Chapter 1
A poodle as a weapon
Dogs don’t look at themselves in mirrors. But despite never having seen me, it’s not hard for me to guess what I look like. I am a white poodle, too tall, with a thick, disheveled mane and delicate claws on my feet. Also, the hairs on my left ear are noticeably darker and have a brownish-yellowish color. I heard how they said it when they bought me. “It’s defective!” they exclaimed. Though I’m sure even a flaw like that wouldn’t stop me from playing, say, the poodle Artemon in the play ‘Pinocchio and the Golden Key’. He would have made a good actor and brought the main character a big cardboard key clamped between my teeth.
I always called the man who bought me in 1991 when I was still a hard-nosed puppy, Amo and the others called him, and continue to call him, Boris or Boris Andriiovich.
I was only a month old when he bought me, although he was already pointing ways. I opened my eyes ten days after I existed and at eleven I was already able to hear sounds. The first thing I saw was not my mother’s big white nipple, or my brothers, but the calendar hanging on the wall. The wind blowing from the open window made the pages of the calendar flutter, and the three figures bent over a single cup shivered silently as if frozen to death. The next morning, I heard human voices for the first time. They seemed to me heavenly songs, the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, perhaps because I had never heard anything before. But when the buyer arrived ten days later, he already knew that it was not the calendar angels who were speaking, but the people; and I also knew that I was not the weakest among my brothers, and that a buyer would arrive sooner or later. He even knew why those white drops were falling beyond the window. Because it was winter. So when the woman, the first of all the women whom I, as a dog, not as a man, would call “my women”, turned the page of the calendar, I immediately understood that we had survived the winter. And that meant we would still be alive.
Yes, I immediately demonstrated my capabilities. Boris, the buyer, was thirty-two years old at the time and was not a nobody either: he had managed to graduate in Geography, join the Komsomol (or was it the other way around? It would be difficult to graduate from university without first joining the Komsomol, right? ?), get married, get his wife pregnant with a daughter (or was it the other way around?), get married a second time, leave the Komsomol, get divorced again, borrow a lot of money from one of his many Komsomol friends, go to Hungary with a big bag on his back, come back and start a business, buy a car and then sell it and buy another, buy a hunting rifle, and finally buy me…
I have to admit it: the Master bought me like someone who buys a weapon. I would wager that poodle is related to the French ‘poodle’, which is defined as one that is capable of catching ‘canards’. This is just as true as the fact that a person must be human, a Ukrainian must be a Ukrainian, a Russian must be a Russian, a Pole must be a Pole, etc. But to be honest, in my humble dog opinion, this doesn’t quite work. There is always someone willing not to identify with his name. Or is it that he just can’t face what he really is?
What is certain is that Boris Andriyovich did not know French, so I will never know why he chose me. I think it was the vendors, his relatives, who convinced him. They told him that the big poodles were excellent hunters of wild ducks, and that this Dominik, the dog with the bad ear, was a descendant of a family of true hunters. Did he believe them, or was he just embarrassed to say no?
“It is not necessary to throw stones at your own roof,” he used to repeat.
It is likely that Boris did not attach much importance to his choice either. And that the course that my life took from there, was only the result of chance. Although sometimes, just sometimes, I imagine how the Master sees a beautiful little white puppy, me, and just falls in love with him. And not because I knew how to catch ducks, which, on the other hand, is something I have no idea about.
In the hunting society the Master took me to, everyone laughed at me. I was especially amused the first time I got on a boat; when I heard the first shot I went crazy and was about to tip it over. The Master was climbing the walls. At first, he didn’t get angry with me, but rather with the laughter of his hunting companions and a little with himself, for being the main culprit in all of this. Perhaps, at that time, he already had other, more suitable dogs in mind. But still, he was my Master.
“You caught it too early. He’s just a puppy,” the shooter said quietly, lighting a cigar.
Everyone called him the Hunter, because he was born to hunt. Other than this, little else was known about the man, other than that he was an excellent hunter and that his name was Vadym.
The others just laughed. Especially after the third bottle. But the Master did not give up:
“You can laugh all you want, you’ll meet my Dominik.”
So I was still Dominik. It was the need for a short and dry name, like that shot, for a true hunting dog, that turned Dominik into Dom.
According to my Master, somewhere in the Alps there was a mountain with the same name: Dôme. And its tips are also white and uneven, like my bangs. My Master was a romantic. The other hunters, no. And they made fun of me more and more. Vadym the Hunter was the only one not laughing. He was a taciturn man, who smoked all day and never made a mistake. They all had great respect for him; they may have wanted to look like him. Like me.
