Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story Read online

  Mitya was thorough. He took pride in being thorough. Thorough and careful would have been his middle names, he thought, if his middle name hadn’t been Boris. He frowned and paused with the boot brush poised in his hand. The thought of his middle name spoilt his mood as a bark spoils silence, and he shuddered briefly in the shadow of his thoughts about Mother. There were things he held against his mother, and his middle name was one of them. A drunkard’s name, a name with no imagination: a typical Russian name. His left eye twitched slightly as he aimed the boot brush at a mental image of his mother hovering near the door, and slowly and deliberately pulled the trigger. Her green-grey brains spread out across the orange wall as Dave Gahan hit a rousing chorus and Mitya felt a tremble shoot from his stomach to his groin. Life was sweet. He had his order, he had his job, and in this room on the East Side, he was in control of his own affairs. He was Lord of all he surveyed.

  There was a muffled click in the hallway, and Mitya froze, sensing trouble. He was not mistaken: a thumping beat suddenly vibrated his orange walls, snuffing out his tape like a candle in a snow storm. He lowered the boot brush and bit his lip. His neighbour, Andrei the Svoloch, was hosting a party, again. Soon there would be girls with too much make-up, girls with too much perfume, girls with skirts impossibly short and tights with ladders reaching up with clawing fingers towards their unmentionable parts. Girls: his neighbour was a success with them, it seemed. The younger, the better, according to Andrei, although Mitya always tried not to listen whenever his neighbour opened his ugly, tooth-speckled mouth. Mitya violently disapproved of Andrei, and his girls. He frowned at them from around his door, and when they laughed, he closed the door and frowned at them through the keyhole. They came out of Andrei the Svoloch’s room to go down the hall to the stinking shared toilet, and then he sometimes frowned at them through the keyhole of the toilet too, just to make his point, although this always made him feel bad afterwards. He didn’t know why he did it. It wasn’t like he found them interesting. It wasn’t like he wanted to see them at all. They were just hairy girls, after all.

  Mitya’s view was that girls, and women in general – females, to use the technical and correct term – were a distraction. Men should keep their eyes on the prize and their wits about them. Girls were for when the fight was over. Or nearly over, as Mitya’s fight would never be over, fully. He knew that if he ever got in the position of being in physical contact with a girl, he would make sure that she knew where she was in his order of priorities before any actual physical contact ensued: somewhere near the bottom, way down the line after work, eating, sleeping, beer, going to the toilet, Depeche Mode and ice hockey. Oh yes, he’d show her. She’d realize how lucky she was, to be in physical contact with Mitya. One day. When he had the time. When he met the right one.

  Mitya’s boot brush was still poised in his hand, one plastic-leather boot shiny, the other slightly dull. He collected his thoughts, pushed the girls firmly to the back of his mind, in fact out of it completely, and polished the dull boot with a frenetic stroke that turned his hand to a blur and made his neatly combed hair vibrate like a warm blancmange on a washing machine. When he had finished, the boot gleamed and small beads of sweat stood out on Mitya’s forehead. He folded a piece of tissue twice and blotted away the small drops. His arm ached slightly, and his heart was beating faster.

  With satisfactory boots in place, he collected his wallet, keys and comb, and indulged in a last look around the room. Everything was in its place under the glare of the bright single bulb. He was out of here, and it was going to be a long night. He felt big, and enjoyed the noise his confident footsteps made stomping on the floor. He was a man on a mission, a man with a plan. He was important. The only cloud on the horizon, so to speak, was his bladder, which was now painfully full.

  In the hall, Andrei the Svoloch with his hateful dyed hair and cheap cologne was leaning against his doorway, smoking a cigarette with one hand and rubbing the thigh of what appeared to be a schoolgirl with the other.

  ‘Hey Mitya, off for another night on duty? You’re so fucking dull, mate! Why don’t you join us for a drink? Come on – have a look at what we’ve got on the table? Maybe you want some?’ Andrei slid his hand right between the schoolgirl’s legs and she squeaked.

  Mitya winced, but despite himself, he glanced into his neighbour’s blood-red room. It was a scene of hell. There were women everywhere: draped over the divan, curling over the TV, straddling the gerbil cage.

