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

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.

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.

So the army was not for him. He needed something more direct, a service he could provide locally, with immediate results, and which kept the streets clean of foreign bodies and pestilence. He became a defender of freedom from animal tyranny, a fighter against the disease and nuisance caused by flea-bitten scrag-end dogs: Mitya was a warrior against unauthorized canine infestations. Mitya could not abide a dog. Any dog he saw made Mitya feel sick, the bitter bile rising in his throat, catching at his tonsils, making him cough. But a stray dog: a stray dog made him really mad. A stray dog was an enemy of the state, an enemy of civilization: a personal enemy of Mitya. He contained his loathing through his job, and put his hatred to good use. Any stray in Azov had better be on the lookout: Mitya showed no mercy.

And as the great Soviet Union had finally fallen to pieces and was replaced by a patchwork of republics and autonomous regions, each one jostling the other, he found his own job became semi-autonomous, and he had more freedom to work as he saw fit. While he would never condone the black market, pernicious as it was, it offered up opportunities for armament and persuasion that had previously been out of the question for dog wardens. So, armed with his dog pole, throw net and Taser (not strictly standard issue, but an addition he felt was fully justified), he spent six evenings out of seven patrolling his jurisdiction in the Canine Control Van, or CCV. Mitya was the best Exterminator this side of Kharkov. And the town of Azov relied on him to keep canine vermin at bay, even if they didn’t know it.

This evening, warm and sweet-smelling as only an industrial town on a river in August can be, Mitya was targeting the west side of town, the old quarter, which took in a lot of important staging posts and was always a good hunting ground. His van oiled slowly around the areas beloved of stray dogs: the collage of kiosks selling books, gum, porn, dried fish, vodka and music boxes; the back of the market, where huge bins of rotting mush drew crowds of dogs like flies, with flies as big as bears buzzing around their squirming sores; and the waste-ground outside the shabby church, strewn with begging crones and bones flung down by do-gooders for the dogs that prowled around the old women, and sometimes took a crafty bite out of them when God wasn’t looking.

Mitya started the evening at the kiosks and worked his way around in a clockwise direction. He was swift with his pole: a talented snatcher. He never took on a whole pack. He would observe a group of dogs from a distance and then pick off the weaker specimens one by one as they got distracted and separated. The only way to deal with a whole pack would be by using a stun-grenade or poisonous gas, neither of which was currently approved by the state for dog-warden use, to Mitya’s chagrin. The evening was warm, and Mitya’s skin became wet and sour beneath his close-fitting trousers and regulation shirt. He pulled the van over and took a wet-wipe from his black plastic-leather bum-bag. It was important to try to remain clean and fresh. Mitya had no idea how doggy he smelt. No-one except Andrei the Svoloch ever told him, probably because Andrei the Svoloch was the only person he regularly came in to contact with.