Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story Read online

  At five a.m., after several half-hearted attempts at a gardening crossword, she went back to bed feeling cold and despondent despite the promising glow of the rising sun. She turned from one side to the other and then back again, replaying all the events of the evening and things that could have turned out differently, and most of all chiding herself for being a stubborn old idiot and not getting the dog a collar from the outset. If only she hadn’t stood on a principle, none of this would ever have happened. Poor Boroda would not be awaiting execution, and old Vasya would be asleep in his own bed instead of languishing in some prison cell far across town. And slowly, once all the scenarios had been churned over and re-jigged to exhaustion and started getting jumbled up with one another in her tired mind, she absently and unwittingly turned to examining problems further back in time: situations, places and people she had left behind a long time ago. The theatre behind her eyelids was filled with scenes and characters about whom she hardly ever thought when she was busy with her garden, her card games, her vegetables and her Boroda.

  She dozed fitfully, and remembered a time when she was young. Back then, when things were different, life was properly difficult and her memories of it were dark. She remembered clattering footsteps in the stairwell, and the dry choking dust coming off the unmade roads in huge silvery plumes all summer. It was a time when work was a twelve-hour day at least, and sparse summer harvests had to be made to last all winter. When they first moved in to the apartment, the electricity, which they were very lucky to have, went off in the evening. That was no great problem, as they had no fridge and no TV, and generally no need for light after eight p.m. In those days, the lazy got nothing, unless they were the bosses, in which case they got theirs and a slice of everybody else’s, and more besides. She remembered her elderly neighbours: they were respected, but had nothing, and hoped for nothing, except maybe a better future for their grandchildren, if they survived. She tried to visualize the faces of some of those friends and neighbours who had gone away years ago and never come back, but the images were smudgy, lacking detail. Too much time had passed. There had been no miracle reunions, no matter what the films in the mobile cinema tried to make you believe. The disappeared did not come back.

  The war had left Galia an orphan, but found her a husband, for which she was grateful. The move from active duty to dealing with the burdens of married life came very quickly. Galia found her new domestic chores rather stifling: occasionally, her heart beat fast against her ribs and she felt a little nauseous, a little trapped, a little desperate, sitting on her stool in the stuffy flat, waiting for Pasha to return from the factory.

  She had no previous connection to the town of Azov: Pasha was required to work at the factory, which produced things that she was not allowed to know about, so they were posted to the town by the Regional government soon after the war’s end. At first they lived in a wooden shack, along with the old lady who was the original tenant and a number of her livestock. Once the factory had been fully rebuilt, new apartments for workers were slotted together with amazing speed, and Galia knew they were lucky to be among the first to be re-homed. At first, they shared the two rooms plus kitchen and bathroom with another family whose baby girl howled all night and whose grandfather howled all day. After a year or so the others were re-housed, and Galia missed the baby once she had caught up on her sleep.

  Azov was a sociable southern town: the people promenaded in the summer evenings, slapping mosquitoes from their legs and always wearing Sunday best if they had it, no matter what day of the week. In the wintertime, when the river froze over and the icy wind snarled in from the north, the locals would wrap up in all the clothes they possessed and go skating over the fishes and the weeds. Married men would seek the silent companionship of ice-fishing as long as the river would take their weight, and day and night, blizzard or sun, they sat over tiny holes drilled through the leaden surface, waiting for a bite or a nip from their own bottles hidden away under piles of bread and pork fat supplied by their loyal wives. Pasha never went ice-fishing though. Galia would have liked it if he had, but her suggestion was always met with a shrug and a sardonic smile. Pasha kept himself to himself.

  Galia loved the river with its changing face and wide, sunlit banks, but no more than she enjoyed the old town walls and the crumbling fortress, red brick and fusty, which repelled invasion by no-one these days, but was chock-full of stories and ghosts. As a young woman, Galia had been impressed with Shop No. 1, Shop No. 2, the shoe shop and the newly built Palace of Culture. It seemed to her that her country was indeed building Communism and rebuilding itself into a better, fairer, and brighter place. The factories and the schools that sprang up around the town were right on her doorstep. It was all new and as fresh as dew on green tomatoes, for a while. Galia felt part of this beginning and wanted to take a role in the real work of the collective, her union, the Soviet Union.

