Pravda Moskvii, 10 June 2003

MOSCOW DOGBOY CAPTURED

Moscow child protection authorities have confirmed rumours that a latter-day Mowgli was caught in recent weeks around Zagarodiye on the northern outskirts of the capital city. The two-year-old boy was first sighted barking and running on all fours in the company of a pack of wild dogs.

Experts say that he has lived with the dogs since babyhood. He is very small and malnourished, with noticeable hair all over his body. He is able to run at great speed on his hands and feet. He uses dog sounds exclusively.

The age of Moscow’s dogboy makes him a rarity. Recent cases of older street children living with animals are well documented. However, while feral children actually raised by animals have been a recurrent subject of fiction, all previous real-life instances on record are of disputed authenticity.

Nothing is known about the long-term physical and mental effects of an early life with dogs. Our Russian dogboy will be kept at the Anton Makarenko Children’s Centre, where he will be studied by leading scientists while receiving the very best of care. The dogboy’s progress will be of considerable interest to the scientific community worldwide. Dr Dmitry Pastushenko put the newspaper down and sighed. If only it were that simple. Three weeks ago this story would have been sufficient; now they would have to make a statement. A dogboy with a brother just didn’t seem to be the real thing. Yes, he was exposed, now. Open to ridicule, and not just on the subject of dogboys. His smug confidence! His hopes.

His views. He had said more than once over dinner that the human was an animal at heart. Healing young humans involves getting the animal part right first—making sure that shelter, food and loving touch are a given in any child’s life. What did that really mean? The memory of his own voice mocked him. Indeed, we never completely dissociate from our animal selves; think of how we use animals in art, or as metaphor. Animal myths and legends—avatars, significant interaction between man and beast. You have to agree these stories articulate something fundamental. He had actually said that, his voice urbane and convincing.

He looked up from the paper. His office was full of animals. He collected ancient animal artefacts: small bronze or stone figurines. He even collected the mass-produced bears carved out of wood that could be found throughout the Ismailovo market; and he liked cuckoo clocks.

Yet just now he felt an upwelling of revulsion at everything animal.

‘Of course we are animals,’ he said out loud just as his Mayak cuckoo clock whirred, pumped its bellows and sang out the half hour. He knew what he meant by this. Animal was the basis, the hidden foundations; but human—that was the building, the amazing sculptured artefact of personality.

Three weeks before, Dmitry had been smarting from an early-morning argument over a dog. Natalya wanted them to get one; he hated the thought. One of their neighbours owned a Moscow watchdog, ovcharka crossed with Saint Bernard, ‘which gives them,’ Yuri Andrejevich had insisted, ‘strength, intelligence, wiliness and surprising agility.’

The dog was called Malchik. Dmitry, bored almost to tears by his neighbour’s adoration for it, had once theorised to Natalya that attachment to animals revealed some deficiency or need dating from early childhood. Attachments between species were nothing more than projections, and in that sense it was revealing that Yuri had named the dog ‘Boy’. A human who became fond of a dog was expressing a disorder or deprivation in the same way as a lone rabbit that bonded to a faun. Or a cat that suckled a hedgehog. Unfortunately, for some reason this had strengthened Natalya’s resolve that they should have a dog.

Dmitry also felt contaminated by contact with animals. He held his breath in the SPF animal house at the university laboratory. He shuddered at the feel of hair over alien musculature, even on a laboratory rat. He washed his hands immediately after touching any creature. This morning he had finally admitted as much to Natalya and instead of comprehension and sympathy, he caught a glow of triumph. When he added over breakfast that he also feared he might be allergic, he had to turn away, knowing he would lose his conviction if he looked at her.

Natalya laughed, her lovely voice ringing. ‘Oh you wish you were allergic.’

Dmitry, genuinely stung, stated then and there that he loved animals but something about them made him uncomfortable.

He went to work churning; it seemed they would be getting a dog. Natalya always got her way. He knew his discomfort demonstrated a proper awareness of the philosophical and scientific divide between man and animal, but he had been unable to express this. As always in Natalya’s company, he lost clarity and eloquence. No one argued with Natalya; most people did the bidding of that marvellous voice and soaked up the sunshine of her approval, her certainties, without even questioning whether they ought to be listening.

Yet he considered Natalya, for all that she was a brilliant paediatrician, a bit nutty. She was the only scientist he had ever met who’d asked him his star sign. It was the first thing she said to him and he still remembered with discomfort the smile, the keen glance she gave him, as if his answer had given her some new knowledge about him.

Such a naïve village soul, Natalya. Such childlike certainties, despite her intelligence. He would have asked her to marry him but he couldn’t think why she would say yes; he was stunned she had even agreed to move in with him. But it was he who furnished their apartment. I left my stuff at home, she’d said, and he had never had the courage to ask why.

His childhood had been hard compared with Natalya’s. Perhaps that was it: people who have had a hard childhood are more likely to realise that pets are a foolish indulgence.

The hypocrisy of dog-lovers! Russian kids were dying every day on the streets—Natalya knew this as well as he did—yet there was a public outcry over exterminating dogs. What other city in the world would fund the castration of strays? Propose rewarding pensioners for feeding them? Despite all this, according to Natalya, happy Russian women had dogs.

Natalya had been the perfect daughter (a talented gymnast, intelligent, warm hearted); she was now a compelling lover (independent, passionate, fascinating) and would become a brilliant wife (albeit less domesticated than some). She was going to be a wholesome mother, beloved aunty and most Russian babushka of babushkas: and all this quintessence of contemporary Russian womanhood was incomplete without a dog.

Dmitry smiled and sighed. He’d do his best to delay it for a while. And that very day the dogboy arrived, and Natalya dropped the subject.

When he first saw the tiny, hairy child crouched half naked, shivering in the corner of the militzia van, Dmitry felt an upwelling of revulsion and pity. Then, as he pulled back a syringe of tranquiliser, a strange thrill of delight tempered by shame. This was a frontier. Voilà! The human animal: a living manifestation of a failed attempt to cross over that great divide.

The child bared his white baby teeth and snarled, a useless defensive display. Dmitry shuddered. You dog-lovers, with your sentimental anthropomorphic fantasies—you should see this.

Of all the mangled and stunted children Dmitry had worked with, this one struck him as the greatest tragedy and the most amazing survival. He found himself horrified, yet hopeful that the ‘raised by dogs’ part would prove verifiable.

‘Let’s call him Marko.’ Dmitry walked into Natalya’s office after lunch and stopped short. Her body was taut, her back turned to him as she typed: she had rearranged her desk set so that she could look out of the window, not at the door. Who else would do that? Who isn’t a little defensive in their office? She tapped faster at the keyboard and waved a hand apologetically. Her hair was a rippling copper swathe covering her shoulders. He could smell her shampoo. Dmitry hovered behind her chair, eager for her to approve the boy’s name. He also wanted to ask her whether she had had any new thoughts on dog ownership but it occurred to him, on the basis of previous inexplicable reasoning, that she might think today’s events had advanced her argument somehow. And he wanted to kiss her. To disperse the discord of the morning. ‘A fighter’s name—commemorate his Romulus-like early years!’

Natalya looked up, her eyes dark, and he felt a little rush of pleasure. He knew from the shadows that flickered across her open face that the dogboy had made a huge impression. Then the sombre eyes were sparkling.

‘Be careful—he’ll end up overthrowing the government!’

‘We must just hope, Natalya, that he will in time stand up or speak.’ He blushed. He so often managed to sound pompous, his words huddling together, when he talked to Natalya. Whereas she shone, it seemed to him; she rang clear as a bell and in her company he became inept with dumb joy.

‘Well, perhaps a strong name like that could help his chances of survival,’ she said brightly, impatient as always with any hint of gloom.

In Natalya’s assessment, however, the boy was frail. There was something doddery in his movements, she said, that could relate to some trace-element deficiency. Tests would be in on Friday.

Dmitry was hopeful. His research on the rapidity of language and cognitive recovery among stimulation-deprived children was now known all over Europe, and just this year had been translated into German, French and English. His university lectures were very well attended. Children found with minimal language but otherwise normal capacities consistently show hyperdevelopment; in several cases they have rejoined age-appropriate levels within a few years. He could hear his own voice saying that, and being believed.

