by Bobbie Pyron
The humming stopped. I opened my eyes. Her face and her eyes — especially her eyes — smiled at me.
In the softest of voices, she said, “Look at you there, you little bear, in your dark den. Come out, little Mishka.”
Her words, that name, slipped like a key into an unused lock. Mishka.
It was then that I stopped being the Wild Child and I once again became a boy.
She came every day after that. She said she was a special teacher for very special children. She said I was the most special boy she had ever met. I frowned at her and looked away, but inside I smiled.
She brought a tape player and played music. Sometimes, she sat with her back against the wall and her eyes closed, listening. Sometimes I closed my eyes too, but mostly I watched her.
She talked about herself. She said her name was Anuva and she loved music and art and books and dogs and walking in the woods.
“What do you love, Mishka?” she asked one day. I wanted so badly to tell her that, yes, yes, I too loved those things. But I did not trust my voice so I only looked away.
The next day, she brought not only music, but a pad of white paper and color sticks the Woman in the Hat had called pastels.
Anuva slid the pad and pastels under the bed and said, “Here, draw for me what you love.”
And so I did. I’d finish one drawing, shove it out to her, and start another. I drew and drew in a fever until all the sheets of paper in the thick pad were gone.
She studied each drawing with care and said, “Ah yes, I see,” and “I love that too.” And then, before she left, she carefully taped each and every drawing on my wall.
One day when she handed me the pad and colors, she said, “Draw for me what you hate,” and then the next day, “Draw for me what makes you afraid,” and then, “Draw what makes you sad.” Up on the wall, along with the firebirds and dogs and trees, went a drawing of him in his scuffed boots and shiny pants and hard fists; up went a drawing of a red stain behind the door, big, pulsing; up went a drawing of a red coat and a black button; up went a drawing of militsiya and Baba Yaga with her fence of bones and skulls.
And with each of the drawings, she said, “I understand,” and “I am sorry.”
She brought me these things — music, drawing — and she brought books. She read out loud to me as I drew and as the music played.
One day she read to me a fairy tale I had never heard before.
“Once upon a time,” she read, “in a certain czardom of the thirtieth realm, beyond the sea-ocean, there lived an old peasant with his wife. They were indeed very poor and had no children.”
I concentrated on drawing a perfect Ferris wheel.
“One day, the old peasant tracked a bear to its den and killed it for its fur and meat.”
I frowned.
“Much to his astonishment,” she continued, “he found a naked little boy in the darkest corner of the cave, a child the bear had stolen and reared as its own.”
I put my pastel down and listened.
“The old peasant took the boy home and called the village priest. He had the child baptized Ivashko Mishka — Ivan Little Bear.” The hair rose on the back of my neck.
She smiled at me.
“He would have been better off with the bear,” I said.
“Ah, but listen,” she said.
She read how the boy grew quickly and became strong. How by the age of twelve he was as tall as any man in the village and stronger than anyone in the whole countryside. The people grew frightened of the boy and drove him from the village.
I tore my drawing into small bits. “They are bad, bad people,” I said. I rocked myself back and forth. “He was better off with the bears,” I moaned.
She moved closer to me. “Listen,” she said softly. “Listen.”
And then she read how he, Mishka, was the only one who succeeded, of all those who had tried, to kill the witch Baba Yaga.
She touched my cheek. “You see, Mishka, it was because he had the strength of the bear and the wisdom of man that he was able to defeat the witch.”
She put her hand on mine. I stopped rocking and looked at her straight on for the first time. Her eyes were the color of amber. “It is you, Mishka. It is you.”
One day, after many months, she took me outside. I blinked against the bright spring sun. I closed my eyes and listened to the birds and the wind. I smelled the earth and the sea. We sat in the walled garden of dirt and didn’t speak.
After a time, I whispered, “My name is Ivan. Ivan Andreovich.”
She did not ask me how old I was or where I had lived before I was captured or where my mother was. She simply sighed and said, “Thank you, Ivan Andreovich.”
Later, months later, she would ask me, “Ivan, why did you not want to be taken from the dogs? Why did you not want to live among people again?”
