Faithful Ruslan (6 page)

In other respects, though, things were very bad indeed. How could it be otherwise for a dog accustomed to sleeping in the warmth on clean bedding, used to being washed and combed, to having his claws trimmed, to having ointment applied to any little wounds or scratches? Deprived of all this, he soon dropped to an extreme of carelessness to which no tramp, homeless from birth, would ever sink. A tramp would never sleep in the middle of the street, and still less under the wheel of a stationary truck—which Ruslan did, and only a miracle saved him from being crushed. A tramp would avoid trying to warm himself against a heap of locomotive cinders; like a fool Ruslan did this, too, and for several days afterward he shed handfuls of his thick coat, his most reliable defense against cold and parasites, while his paws became a mass of sores, burns and cuts. Each day he grew shabbier and more emaciated, until he became repellent even to himself. Yet his eyes burned all the brighter with the unquenchable yellow fire of fanatical devotion, and every morning, having checked that a squad of dogs was on guard duty at the station platform, he would set off for the camp.

In all this time, none of the other dogs came with him. On the very first day, released from their kennels, they searched the camp high and low and found that their masters had left the place long ago, and that their only hope of seeing them
again was to follow Ruslan’s tracks leading to the railroad station. Ruslan was luckier than all the others, because his master was still in the camp. Ruslan knew this not so much by scent as by some superinstinct, by some conviction that he could not explain but that never deceived him—just as he had been right in following his instinct to go hunting for live game.

Ruslan dared not even think what would happen if his master were to go away like the rest. Then, no doubt, life would not be worth living … because, on the whole, things were working out very badly. Certainly the duties of the Service were still being carried out—hunger had not yet made the dogs neglect them—but for some time now, whenever Ruslan met the other dogs they gave him sullen looks and avoided him, and when he approached a pack of them they would immediately disperse. What was more, some of them were not looking as emaciated as he was; no doubt they were less squeamish about eating carrion or garbage, and perhaps—how terrible even to suspect such a thing!—one or two of them had committed the greatest sin of all: they had sought civilian jobs in backyards, had been taken on and were now calmly accepting food
from strangers
! Had they not learned, had they forgotten, that if not today then they would be poisoned tomorrow—but whenever it might be, they would surely be poisoned?

His suspicions were confirmed. One day he happened to meet Alma; they bumped into each other nose to nose at the corner of two fences, and both were disconcerted by the encounter. He had not expected to see her looking so well-fed, cheerful and overflowing with some private joy. He remembered that Alma had long since stopped reporting for duty on the platform. Alma was surprised, too, but she
immediately pretended that she didn’t know him. Behind her there came running out of a gateway a smooth-haired, bowlegged male dog, coal black with white rings around his eyes, who ran off alongside her down the street. And Alma allowed this freak to give her a playful bite on the shoulder. She must have told him something as they were going along, because the black dog turned around toward Ruslan with his ugly, fat muzzle and impudently gnashed his teeth. He was actually threatening him—now that he was at respectable distance and under the protection of his female friend! Ruslan turned aside in contempt and went on his way.

Alma had refused to recognize him! Yet only the spring before last the masters had brought them together in a corner of the exercise yard, releasing them temporarily from all duties of the Service in favor of the other, special sort of service, to which they attached great importance. Even their names were changed during that time: the masters called them Bride and Bridegroom. Ruslan never found out whether anything came of that spell of Service, nor did he see Alma for a long time afterward, but the thing they had done together made them feel unusually close; later when they met on duty they were drawn to one another as closely as their leashes would allow, and they showed their liking and affection in every possible way. He hoped that they would be coupled again, but the masters decided otherwise: another dog was brought to her from somewhere else. For the first time in his life Ruslan felt that he wanted to bite one of his own kind to death, but he never met the other dog and never even learned his name.

As for this civilian dog, with his ugly, white-ringed eyes—he looked so miserable and repulsive that Ruslan had no wish to have anything to do with him.

