Authors: Georgi Vladimov
Then the two of them, the squat man and the boy, picked him up by the forelegs and dragged him to the ditch, leaving an intermittent trail of red, caked dustballs. But the owners of the nearby houses protested vigorously at having a carcass left to rot outside their windows, so they had to drag the body a long way beyond the last house and fling it down the embankment made by the bulldozer.
With it, they also threw the spade, stained with saliva and blood.
WHEN BLIND ASA HAD LICKED CLEAN THE wounds on Ruslan’s flanks and his back and the terrible deep wound behind his ear, she howled a lament for him, instinctively lifting her sightless head toward the sun. Then she went away, certain that Ruslan would never regain his senses.
But regain them he did. It may seem improbable that with a horribly bruised back, with all his weight on his forelegs, his hind legs only scraping along the ground, he should have climbed up the stony-sided embankment and dragged himself all the way to the station. It seems improbable, unless one knows how obstinately, purposefully and unerringly any stricken animal will find its way to the same place where in the past it has endured suffering and recovered. No doubt if Ruslan had been fully conscious he would not have done this, but his mind was clouded now and in his inward eye he could see only one thing—that secluded corner beside a stone wall, between the public lavatory and the garbage cans, where he had recovered from being poisoned.
The sultry afternoon had driven all the people indoors, into cool shuttered rooms where the wooden floors were sprinkled with water. There was not a living soul to be seen. Stupefied by the heat, the yard dogs were dozing in their kennels or under porches, and none of them raised a bark
when Ruslan crawled along the wooden sidewalks past their homes. As twilight approached, however, the dogs awoke and began to show an interest in him. It was they, in fact, who forced him into full consciousness. On top of all his misfortunes, he was fated to undergo one more ordeal, and the most humiliating of all: to be tormented by the mongrels of the town, those Buttons, Blackies, Busters and Fidos that he had once so despised. Unaware of what he had done to wound their pride, he had forgotten that peculiarly nasty streak in the canine nature (perhaps explicable in these wretched little creatures by their defenselessness and their frequent maltreatment by humans) that makes them gang up and attack another animal when he is weak and defeated—and the bigger he is the more gusto they put into their persecution. Strangely enough, however, many of their attacks petered out ineffectually or seemed much weaker than he had been led to fear by the fury that seethed in their voices. Somehow they failed in their cowardly attempts to settle accounts with Ruslan. Some strong, resolute companion, keeping pace with him on his blind side—perhaps it was Alma or Baikal, but he could no longer recognize them by their voices—was beating off all their attacks or taking the brunt of them on himself, and the rest of the little dogs’ aggression was diverted into snapping and biting each other. Eventually the whole pack was driven off by some kindhearted passerby. The mongrels took to their heels willingly and in a high state of self-satisfaction; all they had wanted, in any case, was to get one bite at him apiece, and afterward the tales of their valor would grow large enough in the telling.
A little later, as he was hauling himself painfully across the station square, Ruslan saw his defender, and his immediate thought was to wish that he had stayed and died at the
bottom of the embankment. The dog who had defended him against that vicious rabble was Treasure—that same squat, potbellied little mutt, whose help only yesterday he would have disdained as beneath his dignity.
Treasure stayed with him to the end of his journey. When Ruslan’s hind legs proved too infirm to move unaided into the narrow space of his chosen refuge, it was Treasure who performed that service for him. Ruslan was now protected on three sides, and he hoped to be able to defend himself from the fourth side. Treasure could go now. But he still sat there, resting, occasionally giving a violent shiver and whimpering with persistent fright and the pain of his many bites. He wanted an answer to the final question that he was asking Ruslan with the sad, reproachful look in his eyes—something on the lines of, “Why did you do it, brother?”
Ruslan dismissed him with a shake of his head—the head that so terrified Treasure, with its blood-caked eye—and Treasure understood that it was no use putting the question: Ruslan himself did not know the answer. He also knew that he must leave at once, because what was about to happen to Ruslan was more terrible and more important than anything else he might want to know, and that no one must be present to see it. He backed away, his hairs standing on end with fear, and as soon as he had turned the corner around the trash cans, he ran off with a howl that nothing could stop.