  But at home, life was never simple, and it never reflected the Soviet model that, for a while at least, Galia hoped it would. When Pasha chose to sit and drink, she would stay in the kitchen and work methodically on enough vareniki for a month, gifting them out to the toothless old men and women from down the hall, when they were well enough to be roused by her knock at the door. When Pasha fell asleep at the vegetable patch during the harvest, she carried on, working all day without a break, and ensuring that he was shaded as far as possible so that his translucent pale skin did not peel. When he’d slap her backside with a pink hand and lead her into the shed for a glass of home brew and a cuddle, she tried not to think of her aching back but instead focused on the love that she hoped his attention signified. His stubble and the stale tang of sleep on his tongue sometimes brought a tear to her eye, but the intimate rub of bare wood on her buttocks as he moved inside her sent little shock-waves of desire through her belly and down her legs, and made her toes and fingers curl into tight knots of pleasure.

  But in truth, Galia had realized fairly early on that she didn’t really like Pasha at all. Once she had accepted this to herself, as a woman of principle, she became determined to make a good wife for him, as far as was possible: he was to be clean, his socks darned, meals provided, and other needs met. But despite her good intentions, it was not many years before her interest in him shrivelled like a late rose caught in a sly first frost. Once the home brew had dried up and the shed became a place where only the seedlings received any attention, she squared her shoulders and got on with other things. In time, this became her mantra: get on with things, and don’t complain, and all will be well.

  Pasha had started being away when he should be home almost before the wedding feast (boiled meat, potatoes, kvas and apples) had been fully digested and forgotten by all those concerned. Not that there were many guests to be had at their nuptials, most of their relatives and friends being missing, dead, in prison or building Communism elsewhere in the huge Union. Pasha’s absence hurt Galia at first, but in a dull sort of way. She had expected a man who would be there, making demands on her, eating her food, sleeping with her, giving her ultimatums, making a mess and demanding her attention when she was busy. But mostly she saw the back of his head: as he sat at his desk in the main room, studying papers from the factory, fingers and stubble streaked with ink; or as he stood on the balcony staring out into the evening, smoke from his cigarette rising straight and listless into the still summer sky; or as he slept on the sofa, sucking air noisily out of the room and hiding it in the cavity of his chest like a miser hoarding candle ends. And then there was the quiet mockery of the click of the closing door, sometimes mid-sentence, sometimes just before a meal. Galia ate many meals for two alone. When she was lying on the bed waiting for him, wondering if there was something wrong with her, with her frizzy blonde hair and her pale skin, she’d finish off his pie, lick the fork, and tell herself it didn’t matter. Good food, honesty, timeliness, good neighbourliness: these were worthy enough causes.

  At first she would listen to the familiar bossy tones of the
radio while she waited. Sometimes housework kept her occupied, or some mending. She’d watch the children playing in the courtyard between the brand new blocks of flats, occasionally shouting down half-hearted remonstrations. And she would cook, even on the evenings when he did not come home at all, she would cook. Her favourite was vareniki like her own mother had made. Often she bottled fruit or vegetables, and when she’d run out of her own produce she’d take in endless cherries, plums, cucumbers and tomatoes from her neighbours to do the same for them. Her life revolved around ceaseless movements and small busy tasks for the hands, her methodical steps around the kitchen comforting and repetitive like notes on the balalaika when she was learning to dance before the war, her mother looking on sternly. How had she forgotten that for so long?

