Galina Petrovna’s Three-Legged Dog Story

2

The Azov House of Culture Elderly Club

Galia smiled with quiet satisfaction as she finished making her way along the corridor, dishing out the steaming vareniki to her aged and tremulous neighbours. Xenia, hunched in the midst of a gallery of grainy pictures of her son, had been very happy to take the food. Galia had greeted the son as was expected, crossing herself in front of the little shrine devised in his memory and housed behind the television in Xenia’s sitting room. Twenty years had passed, but the son’s keys and school bag still lay on the cabinet in the hall, where he had last thrown them that day in July 1974 before heading off for the river, and adventures.

Next was poor Denis, with his huge bulbous nose and disfigured cauliflower ears, a bachelor of bear-like proportions. He disappeared into his apartment with Galia’s offering and returned with a huge bunch of mottled grapes in exchange. Galia eyed the grapes and wondered what best use to make of them: they looked a little past their prime, but she accepted them gracefully. Baba Krychkova took the food with a little grumble about Goryoun Tigranovich and how selfish it was of him to go away and not tell her, and of course there was still no answer at Goryoun Tigranovich’s door. The old Armenian was an enigma, and that was the way he liked it. There were rumours of gold, and foreign travel, and antique icons, and land deals in the Far East, but the thing was that no-one on the corridor really knew Goryoun Tigranovich at all. He gave out his vegetables and was always sober, polite and clean, but that was it. Galia wondered again whether she had been right to reassure Baba Krychkova that he was away. But it was true there had been no mewing of ridiculously fluffy white cats discernible from outside the door, and there certainly would have been if they hadn’t been fed for a day or two. Galia had once seen them being fed when she popped in to exchange some garlic for a pineapple, and it had not been a pretty sight: the white cats turned in to beasts when food was involved. Anyway, it was best not to pry. The neighbour would re-appear when it suited him, or he would not.

Back in her kitchen, Galia clucked as she wiped down the plastic table top and put away her tools.

‘Dog lady! Boroda! You want some fat? Come on, my lady, have a little fat, it’ll help your eyes.’ Galia cut small strips of grizzled mutton fat for the dog, whose eyes already shone like stars.

She laid down her knife and flopped down on her tiny stool for a moment, wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron. She observed the knife lying before her: it had been sharpened so many times the blade was now a thin arc, chilli-pepper sharp. Pasha had cut his thumb on it the day he bought it: that had brought steam to his ears. She had cleaned the wound with iodine and bound it with gauze, all the time him muttering under his breath. It had been during the funny time, when he was sick and not himself, not long before the end.

The half hour struck in a lazy, absent kind of way, and Galia pushed herself up from her stool. It was time for the Elderly Club. She gazed from the window out into the hot evening. She could hear laughter rising in the courtyard like bubbles in beer, and the sound of children playing. Every so often a shriek would escape the young fat girl on the bench: it’ll come to no good, thought Galia, as she struggled to swat the mosquitoes dive-bombing her hair. Boroda made her way across the room and placed her muzzle gently into the corner of Galia’s open hand. Galia looked down at the dog and smiled.

In the cool darkness of her bedroom, she stood in front of the wardrobe and picked out tonight’s floral dress. The wardrobe contained four garments to choose from, each a different colour combination, but otherwise almost identical. This evening it would be the blue-and-white flowers, and the blue sandals over flesh-coloured pop socks. She would also take the white headscarf to keep the mosquitoes out of her hair. There was nothing like insects struggling in your hair to put you off your stride. Why had mosquitoes been created, she wondered, when their only purpose was to make other creatures miserable? But she mused only for a moment, the effort of getting her pop socks on over hot swollen ankles pushing the thought out of her mind.

Boroda, sensing it was time for Galia to go out, stood silently inside the front door, with her nose just touching it and her tail still, waiting to be let through. Then, jauntily balanced on her three legs, the dog wove her way along the corridor, down the stairs and out in to the courtyard, to sit a while under the bench and watch the children playing on the wide brown square of dry grass.

‘Pyao! Pyao! Pyao! You’re dead!’