I stopped drawing. I gazed at the smiling eyes of Rip and the worried eyes of Little Mother staring back at me from the paper. I said simply, “I felt loved and protected by the dogs. I belonged with them.”
Anuva nodded and that was all she asked of me.
Anuva opens my door and says, “Are you ready to go, Ivan? Everyone is waiting.”
I nod even though I am not ready. I pluck nervously at my hair and my eyebrows, something I have not done in a long time.
She crosses the room and gently takes my hand away from my face. “You don’t have to worry, brave Mishka, I will be right there with you at the art show.”
I glance at the grainy, black-and-white copy of a photograph of me from an Australian newspaper. The picture was taken not long after I was sent to the shelter in Moscow. The words under the picture of the frightened little boy with haunted eyes say, Mowgli-like child captured after living on the streets of Russia with wild dogs!
“They just want to see me because they think I’m a freak,” I say now.
Anuva glances at the photograph too. “That was many years ago, Ivan. Time has passed. Now they want to see you because of your art. They want to see this artist who paints dogs with wings and dogs on Ferris wheels, who signs his work Malchik.”
I pull on my coat. Even Anuva, who knows as much about me as any human, does not know why I sign my drawings and paintings Malchik. She does not know who gave me that name. She does not know that, even after all this time, I dream of the dogs every night. I have been given many names — Ivan, Mishka, Cockroach, Circus Mouse, Runt, Dog Boy, Mowgli, Wild Child, and then Ivan again. But it is that one name, Malchik, which I keep for my very own. It is that name that gave me a place in the world.
With one backward look at my room, I straighten my shoulders and point my shoes forward. I close the door behind me and step, once again, out into The World.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the social and economic fabric of Russia was left in tatters. Gone were the government-controlled systems such as health care, rent control, and pensions that had provided some semblance of a safety net for families, children, the elderly, and those living on the edge of economic stability. As a result, many parents (in the cities and in rural villages) could no longer afford to keep their children. Alcoholism, physical neglect, and abuse tore families apart, forcing children to take refuge on the streets. By the mid-1990s, estimates of the number of homeless children in Moscow and St. Petersburg were anywhere between 80,000 and 2 million. Most of these children formed packs, and lived in abandoned buildings and in the city’s large underground train stations. The children were both ever-present and subtly invisible — a backdrop, at best, to city life.
Ivan Mishukov was one of these street children. In 1996, at the age of four, Ivan left his abusive home — or was sent away by his mother, no one knows for sure — and ended up on the streets of western Moscow. W hat distinguished him from the thousands of other street children was not his age or his circumstances. Ivan chose to depend on a pack of feral street dogs rather than other children for his survival and, eventually, to be his family. For the nex
t two years, Ivan established a very close, symbiotic relationship with the dogs. He begged for food from passersby and shopkeepers, and shared his food with the dogs. In return, the dogs protected him from roving gangs of older children and homeless adults, and helped him survive the brutal Russian temperatures in winter that can often reach twenty below zero. But it was not purely a relationship of physical survival. In an article about Ivan in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 26, 1998, Ivan reportedly told a worker at the Reutov children’s shelter, “I was better off with the dogs. They loved and protected me.”
What became of Ivan after his separation from the dogs? This is a question that has no definitive answer. Over the years I spent researching the different aspects of Ivan’s story, I came across several vague answers. Some said he remained in one orphanage or another; other accounts suggested he had been adopted. I even read that he was a student in an elite military academy. There were two things consistent in reference to Ivan’s future — one gave me hope, the other was the spark that ignited my fictional account: Because Ivan retained his facility for speech and he appeared exceptionally bright, social workers were optimistic that he would, over time, adjust to normal life; and in almost every account I read of Ivan after his capture from his pack, it was reported that, even after a year, he still dreamed every night of dogs.
In the years since Ivan Mishukov found himself homeless on the streets of Moscow, there has been some improvement for the street children of Russia. The biggest change has been the attention the problem of homeless children and youth in Russia has attracted — not only on the world stage but, more importantly, by the Russian state. As of 2006, the Russian government had committed almost 6 billion rubles to the federal child and homeless and juvenile crime prevention program. The number of orphanages in Russia has increased by more than 100% in the last decade. Still, 2007 estimates of the number of children living on the streets run between 500,000 to 800,000. UNICEF estimates 95% of these children are social orphans, meaning they have at least one living parent.
