An Old Man and his Dog

Grandpa Sasha Panteleyev was sitting, numb with cold, on his glass-screened porch in the early evening chill, gloomily watching the flies butting stubbornly against the grimy panes as he traced a finger over paisley-patterned oilcloth and felt just terrible. Even out here, he could hear the voices of his children – Vitya the eldest, Ninka, the middle one, and Vova, the youngest – rattling on back in the house. They’d come together to mark the forty days since the death of their mother, who had passed away in a quiet hurry, as if remaining ever true to her lifelong way of not being a bother to anyone. She’d leaned over to drop the bucket into the well and stiffened like that, then she keeled over sideways and seemed to fall asleep. It was an hour before Grandpa Sasha noticed she wasn’t there; he thought she’d gone to clean up around the cow, or collect the eggs, or swap nonsense with the neighbor woman over the fence, or soak the linens to be laundered, or do any of the simple everyday things that in the countryside aren’t even considered work.

The whole village mourned Grandma Valya, and they carried her coffin themselves instead of loading it onto a truck, like all the others. After his wife’s death, Grandpa Sasha became strangely distracted and kept thinking that he was still little, a towheaded kid running to the river in knee-length trousers and a shirt sewn from his father’s army smock, carrying a hazelwood pole and a big can that had once held American hardtack and had been made over into a fishing pail. Or he was off to school, in a jacket his grandmother had knitted that embarrassed him horribly, so he pulled it off behind the granary near the school and then ran at breakneck speed, his teeth chattering from the cold. Or he was a tractor driver, and the hot sun was full in his eyes, and the tractor was rumbling and laboring, pulling a harrow behind, and, with his bangs flopping over his forehead and a cheap cigarette glued to the corner of his mouth, he tried to spot Valya among all the girls in her work crew. Or, in a new jacket and holding an accordion with a patent-leather strap, he was sitting in the back of a truck on his way to court Valya and went flying out of the truck bed into the muddy runoff from the farm... And he carried on picturing himself in various ways, both old and young, and now he’s meeting Valya and his firstborn at the district maternity hospital, and now three-year-old Vitya has cut his finger on an axe, and the blood’s gushing out, and Sasha puts his lips to the wound and tries so hard to make it stop, and now Ninka, the middle one, is running to him out on the hayfield with the first jar of strawberries she’s ever picked, and she trips, and the strawberries scatter across the stubble, and Ninka’s crying, but Sasha gathers them carefully, so as not to crush them, and feeds them to her out of his hand, and now the youngest, has got wasted on moonshine for the first time, in the sixth grade, and Sasha takes Valya’s belt and gives him a good thrashing, along with an earful of hair-raising language.

All of this filled his days, while the whole of his usual life went missing. Everything else was needless to him, because the one and only important thing was his memory of Valya, with whom he’d lived for nigh on half a century and with whom his soul had grown together as two tree trunks grow together and intertwine. So strong was the yearning for his wife that Sasha felt no desire to eat or drink. All he wanted was to sit and smoke and watch the clouds rising from his cigarette and catch a glimpse of his darling Valya.

There was a loud thud on the other side of the wall. Vitya, the eldest, said something in his deep bass, and Ninka joined in, her voice shrill and grating, like when a file is used to spread a saw’s teeth, then everything went quiet again. A door opened behind him, letting in a whiff of stove fumes, the reek of bad booze, and the rancid stink of musty rags, and Vova, the youngest, came out onto the porch. Nimble and swarthy he was, resembling neither his mother nor his father. The Leftovers is what Valya’s mother used to call him.

“Well, then, Pa – made up your mind?” Vova blurted from the doorway, at his father’s back. “Come on, now, sign the papers. We’ll set you up in an apartment in town, if you don’t want to stay with us, and there you’ll live your life. Until,” he sniggered, “you die. Pa, come on, while there’s still a buyer for the house. They’ve already forked over the deposit, Pa. Why won’t you do this friendly, like?”

Vova came close to his father and whispered straight into his shirt collar, just above a neck tanned by the summer sun. “Do it, Pa... Else we’ll put you in an old folks’ home so you can while away your days with the gimps, and how’d that be, eh?”

Grandpa Sasha wanted to do what he did when Vova was a youngster – grab him by the forelock or by his slippery, dumpling-like ear and work him over until he wised up, the brat. But Vova had always been like this, ever since he was a little tyke, and he’d even ended up – as well they should, folks like him – joining the police force.

Then the other two came out, the chunky, bald Vitya, with his pot belly and his pricey city clothes, and Ninka, a single mother with a drinker’s sly yet haggard face and Valya’s kind eyes. They crowded around him with their “Sell” and their “Sign,” and kept trying to scare him, and promising him the moon and the stars, and then they’d go back to spooking him with the old folks’ home or worse, a life on the streets.

And because they were wearing on him so and he didn’t have the strength to argue anymore, he stood up, slung his quilted jacket, warm after he’d sat for so long, over his shoulders, knocked Vova’s heavy hand from one of those shoulders, and went down into the yard. He unchained his dog, Gavryusha, old and weak-eyed as he was and covered in long, matted fur, and walked and walked, picking up speed, through the thinning, hazy, scarlet-leaved aspen grove, past the marsh, skillfully skirting the water holes, shuffling over the damp moss on feet familiar with these parts. And he came out onto a hillock that gave a good view for many miles around. The more distant forest formed a dense, violet crest, while closer it glowed red, sparkling in every shade of gold, and it rustled, primped, and preened, and the sun, which had shone triumphantly all day, sank westward, as if closing behind it the door to a bright and radiant world.

Sasha sat down by a pine tree split by a lightning bolt, rubbed the back of his head against its shaggy bark, let his eyelids close, and saw Valya, in a bright, citified raincoat and rubber boots. Wrapped a fashionable scarf with “Paris” written on it, she was beaming at him merrily, and the basket of mushrooms she was holding rocked like a boat, and mushrooms fell out.

“Sasha,” she yelled. “Come to me. There’s such a lot of mushrooms here!”

And he lunged forward and was suddenly afraid because he was wearing an old quilted jacket, and it was awkward to be dressed like this for her to see, so young and smartly turned out as she was, but still she beckoned and called him – “Sasha, Sasha” – and he got up and ran, and she came toward him, except there was no way he could get to her. And Grandpa Sasha fell face-first into the gray moss sprinkled with rusty-colored pine needles, only grasping a handful of earth mixed with needles and tiny mushrooms. His loyal Gavryusha howled, raked the ground with his blunted claws, and lay down alongside him, as if wanting to breathe warmth over the old man as he froze.