On another occasion he picked up the trace of Djulbars, the senior dog. The trail led him to a muddy, smelly gap under a gate and into a courtyard that was festooned with laundry and piled high with firewood. Ruslan was simply dumbfounded to see Djulbars lying on a filthy old doormat beside a stack of firewood—looking just as if he were guarding it! From Ruslan’s point of view, guarding this silly heap of wood made as much sense as guarding the water in a river or the sky overhead; it possessed no value, because only
people
were of any value. And though all Djulbars had to do was to lie and snooze beside the stack of firewood, this fiercest of the fierce, this thug of a dog, with a muzzle that was furrowed with scars, had adopted his new role so completely that he got up, wagging his tail and smirking obsequiously. In fact to say that he was wagging his tail was an understatement—he was positively thrashing about alongside the firewood, groveling in a frenzy of servility. And for whose benefit was all this performance? For some little runt of a man in a sheepskin jerkin, who was puttering about with a contraption of two wheels and an engine, which smelled disgustingly of gasoline and oil fumes. More than anything else this underfed weakling with his sunken cheeks looked like a prisoner, and a long-term prisoner at that—but to treat him as a master … !

Indeed, if this puny little man had realized what sort of a creature he had acquired in Djulbars, he would not have been tinkering with his motorcycle, but would have hastily grabbed a crowbar instead. Djulbars was notorious for biting whatever crossed his path, whether it was another dog, a prisoner or anything; he regarded any day as wasted in which he did not draw blood. A prisoner did not have to step out of line—if he so much as tripped or stumbled with exhaustion
(a dog can always tell whether a man infringes the rules intentionally) Djulbars would seize him at once, without even uttering a warning growl. His cherished dream was to bite his own master, and he succeeded in carrying it out, with the excuse that his master had trodden on his paw. It was a serious moment; all the dogs expected that the swine would at last be dispatched to join Rex, and even Djulbars himself expected no better, but it must be admitted that he behaved remarkably: when his master came to him next morning all bandaged up, Djulbars greeted him as though nothing had happened and made a great show of limping up and down his kennel just to prove how lame he was. And he got away with it, even earning three days’ leave. Presumably the masters either thought he was in the right or he was so valuable that without him the Service would collapse. He was, after all, an example to all the other dogs, being invariably rated “best in aggression” and “best in mistrust of strangers.” Who could have suspected that Djulbars would ever be able to behave like such a creep and wag his tail to a stranger?

Ruslan approached and lay down facing him, staring ferociously into the eyes of this renegade. Although taken unawares, Djulbars did not seem particularly embarrassed. He trotted around the firewood stack a couple more times and yawned, showing his black, ribbed palate—an object of pride, the sign of a fierce, indefatigable biter. After yawning so hard and pleasurably that tears even started to his piglike eyes (one of which no longer opened fully, the result of a wound), he closed his jaws and his blackish-mauve lips, at the same time managing to twist his scarred muzzle into a grimace of sympathy. He was depressed to see what a state Ruslan was in—his wasted body and the anguish of his mind.

“Why get so neurotic?” asked the turncoat. “We’ve got
to live, old man. Think I like having to creep to that decrepit old fool? But if I didn’t, he’d stop feeding me and kick me out. This isn’t the camp, you know, where you got your rations and that was that. Here, if you don’t wag your tail a bit, you don’t eat.”

“Have you given up the Service for
this?
” said the furious, incorruptible Ruslan.

“Hey, you be careful what you’re saying! I report for duty with the best of them.”

It was true. He always came to the platform, and sometimes twice a day. How could he fail to come, when his fangs itched so? When the train came there would be plenty of work for his teeth to do.

“Look, if you’re honest with yourself”—now the renegade went over to the attack—“is it for real, this ‘duty’ of yours? Who told us to go and do it? How do you know whether the Service will ever come back again?”

Ruslan countered:

“How can you say that? Of course it’ll come back! And when it does there’ll be no mercy for dogs like you.”

“Don’t you worry about us! We’ll be the first to answer the call. Because when it does come, you will have died of starvation, and even if you survive, you won’t have the strength left to work. But look at me—there’s solid flesh on these bones and I’m in great shape!”

The devotee of the Service closed his eyes. He no longer had the strength to keep up this wrangling. Strangely, he admitted the force of Djulbars’s argument and realized that it might, in fact, be their salvation. He couldn’t help remembering that this traitor had once rescued them all and saved them from certain death. Ruslan stood up and strolled out of the yard. In the gateway a noise made him turn around:
having put on the required show of guarding the firewood, the dog who had once gained full marks for “aggression and mistrust” had flopped comfortably down on his soft mat. As he stepped over the threshold of the gate, this dedicated zealot fastidiously shook the dust off his paws. Ruslan did not know—and do we literate humans know it any better?—that the first step on the road to destruction always takes the form of self-righteously crossing some threshold.