Dmitry was at a peak in his career when the dogboy appeared, almost like a reward: a spectacular icing on a very satisfactory cake. His position as Director of the Anton Makarenko Children’s Centre was the fruit of many successes and a studious avoidance of overt ambition. He was conscious of the accolade and cautious of provoking those who had conferred it. The Centre was a showpiece, funded in response to a damning international report into the endemic abuse of children in internats and orphanages. It was a show-and-tell for foreign journalists, but he loved being here, where he had the facilities to make his research really count.

And the staff: he had an excellent team. Natalya was indispensable, welding everyone else together. Around her enthusiasm they all felt elevated. His behavioural and developmental psychologists were the best in Moscow. The neurologist was a high-profile public figure and an excellent practitioner, who divided his time between the centre and the university. Anna Aleksandrovna, the administrator, kept the whole organisation running as if effortlessly, and had been Dmitry’s secretary in a range of posts before he was appointed to the centre. And his closest friend, Konstantin Petrovich, the security manager and driver, also happened to be a pedagogic psychologist (with Cuban qualifications). He was a gem. The specialist teachers, nurses and general staff were handpicked and headhunted, pilfered from all the ministries and university departments Dmitry and Anna Aleksandrovna had ever worked for. The whole team, from the janitors and cooks to the medical unit, were proud of what they did here.

Only the building left something to be desired. Dmitry was abraded every morning that the transformation of this old children’s home had been such a rushed job. They had the best equipment and had had some rooms modified, but the paint job was patchy and the children’s rooms still had the old metal beds from before. Just fewer to a room and with nicer linen.

The centre at this moment housed and educated thirty-five children, all rescued from the internat system. It wasn’t as though the children they left behind were ineducable, necessarily. There were intelligent, if deprived, children in overwhelming numbers. They visited one regional internat where 80 per cent of its 112 children passed the special test for aptitude Natalya and Dmitry had devised, showing normal cognitive function once the results were mediated for stimulus-poor environment. Some were screened out because they had been too long in the internat system—by age four they were thought to be irredeemable—some were screened out for extreme behavioural problems; some for physical rather than mental defects (in these cases recommendations were made). The government wanted only success stories or forefront-of-science cases to come out of the centre.

Dmitry tried to approach the unpleasant task with clinical detachment, but Natalya was from the start ruthless and manipulative—in a way he admired when he was with her and cringed at when he thought it over afterwards. She would see a kid who was, from Dmitry’s point of view, unresponsive and beyond their scope, and she would set her jaw: ‘We are getting that one out of here.’

She usually spotted her child within seconds of entering the room, apparently choosing sometimes out of pity. Ugly, stunted or crushed children attracted her, although she treated Dmitry with frosty silence the one time he said this out loud. She manipulated him, she falsified reports, she fiddled with the stats and the results, she bribed without hesitation (using not just her own money but also the centre’s) to get damning mental health reports to disappear; and, with his discomfited collusion, she got every subject she selected out of the internat and into the centre. Worse still, she had never yet been wrong: apart from a couple who had died, her subjects thrived.

This was what kept Dmitry awake: perhaps none of the children they saw and assessed as normal should have been left behind. After Natalya started to erode his detachment, he found he didn’t want to do field visits anymore. Even his favourite children’s home, run by a compassionate and efficient ex-military woman, dismayed him, despite the conscientious care the children received. He found himself wishing that the major too would bend rules and falsify her reports; even cultivate favourites. At his most despairing, he thought that discarded children were too big a problem for him alone: in unimaginable numbers they either died or were abused on the streets; or were deformed through physical, emotional and mental deprivation in the homes.

He was often furious with Natalya. Right now he knew she was in the basement teaching the kids gymnastics, moulding young lives to resemble her own. She was optimistic about the children they rescued and refused to think about the ones they left behind. Amazingly, she could switch off. There were no Madonna mothers between the metro and the university now: Natalya had reported every one of them. She called the militzia on principle whenever she saw one, making herself late to conferences and restaurants. She looked at their outstretched hands and filthy rags, even the weak blue babies they held, as though they were remote from her; an affront to everybody. And she acted. But Dmitry was sure she never thought about them at all. He commented once that the babies at times died of hunger or gangrene from unchanged nappies, and speculated about the link between various kinds of depravity and the degradation of maternal feelings.

Natalya had said brusquely: ‘Don’t get philosophical, Dmitry. It doesn’t suit you. You didn’t father the baby or corrupt the mother.’ His heart had filled, then, with a flood of things to say to her. What if my mother was such a one? Natalya, walking just ahead of him on Pyetnitskaya, turned at that moment with a face so fresh and unscathed that his thoughts scattered and he reached for her hand. Once close to that fire, he just wanted the warmth of it.

Natalya was startled when people didn’t agree with her but she changed nothing, no matter how cogent their criticisms. Dmitry told her once, working himself up for a couple of days to say it, that she was incapable of admitting a mistake. She laughed, said, ‘Rubbish!’ and went on unaffected. Really, Dmitry told himself, daffiness and arrogance were a terrible combination in a character.

Natalya stretched her neck and shoulders as the children chimed their rote thank-yous and filed out. She had insisted on the ritual from the start and their naïve, raw voices pleased her. She felt her age in the stiffening of her body after gymnastics but considered herself young, nonetheless. Gymnasts might be old at thirty-two, but paediatricians were babies. Her technique was still impressive so why shouldn’t the children get the benefit of it? Dmitry—well, if these children were fed, nurtured and educated to the most basic shared standards of parented children, that was more than enough for Dmitry.

Natalya raised her arms, bent at the waist and put her palms to the floor to shift her irritation. She tucked her head to her shins, and became a strange, four-footed entity, narrow, with a tail of hair reaching from the back of her head to the floor. She lifted one leg to the vertical, then the other, into a controlled handstand. For a moment she was an inverted statue, then she dropped, rolling along the half moon of her spine to stand in one fluid movement.

He was so passive about all this! She had had to scrounge for the equipment in this ugly basement while Dmitry the orphan quietly derided and disapproved of the vantage point, the insights her own childhood had given her. She had had the privileges of the talented and the loved, he once said, as though she was somehow tainted by this. Well, Dmitry’s prejudices would not preclude her children from gymnastics. She hadn’t become a self-absorbed gymnast, but had chosen to become a paediatrician. He, on the other hand, had had the benefits of the once-functional state system and had focused on success with the blindness of a mole.

It was odd: only Dmitry ever argued with her. She couldn’t remember anyone, not even her parents, arguing so much with her. And he was brilliant, in his twisted, complicated way: a walnut tree, clenched tight around every burl and knot. Her annoyance faded and she smiled. He still wrote his notes longhand! He would be funny with a dog. He would end up loving it much more than she would: he was the one who needed a dog. And he would be such a wonderful father! She inspired the children, yes, as a great teacher should; but it was Dmitry’s hand they reached for. He needed her to know such things.

She untied her hair, gathered her clothes and headed for the staff showers, feeling the sweat cooling under her leotard. Ha! He might see gymnastics as ornamental, but he certainly enjoyed her flexibility. Her thoughts shifted to his bewildered-looking grey eyes, his charm, his sexual need and directness and the planes and fine lines of his body. He was very handsome, her Dmitry. For a forty-five-year-old.

Since age fifteen, Natalya had known she wanted a man who satisfied two criteria: he had to be physically attractive to her, and he had to need her help. She had dreamed then of an agoraphobic pianist; a gifted (and beautiful) cripple of some kind. Most of her lovers had seemed to fit this at first: one had been a drunken petrochemical engineer; another a psychotic writer. They resisted help, and she lost interest in them. But Dmitry—she was sure she could do him a lot of good.

She would cook tonight, and she would be sweet smelling; and he would flex, glisten and moan. Her belly tightened.

