Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story

by Andrea Bennett

  ‘Never you mind: cars come and go, but the main thing is – it’s mine, for now. I have the key and everything. I have a licence. I have diesel. And you can’t argue.’

  Mitya had no intention of arguing.

  ‘Can’t we go tomorrow though? It’s quite … urgent. The visit I have to make. I’m not sure I can wait until Saturday.’

  ‘Well, I have to study tomorrow, Mitya. And I don’t think you’ll be up to it, to be honest. Saturday will be OK. Trust me.’

  And strangely, Mitya did trust her. The tea had made him sleepy, and shock and exhaustion were weighing down his eyelids and tugging at his sore limbs. The shaking had worn off and been replaced by a heaviness that felt hot and sweet and heavy, and like it would go on forever. With stiff, careful movements he pushed himself up from the floor and collapsed forward, in slow motion, on to his narrow, orange bed, face first, his eyes closing as soon as his head made a furrow in the taut nylon pillow. With an effort, he turned his head to one side, to squeeze out a few words.

  ‘We’ll go to the SIZO. But you won’t like it. And neither will I.’

  ‘Like, not like – that’s not the point, is it? We’re making a start. And to be honest, it’s got to be better than helping cousin Marina wash out her smalls in a bucket, hasn’t it? I think so, anyway. Goodnight. Sleep well. Sweet dreams, Mitya!’

  She looked back at him from the door, but could only see the back of his head, his short hair bristling on his collar slightly as it moved with his deep, even breathing. Katya clicked the door shut. Andrei the Svoloch was waiting in the corridor, leaning against his door frame.

  ‘Katya, honey pie, where have you been all evening? We missed you, we’ve been having a ball. Sveta’s got vint, and we’re all getting, you know, really sexy!’ Andrei was stoned, as usual, as were all the other inhabitants of the room. Katya walked on by, as she’d promised she would, and went to listen to cousin Marina’s tales of her day at the cheese factory.

  Back in the orange room, Mitya never heard the door shut, or Katya’s goodbye: he was already dreaming of dogs, and balls, and wells. And shouting, and tears, and a summer’s day that started so well, but ended somewhere else. And something Mitya couldn’t see, something behind him, or in the corner of his eye, a presence that was definitely there, but intangible. A something that brought him out in a cold sweat and drew an icy finger down the length of his spine. Someone that made him look behind, although he didn’t want to look, and keep on running. Run but don’t trip! Keep running, Mitya. Run, Mitya, run!

  14

  The Ministry

  Galia woke early, as always. It took a few moments for her to remember where she was. She was struck by the quiet all around her. She could not believe she was in the middle of a capital city with a dual carriageway not twenty metres from the building. There was a remarkable stillness in the apartment, and even the dust in the air, glowing golden in the morning sun, was completely still, suspended on threads of soft silence. She gently peeled her face away from the plastic-coated pillow she had found the night before, and rubbed her cheek, waiting to hear footsteps and the usual communal morning movements before getting up. There was nothing. She sat up gingerly, aching a little from the unusual sleeping arrangements: she had chosen an army-issue rubber lilo with rough khaki blankets on top and a couple of relatively clean pink towels underneath to stop her sticking to the rubber, and said plastic-coated pillow. She was still convinced it hadn’t been a bad choice, but she had slid off the lilo several times during the night, and at one point had woken up with it on top of her. Her dreams had not been the most restful.

  She leant back against a tower of old journals and mulled over the plan for today, ticking off the list in her head of ministries and ministers that they had discussed the previous night, and thought about looking for a city map to start making a route.

  When, at eight a.m., the apartment was still blanketed in silence, her impatience got the better of her. She tiptoed out in to the hall, and then peeked into every room for a sign of life. She tried all the doors, and even the store cupboard (which gave her a fright), but could find no sign of Grigory Mikhailovich at all. He had disappeared.

  Zoya was curled up on a large, French-style high-backed sofa, snoring softly under a vibrating pile of greatcoats, fur hats, long-johns and other assorted old clothes. Galia shook her roughly by the shoulder.

  ‘Zoya! Zoya, wake up!’