The problem of homeless children is not unique to Russia. In a recent report issued by UNICEF, there are an estimated 100 million street children worldwide. Whether these children are in Africa, India, Cambodia, Spain, or the United States (where there are an estimated 1.3 million homeless and runaway street kids), they all face the same problems: drug and alcohol addiction, malnutrition, violent encounters with gangs and police, HIV infection, exploitation, and early death.
This is just one child’s story.
Ivan Mishukov:
Innes, John. “Call of the Wild Only Refuge for ‘Russia’s Mowgli.’” The Scotsman, July 17, 1998.
McKie, Robin, and Tom Whitehouse. “6-Year-Old Lived with Stray Dogs.” Chicago Sun-Times, July 26, 1998.
Newton, Tom. “Urchin Ivan Reared by Dogs, Wants Back to Pack.” The Mirror (London), July 17, 1998.
Osborn, Andrew. “Abandoned Boy Said to Have Been Raised by a Dog.” The New Zealand Herald, April 18, 2004.
Raymond, Clare. “Boy Raised by Dogs; Ivan, Six, Lived with Strays on the Street.” The Mirror (London), July 20, 1998.
Richard, Julie. “The Wild Children: When Nature Replaces Nurture.” Best Friends Magazine, September/October 2005.
Tyler, Richard. “Homeless Russian Boy Raised by Stray Dogs.” World Socialist Website, July 23, 1998.
Feral Children:
Brooke, Simon. “Daughter of the Dog Pack …” Times (London), December 15, 2003.
“Chilean ‘Dog Boy’ Found Living in Cave.” Taipei Times, June 20, 2001.
Dennis, Wayne. “A Further Analysis of Reports of Wild Children.” Child Development 22, no. 2, (June 1951): 153–158.
Gardner, David. “Boy Who Lived with a Pack of Wild Dogs; Police Find Abandoned Child.” Daily Mail (London), June 20, 2001.
Gerstein, Mordicai. “Who the Wild Things Are: The Feral Child in Fiction.” The Horn Book Magazine, November/December 1999.
Gold, Karen. “Myth-Making in Silence.” Times Higher Education, February 1, 2002.
“Jungle Book Comes Alive as Wild Boy Found in Romania.” The Scotsman, February 14, 2002.
Newton, Michael. Savage Girls and Wild Boys: a History of Feral Children. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003.
Osborn, Andrew. “Siberian Boy, 7, Raised by Dogs After Parents Abandon Him.” Belfast Telegraph, August 4, 2004.
“Russian Police Discover Teenage Girl Brought up by Dogs.” Moscow News, July 14, 2005.
Seymour, Miranda. “Nature’s Children.” Sunday Times (London), February 10, 2002.
“They Never Knew Human Touch.” Toronto Star, June 9, 2004.
Homeless in Russia:
Ford, Nathan et al. “Homelessness and Hardship in Moscow.” The Lancet 361 (2003): 875.
Ivanov, Andrei. “Sharp Deterioration in Nation’s Health.” Inter Press Service, July 17, 1996.
Lodge, Robin. “Thousands of Homeless Face Death During Russian Winter.” The Telegraph (London), October 12, 1997.
Quinn-Judge, Paul. “Tales from Cold Mountain.” Time (Europe). February 2, 2003.
Swarns, Rachel L. “Moscow Sends Homeless to Faraway Towns.” New York Times, October 15, 1996.
Russian Street Children:
Aref’ev, A. L. “The Homeless and Neglected Children of Russia.” Sociological Research 44 (July-August 2003): 22–44.
Hansen, Liane. “Profile: Growing Problem of Homeless Children in Russia.” National Public Radio Weekend Edition, February 24, 2002.
Jones, Laura. “Homeless and Alone: Russian Street Children.” BBC Newsround, March 5, 2003.
