Dog Boy (28 page)

He felt as though he, Dmitry, had been part of some huge game, even duped in some way. Certainly not by Marko. Nor Romochka. He stopped, remembering in flashes that strange boy’s behaviour. Romochka, an urban feral child, had dissembled with conscious and consummate art. That child was intelligent. Gifted. But Dmitry didn’t feel duped by Romochka. He felt something bigger, some greater blindness that made him the sport or the laughing stock of someone. He started walking again. Who, then? Himself? God? His peers? His discipline, science? Mysterious children? He grimaced as he watched his boots pump in and out of view. Wolf-children, once so rare they were seen as mythic, were now in plague proportions in Moscow. So many millions of homeless children to choose from, for dogs looking to adopt.

He stopped for a moment.
What if it was really nothing new?
How many of the besprizorniki of the terrible 1920s—those devouring, rampant hordes of homeless children—had sought out dogs? Teaming up for mutual benefit—wasn’t it likely, rather than unlikely?

He laughed bitterly. Natalya’s schoolgirl diary on Romochka would be a more valuable resource than any of his painstaking research. They could submit work that described the co-researcher as ‘Bloody Dmitry’ or ‘Dear Old DPP’. It was all going to turn political and might spell the end of the centre. But it would have to be faced. Natalya’s judgments were idiosyncratic but her observations detailed. They would have to go through her volumes with care now, salvaging everything that could be rewritten. At least, for all her fascination with the older boy, Natalya hadn’t guessed either.

And Marko was constantly ill, now, even asthmatic. Marko was trying to deal himself out the game. So then, Romochka. What would he do if Marko died?

Dmitry walked harder. He chided himself for his bitterness:
Get it into perspective. Professional pique, DPP?
He would be ridiculed, sure. All that earnest blindness. Marko and toys. He flushed. Everything was changed, explained in shameful detail. But, think about it, this was all bigger, much bigger.

What if two little boys lived for years with dogs? Not family pets like that little baby Andrei Tolstyk, not like Ivan Mishukov and his street dogs back in 1998. No—with a clan of feral dogs, functioning socially and physically as dogs themselves. Romochka was a hunting animal; Marko a puppy for whom he provided. Yet, because they had each other, they had become liminal beings—socially, developmentally. Marko couldn’t speak because of course in pack life Romochka would never use speech, and Marko more than anything wanted to retain his place in that world.

But Romochka was a master of
passing
. Among humans, he could pass as an ordinary boy, near enough. With Asperger’s perhaps, or mild autism, or a behavioural disorder plus brain damage brought on by abuse. He’d done so for three months now in the centre—among
experts
, no less. Among dogs…well, Dmitry could only begin to guess, but in a way Marko’s early behaviour had to be a reflection of Romochka among dogs. Romochka could cross…over. Romochka walked upright and had language. He had to have begun life with the dogs well after he became verbal and once all sensorimotor, representational and symbolic play skills were developed.

Was this really possible? That meant…what? Three years now with dogs? Three winters. It was astounding, unprecedented. You could almost say one was more dog than boy; the other more boy than dog. Not to mention the feat of survival. Two!

This was exciting, now that he thought about it. He could rewrite the studies and submit an honest reassessment in the light of new information. He would note all he could remember (and those diaries would be crucial: Natalya and he could do it all together). He would study the two boys with the greatest attention. He would lure Romochka into the easy living in the centre, wean him from the dogs over a period of time. Come to think of it, he had never seen Romochka eat—all the food they ever gave him was taken, surreptitiously sniffed, and stored on his person. Dmitry’s blood sang around his body as he strode. He would rehabilitate both, and perhaps be able to show the resilience and recovery of children who have had just one significant human contact in early years, no matter how defective. Marko’s health might improve too, if Romochka lived with him. Marko
would
acquire language, if Romochka lost his secret clan dominance, Dmitry was almost certain. And Romochka would reintegrate spectacularly. After all, Ivan Mishukov’s rehabilitation from his life with street dogs had been successful.

He found himself thinking about the time Romochka slapped him. He had been walking up the hospital corridor with Romochka keeping step by his side. They were on their way to see Marko. Romochka said something to him, once, twice, and Dmitry was thinking about this broken speech—its odd rhythms and its insistent claim on the listener through unfamiliarity. Romochka had stopped walking, suddenly, and at the same time Dmitry felt a sharp blow to his hand. He turned. Romochka was standing a couple of paces behind him, his small face grimacing in strange, helpless rage, his eyes fierce with it. Dmitry’s hand burned afresh now with its own memory. He wished he had heard what the boy said. The incident stood out to him now as important. An irretrievable moment that might have illuminated everything.