Dmitry sat watching Marko from the observation bay, the various test results clipped to his folder. What a surprising child. Internalised to a degree—licking his hands over and over, absent and sad looking a lot of the time. A degree of stereotypy—as now, rocking side to side or front to back, or pacing anxiously and without purpose around the room on hands and feet. Didn’t know how to chew food, but he did know when he was full, which was, from Dmitry’s experience with other neglected children, unusual. No single terms or combinatorial speech, but much babbling, drawn-out vowels. And signing—doglike signing, for want of a better word. The rapid wriggling movement of his bottom had seemed odd until Dmitry recalled seeing a large dog wag its tail, its whole body swaying. Language development, at least in the coming together of verbal and thought intelligence, had not happened; something altogether strange had taken place instead.

He was in some ways like a stimulation-deprived child from an internat, but in other ways very different. For one thing, he knew how to play—a most extraordinary thing.

Dogs are playful, Dmitry thought, leaning forward to watch through the one-way window as the boy scampered with a large yellow ball. But dogs don’t build with blocks, and this child did. Dogs don’t make a yellow block bark at a red block. This child was much more responsive than any long-term internat child. He showed fear, hope, delight, anger and hunger openly. His sleeping patterns were also unusual—he was nocturnal and slept immediately after eating. His physical condition was worrying—Natalya had diagnosed cystic fibrosis—but treatable. His scores on physical tests were as odd as everything else. Good in some ways, despite severe developmental retardation, malnutrition, hypertrichosis and the deformed movement his body had adopted.

It was clear that he had lived in darkness a lot of the time. His sensory and primitive abilities were skewed beyond the range of any tests on children. His hearing and sense of smell were exceptional. Very exciting. But…

Dmitry stopped chewing his pen. What if? What if they were on the brink of some breakthrough, a chink in the theories and one that, via anomaly, showed, after all, that Vygotsky was right! The Psychology of Play, but beyond what Vygotsky and Leont’ev postulated. What a startling find—the subject at play, so unlike any deprived child. He was compulsively constructing a non-canine zone of proximal development! This would imply…God!—being human was elemental!

Dmitry could not contain himself. He leapt up and strode back to his office to start writing the test results up and to enter in a separate file some of his thoughts. The words ran through his head, thoughts tumbling, jostling for space. He scrawled some bold lines onto foolscap.

Age impossible to determine—teeth affected by malnutrition and individual variation—not even a wrist x-ray analysis would get a precise result on a child this young. Comparative stats unhelpful in any case. But results astonishing nonetheless: subject appeared to score highly on psychoneurological tests. The neurological tests—normal function, in some brain areas hypernormal. Brain function utterly unlike that of a stimulation-deprived child…

He wrote his observations on play, and then wrote the implication. His handwriting sprawled larger than life across the page, marking this possible breakthrough, this unexpected chink in the confusion of neuropsychology. He’d have to be careful to control his tone. He chewed his pen again and reread his last paragraph. He crossed out two astonishings and one astounded. Let them gasp: all the more effective if he stayed calm.

The psych tests were a problem—hard to administer and arguably useless. Compromised by the subject’s deficiencies: fine motor skills, attachment to people, language. On the other hand, the adaptability the boy showed in play was at the very least unusual, possibly unprecedented. The circumstances that had moulded this subject were also perhaps unprecedented, at least in this era. He knew other scientists might dispute this and he was uncomfortable with how anomalous it would all look in the test scores. Some might even suggest that all they were seeing in this individual subject were the extremes of autism.

But the play—sensorimotor, representation and symbolic— it all ruled out autism. Absolutely ruled it out. Dmitry scribbled a note at the top of the first page of his foolscap pad: This subject presents as a child who, at the outset of his short life, had nothing wrong with him and most likely had above average intelligence.

The subject scored lowest in socialisation. He identified other children in the centre as threatening on sight, even when seen from behind glass or at a distance. He didn’t differentiate between younger and older children; they all elicited bared teeth, a low growl and snarls. Yet, despite this hostility, the subject had become trusting and affectionate. This was also inexplicable.

In some ways the prognosis seemed good, and the opportunity for research was one in a million. A trillion.

Dmitry stared out of the window of his office, not noticing the children playing in the sunlight in the gardens. He was trying to imagine the boy’s life. Darkness. A den. Many dogs. He fingered the smooth porcelain of his favourite coffee mug. Scratches and wounds from play-fighting with puppies and other dogs. Damp and freezing cold, except up close to dog bodies. Some alpha bitch guarding him and providing for him. A lot of rough affectionate touch. A blind world, rich in sound, touch, smell. That was the key: no sensory deprivation, so crippling and so familiar in the internat child, so visible in the little loners hunched out there to one side of the world, rocking back and forth.

How had this boy learned to play with toys? Was this simply the personality growth and flexibility conferred by a sensually rich environment? Gait, sounds, hearing, smell, and habits all suggested a subject enculturated in the life of dogs. Sighted multiple times with dogs and caught in the company of two dogs, which had initially tried to defend him from the militzia. Better collect the data of public sightings from the militzia before it was lost. Would go to proof. Why had he appeared this spring? Of course—he would have been denbound for winter. Before that, perhaps too young. He had to be a genuine feral child—and, Dmitry couldn’t help thinking, a godsend for the centre. The Kremlin couldn’t withdraw funding with the sort of attention this would attract.

Dmitry stared at the scene on his mug, the spring flowers, the silent singing birds, the wolf cub and the faun. So, how had the boy ended up partly clothed? Could he have stolen or found clothes and dressed himself? They were miserable rags, shoddy even when new. Could survival intelligence have been sufficient to put observation of humans and physical need together in such action?

The Mayak clock behind him chimed, whirred and cuckooed, and he started. 12.30. But he didn’t move. No speech. Presenting with no apparent human nurture, but unusually able. And clothed. It didn’t make any sense. It could ruin everything.

Clothed. He had to have had a parent or caregiver.

Damn.

Romochka couldn’t stop stroking Puppy’s new hair. It had been an unpleasant surprise to find Puppy shorn, but now he found that his scalp felt lovely. A little like White Sister in summertime but even better. Springy, smooth. Golden, shiny and soap-stinky.

He had entered Puppy’s room warily. It was too bright and smelled sharp and nasty. Puppy’s smell had changed too. He could just pick up a tiny trail of it among all the new smells on Puppy’s body. Puppy had howled and yelped in an excess of delight at the sight and smell of him. Puppy bowled him over when Romochka squatted down, wriggled onto his lap and off again, and then raced around and around him in tight circles, winding his skinny arms around Romochka’s neck, then unwinding them to use them as legs again, unstoppable until Romochka caught the little body in his arms and held him tight. For all the strange smells, it was a relief to hold Puppy again. He had bent his face to Puppy’s neck while the little boy, breathless with happiness, squirmed uncontrollably. He would have begun slow-licking Puppy but he could not shake off the feeling that they were being watched. They explored the room together, looked at themselves in the mirrors, played with the toys. Romochka hunted for the little crack with eyes behind it but could find no telltale draught, no shift in the uniform smells of the room. He couldn’t work out how they were doing it, but he was sure.

Romochka relaxed a little when he saw that Puppy liked the dry man and the elk woman here. He was so free and joyous with them, they couldn’t have done anything to harm him, but still Romochka’s neck hairs prickled. He listened for the tramp of heavy boots and the ripple outside the door that might hint at militzia. He was careful to keep his boy-mask on; he held himself back from sniffing Puppy too much or licking him at all. He used his hands as a boy would and stood up self-consciously, boy-fashion.

Puppy recognised this as a game and played too, pretending to be a dog with a boy, rather than a dog with a dog. He stood up occasionally, being a boy with a boy. He licked Romochka’s hands, eyes shining, then held Romochka’s hand self-consciously in his own, like a little brother with a big brother. He raced around Romochka’s legs. He didn’t even begin games that involved gripping Romochka by the throat or barging into his side to try to push him over and get his belly exposed. Romochka was proud of him, and Puppy felt it.

Puppy was curled in his lap asleep, body lax and loose. Now, resting, Romochka wanted to be gone. The charade had been an effort; he felt tired and frazzled, even cross. He felt Puppy’s body with careful hands while Puppy sighed, smiled and stretched in his sleep. He felt like pinching Puppy to make him jump, but the constant feeling that they were watching stopped him. He looked around now and then to see whether he could catch them at it, but the room gave nothing away. Puppy was thinner, and seemed small in these new clothes. Had he fitted into Romochka’s lap before, limbs spilling out all over, but centred like this? He couldn’t be sure, but Puppy might be shrinking. He worried about taking this stripped-down hairless Puppy out into the cold.