  Galia gradually grew from a frail strip of a thing into a powerful, square-shouldered woman. She was not obese, and definitely not round: she had her corners, and a core of strength that underpinned all her movements. She ate her meals for two in quiet solitude, stolidly, slowly and with care. She became resigned to the fact that Pasha was having an affair, or maybe several. She never heard any gossip, and didn’t know who was involved, but had no other rational explanation. The woman behind the counter at the bakery always gave her a sly look. Then again, maybe it was one of the gypsy women who lived down by the river. Perhaps one of the women at the factory, one of the ones who wore trousers and smoked in the yard, had finally gained his attention. Heaven knew, young women outnumbered men four to one since the war, and some were not bothered where they scratched that particular itch. Perhaps it was her duty to share her husband? It was only her pride that was hurt, after all. But she could not get the thought to leave her head: why wasn’t his home enough for him?

  When Galia finally nodded off just before six a.m., her dreams were full of weird flashing scenes, strangely stilted and discoloured, as if she were back at the mobile cinema with the dirty cigarette smoke swirling about her like fog and the tinny speakers detached from the walls and clamped to her head. Faceless people talked nonsense, words coming out chopped up or backwards or speeded up, and nothing making sense. As she sat in the film dream she knew, with a creeping dread that rolled snail trails down her spine, that there was something vital she had forgotten to do. She couldn’t remember what, and was frantic with worry. She had caused a catastrophe due to her own stupidity. But then the feeling faded and the face of Pasha loomed in front of her. He was shoving at her, angry, with the veins in his forehead standing out and pulsating. All of a sudden a furious bark erupted from his mouth. Pasha lunged at her, teeth bared and arms outstretched, making directly for her face. Galia woke with a start, covered in a cold sweat.

  She shook herself free of the last remnants of the dream and, putting on the bedside light, made sure that her arms and legs were still in roughly working order. Her knees and ankles were stiff and puffy, and bruises had appeared up and down both legs. She needed to feel human, and needed some company. There were reasons why it was stupid to delve too deeply into the past, reason one being that the present was no place for the dead. She crept into the kitchen, made a cup of tea so strong she feared it may be poisonous, and looked at the clock. An acceptable hour to ring? Six-fifty was acceptable in Galia’s book, and she telephoned Zoya, for help and support and some kind of plan.

  Zoya: popular lover of culture, queen of local theatre and the arts, spinster, gossip and until very recently, Greco-Roman wrestler. Her thinning hair, spun into a brittle nest on top of her bird-like head, was a different colour every week. Tiny Zoya, hopping from friend to friend, quoting, quothing, groping for truths among all the lies, trying to find out what was making each and every citizen tick, and tock, and stop and go. She was a live-wire at most times of the day and in almost all settings. She had wanted to join the circus as a girl, but was forced to become a seamstress, or something like that, by luck or fate or the State, Galia couldn’t really recall. Zoya: lover of the Zodiac, Pontiacs, Shakespeare and Lenin. She had a comment for every occasion, and an occasion for every hour of every day.

  ‘Yes,’ rasped a voice climbing out of a living grave. It was early for Zoya. ‘This had better be good.’

  Zoya took the news of Vasya’s arrest and Boroda’s removal as Galia expected she might: there was a soft thunk as she fainted against the telephone table followed by a few seconds of rustling as she revived herself with the smelling salts she always kept by her side and some choice, rather long-winded swearwords.

  ‘How could they do this! Murdering poor … Vasya and Boroda! Call the police!’

  ‘Zoya, they’re not dead, and it was the police who took him. But Vasya wasn’t even beaten: he’s an old man. They arrested him – they just shoved him a bit, twisted his arm a little: he’s like spaghetti anyway; he won’t be any the worse for wear. But Boroda … he had her by the scruff, Zoya, and he dangled her … I really don’t know whether she’s— and Zoya, I feel so responsible! What can we do? I don’t know where to turn. It’s my fault. The old fool wouldn’t have been involved if it hadn’t been for me. And now he’s arrested and I don’t think he even has a change of socks with him. I haven’t slept – I’m at my wits’ end.’

  ‘The course of true love never did run smooth, my dear. And what exactly was he doing at your apartment at midnight? You always told me that you didn’t like him. You were very strongly of the opinion that he should leave you alone to your cabbages and turnips. I am, I must admit, thrown, very strongly, by the fact that he was in your boudoir at the dead of night.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that, Zoya. He helped me get the dog back in the first place, and he got knocked on the shins, so I had to have him in to put some iodine on the wounds. I couldn’t have him walking around with septic shins, could I? What woman would do that?’