Boroda made her way gingerly past the smaller, more unpredictable children and across the courtyard to the scruffy trees that hung over the swings. In a comfortably shady spot, she laid her head on her paw and twitched her long grey eyebrows. Sometimes, the children would make up a fidgeting circle around her under the tree and fashion her headdresses of wild olive leaves. She looked noble. She hoped they would stop the shooting and make her a headdress or two soon.

* * *

The lights, such as had bulbs in them, were burning brightly at the Azov House of Culture Elderly Club. The building itself was typical: concrete panelled, with large windows set high in cracked walls gazing on to parquet flooring, itself breaking away from its moorings. Forty-five women and two men, one of whom appeared not to be breathing, stood or sat at tables arranged around the walls of the central hall. At one end a plethora of spider plants hung from the top of a large serving hatch, trailing their grubby fingers across trays of moistureless biscuits, crackers and pretzels, such as could well be found on Mars. In the middle of the room, the host, chairman and general in charge, Vasily Semyonovich Volubchik, or Vasya to his friends, scrabbled through papers, dropped pens and stamped the all-important official membership cards.

Galia thought the Elderly Club was rather a waste of time but felt compelled to go, simply because she was old. There would be card games and tea, chess and arguments. And perhaps a talk on astrology or healthy eating, as if the old ones present didn’t know what fate had in store for them, or what food might kill them. Galia handed her card over to be stamped, avoiding Vasya’s enquiring eyes, and nodded to her old friend Zoya, whose hair had, on this occasion, turned out a violent shade of purple, and went to sit down in the corner.

‘One moment, Galina Petrovna, my dear,’ tolled Vasya like an old cracked bell. He was sorting through papers that kept falling from his fingers, splishing across the floor in great sheaves of hopelessness. Galia’s lips pursed despite herself and her left eye twitched very slightly.

‘Please, here is the agenda for this evening. I thought you might like to say a few words about cabbage root fly?’

‘Really, Vasily Semyonovich? Why?’

‘Vasya, call me Vasya – why stand on ceremony? We are old, and time is not our friend. We are old, so we must be best friends.’

Galia sighed at the well-worn, and totally un-entertaining, phrase. ‘Very well – Vasya – but I gave a talk on cabbage root fly last spring, as I recall.’

‘Yes, yes, my sister, so you did. But it is always worth reminding the people how to avoid this pest, don’t you think? And I think we’ve had some new members join, and some depart, since then.’

Galia was not sure about any new members joining, but recalled, with a needle in the ribs from a sharp stab of missing, that a number of valued members had indeed departed.

‘Yes, you are right, of course, Vasily Semyonovich.’ Galia squashed the thought that all those present knew all there was to know about cabbage root fly with a firm thrust of the chin and a splash of smiling dignity. ‘It will be my pleasure to speak about cabbage root fly, again.’

In truth, Vasya often asked her to speak on vegetable infection issues, and she was, although she would never admit it, quietly flattered. Vasya, for his part, considered that her talk on the Cockchafer beetle still rested in many a memory as the highlight of the Azov year, or even the decade. It had left a lasting impression on him.

He pressed a boiled sweet into her palm and a small sphere of spittle burst at the corner of his smile. She took her hand away sharply and, nodding quickly, made squarely for her seat. Through the long-closed window high above her head, she could see the pale moon rising in a blueberry sky, and vaguely wished she hadn’t come. It would have been so much nicer to be at home with her comfortable slippers, the radio, a bowl of steaming vareniki and her Boroda curled up beside her. As she sat sucking the sweet, circling her ankles and nodding absently to the old, old lady welded to the chair next to her, a memory crept into her mind, as unwelcome as a cockroach under a toilet seat.

One moonlit evening, way back, she had done a very untypical thing. Pasha had walked out, just as she had turned to pour him more tea, it seemed to her, teapot poised in mid-air. Instead of finishing off both their dinners, she placed the teapot on the lino table cloth, put on her cardigan and shoes with shaking hands, and followed him. She could hear the repeat of his footsteps on the stairs, down the passage way, through the courtyard, then clicking briskly along the alley. Down through the old town centre she had crept, as best she could, feeling furtive but unable to stop, scuttling in her billowing summer dress, across the bridge, past the factory, out towards the flats on the east side of town. Once or twice she felt a hint of his tobacco or a lick of his hair cream clinging to the warm panels of the shops she passed: Grocery No. 5, Milk Products, Shoe Shop No. 1 … There was not another soul about. Evenings ended relatively early in Azov back then.

