He was an old man, after all, about to reach eighty, and sometimes he asked himself why he was still bothered – for example, with the ritual of shaving first thing every morning. Now Lydia was gone and not rattling the door knob every five minutes, he had all the time in the world, and it was the nicest time of the day. He could tell whether it was going to be a good or a bad day from the way the razor glided over his skin.
Today he had cut himself. No wonder. He didn’t even have enough time to knot his tie properly. Or to sit down for five minutes with his first cup of coffee. And he had totally got out of the habit of reading the newspapers in the morning. Now his life was filled with the sounds of whining and panting, and constant patter of canine feet across the lino. He only had to lift his head and Batica would start wagging her stumpy tail so vigorously that her whole rear end was set in motion.
‘I’m coming,’ he said, getting up and pushing his chair under the table. ‘For God’s sake, I’m coming.’
When they had brought Batica to him he’d said, there and then, ‘No thanks, kids, really not. No need.’
Of course, he knew what they were up to. It was the familiar story: give the old codger a dog, that’ll keep him interested and occupied.
But to be honest, he wasn’t bored, nor was he getting too little exercise or feeling lonely – certainly no lonelier than when he’d been married to Lydia. Rather, the problem was that the children had a chronically bad conscience whenever they thought of their old dad. So there was this bundle of fur on the table all of a sudden, and what’s more, it already had a name. What was he supposed to do? Play the stubborn old git and make a scene?
He laid down some ground rules. He fed the animal and assigned it a place to sleep in the corner. The sofa, the easy chair and the bedroom were off limits. And he wasn’t about to get into the whole business of a collar, a lead and all that stuff, or with issuing commands like ‘Batica: heel’, ‘Batica: sit’! He had never been responsible for bringing up his children, so he wasn’t going to start now with an animal.
It was intriguing: Batica was a proper companion, but with the right instinct – namely, not submissive, quite intelligent in his own way, and keeping to himself but also managing to be a free spirit. When he went to a café, Batica settled down under the seat the same way as he did on the bus, in the kitchen or in the cinema. The dog always seemed to be waiting for his special moment, Batica’s hour, when he could roam free in the open air.
He himself had never been much of one for outdoor pursuits, but he went along with this tacit arrangement. Batica was a dog, and dogs needed exercise. In the interim, then, they’d taken to going to the Belgrade Forest on an almost daily basis, taking the number 72 bus with all the other loons in their walking boots.
Batica roamed through the bracken, fetched sticks and made friends with everybody. He was greeted by pensioners like an old acquaintance (which wasn’t surprising), but now even the joggers would stop, running on the spot and striking up puffed conversations with Batica. His master began to find it increasingly difficult to stop himself from being drawn into saying hello and getting embroiled in conversation. Discussions about the weather or rheumatism were just not his thing, nor did he want to chat about creatures whose only thought was where the next meal was coming from. Before he knew it, he’d find himself looking around. Where the hell had the dog got to?
‘Batica?’
The dog would show up eventually, like he always did: panting, wagging his tail, with burrs sticking to his ears and bad breath. But the times when he’d found himself secretly wishing that Batica would disappear for good had become less frequent. The more he thought about it…
He stopped again.
‘Batica!’ He listened. Silence. Only the wind in the branches. And birdsong.
He called again and again. He even backtracked slightly and searched around, unsure quite what to do next. He could see anthills and molehills and tyre tracks. What were tyre tracks doing here in the woods?
Then he heard him, at quite a distance, more of a pining noise, and so heart-wrenching that it struck fear into his heart. Something had happened to the dog. He started running as fast as his legs would carry him.
The howling noise was high pitched. Branches struck his face, knocked his hat off his head – he ran like he’d never run before in his life, stumbling over roots and barely able to catch his breath. In confusion, he straightened his glasses on the bridge of his nose
His first thought was that somebody must have hung a pair of shoes in the tree. But then he saw that there were also jeans hanging there, torn above the knee. An entire body was swaying gently in the wind before his eyes.
There was a rope wrapped around its neck. Flies were buzzing all around. The man’s head lolled to one side on his chest, and his sightless gaze was fixed on the place where Batica was sitting, howling in distress.