  ‘And now instead he’s arrested, and the dog taken away too. Galia, this isn’t like you. Tragedy hardly ever afflicts your life. You are not a tragic woman. You never cry even, let alone feel passions, shaking you like truths falling from heaven. Unlike my own path … the trouble I’ve seen Galia, and now you add to it! My own dear mother once warned me—’

  Galia looked at the clock and sighed. She didn’t have time to listen to one of Zoya’s histories today. She’d heard them all before, and while entertaining on occasion, this was not the occasion.

  ‘—that the Ides of March itself was not to be denied—’

  ‘Zinaida Artyomovna, be silent for a second!’

  Again rustling, again the clink of the bottle of smelling salts and a long exhalation.

  ‘I’m sorry, my dear, but this is an emergency, and I need your help. What should I do? How can I free Vasya from the police station? And how can I get my own Boroda back – if it’s not too late. Please help me!’

  ‘Ah, such trouble! Don’t hurry me, Galia. I am near death’s door: it takes a while for the old fleas to start hopping and the ideas to start popping at this time in the morning. For the best: meet me at the Golden Sickle in an hour. We’ll plan our actions then, once I’ve had a chance to … collect myself,’ said Zoya in a dreamy voice, and rang off.

  Fifty-eight minutes later, Galia was sitting on a hard wooden chair at the Golden Sickle. It couldn’t be classed as a cafe, nor a restaurant, nor even a refectory, and it certainly was not a bistro. The food was plain, but usually edible, and that was all that was necessary. This was a place where people went to eat, not to socialise or show off, or relax. Galia sipped her tea and tried not to fiddle with the spoon as the clatter of cutlery against china jarred the air around her. The only voice heard above the metallic din was that of the cashier, barking unlikely numbers at dumbfounded customers as they queued to pay.

  Galia’s gaze was drawn to the man at the next table, also drinking tea but with soggy slurping sounds, and reading a local paper: heavy and oily looking, she recognized him as the deputy mayor. As she watched, he stood up slowly, sauntered to the door like a gun-slinger in the old west, and, having stood perfectly still for
a number of seconds, let out a huge and juice-filled belch, the echo of which splashed off the walls, reverberating, and soaking the eaters’ ears. The clatter of cutlery faltered momentarily, and then resumed even louder, before the oily man turned back into the room. He made his way back to his seat, adjusting his fly as he did so, and nodding slightly to Galia and a glowering waitress as he passed.

  Galia stood to queue for another glass of tea and noticed that the framed posters of favourite Soviet holiday destinations that decked the cafe’s walls had been moved around. Where once there had been a view of Yalta, there was now a vista of the Caucasus; where once the impressive war memorial at Volgograd had hung, there was now the hydro-electric dam at Krasnoyarsk: impressive, maybe, in a different way. Galia wondered absently why the management had decided to reshuffle the fly-blown decorations. Maybe it was the requirement of some by-law.

  She hobbled slowly back to her seat and surveyed the crumb-laden table with eyes that ached. In the late Sixties, or maybe the early Seventies, she had taken a holiday to Volgograd. It wasn’t by choice: all the women from her section at work were taken for four days on a tour of Volgograd. It was their annual holiday, and they were grateful. She had stood looking up from the windswept banks of the Volga, tiny in the shadow of the immense Motherland war memorial, and tears had trickled down her cheeks. Motherland, sixty metres high, wielding her sword, hair and gown flowing in wide waves of concrete, had left her speechless. The great dignity, this calling to the people for blood and honour and sacrifice, had moved her. She closed her eyes and remembered the dead, including Pasha. A voice inside her whispered that it might have been better for Pasha to have been blown to smithereens along with his field kitchen and liquid eyes, right there in 1945: it would have saved them both a lot of bother. A strange hiccup, half sob, half giggle escaped her and trailed off into a throaty sigh. Her comrades had nodded in sympathy and stroked her hand. They knew Galia never cried.