Faithful Ruslan

by Georgi Vladimov

  As he came down the hill, he tried to think what might have caused his memory to give him a warning. Was it the unfamiliar blue color of Stiura’s dress? Her sad, wet-eyed look of farewell? Yes, it was probably that tearful look—except that he now realized it had been a look not of farewell but of deception. For some reason, humans always felt a sort of remorse before committing some act of deceit or treachery. Ruslan remembered noticing a particular sadness in the eyes of prisoners whom the very next day he had had to chase when they attempted to escape: the villains had lulled him with that sad, caressing look in their eyes!

  He did not have to turn off the main street, because their trail came out of an alley and down the main street toward the station. They had only recently passed that way, because the bitter reek of his polishing fluid and her strong flower scent had not had time to dissipate. They were obviously trying to cover their tracks with these smells—a clever plan, because they were stronger than tobacco. They had, however, made one mistake that would ensure that they did not get far: Stiura had put on new shoes, which like her dress were too tight for her, so that she found walking extremely difficult, and despite his nervous haste the Shabby Man had shortened his stride to keep pace with her.

  He caught up with them at the very edge of the platform, and there much of his zeal for the pursuit faded away. He had expected to find them looking guilty and glancing around in fear, but instead they were just sitting hunched up and almost motionless on a bench. When Ruslan arrived, panting, they did not even notice him. Hidden from their view by a lamppost, he slunk along a silver-painted, wire-mesh fence and lay down behind their bench. From this position he could only see their feet—the Shabby Man was holding a tightly packed army duffel bag between his legs, while Stiura had kicked off her shoes and was wriggling her toes. He could, however, hear every sigh they uttered, even the slight hoarseness in their voices—and he quickly realized that they were not planning to escape together.

  “Don’t waste money on a telegram,” she said. “I hate telegrams, anyway. But write me a letter with all the news. Force yourself.”

  “I’ll write as soon as I arrive.”

  “Why write so soon? Look around a bit and find your family first. You may not even find them—anything can happen. And if you do find them, you won’t be thinking much about me. But at least write before the month is out; otherwise I’ll start thinking you’ve fallen under a streetcar.”

  “Sure, I’ll write, I’ll write,” he said dully. “And you won’t mope, O.K.?”

  “I’ll try not to. Anyway, there won’t be much time to spare for moping. Didn’t I tell you? We’ve been officially notified that our whole office is being moved to where your camp used to be. There’s to be a big expansion program there. As of next month, they’re going to run a bus service out to the old camp. So what with traveling back and forth every day and straightening up the yard a bit, I soon won’t have much time on my hands. So if you come back and by any chance I’m not at home, you’ll know where to find me.”

  As he listened he was scraping his shoe over the asphalt, and probably staring down at it.

  “Stiura,” he interrupted her, “I was lying, you know, when I told you I’d had a dream.”

  “What dream?”

  “I said I’d dreamed that all my family were alive and were waiting for me. But there was no dream. I got a letter.”

  She froze into stillness and stopped wriggling her toes.

  “Remember I told you I met a man in a transit prison who used to be a neighbor of mine? We traveled here together, all the way in the same railroad car. And we were in the camp together almost till the end—they released him six months earlier, because he had a disability. I’m not sure which of us was the luckier, though. His job was no use to him in the camps—he used to be a molder in a cast-iron foundry, and there’s no call for that sort of work in prison. He spent the whole of his stretch on general laboring, did nothing but stack lumber all the time and got a hernia for his pains. I was put on lighter work ’cause I’m a cabinetmaker by trade. Sometimes the officers needed a piece of furniture made, and I can do upholstery, too—so I got by without knocking myself out. Never did a decent job of work for them, though—any old crap was good enough for those bastards!”

  “Forget about it. You’ve got to start living again, instead of raking up the past. Well, what about this neighbor of yours?”

  “Well, you see, I wrote to him—and I got a reply.”

  “The hell you did!” she said, deeply offended. “Why keep it secret, then? I’m not your enemy, am I? You should have told me right away you’d had a letter. Getting a letter makes it much better—it means you know for certain you won’t be making the trip for nothing.”

  “No, I don’t know that. I told him he wasn’t to say I was alive, but just to drop a few hints, like: ‘It does happen, you know,’ and, ‘Sometimes they do come back.’ Well, he did as I told him. And they moaned and looked all upset.”

  “Of course they did! They were so excited, so thrilled.”

  “No, he didn’t exactly say they were thrilled in his letter. But he did warn me that my eldest girl was studying at the university.”

  “Is she such a big girl? Well, congratulations. But what’s bad about it? Why did you say he ‘warned’ you?”

  “Well, you know how students have to fill out a questionnaire before they can get into the university? And you have to say who your father is, where he works and so on. She can’t say I’ve been in a prison camp since 1946—they’d never let her in. Any sensible kid would write, ‘Father—Killed on active service at the front’—wouldn’t she? And for all she knows, that’s true. So it’s going to look a bit funny if I suddenly show up as large as life. See what I mean? Mind you, I don’t know for sure what she did say about me on her questionnaire. My neighbor couldn’t find out—or rather, they wouldn’t tell him.”