If Romochka was around four when he began life with dogs, then Marko was…born later.

No. It wasn’t possible. His disappointment settled even more heavily than before. There was going to be some ordinary explanation that revealed them as merely neglected.

Dmitry looked up, his rhythm broken by the slowing flow of pedestrians. He had walked a long way from the Makarenko Centre and the university. He checked his watch. 4.30. He had left the centre just after lunch. He didn’t recognise this district at all. The pavement was narrow and treacherous, broken here and there as if diseased, and the buildings were an ugly, impromptu mix of structures, some faded and crumbling, some newer, Kruschev-era. Almost all post-revolution. There was some blockage up ahead. Other pedestrians leapt among cars and around each other and eventually he found himself directly behind the obstruction. An elderly lady in a dirty cream lace scarf inched along the cracked stone lip, carrying two avoski bulging with produce. Cars scudded by in the crushed ice of the puddles, spattering them both as he waited, his thoughts scattered, for a chance to pass her.

He crossed the road instead and found himself at an intersection, unsure which way to turn. He could see no tram stop, no avtobus, and no metro. He would have to ask directions. A sad-looking black dog crossed the street with care and headed along it with some steady purpose. Where did dogs go and come back to with such certainty?

He followed the dog for no real reason other than curiosity. After just five minutes, its purpose faltered. It stopped, sniffed around and lifted its leg to mark a concrete seat. Meandering around, but not randomly. It was intent on something, sniffing here and there, then marking a tree behind the bench. Dmitry looked up and saw that he was outside a fairly recent Soviet-era metro entrance.

Inside, the warmth enveloped him, and he headed to the turnstiles, relieved. He passed a group of bomzhi, men and women, begging along the wall and descended the escalator into the deep vault and arcades of the underground. He didn’t recognise the name of the station and was disoriented. Definitely outside the ring route, he thought, or he would know it. He looked for the signs, unsure at first which platform would lead back home. Yes. This was one station from the end of the line.

The station opened up in a series of plain palisades, arches and pillars. A rather grand place for all its plainness. The platform was crowded with tired-looking commuters. Factory workers. Along the back wall of the platform there were more bomzhi, some asleep in piles of rags, some standing near trolleys that were piled high with miscellaneous stuff and draped with plastic bags or blue tarpaulins. They looked ready to move and, when the militzia came down the stairs, they all got up and pretended to be waiting for the train. Dmitry noticed particularly the dogs. A dog hovered warily at the outer fringe of the workers and another, in its own private cocoon, wove in and out among the people, avoiding contact, alert but unafraid. A small black dog rode high on a blue tarp, staring bug-eyed yet blank. None of them made any noise. Although Dmitry was surprised at how many there were, he was also aware that they were familiar. There were often dogs and bomzhi in metro stations. He had simply never paid them much attention before.

He stood among the workers waiting for the train to pull in. Just ahead of him he saw a plumy dog’s tail and he moved to see better. It was a large thick-haired mongrel ovcharka. It stood patiently among the people, shifting if anyone came too close.

The tracks hissed and rattled, the air, shunted up the tunnel and across the waiting people, was filled with the familiar compound cacophony, and the squat face of the train filled their view. People stirred, reanimated. The dog’s tail moved, and it turned with the people to acknowledge the arriving train.

The dog waited for the doors to sigh open and the first crush of people to embark, then it too hopped onto the train. Dmitry followed. The dog stood to one side and stared into the middle distance. People ignored it. Dmitry stood not far from it, his heart beating fast. The dog sat down and stared out of the glazed doors, panting quietly. Dmitry noticed how the thick pelt shifted and parted over its shoulders as it swayed. He could see its profile—wide smiling jaws, white teeth. The dog gulped now and then to clear the saliva from its tongue, then resumed panting. The steady look in its brown eyes, the wrinkled brow, didn’t change. When the train pulled into the next station, it stopped panting and looked around, ears lowered deferentially, apologetically, as it moved its large body out of the way for exiting passengers. Then it resumed its stare and its relaxed swaying stance. As the train slowed for the second station, the dog stopped panting. It waited until most people had left, then stepped off among the stragglers. Dmitry watched as it trotted across to the peregod through to the ring-route station and disappeared up the stairs.

