Shaking her head, Stiura went out into the kitchen. His eyes followed her with a blazing look as he swiveled around on his stool. After some rattling of dishes she clambered noisily down into the cellar, returning with a plateful of tomatoes and pickled mushrooms garnished with red-currant leaves, and placed a sweating bottle in the middle of the table. The Shabby Man shivered and turned his watery eyes away, but it was obvious that the bottle was the center of attraction, the chief object in the room.
Ruslan already knew that the horrible stuff in that bottle was nicknamed “vodka” (it also had a longer name: “Filthy-stuff-damn-the-man-who-invented-it”), and he could never make up his mind whether the Shabby Man really liked it or not. In the evenings he yearned for it with all his heart, but by morning it made him feel terrible and he hated it. Many times Ruslan had noticed that humans often did things that they didn’t like, and without any compulsion—something that no animal would ever do. It was significant that in Ruslan’s hierarchy the highest rank was held by the masters, who always knew what was good and what was bad; next in order were dogs, while prisoners came last of all. Although they were bipeds, they were still not quite people. None of them, for instance, would dare to give orders to a dog, yet their lives were partly controlled by dogs. In any case, how could they give sensible orders when they were all so stupid? They were obviously stupid because they kept on thinking there was some sort of better life far away from the camp and beyond the forests—a piece of nonsense that would never enter the head of a guard dog. As if to prove their stupidity, they would run away and wander alone for months, perishing with hunger, instead of staying in camp and eating their favorite food—prison gruel, for a bowl of which they were prepared to slit each other’s throats. And when they did return, looking abashed, they would still go on thinking up new ways to escape. Poor fools! They were never, never happy, wherever they were.
Here, for instance—had the Shabby Man really found a better life here? Ruslan knew perfectly well what it was that kept him and Stiura together—it was the same thing that went on between himself and his various “brides.” True, it wasn’t the worst thing in life, yet even so these two were not really happy together living under one roof. Otherwise why were they often so miserable and why did they quarrel so much, sometimes to the point of shouting at each other? Even here the Shabby Man remained a typical prisoner, in that he often did what he didn’t want to do and his “bride” acted the same way; therefore Ruslan was convinced that when the time came to separate them and take the Shabby Man away to the only place where he could find peace, then he, Ruslan, would feel neither doubt nor pity.
Seated at table, Stiura invited “my two lodgers” to come and eat, but one of them refused without even glancing at the bowl put down for him, while the other one wanted to go on working a bit longer. Yet his work merely consisted of fitting the remaining planks into position, after which he would put them aside again, sit down and smoke a cigarette, purposely delaying his blissful appointment with the bottle. A curious change had come over him: for no good reason his features glowed with relaxed good humor, yet at the same time he obviously felt a nervous compulsion to fidget and talk unceasingly:
“Well, Stiura, my dear, I was telling you about the Finnish War … M’m, yes. Officially, of course, it wasn’t a war, but a ‘campaign,’ or rather, ‘the campaign against the White Finns.’ Dammit, but Stalin was diabolically clever in his way, the old murderer! It was a stroke of genius to call them ‘White Finns.’ None of us knew whether they were really the aggressors or not, but ‘White Finns’—that was clear: they were ‘Whites,’ and we hadn’t forgotten about the ‘Whites’ since the days of the civil war, so it all seemed quite natural and we knew who we were fighting against. Yet really they were just Finns, the people of Finland. Well, so we beat them … But it was a funny sort of victory. We sure were glad as hell when they asked for peace. And they were clever. They realized that even if we Russians were ready to go on dying for a great cause and for the Beloved Father of All Peoples, the Finns preferred to stay alive. Much better to make peace and save lives—and they didn’t even lose much territory, either. Then, in the World War they played a clever game, too: their troops advanced just as far as the old frontier and no farther, however much Hitler tried to order them to go on. There are some clever people in this world, and we could learn a lesson or two from those ‘White Finns’—I mean from the Finns pure and simple.”
