Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story Read online

  One moonlit evening, way back, she had done a very untypical thing. Pasha had walked out, just as she had turned to pour him more tea, it seemed to her, teapot poised in mid-air. Instead of finishing off both their dinners, she placed the teapot on the lino table cloth, put on her cardigan and shoes with shaking hands, and followed him. She could hear the repeat of his footsteps on the stairs, down the passage way, through the courtyard, then clicking briskly along the alley. Down through the old town centre she had crept, as best she could, feeling furtive but unable to stop, scuttling in her billowing summer dress, across the bridge, past the factory, out towards the flats on the east side of town. Once or twice she felt a hint of his tobacco or a lick of his hair cream clinging to the warm panels of the shops she passed: Grocery No. 5, Milk Products, Shoe Shop No. 1 … There was not another soul about. Evenings ended relatively early in Azov back then.

  She was beginning to think that she had lost him, that he must in fact have turned off at the factory and simply hurried in to work with some important idea, or maybe an idea or two about one of the women there who wore trousers and smoked cigarettes, when a vague glinting up ahead, away to the right, caught her eye. She was on the very edge of town now, stolidly rustling forward. The half-hearted street lights had petered out 200 paces back, and only the moon lit her way. She made out the dim outline of a building site to her right, the great bulks of concrete panels stacked up like enormous playing cards. To her left lay dead fields, uncultivated, heaving, empty. She caught a vague snatch of words on the wind, and ducked down behind a dark pile of pipes. Something scuttled sharply in the heart of the pile and she recoiled with a startled gasp. With her heart beating in her ears like giant felt boots in the snow, she moved on carefully in her thin canvas shoes. The wind blew her a few words, and she recognized the speaker: it was Pasha, and he was answered by another voice. Was it a woman? Galia hadn’t waited to find out. She had run home, afraid to come face-to-face with whatever was out there on that summer night. The memory sent a shudder up Galia’s backbone that travelled all the way to her eyes, making them prick with tears.

  ‘So, Galina Petrovna, would you like to inform us of developments around cabbage root fly?’ invited Vasya Volubchik. Galia was sitting staring at the moon, mouth open, eyes glazed. A silence thick as fog rolled over the crowd for several seconds, broken only by a vague slurping at the back of the room. Vasya began to fear a stroke. ‘Galina Petrovna … Galia!’ The urgent pitch of his voice finally broke in to Galia’s reverie. The vision of Pasha and the building site melted and then crystallised into the faces of dozens of her fellow aged citizens, bright eyes burning into her as their rubbery gums sucked rainbows of boiled sweets into tongue-slitting shards: waiting. Galia met their eyes, and swallowed. ‘Yes, Vasily Semyonovich!’

  ‘A glass of water is required?’

  ‘No, thank you, I’m quite all right. Just a little tired. I’ve been working today.’

  ‘And the moon has a strange effect on all ladies, I am told?’

  Galia twitched her lip, and took command of her faculties. She began her report, stumbling a little at first, but gradually building her case before the slumbering group. Vasya drew his chair nearer, and gazed at her from five feet away: his deafness brought him in to close proximity with ladies on a daily basis, and it was something he treasured and respected.

  But Vasya was troubled: Galia looked pale, and less hearty than usual. The thought crossed his mind, as it often did, that what she needed was a man to look after her. A good, old man, a retired headmaster say, with a vegetable patch of his own, four grandchildren living more than seventy kilometres away, a fine Ural motorbike (1975 vintage) that ran like new, three pairs of good shoes, no bad habits, a lovely cat called Vasik, and at least five of his own teeth. Vasya, he was content to affirm, met all of these criteria.

  But no matter how close he sat to Galina Petrovna, she didn’t seem to notice him. She fed him scraps of attention, but rarely a direct look. She resisted all his advances. The flowers he had left outside her door had remained there for days, untouched. If he tried to take her hand to help her up the kerb when they passed in town (he knew her routine quite well, and often managed to happen to be in the same place on the same day), she smiled but frowned simultaneously, and shooed him away with a quiet but firm tut. Once or twice he had made her genuinely angry, but he couldn’t really say why. Her cheeks had flushed and her voice shook slightly as she chased him away, as if he were a cat doing its business among her broad beans. He had only been trying to help with hard work. But he couldn’t be offended, and he couldn’t give up.

