Faithful Ruslan

by Georgi Vladimov

  The entranceway of the hut gave forth a gust of heat and the usual smell, together with a buzzing noise—the same sort of vaguely indignant buzz that arose in the dogs’ quarters when the food came late. Behind the thin inner door some large object could be heard bumping about, hitting the walls or the floor with a dull thump, mingled with shouts, groans and rapid, angry muttering. It sounded like one of those brawls that humans were prone to start for no good reason, sparked off by a single word in a bad-tempered argument, which escalated furiously and inexorably into a fight, only to cool down as quickly as they had begun, after which all the people would disperse—though sometimes leaving one person lying on the ground clutching his stomach, doubled up in convulsions, or maybe not moving at all.

  The Chief Master pushed open the inner doors, flinging them wide enough for a truck to drive through, and stood in the doorway with a visible cloud of cold air swirling up to his waist.

  “Shut that door, you son of a bitch, or I’ll smash your head in!” This bestial yell, uttered from the murky depths of the hut, was followed by some heavy object flying through the air and hitting the doorpost right alongside the Chief’s ear.

  The Chief Master waited calmly until the noise had died down.

  “I see,” he said, rocking back and forth on his heels, hands clasped behind his back. “I see. So we are discussing the fate of the country again, are we?”

  The hut was silent, but someone near the door spoke up eagerly:

  “Of course we weren’t, Citizen Captain. We wouldn’t dare. We were just discussing things that we’re allowed to talk about in our free time.”

  “Aha … But as I was walking past just now, it seemed to me that things were getting a bit heated in here. So I thought perhaps you people ought to be given a little work to do. Otherwise you might get bored.”

  Again the hut answered back—with the same voice, this time accompanied by a faint chuckle:

  “We’re always ready to work. With pleasure! Only the damn thermometer is showing minus forty-four.”

  “Oh, you’ve had a look, have you? I haven’t seen it yet. Funny, but I had the impression it had got a bit warmer.”

  “Citizen Captain!” The voice was irrepressible, seemingly ready to go on chattering forever. “Why do we respect you so much? It’s because you have such a nice sense of humor. Come inside, please, so that I can shut the door.”

  A vague shadow moved toward the cloud and merged with it, but the Chief pushed the shadow away with his hand.

  “Sure, I don’t mind jokes. I’ll even allow debates—when they’re orderly and well-behaved. But if the work suffers, then that’s bad.”

  The buzzing started up again in the semidarkness inside the hut, and another voice—hoarse, redolent with sleepy warmth and reluctance to come out into the cold—asked with glum despondency:

  “Will you shoot?”

  “What d’you mean—‘shoot’?” retorted the Chief in amazement. “Why should I shoot, unless there’s a mutiny in camp? There’s no mutiny.”

  “That’s right!” The whole hut sighed with relief. “There’s no mutiny!”

  “You see? So why should I shoot? I’d much better make you a skating rink!”

  “What sort of skating rink?”

  “The usual sort. Never seen a skating rink? Anyone who has a pair of skates can go skating.”

  The timid shadow approached again, tried to slip through the doorway and was pushed back by the Chief.

  “No, it’s not good enough if just one or two of you come out. I want all of you out, together.”

  Silence fell on the hut for a moment, just long enough for someone to cry out in an urgent, pleading voice:

  “Come on, fellers, let’s go out. It’s our own fault, after all.”

  Immediately the many-tongued brute inside the hut started banging, rumbling and shrieking again:

  “Lie down, you son of a bitch, or I’ll kill you!”

  “There’s a law against it!”

  “The law says you can’t send us out to work when it’s minus forty or below!”

  “Everybody lie down … !”

  “It’s the law!”