“Just listen to the way you talk,” said Stiura severely. “You shouldn’t have been put in prison, you should have had your tongue cut off—that would have stopped your babbling.”
“I wasn’t put in prison for talking out of turn, Stiura. I was a spy, they said, because I raised my hands in surrender to the hated enemy. So maybe they should have cut off my hands, but my tongue had nothing to do with it.”
“How can you tell which country’s people are clever and which aren’t?”
“This is how I see it, my dear.” Anger and irritation were seething in his voice. “A person who insists that everyone else should live the way he lives isn’t clever. And a people that thinks the same way isn’t clever either. That people will never be happy, even though they may sing songs from morning till night saying how happy they are.”
Biting her lip, Stiura cast a frightened, sidelong glance at Ruslan, who turned his glittering eyes aside and closed them, pretending to be asleep.
“Evil people are never happy,” she said. “And why aren’t we happy? Do you think it’s because we are evil?”
“We have our share of evil, Stiura. They don’t call us a ‘hard’ people for nothing. But that’s only half the trouble. Other peoples are hard, yet they manage to live well enough. Take yourself, now: you seem to be a nice, kind person, but just think what happens if some little bit of fluff hoists her skirt up higher than you’re used to seeing it or pushes her tits out into the firing position: you’d stop and give her a piece of your mind, wouldn’t you? If you had your way, in fact, you’d have her arrested.”
“Good Lord, she can walk around naked if she wants to! As long as I don’t have to look at her, though.”
“But what if she likes doing it?”
“I don’t care what she likes. Other people have got to like it too. People aren’t fools—they know what’s decent and what isn’t.”
“There you are!” the Shabby Man raised his finger in triumph. “You can learn everything you need to know about politics by listening to you women talk. Ah, Stiura, all that time I spent in the prison camps wasn’t wasted. Why, you’d never believe the different sorts of people I met when I was inside. Clever, educated people—any number of ’em. I’d still be a dumb old fool to this day if it hadn’t been for them. I remember I shared a ‘sleeping car’ in a camp for two years with a German comrade—you know, he had the lower bunk and I had the top bunk.”
“Yes, I know what a ‘sleeping car’ is.”
“He’d been to all sorts of countries and he told me all about them. Course, he was a Communist through and through, but you can’t change the national character, and this is what I noticed about him: he saw that the people in another country maybe didn’t live the same way he did, but that they lived in a special way, which was their way—they had their own kinds of customs, they painted their houses like this or like that, they had their own fashion of singing songs or celebrating weddings. Now, if one of our guys starts talking about where he’s been and what he’s seen, the most important things, according to him, are that they’ve organized a Young Communist movement in one place, or that the revolution’s just around the corner, or in some other place things are hopeless—they haven’t learned Marxism yet and are only at the stage of trade-union struggle. But what really bugs him is not the revolution or the Young Communists—it’s that things in these other countries are not exactly like they are back home in Saratov. And if you ask him what else he saw that was interesting, he just looks astonished and yells at you: ‘Well, if you don’t thin
k that’s interesting, what else is there?’ See what I mean?”
As she listened, with her cheek propped on her fist and a frown on her big white face, she suddenly burst out:
“Well, will you sit down at table or are you going to talk your head off all night?”
He moved over to the table and reached swiftly for the bottle. Forcing himself not to hurry, he filled Stiura’s glass up to the level which she showed with her hand and gave himself nearly a full glass.
“That’s rather a lot,” she said, “for the first drink.”
“It all depends on what you’re going to drink to. The first drink is to the Big Amnesty. I waited for my little amnesty, and it came—but the Big One is still to come. That’ll be when they open all the gates and say to everybody, ‘You may go, people! Go wherever you like—and without an escort.’ Well, here’s luck, Stiura.”
