Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story

by Andrea Bennett

  Reaching the hallway, Grigory Mikhailovich was relieved to see that Kolya was still there, and alone, although the boy was clearly in turmoil.

  ‘Them?’ asked Grigory Mikhailovich.

  ‘Them,’ whispered Kolya, after a brief pause.

  ‘What happened? What did they say? Are you all right, my boy?’

  ‘They said,’ Kolya spoke slowly, emphasising every word, ‘to keep away from the Lubyanka. They are watching the flat. If you try to leave – they will arrest us both. It seemed like they knew it all, Grigory Mikhailovich! I don’t know how—’

  ‘The walls have ears.’

  ‘Maybe – your Zinaida, was it …?’

  ‘Zoya? No! Well … No, I can’t believe it. She only just called from Azov. She can’t be the mole. Maybe it’s that skunk downstairs at the desk! He’s been listening in again!’ Grigory Mikhailovich collapsed back into his chair as Kolya skipped into the kitchen to light the stove. ‘All the same, we have to help her, boy, we have to. The man … and the dog! They have been taken! Yes, the dog! We have to get them back!’

  ‘There is a complication, Grigory Mikhailovich,’ Kolya re-appeared in the kitchen doorway, ‘I don’t want you to worry, but I must present myself at their HQ tonight, to pay a fine.’

  ‘A fine? That is most unusual.’ Grigory Mikhailovich screwed up his eyes until they disappeared. ‘A beating yes, disappearance, confiscation of property – but a fine?’

  ‘Modern times, Grigory Mikhailovich: you are confused, and old. It would be best just to pay. That way, no-one gets hurt. It is a fine for … for an unauthorized phone call.’

  Kolya whispered an amount, and Grigory Mikhailovich shoved a gnarled hand down inside his shirt, teasing out a sheaf of faded notes. Pressing them in to Kolya’s hand, he wheezed ‘Good luck, comrade. You must fight your own battles,’ and turned to the window.

  * * *

  Around ten p.m., Grigory Mikhailovich was still sitting at the window with unblinking eyes, that had once been so piercing, but were now wet as carp. The potatoes and mushrooms sat in his belly, undigested and indigestible. The small bottle of Pshenichnaya vodka at his elbow was half empty, or half full, depending on your point of view. Slowly and deliberately, he reached for the crusted plastic phone by his side, and punched in several numbers, methodically.

  ‘Zinaida Artyomovna? Good evening, it is Grigory Mikhailovich here. I am sorry for the delay in getting back to you. It was a particularly busy evening, if you understand my meaning. I have decided that your presence is required in Moscow, to help resolve the disappearance of … er, the missing … person. And your canine. No, I will hear no argument. You called on me for help, and unfortunately, when we spoke earlier, I was a little confused. I thought we were meeting you at the Duma, or was it the Lubyanka? I was hungry, to be honest. But I have had a good dinner, and now everything is clear in my mind. You must come here. Bring the other woman: the dog woman. She can help you. You are not used to cities, Zoya, not really. Moscow is a queen among cities, believe me: a queen with filthy petticoats and a penchant for blong, as I believe the young people say. Book your tickets: unless I am much mistaken, the Green Arrow leaves Rostov-on-Don for Moscow tomorrow at one p.m. – you get in the next afternoon: it is the express.’

  Grigory Mikhailovich waited patiently for the wittering sound at the end of the line to subside.

  ‘Now Zoya, be on your guard. We’ve already had a run in with them this afternoon. You know what that means.’ Grigory Mikhailovich replaced the handset, and spread the newspaper over his great bulk, the better to keep the warmth in. The black and white faces of sickly Chechen orphans stared up at him.

  ‘Lenin would have known what to do,’ he murmured to them, before nodding silently into the blizzard of sleep.

  8

  A Train Ride

  ‘You may not see the prisoner, no. Citizen Old Women—’

  ‘My name is Zinaida Artyomovna Krasovskaya, but you may call me Madam, and this is my friend—’

  ‘Well, Madam Old Citizen,’ broke in Officer Kulakov, smiling unpleasantly and displaying small, dirty teeth flecked with something greenish and soft, ‘if you continue to beat your fists on my reception hatch like a hooligan, I will arrest you. I may even have to use my police dogs to subdue you, or maybe just my baton. Whichever it is, I advise you to fuck off back to your lair before it happens: you really don’t want to find out how brutal this policeman can be. Leave police work to the organs of the State, hag.’ Kulakov leant through the hatch and spat the words into the old lady’s face.