  He recognized that he was a man who needed to feel useful to a woman, and since his Maria had gone, he was at a loss as to what to do. His mastery of the House of Culture Elderly Club was, of course, a manifestation of being put to good use for women folk. And many of the women were sweetly grateful. He received bowls of fruit, and little cakes, and he never had to mend his own trousers. But the women who put on lipstick for him, and even sometimes wore sandals in summer, held no love interest for him. They were like sisters, or mothers, or even daughters. He didn’t know why. A mystery of life, along with why vodka tasted so good with pickles but not with cress, and why there were no fish left in the river, not even little ones. A riddle, and a good one. Vasya sighed and rested his chin on his walking stick, enjoying the prickling of his white stubble against the old plastic handle, and the proximity of the untouchable Galia.

  The oldest old woman stood up with a clearly audible creak, her mosaic brown face cracking open to produce a voice that rumbled up from her belly, or perhaps her boots, which were fashioned from the same stuff as her face. ‘So, citizen, when will the drought be over?’

  Galia blinked slowly, twice, before responding.

  ‘Babushka, I do not know when the drought will be over. But if I hear, I will be the first to let you know.’

  ‘This, this bourgeois capitalism! This is why we have a drought!’

  Galia looked down at the papers in her hand and then at Vasya, who was staring at her, smiling vaguely, in a lopsided fashion. Stroke, thought Galia.

  ‘Rubbish, crone!’

  There was a rustle as forty-five heads turned slowly but urgently to take in the second speaker.

  ‘Drought is punishment for all the years of godlessness!’ the second oldest old woman rejoined, also creaking to a stand, her voice high, thin and piercing as a rusty violin in a bucket of vinegar. The recently slumbering majority heaved a collective sigh and shifted in their seats, sensing that their comfortable half hour was coming to an end.

  ‘Citizens—’ began Galia.

  ‘There were no droughts under Brezhnev, bitch!’

  ‘Now, ladies, now!’ Vasya levered himself upright and knocked his stick on the parquet floor in an attempt to call order. No-one heard the noise, muffled as it was by the rubber tip, the collective years of hardened earwax, and the screeches and rumbles of the newly roused collective. ‘Ladies, no! General discussion is not on the agenda. We haven’t done the Lotto draw yet!’

  Chairs scraped the floor as one after the other the members of the crowd rose to their feet, all the better to berate their neighbour. Knobbly fingers were thrust into ancient faces, and tongues that until five minutes ago had been thick with sleep were now roused to full war-cry and hullabaloo. Vasya, arms flailing, was engulfed in the onslaught, disappearing in a crush of bustling floral-clad flesh and grey hair. Galia subsided slowly into her chair with a sigh and took in the view at the window high above her head. The sky was now a deep black, hung with a moon sharp and cold as the silver arc of her peeling knife. She wished she hadn’t come.

  3

  Mitya the Exterminator

  Mitya didn’t enjoy his job. No, that just wouldn’t do it justice. You might enjoy an ice-cream or something trivial like that, where the feeling passes quickly and is mainly connected to your gut or some other swiftly satisfied desire, leaving you with sticky fingers and a dribbly chin,
but rarely with any inner fulfilment. No, Mitya lived for his job. In fact, it wasn’t a job at all. To him, as his boss observed with what Mitya felt was a somewhat insincere smile, it was a calling.

  Some are called to the church to share God’s word, give comfort to the sick, guidance to the sinners and enjoy the hospitality of old ladies, especially those who make good jam. And some are called to be medics, healing the sick, giving comfort to the incurable, and receiving gifts from thankful relatives when someone is helped ahead of the queue for testing, results and treatment. And some citizens, some are called to take up arms. Mitya classed himself among this latter group. He had willingly completed his national service after school and had, like many Soviet children, not really enjoyed it. The discipline wasn’t a problem: Mitya enjoyed discipline, and a uniform, however ill-fitting and badly made. The food had not been a problem for him: he liked things plain. The bullying and cold had not got to him, and the military dentist had probably done him a favour by removing all those teeth. But it was the apparent pointlessness of the service that had caused him a problem. He had failed to be sent to Afghanistan: both he and his mother had been disappointed. He wrote to his divisional commander and asked why his unit was not going: there had been no response. So they had been stationed in the middle of the flat Russian steppe for two years, their only adversaries the drunken local peasants and huge clouds of mosquitoes that ruled the land from May to September.