With a violent shudder he leaned back and drained the whole glass in one gulp, then breathed hard at the ceiling, his streaming eyes blinking as though he had been hit on the head. Regaining his breath, he dug his fork into the food on the plate, but immediately dropped the fork and hastened to pour out again. Stiura covered her glass with her hand, but when he said, “Go on!” she took away her hand.
Now no longer impatient, he grew relaxed and cheerful, and a sort of game crept into their talk.
“Stiura! Say, Stiura,” he asked, “what sort of a funny name is that? I’ve never heard it before.”
“You’d better marry me,” she replied. “You’ll find out if you take me to the register office. Then you can have all of me.”
“I’d never even get all of you into that dresser, Stiura, you’re such a bi-ig girl.…”
She snorted, pretending to be offended, but soon she was sitting on his knees and the game continued with the help of their hands.
“And what about that boss of ours, the captain? What’s he like as a man—O.K.?”
“He’s nothing special, your boss. Ordinary, same as all of them.”
“All of them, eh? Been having the whole lot? If you have, you ought to know every man’s different. It’s you women who are all the same.”
“He was no worse than you, anyway.”
“Crap. You’re lying. No worse than me—is that all? Why, he’s an outstanding personality, a man-mountain, an eagle! In other words, a tick. When a tick gets his teeth into you, either you pull him out with a piece of your flesh or he leaves his head stuck in you for a souvenir. I’ll bet he scraped you good and proper!”
“Like hell! That’s all he did, scrape.… The only stiff thing about him was the collar of his uniform.”
“But underneath it he was a noncombatant, eh? Ah, it does me good to hear you say that. That calls for another drink.”
Ruslan stood up, pushed open the door with his forehead and went out.
The daylight had only just faded, but Ruslan knew for certain that his prisoner would not be going anywhere until late next morning, and “that filthy stuff” would keep him at home more reliably than any guard. Accustomed to treasuring his limited free time, Ruslan could not get used to having it in abundance. Until the sky turned pink again and the world glowed with color, he could sleep to his heart’s content, go hunting, check on what was happening at the station and visit some of his friends. The problem was to survive till morning on a stomach so empty that the wind seemed to be blowing through it and a pool of hot water was splashing against its sides. He knew that in the warmth the pangs of hunger grew infinitely worse, so he purposely cooled his belly with snow, stretched out on the sidewalk in front of the gate. This was his invariable post, and a very convenient one it was. From here he could not only observe the street in both directions but also see the porch through the open wicket gate, which was never shut at night. His favorite moment was when the streetlamp on its rickety pole was turned on and threw a cone of yellow light all around Ruslan’s post. This light warmed Ruslan’s heart, because it so vividly reminded him of the prison camp and his spells of guard duty with his master, when together they patrolled the No-Go zone or stood sentry outside a storehouse; cold and lonely, they were hemmed in by a malevolent, impenetrable wall of darkness, on one side of which was light, fair dealing and mutual affection, while on the other side lurked an evil world of deception, trickery and violence.
Treasure, too, would come out into the cone of light and lie down a little distance away from Ruslan, though each day he moved a little closer. He had, of course, already told his friends about Ruslan, and on the second evening they came to make his acquaintance. First to come was a skinny dog called Polkan, with a scalded flank and a look of fixed puzzlement on his face, a grizzled little goatee beard, and a habit of always nodding his head as though constantly agreeing with someone. Then came the painfully intelligent-looking Druzhok, with a permanent enigmatic frown as though he knew some great secret, but who was really extremely dim-witted and could never even remember who his parents were; elsewhere he generally answered to the name of Mutt. Another visitor was the elegant and highly strung Bouton, terribly proud of his frilly pants and his bushy, ever-stiff tail. The introductions were entirely one-sided; Ruslan did not deign to acknowledge them by a single look or movement, towering above them with the indifference of a megalith. Treasure contrived to turn even this to his advantage: he, too, lay there in silence, adopting the same pose as Ruslan, with the same disdainful look on his face. His friends bitterly envied him and departed in baffled perplexity.