What was unclear to him was how he could go from being a dog to being a mountain so easily. But in the end I ended up getting used to my new name.
The Master still believed in my future, did everything possible to help me become a real dog. He was a good and simple person. Do not take into account that the house that he was building, which only lacked the roof, was like an enormous three-story castle, like the ones that María de él would later see often in the drawings of his daughter.
No, Boris was a simple and sincere man. You’ll see. He once fell in love with a girl named Tamara, a student like him and the daughter of a colonel about to retire in Lviv, in western Ukraine. By the way, he lived there very reluctantly, as he would have preferred to reside a little further east. The colonel’s daughters did not know a word of Ukrainian. Except for some endearing words that the colonel used to address them. And, according to the people, in Lviv even the classes at the university were given in that language. It was as if fate had brought the Master’s beloved to Lviv. So Boris ran to that strange western city to ask the strict colonel for the hand of his daughter Tamara. He wanted to take his beloved away from there, somewhere in the center of that Geography that they had just studied at the university. During the trip, the Master was robbed of all the money and the return ticket. Boris did not dare to ask for help from his future father-in-law, he had enough to ask for the hand of his daughter. However, he did dare to stow away. He hid from the conductors in the halls, he ran from one car to another… All of this was normal, who could get into trouble for the simple fact of traveling without a ticket? Well, the Master managed to end up in a mess. He was trying to read Petrarch to the exhausted reviewers, replacing Laura’s name with Tamara’s. In the end, he ended up penniless at an intermediate station, still a long way from Lviv. So he continued on foot, fruitlessly sending telegrams with the few rubles he had managed to raise: they had all gone on vacation and the Master had no intention of worrying his mother. Neither did her girlfriend, who was also already pregnant. He walked, accepted milk and bread from the grandmothers of Ternopil and Kharkiv, and entertained sympathetic bus drivers and taciturn truck drivers with all sorts of fabulous stories, studying that Geography of his with his feet. It was then, perhaps, when he learned to negotiate and to survive.
I think he was as naive as me. And that he really dreamed of being a school teacher when he finished university, although not in Geography, but in History. The Master was fully aware that many virtues were introduced into the falsified History of the USSR (perhaps, how are explosives placed?): self-sacrifice, resistance to evil, generosity and love of neighbor… but that the real History was not So.
“In real life it’s impossible for something like this to happen,” he said with a sigh, “but people need to convince themselves that they are part of a great nation, because only then will they end up achieving something great.”
“And if you convince them of something else?” the friends asked, while the Master poured something poisonous into the raised glasses.
-About what?
“Well, for example, you could try to convince them that this dog is a real hunter.” Even if he never becomes one, you would have already convinced them that he is a hunting dog…
The Master rejected the argument: a dog could not be compared to a town. The people can do everything, tolerate everything, accept everything. The town is like a true love. You just have to show him the right path.
The Master had begun to practice as a teacher. In his geography classes he included moralistic fables from Soviet history books, and he progressed through the Komsomol hierarchy. His wife Tamara was jealous of the high school students, of the Komsomol beauties, because she knew that “everyone with everyone” hung out there. She herself was a member of the Komsomol and a real beauty. Later, the Master joined the party… Boris liked to remember those times.
And now that? Now the Master sells I don’t know what in a big city. What does he sell? He would say houses. Or maybe bricks for houses? Or tractors? Or wood? Or maybe wheat? Of course, it’s time to find out that Boris simply sells whatever it takes.
It’s hard for me to understand “business” conversations, there are too many words and the smells are always the same. When the Master comes home, he reeks of cigarette smoke, and sometimes gunpowder, as if he had gone hunting. He says that he needs to hunt like he lives and live like a hunt. What a philosopher it is! And his huge hands always have that scent of money in his wallet.
Our house is located just behind the village of Noversk, there where the forest begins. It’s a small old house, with blue shutters, although next to it the Master is about to finish a new, huge one.
They bring the bricks from across town. There they are dismantling an old Soviet factory that, apparently, nobody claims. I think they are doing a good job. And at the same time, they build formidable houses for themselves.
“You have to find a way to survive, dog. Living is like hunting. Do you understand?
The forest
Noversk is a terrible place only in the imagination of foreigners. It is actually surrounded by beautiful lakes and forests, where birds, wild boars and roe deer are hunted. There one can easily smell the scent of a real wolf, although it is better that people do not know it. Although I haven’t seen any yet. What if what I smell is not the scent of the wolf but that of a mysterious beast? For example, the chupacabra, which will be talked about so much on television in ten years. Maybe I was the first to discover it in our country?