  So the army was not for him. He needed something more direct, a service he could provide locally, with immediate results, and which kept the streets clean of foreign bodies and pestilence. He became a defender of freedom from animal tyranny, a fighter against the disease and nuisance caused by flea-bitten scrag-end dogs: Mitya was a warrior against unauthorized canine infestations. Mitya could not abide a dog. Any dog he saw made Mitya feel sick, the bitter bile rising in his throat, catching at his tonsils, making him cough. But a stray dog: a stray dog made him really mad. A stray dog was an enemy of the state, an enemy of civilization: a personal enemy of Mitya. He contained his loathing through his job, and put his hatred to good use. Any stray in Azov had better be on the lookout: Mitya showed no mercy.

  And as the great Soviet Union had finally fallen to pieces and was replaced by a patchwork of republics and autonomous regions, each one jostling the other, he found his own job became semi-autonomous, and he had more freedom to work as he saw fit. While he would never condone the black market, pernicious as it was, it offered up opportunities for armament and persuasion that had previously been out of the question for dog wardens. So, armed with his dog pole, throw net and Taser (not strictly standard issue, but an addition he felt was fully justified), he spent six evenings out of seven patrolling his jurisdiction in the Canine Control Van, or CCV. Mitya was the best Exterminator this side of Kharkov. And the town of Azov relied on him to keep canine vermin at bay, even if they didn’t know it.

  This evening, warm and sweet-smelling as only an industrial town on a river in August can be, Mitya was targeting the west side of town, the old quarter, which took in a lot of important staging posts and was always a good hunting ground. His van oiled slowly around the areas beloved of stray dogs: the collage of kiosks selling books, gum, porn, dried fish, vodka and music boxes; the back of the market, where huge bins of rotting mush drew crowds of dogs like flies, with flies as big as bears buzzing around their squirming sores; and the waste-ground outside the shabby church, strewn with begging crones and bones flung down by do-gooders for the dogs that prowled around the old women, and sometimes took a crafty bite out of them when God wasn’t looking.

  Mitya started the evening at the kiosks and worked his way around in a clockwise direction. He was swift with his pole: a talented snatcher. He never took on a whole pack. He would observe a group of dogs from a distance and then pick off the weaker specimens one by one as they got distracted and separated. The only way to deal with a whole pack would be by using a stun-grenade or poisonous gas, neither of which was currently approved by the state for dog-warden use, to Mitya’s chagrin. The evening was warm, and Mitya’s skin became wet and sour beneath his close-fitting trousers and regulation shirt. He pulled the van over and took a wet-wipe from his black plastic-leather bum-bag. It was important to try to remain clean and fresh. Mitya had no idea how doggy he smelt. No-one except Andrei the Svoloch ever told him, probably because Andrei the Svoloch was the only person he regularly came in to contact with.

  With four matted mongrels already caged and whining in the back, Mitya spotted a lone dog, thin and lank, sitting in a square just off Engels Street on the corner with Karl Marx Avenue. Lone dogs were bad news: even their own canine kind could not stand them. A group of children played nearby. Mitya’s stomach quivered: the dirty dog was salivating, panting like an animal, preparing to savage one of the innocents, there and then. It was Mitya’s duty to spare the child and bring the dog to justice.

  ‘Master and servant,’ whispered Mitya as he dropped the used wet-wipe into a plastic bag he kept in the van specifically for this purpose, and sprang quietly on to the pavement. He took a few steps into the square and concealed himself behind a set of bins, resting his mini-binoculars on the rim, the better to observe his quarry. He watched, while the dog licked its forepaw, and he blinked, confused: the animal appeared to be a tri-ped.

  ‘Excuse me?’ a female voice behind him made him jump and drop his mini-binoculars into the open bin with a soft clunk.