  ‘You filthy vermin, you have no right—’

  ‘Madam Old Citizen, I have all the rights in the world. I am a state policeman, and I have a hangover. And you should realize,’ he paused briefly to pick a small piece of green from his teeth and wipe it on his shirt, ‘you should realize, and I’m surprised that you haven’t already, that the more you piss me off here, the worse it will be for the other old fucker – your boyfriend, whatever his name is. The senile one. You’re making life quite difficult for him at the moment. And the funniest thing is—’

  ‘You …!’

  ‘The funniest thing is, he’s not even here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We transferred him to the SIZO last night. Best place for him. Old crim that he is. He’ll fit right in there.’

  ‘You monster!’ shouted Zoya.

  ‘He won’t get lonely in that cell, I can tell you. He’ll have company everywhere he looks. Let’s just hope that they’re, you know, gentle with him.’

  ‘You jumped-up rabid sewer rat!’ Zoya cried, clutching at the edge of the hatch with her gnarled finger-claws, reeling as if about to faint but fixing the policeman with a peculiar, piercing stare.

  ‘Sshh, Zoya, don’t upset yourself. Come on, there is no point in wasting any more time here. We don’t want to make things any worse for Vasya. We’ll be seeing him soon enough.’ Galia slid her arm through Zoya’s and propelled her gently towards the police station door. A prolonged confrontation with Officer Kulakov wouldn’t get this important day off to a good start, and calling a representative of the State a sewer rat was not likely to make them any friends either.

  ‘Yes, you are right, my dear. After all, we have a train to catch, don’t we?’ Zoya tugged Galia back towards the reception hatch. ‘To Moscow, to the Ministry!’ Zoya leant her face back into the hatch and slapped her hand on the counter once more, to make her point. ‘To the Ministry, in Moscow!’ Kulakov didn’t look up, but snapped the hatch shut so quickly the sliding glass took the skin off the tip of her nose.

  Walking away from them, over his shoulder, he called out, ‘Have a good trip, Citizens. Don’t worry about your senile boyfriend – we’ll take good care of him while you are away. He’s very safe, up at the SIZO. And I hear he has deep pockets, eh – is that why you like him?’

  Back in the bright, sun-drenched street, they made slowly for the trolleybus stop. Both ladies had been awake since before six, mainly arguing about what to pack in to their shared travel bag for the journey. The items they had agreed on were as follows: a hearty picnic of hard-boiled eggs, dried fish, best Doctorskaya sausage, two loaves of brown bread, fresh tomatoes, parsley and apricots from the vegetable patch, a litre of kefir and two bottles of cold tea; a change of clothes, a toothbrush and a notebook each. There were a number of things they could not agree on, and these included: a crystal ball, woollen mittens, a Makarov pistol, a big bag of sewing, a world atlas, a pair of opera glasses and two sets of galoshes.

  It was a long time since either of them had taken the sleeper train and neither relished the prospect. Zoya had once, she reminisced, had a very interesting and prolonged encounter in the porter’s cabin of such a locomotive, where ballet and the arts had been discussed at length, caviar partaken of and several toasts to Nijinsky raised. Galia switched her ears off and felt the chances of anything as interesting or remotely pleasant happening on this occasion were nil. The long, open carriages,
with bunks for fifty at a time, were meltingly warm in the summer and filled with the cloying sounds and smells of closely confined strangers. Good if you wanted to trade anecdotes, play cards, make business connections, drink vodka, sing, learn dirty jokes or challenge your fellow citizens to a brawl: not so good if you were an old lady who wanted to sleep a little before hatching a plan to rescue your dog and an old acquaintance from untold horrors and in the former’s case, certain death.