  ‘I’m going to work, just as soon as I’ve had a piss,’ he muttered, and stomped down the corridor. Turning on a sudden impulse at the toilet door, he bit out the words, ‘You need to clean this toilet, Andrei. It’s your turn. I did it the last four times. I’m not doing it again!’

  Andrei the Svoloch laughed, displaying two rows of stumpy yellow teeth, and pushed the schoolgirl back inside the red room, closing the door behind him with a hollow thud. Mitya pushed hard on the toilet door, and his nose connected with the back of his hand. It was locked, again.

  ‘Son of a bitch.’

  His swollen bladder would not be denied. The strain of keeping the pee in was bringing a film of sweat to his smooth upper lip. He had been periodically waiting to use the filthy toilet for over half an hour but every time he gave up and went back to his room, the cursed toilet occupant would come lurching out and be replaced by another incontinent before Mitya could get back down the corridor. So now he had to wait, and risked leaning on the wall next to the violent alcoholic’s door, his slim legs tightly bound together, hands clenching and unclenching. He hammered on the door again.

  ‘Come out of there you stinking old tramp! I’m going to call the skoraya – you’ll go to the dry tank!’ Mitya really, badly, needed to pee.

  The door opened slightly, and in the festering half-light a peachy soft face looked out at him, hesitantly. After a moment the door opened wider on its squealing hinges and out stepped, not the stinking old alcoholic with vomit down his chin, but an angel come to earth. Mitya gasped and felt a small pool of saliva collect in the corner of his mouth and then trickle gently on to his chin. He had never seen a girl so beautiful and so perfect. Blonde hair framed a delicate face with apple cheeks, a small freckled nose and eyes that seemed to stroke a place deep within his stomach. And here she was, in the stinking bog, with a twist of yellow toilet paper stuck to her perfect, peach-coloured plastic slipper.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she lisped, looking up at him through gluey black lashes.

  ‘No! Ah …’ Mitya wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I’m sorry, er, small female. Let me!’ and he held the wobbling door open for her as she slid through the gap between it and his underarm. ‘I didn’t know … I thought you were the old man – from up the corridor. He spends … hours in the … smallest room.’

  ‘Jesus, I’m surprised he’s still alive,’ joked the perfect angel with a wink.

  Mitya felt something twang deep within him, like a ligament in his very soul stretching and snapping, never to be repaired. She turned slowly and swayed, tiny and ethereal, up the hallway towards the end room, and then hesitated, looking back at him from the doorway.

  ‘Who are you, beautiful?’ Mitya blurted, without meaning to make a sound, without knowing his mouth had opened, without giving his tongue permission to form any words at all.

  ‘Katya,’ she said, as if it was obvious, and she vanished behind the farthest door. The click of the latch struck Mitya like a punch in the face, and he gasped.

  He took a long, slow piss and was struck by the thought that she, the angel, had been seated where his golden stream of warm pee was flying and foaming, just a few moments before. He shuddered and then, despite himself, leant down towards the toilet and could just make out a trace of her scent among the other odours rising from the dark bowl, the floor and the bin. Her scent, the musky scent of an angel, was subtle but powerful. Another hand rattling the door handle pulled him from his reverie, plucking him from his dream-like state and plunging
him back into the reality of the smallest room. He pushed his way out of the cubicle, past the wobbly old man who roared something indecipherable but crushingly depressing at him, and made his way down the stairs and out to his van.

  ‘That my life should come to this,’ he thought, and aimed a ferocious kick at a passing tabby cat. He missed it by a wide margin and lost his balance for a moment, grabbing hold of the hedge to save himself and trying to ignore the muffled laughter bubbling from a bench behind it: a bench laden with small children and elderly hags, of course. ‘Females, children: nothing but trouble. I’ve got my work,’ he muttered to himself, and brushed the leaves from his shirt, ready to march off. As he did so, a butterfly bobbed up from the depths of the hedge and collided with his nose, making him flail slightly. Again muffled laughter scuffed his ears.

  ‘What are you doing, sitting there, cluttering the place up? Haven’t you got work to do?’ he roared over the hedge.