Later there came a bevy of bedraggled little bitches—all with silly names like Darling and Blackie, and one without a name at all—who spread out in a semicircle and gazed at Ruslan with adoration. Their shameless looks said quite openly, “Oh, isn’t he handsome! So big and such lovely long legs! Well, of course, he’s from the military. Other bitches would try and flirt with him, but I wouldn’t dream of it for a second.…” If they were hoping for a passionate encounter, they had come to the wrong place; it never entered their thick little heads that Ruslan was On Duty, and that where sex was concerned he was accustomed to performing as generations of his ancestors had done: an order would be given, you were led out on a leash and shown with whom to do it. When their presence bored him he simply twitched his blackish-mauve lips and bared his fangs—at which they all vanished as though blown away by the wind and Treasure immediately remembered some urgent business in the yard.
None of his fellow guard dogs came to visit Ruslan, and he avoided other acquaintances, valuing solitude above all. In the hours when he lay and watched the onset of evening, from an old habit acquired in his prison-camp days, he would run over the events of the day in his mind and prepare himself for the morrow. Anxiously he racked his brains to make sure that he still remembered everything he had been taught, that he had not forgotten any of the lessons learned by harsh experience and for which, if they were ever to slip his memory, he might have to pay dearly.
… HE WAS COMING AGAIN, THE STRANGER IN the gray overalls that smelled of a prison hut. He was approaching out of the sun, his long, early-morning shadow creeping insinuatingly toward your paws. Be on guard and don’t be afraid of his shadow, but beware of his hands, hidden in his thick sleeve. When the sleeve was rolled back the poison would be there, in the palm of his hand. But there was his palm, right in front of your nose—wide open and empty. He only wanted to stroke you—after all, one couldn’t suspect a trick all the time! The warm human hand was laid on your forehead; its touch was affectionate and solicitous, making a pleasant languor spread through your whole being and driving away all suspicion. You lifted your head to respond to that touch with the ultimate sign of trust: taking the hand between your teeth and holding it briefly and gently without hurting the man. Suddenly the laughing face was transformed with a sneer of malice; for a moment astonishment kept you from feeling the pain, because you could not grasp where it had come from—and the hand was snatched away, having plunged a barb into your ear.…
You had not seen it, hidden between the fi
ngers. Learn to see it.
Once again, Master had only to go away for a moment or two and straight away you did something stupid. The shame of it! And the pain! Worst of all, you had to admit to your own stupidity, because you found that you couldn’t get rid of the thing by yourself—it wouldn’t come out if you tried to dislodge it with your paw or shake it out by twitching your ear, and whatever you did only made it worse. Your ear was now positively burning, with a raging pain that was making the daylight fade—this day that had begun so well, that had been so cloudless and blue. But there was Master—ah, he always appeared at the right moment and understood everything. He would never punish you, even when you had undoubtedly deserved it. He would take you away, while you cried so much that you could not make out where you were going, and then he would quickly remove that horrible thing and put a damp piece of lint on the place that hurt. You gave just one final yelp, and it was all over: Master was already tickling you behind that ear and it did not hurt at all. But if you were a clever dog, you would think to yourself: next time try to see whether there was anything hidden in a stranger’s hand. Or perhaps it wasn’t even worth the trouble of looking? Wouldn’t it be better to be like Djulbars and not trust anyone—so that no one could ever fool you again?
It was not surprising that Djulbars, who had bitten his own master, always earned top marks for mistrust. It was not so much that he showed exemplary aggression toward strangers; he simply wanted to devour them whole, overalls and all. It happened several times that he went berserk and forgot the rules—and he alone was forgiven for it. Casting aside all reason, he would whip himself into a state of anger five or ten times greater than necessary, until his coat was practically steaming and the whole exercise yard reeked of dog. One lesson, at least, he had thoroughly acquired: if you tried too hard, you got away with it; if you didn’t try hard enough, you were in trouble.
Faithful Ruslan Page 9