  They took the rattling No. 3 trolleybus from the police station, sharing the weight of the travel bag by taking one handle each, Zoya still dabbing at the end of her nose and cursing the organs of the State. Although they both rode the trolleybus regularly, neither had realized how very, very slowly it meandered from Azov through the industrial sprawl towards the mainline station at Rostov. Galia’s disquiet, a constant companion since Vasya and Boroda had been taken, pricked sharply as the trolleybus nosed into a pothole and bucked free from its overhead electric cable: the engine died with a deflated moan and the trip ground to a halt. The driver swore and dismounted his cab to attempt to re-attach the vehicle, now stranded and baking in the midday sun. Sweat trickled down the middle of Galia’s back and she wondered whether it would be better to jump off the trolleybus right now – through the window if necessary – and forget Moscow. Why were they going to Moscow anyway? Why didn’t they just go and see the State solicitor and try to sort things out? She eyed the emergency exit and calculated how much shoving she would have to do to get to it through the sweat-drenched crowd. Galia wasn’t a happy shover, but the heat and her second sleepless night were conspiring to send tremors down her arms and nauseating twinges through her gut. She felt faint and wretched, and the meeting with Officer Kulakov had not helped one bit. She took out her handkerchief and blotted her forehead with quivering fingers, wondering which way she would fall in the event that her still-swollen knees gave way. On one side of her stood Zoya, who would be crushed as easily as a dry leaf in autumn, and would offer no cushion at all, and on the other – a gently mildewed man with a blooming red nose and an aura of moonshine. He wouldn’t feel a thing.

  A murmur of dissent began to snake through the trolleybus as the driver continued to fumble with the guide ropes which smacked against the windows and made a choir of babies break into hellish wailing. The travellers were getting restless.

  ‘Fiddlesticks!’ cawed Zoya, checking her watch for the fourteenth time, just as the engine jolted back into life with a high-pitched whine and a shudder, causing the standing passengers to wobble from the handrails like chickens in an abattoir. And now it was too late to move. Galia gritted her teeth and kept her eyes on the view from the window, of dusty streets, and high-rise blocks, and the occasional wilted lime tree. After twenty more minutes’ torture, the greying duo were spewed out at their destination in a pool of assorted desperate and semi-liquefied travellers, with four minutes to get to their distant, promised platform. They caught each other’s eye, and nodded as one: it was elbows to the ready, comrade.

  The cavernous station, warm, stinking and curiously pink, embraced a concourse that was heaving with people and animals that buzzed and flowed dimly, forming small cells and then dissipating. There were skinny hens in home-made coops treading on each other’s heads, bands of assorted small children with uniform grubby faces, towers of Chinese laundry bags stuffed to bursting with secret cargoes, wheelbarrows laden with juicy marrows and dripping watermelons, old ladies hidden behind shiny metal casks full of lukewarm sausages in pastry, packs of lame dogs guarding the quiet corners, waiting for scraps, or lucky accidents, or maybe, squinting out of their good eyes, planning a heist on the weakest old lady, the one who had been abandoned by her own pack. Pick off the weakest, my dear.

  ‘Excuse me, Citizen, excuse me!’ rang the battle cry as the ladies ploughed a straight furrow from the station entrance towards their platform: firm, unstoppable, mouths set straight and teeth clenched.

  ‘We’re for the Moscow train!’ squawked Zoya.

  ‘The Moscow train!’ echoed Galia.

  To anyone who didn’t get out of the way: ‘The Moscow train!’ It was a stiff retort to all complaints about bashed shins, overturned bags and bloodied small noses. The bag handles squirmed in their palms, moist with sweat, and cut in to their flesh: but they surged on towards the platform. Galia concentrated on the collage of whirling shapes directly in front of her, keeping her steps measured and her shoulders square, but couldn’t help slowing in the face of the mass of flesh. Zoya sensed her hesitancy and tugged hard on her bag handle with an angry ‘Come on!’ whipping Galia headlong into a cloud of gangly school children, all unfortunate hair and big teeth. When the two women emerged on the other side of the endless teeth, they had reached the Moscow platform. The station clock struck one.

  ‘Which carriage?’ Zoya shrieked, checking the tickets with one beady eye and the end of her nose with the other.

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘Fourteen?!’

  ‘It’s at the other end,’ Galia added unnecessarily, hesitantly, trying to remain calm and keep walking as Zoya dropped to her sparrow-like knees on top of the bag.

  ‘Oh my God—’

  ‘Not now!’ Galia surprised herself with her harsh tone. ‘There’s no time for that now, Zoya: get up, my dear!’ She grabbed the bottle of smelling salts that hung from Zoya’s neck and thrust it under her nose with some force. ‘We’ll rest once we’re on the train. We can walk down the carriages. Come on!’

  The acne-ridden Guard was blowing his whistle to wake hell’s sleepers as Galia heaved first the travel bag and then Zinaida Artyomovna in through the door of the first carriage and fell on top with a grunt as the train slowly pulled away.

  ‘Are you trying to kill me, Galina Petrovna?’ Zoya was petulant, flustered, and a little bit flattened.

  ‘I’m sorry, Zoya, it was the only way. No harm done though, my dear?’