Sometimes you may have seen a little dog running down the middle of the street in the gathering darkness, uttering now and again a muffled whine as if through clenched teeth, and apparently running away from something, even though no one is chasing him. It is almost as though he is running away from himself—or from the edge of an abyss over which he has peeped from curiosity or lack of caution, a gulf into
which no living creature should look, and from whence he has brought back a secret to make him shiver with cold even in the warmest, safest place of refuge. Treasure had discovered the merest inkling of that secret, yet he was condemned to shiver as with cold, to spurn his food, to ignore his mistress’s call, and to crawl into the dimmest, darkest hole, to thrust his nose into the corner and screw up his eyes. Yet even there the thread linking him to Ruslan would not be broken; even there he could not hide himself, and he would go numb with terror as he listened to his swelling, thumping heart, not knowing that it was beating in time to another heart—and that so it would be until that other heart stopped beating. Only then would the link be snapped, allowing him at last, exhausted and in pain, to sink into the oblivion of sleep.
The sound of Treasure’s howl fading into the distance was not the last noise to disturb Ruslan. For a long time he could hear footsteps and voices as they approached and died away again, the banging of trash-can lids right above his ear, and the clank followed by a gurgle of water each time the lavatory cistern was emptied. Each sound made him freeze and hold his breath, but by the mercy of fate no one noticed him. Even if anyone had seen him, they would have taken him for a heap of gray rags or some other garbage.
He was waiting for night, when the place would be quiet and deserted, for there was something that he longed to recall, some fleeting memory that he must catch. He did not know what would happen to him by morning, yet he had nevertheless prepared himself for some event; he felt that he was due to return to a certain place: was it perhaps to that black oblivion from which he had once come? And gradually time began to turn backward for Ruslan.
His days in the Service flickered past—most of them as identical as the barbed-wire fence posts or the rows of huts—his turns of sentry duty, his escort duty, his chases and fights. He recalled them all as colored with the yellow of anger and aggression, and everywhere he was a captive—whether on the leash or not—for at no time had he ever been free or on the loose. He wanted now to return to an animal’s first joy—to freedom, which he never forgot and to the loss of which he was never reconciled; he hurried on and on until finally he reached it, and saw himself in the spacious enclosure at the breeding kennels, saw the pink and brown-spotted teats of his mother, a famous prizewinning bitch, and his five brothers and sisters fighting and tumbling over one another on the soft bedding. Through the wire-mesh fence that formed the outer wall could be seen bright greenery, yellow sand and a dazzling blue sky, but they never noticed the fence itself and it never occurred to them to wonder what it was for. Two men approached from the other side of the fence, opened the wire-mesh gate, and in walked his master. He entered with another man, already familiar to them, who often came in with food for their mother and swept out the kennel with his harmless broom. This was the first time that Ruslan saw his master: young, strong, well-built, wearing the beautiful dress of the masters, with his handsome, godlike face, his terrible flashing eyes filled, like saucers, with cloudy blue water, and for the first time he felt an unaccountable fear that not even the closeness of his mother could assuage.
“Choose one,” said the man with the broom.
Squatting down on his haunches, the Master looked them over for a long time and then stretched out his hand. Immediately Ruslan’s five brothers and sisters crawled toward that outstretched hand—submissive, whining pathetically,
shivering with fear and impatience. Their mother, delighted and proud of them, prodded them forward with her nose. Only Ruslan, his hackles rising, crawled away growling into a dark comer. It was the first time in his life that he had growled, in fear of the Master’s hand, whose short fingers were dotted with a sparse growth of red hairs. The hand passed over all the other puppies and stretched itself out to him alone, picked him up by the scruff of his neck and carried him out into the light. The dread face came nearer—the face that he was to love, and then to hate—and grinned, at which he growled and struggled, wriggling all his paws and his little tail, full of anger and terror.