  They did not see that a fire hose was already being unreeled from the water tower. Leaning against the crowbar stuck through the middle of the reel, two of the masters pushed it until they were just short of the door of the hut, where they dropped it onto the snow. Two more rushed and straightened out the kinks in the hose, seized the gleaming yellow nozzle and ran with it up to the doorway. The Chief Master moved aside with a glum look on his face, sadly let out a cloud of steam from his mouth and waved his mitten as a signal to someone in the distance. From the water tower came a barely audible rustle; the flattened canvas of the hose started to come alive, to fill and grow round, a gurgling, high-pitched hiss came out of the nozzle and the two masters in the entranceway staggered slightly. A thick blue jet struck the ceiling inside the hut, then moved lower down, sweeping away a man lying on an upper bunk, together with all his belongings, and forced back into the hut a number of timid shadows who tried to run forward through the door. The two masters, jamming down their boot heels to keep a foothold in the slippery doorway, could hardly control the heavy nozzle as the jet of water sprayed from side to side, striking blows that were as hard and resonant as the blows of a club. A white cloud poured out of the hut above their heads, and along with the hot, stuffy air there came not a scream, not a shriek but a gasping, long-drawn-out sigh, such as a man gives before a long plunge into the water.

  Ruslan’s ears were so filled with the sound of that sigh that he hardly heard the windowpanes shatter and the frames crack, and at first he did not realize what the gray, smoking foam was that was crawling out of the windows and onto the snow; he only understood it when the foam began to separate out into men, who struggled to get up while others fell on top of them. The Chief Master raised his hand from behind his back and pointed in their direction, at which the hissing jet was aimed at them in a smoothly curving arc and was held there for a long time before being directed back into the hut. By then the men who had fallen out of the windows no longer attempted to get up but simply twitched feebly as they lay on the snow—and turned white in front of the watching eyes.

  Unable to sit still, Ruslan fidgeted and yelped, nervously lifting one paw after the other. As those white spangles encrusted the men’s clothing like chain mail, he seemed to feel them on his own coat, thick, furry and warm despite the ice-cold wind blowing through it. Gradually the white spangles started to turn yellow, which happened to Ruslan whenever he got very angry, until the only thing that he could see clearly through the yellow film was the thick hose wriggling in the snow. As this reptile crept toward his paws, it squirted water out of small holes in its side, and in one place, where the masters had been unable to straighten it out, it was twisted into a crease that had risen up and was now swaying right in front of Ruslan’s nose, threatening to attack him but always falling back whenever Ruslan made a dart at it.

  Luckily for him, there was another dog, younger and rasher, who was the first to lose patience. Ruslan heard a spine-tingling growl, and across the edge of the yellow film there flashed the dog himself—dark gray and slim, body extended in a flying leap. In midair Ingus seized the thing that was threatening Ruslan, sank his teeth into the hose and pressed it down with his paws. The hose immediately began to struggle free, and this infuriated Ingus even more; snarling with frenzy and shaking his head from side to side, he tore at his enemy, water squirting out of his mouth in a rainbow-colored spray. The two masters holding the nozzle shouted and pulled the hose toward them, pulling Ingus with it. At the same time his leash pulled him backward, throttling his slender neck. A haze came over Ingus’s bloodshot eyes, but he would not let go of his prey.

  “What’s the matter with him?” asked the Chief Master. He walked slowly over, a demigod with terrible blue eyes and an angry face, holding up the blue vault of heaven with his fur cap. But Ingus was too pre
occupied to give him more than a glance. “What’s the matter with him, I say? Has he gone crazy?”

  “God knows, Comr’d Cap’n,” said Ingus’s master. He was in despair. He kicked Ingus in the flank. The dog squealed painfully, but would not open his teeth. “Why does he always give trouble? You know what he’s like.…”

  “O.K., give it here.” The Chief Master stretched out his hand and one of the masters hastened to give him a crowbar. The Chief frowned with irritation. “No, not that. That’s not what I want.”

  He reached instead for the submachine gun. Hurriedly and clumsily Ingus’s master pulled the sling over his head. With a stab of the pain that was always lurking in his consciousness, Ruslan saw at last what happened when a dog was taken outside the wire. The pierced, blued-steel barrel casing was pointed downward, swaying above Ingus’s head as though choosing a spot to thrust itself between the hemispheres of the sloping forehead and the ears that were laid back in fury. The muzzle was not thrust down, but something jerked rapidly inside the barrel casing and an orangered halo flashed out around the slanting black muzzle, while out of Ingus’s head … out of the black-edged, lacerated hole spurted something hot and pink mixed with slivers of white. With a convulsive movement, Ingus stretched himself out with his head at the Chief Master’s feet as though striving at last to lay the chewed hose on his boots.

