Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story Read online

  Copyright

  The Borough Press

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Copyright © Andrea Bennett 2015

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

  Cover images © Shutterstock.com (leaves, dress texture). Illustration by Heike Schüssler.

  Andrea Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008108380

  Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008108397

  Version: 2015-01-13

  Dedication

  For my family, especially Louis

  Author’s Note

  In the 1990s, there was a three-legged dog called Boroda, who wore no collar and lived in Azov with an old Russian lady who worked hard on her dacha.

  However, everything else in this book, while inspired by my memories of the people and geography of Russia, is a work of fiction, and should be treated as such.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  1. A Typical Monday Afternoon

  2. The Azov House of Culture Elderly Club

  3. Mitya the Exterminator

  4. A Chase

  5. A Visit

  6. The Plan

  7. Grigory Mikhailovich

  8. A Train Ride

  9. A Rescue

  10. Guests

  11. A Date with Mitya

  12. A Letter from Vasya

  13. Mitya’s Angel

  14. The Ministry

  15. Deep in the SIZO

  16. A Minor Triumph

  17. The Cheese Mistress

  18. The Third Way

  19. A Dog’s Life

  20. The Return

  21. Of Butterflies, Dogs and Men

  22. Rov Avia

  23. Vasya’s Pussy

  24. The Sunshine SIZO

  25. Chickens Roost

  26. The End of the Beginning

  27. The End

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  1

  A Typical Monday Afternoon

  ‘Hey! Goryoun Tigranovich! Can you hear me?’

  A warm brown hand slapped on the door once more, its force rattling the hinges this time.

  ‘He’s dead, I tell you! He’s probably been eaten by the cats by now. Four of them he’s got, you know. Four fluffy white cats! Who needs four fluffy white cats? White? Ridiculous!’

  ‘Babushka, can you hear any cats mewing?’

  The two ladies, one indescribably old and striated and the other only mildly so, waited silently for a moment outside the apartment door, listening intently. Tiny Baba Krychkova bent slightly to put her ear to the keyhole, closed her eyes and sucked in her cheeks.

  ‘I hear nothing, Galia,’ she replied after some moments.

  ‘So that’s good, isn’t it, Baba? That means that Goryoun Tigranovich has probably gone on holiday to the coast, or perhaps to visit friends in Rostov, and has left the cats with someone else. And that means he isn’t lying dead in his apartment.’

  ‘But Galia, maybe they’re all dead! The cats and Goryoun Tigranovich! All dead! Maybe they found him too tough to eat and they starved! It’s been several days, you know.’

  The older lady’s face crumpled at the thought of the starving cats and the dry, wasted cadaver of Goryoun Tigranovich, and she began to sob, rubbing a gnarled red fist into her apple-pip eyes. Other doors began to creak and moan along the length of the dusty corridor, and slowly other grey heads studded with curranty eyes bobbed into view, to peer curiously down the hall towards the source of the noise and excitement. A vague hum stretched out along the length of the building as the elderly residents rose as one from their afternoon naps, whether planned or unplanned, to witness the drama unfolding on floor 3 of Building 11, Karl Marx Avenue, in the southern Russian town of Azov. Galia sighed, and offered her handkerchief over, and made compassionate tutting noises with her tongue.

  ‘Baba Krychkova, there is nothing we can do out here in the hall. I am sure that Goryoun Tigranovich is in the best of health. He’s such a sprightly fellow – and a regular traveller, you know. Just last month he was in Omsk.’

  Galia didn’t trip over the words, pronouncing them firmly and evenly, but to her own ears they sounded unconvincing: the last time she had seen the gentleman he had resembled a piece of dried bark dressed in a suit. ‘I am sure I saw him last week, down at the market, and he was buying watermelons. People who buy watermelons are not about to die: they are enjoying life; they are robust, and hopeful. Watermelons are a sure sign. He was probably taking the melons as a present for whoever he has gone to visit. I am confident he will be back soon.’

  Melons or no, Goryoun Tigranovich was a very private person, and he would not welcome being discussed in the hallway by his entire entourage of elderly neighbours. Galia tried to encourage the older lady to go home.

  ‘Why don’t you go and have a nice cup of tea, and I can bring you one of my home-made buns. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  The older lady’s face did not change, but her tiny watery eyes were on Galia now.

  ‘And if we still haven’t seen him by the end of the week, we’ll ask if the caretaker knows where he’s gone.’

  ‘He promised me a marrow, you know,’ said Baba Krychkova over her shoulder, as she shuffled off down the corridor. Now there, thought Galia, is the real root of the problem: upset over an unfulfilled vegetable promise.

  ‘I can give you a marrow, Baba Krychkova, and mine are just as tasty as Goryoun Tigranovich’s.’

  Baba Krychkova shrugged in a dismissive manner and shut her door, leaving Galia little choice but to cluck her tongue, shake her head gently and disappear into her own apartment. Boroda got up from the box under the table and greeted her with a gentle wag and a beautiful, elongating stretch.

