The Story of a Life

61

The Bulldog

My unit was not in Baranovichi. It had already moved on towards Nesvizh, the commandant told me. I didn’t want to go back to the hospital even for a little while. It was too hard to be around people. I spent the night in a signalman’s hut outside town on the line to Minsk, and then left in the morning for Nesvizh. I let my horse go at his own pace. He walked along slowly, even stopping at times to think about something. Or perhaps to rest. After a bit he would move on again, shaking his head as he went.

It was a fresh autumn day, free of rain but with dreary clouds hanging low over the fields. I reached a small village by midday. I don’t recall its name. I decided to stay the night there. The retreat had slowed down, and our unit could not go any farther than Nesvizh. I was certain I’d catch up with it tomorrow.

The village hugged the shores of a small lake at the bottom of a hollow. At the far end of the lake water rushed over the dam by an old mill. Dark willows stretched out so far over the lake that it appeared they might lose their balance at any moment and fall into the deep water. I asked some old Jewish women where I could stay for the night. They pointed me towards a simple inn, a broken-down wooden building that reeked of paraffin and herring. The innkeeper, a tiny Jew with a shock of red hair on his head, said yes, of course, he had a place where I could sleep for the night, but it was a small room and I would have to share it with an artillery officer and so it would be tight. He led me to the room. It was as narrow as a coffin. The officer wasn’t there, but his camp bed had already been set up. There was just enough room for my bed, but not enough for either of us to sit down on them.

‘Your home for the night!’ said the innkeeper. ‘It’s nice and quiet here, and we don’t have any bedbugs, as God is my witness! You can have an omelette for supper or I can boil you some milk.’

‘But what about the officer?’ I asked. ‘Will he agree to this?’

‘Oh, good God!’ he cried. ‘That’s funny! Dvoira, did you hear what he asked? This here is no officer. This is an angel from heaven.’

I took my horse to the barn, fed him and then headed off for the village. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, or even hear the talk of others. Every word I spoke and every word I heard increased the distance between Lëlya and me. My pain was all I had left of her, and I feared its being blunted or softened. I had to guard it as the last thing that remained of our love. Poetry was the only language that didn’t upset me and from which I didn’t feel the need to hide. Verses kept coming to me for mysterious reasons from the hidden depths of my memory, and the comfort they offered was neither obtrusive or painful.

I walked over to the lake, sat down on the shore under a willow, and listened to the sound of the water flowing through the rotten mill-race. Towards evening a soft yellowish glow tinged the clouds. Somewhere beyond the rim of the earth the sun was shining its meagre light. The water mirrored the yellow sky. Under the willows it was already cold and damp. I recalled a few lines I had read long ago whose author I had forgotten: ‘An old miller opened to me his home by the black willows, on my nighttime journey …’

There was nothing special about the lines. But somehow, for me, they held a magical healing power. The loneliness of my nighttime journey soothed me for some strange reason. But almost at once I buried my face in my hands – familiar words came to me in an echo of that sweet voice across a vast, cold, windswept distance. There the heavy dusk was gathering over an abandoned grave. There lay the girl from whom I never should have been parted, not even for a single hour. I distinctly heard her words: ‘Springtime, you have no name. For you, my distant one, there is no name.’fn1 These had been her favourite lines. I repeated them now, but my ears heard the distant voice of Lëlya, not my own. It was a voice neither I nor anyone else would ever hear again.

I got up and walked towards the field beyond the village. Dusk now filled all the air between the sky and the rust-brown fields. It was already difficult to see the road, yet still on and on I walked. A dull glow rose over the village of Luninets. To the north, a lone white star shone above a hut that sat dark and lonely amid the fields. ‘Her lucky star!’ the thought struck me. ‘The one she had believed in a few days before her death.’ No, I told myself, it is simply impossible to accept the permanent disappearance of a fellow human being.

It was dark when I returned to the inn. My camp bed had been set up in the little room. The artillery officer, his face brown from the sun and his eyebrows singed by fire, lay in bed reading a book by candlelight. As I entered, I heard a ragged growl coming from under his bed.

‘Mars, quiet!’ said the officer. He sat up and extended a hand. ‘Lieutenant Vishnyakov. Glad to have a roommate. Think we can get any sleep in here tonight?’ he asked, a note of doubt in his voice.

‘Dvoira!’ shouted the innkeeper from behind the wall. ‘Why don’t you go and see if the gentlemen officers want something to eat?’

I wasn’t hungry but had a cup of tea and then lay down. The artillery officer was a quiet fellow, which came as a relief. A large yellow bulldog crawled out from under his bed, came over and stared at me in the face for a long time.

‘He’s begging for sugar,’ said the officer. ‘Don’t give him any. He’s picked up a bad habit of begging. It’s torture having a dog with you at the front, but I’d hate to get rid of him. He does make an excellent watchman.’

I patted the dog. He grabbed my hand with his teeth and held it there for a minute to frighten me and then let go. It seemed he was a friendly sort. I lay there with my eyes closed for a long time. Ever since childhood I had loved to lie like this, pretending to be asleep, and dreaming up all sorts of adventures or travelling with closed eyes around the world.

But now I didn’t want to make up adventures or travel. I only wanted to remember. I recalled my time with Lëlya and bemoaned the fact that even though we had lived side by side for a long time, still we had been so distant from one another. It was not until Odessa that everything had become clear to us. Or perhaps it had happened earlier, the day we had sat in the poor Polish hut on the river Vepsh and listened to the fairytale about the lark with the golden beak. Or even earlier, in Khentsiny, when Lëlya sat at my beside all night long as the rain poured down.

