Dog Boy (33 page)

The Major turned to look at him, shocked for a moment, then nodded. ‘That would be just about all of us,’ he muttered with a wry smile.

 

They watched the van pull away.

‘Why didn’t you try to talk to him?’ Natalya asked.

Dmitry didn’t answer immediately. Why indeed? Would Romochka have listened? He might have calmed the boy down. Why the reluctance? Had he feared what he would see? The noise was inhuman, bestial. That, yes; and what else? Then he knew: he was wary of being associated with the capture. No act in that moment could have been right for the boy he was going to foster, so he chose not to act.

‘Why didn’t you?’ he asked coldly.

‘I don’t want him to hate me!’

That’s why she had held back meekly and uttered no word, waiting for Bloody Dmitry to act. Dmitry felt anger wash over him and then leave as quickly as it had come.

There was a silence. They both thought it: Romochka must surely have heard Dmitry; and maybe he had smelled them both. They had made an awful mistake in leaving him as if he were an animal screaming in the van. Waiting for that van to make the journey from wilderness to hospital, from animal to human, before they would touch him or help him.

Natalya sighed. ‘Oh well.’

Dmitry suddenly felt very sorry for her and for her sadness, and sorry for both of them and all the mistakes they would be making together. A strange streak of joy shot through him, completely at odds with everything: here they were, inexpert and foolish, together, as parents. Their love story, so small and ordinary, would include all the ordinary mistakes too.

He reached his arm around her shoulders, patting her awkwardly.

‘You’ll be the best foster mother,’ he said.

Dmitry pored over his map as Natalya frowned at the skyline. The city was unfamiliar. Even the names were strange to him and the topography bewildering. He rotated the map through one-eighty degrees. Here it was. Yes, they were in the alleys of Zagarodiye now, the known territory of the pack, and very likely the precise area in which the lair was situated, according to the militzia. The restaurant was a very long way from home for these dogs. Incredible as this hunting range seemed, there was no doubt: Dmitry had the tracking routes marked in orange on the map from the brief five hours that one of the restaurant dogs had had the implant. He had planned on going everywhere but this forgotten fragment of Moscow was disturbing and his resolve faltered. He felt as though they had entered an alien land and were strangers. They were attracting attention—watched with hostility, skirted as though diseased.

To Dmitry’s dismay, he noticed they were being followed by a silent gang of children and adolescents. A cold sweat broke out all over his body. He knew all the theories on gangs and the reasons why children and youth gravitated to them (the twin drawcards of power and group belonging), and the miraculous fact that if they lived, they grew out of the need for gangs at a certain point. But he had always felt gut-clenching fear at being followed by kids like these. They had secret codes, secret incomprehensible wars. These ones all had 88 or 18 on their shirts and bomber jackets. The only certainty was that they were merciless.

He glanced at Natalya. Except for a quickening of her step, she seemed unconcerned, ridiculously unafraid. Natalya, he knew by now, had never once seriously considered that rape or violent death might come her way. Natalya had a stand-up-and-talk-your-way-out-of-it reaction to all confrontations, a dangerous, naïve confidence that her small universe of right and wrong could prevail and, with the force of her eloquence and personality, be imposed on anyone. She was often right.

But Dmitry knew she couldn’t be right here, now, and he was annoyed that he had to have the double terror—for her as well as for himself. He couldn’t trust her to follow his lead. She might do something crazy like talk to them. He would fight for her with all his strength. He was ready—but what if he failed? His heart pounded as he tried, unremarked, to assess their numbers. About fifteen, at least half of them past puberty. He felt his feet sliding in the sweat that filled his shoes.

After a while the children veered off, and Natalya slowed, making him slow down too. His terror settled. She must have had some inkling of danger, or she wouldn’t have quickened her step. He wanted to hug her as he glanced back to make sure the 88s had really disappeared.