  Zoya groaned and tried to shake free of Galia’s clutch. ‘Get off me, don’t touch,’ she muttered half asleep, ‘I’m a state servant!’

  ‘Zoya! Wake up! Grigory Mikhailovich has gone!’

  ‘Fanny fed the butter to the pig!’ was Zoya’s only response, delivered in a plaintive and high-pitched wail.

  Galia tried shaking her again, and the pile of old clothes spilled over the floor, leaving Zoya’s puny body covered only by a red velvet flag emblazoned with Leonid Brezhnev’s bear-like face.

  ‘Oh Lord!’ exclaimed Galia, momentarily horrified, and sitting down sharply on top of a pile of old cake boxes, she realized too late.

  ‘Don’t panic, Galia, don’t panic. I expect he’s in the bathroom,’ croaked Zoya, suddenly lucid and stretching stiffly beneath Brezhnev’s musty embrace.

  ‘No, Zoya, he’s not anywhere in the apartment, and … and … his bed hasn’t been slept in.’

  Zoya opened an eye and peered at Galia. ‘What bed? Anyway, how would you know if his bed had been slept in, Galia my dear? He rises early, my cousin Grigory. Always has done. When we young—’

  ‘I’ve been awake since before six, Zoya, and I have heard nothing: no-one has moved. No-one has come in, and no-one has gone out. You’re telling me he’s got up and gone out at five, are you? That old bear? I doubt he can actually get out of bed on his own, his joints are so bad.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were so keen on surveillance, Galina Petrovna. You surprise me!’

  ‘I’m just trying to tell you that he has not gone out this morning, but he’s not here either.’

  ‘So – what? You’re saying we imagined him, are you?’

  ‘No. I don’t know what I’m saying. But I’ve waited for two hours to get up and I’ve got all sorts of plans and things to do and questions to ask and then when I do get up – he’s not here. What are we to do? We can’t go to the ministries on our own, can we?’

  Zoya swung her pale lilac feet to the floor and arranged Brezhnev into a makeshift toga.

  ‘What we will do, Galia, is have some breakfast, and then get going.’

  Galia gave an exasperated sigh, coaxed the ill-fitting borrowed slippers back on to her swollen feet, and followed her tiny friend into the kitchen. When she got there, Zoya was standing at the table, looking theatrical.

  ‘There is a note, Galia my dear – your search for evidence wasn’t very thorough, was it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He left a note. He will meet us at the Ministry of the Interior, at nine a.m.’

  ‘But how …?’ Galia was aware that her mouth was hanging open in an elongated ‘o’, but she didn’t understand what was going on.

  ‘No time for breakfast then,’ said Zoya, taking a bottle of pills from her handbag and popping two down with a glug of greenish looking kefir that she found in the rather threatening-looking fridge. Then she hopped nimbly past Galia and back to her nest with a chirpy cry of, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! Screw up your courage, woman!’

  Galia frowned, and set off back to her own patch next door to find clean pop socks and a headscarf. It promised to be a long day. And the prospects for success seemed to be diminishing considerably. She heard a dog howl somewhere in the block, a muffled cry, lonely and despairing, and felt a shiver run down her spine.

  * * *

  Over twenty years before, Galia had visited Moscow on a works cultural trip. She had been rushed past Red Square and Lenin’s Tomb, the Moscow Museum and the Kremlin. The glinting ancient monuments studded with
modern memorials to the glory of the Soviets had intrigued her, the warm rosy flesh of reality replacing the black and white bones of pictures that had smattered the pages of shared books at school. The buildings had still seemed mysterious, other-worldly and never to be touched. But the visit had largely been spoilt by the efforts of their zealous guide. She felt herded as her group moved, as a single unit, from one stop to the next, with no time for questions, or individual exploration, or even for talk between the holiday makers. Idle chat between group members had been ruthlessly shushed by the guide. Other special sights had included the grey mass of the Hotel Rossiya – the biggest tourist hotel in the world – and Bassein Moskva, the biggest open-air swimming pool in the world. She hadn’t liked it, this modern stuff: it was brash, hard and unwashed. The hotel was full of roaches and inedible food, bad smells and rude staff. And the swimming pool had steamed in the autumn sky like the depths of a chlorine-impregnated hell. Every so often she glimpsed the faces of sinners writhing under the noxious clouds, their mouths wide, hands raised in silent entreaty. But mostly Muscovites had struck her as rude and self-important, and best avoided.

