The Dogs of Winter (13 page)

One morning, I awoke to a beautiful sound filling the train station. It was not the
hiss
and
whirr
of the train track, or the whistle of an approaching train. It was not the
whoosh
of the train doors opening and closing or the
click click
of boot heels on the marble floors. This sound brought to mind summer and painted wooden horses going up and down and round and round in a circle, and the circuses I had seen on TV. This sound soared and swooped and dipped like swallows.

I jumped to my feet and clapped my hands. “Do you hear it?” I asked the dogs.
“Music!”
Lucky yawned and wagged his tail. The dogs and I followed the sound.

The maker of the music was a man with a long white beard. Against his chest he held a box with yellowed piano keys and shiny buttons. One hand swept across the keys while the other hand pushed the buttons. All the while, his arms squeezed the box in and out. It breathed, the box did, in great sighing, singing gulps like a dragon without fire.

“What is it?” I asked the man.

He turned his face in my direction but looked past me. “It is an accordion,” he said to the air beside me.

“I think the accordion is the most beautiful sound on earth,” I declared. The man smiled and nodded and played.

I sat at the feet of this man and listened. I rocked and smiled and sometimes even danced. The dogs yipped. Lucky tried to sing along.

And always the
clink clink
of money in his tin.

At the end of the day, the Man of the Accordion folded his stool and put the money from the tin into a small leather bag.

“Where are you, boy?” he asked, his milk-colored eyes passing over me.

I laughed. “Why, I am right here.”

He gave me a handful of rubles. “You brought me luck today.”

“Thank you very much!” I had not seen so much money in a long time.

The Man of the Accordion unfolded a long white cane with a red tip. “You're most welcome, young man.” He slung his accordion over his shoulder and
tap tapped
his way down the long hallway to the stairs.

Again he was there the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. And always, I sat with him and listened to his music.

“Good morning,” I would say to him as he unfolded his stool and folded his long white cane.

“Good morning to you too, my young friend,” he would say, smiling in the general direction of my face.

Halfway through his day of playing, he would hand me a wad of rubles and say, “We need food and drink if we are to play and dance the rest of the day. Do you think someone is selling
pirogi
today?”

Up the stairs the dogs and I would dash in search of
pirogi
. I liked my pie filled with cheese. The old Man of the Accordion preferred his stuffed with potatoes. After the second day, he gave me an extra coin and said, “The dogs need lunch too.”

The days passed now with music and dancing and hot
pirogi
. I did not feel bad taking some of the old man's money at the end of every day. He said I brought him luck. “Who can resist an old blind man and a young boy with dogs?” he said, as I walked him up the stairs to the world above.

That night, the wind was sharp as a knife, but it had warmed up enough to snow. “Ah,” said the old man. “Perhaps that killing cold has finally broken.”

I nodded.

His hand gripped my shoulder. “But what about you, my young friend? Where do you go at night?”

“Go?”

“Do you have a home?”

“This is my home,” I said. “Mine and the dogs.”

He sighed like his accordion. “I have heard of children like you —
bezprizorniki
— the neglected ones. It is Russia's dark shame.”

I shrugged. “We are warm, the dogs and I, and not as hungry thanks to you.”

The old man shook his head, his long white beard waggling. “You must be careful, my friend. It is not safe for a young boy like you. There are gangs of teenage boys just looking for someone weaker to prey upon.” He shook his head again. “Very bad, these boys. They are like wolves.”

I had seen these gangs of boys the old man talked about. They wore chains and leather and their hair rose in impossible ways. From time to time, they would approach me, flinging hard, nasty words in my face. If I had spoken those words, my mother would have slapped me. But I was not afraid of these gangs: The dogs never let them get close.

I touched the old man's hand. “Don't worry. The dogs watch over me.”

Two days later, I once again searched for the best
pirogi
for me and the Man of the Accordion, and meat for the dogs. The day was unaccountably mild. The brutal fist of winter had opened. The wind blew warm, soft air from the sea; the frozen branches of the sleeping birch and fir trees relaxed
and dripped. Shop owners stood outside in the sun and talked.

I will admit, we were gone longer than we should have been. Even the dogs turned their faces up to the sun. “We should bring Grandmother and Little Mother and the puppies up here to enjoy the warmth and the fresh air,” I said to Smoke and Lucky.

Reluctantly, I took the steps down and down into the train station. Lucky and Smoke refused to leave their sunny spot on the sidewalk. “I'll be back with the others soon,” I called to them.

I had not gone far down the long hallway when I heard a sound that turned my blood to ice: the frantic barking of Grandmother and Little Mother. I dropped the package of food and sprinted down the hallway. The barking of the dogs mixed with cries of “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!”

The sight that greeted me was this: the Man of the Accordion surrounded by four skinny, leather-clad things — like a gang of crows — with chains and impossible hair. At the feet of the old man were a growling, snarling, shivering Grandmother and Little Mother trying their best to protect him and the puppies.

The gang shoved the old man off his stool. The tin with the coins and the rubles clinked to the floor. One of the boys swooped in and scooped up the money.

“No!” cried the old man. “How can you steal from an old blind man?”

“Get the accordion,” the tallest of the Crow Boys commanded.

Grandmother stood over the old man, growling and snapping at the boys.

A boot-clad foot flew out and kicked Grandmother in the side, sending her skidding across the floor.

The sight unfroze me. “No!” I screamed.

I flew at the Crow Boys with all my might. I whirled and spat and kicked and punched. “Leave them alone!” I cried.

One of the boys punched me in the face. A warm, coppery taste filled my mouth. I spat out a tooth.

“Don't hurt them,” the old man pleaded.

The gang turned their attention back to the old man and his accordion. The tallest of the Crows smacked the old man in the face and grabbed the strap of the beautiful accordion. “Give it to me,” the boy snarled.