At that time, the decade of the chupacabra had not yet begun, that was still the time of the wolves. And until people called a chupacabra a chupacabra, I didn’t recognize it. All human power is in words. So when we went hunting I would howl, afraid of the wolf’s presence.
When you enter the forest, everything changes. It seems as if the world slows down and the smells become heavier. Everything has its importance in the forest. Every trace, every path.
My childhood is over and now I already have a job. The typical dog job.
Thanks to my thick fur I can swim in the icy water and, thanks to my senses, I can stalk the ducks that hide behind the reeds, like mature brides in the bowels of Soviet skyscrapers, at the other end of Noversk. . I know how to scare these girlfriends at the right time, just when the Master points his gun at them and is ready to shoot. Like when he was a young pioneer. “You have to be prepared! Always ready!” the hunters joke when they drink. And their faces are as red as their pioneer ties.
When a duck falls from the sky, I know how to take it back to a human. I know how to do it because I am a dog and it is my duty to know it.
But unfortunately not everything is so simple.
Ducks are prudent and cunning birds, it is not easy to get close to them. They notice my presence as if life had taught them to guess the immediate future. If you disturb or scare a duck, it will hardly return to the place from which it has fled. I may never come back…
You have to control yourself. Swim without making noise. And just on cue, scare the duck into flying, one last time, and bam!
It was at the end of May when we went to the forest for the first time. In spring, according to the regulations, hunting legs is not allowed, only ducks are hunted. You have to give the legs time to raise new ducklings for us.
Although Vadym the Hunter, the one who barely makes fun of me, says:
—The rules can be broken if nobody controls their compliance.
“Well, Dominik, in that case, shall we go hunting?” the Master asks or, rather, affirms and, with a paternal gesture, shakes my white hair.
We will go to the forest almost every Saturday. Until the moment when the ducks flee from us to warmer lands and leave the lake trapped in winter, as people leave a conquered city. I will see ducks high in the sky, as high as only before have I seen the planes fly from the military airfield. And suddenly, I think that it must be okay to be a duck. Ducks have ‘iriy’. I still don’t know what this word means, but it seems to me that it is the same as a home, the place where your intrinsic smell is always, invariable and real, waiting for you as if you had never left. Your own smell never leaves your home.
I only shot three ducks that season. Not three. Vadym the Hunter missed the third. Or, since Vadym was never wrong, perhaps it was the duck that was reluctant to lose its life. He shuddered, hit me with his wing, like the Master with his fist, and croaked as if asking for help. And I released it.
The water in the Noversk lake is always so cloudy that you can’t see blood in it, you can only feel it. Fear is in the blood. But there was something else in that duck’s blood. Something more than fear. I turned and swam, splashing noisily, away from that place.
If you have not met something before, it is difficult to recognize it, as it is with the chupacabra. But now I remember that, surely, in the blood of that duck I felt anger for the first time.
The Master got angry and hit me with all his might. His duck stopped wriggling there in the reeds.
Then came the silence.
The next day it rained. Her ducks flew so high that they disappeared above the gray clouds. I wanted to be a duck, but my iriy, my home, was in the Master’s house.
“When you choose a dog for this,” said a burly man who smelled of cigarettes and a stomach ache, “you have to make sure it’s right. But look at him… He’s not even the right type of poodle.
-Do not say foolishness. What simply happens is that he splashes too hard with his paws and scares them before their time… He’s still little, he’ll learn. Yesterday was…
-Who you think you are? It’s just that she’s not a person! What are you going to explain to him? How does he have to swim, or what? Will you hire him a swim coach? the man said, laughing. Well, yesterday! What was that? Well, a demonstration that he is a real useless!
-Oh! Fuck off! —The Master was angry and drank that intense-smelling pomace in large gulps.
But that big man with the sick stomach kept commenting that something was wrong with my coat, that there are poodles with curly hair, like mine, and there are poodles with “cord” hair. He wasn’t able to figure out what he was referring to exactly, but it must be similar to the Master’s shoelaces. My hair really isn’t like that. It is not defective.
“He’ll be able to herd sheep at most,” the man said. I think he was a real judge.
The judge and the Master continued arguing, only the third party in the meeting remained silent and smoked. The one who always shut up and smoked, the one who was never wrong. Let’s see, a person can be called Vadym and not have a single flaw, all right. And a dog can be called “Dog of the Lord”, and yet be an absolute failure, a testimony not of God’s nature, but of human nature; either because of his ability to be wrong, or even because of his inclination to do so.