  ‘The grace of dogs,’ thought Galia, ‘is in their complete, friendly laziness. And the fact that they can’t speak.’

  Unlike many of her neighbours, and all her friends at the Azov House of Culture Elderly Club, Galina Petrovna Orlova, or Galia for short, almost never cried. While they glistened like sweetie wrappers chewed up by one of Goryoun Tigranovich’s cats, she sat squarely on her chair, quietly bronzed, her muscular hands resting in light puffy fists on her floral-clad thighs. She listened attentively to the complaints of the others, sighed and tutted gently as they recounted tales of lives that were hard. Galia considered that she herself lived in the present, and rarely reminisced. Her concerns included her vegetable patch, good food, complicated card games and her friends.
She took pride in her town and her region, and she would certainly defend her motherland against any sort of criticism that wasn’t her own. She was not what one might call a sentimental person.

  However, even the most unsentimental among us have to have something or someone and, in the autumn of her days, the source of Galia’s completeness, and the well from which she drew her compassion, her patience, her certainty and her rest, was neither the church nor alcohol, nor gossip, nor gardening: the source of her calm was her three-legged dog.

  The dog had a narrow face and graceful limbs tufted with wiry grey hair. Her dark eyes tilted over high cheekbones, recalling, perhaps, some long-lost Borzoi relative waiting on the eastern plains, under a canopy of frozen tear-drop stars. That was Galia’s initial impression when she first saw the dog from a distance outside the factory, when she didn’t have her glasses on. On closer inspection, however, she could find little evidence of blue blood in the mutt: limp-tailed and apologetic, she had taken up residence under a particularly rancid snack kiosk, and was scavenging for food. Galia steadfastly ignored the beast. For five days, Galia pretended the dog wasn’t there and turned her head slyly as she passed to and from the vegetable patch. And then on the sixth, she saw the dog trying, with her lone fore-paw, to extract a stub of bone from under the piss-stained kiosk. Poor dog: only three legs. It reminded Galia of a feeling, like a vague sniff of something or someone that had been a long time ago and long-since departed. Something she wanted to hold on to, but could not even touch. The old lady watched the dog and sighed. The dog’s ears pricked at the sound, and she stopped scrabbling. There was a moment’s breathless pause in the bustling afternoon, and a long dark-brown gaze was directed straight through Galia’s woollen cardigan and into her heart. Their fate was sealed, whether she liked it or not.

  Galia had carefully extracted the stub of bone with her penknife and given it to the dog, who accepted it between gentle white teeth. As evening drew on, the dog followed Galia home at a polite distance, ignoring vague shooing noises that emerged, half-hearted as sun-kissed bees, from Galia’s throat. The dog sat patiently outside the apartment door as dusk crept down the hall, and was still there when the ball of the sun rose on the horizon and the blackbirds broke into song. After a night of deep meditation, Galia relented and opened the door wide. In slid the dog, to sit calmly under the kitchen table, looking about her with brightly inquisitive, almond-shaped eyes.

  ‘Dog lady, what shall we call you, eh? I wonder if you’ve had a name before? Probably Fido, or Shep, or Sharik or something else ugly and completely unsuitable. Well, no matter. Look at you, handsome lady, with your cheekbones and your pointy beard: we will call you Boroda, the bearded one. That’ll do for us.’

  And Galia called the dog Boroda, in recognition of her fine, pointy beard.

  * * *

  Sometimes, her broad arms thrust into a great cool bowl of pastry, gently kneading the gloop into the tastiest morsels this side of Kharkov, Galia’s thoughts turned to the past. For all she insisted she lived in the present, as she got older, she needed, occasionally, to remember. Not to look for answers or mend long-forgotten quarrels, or cry and miss and reminisce, but to remind and reassure herself of who she was and where she’d come from. Rolling the pastry out into huge snowy sheets, ready to cut into hundreds of leaves to be filled, crimped and boiled, Galia sweated in the heat of midday, the small salty drops occasionally dripping into the expanding mixture below. Her brow grew wet and dark as the culinary process proceeded and memories crowded around her, and Boroda receded further under the table, claiming her cardboard box in the darkest, coolest corner.

  Galia had lost her parents, her virginity and many of her teeth during the Great Patriotic War. She preferred not to relive any of those events. In a space of weeks, that seemed like her whole lifetime – but also no time at all, as time had stood still or ceased to exist or just exploded – she had grown up. This was a few weeks that, in her memory, she condensed into something untouchable and shut up in a black box. Open the box, and all you could hear was a never-ending scream and all you could see was a giant mechanical hand scratching dry bones, and all you could feel was the freezing wind of the steppe and a raging hunger. A box of memory that denied the existence of the sun, animals, trees, laughter or childhood. A box she rarely dared delve in to.