It was in this position that he came to know his name, which was not the name that his mother had given him to distinguish him from her other children—to her he was known as something like “Yrrm.”
“What’s his name in the register?” asked his master.
The man with the broom came closer and stared.
“Ruslan.”
“Why ‘Ruslan’? That’s usually a name for retrievers. I thought of calling him Jerry, but we already have a Jerry. What the hell, Ruslan will do.… Do you hear what your name is? Why are you squirming so much? Don’t you trust your new master?”
With two fingers he opened the puppy’s mouth and inspected his palate.
“Seems like he’s a bit of a coward,” observed the man with the broom.
“Much you know!” said Master. “He’s mistrustful, the little brute. Just the sort to make a good guard dog.… Ah, temper, temper! Bite my finger, would you?” Laughing, he gave Ruslan a painful slap on his little bare belly and put him
down separately in a corner. “Feed up this little fellow for a bit longer. And you can drown all the rest. They’re just ass-lickers—not worth shit.”
Without even looking at her other puppies, the mother gathered Ruslan alone to her side. The five that had been rejected were put into a bucket and carried away, to be replaced by five greedy foster children, whose teeth had already started to come through and who hurt her teats; she accepted them uncomplainingly and licked them all over, gazing devotedly into Master’s face.
Why hadn’t she attacked him and bitten him? Seeing himself again as a helpless little puppy, he was still puzzled by her serenity, her untroubled brow. Horrified, Ruslan had tried to make a dash to save his brothers and sisters, only to be struck down by a blow from her heavy paw. What kind of pact existed between her and the Master? There must have been some grim truth she knew that made her obediently submit to the murder of her children—for when a mother animal’s young are taken from her, it can only be to destruction.
That grim truth had been revealed to him today—when he had been knocked down and saw the three men advancing on him with faces twisted with hate; when the backpack had struck him on the head; when the spade flew up; and when the Shabby Man had said, “Finish him off.” Never, never was the hatred stilled in the hearts of those dimwits; they were only ever awaiting their hour when they could vent it on you—and all because you were doing your duty. The masters were right: in every human who was not of their number there lurked an enemy. But were even the masters his friends? Only the Instructor, who had eventually turned into a dog, had been a real friend—and what had he been
barking on that frosty night, to the howling of a snowstorm? He had said: “Let us leave them. They are no brothers of ours. They are our enemies. Every last one of them is an enemy!” So everything that had happened today had, after all, been foreseen by that wise she-dog, his mother, doomed as she was in exchange for her food to bear and suckle aggressive, mistrustful creatures for the Service. Was that why she had shown no distress when her puppies had been removed from her—because she knew that the five who were carried away in a tin bucket were going to the better fate?
… Every animal, when stricken by misfortune, crawls away to a place where in the past he has found refuge in which to endure suffering and recover. This was not the reason, however, that made Ruslan crawl to this place; he knew that this time he could be cured neither by Asa’s healing saliva nor by the bitter herbs and plants whose scent he always smelled whenever he was unwell or injured. A wounded animal lives for as long as he wants to live; but now he had sensed that there, in the place where he had been before, there would be no murky cellar, no beating with the leash, no jabs with a needle, no mustard, nothing, no sound, no smells, no alarms, only darkness and calm—and for the first time he longed for that. He had nowhere to go back to. His humble, imperfect love for man had died completely; he knew no other kind of love, he was unfitted for any other form of existence. Lying in his stinking hideaway and sobbing with pain, he heard the distant hooting of locomotives and the clicking wheels of approaching trains, but he had no more expectations from them. Even his erstwhile visions, which had once brought him such delight, now only gave him pain, like a bad dream that leaves a sense of shame and unease on awakening. He had learned enough in his waking
life about the world of humans, and it stank of cruelty and treachery.
IT IS TIME FOR US TO LEAVE RUSLAN, AND THAT indeed is now his only wish—that all of us, who share the guilt of what was done to him, should finally leave him and never come back. Any other thoughts that may arise in his brain (which is beginning to suffer from inflammation) will be beyond our comprehension—and it is useless for us to expect enlightenment.