Faithful Ruslan (17 page)

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.

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 bloodletting. 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.

Made reckless by his success, Ruslan on a sudden impulse dared one day to bring down an elk fawn; the risk lay not in whether he could bite through the thin tendons of the neck in time before getting a hoof in his flank, but in the fact that the mother elk was walking only just ahead along the path, and she caught him in the act. Rashly he attacked the elk doe, and our story of Ruslan’s life came within an ace of ending right there, but a saving instinct told him that he had met a force from which it was wiser to retreat. He ran off with an exaggerated display of panic, though not forgetting to follow a circular course that did not take him too far away from his prey. He had to wait a long time, knowing that he was unforgivably late in reporting for duty, but he was in the grip of something stronger than himself, stronger than
any feelings of duty or guilt. So he waited until the elk doe had abandoned her lifeless child—although he did not wait in order to eat it (there was no time for that) but simply in order to prove that he could show more patience than the inconsolable mother.

He also encountered the lords of the forest, of whose existence he previously had only a vague suspicion; they turned out to be very similar to himself, but how wretched they were in comparison! He was far bigger and stronger, and calculated at once that he was more than a match for one or even two wolves, but that he would have to run if faced with a whole pack. In fact, the wolves treated him kindly—they pretended not to notice him.

The wolves, however, did awaken one thought in Ruslan’s mind: he might become a free wild animal like them, since he was quite capable of feeding himself by hunting. Ruslan did not know—and we, literate humans, do not always realize it either—that our surest safeguard against disaster is to stick to our proper way of life, to which we are suited and for which we have been trained. For he was already entering on the second half of his life, and throughout its first half he had grown used to an existence of complete adaptation to humans, whom he obeyed, served and loved. Most important of all was that he loved them, for no one on this earth can live without love: not even a wolf, a shark in the sea or a snake in a swamp. Ruslan was forever poisoned by his love, his pact with the human race—that same delicious poison that plays a greater part in killing an alcoholic than alcohol itself—and however blissful a hunter’s life might be it could never surpass for him another sort of bliss: obedience to the person he loved, the happiness bestowed by his slightest praise. His hunting, to which no
one had sent him and for which no one ever praised him when he was successful, he regarded merely as a job to be done that helped him to survive and keep his strength up. When the clock mechanism rang inside his brain—or rather, when the sun’s rays striking through the treetops reached a certain angle—Ruslan had an inexplicable feeling that his prisoner was waking up and opening his eyes, and so he returned in answer to the call of duty, abandoning the hunt just when it was most interesting.

In the afternoon, as soon as he had escorted the Shabby Man home and waited for him and Stiura to reach for the bottle, he delayed not a minute longer before running off to the station. He alone continued to report for duty there, and Ruslan was now the only dog whom the railroad staff saw sitting on the empty platform or padding up and down the tracks. He would sometimes wait by the distant signal until darkness fell, listening to the humming of the rails, or meeting the freight trains and passenger expresses that smelled of smoke and the dust of far-off cities. When the trains roared past him or stopped at the other platforms, he felt furious at them and turned away, frowning involuntarily, then ran all the way through the station to the other signal and there sat for another long spell, meeting other trains that brought with them a faintly detectable whiff of the mighty ocean.

Sometimes when he was dozing half asleep the smells of distant places and the ocean he had never seen would disturb Ruslan, tormenting him with the seductive desire to set off at random along the railroad tracks, past one signal or the other, to run and run for as long as his strength lasted and until he finally saw what it was that had been beckoning him. But he did not know for how long he might have to
run—a whole day or a whole summer—and then, while he was away, the train might come, the one and only train for which he waited.