  The babushkas looked at the small children and the small children looked at the babushkas, and then they all began giggling again, tears streaming down their cheeks.

  ‘There, there, Mitya, on your way,’ croaked a sun-kissed face pitted with tiny, shining eyes.

  ‘Idiots. Geriatrics and idiots. You’re no better than rats, laughing rats,’ scolded Mitya, but not loud enough for his audience to hear. He turned on his heel towards the setting sun, and his shiny van that glinted in its rosy rays. The night was young.

  2

  The Azov House of Culture Elderly Club

  Galia smiled with quiet satisfaction as she finished making her way along the corridor, dishing out the steaming vareniki to her aged and tremulous neighbours. Xenia, hunched in the midst of a gallery of grainy pictures of her son, had been very happy to take the food. Galia had greeted the son as was expected, crossing herself in front of the little shrine devised in his memory and housed behind the television in Xenia’s sitting room. Twenty years had passed, but the son’s keys and school bag still lay on the cabinet in the hall, where he had last thrown them that day in July 1974 before heading off for the river, and adventures.

  Next was poor Denis, with his huge bulbous nose and disfigured cauliflower ears, a bachelor of bear-like proportions. He disappeared into his apartment with Galia’s offering and returned with a huge bunch of mottled grapes in exchange. Galia eyed the grapes and wondered what best use to make of them: they looked a little past their prime, but she accepted them gracefully. Baba Krychkova took the food with a little grumble about Goryoun Tigranovich and how selfish it was of him to go away and not tell her, and of course there was still no answer at Goryoun Tigranovich’s door. The old Armenian was an enigma, and that was the way he liked it. There were rumours of gold, and foreign travel, and antique icons, and land deals in the Far East, but the thing was that no-one on the corridor really knew Goryoun Tigranovich at all. He gave out his vegetables and was always sober, polite and clean, but that was it. Galia wondered again whether she had been right to reassure Baba Krychkova that he was away. But it was true there had been no mewing of ridiculously fluffy white cats discernible from outside the door, and there certainly would have been if they hadn’t been fed for a day or two. Galia had once seen them being fed when she popped in to exchange some garlic for a pineapple, and it had not been a pretty sight: the white cats turned in to beasts when food was involved. Anyway, it was best not to pry. The neighbour would re-appear when it suited him, or he would not.

  Back in her kitchen, Galia clucked as she wiped down the plastic table top and put away her tools.

  ‘Dog lady! Boroda! You want some fat? Come on, my lady, have a little fat, it’ll help your eyes.’ Galia cut small strips of grizzled mutton fat for the dog, whose eyes already shone like stars.

  She laid down her knife and flopped down on her tiny stool for a moment, wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron. She observed the knife lying before her: it had been sharpened so many times the blade was now a thin arc, chilli-pepper sharp. Pasha had cut his thumb on it the day he bought it: that had brought steam to his ears. She had cleaned the wound with iodine and bound it with gauze, all the time him muttering under his breath. It had been during the funny time, when he was sick and not himself, not long before the end.

  The half hour struck in a lazy, absent kind of way, and Galia pushed herself up from her stool. It was time for the Elderly Club. She gazed from the window out into the hot evening. She could hear laughter rising in the courtyard like bubbles in beer, and the sound of children playing. Every so often a shriek would escape the young fat girl on the bench: it’ll come to no good, thought Galia, as she struggled to swat the mosquitoes dive-bombing her hair. Boroda made her way across the room and placed her muzzle gently into the corner of Galia’s open hand. Galia looked down at the dog and smiled.

  In the cool darkness of her bedroom, she stood in front of the wardrobe and picked out tonight’s floral dress. The wardrobe contained four garments to choose from, each a different colour combination, but otherwise almost identical. This evening it would be the blue-and-white flowers, and the blue sandals over flesh-coloured pop socks. She would also take the white headscarf to keep the mosquitoes out of her hair. There was nothing like insects struggling in your hair to put you off your stride. Why had mosquitoes been created, she wondered, when their only purpose was to make other creatures miserable? But she mused only for a moment, the effort of getting her pop socks on over hot swollen ankles pushing the thought out of her mind.