  ‘Christ! Look what you’ve done!’ Mitya thrust his arm into the bin after the binoculars. His fingers came into contact with slime, grit, and soft-boiled cabbage and he winced. He pulled out his hand and turned on the owner of the voice.

  ‘Oh! It’s you!’ He put his dirty hand behind his back and tried to wipe off his fingers on the edge of the metal bin. It was the angel from the smallest room, Katya. His gaze bounced off the golden hair crowning her head and rested for a moment on her toes, which peeped out from a pair of slightly dog-eared wedge sandals. He found himself imagining his tongue curling around them, and bit on his free knuckle.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t realize you were … what were you doing, actually?’

  ‘I’m working, female citizen.’ Mitya aimed for clipped tones, and tried not to look at the curve of her jeans.

  ‘Oh, you can call me Katya, you know. You asked so nicely, after all.’

  Mitya felt the skin on his face and neck flush hot red, and almost stuttered his response, ‘Yes, but I’m working, and you made me drop my binoculars.’

  ‘Oh shucks, I am sorry.’ The girl looked genuinely contrite, her brown eyes large and serious.

  ‘It’s OK. They’re only the regulation ones. Not the special night-vision ones.’

  ‘Ooh, night-vision binoculars. Wow! Are you spying on those grannies over there?’

  ‘No, I am not.’

  ‘What have they done? Are you in the Spetznaz?’

  ‘No, of course I’m not in the Spetznaz—’

  ‘But I suppose you wouldn’t be able to tell me if you were!’ She smiled at him and winked in her lopsided way.

  ‘I’m not in the Spetznaz, Katya. Look, I’m busy right now. What do you want?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing really. To be honest, I just wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I’m new in town, and I don’t really know anyone, except my cousin, and I like to chat. You know, just chat. And I know you – sort of. And I was just curious about what you were doing sneaking around like that—’

  ‘I wasn’t sneaking around.’

  ‘And you remind me of someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But it’ll come to me.’ Katya smiled self-consciously and scraped her sandal across the corner of the flower bed, watching intently as the dry earth broke like brown sugar over her toes. She looked up and caught Mitya’s stare.

  ‘Look, I just wanted to know if you could tell me how to get to the cinema?’

 
‘The cinema?’ Mitya asked flatly, his face blank.

  ‘Yes, the cinema. I’ve never been and I’m having a bit of trouble finding it. I’ve been round this block at least three times and no sign. But the tourist map says it should be here. Look – see?’ She leant towards Mitya and pointed to a blob on the badly reproduced map that was supposed to represent the location of the cinema. He observed her golden hair and the way the streetlight picked up slight reddish tones in it around her ears and the nape of her neck.

  ‘Ooh, what’s that smell?’ she squealed, looking up suddenly, her golden head nearly colliding with Mitya’s nose.

  ‘Sewers!’ Mitya bit out, jumping back to a safer distance. ‘It’s always the sewers, and the bins. Look, I’ve never been to the cinema, but I can tell you that it is that way.’ Mitya indicated the boulevard to their left with a slightly shaking finger. ‘Your map is clearly out of date. Or maybe you’ve got it upside down – I hear women often do that. Now, I have important work to do, so, please be on your way.’

  Katya looked him up and down slowly, her eyes seeming to reach into every nook and crevice of his body, through his clothes. Mitya shuddered slightly and again felt his skin flush.

  ‘OK, thank you. But you should go to the cinema some time. They have some good films these days. You could learn a lot! Oh, and,’ she stepped towards him slightly, leaning in conspiratorially, ‘your flies are undone, soldier!’ With a tinkling laugh and a wink she turned and ambled off up the boulevard, her hands swinging slightly, everything about her looking light and fresh and clean and happy.

  Mitya yanked up his flies with his sticky hand and for a few seconds watched her progress up the street, wishing he had his binoculars: the binoculars that were languishing in the bottom of the rancid bin. He turned to examine the square: the dangerous tri-ped was still sitting there and the children were still in danger. He turned for one final glance at Katya’s receding backside, and then stared at the patch of earth disturbed by her tiny, perfect foot a minute ago. There was nothing else for it: he was going to have to retrieve his equipment.