  Zoya sat up and agreed, slightly sniffily, that nothing was broken. She patted her brittle spun hair back in to place on top of her head, and looked down the first of the fourteen carriages.

  ‘You go first, Galia, you’re bigger than me.’

  Their progress through the smarter carriages was slow: their assorted fellow travellers were almost all standing in the aisle to wave goodbye to loved ones, or simply get a bit of air, and the ladies and their bag were an unwelcome side-show. Bumping, bruising, apologising, and stumbling, they made their way down the impossibly long train, all faces a blur now, all blurs vaguely threatening, their ears clogged with the sounds of track and wheels, and their own apologies for being in the way. Fourteen carriages later, they arrived at hard, bare bunks, cursing the bottles of tea and hard-boiled eggs, their carrying arms several inches longer than they had been at the start of the morning. The ladies looked around them: the carriage was completely open, with bunks at every available height in every direction. However, it was clean, and so far there were no obvious drunks present. They thought it would do.

  They found their niche and the travel bag was stowed, with no little relief and a lot of huffing and puffing, under the bottom bunk. Next, their tickets were checked by a loudly welcoming carriage stewardess with an expansive red grin, bright blonde hair and the biggest, blackest eyelashes they had ever seen, who promised them fresh tea within the half hour. They took a seat next to each other on the bottom bunk and exhaled deeply. Soon the stewardess would be round with the tea and fresh white bed linen, and all would be a little righter with the world. Now they could just relax a little, recoup their strength and plan. The ladies’ dissatisfaction with the morning gradually melted away and was replaced with a warm flowering sense of triumph and wellbeing: they had made the train, and they were on their way. In twenty-four hours, or so, they would be arriving in Moscow.

  ‘Toss a coin for the top bunk?’ asked Zoya, winking.

  Galia hesitated, and then committed herself to tails. She lost the toss, as she knew she would, and placed her folded coat on the
top bunk to show that it was taken. She couldn’t help a slight tut at the thought of having to get up the tiny metal ladder. She knew there was a knack to it, but the knack was not hers. She vividly remembered once getting stuck half-way down when on the train returning from a holiday on the Black Sea. Her cheeks burnt as she remembered how a construction worker from Azerbaijan had had to take her on his shoulders to rescue her, as one foot had slipped ever further down the ladder rung as the other foot had remained firmly planted on the bunk. It had been many years ago, and the construction worker had been a fine, muscular fellow with a ready smile, high cheekbones, coal-black hair and nut-brown skin. She shook herself, and fixed her gaze on the occupants of the bunks opposite.

  Formal hellos were exchanged with their nearest half-dozen fellow travellers. Within several more minutes the travel bag was heaved out from under the bottom bunk and, as is traditional in all countries on all continents, the ladies began to tuck in to their picnic with their home town still clear on the horizon. The food was offered around to their neighbours, and the business of finding out who was who and what was going on began in earnest. The little old lady in the corner was visiting family, the middle-aged man directly across from them was an engineer visiting a university, and the pair of Chinese men across the aisle could not explain the purpose of their journey but smiled a lot and shared boiled eggs cooked in tea that were very delicious and quite beautiful to look at. There were two further neighbours, a young couple, who were occupying the very topmost, most uncomfortable bunks, and they did not say why they were travelling, and preferred not to talk at all. The young woman rolled her eyes and simpered, and the young man made gestures about Zoya’s hair. Galia decided they were too young to be interesting, but old enough to have better manners.

  The steaming tea, accompanied by sugar lumps wrapped in paper bearing the State railway insignia of a winged hammer and sickle, was duly delivered a little later by the grinning stewardess. The whole carriage relaxed a little, slid off its shoes and stuffed its pinkies into its favourite travel slippers. Galia was enjoying talking to the engineer across the bunk, nibbling sugar lumps between her white front teeth and chiding softly as he told her unlikely tales of bear hunting in the Urals and prospecting for gold in the distant wastes of Yakutia. Zoya, meanwhile, had read a number of fortunes to what seemed like half the carriage, exclaiming hoarsely about possible Lotto winnings, tall dark strangers, the dangers of deep water and the likelihood of Spartak Moscow winning the league. Now she was hunched between the table and the carriage side, yanking the travel bag out from under the bottom bunk. Stealthily, she unloaded from it an enormous blue plastic sewing bag. She began fiddling frantically with threads and sequins and velvet. Galia frowned slightly: the old minx had snuck that one in without her noticing.