  “Those questionnaires aren’t so important nowadays. They gave us a talk about it the other day at the office. They check them out, but they’re not nearly so tough about them as they used to be. So don’t worry. Tell me—what sort of welcome did your friend get when he came home?”

  “Most of his letter was about himself. It was all in camp slang—I couldn’t repeat it in front of a lady. It wasn’t exactly a happy homecoming.”

  “Pigs! That’s what they are—pigs!”

  He gave a long-drawn-out sigh.

  “I can understand their feelings, though. There they are, struggling with God knows how many problems already, and suddenly he turns up on the doorstep—an ex-con with a hernia. I don’t know which of those two is worse. But it made me think: I won’t go and drop on my family straight away, out of the blue. I’ll lay low for a bit, and watch to see how they’re getting on, without showing myself. And I’ll call on my neighbor and talk things over with him.”

  “Much good his advice will be! I’m not stupid, you know, and I had my reasons when I asked you what sort of a welcome he got. He’s frightening you on purpose, so that he’ll have you for company. He has his own problems—it’s not your job to sort them out. Look after yourself.”

  “No, that’s how it used to be: to each his own. But now, since he and I have been in the camps together, we share our troubles and help each other out; it’s different for everyone else—they can cope; they didn’t go through what we went through.”

  From what was said, Ruslan deduced that the Shabby Man was already repenting of his attempt to escape, and would probably have turned back by now if she had not been egging him on—and how right Ruslan himself had been to resist the temptation of her bowls of soup! But either she was not being very successful in urging him to go or she did not really want him to go either. Whatever the reason was, the Shabby Man felt himself overcome by a familiar dread and growing weaker by the minute: the nervous movements of his shoe gave him away.

  “If only it had happened earlier, Stiura! If only I’d known a bit earlier.… It’s funny: when I got the letter
, I was thrilled, but then I realized that I’d put so much of myself into making a life here … into that dresser, for instance.”

  “What on earth’s the dresser got to do with it? To hell with the damn thing.…”

  “No, I don’t mean that. Earlier still.”

  “Earlier still? You mean when you were released? I’m sorry, but if you had turned up then and said, ‘Any work you need doing, ma’am?’ I’d have bawled you out and said, ‘Shove off! There’s all the money you need for your ticket. If you drink it all, don’t bother to come back ’cause I’ll kill you with the poker!’ ”

  “When I said ‘earlier still,’ I meant I should have gone over the wall when I was halfway through my stretch. People did it, you know. Not all of them came back and not all of them got caught.”

  “I’ll bet you’d have been caught.”

  “It wasn’t getting caught that worried me—it was the thought of not making it all the way. The thought of dying in vain, like some wild animal in the forest. No one could make it home in one go, you had to make a stopover somewhere, but all I wanted to do was to get home—nowhere else. Just to see my family again with my own eyes. I wrote letters to them, but never got an answer. Later I found out they’d changed the name of the street, Goddammit—used to be Ovrazhnaya Street; now it’s Marshal Choibalsan Street. And the number of the house was changed, too, because half the houses were burned down under the German occupation. I told myself: if I can only see my family, that’s all I need. Then they can arrest me, double my sentence, even shoot me if they want to, I won’t mind! But the problem was: where to stop on the way, who would give me food, who would give me a little cash for the journey—even though I would have worked for it? You can’t knock on every door—and when you do, will there be a kind soul behind it? If only I’d known that you were living right nearby, almost in my pocket so to speak … !”

  “You’re talking nonsense again,” she said with the same boiling irritation that heralded one of their quarrels that always ended in shouting. “Now that’s all a lot of crap. Want me to tell you? Sure I was living here—but with somebody else. O.K., I would have let you in. And I’d have fed you and given you a drink. And you could have slept in the warm. But I’d have gone straight and told the police—they were on duty here at the station day and night.”

  “Would you really have gone to the police?”

  “What else could I have done? The neighbors are all good Soviet citizens; how can you keep anything secret? Yes, they’ve made us into a nation of stool pigeons—what a lovely thought.”

  “Who did that, Stiura? Who could do it?”

  “Don’t ask me, because I won’t tell you. I’ve told you what would have happened and that’s enough. I told you so as you’d know that if you had tried to get away earlier, nothing would have come of it. Does that make you feel better? Now you can cheer up and go.”

  The train had already come into sight in the twilit distance. A few travelers were moving to the edge of the platform and a warning bell rang in the station.

  Stiura was the first to get up, and stamped hard on the ground with her shoes. The Shabby Man stood up slowly as though ungluing himself from the bench, rising with the same reluctance in his legs that a prisoner feels when forced to leave a campfire and go back to work in the cold. He even looked as if he were freezing, since he was wearing his winter cap and overcoat and was wrapped up to his ears in a scarf. She helped him with his duffel bag and hastily kissed him three times. He embraced her convulsively, letting the cord of his duffel bag slip down from his shoulder to his elbow. No sooner had he mounted the steps than the couplings jerked all along the train and the car started to move. The Shabby Man turned around—his face white with fear, sweat on his temples, an insane look in his eyes.