On that same day he also learned a great deal more that it would have been better for him not to know. Nearly all the dogs had sought a place in some backyard, they had been taken in and fed, and while waiting for the next feed they had managed to show what they could do. Some had started by raiding hen coops, which was easy enough, while others had gone after bigger livestock. Dick, who had succeeded in devouring half a piglet before he was caught, now wore a permanent scar from an iron rod—and on his muzzle, where he could not lick it properly. Trigger had literally brought about his own punishment: while trying to pull a piece of meat straight out of a boiling saucepan, he had upset it all over himself, so that he lost all the hair on half his head and his chest, in which state he had been kicked out of the door. Another dog, Breechblock, had admittedly been successful in running away with a goose in his teeth, but how long would a goose last him, and how could he go back when his new master threatened him with a poker as soon as he came in sight? At one household, which welcomed any dog who appeared, they took in two bitches, Era and Cartridge, an inseparable pair who began by fighting each other over a male who had laid claim to both of them, and then, having made up, they attacked the dog together and would have killed him if they had not been pulled off just in time. They, too,
were thrown out. And what of those who were not thrown out because they did not ask or were not taken in? Thunder, having decided that he would fend for himself, found the garbage cans at the station restaurant, ate his fill of tainted meat and was now lying in a nearby ditch, silent and stiff, covered with lime. Stupid Asa thought she would hunt for cats—no great sin, and one for which Ruslan would have forgiven her, having himself tasted mouse—but she had no experience of cats and did not even know that one must never, on any account—but never!—drive this beast into a corner, and in a flash the cat’s claws had scratched her across the eyes. She killed the cat, but one eye started watering and the other festered, so that she could hardly see and was going mad with pain. It was all bad, very bad. And the worst of it was not that they had ceased waiting, but that they had ceased to have faith.

NUMBED AND DEPRESSED BY ALL THESE DISASTERS, Ruslan lay with eyes closed, stretched across the sidewalk. The passersby thought he was dying. On such occasions, mankind divides itself into two sorts: one sort walks around you with wary compassion; the other sort, of sterner fiber, simply walks over you. He was unable to notice either sort, being absorbed by the pain that was burning his stomach and his gums, which he had smeared with snow. Lately he had often taken to eating snow, driven to it by thirst and by the nausea that came with extreme hunger. Suddenly he remembered that he had not been to the camp today; he was appalled that he had only just thought of this and had, in fact, failed to go for a long time. The thought was as terrible as the anticipation of some unknown punishment. Hunger was affecting his memory. He made an effort to recall the
smell of the man who had offered him the scraps of bread, but he could only summon up the smell of bread—and all that he could see, behind closed eyes, was bread. When he tried to envision his kennel, the only thing that swam into his consciousness was the marrow bone that he had left in his feeding bowl, with a damp, yellow cigarette butt alongside it. The thought of it, however, made him get up from the sidewalk.

I must go, thought Ruslan. There’s so much news to tell Master! It was terrible to find how unwilling he was to set off on the long journey. Twilight was approaching, and he would have to come back in the dark, or worse still, by moonlight. In the dark he could hardly see anything, but moonlight drove him out of his mind, because it always awoke in him a host of vague but menacing forebodings. In this respect Ruslan was a wholly typical dog, the true descendant of that primeval Dog who was driven by fear of darkness and hatred of moonlight toward the fire inside Man’s cave and forced to exchange his freedom for loyalty. To cheer himself up, Ruslan began thinking about the marrowbone, which his master had perhaps not thrown away but had kept for him. Somehow, though, he could not really believe in it; it had never happened before that an abandoned piece of food ever came back, unless you hid it or buried it at once. And he thought of the sin he had committed by forgetting his duties; no doubt that damned moon was his punishment for this failure. Every sin, even the smallest, was always punished: this was a rule he had well and truly learned in his canine lifetime, and he had never known there to be an exception to it.