Kenneth, Christopher. “Homeless Children Eke Out a Miserable Living on Moscow Streets.” The Russia Journal 415 (2002).
McMahon, Colin. “Russia Struggles to Address Problem of Rising Number of Street Kids.” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 2001.
Mereu, Francesca. “Russia: Homeless Children — Helpless Victims of Collapsing Welfare, Family Systems.” Johnson’s Russia List, June 19, 2002.
“Moscow, 50,000 Homeless Children.” UNESCO, May 5, 2002.
“Moscow’s Street Children Endure and Survive Russia’s Record Low Temperatures.” Médecins Sans Frontières, January 1, 2006.
Paddock, Richard C. “The Grim Face of Russia’s Orphanages.” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1998.
Parfitt, Tom. “The Health of Russia’s Children.” The Lancet 366 (2005): 357–358.
Rainsford, Sarah. “Moscow’s Street Kids Army.” BBC News, January 25, 2002.
Weir, Fred. “Russian Runaways Find Few Willing to Help Them.” Christian Science Monitor, December 19, 2001.
Wroe, Georgina. “Lost Children.” Sunday Herald, February 14, 1999.
Yablokova, Oksana. “Street Children Disappear from Streets.” Moscow Times, February 21, 2002.
Street Dogs of Russia:
Antonova, Maria. “Warning: Let Stray Sleeping Dogs Lie.” The Moscow News, March 21, 2005.
Cooley, Martha. “Dogs: A Moscow Triptych.” AGNI, October 12, 2005.
English Russia. “Smartest Dogs: Moscow Stray Dogs.” Accessed February 9, 2010. http://englishrussia.com/?p=2462.
Liakovich, Oleg. “Homeless Animals Getting Smart.” The Moscow News, October 13, 2005.
Schoofs, Mark. “In Moscow’s Metro, A Stray Dog’s Life is Pretty Cushy, and Zoologists Notice.” Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2008.
Sternthal, Susanne. “Moscow’s Stray Dogs.” Financial Times (London), January 16, 2010.
Additional Resources:
Children of Leningradsky, The. DVD. Directed by Hanna Polak and Andrei Celinksi. Poland: Forte Andrzej Celinkski Hanna Polak, 2005.
Wheeler, Post. Russian Wonder Tales. New York: The Century Company, 1912.
Winchell, Margaret. Armed with Patience: Daily Life in Post-Soviet Russia. New York: Hermitage Press, 1998.
As always, I owe a huge thank you to my agent, Alyssa Eisner-Henkin, for opening her heart and championing Mishka’s story.
My edito
r, Arthur A. Levine, believed in this story and my ability to tell it, from the beginning. With his respectful and compassionate guidance, he helped me write the story I had dreamed of for years.
I would not have encountered the inspiration for this book — Ivan Mishukov — without Julie Richard’s article, “The Wild Children: When Nature Replaces Nurture,” in Best Friends magazine way back in 2005. A special thank you to Best Friends Animal Society for all they do for homeless animals.
Two books in particular were vital in my research. Many thanks to Michael Newton for his excellent examination of feral children in his book, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. Margaret Winchell’s memoir of her time in Russia, Armed with Patience, helped me understand life in Russia in the mid-1990s.
An invaluable resource that helped me see what life was (and still is) like for Russia’s homeless children was Hanna Polak’s critically acclaimed documentary, The Children of Leningradsky. Many thanks to Hanna and Active Child Aid for their continued efforts to make these invisible children not only visible, but valued.
Bottomless thanks to the patient and talented members of my pack: Chris Graham, Lora Koehler, and Jean Reagan. Y’all watched me gnaw on this bone for a long time. Also thanks to Lisa Actor, Corinne Humphrey, and Sydney Salter for reading early drafts and providing the two things writers need most: support and feedback.
Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Todd, who makes me feel loved and protected.
Bobbie Pyron is the author of A Dog’s Way Home, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was named to the Spring 2011 Indie Next List. She lives in Park City, Utah, and works as a librarian in Salt Lake City. Visit her online at www.bobbiepyron.com.
Text copyright © 2012 by Bobbie Pyron
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