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.
He had reached the end of the town’s main street, with its high, solid fences and houses with tiny, little, blank windows that seemed to have been made for any purpose except looking out of them. At this point Ruslan was stopped by a thought that came into his mind—a recollection of something that had happened not long ago but that had already grown blurred in his memory. Yet it would not allow him to go on and it filled him with a certain vague presentiment—not sad, but pleasant. He whined and circled around and around on the spot, like a puppy discovering his own tail for the first time, and suddenly he stood quite still with his paws spread wide on the ground. After standing like this for several moments, he lowered his head and slowly trotted back, not sure whether or not to believe his instinct. Here was the place that he had run past in such haste, preoccupied with his thoughts. Admittedly it was on the far side of the street, but he should have been able to pick up Master’s scent at that distance. He had, it seemed, been driven into town by car—curse that stinking rubber, curse that gasoline!—but he had got out and stamped his feet while they handed him his suitcase and duffel bag. There was no way of sniffing what was in the suitcase, which was coated with some sort of smelly glue, while the duffel bag contained clean laundry and soap (lilac-smelling, from the officers’ canteen), also Vaseline, smeared on preserving jars to make them airtight. Here he had lit a cigarette; the match still smelled of smoke and his fingers. Then he had picked up his suitcase and slung the bag over his shoulder, so that all smells stopped and the only clue was Master’s footsteps, firmly imprinted in the snow. Now Ruslan could not go wrong. Master’s legs were slightly bandy and perhaps a little short for his height, but he trod hard, putting down the whole of his boot sole at once, as though carrying a heavy weight. Today he was wearing his very best pair of leather boots—which were admittedly the same that all masters wore—but then his feet inside them were wrapped in footcloths and they (as we have already explained) smelled of Master’s special character. It was a good thing, too, that his footsteps did not weave around among the tracks made by other people—Master never did like to take a wavering course—but went straight ahead without any deviations to either side.
Now the pedestrians shied away from Ruslan; they took him, in his frenzy of love, for a mad dog that had broken loose—and he really looked terrifying: so emaciated that his ribs showed, a yellow film over his eyes, panting hoarsely and with his loose collar clinking as he ran headlong with frightening single-mindedness toward his unknown goal. At the station his way was barred by a slowly maneuvering truck; Ruslan dived underneath it, hurting his back, but the scent made him ignore the pain and drew him on, through the doors and into the warmth and noise of the station building. There, on the slushy floor among the sweat-soaked felt boots, rotten sacking, rawhide straps, gobs of spittle, sodden cigarette butts and dirty, exhausted bodies, the thread of the scent was broken off—the thread that had been fastened to his nostrils and that he had been following like a bull running after the ring through its nose. He tried in vain to pick up its vital, magnetic pull, but there were food smells in the air, too, and their delicious, spicy odors drove him absolutely crazy. Then suddenly he heard his master’s voice, that inimitable, godlike voice—and although it was not calling him, it was somewhere nearby. He flew straight as an arrow in that direction, over benches and sacks, ready to knock down anybody who would not let him reach his master.
He was obliged, however, to contain his joy. As he burst into the restaurant, he was about to bark: “I’m here! Here I am!” when he saw that Master was not alone but was sitting at a table and talking to another person, and Ruslan did not dare approach him. Standing timidly by the wall, he stared at Master and his companion—a fussy little man with a pink, sweaty bald patch on the top of his head, wearing an extremely shabby overcoat, with a green scarf draped over his chest that no doubt concealed either a dirty shirt or the absence of a shirt. Ruslan compared the two, and the comparison was wholly in favor of his young, strong, slim, utterly splendid master. He would have looked even more splendid if he had not forgotten to put on his epaulets and had not been sitting with his uniform collar unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up. Even so, his face was magnificent, godlike, with beautiful, godlike, saucer-round eyes, and he held himself in a magnificent and godlike way. The man facing him, on the other hand, was simply repulsive, with a pair of watery little eyes, an idiotic habit of giggling for no reason and of scratching his unshaven cheek with all five fingers as he did so. Both of them, it was true, gave off a smell that was not just unpleasant but sickening, and the source of this loathsome reek, as Ruslan suspected, was contained in the little decanter full of a clear, waterlike liquid. With a little effort, however, he was able to convince himself that his master smelled much less, in fact hardly at all, whereas the Shabby Man exuded an intolerable stench. Ruslan had already taken a dislike to the Shabby Man, because the fact that he was there prevented Ruslan from dashing up to Master, but especially because he was talking to Master in a strangely careless and disrespectful manner, failing to lower his eyes and, what was worse, with an obvious grin on his face. Just like that tractor driver.
“I see you had to stay behind for quite a while, Sergeant,” said the Shabby Man. “The others cleared off long ago.”
He kept addressing Master as “Sergeant,” whereas his real name was Corporal, and oddly enough Master seemed to prefer this new name. Ruslan didn’t like it at all. He liked names that contained the letter R; he liked his own name because it began with R, and in Corporal there were no less than two of them, and they both made a lovely growling sound, whereas the single R in Sergeant was hardly sounded at all.
Master did not answer immediately, because he did not like doing two things at once, so before replying he finished filling two glasses from the decanter—first one for himself, then another for the Shabby Man.
“There was a reason for it.”
“You don’t have to tell me, if it’s a secret.”
“Secre
t? No, it’s no secret any longer. I was guarding the camp records.”
“The re-ecords, eh?” drawled the Shabby Man. “You mean all the files on us? And aren’t they being guarded any longer, now that you’ve gone?”
“Not likely. They’ve been sealed up and taken away.”
“I see. But what for, Sergeant?”
“Whad’ya mean, ‘what for’?”
“Well, why do they have to be guarded and sealed at all? They should just be put in a stove and burned—and good riddance. And all that ‘secret’ stuff, too. Into the stove with it, till there’s nothing but ashes.”
Master gave him a pitying look.
“What are you, a kid? Or have you gone crazy? Don’t you know those records are to be kept forever?”
“There’s no such thing as forever, Sergeant. You’re an intelligent man, you ought to know that.”
Master sighed and picked up his glass. Immediately the Shabby Man picked up his; this was all he had been waiting for.
“Here’s luck,” said Master.
The Shabby Man stretched out his glass toward him, but Master beat him to it, raised his own slightly higher so that they could not clink glasses and quickly tipped it into his mouth. The Shabby Man slowly drew his hand back and drank. Then they both took a sip of yellow stuff out of mugs and stuck their forks into the food. Ruslan swallowed his saliva and couldn’t bring himself to look away.
Faithful Ruslan Page 5