  This same era of numbing change, hurt and sacrifice also brought her – like a particularly big and difficult baby under a gooseberry bush – a husband. Just like that! Again, she didn’t like to brood on this fact, but she could not, for the life of her, remember how it had happened. She had been a slight girl then, with milky skin and frizzy blonde hair that she hid under a greasy khaki cap. Entirely alone and so scared she couldn’t recall her parents’ faces, or her own, she had somehow got slung together with Pasha and his field kitchen and a band of stragglers, way behind the front line, with Victory in Europe a few weeks off. Pasha: a little weak, a little lazy perhaps, with liquid brown eyes and a smile as wet as tripe. He kept the black box out of her sight for a while. He smiled and there was a possibility that laughter had, at some point, existed, and had meant that something was funny, not that someone was mad. He felt like a ballast, keeping her feet on the ground as the world shook and the war ended around them.

  ‘Ah, too bad, butter fingers,’ Galia muttered to herself as the last of the vareniki slid from her tired fingers and plopped with a puff of flour on to the floor. Boroda extended her noble neck a few inches from her box under the table, politely indicating that she would happily clear up the fallen morsel if Galia would permit.

  ‘Go on then, lapochka, you may as well have it. Do a good job mind, clean it all up, my bearded lady.’ Boroda’s sharp pink tongue lapped up the mixture in seconds and her tail thumped gently on the wall of the box.

  ‘No gulping, mind – even street dogs don’t have to gulp!’ Galia teased. Boroda flicked her a grateful glance and continued licking the floor clean with a great deal of care. The dog’s needs were simple: bread, potatoes, occasional scraps of fat and bits of fruit were her staples. She, generally speaking, would not have dreamt of begging for food from the table, but if it fell her way that was a different matter. In her turn, Galia would not have thought of putting a collar around her neck. They were equals, and chose to be together in companionable quiet. There was no constraint, and new tricks were not required. The spillage all cleared up, Boroda licked her lips and then the tip of her long thin tail, and settled down to sleep.

  Galia was prevented from returning to her reverie by the sudden bleeping of the phone, which brought her huffing into the hall. ‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’ she muttered under her breath, ‘is a body to get no peace in this world?’ and then loudly ‘Hello! I’m listening!’

  ‘Galina Petrovna, good afternoon! It’s Vasily Volubchik here,’ said a confident but somewhat creaky voice.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ replied Galia with a sigh, and then, fearing she sounded rude, ‘and how can I help you, Vasily Semyonovich?’

  ‘I’m just checking that you’re coming to the meeting this evening, Galina Petrovna. We have a very exciting agenda, I assure you: the Lotto draw, and … er, oh, er, bother, what was it? I’ve forgotten the most exciting thing, er—’

  ‘Yes, Vasily Semyonovich, I’ll be there. I am sure it will be most entertaining. Goodbye!’ and Galia replaced the receiver with a slight frown. Vasily Semyonovich Volubchik was nothing if not determined. He had been phoning every Monday for at least three years to ensure that she didn’t forget to attend the Elderly Club. And every week he promised her something exciting. So far, the most exciting event hosted by the Elderly Club had been a talk on fellatio by a local enthusiasts’ group. Or did she mean philately – Galia could never recall the difference. But it had not been exciting: merely diverting, in her estimation.

  She padded down the hall in her soft white slippers to wash her face and neck. She had a feeling that the evening was going to be dull. Looking back later, she couldn’t qui
te believe how wrong this feeling had been. She had no presentiment of how her life was about to change. People often don’t.

  * * *

  ‘Straindzh lavv, straindzh khaize end straindzh lauoz, straindzh lavv, zat’s khau mai lavv grouz …’

  On the east side of town, in a square box of a room with orange walls and a shiny mustard lino floor, a youngish man intoned the words of his beloved Depeche Mode without a recognizable tune. He was wearing some sort of uniform that was very clean, but still smelt to others around him of something not quite savoury. The man was making busy, precise preparations under a bare sixty-watt bulb as the sun set outside, unnoticed. His black nylon trousers, crease-free and firmly belted, sparked small currents against his thighs that made the black hairs there stand up as he moved. His regulation blue shirt was neat and pressed and tucked in snugly all the way around. It made taut pulling noises as he reached to comb his hair, which he found minutely satisfactory. He had shaved carefully, including his neck and that part of his shoulders he could reach, and had fully emptied his nose into the basin (down the hall on the left, no, second left: first left is the room of the violent alcoholic – well, one of them). He had cleaned out his ears with a safety match, and the match had then been safely placed in the bin – not in the toilet, as had happened once, by accident, when it had bobbed about in the yellow-brown water for several days, disturbing him greatly to the point where he couldn’t sleep. For that matter, a match had also once been carelessly left on the bedside cabinet. But only once. The match problem had been overcome and Mitya’s will imposed on the small woody sticks and their sticky pink heads. Now they always went in the bin, immediately, and he slept well.

  These things he did every day, in a set order. Or rather, every evening. He turned over the cassette – Depeche Mode, Music for the Masses – as he did every evening around this time, and pressed play with the second finger of his right hand. He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes as the music began. He envisaged the night before him, and emitted a satisfied snort, quietly, just for himself.