  “Stiura!”

  “Don’t worry.” She walked alongside the car. “I’m still here. Hold tight.”

  His tongue lolling out with the heat, Ruslan watched them go. Though we in our patronizing way may call dogs our “brothers,” we still qualify them as little or younger brothers; but if one of us bigger, older brothers had been in Ruslan’s skin and doing his job at that moment—what would we have done? Would we have run after them? Would we have caught up with him and pulled the prisoner to the ground? Would we have flattened him on the asphalt, growling furiously? The step on which the Shabby Man was standing had already drawn level with the station building, Stiura had tired of following the car and turned back—black and flat as a target, bearing the scarlet disc of the setting sun on her shoulder—yet Ruslan still lay in his place and waited, certain that the Shabby Man was not leaving, was not lost to him. When the duffel bag flew through the air and flopped onto the ground, he could turn away without bothering to watch as Stiura ran up to the Shabby Man, swearing as she helped him to his feet, and as they embraced again on the empty platform as though meeting after a long separation.

  She helped him to a bench and sat him down, standing in front of him, shaking her head and frowning with vexation. Then she took off his cap and unbuttoned his overcoat.

  “There now, sit awhile. You stupid man—you should have handed in your ticket before the train left. O.K., we’ll pretend you went away and came back again. Now rest and take it easy.”

  “No,” he said, breathing jerkily as though he had been winded. “We’ll say that I never meant to go at all. Where was I going, anyway? Who was I going to? You must understand me …”

  “I understand,” she said.

  They took a long time to return home, stopping to sit down on nearly every bench outside other people’s yards on the way. The Shabby Man was carrying his cap, Stiura carried her shoes. Ruslan followed them at a considerable distance, unnoticed by them. He was not particularly pleased at this return—if only they knew how much extra trouble this was going to cause him! Something would have to be done with the Shabby Man; he was worn out, he had lost faith and had given up waiting, so he had tried to go away—only to realize that it was useless. And strange things were happening in the place where Ruslan wanted to take him, the only place where his prisoner could find the calm and orderly life he longed for. Since the day when he had picked up his master’s trail at the end of the main street, Ruslan had not been back there; indeed it had not even occurred to him to wonder what was happening in the old camp. While guarding a single prisoner, he had neglected something much more important—and by certain mysterious, subtle threads that important thing was for some reason linked to Stiura and to something she had said at the station. That was why he had suddenly been reminded of the camp while lying behind that bench on the platform.

  Till late that night he listened to them sitting noisily over a bottle, while the Shabby Man kept on tearfully trying to explain something; nothing would calm him down or stop his interminable flow of reminiscences and arguments.

  How many times in recent weeks had Ruslan observed loaded flatcars at the siding and seen the crane lifting up pallets carrying bricks, long gray girders, panels of sheet metal and huge boxes marked with black writing; all this had been loaded onto trucks and driven away up the familiar road that led to the camp. For appearances’ sake he barked at the trucks; no one ordered him to, but he was on independent duty now and could occasionally give himself orders. Sometimes he followed them to the end of the street, but never once did it occur to him to chase after them to their destination. Had he been capable of blushing, he would have gone crimson from his nose to the tip of his tail and turned smoking hot with shame!

  Morning found him out on the road, which had changed greatly since he had last gone that way; it had been widened, and from the edge of the town onward the road surface was covered with fine, light-colored gravel. Where once the road had curved around the edge of a gully, this bend had now been straightened out by a newly made embankment, on whose sloping side a bulldozer was rumbling back and forth. Through the forest it ran like a river, the tree-grown edges having been widened and pushed back, and it would have been
a pure pleasure to run along it, had not the gravel felt so sharp to Ruslan’s paws. Alongside the road, however, among the trees, there ran several fine trails that had been newly cleared of fallen tree trunks and branches; these paths sometimes led off into a thicket, then curved back again to the road, which was never out of sight for long. In any case Ruslan would have found it hard to lose touch with the road, because it gave off such a powerful smell, a mixture of lime and engine oil.

  When he reached the camp he was completely stunned. The sight made him sit down and hang out his tongue in alarm and perplexity. He had never imagined seeing anything like it: right across the open fields, stretching far beyond the old camp perimeter, were row upon row of single-story gray buildings; in some of them the tall windows were already glazed, some were still just empty spaces beneath newly erected roofs, while others were no more than a series of uneven posts sticking out of the ground. He began counting: six, then another six, after which he lost count. Ruslan could only count up to six, because the regulation column of prisoners had been lined up in ranks of five; if a sixth had sneaked in, the masters had said “too many,” and ordered him into the next rank. So it was simpler to say that there were “too many” new buildings. Strangely enough, however, practically none of the old prisoners’ huts were left, except two or three, and they all had broken windows. The masters’ barracks were still there, also the storehouses and the garage, but of the building that had housed the dogs’ kennels there was no sign.