  As his master tried to straighten out the hose, Ingus’s head was wrenched backward with it; there was still life in him—but only in his jaws, clenched in their last bite. His master threw down the hose and straightened up. He watched and the Chief Master and the other masters watched as the thick, gray snake thrashed around, flinging Ingus’s head back and forth across the snow. But no animal could stand by and watch this; Ruslan could not watch it, and he flung himself down alongside Ingus. Even now, remembering how it had all happened, he could feel the plywoodlike firmness of the hose and the icy cold that set his teeth on edge. With a sinking heart he realized the hopelessness of trying to bite through that canvas neck—all he could do was bite some more small holes, from which stinging little jets of water came hissing out—while his ruff, his defenseless ruff stood up on end at the closeness of that black gun-muzzle, from which retribution was bound to roar out at any moment. And yet each time that he relived this unfortunate episode, he still could not feel that he was wholly guilty. The masters, after all, had done something that even humans should never do to each other, and Ruslan was not the only dog to follow Ingus’s lead: Ruslan’s lone misdemeanor lasted only a moment before the others joined in. Something large, gray and powerful flew over Ruslan, somersaulted and crashed heavily to the ground. Glancing sideways, he saw Baikal, always so placid and obedient; a moment later the cunning Alma flung herself at the hose, then the shaggy jaws of Dick—champion at guarding prisoners!—sank themselves into the hose right beside Ruslan, and in a moment the entire pack was biting and worrying the detested hose. Scorning duty and orders, all of them had cast off the restraints of obedience, and had forgotten their permanent fear of those black-muzzled guns, while the masters were forced to realize that they could only make their dogs obey them as long as the animals did not object too strongly. Right now they were insensible to the furious tugging at their leashes, which almost broke their necks, to the boots kicking at their stomachs and to the fact that the Chief Master himself was angrily waving a submachine gun and shouting at the others to get out of the way so that he could slaughter all these beasts with a single burst of fire—they were all useless now, anyway, and new ones would have to be found!

  Coarse and inadequate though human language may be, dogs understand such things—but which of them was in a fit state to behave sensibly and let go? Now and again one of the dogs would raise his muzzle to the cold, infinite sky and howl—not with pain but with anguish at his own sin, at the poverty of a brain that could not cope with madness. Anyone able to interpret the dogs’ supplication would have found it to be their eternal complaint—an animal’s inability to penetrate the inscrutable workings of the human mind and discern its godlike intentions. For every beast knows how great man is, knows, too, that his greatness extends equally far in the direction of both Good and Evil; but that an animal, though prepared to die for man, cannot follow him all the way to the highest peak of Good nor beyond a certain threshold on the path to Evil—and that on that threshold the animal will stop and rebel.

  Who could have imagined that Djulbars would save them all? Ignored by everyone, the only one to have kept calm, he suddenly stood up and stretched pleasurably as though preparing for a fight to defend his supremacy against all his rivals. No one noticed it when he bit through his leash—he was always chewing through it when there was nothing else to bite—but they all saw him trot forward with the loose end of his leash trailing in the snow. He walked right up to the Chief, faced the small, round, black gun-muzzle that was threatening the other dogs, and watched intently with his one and a half eyes to make sure that the Chief did not put his finger on the trigger: a small, scarcely noticeable movement but one that Djulbars recognized perfectly—the Instructor had demonstrated it so many times on the training ground—and that might be the last movement the Chief made in his life. The Chief dared not move his finger, knowing the temperament of this creature Djulbars, whom he had allowed to come so close. His self-confidence was shaken; this, too, Djulbars realized full well, and it was why he now allowed himself to take a small liberty: with his bearlike skull he nudged the black barrel and pushed it slightly upward. Although dumbfounded by this piece of impertinence, the Chief also approved of it; his face softened, and wiping his forehead with his mitten, he said:

  “O.K., let the dogs chew the hose if they want to. There’s plenty of water.”

  Then Djulbars, calm as ever, turned and went back to his place.

