Andrea Bennett - Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story

‘Galia, my dear, I have solved the problem. You can relax: Romeo will be home before you know it.’

‘Zoya, it’s not like that, I keep telling you—’

‘You have no subtlety, Galia, and I’m surprised at you. Anyway, you must telephone my cousin Grigory Mikhailovich, in Moscow. He used to be… in the services. I can’t tell you which, it is a secret. He is old now, but he will know what to do. He will advise us on the best course of action. After all, we are weak women.’

‘But Zoya—’

‘Galia, you are exasperating me!’ and indeed Zoya did seem somewhat exasperated: her lower jaw and her fingertips quivered with the pulse of unusual energy, and her eyes rolled in her lollipop head. ‘You should never have taken this on. You should have known how it would all end. I told you the third house of Aquarius was rising in your moon. You should never have gone out last night. And that old fool Vasya – I read his palm last week, and told him to avoid excitement of all kinds!’

Galia looked into her glass of tea and sighed, her breath making small ripples in the remains of the brown liquid. So, cousin Grigory was to be the answer to the problem. Vasya and Boroda would be freed, and the world would be right. Galia had heard a lot about cousin Grigory over many years, and had assumed that he must be either dead or in a nursing home by now. She was not particularly heartened to hear that he was to be their saviour.

‘But, Zoya, my dear, what can Grigory Mikhailovich do? He is up there in Moscow, we are down here in the sticks. He is an old man! His connections, when he had them – and I’m sure he did – were with people who are now very old, or, er, even dead. How can he help us? I think maybe a trip to the State solicitor’s office would be of more use.’

Galia looked over at the oily deputy mayor, who was receiving something in a brown envelope from the manager of the Golden Sickle.

‘Or a loan for a bigger bribe, to be honest.’ Galia added.

‘How can you talk of bribes? Bribery is disgraceful, and also – very expensive. In truth, sister, it very rarely works – trust me. But you don’t know my Grigory. He is a sorter! He gets things sorted! Remember that holiday we went on, to Tambov?’

Galia remembered a while, and nodded. It had been a memorable excursion. Not least for the mosquitoes and lack of anything remotely fun to do.

‘He wangled that for us! Oh yes, you may well look startled! He got us on that holiday: none other.’

‘Well, Zoya, that was kind of him, but really, the holiday was quite dull. I said to you that I would have preferred the Black Sea.’

‘You did not! You were very grateful at the time!’

Galia hesitated. ‘Well, maybe I didn’t say it out loud, Zoya. But the clouds of mosquitoes—’

‘That was hardly Grigory Mikhailovich’s fault! And he organised the House of Culture visit to the Moscow Olympics. Remember, when we couldn’t get a booking for love nor money? He pulled some strings.’

‘Oh yes, Zoya, I remember that. I didn’t know he was involved with that.’ Galia took a moment to remember: the happy faces of Azov’s best as they clambered on to the coach to Moscow. The assistant vice-director of production at the factory, and his number two, had never returned. No-one knew what had happened to them: had they ever got to see the synchronised swimming?

‘Zoya, that was—’

‘And Grigory sorted out Pasha’s visit to the sanatorium at Kislovodsk, when he was poorly. No-one else could have got that. Only Grigory Mikhailovich. Now, what do you say? He’s our man, isn’t he?’

Galia didn’t say anything. She was somewhat surprised to learn that her old friend’s cousin in Moscow had arranged for her husband to be taken away to the sanatorium for a two-month stay and her friend had never mentioned it before. She’d had forty years to say something.

‘Zoya, you never told me that before. I never asked you to arrange anything for Pasha. What made you do that?’

Zoya stretched her face into something designed to look like a girlish smile, which actually made her look like a little dog – wearing lipstick – caught with its master’s slipper half-eaten in its mouth.

‘Ah, I’ve made a boo-boo, I can see.’ Zoya was agitated all of a sudden. Her translucent arm shook slightly as she attempted to spoon jam into her tea, and a big red clot flopped on to the table, splattering her smock with bright, sticky seeds.

‘Shit!’ cried Zoya, the sound fleeing her in a crow-like caw, which again caused a brief lull in the clatter of cutlery.

‘Zoya! There’s no need for that language! Calm yourself, and tell me exactly how you were involved in packing my husband off to Kislovodsk, after which I might add, he was never the same again!’

‘Can’t,’ muttered Zoya in a low voice. ‘It’s classified.’

‘Classified?’ Galia’s eyebrows met her hair as her forehead concertinaed in disbelief.

‘Classified. Let’s not get distracted. Forget old history: it’s not important. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I just wanted to… The vital thing – the real issue here – is saving your poor innocent dog from that evil Exterminator, and freeing your boyfriend of course. It may already be too late, Galia! Why are we dallying? We need a plan: and for that, we need Grigory Mikhailovich. There can be no doubt – no really! Look at you! You’re no match for the organs of the State, are you?’

Galia briefly examined her reflection in the window and had to agree with Zoya: she was exhausted and dishevelled, and the thought of going into battle, alone, with the organs of the State, filled her with dread. She considered the options, and decided that pragmatism would have to win the day, for now.

‘Very well, Zinaida Artyomovna. We will telephone your cousin in Moscow. But I want to hear more about your involvement in Kislovodsk.’

‘It’s classified,’ Zoya rasped, screwing up her face. ‘And not important. What is important is Boroda – isn’t that true?’

Galia gave her friend a cool look. ‘Yes, Zinaida Artyomovna, you’re right. Let’s go. I can’t sit around here slurping tea with you all day. I’ve got a list of jobs to do.’

‘And we have a plan to hatch,’ chirruped Zoya, as both ladies rose from the table and started for the door, handbags held out like shields.

‘Kolya!’

Mountainous at the window, bedecked in dead flies and crumbs, Grigory Mikhailovich was beginning to foam. His pale blue eyes, once so sharp they could bore holes in glass, lapped damply at a point mid-way between the dirty courtyard and the cosmos. A crumpled paper lay in his lap.

‘Hey, Kolya!’

A draught fumbled at the old man’s collar as the jangle of the Kremlin clock floated from the radio.

‘He would be turning in his grave, if he had one,’ the old man growled. ‘If those bloody bastards hadn’t made his mausoleum a bloody circus. Did you know, Kolya, that there are miles of tunnels, and literally scores of laboratories, hidden under the Kremlin walls, under the Moskva River itself? All stuffed full of boffins regulating the temperature and humidity, so that he only gently decomposes. Did you know? You didn’t know!’

Kolya said nothing. He circled the kitchen in his brown plastic slippers, and wondered what the old man had done with the potato peeler.

‘But you know what the real joke is? He is made of wax. Wax – sixty percent, maybe seventy. It’s true! He was OK, not bad, just stiff, you know, until the Great Patriotic War. But then they had to take him to the Urals – Moscow wasn’t safe – and, well, the Soviets aren’t the Pharaohs and the preservation was… insufficiently robust.’ Grigory Mikhailovich enunciated the phrase with difficulty, as if the words were made of glue.