She was beginning to think that she had lost him, that he must in fact have turned off at the factory and simply hurried in to work with some important idea, or maybe an idea or two about one of the women there who wore trousers and smoked cigarettes, when a vague glinting up ahead, away to the right, caught her eye. She was on the very edge of town now, stolidly rustling forward. The half-hearted street lights had petered out 200 paces back, and only the moon lit her way. She made out the dim outline of a building site to her right, the great bulks of concrete panels stacked up like enormous playing cards. To her left lay dead fields, uncultivated, heaving, empty. She caught a vague snatch of words on the wind, and ducked down behind a dark pile of pipes. Something scuttled sharply in the heart of the pile and she recoiled with a startled gasp. With her heart beating in her ears like giant felt boots in the snow, she moved on carefully in her thin canvas shoes. The wind blew her a few words, and she recognized the speaker: it was Pasha, and he was answered by another voice. Was it a woman? Galia hadn’t waited to find out. She had run home, afraid to come face-to-face with whatever was out there on that summer night. The memory sent a shudder up Galia’s backbone that travelled all the way to her eyes, making them prick with tears.

‘So, Galina Petrovna, would you like to inform us of developments around cabbage root fly?’ invited Vasya Volubchik. Galia was sitting staring at the moon, mouth open, eyes glazed. A silence thick as fog rolled over the crowd for several seconds, broken only by a vague slurping at the back of the room. Vasya began to fear a stroke. ‘Galina Petrovna … Galia!’ The urgent pitch of his voice finally broke in to Galia’s reverie. The vision of Pasha and the building site melted and then crystallised into the faces of dozens of her fellow aged citizens, bright eyes burning into her as their rubbery gums sucked rainbows of boiled sweets into tongue-slitting shards: waiting. Galia met their eyes, and swallowed. ‘Yes, Vasily Semyonovich!’

‘A glass of water is required?’

‘No, thank you, I’m quite all right. Just a little tired. I’ve been working today.’

‘And the moon has a strange effect on all ladies, I am told?’

Galia twitched her lip, and took command of her faculties. She began her report, stumbling a little at first, but gradually building her case before the slumbering group. Vasya drew his chair nearer, and gazed at her from five feet away: his deafness brought him in to close proximity with ladies on a daily basis, and it was something he treasured and respected.

But Vasya was troubled: Galia looked pale, and less hearty than usual. The thought crossed his mind, as it often did, that what she needed was a man to look after her. A good, old man, a retired headmaster say, with a vegetable patch of his own, four grandchildren living more than seventy kilometres away, a fine Ural motorbike (1975 vintage) that ran like new, three pairs of good shoes, no bad habits, a lovely cat called Vasik, and at least five of his own teeth. Vasya, he was content to affirm, met all of these criteria.

But no matter how close he sat to Galina Petrovna, she didn’t seem to notice him. She fed him scraps of attention, but rarely a direct look. She resisted all his advances. The flowers he had left outside her door had remained there for days, untouched. If he tried to take her hand to help her up the kerb when they passed in town (he knew her routine quite well, and often managed to happen to be in the same place on the same day), she smiled but frowned simultaneously, and shooed him away with a quiet but firm tut. Once or twice he had made her genuinely angry, but he couldn’t really say why. Her cheeks had flushed and her voice shook slightly as she chased him away, as if he were a cat doing its business among her broad beans. He had only been trying to help with hard work. But he couldn’t be offended, and he couldn’t give up.

