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

In the 1990s, there was a three-legged dog called Boroda, who wore no collar and lived in Azov with an old Russian lady who worked hard on her dacha .

However, everything else in this book, while inspired by my memories of the people and geography of Russia, is a work of fiction, and should be treated as such.

‘Hey! Goryoun Tigranovich! Can you hear me?’

A warm brown hand slapped on the door once more, its force rattling the hinges this time.

‘He’s dead, I tell you! He’s probably been eaten by the cats by now. Four of them he’s got, you know. Four fluffy white cats! Who needs four fluffy white cats? White? Ridiculous!’

‘ Babushka , can you hear any cats mewing?’

The two ladies, one indescribably old and striated and the other only mildly so, waited silently for a moment outside the apartment door, listening intently. Tiny Baba Krychkova bent slightly to put her ear to the keyhole, closed her eyes and sucked in her cheeks.

‘I hear nothing, Galia,’ she replied after some moments.

‘So that’s good, isn’t it, Baba? That means that Goryoun Tigranovich has probably gone on holiday to the coast, or perhaps to visit friends in Rostov, and has left the cats with someone else. And that means he isn’t lying dead in his apartment.’

‘But Galia, maybe they’re all dead! The cats and Goryoun Tigranovich! All dead! Maybe they found him too tough to eat and they starved! It’s been several days, you know.’

The older lady’s face crumpled at the thought of the starving cats and the dry, wasted cadaver of Goryoun Tigranovich, and she began to sob, rubbing a gnarled red fist into her apple-pip eyes. Other doors began to creak and moan along the length of the dusty corridor, and slowly other grey heads studded with curranty eyes bobbed into view, to peer curiously down the hall towards the source of the noise and excitement. A vague hum stretched out along the length of the building as the elderly residents rose as one from their afternoon naps, whether planned or unplanned, to witness the drama unfolding on floor 3 of Building 11, Karl Marx Avenue, in the southern Russian town of Azov. Galia sighed, and offered her handkerchief over, and made compassionate tutting noises with her tongue.

‘Baba Krychkova, there is nothing we can do out here in the hall. I am sure that Goryoun Tigranovich is in the best of health. He’s such a sprightly fellow – and a regular traveller, you know. Just last month he was in Omsk.’

Galia didn’t trip over the words, pronouncing them firmly and evenly, but to her own ears they sounded unconvincing: the last time she had seen the gentleman he had resembled a piece of dried bark dressed in a suit. ‘I am sure I saw him last week, down at the market, and he was buying watermelons. People who buy watermelons are not about to die: they are enjoying life; they are robust, and hopeful. Watermelons are a sure sign. He was probably taking the melons as a present for whoever he has gone to visit. I am confident he will be back soon.’

Melons or no, Goryoun Tigranovich was a very private person, and he would not welcome being discussed in the hallway by his entire entourage of elderly neighbours. Galia tried to encourage the older lady to go home.

‘Why don’t you go and have a nice cup of tea, and I can bring you one of my home-made buns. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

The older lady’s face did not change, but her tiny watery eyes were on Galia now.

‘And if we still haven’t seen him by the end of the week, we’ll ask if the caretaker knows where he’s gone.’

‘He promised me a marrow, you know,’ said Baba Krychkova over her shoulder, as she shuffled off down the corridor. Now there, thought Galia, is the real root of the problem: upset over an unfulfilled vegetable promise.

‘I can give you a marrow, Baba Krychkova, and mine are just as tasty as Goryoun Tigranovich’s.’

Baba Krychkova shrugged in a dismissive manner and shut her door, leaving Galia little choice but to cluck her tongue, shake her head gently and disappear into her own apartment. Boroda got up from the box under the table and greeted her with a gentle wag and a beautiful, elongating stretch.

‘The grace of dogs,’ thought Galia, ‘is in their complete, friendly laziness. And the fact that they can’t speak.’

Unlike many of her neighbours, and all her friends at the Azov House of Culture Elderly Club, Galina Petrovna Orlova, or Galia for short, almost never cried. While they glistened like sweetie wrappers chewed up by one of Goryoun Tigranovich’s cats, she sat squarely on her chair, quietly bronzed, her muscular hands resting in light puffy fists on her floral-clad thighs. She listened attentively to the complaints of the others, sighed and tutted gently as they recounted tales of lives that were hard. Galia considered that she herself lived in the present, and rarely reminisced. Her concerns included her vegetable patch, good food, complicated card games and her friends. She took pride in her town and her region, and she would certainly defend her motherland against any sort of criticism that wasn’t her own. She was not what one might call a sentimental person.

However, even the most unsentimental among us have to have something or someone and, in the autumn of her days, the source of Galia’s completeness, and the well from which she drew her compassion, her patience, her certainty and her rest, was neither the church nor alcohol, nor gossip, nor gardening: the source of her calm was her three-legged dog.

The dog had a narrow face and graceful limbs tufted with wiry grey hair. Her dark eyes tilted over high cheekbones, recalling, perhaps, some long-lost Borzoi relative waiting on the eastern plains, under a canopy of frozen tear-drop stars. That was Galia’s initial impression when she first saw the dog from a distance outside the factory, when she didn’t have her glasses on. On closer inspection, however, she could find little evidence of blue blood in the mutt: limp-tailed and apologetic, she had taken up residence under a particularly rancid snack kiosk, and was scavenging for food. Galia steadfastly ignored the beast. For five days, Galia pretended the dog wasn’t there and turned her head slyly as she passed to and from the vegetable patch. And then on the sixth, she saw the dog trying, with her lone fore-paw, to extract a stub of bone from under the piss-stained kiosk. Poor dog: only three legs. It reminded Galia of a feeling, like a vague sniff of something or someone that had been a long time ago and long-since departed. Something she wanted to hold on to, but could not even touch. The old lady watched the dog and sighed. The dog’s ears pricked at the sound, and she stopped scrabbling. There was a moment’s breathless pause in the bustling afternoon, and a long dark-brown gaze was directed straight through Galia’s woollen cardigan and into her heart. Their fate was sealed, whether she liked it or not.

Galia had carefully extracted the stub of bone with her penknife and given it to the dog, who accepted it between gentle white teeth. As evening drew on, the dog followed Galia home at a polite distance, ignoring vague shooing noises that emerged, half-hearted as sun-kissed bees, from Galia’s throat. The dog sat patiently outside the apartment door as dusk crept down the hall, and was still there when the ball of the sun rose on the horizon and the blackbirds broke into song. After a night of deep meditation, Galia relented and opened the door wide. In slid the dog, to sit calmly under the kitchen table, looking about her with brightly inquisitive, almond-shaped eyes.