They listened hard now for anything that might give them a sign of dogs. A pack of eight dogs, and one of the bitches had had dugs. There should be puppies. It was autumn, though; perhaps too late.

Where would you hole up if you were a dog?

To their left, pale gold grass half covered a meadow dotted with miscellaneous rubbish. In the middle distance the grass ended at the feet of serried ranks of huge apartment blocks, once cream- and blue-tiled but now streaked with grime and riddled with snow crazing. They were typical of their era. Probably a thousand people per building, Dmitry thought. He had heard about this precinct Zagarodiye, he realised. Popularly known also as Svalka, Rubbish Dump. He had had something to do with a couple of teenagers, juvenile killers, who had lived, he guessed, in these same apartments somewhere.

Tiny squares of washing fluttered gaily on myriad far balconies. Really, these buildings were just like hundreds of others clustered around Moscow’s outer ring route, yet Dmitry found the whole tableau, even these flags of lace and gaily coloured cloth, awful somehow; tainted by the fact that a boy (two boys) had lived with a pack of dogs here and been unremarkable. To the side of the blocks, unfinished constructions were slowly disintegrating in a weedy waste land. They looked blackened, even burnt in places, and Dmitry guessed that gangs or bomzhi lit fires in them. High up on the bare façades burnt holes showed here and there, with fire marks around them like theatrical eyelashes.

With a foetid chemical-and-rot smell in their nostrils, they crossed an empty allotment, as big as a communal garden plot. The smell was getting stronger, until it was almost a physical barrier, pushing them back. Dmitry had the feeling that it was coating their lungs, infecting them somehow. He pulled out some tissues, clamped one over his mouth and nose, and handed one to Natalya.

Then Dmitry realised that the great flat-topped hill to their right was made of rubbish. A mountain of rubbish. He had never known that Svalka was literal, not metaphoric. The mountain loomed over the forest and the land, compelling attention with its height and breadth and stink. They walked down the lane towards it, and the city dropped away behind them, leaving Dmitry feeling as though he had entered a different world. This wasn’t Losini Ostrav National Park, that was for sure. This was forgotten land. Waste land, marsh and forest, stench-blasted. You could see occasional dachas here and there, looking unkempt. Pre-mountain, no doubt.

They passed a developer’s sign that depicted the rubbish mountain as ski slopes and Natalya snorted into her tissue. Dmitry looked around with a new awareness. Actually, this was all extremely valuable. Vacant real estate. In Moscow. Incredible. If he were ever to consider buying a little block of land, this would be the place. Perhaps it was already too late; perhaps all this had already been sold for impossible prices. Powerlines buzzed audibly overhead, sagging almost to treetop level in between huge steel pylons. He could see movement on the mountain now, although nothing that resembled the brightly dressed skiers of the billboard. Tiny stooped figures inched over the rubbish in the middle distance.

‘There,’ Natalya said, pointing again and holding her nose. ‘Somewhere in those buildings—Oh! It’s a cemetery.’

They made their way slowly in that direction with a quiet footfall, listening. Natalya grimaced, looking around, and then said almost in a whisper, ‘Remember what Dostoevsky had to say about animals?
God gave them joy untroubled. They are without sin, and you, in all your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you
… something like that!’

Dmitry laughed. He kicked a plastic bottle towards the place marked for a future chairlift. ‘But which is our dogboy to be, Natalochka? The sinless or the defiling?’

Natalya thought of Romochka, locked now in the spare room of their apartment: bereft, wild, furious, betrayed. Shaved. He would be awake by now, groggy. She was thankful for the sedative; and trusted Konstantin to prevent the boy doing himself any physical harm.

She was even more certain now that this was their one chance to regain the boy’s trust: to convince him to stay and, long term, to give him a life. He had an exceptionally strong and healthy body. Worms, sure; and the worst ear mite infestation she had ever seen, but they had been able to clean, microchip and inoculate him; and treat practically everything while he was unconscious. Lab results were back, too. No HIV; and one big surprise: Romochka was completely unrelated to Marko. She’d given Dmitry the data summary. But she hadn’t told Dmitry everything: certainly not what she had seen, looking at Romochka’s naked, cleaned body.

