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

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.