  Now, in the 1990s, it was even worse. The Metro was bursting with adverts full of women with huge white teeth and disposable nappies. Every poster on every street corner was trying to sell the citizens shares in this or that diamond mine, oil company or chocolate factory. The roads, be they sweeping boulevards or the narrow crooked lanes that strained to connect them, were crammed with filthy cars jostling for position, and none of them going anywhere. The shops in the city centre were bursting with the kinds of things that few honest people could afford, and no-one needed. And in among all the grandeur and twenty-four-hour consumption, old ladies stood in ragged rows around Metro stations, trying to sell any old thing in order to buy a crust of bread: a single shoe; some well-used laces; a spoon.

  ‘Zoya. Hey, Zoya!’ Galia nudged her friend and shouted as their Metro carriage roared through a tunnel several tens of metres below the Lubyanka, ‘which is our stop?’

  ‘Relax, Galia, I’ve got it all under control. It’s the next one.’ Zoya had been busy eyeing a couple across the carriage from herself, wondering what they saw in each other. One of them was studying a ‘What’s On’ guide to Moscow, and Zoya wished she had time to take a look. She was entranced by this new Moscow. She loved the mass of bright colours, the bustle, the quiet music seeping from cafe doorways and the hullabaloo of street performers, the well-groomed young people with their deodorant and leather shoes, the little dogs and exotic foreign students smelling of expensive perfume and tobacco. Moscow was home to dozens of fancy theatres, there were ballet schools around every corner and great collections of art galleries and historical museums at every turn. Zoya hoped she was not going to have to spend the whole day traipsing around dust-laden ministries full of people who should have been buried long ago: it would be a shame not to get a nose full of culture while they were here. The Metro train plunged deeper into the rattling darkness, making Zoya’s ears pop and for a moment the lights flickered and the carriage was bathed in a weird half-light. Who knew, it may be her last chance.

  To exit the station the ladies rode an escalator that was so long they almost forgot what they’d got on it for by the time they approached daylight. Turning to look back down at her friend, Galia was stabbed by a sudden feeling of vertigo that spread from her stomach in to her legs and then into every extremity. She was shaking by the time they had fought their way out of the busy station and into the bright Moscow morning.

  Back on the surface, the Ministry of Internal Affairs turned out to be a plain building on the Garden Ring: solid, squatting square and grey in the sunshine, it looked uninviting, and uninteresting. Galia swallowed back a taste of disappointment that the ministry wasn’t housed in one of Stalin’s sky-scrapers, the Seven Sisters. She had a long-standing respect for the hugely sinister buildings, rocketing sun-ward from a broad launch pad of certainty that the Soviet Union is, was, and ever shall be, eternal. Gothic and glowering, at least they had presence, Galia thought, unlike this third-rate shiny-suit of a building. Zoya hopped ahead of her and grabbed her wrist with a tenacious, claw-like grip. ‘Come on, Galia, don’t lose heart now. We can do this. I read the cards this morning, and all the portents are good.’

  They found the correct door on their fourth attempt, which they both felt was quite good going. ‘I told you the portents were good,’ whispered Zoya.

  As each oak door, complete with brass handles, seemed to stand at least twenty feet tall and weigh at least 200lbs, they were panting by the time they stood before the rather shabby reception desk at ‘Internal Affairs: Southern (Non-Caucasus)’. The desk was littered with forms of various colours, shapes and thicknesses, many of which appeared to have been partly filled in and then abandoned. A pale, slender young man with watery red-rimmed eyes checked their papers and took their names.

  ‘Would you like a reference number?’ he asked without looking up.

  ‘Do we need a reference number?’ countered Zoya, screwing up her nose inquisitively.

  ‘Well, it depends on you. This ministry is a modern Russian Federation state organ: we don’t treat people like numbers. President Yeltsin has decreed that everyone is to be treated as an individual, and has abolished compulsory reference numbers.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Galia, smiling at the pale young man.

  ‘Yes it is,’ he said, still without looking up.