He slumped back into his seat and let his home-bound train pull him back to the familiar parts of the city. His dizziness returned. His world had shifted somehow, had swelled to encompass some fact that had always been there but from which he had been barred. Why had dogs always seemed thing-like, symbolic, when they were in fact person-like and about as symbolic as he was? Where was that dog going? Was it someone’s dog? How had it learned a path that took a train, then a transfer? Or was it travelling randomly—his scalp crawled—for pleasure? When he reached home, one station short of the university, he stepped down beside a ghost image of four legs disembarking in the throng.

Here everything was familiar. Just beyond the park was his apartment, seventh floor up, with a beautiful view of birch tree trunks and golden tops, a restored church and a ring of identical apartment blocks. In it Natalya was waiting. He had a feeling Natalya would see no cause for dismay in his news, and although he was bracing himself against her enthusiasm he craved it too. He was exhausted and his legs were shaking. He found it hard to put one blistered foot in front of the other.

At the park gate he saw a dog. It was a shaggy thing lit murky orange in the street lights. It caught his glance and dropped its head to slink into the shadows, then it loped on silent feet to slip out of sight into the small alley by the Megafon shop. Three dogs further down the street were raiding the large new rubbish vat. A pale dog was up on top, gleaming as it tore at a cardboard box. The second had its front paws on the vat and was wagging its tail and flipping its nose as though making small silent barks. The third, black, its silhouette tipped in orange light, was standing four-square a little away from them, not looking at them.

Dmitry realised suddenly that they were a team. The muscle, the brains and the lookout—which was staring, he realised, straight at him. He was part of this tableau.

He turned away and pushed the park gate open.

This large, poorly lit park was considered safe. A militzia patrol was supposed to keep drunks, beggars and drug dealers out. All the neighbourhood knew the militzia controlled the deals that took place in the park, but the effect was the same: the place was safe, and free of beggars.

Tonight, however, the park was full of dogs. Dmitry counted at least seven, looming larger than life in the shadows. Why had he never noticed? He reached his bench under the birch trees and sat down. He had sat here often on his way home. He had sat here in all seasons, winding down after long days. On clear autumn nights like this the park shimmered and glittered as pale leaves tugged at their stems and then rained down with a windy rustling to the pale carpet. The army of park workers had not yet taken over. They would be along soon to rake up all the leaves and pack them into garbage bags, leaving bare ugly earth ready for the snow, but at this moment the park shone, unkempt. Everything was luminous, the sky dark and cloudless. He had seen few such nights in his six years here. He closed his eyes. Of course he had seen dogs before. He had been harassed by dogs before. Everyone had. Still, he felt shaken.

He opened his eyes at a tiny, proximate sound. Well, of course—a dog. It was a mastiff, a Moscow watchdog, and it knew him. Its little black eyes gleamed at him in a friendly way out of its dark panda mask. He knew it too. His neighbour’s dog. Malchik sat down and waited, still eyeing him with happy affection and wagging a huge tail.

‘Hello, Malchik,’ Dmitry said softly, and Malchik tipped his massive head to one side in what seemed almost comical acknowledgment. Had Dmitry ever spoken to a dog before? Not that he could recall. He held out a hand, and Malchik immediately got up, padded towards him and licked it. The tongue felt warm, faintly raspy, quite gentle. Sloppy, too. Dmitry wiped his hand quickly against his trouser leg. Malchik then turned and reverse-parked his great bulk right beside Dmitry. He pressed his weight in against Dmitry’s knee. He tipped his huge head up and back over his shoulder to keep eye contact. Dmitry stroked that bunched brow; ran his hand down over the heavy neck and shoulders. Malchik’s thick pelt was so loose on his body that it rolled under Dmitry’s hands. The tree-trunk neck and rippling muscles were deep underneath all this cuddly stuff. Dmitry smiled and kept massaging the dog. He glanced up and down the dark park lane and leaned in to sniff his fingertips and Malchik’s neck. This dog smelled quite nice. A lot nicer than Romochka. Yuri Andrejevich must shampoo him. This huge bulk all sudsy in a small bathtub? How ludicrous. Rub-a-dub-dub. But you’d have to wash a dog if it lived with you.