Faithful Ruslan Read Online Free PDF Page A

away. If his master could have seen Ruslan’s eyes—yellow, unblinking, with deep, clearly defined pupils, dark as burnished gun-barrels—he would have found not a trace in them of hatred, suffering or entreaty, but only humble expectation. His master, however, was looking somewhere above the top of Ruslan’s head, and he raised the muzzle of his submachine gun skyward. Something behind Ruslan was preventing him from opening fire. Ruslan looked around and saw what it was. He had noticed it earlier out of the corner of his eye, had listened with half an ear to its rumbling and clanking, but had forced himself to pay no attention, being wholly occupied in looking for a scent.
    A tractor was coming up the white road to the camp. It was crawling slowly, looking as though it had been a part of these snowy fields and grayish-white sky for so long that the landscape was unimaginable without it. Nosing forward with two big, staring eyes on either side of its ribbed snout, all black soot and streaming exhaust, it was pulling a sledge behind it. On the sledge, making it sway and occasionally slither off the roadway, was a vast, reddish-brown object far bigger than the tractor itself; as it came closer, the thing turned out to be a railroad freight car without wheels, lashed onto the sledge with rusty hawsers.
    Ruslan growled and moved out of the way. Tractors were nothing new to him. They were used to haul logs away from the lumber-felling site in the forest, and his experience of them had been wholly bad. The black smoke of their exhaust had caused him to lose his sense of smell for a long time, whichhad made him the most helpless creature on earth. What was more, the men who drove the tractors were “free workers,” a tribe of people who were alien and strange to Ruslan; they wandered around everywhere unescorted and they treated the masters without proper respect. They also used to make their own way to the work site, so that by the time the column of prisoners was just marching into the forest, the free workers were already there and horsing around. A nasty bunch.
    The tractor crawled forward and halted, but did not stop roaring; something inside it gave an indignant howl, and through the noise the driver bawled a greeting to Ruslan’s master. Ruslan was amazed by this. As far as he could remember, no other biped had ever spoken to his master like this:
    “Hi there, soldier!”
    The mere look of the driver was infuriating, too: an ugly, shiny, crimson-red mug slashed by a thick-lipped, fire-breathing maw that gaped in a cheeky grin from ear to ear. His cap, which he did not take off to Master, failed to cover a blond forelock that stuck wetly to his forehead, something that was unthinkable for a prisoner, as was the way he fired off a whole string of questions at Ruslan’s master:
    “You weren’t waiting for me, were you? What? Can’t you hear what I’m saying? I’ve brought this boxcar for you; where d’you want me to put the damn thing? Or can’t you speak for your boss? Are you checking passes? Sorry, forgot to bring mine. Maybe you won’t let me out again, eh?”
    With this he burst into a horrible, disgusting guffaw, as he leaned out of the door and put his foot, clad in a felt boot, onto the track. Master made no reply to his laughter or his questions. Ruslan knew that he would not reply. This habit of the masters’ never ceased to thrill Ruslan: whenever aprisoner asked them a question, they would either answer only after a long pause or not answer at all, but simply stare at him with a cold, impassive and sarcastic look. It did not take long before the eager questioner lowered his eyes and drew his head down between his shoulders; sometimes the man’s face would break out in a cold sweat. The masters caused the prisoners no harm by this treatment, yet their mere silence, combined with that stare, produced the same effect as a clenched fist raised to a man’s nose or the rattle of a rifle bolt. At first