He recognized that he was a man who needed to feel useful to a woman, and since his Maria had gone, he was at a loss as to what to do. His mastery of the House of Culture Elderly Club was, of course, a manifestation of being put to good use for women folk. And many of the women were sweetly grateful. He received bowls of fruit, and little cakes, and he never had to mend his own trousers. But the women who put on lipstick for him, and even sometimes wore sandals in summer, held no love interest for him. They were like sisters, or mothers, or even daughters. He didn’t know why. A mystery of life, along with why vodka tasted so good with pickles but not with cress, and why there were no fish left in the river, not even little ones. A riddle, and a good one. Vasya sighed and rested his chin on his walking stick, enjoying the prickling of his white stubble against the old plastic handle, and the proximity of the untouchable Galia.

The oldest old woman stood up with a clearly audible creak, her mosaic brown face cracking open to produce a voice that rumbled up from her belly, or perhaps her boots, which were fashioned from the same stuff as her face. ‘So, citizen, when will the drought be over?’

Galia blinked slowly, twice, before responding.

‘Babushka, I do not know when the drought will be over. But if I hear, I will be the first to let you know.’

‘This, this bourgeois capitalism! This is why we have a drought!’

Galia looked down at the papers in her hand and then at Vasya, who was staring at her, smiling vaguely, in a lopsided fashion. Stroke, thought Galia.

‘Rubbish, crone!’

There was a rustle as forty-five heads turned slowly but urgently to take in the second speaker.

‘Drought is punishment for all the years of godlessness!’ the second oldest old woman rejoined, also creaking to a stand, her voice high, thin and piercing as a rusty violin in a bucket of vinegar. The recently slumbering majority heaved a collective sigh and shifted in their seats, sensing that their comfortable half hour was coming to an end.

‘Citizens—’ began Galia.

‘There were no droughts under Brezhnev, bitch!’

‘Now, ladies, now!’ Vasya levered himself upright and knocked his stick on the parquet floor in an attempt to call order. No-one heard the noise, muffled as it was by the rubber tip, the collective years of hardened earwax, and the screeches and rumbles of the newly roused collective. ‘Ladies, no! General discussion is not on the agenda. We haven’t done the Lotto draw yet!’

Chairs scraped the floor as one after the other the members of the crowd rose to their feet, all the better to berate their neighbour. Knobbly fingers were thrust into ancient faces, and tongues that until five minutes ago had been thick with sleep were now roused to full war-cry and hullabaloo. Vasya, arms flailing, was engulfed in the onslaught, disappearing in a crush of bustling floral-clad flesh and grey hair. Galia subsided slowly into her chair with a sigh and took in the view at the window high above her head. The sky was now a deep black, hung with a moon sharp and cold as the silver arc of her peeling knife. She wished she hadn’t come.

3

Mitya the Exterminator

Mitya didn’t enjoy his job. No, that just wouldn’t do it justice. You might enjoy an ice-cream or something trivial like that, where the feeling passes quickly and is mainly connected to your gut or some other swiftly satisfied desire, leaving you with sticky fingers and a dribbly chin, but rarely with any inner fulfilment. No, Mitya lived for his job. In fact, it wasn’t a job at all. To him, as his boss observed with what Mitya felt was a somewhat insincere smile, it was a calling.

Some are called to the church to share God’s word, give comfort to the sick, guidance to the sinners and enjoy the hospitality of old ladies, especially those who make good jam. And some are called to be medics, healing the sick, giving comfort to the incurable, and receiving gifts from thankful relatives when someone is helped ahead of the queue for testing, results and treatment. And some citizens, some are called to take up arms. Mitya classed himself among this latter group. He had willingly completed his national service after school and had, like many Soviet children, not really enjoyed it. The discipline wasn’t a problem: Mitya enjoyed discipline, and a uniform, however ill-fitting and badly made. The food had not been a problem for him: he liked things plain. The bullying and cold had not got to him, and the military dentist had probably done him a favour by removing all those teeth. But it was the apparent pointlessness of the service that had caused him a problem. He had failed to be sent to Afghanistan: both he and his mother had been disappointed. He wrote to his divisional commander and asked why his unit was not going: there had been no response. So they had been stationed in the middle of the flat Russian steppe for two years, their only adversaries the drunken local peasants and huge clouds of mosquitoes that ruled the land from May to September.