On the plus side, clean, asleep and shaved, Romochka had a striking face, and, unlike many severely neglected children, the look of a child. Despite the scars, quite beautiful. Faintly Tartar. But—she couldn’t get it out of her mind.
Who had carved the word
собака
into the child’s chest?

She had a strong sense that the whole story was more tainted by human cruelty than they could ever know. The story of Mamochka who loved her sons was merely something they had been told because they wanted to hear it. She said nothing of these doubts either. Something about her former certainty made her feel vaguely ashamed—an alien and unpleasant sensation. Well, she told herself, Romochka had lied brazenly and put on a very convincing performance, and she didn’t want Dmitry getting cold feet because a child was not what he seemed. Not now when she could see clearly that he needed this child in his life.

The word on Romochka’s chest would be there for life. Natalya was more determined, having seen it, that it wouldn’t define him and that she would see to it that he was rehabilitated. That word ‘dog’ made her really want this boy.

Dmitry was losing hope. Yes, he agreed, on the balance of probabilities, there might be puppies, but even in the territory the militzia map had identified, finding them would be near impossible. They wandered around with their ears straining for every tiny sound under all the sounds, finding this quiet dead land, to their surprise, too busy, too rich in noises. Underneath the buzzing all manner of things twittered and clanked, revved and rattled. Ravens yowled, gulls screeched, engine noise ebbed and flowed nearby; in the distance the steady whisper-roar of the great motorway. Natalya was not confident that they hadn’t missed what they were seeking amidst all this racket.

‘See, Dmitry! We are becoming dogs to try to keep him!’

‘Let’s smell them out then,’ laughed Dmitry, releasing his nose briefly. He was mulling over something Natalya had said when they first thought Romochka too was a dogboy.
This boy was better off living with dogs than with humans.
In a way she was right. No drugs, for starters. No glue or petrol. Probably no rapes. Eight-year-olds living in the street were almost invariably victims of all three. And even if they had once been Romochka’s family pets, these dogs had evolved to function as a pack. They were close enough to being feral, and probably very loyal and protective. His readings on feral dogs gave him some confidence: how organised and disciplined their social structure can be. What strong codes and laws they live by. The whole clan remaining one family, working together to feed each other. Most females and males remain non-breeding. An outsider is not even approached, even if it is a bitch in oestrus. So rigidly familial that, were they to survive in peace for any length of time, they would become hopelessly inbred. Genetically speaking, they needed disasters to smash the clan so that lone survivors could begin new clans with unrelated dogs.

Well, disaster had struck, no doubt about it.

But really, a very focused and disciplined life. A homeless boy could be a lot worse off, all things considered. Romochka had scars and parasites, but no major diseases. And physically he was frighteningly strong. His clan had been sleek, healthy, fast and, if the rumours were to be believed, very dangerous. Dmitry smiled, remembering a headline: MUTANT DOGS TERRORISE MOSCOVITES. According to that article they were smart enough to use limited sign language and catch the metro to whatever part of Moscow they wanted to hunt in. Humans were on the menu, it seemed: bodies found here and there, partly eaten.

Dogs did catch the metro. He had seen that for himself.

They turned a corner into a lane that seemed almost a potholed farm track. A woman was walking towards them. She was dressed in a bulky military overcoat gathered with string at the waist. Her head was covered with a lace kerchief, perhaps once white, from which dishevelled ropes of long straw-coloured hair fell over her shoulders. She stopped and looked them up and down from a little distance away. Dmitry could see a broad imbecilic smile, but the rest of her face was strangely hard to make out. She held out one hand in a gesture to welcome or perhaps delay them, wrestling with the overcoat and rummaging in her bodice with the other.