  Boroda, sensing it was time for Galia to go out, stood silently inside the front door, with her nose just touching it and her tail still, waiting to be let through. Then, jauntily balanced on her three legs, the dog wove her way along the corridor, down the stairs and out in to the courtyard, to sit a while under the bench and watch the children playing on the wide brown square of dry grass.

  ‘Pyao! Pyao! Pyao! You’re dead!’

  Boroda made her way gingerly past the smaller, more unpredictable children and across the courtyard to the scruffy trees that hung over the swings. In a shady spot, she laid her head on her paw and twitched her long grey eyebrows. Sometimes, the children would make up a fidgeting circle around her under the tree and fashion her headdresses of wild olive leaves. She looked noble. She hoped they would stop the shooting and make her a headdress or two soon.

  * * *

  The lights, such as had bulbs in them, were burning brightly at the Azov House of Culture Elderly Club. The building itself was typical: concrete panelled, with large windows set high in cracked walls gazing on to parquet flooring, itself breaking away from its moorings. Forty-five women and two men, one of whom appeared not to be breathing, stood or sat at tables arranged around the walls of the central hall. At one end a plethora of spider plants hung from the top of a large serving hatch, trailing their grubby fingers across trays of moistureless biscuits, crackers and pretzels, such as could well be found on Mars. In the middle of the room, the host, chairman and general in charge, Vasily Semyonovich Volubchik, or Vasya to his friends, scrabbled through papers, dropped pens and stamped the all-important official membership cards.

  Galia thought the Elderly Club was rather a waste of time but felt compelled to go, simply because she was old. There would be card games and tea, chess and arguments. And perhaps a talk on astrology or healthy eating, as if the old ones present didn’t know what fate had in store for them, or what food might kill them. Galia handed her card over to be stamped, avoiding Vasya’s enquiring eyes, and nodded to her old friend Zoya, whose hair had, on this occasion, turned out a violent shade of purple, and went to sit down in the corner.

  ‘One moment, Galina Petrovna, my dear,’ tolled Vasya like an old cracked bell. He was sorting through papers that kept falling from his fingers, splishing across the floor in great sheaves of hopelessness. Galia’s lips pursed despite herself and her left eye twitched very slightly.

  ‘Please, here is the agenda for this evening. I thought you might like to say a few words about cab
bage root fly?’

  ‘Really, Vasily Semyonovich? Why?’

  ‘Vasya, call me Vasya – why stand on ceremony? We are old, and time is not our friend. We are old, so we must be best friends.’

  Galia sighed at the well-worn, and totally un-entertaining, phrase. ‘Very well – Vasya – but I gave a talk on cabbage root fly last spring, as I recall.’

  ‘Yes, yes, my sister, so you did. But it is always worth reminding the people how to avoid this pest, don’t you think? And I think we’ve had some new members join, and some depart, since then.’

  Galia was not sure about any new members joining, but recalled, with a needle in the ribs from a sharp stab of missing, that a number of valued members had indeed departed.

  ‘Yes, you are right, of course, Vasily Semyonovich.’ Galia squashed the thought that all those present knew all there was to know about cabbage root fly with a firm thrust of the chin and a splash of smiling dignity. ‘It will be my pleasure to speak about cabbage root fly, again.’

  In truth, Vasya often asked her to speak on vegetable infection issues, and she was, although she would never admit it, quietly flattered. Vasya, for his part, considered that her talk on the Cockchafer beetle still rested in many a memory as the highlight of the Azov year, or even the decade. It had left a lasting impression on him.

  He pressed a boiled sweet into her palm and a small sphere of spittle burst at the corner of his smile. She took her hand away sharply and, nodding quickly, made squarely for her seat. Through the long-closed window high above her head, she could see the pale moon rising in a blueberry sky, and vaguely wished she hadn’t come. It would have been so much nicer to be at home with her comfortable slippers, the radio, a bowl of steaming vareniki and her Boroda curled up beside her. As she sat sucking the sweet, circling her ankles and nodding absently to the old, old lady welded to the chair next to her, a memory crept into her mind, as unwelcome as a cockroach under a toilet seat.