I rushed at the boy and slammed into the back of his knees. He folded in half. A hand grabbed the back of my coat and flung me aside like garbage. I grabbed a long, pencil-thin leg and bit as hard as I could. Little Mother bit the other leg.

“Get off me!” the voice above the legs cried. He flung first Little Mother, then me against the wall. Little Mother let out a pitiful scream. I tried to rise, I tried to call to her, but I could not breathe. It was as if, like the old man's accordion, all the air had been squeezed out of me.

And then I heard two things: the faraway
tweet tweet!
of a policeman's whistle, and the roar of angry dogs. Then I heard the frantic cries of the Crows. “Help!” “What the —” “Get them off me!”

I pushed myself up on one elbow. Smoke and Lucky tore and lunged at the boys. Blood speckled and smeared the floor. Even though they were only two dogs, they fought like twenty.

I crawled over to Little Mother and Grandmother, who cowered over the puppies.

The
tweet tweet
of the
militsiya
's whistle grew closer.

A crowd had formed around the boys and the Man of the Accordion.

Someone helped the old man up from the floor. Blood streaked his white beard. “They saved me,” the old man said, trembling. “The boy and the dogs.” Even though they could not see, his milky eyes searched for me anyway.

The policeman trotted up to the crowd and blew his whistle one last time. “What's going on here?” he barked. His tall black boots shone like black mirrors.

I wanted to take the old man's hand and tell him I was okay and that the dogs had protected his beautiful music and us. But I was no longer a stupid little boy. I knew the policeman would not help me. The police meant the orphanage or worse. The policeman would take me away from the only family I had.

Quietly, while the crowd helped the old man, and while the policeman gathered up the Crow Boys, the dogs and I slipped into a bathroom and hid.

I checked the dogs over for wounds. Grandmother was very sore on her side and would limp the rest of her life. Little Mother had a lump the size of a small potato on the side of her head. The puppies licked and licked her ear and her face.

I slumped against the cold tile wall and cried myself to sleep.

When I woke, I washed the blood from my face and hair. I poked my tongue in the empty space where my tooth had been. When I was a little boy living with my mother, I would have saved the tooth under my pillow for the tooth fairy. But I was no longer a little boy. I did not believe in fairies.

It was unusually quiet on the train platforms. I had no idea if it was day or night or had become day again. I walked back over to the place where the old man with the snow-white beard had played his accordion. He was not there, but the bloodstains were.

I knew then, he would not be back.

Rip sniffed behind a trash bin near the bloodstains. He looked at me, wagged his little tail, and yipped his come-see yip.

“What is it now, Rip?” I asked, kneeling beside him. And then I saw it: a small white tooth glowed like a pearl in the train station light. My baby tooth.

I picked the tooth up. “I should throw it away,” I said to Rip. “It is only a stupid baby tooth.”

Instead, I dropped it in my pocket and ran my thumb over its bumpy hardness.

A train eased to a stop. Smoke looked up at me. I looked at Smoke.

The train doors slid open. I lifted the puppies into my arms. “Let's go,” I said.

And so in this way, and for the rest of that long winter, the trains became our home. And because the trains were our home, so The City was our home.

The trains were warm and the trains were mostly safe. We learned we were most invisible when we rode them late at night and early in the mornings. The people who rode the trains at those ghost hours mostly slept or were too drunk to care about a small, dirty boy and his seven dogs.

We learned the best stops to find food. At this stop, the garbage cans in the subway station were rarely emptied. At that stop, the butcher put out meat scraps and bones in the alley for the dogs. A kind grocer at a stop on the west side of The City saved old bread and expired tins of fish for me.

And once a month, in the tumbledown buildings near the railroad tracks, the Christian Ladies came with food and clothes and, sometimes, doctors. Homeless children crept and ran and swaggered from every direction for a bowl of kasha or
shchi
— made with only cabbage and a thin broth — and hunks of bread.

The Christian Ladies set up in the empty peasant market. “Come, children,” they would call. And come they did.

They pushed and shoved and elbowed their way to the pots of porridge and soup and the loaves of bread. The dogs and I watched. When the crowd thinned and the children were busy eating, I took my turn. I held out a bowl and said, “Please,” and when I returned my bowl, I said, “Thank you.”

The Christian Lady would smile and take my bowl. “What a good boy you are, so polite.”

I smiled.

“What's your name?” the Christian Lady would ask.

And always I would reply, “My name is Dog Boy.”

One time as I sat with the dogs atop a heap of concrete and bricks eating a piece of bread, I thought I spotted the dark hair and loose legs of Pasha.

I leapt to my feet and scrambled to the ground. “Pasha!” I cried, pulling on the arm of the dark-haired boy waiting for a bowl of soup.

The boy turned his head and looked down at me. The eyes were dark like Pasha's and tilted up at the corners, like Pasha's.

“It's me,” I said, plucking at his sleeve. “Remember? Leningradsky Station?”

But although the eyes may have been Pasha's, what lived behind them was not. Because the place behind the eyes was dead. Behind the eyes lived only a ghost.

My first winter with the pack passed in this way. The trains rocked me to sleep, and the trains showed me the world. And always, the dogs loved and protected me.

I no longer looked for a red coat. I knew I would never see her again.

Now when I read the stories from the few torn pages of my book of fairy tales, I heard only my voice — the voice of Sobachonok — not the sound of my mother's voice. The dogs lay close to me as I read to them of witches and snow queens and the magic firebird. Grandmother's white head rested on my knee, Rip sprawled half on and half off my lap, and Little Mother, Lucky, and the puppies lay close by. Smoke dozed always a little apart from the rest, watchful, even in sleep, for trouble.

On through the night, and the months, and the winter we traveled with the train, until one day it was spring.