Faithful Ruslan (21 page)

“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.

He ran to find it—not a trace, not a smell. The people walking around the place, who cheerfully called out to him, had so messed it up with their bonfires, pools of cement mixture and heaps of slag that it was impossible to say even approximately where the kitchen, the exercise yard and the training ground had been. He even had the impression that the place was not a camp at all any longer but some other institution, and the camp had been moved somewhere else. Such a move had, in fact, happened twice during his lifetime. At one camp, the forests had gradually been thinned out and cut back so much that the work columns had to be marched over a long and ever-increasing distance to the logging sites; at the same time the huts had filled up with more and more patients coming for treatment, so that in the end a full-scale relocation had perforce taken place. The whole enterprise had begun again at a new site, starting literally from the driving of the first stake. When everything had settled down and was functioning properly, it turned out that the new camp was much more spacious than the old one, and that the dogs, for instance, had better living quarters—clean kennels, a nice, warm guardhouse and heaters installed in every sentry box; even the inmates could not complain about the new punishment cells, which were made
of reinforced concrete and had room for many more of them than the roofless wooden cage at the old place. Even so, by last summer the overcrowding had grown to be as bad as ever. Because of it, everyone’s nerves were on edge and the prisoners began to complain in loud, angry voices; more and more frequently they would gather in crowds, refusing for a long time to disperse. Even the dogs realized that another move had simply become a necessity, otherwise something would happen before long. Sure enough it did happen—and the escapers had not been found yet.

No, it was still a camp and not something else. When they had moved in the past, the old site had always been completely leveled, leaving behind nothing but a few dead ashes and filled-in latrine pits. Ruslan had to admit he was glad that this time they had decided not to move but to build a bigger camp on the same site. The only thing that worried him was that the new buildings were being placed dangerously close to the forest, and some were actually being built among the trees; if the machine gunner on the watchtower spotted someone trying to escape, he would have no time to take aim before the runaway had vanished into the forest. And by the way—there were no watchtowers! Nor was there any barbed wire to be seen—the wire from which everything had begun, the wire for which that first stake had been driven in!

He decided that they would string up the wire later, when everything else was ready and in its proper place. Perhaps, too, they would cut down a lot of the trees surrounding the camp, so that there would be good, all-around observation. Where, though, would it go, the double perimeter fence of barbed wire? He could not figure it out. The camp, as he saw it, had started to expand in all directions, and the wire
would have to be moved farther and farther back, until it was enclosing the whole forest, and then the town and the station—and finally every bit of the surrounding landscape that Ruslan had come to know. The thought was breathtaking—why, then even that damned moon would be in the line of fire and the masters could shoot it down or lock it up in solitary! That would be wonderful; the light from the camp floodlights was quite adequate—it was also less upsetting and it made fewer dark corners.

What was the nagging thought that still worried him, which still did not square with his scheme of things? He knew that the world was a big place and that in whichever direction you might go, there was always more of it to come. He remembered how his master had driven him away from the breeding kennels in the cab of a truck and had allowed him to look out of the window. What a long drive that had been and how much there had been to see! So if the world was as big as that, how many stakes would have to be driven in, how many of those heavy coils of barbed wire would have to be unreeled? Perhaps … perhaps the time had come to live without any barbed wire at all—and the whole world would be one huge, happy prison camp?

He sadly decided, however, that it wouldn’t work. Everyone would wander away where he pleased and the guards could never keep track of them all. It would be impossible to give every person his own guard dog. There were an awful lot of people and not enough dogs; he didn’t count mongrels, of course—there were more than enough of those—but real dogs, fit for the Service, who had been selected, bred up and trained. Only after proper training was a dog capable of teaching something to humans, who bred without selection and never learned anything. Besides that—sad though
it might be—there had to be a place where you disposed of certain dogs who forgot the rules of the Service and certain unreliable prisoners; since it was forbidden to use firearms in the accommodation zone, where would you take them if the whole world was a camp? It came down to this: barbed wire was indispensable. But where would it go? Where it was needed—that’s where it would go!

So all was well. He started back, satisfied with what he had seen, even though he was late; he had not had time to go hunting, and somewhere along the way would be the moon, which no one had yet managed to shoot down. Clearly the moon did not want to come out tonight, but something was lighting his way all the same: he could easily make out the path, the bushes and the trees. Stopping to relieve himself, he looked up at the sky and saw the stars. It was they who had decided to shine for him tonight—good, let them shine. He ran on, and the stars ran with him. When he stopped, the stars stopped, too, patiently waiting for him. He knew this trick of theirs already, but it always thrilled him. He stared at the stars with gratitude, meaning to give them a friendly bark—when at that moment it suddenly came to him that the train, which he and the Shabby Man were waiting for so longingly, was soon due to arrive.

A bright flash lit up his brain and showed him a vision, the most delightful of all his visions. He had never seen the sea, but the salt of our primal mother was dissolved in his blood and carried with it ancestral memories of the menacing roar of the ocean, rolling its endless waves upon the gray, shingly beach, while the smoking wave-crests surged into the air like fountains and white birds wheeled in the dark sky, heralding disaster. His master’s crook and white cloak lay on the shore, alongside his rope sandals and the knapsack with his bread,
while his master was swimming beyond the line of surf. Though exerting all his strength, he could not overcome the roaring undertow of the waves and he called for help. Ruslan barked to him: “I’m coming, hold on a little longer!” and flung himself into the thick of the water, which rose before him like a solid wall. He thrust his muzzle into it, blinded and half-deafened, hearing only the glasslike scrunch of pebbles, and when he could hold his breath no longer, he surfaced and gulped air into his lungs. Then he swam toward his master, full of pride and happiness, flying high on the crests and slithering down into the troughs, nearer and nearer to his master, at one moment losing him from view, at the next catching sight of his head amid the raging elements.

Shaking off this vision, Ruslan trotted on. Other cares were burning him and driving him on now: he must keep a better watch on the station, he must alert the other dogs. He was nagged by a doubt: would they believe him? For a long time now his attitude of unflagging zeal had only antagonized them. Themselves soiled with corruption, they were all too ready to suspect him of being corrupted, too: he had already overheard a rumor that he was
serving the Shabby Man!
No slander could be more vile! If you looked at things calmly, however, it might be said that he had lowered his standards: he had nuzzled a prisoner’s knee—the shame of it! In a sudden access of guilt, he asked himself: on the very eve of their return to the Service, could he be said to have transgressed its rules? Had he given his allegiance to anyone or anything but the Service? No, no and no again. He had taken no food from anyone, had obeyed no one’s orders, had never truckled to anyone. He had never befriended strangers, had never had any contacts that did not befit a dog who belonged to the Service. Just a moment, though—what had
happened between him and Alma? Yes, with Alma—without orders, without a leash and without the masters, who were always supposed to be present on such occasions. Good Lord above—nothing had happened between Ruslan and Alma! There had been a tremulous attraction, a heedless surge of emotion, they had run alongside one another as though harnessed together, shoulders touching—but she had been thinking all the time of her puppies, and her puppies were her sin and she must answer for it as best she could. True, Ruslan had felt very sorry for Alma, but he himself had a clean conscience.