Georgi vladimov faithful ruslan

distance that he belonged to the male sex, one or another of the dogs would break away from the pack and take up his station a little way behind him. Having escorted him to his destination the dog would return, asking nothing in reward. Whenever a person threw them something edible, the dog would growl and turn aside, convulsively gulping down the sudden ow of saliva. Nobody knew what they lived on; this, too, was a concern that they revealed to no one. There was only one disturbing feature of their behavior: they did not like it when more than three men formed into a group. A party of three was the legal limit in Russian prison camps, but fortunately in the cold winter of Siberia larger gatherings did not occur very often. Gradually the people got used to the dogs, and the dogs in turn presumably grew accustomed to the town; at any rate, they showed no sign of wanting to leave it.

The only one who could not get used to town life was Ruslan; in any case, he had no time to spare for such things. Each morning he would set out along the white road to the camp and sit for hours outside the barbed wire. He had a great many important things to tell Master: that the train had not come yet, but that when it did come at least one of the dogs would certainly be on duty to meet it; that in general the dogs had settled down fairly well for the time being and were keeping together … and a few other more trivial matters. It never occurred to Ruslan to worry about how he would communicate all this; somehow his master had always managed to grasp whatever Ruslan was trying to convey. He was worried and upset by something di erent, however—namely, what was happening to the camp. Many more fence poles had been knocked down, huge ugly holes and openings in the wire gaped between the poles that were still standing, and some strange newcomers had lit bon res alongside the huts. They were unloading bricks from trucks and stacking them in piles, though they seemed to be doing it very casually and in between other activities, on which they preferred to spend more time, such as wrestling in the snow, lounging around and smoking for an hour or so at a time, or singing in chorus while seated on logs—sitting, in fact, on those same sacred fence poles! They took special pleasure in doing body searches on the women, slapping them on the seat of the pants or the chest, and while they were being frisked, the women roared with laughter or squealed like stuck pigs. None of this was anything like the life the real prisoners had led, and Ruslan began to feel an ever-growing fondness for those runaways. He would, he thought, forgive them for their stupid escape if only they would come back and would stand again in beautiful straight ranks with the masters and the dogs posted alongside them.

He very much wanted to go into the camp and have a good bark at these intruders, as a reminder that the camp did not belong to them and they had no right to run things according to their rules. But Master had forbidden him to pass through the wire, and only he could lift that ban. Twilight was falling, and still his master had not shown up.

Not once had Ruslan picked up his scent or sni ed that beloved, manly smell—a mixture of ri e oil, tobacco and strong, well-scrubbed youth. All masters smelled like that, but Ruslan’s master also liked to put on eau de cologne, which he bought at the o cers’ canteen, and besides that there was an entire bouquet that belonged to him alone, to his character. Ruslan knew well that humans di ered from one another in character as much