’s sleep; thawed patches appeared in the middle of the street and the worn, splintered planks of the sidewalk began to show through. Only in ditches and where fences cast a permanent shadow did the snow still lie in heaps, but day by day they shrank, grew lumpy and oozed puddles of water that did not even look cold anymore.

  So came the ninth spring of Ruslan’s life—a spring that was unlike any previous one.

  He came to learn that when the snows melt and the forest fills with sticky young greenery, the amount of live food increases too. Ruslan was no longer catching mice—perhaps because they had learned something from their tragic experience of the winter, or perhaps because he himself lacked the skill to grope for the little rascals in the thick, springy layer of last year’s fallen leaves. To make up for this, the birds were much in evidence now, grown stupid and light-headed with their own singing, and the bigger the birds the more careless they were. Later, when their singing declined, he began to find their nests, low in the bushes or even right on the ground, in which there were some funny, longish, roundish pebbles, colored white or pale pink, or blue and speckled. Inside these pebbles was something warm and alive, and he reasoned that this must be good to eat, even though it was not running or jumping around. He would take them all into his mouth at once, crunch up the shells and suck out the warm, sticky liquid. The bird to whom these pebbles belonged usually tried to harass him by fluttering about right over his nose, but her indignant squawks made no impression on Ruslan—he knew a thing or two about diversionary maneuvers. But winning his daily meal by sheer robbery sickened him; a born fighter, he longed for struggle and contest, if necessary with mutual bloodletti
ng. Catching a badger, for instance, was a real trial of cunning. Clumsy though this beast looked, Ruslan soon found out that a badger could never be taken by simply making a lunge for him. You had to use your brain, and above all you must not be impatient when the badger came out of his earth the first time, nor even the second time, for he was merely reconnoitering and might vanish into his lair in a flash; you had to let him be lulled by the quiet until he felt safe, and then his despair and confusion were all the greater when you blocked his retreat. No one had ever taught Ruslan any of this; there was much that he had not known about himself and was now learning, to his own joy and astonishment: firstly, he was discovering the attraction of catching your own food without having it brought to you in a feeding bowl, and secondly, he was finding out all the things he could do—creep up on the prey, flatten himself in the grass and ferns, hide for long hours and then pounce unerringly, like a flash of lightning.