His throat tightened and he longed for the warmth of the lair, to curl up with Puppy and slip his hands round Puppy’s belly, licking and murmur-growling in his ear. He pushed Puppy off his lap, stood up carefully, opened the door and walked out without looking back. The hair along his neck rose but nothing happened. They didn’t stop him. Not the tall man, nor the elk woman who was his mate. She came up to him, walked him part-way along the corridor, then smiled and said, ‘See you again, Romochka.’ He glowered at her and ran the length of the corridor, down the stairs and out into the pouring rain with her voice ringing on in his ears.

‘You didn’t want him to be human,’ Natalya said, pointing her shashlick at him over the dinner table. Dmitry was speechless. She was wrong, so wrong! He had just wanted Marko to be purely what he was, rather than partially this, slightly that. Everything in his whole life had been partly this, slightly that— and all the rest murky. Natalya herself was the only exception. She licked her fingers, watching him. He felt the blood rush to his face.

‘Well, maybe this explains the clothes.’ Natalya’s voice was light. She was trying to give him the positive side, as she always did. But he felt no better. This bigger boy called the younger one Puppy. Dmitry had cared for a child once whose mother had forced her to sleep outside with the two family dogs. Was this, too, going to turn into some everyday case of parental cruelty? Marko’s spectacular story was tarnished, no matter what. This kid—obviously bomzh—doubtless had a family, along with all the critical threshold survival skills by which street kids were deemed to be past rehabilitation age. He was part of the normal social wreckage: one of a possible five million street kids in Russia outside the sphere of the centre’s business.

He found himself lying in Natalya’s arms on his leather sofa. She put a whisky in his hand. She started talking and he relaxed a little. ‘Let’s feed him at the centre, Dmitry. He’ll appreciate it, and he’ll give us a lot on Marko in return.’

Yes, observing the two together might explain some things and be fruitful for research. But still there was ink in his milk and his half-formed wish was that Romochka would disappear. He sighed. He knew himself. This wish was a fantasy, not a desire. Romochka made him see things he would rather not have seen. Having seen, there was no turning back. Marko belonged with, and therefore to, someone else; and Dmitry had wanted him to himself.

Natalya patted him out of his reverie and slipped out from under him, solicitously replacing herself with two cushions. She scampered off, most likely to the shower and bed.

Dmitry put his feet up on the sofa and sipped at the whisky, thinking back over his day. Out of the blue, an established human relationship. Inescapable. He stroked the taut yellow of the sofa. There was something about good leather: silken, yet earthy. The sofa was his one expensive piece, a modern 8 Marta, cheaper because of a factory defect. Its egg-yolk expanse filled him with an obscure, shy pleasure; as if it, too, marked a milestone in his successful life. He sighed again. Romochka and Marko were both abnormal, and this would have to be taken into account in any research. They were going to present in the end as simple aberrants, no frontier at all. Nothing to be learned about mankind in general: merely the usual morass of individual suffering.

Romochka ran all the way, rather than catching the metro. White Sister loped along beside him. He needed the singing of his blood and muscles, the air washing through him, and the exhaustion at the end. He ran on and on along a route he now knew so well that its little detours and shortcuts took no thought. The rain pelted down and his feet splattered as he ran. Puppy’s things swirled through his mind: the squishy patterned mat that smelled like a car window frame; the hard coloured animals; the red, yellow, blue shapes, all clean and unchewed; the smooth, pale yellow walls, and the watery glass of the windows. The smell of Dmitry. Natalya’s voice. He wanted to be home.

But the next day he wanted to go again.

Dmitry, Natalya and Anna Aleksandrovna got used to Romochka’s sudden appearances in reception and built his visits into Puppy’s rehabilitation program. Anna Aleksandrovna had instructions to call Natalya at the clinic if Romochka appeared, whereupon she would finish with the child at hand and cancel bookings for the next couple of hours. Natalya began an observation diary for her own interest while Dmitry was writing up his revised preliminary findings for the Journal of Advances in Neuropsychology.

She found the older boy fascinating and appalling; and, like any bomzh, an indictment of society, a walking human tragedy. Natalya had some firm principles. She had once ended up as the only other person in a carriage with a great reeking lump of a man sleeping on the seat opposite. She’d sat, shallow-breathing, fighting down waves of nausea, almost in tears. This man is Russian, she told herself. This man is my brother.

At first, she attached herself to Romochka with a similar feeling—but somehow the shock value of his appearance and smell wore off, and her repulsion faded. Romochka was compelling as a human subject, quite a character. The appearance, she decided one day, was not a reliable marker of everything there was to this boy; it was even a bit theatrical. A disguise, an inadvertent dress-up.

Today is the 17th of July, week two of watching Romochka and Marko. What to make of the two boys together? Romochka, dark, fiery as a furnace. The child warrior. Radiating black hair and black moods. Marko, so fair, pale, frail: a snowflake who fades, retreats into passive, and yes, melting, adoration next to his dark brother. Romochka looks indestructible. He has the most horrible fingernails—talons would be a better word. He looks like a nuclear holocaust survivor in an American movie (costume to match). Marko looks as though he might vanish as mysteriously as he came, as if he is transparent, somehow—not quite here. His health is now acceptable, but there is something beyond physical health that holds us in life or lets us go, as doctors all know (should know). What a sight these two are. If they were in a painting, they’d look like archetypes. Funny!

18th July. A hot sultry day, with Romochka’s mood to match. Romochka has something in common with professional beggar children. He is impervious and self-contained, but I think I understand him quite well now. We have little to offer him: we can feed him, but he is too wily and experienced to form an attachment. I don’t pity him or want to rescue him, anyway. Although I am convinced he is smart—despite the fact that he stands out clearly as a defective. His body language, his manner, everything is that teensy fraction out of sync, the fraction all normal humans recognise immediately. Perhaps it is his self-esteem that repels pity. He likes himself. Sees no reason why we shouldn’t like him too. No, that’s not the right word—admire, more like. It is also disconcerting— self-confident defectives are not usually appealing, except to their mothers, and then only if the mothers themselves are not hopelessly degraded. Marko is the victim child, the one we all must rescue. Romochka is something much more romantic and awful. And he’s proud of those hellish talons. He uses them for everything, including to scare other children—and I caught him carefully filing them on the bricks of the garden wall. I should give him a nail file so he can do his manicure in style! He is vain!

28th July. Romochka is speaking a lot now, both with us and with Marko. He talks to Dmitry, but with far more reserve than with me, I believe. He is quite eloquent in a bizarre way. He said to me this morning in his odd little voice, ‘I can get you a bird. Today is sunny, it’s not fuckin easy, but I can get you a bird.’ This is the longest sentence I have heard him utter. A pity I don’t know all that much about language acquisition. Dmitry does, though. He thinks it is a mental or speech impediment in Romochka’s case, but I’m not convinced. Dmitry doesn’t do intuition—data and data only. I’ll have to show him this sequence. This boy’s not an imbecile, I’d bet my professional reputation on it. He is something else. Intonation is spare and flat, but his speech is nonetheless vivid and elliptical. Sometimes his language is colourful and very local. I dropped a plate when heating something for him in the microwave, and he said sagely, very comically: ‘But for some piss, the world’s full of shit.’ He sounded rather like a little old drunken moujik. He grinned ridiculously for a fleeting second when I laughed. He was showing off. At other times he sounds like a migrant using Russian as a second language. He reuses what he hears and cobbles together phrases, manufacturing meanings on the spot. Today he said a couple of things that sounded just like Dmitry: ‘What does that really mean?’ and ‘the human animal’. I’ll show those to Dmitry too—I’d like to see him try to call that echolalia! And, somehow, he has picked up bits of Italian. He uses Italian endearments with Marko, or a funny mixture. He got up to leave, today, and said ‘Scram, caro’ as he pushed Marko off his lap.