  ‘So why might we want a reference number?’ asked Zoya with a frown.

  ‘Well,’ said the young man, finally putting down his pen and raising his eyes to look at them, ‘in the new Russia, it is all down to individuals’ choices. You can choose not to have a reference number, and just join the queue. Or you can choose to buy a reference number, and join the queue.’

  ‘Buy?’ both ladies said as one.

  ‘Yes, buy. This is capitalism, after all.’

  ‘Why would we want to buy a reference number and join the queue?’ Galia asked, puzzled.

  ‘Well, it just depends on how much queuing you want to do.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to queue at all?’ Zoya replied.

  ‘Then you will need to buy the Platinum Rate reference number.’

  ‘And if I want to queue for an hour.’

  ‘For an hour you will need the Gold Rate reference number.’

  ‘Saints preserve us. This is just legal bribery, isn’t it?’ Galia rolled her eyes towards the beige-painted ceiling.

  ‘Elderly Citizen, this is capitalism; customer service, meritocracy, individual wealth. Now, would you like to buy a reference number, or not?’

  ‘My cousin, Grigory Mikhailovich Semechkin, will be joining us shortly,’ Zoya enunciated in clipped tones, leaning over the desk as far as her sparrow-legs would allow her and scanning the young man’s eyes for a flicker of fear, or recognition, or life. There was none. ‘So you can stick your reference number up your samovar until then.’

  ‘Sit there,’ he said blankly, pointing across the hall.

  Galia took a seat next to an extremely broad, ruddy-faced woman. As she nodded to the woman she noticed that every tiny vein in the woman’s face was bright crimson and clearly visible. She was momentarily fascinated by the intricate network of lines that made up her neighbour’s face, and traced the network with her eyes from nostril to cheek to lip and hairy mole. Then, with a rush of colour to her own face, she realized how closely she was examining the poor woman. She was probably a farmer or construction worker or similar. She probably didn’t even own a mirror. She had probably spent her whole life toiling in the fields so that the people of this city could put bread in their mouths and flush their toilets in peace. Galia turned in her seat so that she looked straight ahead instead. She wondered if they should have invested in a reference number: numbers were still very important, and if you didn’t have one, you didn’t really exist, despite what the young man with the red eyes had said about meritocracy. She loo
ked down the corridors to the left and right: they were lofty, brown, echoing, and very, very long. She could not even make out the ends of either corridor; it was as if they went on for ever, a never-ending repeated pattern of brown door, brown wall, strip light and shiny floor: no people, no curves, and no life.

  Zoya was bored already. She had examined all the people she could see from here, and found them wanting. There was nothing of interest in their faces, clothes or speech. They were the usual crowd. She took out her sewing bag from beneath her rain poncho: she had insisted on wearing it despite the sun and heat: she predicted rain, and with her coat gone, the plastic poncho would have to suffice.

  ‘Oh Lord, Zoya, don’t be sewing eyes on a thousand-eyed serpent in the Ministry of the Interior. It’s just asking for trouble. Put it away – now!’ Galia’s eyes were wide as she hissed at her friend, trying not to draw attention to herself, and only succeeding in the opposite. All heads turned their way with a rustle of manmade fibres and a slight puff of dandruff.

  Without raising her head, Zoya’s eyes moved stealthily across the dough-pale faces with their blackcurrant-eyes staring blankly in her direction, and with a sniff indicating both hurt and mild discomfort, quietly put the sewing bag away. ‘These people aren’t ready,’ she conceded to Galia. ‘This ministry isn’t ready. Might be, you know … hmm,’ and trailed off with a sigh which slipped into a vague hum of something slightly stirring, and ancient.

  An hour later, there was still no sign of Grigory Mikhailovich, and Zoya began to pace, her tiny bird-like feet making sharp click-clacks on the polished granite floor. The dough zombies watched her progress, their heads moving in unison first to one side, then to the other, like spectators at a very, very slow tennis match, with no points scored. Galia had attempted, for some time, to concentrate on the crossword that had been in her pocket since before the train journey, but it was now just a mess of boxes and letters and scribbles that offended her sense of correctness. She screwed it up and tossed it in to the over-flowing bin.