  The dogs’ attack of madness soon passed, and they all began to realize the real nature of this enemy they had attacked. It had punished them, and in a way they had not expected; Ruslan could not recall it even now without a shudder. He vividly felt again how he had choked on the jets of stinging cold water that spurted out of the holes in the hose, how the coat on his stomach—where it was so soft, long and fluffy—had frozen to the water-soaked snow, how he had twitched in pain as he tried to wrench himself free and found that he could not move. What a miserable bunch they were now, with their usually luxuriant coats sodden to the skin, suddenly reduced to such thin-looking, pitiful creatures, tearfully begging for mercy!

  The masters used the same stream of hose water to wash them free from the icy surface, and then led them at a run back into the guardhouse, while some of the dogs, who could not even stand, had to be pulled along on sheepskin coats. There they all huddled into one corner, licking themselves and consoling each other for the disastrous incident. The masters pulled them apart, but they crawled back together again, for the law of their kind bade them comfort one another in misfortune and offer each other warmth and dryness in the cold.

  There followed a terrible night, when they were led back to their kennels and each was left alone to reflect on his sin. They could, of course, bark to each other through the thin walls, but this did not help to warm them up and they had nothing more to communicate than mutual recriminations and deathly forebodings. Many of them dreamed of Rex that night; they could even hear his voice, hoarse with cold and wind, as he lamented his solitude outside the wire and called upon them to join him. The older dogs remembered a certain Bairam whom Ruslan had never known, but who, it seems, had trodden that same path even before Rex, while the very oldest dogs recalled the famous Lady (the masters, for some reason, had nicknamed her “Lady Hamilton”) who had been the first of all that ill-starred company; further back than Lady the history of the camp was lost in obscurity.

  Next morning the masters came at the usual time and brought food, but they did not touch the dogs. They cleaned out the kennels, shook out the bedding in the corridor and talked in angry voices, grumbling about the Chief Master;
some said, “He’s fair, of course, but he’s a brute,” while others disagreed, saying, “He’s a brute, all right, but he’s fair.” Then the Chief himself appeared and ordered the masters to feel the dogs’ noses:

  “Any dog with a warm nose can rest. The others are to go on duty. And that brute there is to stick close behind me, to make sure there are no more excesses like yesterday!”

  Why did they take them out on duty on such a bitterly cold day? Why did they make them sit freezing in a semicircle around the same hut which, though now quite silent, caused the dogs to have such painful memories of the previous day’s episode? Surely it cannot have been simply to guard the huge box on wheels standing outside the hut, a wagon with high wooden sides that they always saw whenever there were deaths in the camp? Two wretched little horses, their eyes rheumy with the cold, heads nodding up and down like mechanical hammers, dragged the cart wearily through the camp gates and from hut to hut; then, loaded sometimes to the very top, it would bump away over the ruts and potholes toward the forest. The dogs knew that no one would try to rob or attack this cart or the freight that was carried in it. The cart never needed to be guarded by an escort: in winter it frightened people with the rustling and bony creaking of its cargo, and in the summer heat, when it was always accompanied by a thick swarm of flies, its nauseating stench made you want to run as far away as possible. If Ruslan had been able to put names to smells, he would have said that the smell coming from the cart was the stink of hell. Like all his fellow dogs, he could not accept the idea of death as total extinction, a state where there was absolutely nothing at all and no smells whatsoever. He did, however, have a vague idea of what the dogs’ hell must be like: it was no doubt a huge, dim cellar where all of them, the Bairams and the Rexes, were chained to the wall. Huge hands gripped them by the muzzle, day in and day out they were whipped with leashes, stinging barbs were stuck into their ears and they were given nothing but mustard to eat. His picture of the human hell was rather less distinct, but no doubt it was not much fun there either, especially since people went there stark naked. The clothing of those who died was divided up among the living, and for a long while afterward Ruslan would confuse them with the dead, believing that the latter were still lurking somewhere nearby and might reappear at any moment. As far as he could remember, however, none of them had ever shown up again—they, too, were obviously confined to their cellar for a very long stretch, and there was as much likelihood of seeing them again as of meeting Rex alive and in the flesh. There was, though, something in common between these two hells—a mysterious, insistent terror and a dull, aching misery that could not be repressed or evaded once you had become aware of that grim secret.