Romochka and Puppy worked together to convince Dmitry and Natalya that Romochka was a boy. Romochka picked up that Puppy was special to them because of the dogs, and he felt big with secrets. He could make himself special to them any time he wanted, but he didn’t want to be locked away from his family, and that was clearly what they would do. Being a dog had kept him in that cell as Belov’s begging tool. Being a child now seemed to keep him free. So for the second time in his relationship with Puppy he played the human role but not, this time, to intimidate; and this time it filled them both with glee.

From that first day, he didn’t lick Puppy. Nor did he yelp or whimper or ask for Puppy’s belly. He was careful to avoid sniffing things. He watched other small boys in the metro stations and on the streets, and copied some of their mannerisms. He passed these, too, on to Puppy, who mimicked him in everything. One day his special performance piece would be slapping his thigh and laughing loudly; another day it might be spitting in his hands and combing his fingers through his hair. He loved this pretence.

He terrorised the other children in the centre in subtle ways, growling and snarling at them when no one would see, but he lost interest quickly. He gave his attention to Dmitry and Natalya, and to Puppy. For his part, Puppy knew what Romochka was doing and backed him up with his characteristic joyous inventiveness.

Dmitry was careful of asking too much. He could only imagine what their home might have been like. Romochka was silent on the subject. He was silent too, on how his younger brother might have been lost and have come to live in the care of dogs, or how Romochka had found him. Maybe, as was the case with that Ukrainian girl Oksana, everyone knew about the child with the dogs. Dmitry tried once to ask about Marko’s parents, and Romochka said the oddest thing.

‘I am the only dish on the table.’ He said it with quiet confidence, even pride. Dmitry was startled. The phrase stuck with him. He assumed it meant they were orphans, a revelation that pleased and troubled him. On the one hand, no more family members were likely to pop up, and that meant no more nasty surprises for his research to accommodate. He couldn’t hide from himself how delighted that made him. This had been a nagging fear—at its worst the threat of an emotional claim made by an adult who might legally be able to take Marko away, at least until he proved her unfit, and who would taint all his painstakingly reconstructed data. But if Romochka was alone in the world, shouldn’t they take him in too? Wasn’t there some moral aspect independent of policy, independent of the five million homeless?

Natalya, surprisingly, reassured him.

‘Romochka’s lucky we let him in and feed him, and we only do that because he’s harmless, interesting and unusual. We can only do so much, Dmitry. You think the rest of the children we have here don’t all have siblings in horrible situations? Nadezhda has five. All drug addicted, and one who sexually abuses her. Half these children’s relatives are psychopaths who belong in corrective institutions for the sake of society as a whole. Do you want them here too? The gangs, the rapes, drugs and violence—and don’t even get me started on the parents.’

Natalya, Dmitry guessed, didn’t want Romochka on their hands either.

The food they gave Romochka at the centre was cooked, hot, and they gave him nearly as much as he asked for. But he was hunting less and what he took home was never enough. He worried about the dogs when he spent too much time with Puppy, and he worried about Puppy when he hunted with the dogs. He began to notice weekdays and weekends because the centre was shut two days a week.

He began to look forward to walking with Dmitry, talking about this and that, mostly about Puppy. He liked to try to match his stride to Dmitry’s long legs, and he liked the way Dmitry’s large adam’s apple moved up and down his neck. He liked those kind grey eyes, and that Dmitry didn’t mind being stared at. Dmitry thought nothing of holding his nose to bring his face in close and make eye contact. Dmitry never laughed, but was funny. He was comfortable with Dmitry; Natalya was a different matter. He felt a little sorry for Dmitry: he could see that he too feared Natalya.

Dmitry didn’t know everything but was trying to find out so he could help Puppy. Romochka found that dry voice, telling him these dry truths, comforting, but most of all, he liked Dmitry’s smell.

He watched Dmitry and Natalya, noting the kisses and endearments; and the fights. Dmitry, Romochka knew, was most interested in Puppy. But to his huge gratification, he began to notice that Natalya was more interested in him. He frowned whenever she came near him. He imagined pulling her long brown hair. She smelled of slightly rotten flowers, of Dmitry, hair, soap and girl sweat. He could smell her vulva, too—spring mud and cut grass; so different from the musk and pungent anus smell of full-grown men. Very different from the cosy, sweet smell of Mamochka. He kicked chairs over and tried to bend or break things when she came near in order to show her how strong he was. He began to perform the boy most of all for Natalya. Her body-smell seeped into his dreams.

Yet he felt safer with Dmitry.

31st August. Today Romochka arrived at 10.30 with a small and very putrid coat, too small for him but clearly too big for Marko. An awful object, grease-covered and stained inside and out. Dark brown and grey stains. Blood? Hard to tell what colour it once was. Shreds of matted rabbit fur around the hood. Romochka’s very proprietorial with it. Carried it in diffidently, but with a certain dramatic air. The stench! It filled the whole building. Once inside Marko’s room, a curious ritual took place. Romochka laid it on the ground in front of Marko. The little boy was beside himself with delight at the sight of the coat, but seemed hesitant to touch it. He seemed to regard it with something like reverence. The sacred coat. Romochka looked down at his hands, then began staring out of the window. Marko crept, belly to the ground, over to the coat and gingerly laid a hand on it, staring at Romochka all the while. Marko stayed still, extended hand on the coat. He turned his face slowly, shut his eyes and stayed like that, face averted. I counted ten seconds in which both boys stayed absolutely still. Eventually Romochka turned and walked out of the room. He left. I could hear him clumping rather obviously down the stairs. Marko fell upon the coat in a whimpering frenzy. I called Anna Aleksandrovna and Dmitry in to watch. Marko smelled the coat in deep breaths, then slowly slipped it on, then rolled about on the floor in it, then took it off, and lay down on it and went to sleep with part of the hood in his mouth. I went in after ten minutes. The smell in the room was unbearable.

Not sure what Dmitry’ll make of this either. Probably some guff about an autistic child’s older sibling learning the behaviour necessary to communicate, with the younger effectively as teacher. But when? How does Romochka know that Marko needs to receive a gift the way a dog would? Because that’s what I saw here. Why does Marko put it on, as well as doing all the doggy things with it? Trouble is, DPP knows nothing about dogs.

These are strange times. What if Marko was simply born a dog? What if he never lived with dogs, but attracts them, and this is simply a new condition, a mutation? Not impossible. Not a theory to share with DPP, Natalya!

But they are an odd pair.

Romochka was delighted with Puppy’s progress. Being a boy himself so much of the time made him value boyness far more than he ever had. The challenge to improve drew him on, and Puppy followed. He was standing and walking most of the time now, and even making voiced noises a lot. None of them real words, but all rather like words. Dmitry praised Romochka for all this, suggesting that it was Romochka who was responsible. Romochka added Dmitry and Natalya to his clan of human people he liked. Laurentia, the Singer, Dmitry, Natalya—in that order. He murmured their names in human voice and loved the music of it. He sang them, along a melody line that rose and fell like a dog’s howl. Until then it had been just Laurentia and the Singer.

He didn’t count Puppy as a human. Schenok in voice was, after all, a game. Puppy’s real name lived in silence in his smell, in the woven breath of the lair. And inside Romochka.

He thought now and then about breaking Puppy out of the centre and taking him back home. How happy all the dogs would be! He pictured Puppy scampering about to revisit every smell and every game. They could go back to being a proper family again. But he worried, too. Puppy was so clean and soft now. The hardened muscles and the calluses on his hands and feet were gone. He ate a lot of different things here, hot things, soups and pies and meat stews in huge amounts. Much more than Romochka ate. Would he be able to find enough food for Puppy? He coughed these days, too, all the time. Maybe he wasn’t strong enough to go back to that life. He asked Dmitry eventually, with what he thought were well-masked intentions, what would happen if Puppy escaped.

Dmitry looked at him thoughtfully.

‘You know, Romochka, it is lucky we rescued Marko when we did. He was a very sick little boy. He needs to live here, or he might not survive.’

Romochka must have looked doubting. Dmitry walked over to a drawer and took out a small disc. He held it up between thumb and forefinger.