Then I recalled Romanin. What had happened to him? Why had he become so rude to me? It must have been my fault. I understood that my habit of giving in to people – what he called my unsteadiness – irritated him, as did my tendency to see the good in everything, even in things that were in clear opposition to each other, which he called spinelessness. To him I was a ‘wobbly intelligènt’, and what made it all the harder to bear was that I was the only one he treated so unfairly. ‘I’m not like that at all, and that’s the truth,’ I told myself, but how was I to prove that to him?

The clatter of metal wheels woke me in the middle of the night. The artillery was passing through the village. I drifted off after that and fell back asleep. I sat up in terror at the sound of a strange wailing in the room. At first I thought it was the dog, but then I heard the officer’s bed creak and shake. I lit a candle. He was groaning and writhing in convulsions. Yellow foam oozed from his mouth. It was ‘falling sickness’, an epileptic fit. I had seen a great many of them on the hospital train and knew just what to do. I had to put a spoon in the officer’s mouth and hold it there so he didn’t bite or swallow his tongue. There was a spoon in my cup of cold tea on the windowsill. I grabbed it and tried to stick it in his mouth, but there was so little room to move and he shook and thrashed so violently I couldn’t. I got on top of him and pinned him down to the bed when all of a sudden, I felt a stabbing pain in my neck and a heavy weight on my back. Not understanding what had just happened, I tried to shake it off until I felt the sharp fangs digging deep into my neck. In defence of his master, the dog had leapt on me from behind without making a sound. He thought I was strangling him.

His jaws tightly clenched, the dog tried to swallow. I could feel the skin tighten around my neck and knew that in seconds I would pass out. With my last bit of remaining strength, I forced myself to pull my Browning from under the pillow, point it behind me next to my ear, and fire.

I never heard the shot go off. All I heard was the heavy thud of a falling body. I turned around. The dog lay on the floor. His teeth were bared and blood trickled from his mouth. His body shook, and then he lay still.

‘They’re fighting!’ cried the innkeeper from the other room. ‘Fighting, oh, dear God!’

‘Shut up!’ I yelled. ‘Get in here! I need help.’

He appeared in nothing but his white nightshirt, carrying a thick candle in a silver candlestick. His eyes were filled with terror.

‘Hold him,’ I said to the innkeeper. ‘I’m going to try to put this spoon in his mouth or he might bite off his tongue. It’s the falling sickness.’

The innkeeper grabbed him by the shoulders and pressed him down. I thrust the spoon into the officer’s mouth and turned it sideways. He bit down so hard on it I thought his jaw had snapped.

‘Sir, you have blood on your back,’ the innkeeper said in a gentle voice.

‘It was the dog. It jumped up and bit me. I shot it.’

‘Oh, what a world!’ the innkeeper cried. ‘Just look what we’ve done to each other!’

All of a sudden, the officer went limp and quiet. The attack had passed.

‘He’ll sleep for a few hours now,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get the dog out of here.’

The innkeeper picked up the bulldog and buried it in the garden. Dvoira, a thin woman with a kind, meek face, came in. I unpacked my first aid kit and she cleaned and then bandaged the wounds on my neck. I told the innkeeper I didn’t want to see the officer when he woke up so I would be leaving as soon as it was light.

‘Right you are!’ he said. ‘He’ll be sad, and you’ll feel bad, even though it’s nobody’s fault. Come and sit with us. Dvoira, light the samovar. Have a cup of tea for the road.’

After I had drunk about half a cup of their thick tea, Dvoira said: ‘Just imagine! Another minute and he’d have strangled you. I’m shaking just thinking about it.’

My neck hurt. I could hardly turn my head.

‘Life isn’t what it once was,’ said the innkeeper with a sigh. ‘And a kopeck isn’t either. Now it’s worthless. If only you could have visited before the war. Every day had a sense of order to it, every day brought with it its own pleasures. I would open up the inn early in the morning, and wagons would roll in with kind people – some on their way to the market, others to the mill. I knew them all for fifty versts around. They came to the inn to eat and drink – some tea, others horilka. And it made us happy to watch folks enjoy our plain, wholesome food – bread and onions, or sausage and tomatoes. They chatted happily, about prices, about the harvest, about the quality of the flour, about potatoes and hay, and I don’t know what else – everything under the sun! It was a quiet, peaceful time that made your soul feel good. I never had to chase after every last kopeck, as long as I had enough to live on and a bit left over to pay off the local police inspector. I had one wish – an education for my children. Well, you could say they’re getting one now, as soldiers in the army. It’s all gone to ruin. Everything’s ruined, our entire lives.’

It began to get light. Thick mist covered the ground. It made the trees look taller than they were. The mist foretold a fine, clear day. I said goodbye to them. The innkeeper asked me to leave a note for the officer. I wrote: ‘I’m sorry, but I had to shoot your dog.’

The sun came up when I was a couple of versts past the village. Everything shone with dew. In the distance, the rust-brown woods, lit by the early light, seemed to be smouldering darkly. The air on the land was unusually sharp and clear, as though it had been locked up for a long time and only now given its freedom.

I pulled up my horse, took Lëlya’s ring out of my knapsack and put it on my little finger. It felt warm on my hand. I caught up with my unit in the village of Zamirie, near Nesvizh.