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

‘Fanny fed the butter to the pig!’ was Zoya’s only response, delivered in a plaintive and high-pitched wail.

Galia tried shaking her again, and the pile of old clothes spilled over the floor, leaving Zoya’s puny body covered only by a red velvet flag emblazoned with Leonid Brezhnev’s bear-like face.

‘Oh Lord!’ exclaimed Galia, momentarily horrified, and sitting down sharply on top of a pile of old cake boxes, she realized too late.

‘Don’t panic, Galia, don’t panic. I expect he’s in the bathroom,’ croaked Zoya, suddenly lucid and stretching stiffly beneath Brezhnev’s musty embrace.

‘No, Zoya, he’s not anywhere in the apartment, and… and… his bed hasn’t been slept in.’

Zoya opened an eye and peered at Galia. ‘What bed? Anyway, how would you know if his bed had been slept in, Galia my dear? He rises early, my cousin Grigory. Always has done. When we young—’

‘I’ve been awake since before six, Zoya, and I have heard nothing: no-one has moved. No-one has come in, and no-one has gone out. You’re telling me he’s got up and gone out at five, are you? That old bear? I doubt he can actually get out of bed on his own, his joints are so bad.’

‘Oh, I didn’t know you were so keen on surveillance, Galina Petrovna. You surprise me!’

‘I’m just trying to tell you that he has not gone out this morning, but he’s not here either.’

‘So – what? You’re saying we imagined him, are you?’

‘No. I don’t know what I’m saying. But I’ve waited for two hours to get up and I’ve got all sorts of plans and things to do and questions to ask and then when I do get up – he’s not here. What are we to do? We can’t go to the ministries on our own, can we?’

Zoya swung her pale lilac feet to the floor and arranged Brezhnev into a makeshift toga.

‘What we will do, Galia, is have some breakfast, and then get going.’

Galia gave an exasperated sigh, coaxed the ill-fitting borrowed slippers back on to her swollen feet, and followed her tiny friend into the kitchen. When she got there, Zoya was standing at the table, looking theatrical.

‘There is a note, Galia my dear – your search for evidence wasn’t very thorough, was it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He left a note. He will meet us at the Ministry of the Interior, at nine a.m.’

‘But how…?’ Galia was aware that her mouth was hanging open in an elongated ‘o’, but she didn’t understand what was going on.

‘No time for breakfast then,’ said Zoya, taking a bottle of pills from her handbag and popping two down with a glug of greenish looking kefir that she found in the rather threatening-looking fridge. Then she hopped nimbly past Galia and back to her nest with a chirpy cry of, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! Screw up your courage, woman!’

Galia frowned, and set off back to her own patch next door to find clean pop socks and a headscarf. It promised to be a long day. And the prospects for success seemed to be diminishing considerably. She heard a dog howl somewhere in the block, a muffled cry, lonely and despairing, and felt a shiver run down her spine.

Over twenty years before, Galia had visited Moscow on a works cultural trip. She had been rushed past Red Square and Lenin’s Tomb, the Moscow Museum and the Kremlin. The glinting ancient monuments studded with modern memorials to the glory of the Soviets had intrigued her, the warm rosy flesh of reality replacing the black and white bones of pictures that had smattered the pages of shared books at school. The buildings had still seemed mysterious, other-worldly and never to be touched. But the visit had largely been spoilt by the efforts of their zealous guide. She felt herded as her group moved, as a single unit, from one stop to the next, with no time for questions, or individual exploration, or even for talk between the holiday makers. Idle chat between group members had been ruthlessly shushed by the guide. Other special sights had included the grey mass of the Hotel Rossiya – the biggest tourist hotel in the world – and Bassein Moskva, the biggest open-air swimming pool in the world. She hadn’t liked it, this modern stuff: it was brash, hard and unwashed. The hotel was full of roaches and inedible food, bad smells and rude staff. And the swimming pool had steamed in the autumn sky like the depths of a chlorine-impregnated hell. Every so often she glimpsed the faces of sinners writhing under the noxious clouds, their mouths wide, hands raised in silent entreaty. But mostly Muscovites had struck her as rude and self-important, and best avoided.

Now, in the 1990s, it was even worse. The Metro was bursting with adverts full of women with huge white teeth and disposable nappies. Every poster on every street corner was trying to sell the citizens shares in this or that diamond mine, oil company or chocolate factory. The roads, be they sweeping boulevards or the narrow crooked lanes that strained to connect them, were crammed with filthy cars jostling for position, and none of them going anywhere. The shops in the city centre were bursting with the kinds of things that few honest people could afford, and no-one needed. And in among all the grandeur and twenty-four-hour consumption, old ladies stood in ragged rows around Metro stations, trying to sell any old thing in order to buy a crust of bread: a single shoe; some well-used laces; a spoon.

‘Zoya. Hey, Zoya!’ Galia nudged her friend and shouted as their Metro carriage roared through a tunnel several tens of metres below the Lubyanka , ‘which is our stop?’

‘Relax, Galia, I’ve got it all under control. It’s the next one.’ Zoya had been busy eyeing a couple across the carriage from herself, wondering what they saw in each other. One of them was studying a ‘What’s On’ guide to Moscow, and Zoya wished she had time to take a look. She was entranced by this new Moscow. She loved the mass of bright colours, the bustle, the quiet music seeping from cafe doorways and the hullabaloo of street performers, the well-groomed young people with their deodorant and leather shoes, the little dogs and exotic foreign students smelling of expensive perfume and tobacco. Moscow was home to dozens of fancy theatres, there were ballet schools around every corner and great collections of art galleries and historical museums at every turn. Zoya hoped she was not going to have to spend the whole day traipsing around dust-laden ministries full of people who should have been buried long ago: it would be a shame not to get a nose full of culture while they were here. The Metro train plunged deeper into the rattling darkness, making Zoya’s ears pop and for a moment the lights flickered and the carriage was bathed in a weird half-light. Who knew, it may be her last chance.

To exit the station the ladies rode an escalator that was so long they almost forgot what they’d got on it for by the time they approached daylight. Turning to look back down at her friend, Galia was stabbed by a sudden feeling of vertigo that spread from her stomach in to her legs and then into every extremity. She was shaking by the time they had fought their way out of the busy station and into the bright Moscow morning.

Back on the surface, the Ministry of Internal Affairs turned out to be a plain building on the Garden Ring: solid, squatting square and grey in the sunshine, it looked uninviting, and uninteresting. Galia swallowed back a taste of disappointment that the ministry wasn’t housed in one of Stalin’s sky-scrapers, the Seven Sisters. She had a long-standing respect for the hugely sinister buildings, rocketing sun-ward from a broad launch pad of certainty that the Soviet Union is, was, and ever shall be, eternal. Gothic and glowering, at least they had presence, Galia thought, unlike this third-rate shiny-suit of a building. Zoya hopped ahead of her and grabbed her wrist with a tenacious, claw-like grip. ‘Come on, Galia, don’t lose heart now. We can do this. I read the cards this morning, and all the portents are good.’