‘But don’t worry. See this? We put one of these inside Marko’s body. It sends a signal, like a little beeping that you can’t hear. If he got lost the militzia could find him wherever he goes just by following the signal.’

Romochka held out his hand for the disc. It was smooth and shining. He turned his back on Dmitry and surreptitiously bit it. He handed it back to Dmitry with a metal and plastic taste in his mouth. He didn’t understand what Dmitry meant but it was clear that Puppy as good as had Dmitry’s rope around his neck.

30th September. Romochka arrived late today, at 11.35, with a present. He hid his face behind his outrageous hair, scowled fiercely, and held out a dripping, bloodied, grimy chicken. I am clearly a favoured person to be so honoured. I think cats give their owners mice in much the same manner. It has feet, but no head. It is very unprofessionally plucked, or rather its feathers have been torn out, but it is not cleaned. I hate to think where he stole it from. He certainly didn’t buy it, although I guess he might have traded it. I took it and thanked him, and he stalked off in silence. But he has been jaunty all day, really pleased with himself, and he has hung around, chatting to everyone. He helped me move furniture with a very superior look on his face, showing off his genuinely impressive strength. He is playing now out in the garden with Marko and that one-eared dog that hangs around. They must be slipping food to it. Marko adores it of course, but we’ll have to get rid of it. Pity.

4.30. I caught him again scaring other children with his mad-boy act, and he looked crushed and took off.

The awful chicken is in the fridge. I washed it, and it is fresh at least. It has bruises, so I think he acquired it when it was alive. Ha! Hadn’t thought of that. Ruthless little fellow. I am determined to take it home and cook it tonight for dinner—and bring Romochka a sandwich with some of it tomorrow. I’ll have to have a look on the internet how you pluck and clean a chicken. I think you have to dip them in boiling water, then pull the guts out the back end. Oujas! Babushka would know, but she’ll scoff at me for asking. I’ll have to make it look presentable before Dmitry sees it, or he’ll get all fastidious. But a present must be respected, even if it makes me the receiver of stolen (and rather revolting) goods!

Dmitry stood at the window of his fourth-floor office and watched the boy leave. He hoped the attachment Romochka had formed with Natalya wasn’t going to cause problems. Kids got attached to her all the time, of course, and she was professional about it. But this time she seemed to see Romochka as a kid she could befriend, perhaps just because he wasn’t an inmate. She went out of her way to flatter the boy and was clearly, to Dmitry’s thinking, herself flattered by Romochka’s attachment. Now that was unprofessional. He was particularly annoyed today because he had seen a loyal glower beamed his way from under Romochka’s hair when he snapped at Natalya about taking Romochka upstairs. But really, how could she? Even if it hadn’t been against the rules, it would have been ill-advised. It did children no good at all to know that they were watched twenty-four hours a day. Not to mention that it would vitiate any future data if Romochka took it upon himself to tell the others.

That one was a mystery, unlike any child he had come across. Definitely some kind of intellectual disability. Nonetheless, the way he interacted with Marko was fluent, wordless, authoritative. Solicitous. Romochka was always pleased by Marko’s progress, pleased to hear that he was sometimes walking rather than four-footing it. Romochka could make Marko do anything, and initially Dmitry had been delighted.

These days, however, he noted there was still a canine element in Marko’s eagerness and aptitude, and wondered in more jaundiced moments whether Romochka was teaching him tricks for their benefit. At other times Romochka simply sang to his little brother, and Dmitry put aside his doubts. He sang snatches of songs that were all, oddly enough, Italian. He had a raw yet musical voice. It was Romochka who managed to get Marko to make a word, repeating his own name over and over to his younger brother.

‘Romochka, Romochka, Romochka, Romochka.’

Then Marko’s startling sound, his only human syllable:

‘Rom…Rom…’

Dmitry watched Romochka saunter along the drive below, swinging that club. That was one tough kid. Romochka was bomzh and an orphan, and well past the age to form attachments, yet he was developing a relationship with them. Maybe the idea of foster care was not hopeless after all. Their hands-off approach to Romochka’s life still troubled him, especially as he observed the boy’s growing attachment to Natalya. He was fairly sure Natalya was no longer so certain in her views either. In fact there was a good chance, he thought with a wry smile, she would deny ever having held them.

There was no doubt the two brothers loved each other, but Dmitry was beginning to suspect that Romochka’s visits had something to do with the younger child’s slight regression and physical deterioration; perhaps also with Marko’s complete failure to learn to speak. He couldn’t explain it. Marko’s play indicated the cognitive parallel for language. He had arrived with all the preconditions for language acquisition to be rapid, but there was little sign of it. Romochka spoke, yet Marko barely noticed it. However, if Romochka grumbled or murmured, Marko reacted immediately. At one point Dmitry had annotated this, relating first the story of Viktor, the wild boy of Aveyron, who didn’t notice a pistol shot but showed animated interest at the sound of a nut cracking. At the very least Marko was missing his older brother more and more during Romochka’s absences. Dmitry was unsure what to do about it, other than take the older boy into care too.

Below, Romochka was joined at the end of the driveway by that big white dog. Natalya had said she would get rid of it more than a week ago. The dog licked the boy’s hand, which he didn’t seem to notice, and fell back to trot along at his heels. Romochka stopped by the gate, bent and sniffed it. Then, without looking around, he casually urinated, out in the open, on the gatepost. Odd.

Oh God.

It had been staring him in the face from the beginning. Two of them. He felt dizzy.

Dmitry had been walking for more than an hour, energetic, apparently purposeful, but without any destination. How did two brothers become dogboys, wolf-children? Who were they, these two, one so dark and one so fair? The memory of his own excitement over the discovery of Marko brought with it a sharp flicker of shame. It wasn’t just that Romochka’s existence devalued and tainted all the data. His groundbreaking studies on Marko seemed now some unwitting part of a sick experiment, larger than the ‘linguistic thresholds’, ‘non-canine zones of proximal development’ and ‘compulsive human-ness’ of his published papers, way beyond debunking the twenty-first-century vestiges of a belief in Homo ferus.

He felt as though he, Dmitry, had been part of some huge game, even duped in some way. Certainly not by Marko. Nor Romochka. He stopped, remembering in flashes that strange boy’s behaviour. Romochka, an urban feral child, had dissembled with conscious and consummate art. That child was intelligent. Gifted. But Dmitry didn’t feel duped by Romochka. He felt something bigger, some greater blindness that made him the sport or the laughing stock of someone. He started walking again. Who, then? Himself? God? His peers? His discipline, science? Mysterious children? He grimaced as he watched his boots pump in and out of view. Wolf-children, once so rare they were seen as mythic, were now in plague proportions in Moscow. So many millions of homeless children to choose from, for dogs looking to adopt.

He stopped for a moment. What if it was really nothing new? How many of the besprizorniki of the terrible 1920s—those devouring, rampant hordes of homeless children—had sought out dogs? Teaming up for mutual benefit—wasn’t it likely, rather than unlikely?

He laughed bitterly. Natalya’s schoolgirl diary on Romochka would be a more valuable resource than any of his painstaking research. They could submit work that described the co-researcher as ‘Bloody Dmitry’ or ‘Dear Old DPP’. It was all going to turn political and might spell the end of the centre. But it would have to be faced. Natalya’s judgments were idiosyncratic but her observations detailed. They would have to go through her volumes with care now, salvaging everything that could be rewritten. At least, for all her fascination with the older boy, Natalya hadn’t guessed either.

And Marko was constantly ill, now, even asthmatic. Marko was trying to deal himself out the game. So then, Romochka. What would he do if Marko died?

Dmitry walked harder. He chided himself for his bitterness: Get it into perspective. Professional pique, DPP? He would be ridiculed, sure. All that earnest blindness. Marko and toys. He flushed. Everything was changed, explained in shameful detail. But, think about it, this was all bigger, much bigger.

What if two little boys lived for years with dogs? Not family pets like that little baby Andrei Tolstyk, not like Ivan Mishukov and his street dogs back in 1998. No—with a clan of feral dogs, functioning socially and physically as dogs themselves. Romochka was a hunting animal; Marko a puppy for whom he provided. Yet, because they had each other, they had become liminal beings—socially, developmentally. Marko couldn’t speak because of course in pack life Romochka would never use speech, and Marko more than anything wanted to retain his place in that world.

