XI
Seryozha’s dog, all netted with spiders’ webs and glazed with dew, stood in the doorway, collecting with a high nose the too faint traces of Seryozha’s vicinity. The smell of putrefying fish clinging to Seryozha’s pack in the passageway cheered the dog a good deal; it knew that smell by now as part of the family. The house seemed to be empty of everything but air, and this happy patch of smelly air was a sort of ghost of Seryozha—the next best thing to the presence of that solid and glorious being. The dog stood for a long time with its nose pressed very hard to a spot on the floor on which Seryozha had dropped, hours before, a small shred of fish liver. For quite a minute, the bereaved dog licked this spot slowly, romantically, like a melancholy epicure.
Slanting from the windows were shallow barred slides of sunlight, down and across which raced and blew and eddied the little light glittering typhoons of dust stirred up by Katya’s recent sweeping. The pale floor mats were a rectangular maze of sunlight and shadow; and flies seemed to browse in these square fields of sunlight like cattle seen from an airplane. Now and then this restful illusion was broken by one fly rising and flying petulantly away as another one alighted. A sequin-blue butterfly with a long tail flew uncertainly in from the garden, its shadow dodging across the fields of sun and dikes of shade, and settled on Tanya’s blue cloak which hung on a peg. It opened and closed its wings slowly before its shadow, like a queen trying on a new dress before the glass. Summer morning danced in the house, but, to the dog, human bustle alone spelled morning—and human bustle was disturbingly lacking here. There were so many strangers in the house—the blue butterfly, a couple of thistledowns riding high across the ceiling, a muddy spade with a rather dead section of worm on it, leaning against the wall, a riding-whip smelling of horse, a noisy bee that hovered about the dog’s shrinking ear, an insolent brown hen on the threshold—all strangers—no friends—and the dog loathed strangers. Strangers so often have stings, like bees, or sticks, like beggars, or kicks, like horses; they never smell right.
A smell casts no shadow before; dogs, therefore, who are led through life by the nose, have to be intensely conservative. They can tolerate no new departures because they can know no destinations. Seryozha’s dog, though trying to be brave, felt as far away from its own tried and trusted circumstances as a man might feel who found himself the first to set foot on the moon. To the dog this house seemed as shimmering and appalling and silent as the moon; this bright gloss of sunlit air, speckled with smell-less strangers, lacking the immediate familiar smell of known gods, was as lifeless as the brittle bodiless glare that lays gray shadows at the feet of the moon’s starved peaks. Traveling from place to place, one carried one’s own exciting, flying world along with one; somewhere close in front of one’s thrilled nose was home, or something like home; somewhere close behind one’s tail was one’s own tramping homespun god. But arrival at Mi-san had meant to the dog an elaborate homelessness. That little spot of concentrated rotten fish smell on the floor was all that was left of home.
Tiptoeing on stiff suspicious toes into the living-room, the dog was much pleased to find Wilfred Chew lying asleep on the sofa. As a rule, the dog thought nothing of Wilfred, but this morning the man could certainly be promoted to the rank of an encouraging smell. The dog pushed its nose into Wilfred’s eye, savoring the blessed tang of something known before. Wilfred, with a loud groan, turned over, flinging his arms across his frowning shut eyes, and the dog whipped its precious self away to the other side of the room, fearing a kick.
A very small piece of goose skin, which, under the table, had escaped Katya’s active brush, comforted the dog for a moment, and this snack inspired the lost animal to go to the kitchen. It knew where the kitchen was; any dog could find a kitchen, even in the moon. Katya had gone to market. The kitchen door at the end of the passage was ajar, and the dog pushed in. In a bucket by the pump it found a priceless treasure of goose bones and gravy-splashed scraps.
Seryozha, coming with a dazed, quiet step into the kitchen, saw his dog and loved it as he had never loved it before. That dusty brindled back seemed to shine with a light of blessed familiarity. Seryozha’s tired eyes, looking at it, seemed to be stroked with a kind of home balm. He stood still watching the dog, his consciousness numbed—as it always was—by the thrill of seeing an animal enjoying itself by itself, unaware of his presence. To watch his dog smiling and snorting into its bucket of ambrosia almost made him feel as if this old worried Seryozha were standing here watching his young self, careless and apart—his young lost self, enjoying something as this old watching Seryozha would never enjoy anything again.
The dog looked up and saw Seryozha. It cringed and crawled toward him, expecting a kick for thieving, and Seryozha, beaming at it, gave it a little soft kick to oblige it. While he focused his eyes exclusively upon it, blurring from his sight the strange surroundings, he could imagine himself that young happy Seryozha again at home in his mother’s kitchen. He could pretend that he would look up in a minute from the dog’s delighted writhings and see the white pansy face of that