But Romochka was a master of passing. Among humans, he could pass as an ordinary boy, near enough. With Asperger’s perhaps, or mild autism, or a behavioural disorder plus brain damage brought on by abuse. He’d done so for three months now in the centre—among experts, no less. Among dogs…well, Dmitry could only begin to guess, but in a way Marko’s early behaviour had to be a reflection of Romochka among dogs. Romochka could cross…over. Romochka walked upright and had language. He had to have begun life with the dogs well after he became verbal and once all sensorimotor, representational and symbolic play skills were developed.

Was this really possible? That meant…what? Three years now with dogs? Three winters. It was astounding, unprecedented. You could almost say one was more dog than boy; the other more boy than dog. Not to mention the feat of survival. Two!

This was exciting, now that he thought about it. He could rewrite the studies and submit an honest reassessment in the light of new information. He would note all he could remember (and those diaries would be crucial: Natalya and he could do it all together). He would study the two boys with the greatest attention. He would lure Romochka into the easy living in the centre, wean him from the dogs over a period of time. Come to think of it, he had never seen Romochka eat—all the food they ever gave him was taken, surreptitiously sniffed, and stored on his person. Dmitry’s blood sang around his body as he strode. He would rehabilitate both, and perhaps be able to show the resilience and recovery of children who have had just one significant human contact in early years, no matter how defective. Marko’s health might improve too, if Romochka lived with him. Marko would acquire language, if Romochka lost his secret clan dominance, Dmitry was almost certain. And Romochka would reintegrate spectacularly. After all, Ivan Mishukov’s rehabilitation from his life with street dogs had been successful.

He found himself thinking about the time Romochka slapped him. He had been walking up the hospital corridor with Romochka keeping step by his side. They were on their way to see Marko. Romochka said something to him, once, twice, and Dmitry was thinking about this broken speech—its odd rhythms and its insistent claim on the listener through unfamiliarity. Romochka had stopped walking, suddenly, and at the same time Dmitry felt a sharp blow to his hand. He turned. Romochka was standing a couple of paces behind him, his small face grimacing in strange, helpless rage, his eyes fierce with it. Dmitry’s hand burned afresh now with its own memory. He wished he had heard what the boy said. The incident stood out to him now as important. An irretrievable moment that might have illuminated everything.

If Romochka was around four when he began life with dogs, then Marko was…born later.

No. It wasn’t possible. His disappointment settled even more heavily than before. There was going to be some ordinary explanation that revealed them as merely neglected.

Dmitry looked up, his rhythm broken by the slowing flow of pedestrians. He had walked a long way from the Makarenko Centre and the university. He checked his watch. 4.30. He had left the centre just after lunch. He didn’t recognise this district at all. The pavement was narrow and treacherous, broken here and there as if diseased, and the buildings were an ugly, impromptu mix of structures, some faded and crumbling, some newer, Kruschev-era. Almost all post-revolution. There was some blockage up ahead. Other pedestrians leapt among cars and around each other and eventually he found himself directly behind the obstruction. An elderly lady in a dirty cream lace scarf inched along the cracked stone lip, carrying two avoski bulging with produce. Cars scudded by in the crushed ice of the puddles, spattering them both as he waited, his thoughts scattered, for a chance to pass her.

He crossed the road instead and found himself at an intersection, unsure which way to turn. He could see no tram stop, no avtobus, and no metro. He would have to ask directions. A sad-looking black dog crossed the street with care and headed along it with some steady purpose. Where did dogs go and come back to with such certainty?

He followed the dog for no real reason other than curiosity. After just five minutes, its purpose faltered. It stopped, sniffed around and lifted its leg to mark a concrete seat. Meandering around, but not randomly. It was intent on something, sniffing here and there, then marking a tree behind the bench. Dmitry looked up and saw that he was outside a fairly recent Soviet-era metro entrance.

Inside, the warmth enveloped him, and he headed to the turnstiles, relieved. He passed a group of bomzhi, men and women, begging along the wall and descended the escalator into the deep vault and arcades of the underground. He didn’t recognise the name of the station and was disoriented. Definitely outside the ring route, he thought, or he would know it. He looked for the signs, unsure at first which platform would lead back home. Yes. This was one station from the end of the line.

The station opened up in a series of plain palisades, arches and pillars. A rather grand place for all its plainness. The platform was crowded with tired-looking commuters. Factory workers. Along the back wall of the platform there were more bomzhi, some asleep in piles of rags, some standing near trolleys that were piled high with miscellaneous stuff and draped with plastic bags or blue tarpaulins. They looked ready to move and, when the militzia came down the stairs, they all got up and pretended to be waiting for the train. Dmitry noticed particularly the dogs. A dog hovered warily at the outer fringe of the workers and another, in its own private cocoon, wove in and out among the people, avoiding contact, alert but unafraid. A small black dog rode high on a blue tarp, staring bug-eyed yet blank. None of them made any noise. Although Dmitry was surprised at how many there were, he was also aware that they were familiar. There were often dogs and bomzhi in metro stations. He had simply never paid them much attention before.

He stood among the workers waiting for the train to pull in. Just ahead of him he saw a plumy dog’s tail and he moved to see better. It was a large thick-haired mongrel ovcharka. It stood patiently among the people, shifting if anyone came too close.

The tracks hissed and rattled, the air, shunted up the tunnel and across the waiting people, was filled with the familiar compound cacophony, and the squat face of the train filled their view. People stirred, reanimated. The dog’s tail moved, and it turned with the people to acknowledge the arriving train.

The dog waited for the doors to sigh open and the first crush of people to embark, then it too hopped onto the train. Dmitry followed. The dog stood to one side and stared into the middle distance. People ignored it. Dmitry stood not far from it, his heart beating fast. The dog sat down and stared out of the glazed doors, panting quietly. Dmitry noticed how the thick pelt shifted and parted over its shoulders as it swayed. He could see its profile—wide smiling jaws, white teeth. The dog gulped now and then to clear the saliva from its tongue, then resumed panting. The steady look in its brown eyes, the wrinkled brow, didn’t change. When the train pulled into the next station, it stopped panting and looked around, ears lowered deferentially, apologetically, as it moved its large body out of the way for exiting passengers. Then it resumed its stare and its relaxed swaying stance. As the train slowed for the second station, the dog stopped panting. It waited until most people had left, then stepped off among the stragglers. Dmitry watched as it trotted across to the peregod through to the ring-route station and disappeared up the stairs.

He slumped back into his seat and let his home-bound train pull him back to the familiar parts of the city. His dizziness returned. His world had shifted somehow, had swelled to encompass some fact that had always been there but from which he had been barred. Why had dogs always seemed thing-like, symbolic, when they were in fact person-like and about as symbolic as he was? Where was that dog going? Was it someone’s dog? How had it learned a path that took a train, then a transfer? Or was it travelling randomly—his scalp crawled—for pleasure? When he reached home, one station short of the university, he stepped down beside a ghost image of four legs disembarking in the throng.

Here everything was familiar. Just beyond the park was his apartment, seventh floor up, with a beautiful view of birch tree trunks and golden tops, a restored church and a ring of identical apartment blocks. In it Natalya was waiting. He had a feeling Natalya would see no cause for dismay in his news, and although he was bracing himself against her enthusiasm he craved it too. He was exhausted and his legs were shaking. He found it hard to put one blistered foot in front of the other.

At the park gate he saw a dog. It was a shaggy thing lit murky orange in the street lights. It caught his glance and dropped its head to slink into the shadows, then it loped on silent feet to slip out of sight into the small alley by the Megafon shop. Three dogs further down the street were raiding the large new rubbish vat. A pale dog was up on top, gleaming as it tore at a cardboard box. The second had its front paws on the vat and was wagging its tail and flipping its nose as though making small silent barks. The third, black, its silhouette tipped in orange light, was standing four-square a little away from them, not looking at them.

Dmitry realised suddenly that they were a team. The muscle, the brains and the lookout—which was staring, he realised, straight at him. He was part of this tableau.

He turned away and pushed the park gate open.

This large, poorly lit park was considered safe. A militzia patrol was supposed to keep drunks, beggars and drug dealers out. All the neighbourhood knew the militzia controlled the deals that took place in the park, but the effect was the same: the place was safe, and free of beggars.

Tonight, however, the park was full of dogs. Dmitry counted at least seven, looming larger than life in the shadows. Why had he never noticed? He reached his bench under the birch trees and sat down. He had sat here often on his way home. He had sat here in all seasons, winding down after long days. On clear autumn nights like this the park shimmered and glittered as pale leaves tugged at their stems and then rained down with a windy rustling to the pale carpet. The army of park workers had not yet taken over. They would be along soon to rake up all the leaves and pack them into garbage bags, leaving bare ugly earth ready for the snow, but at this moment the park shone, unkempt. Everything was luminous, the sky dark and cloudless. He had seen few such nights in his six years here. He closed his eyes. Of course he had seen dogs before. He had been harassed by dogs before. Everyone had. Still, he felt shaken.

He opened his eyes at a tiny, proximate sound. Well, of course—a dog. It was a mastiff, a Moscow watchdog, and it knew him. Its little black eyes gleamed at him in a friendly way out of its dark panda mask. He knew it too. His neighbour’s dog. Malchik sat down and waited, still eyeing him with happy affection and wagging a huge tail.

‘Hello, Malchik,’ Dmitry said softly, and Malchik tipped his massive head to one side in what seemed almost comical acknowledgment. Had Dmitry ever spoken to a dog before? Not that he could recall. He held out a hand, and Malchik immediately got up, padded towards him and licked it. The tongue felt warm, faintly raspy, quite gentle. Sloppy, too. Dmitry wiped his hand quickly against his trouser leg. Malchik then turned and reverse-parked his great bulk right beside Dmitry. He pressed his weight in against Dmitry’s knee. He tipped his huge head up and back over his shoulder to keep eye contact. Dmitry stroked that bunched brow; ran his hand down over the heavy neck and shoulders. Malchik’s thick pelt was so loose on his body that it rolled under Dmitry’s hands. The tree-trunk neck and rippling muscles were deep underneath all this cuddly stuff. Dmitry smiled and kept massaging the dog. He glanced up and down the dark park lane and leaned in to sniff his fingertips and Malchik’s neck. This dog smelled quite nice. A lot nicer than Romochka. Yuri Andrejevich must shampoo him. This huge bulk all sudsy in a small bathtub? How ludicrous. Rub-a-dub-dub. But you’d have to wash a dog if it lived with you.

He sat back, self-consciously stroking the dog. Naming Malchik, he thought, would not have been so easy. How could you ever know their real names? Boy, Girl, Mother, Father, Pup—that was the only honest common ground. He was overcome with weakness: he was not only exhausted but also famished. He sighed. Natalya was not particularly interested in food. She cooked rarely, with unpredictable results and an air of proving a point. I do cook for you, see? He had never mentioned her cooking or not cooking, and, bewildered, had made no comment when she raised it. Natalya always got home before him, but these days he found it stressful to walk in and find her wreathed in cooking smells, smiling triumphantly, preemptively winning an argument.

She might have shopped, though. Perhaps it was the influence of the dogs, but he really felt like otbivnaya. A dog’s dream dinner: a slab of meat, bloody, seared. With onions. He would cook, and they’d eat together.

Dmitry got up. ‘Come on, Malchik,’ he said, and they headed home. Dmitry had never walked alongside a dog. Malchik padded beside him with a lion-like gait, his brow twitching incessantly. One eyebrow lifted in triangular wrinkles now and then as he cast an eye up at Dmitry’s face. Dmitry was intensely aware of the dog’s friendliness. This huge beast, this sagacious brute who could not speak his language, was radiant, somehow, with a foolish goodwill.

Dmitry pressed the buzzer on his neighbour’s apartment. Yuri Andrejevich opened the door and Malchik romped inside, splattering spittle. Dmitry gestured towards the dog with a wordless smile. Yuri stared at him.

‘He’s a nice dog,’ Dmitry said hurriedly, and waved goodbye.

Natalya had bare feet up on the yellow arm of the 8 Marta. Her hair was down and her wild curls gleamed in the light of the table lamp. She hadn’t cooked, but the fridge was full and the kitchen clean. Her face glowed softly, blue-lit by the television. She looked up at him with her uncomplicated smile; and, as always, the unfailing health and warmth of her face drew him in. He felt the miseries of the day as small inert packages, defused, well-prepared for handover.

1st November. We had a long talk with Romochka, and finally all is clear. What a godsend it is that Romochka can actually talk and is intelligent! He gave most of our questions one-word answers, but was open enough. It is a strange yet somehow ordinary story. Everything is explained. Romochka and Marko (‘Puppy’ is a pet name) were in the care of their mother. Mamochka, Romochka calls her—very sweet. He must be one of those boys who regard their mothers with intense devotion and solicitude. They all loved dogs, and the family had many dogs, he says—they lived with him and Marko. No father in the picture; mother working very long hours, leaving the boys with the dogs. He’s loyal: says she took ‘very good care’ of them, giving them milk and other wholesome foods, and keeping them ‘very clean’. Mamochka got Marko ‘as a present’ for Romochka, he says, which is also rather sweet. There seems to have been a lot of love in this impoverished little family. Then, at some point, Mum disappeared. Asked him repeatedly what happened to his mother; his answer always the same: he has no idea, but he never saw her again. Romochka was, as he says, ‘the leader’. He took care of Marko and the dogs, he says.

Time frame: only vague answers. We’ll have to go on the behaviours Marko demonstrates and speculate a bit.

They are not really dogboys, just from a family that understood dogs well, and then had to fend for themselves with only the dogs for company. The older child in loco parentis, as is common in neglect scenarios. Disappointing for the purists—and the mythologists. They can’t really be categorised as feral children, but they have survived an incredible ordeal for at least a couple of years. Not much here for poor DPP to write up, though. Romochka’s still looking after the dogs, it seems, and has them living with him. He said, or rather agreed, that they live in a nice place, with everything they need. He mentioned other people who help them with clothes and food, so maybe some kind neighbour lets them live in the cellar or attic. Dmitry is right, really—a lot of Romochka’s behaviours can be explained by some mental defect and the emotional attachment to the dogs, the only enduring element of their family life.

How do you define a dogboy? The fact he’s a boy will always dominate, and these dogs were family pets. Providing warmth and affection but perhaps more a responsibility? Not really such a major influence upon the older child.

Good to have got to the bottom of all this, finally. It makes you think, it really does.

Natalya had Puppy moved to intensive care. The blood tests were in: it was pneumonia. With cystic fibrosis, this was critical.

The oxypulsimeter graph showed the racing heartbeat and the falling oxygen. The little boy flicked his limbs and she knew he was in pain. He didn’t appear to recognise her but fixed his gaze on Dmitry. As she watched the bony chest labour under her stethoscope, she felt Dmitry staring across the barouche. There wasn’t much to say, so she didn’t say anything. She wrote up her notes without looking up. Nothing they had done had made the child sick, so Dmitry’s accusing stare could burn itself out. Of course, he had more at stake here. He had still wanted to study the two boys together, and stubbornly held onto the idea that they were at least partly feral. She could do without his disapproval just the same.

She gave instructions to the nurse for the increased dosage of intravenous gentomycin and morphine and left the room. Dmitry would call her if anything changed. She was conscious of retreating. She had been fond of Marko, but she could not turn this around. Her affection had no place now, and she needed to retract it. She was the one who would be doing an autopsy on a child she’d known, not Dmitry.

Puppy’s body made a tiny mountain in a vast snow plain on the barouche. He objected to nothing. Dmitry sat long hours with him and Puppy, soaring somewhere on morphine and fever, smiled each time he looked into Dmitry’s eyes. There was nothing canine, or boy-like either, in this glance. Certainly there was nothing of the boy Dmitry had known. Dmitry sat, waiting for the glance, and wondering what Marko saw to make him smile so sweetly. He had the uncomfortable feeling that the boy was seeing someone else.

Puppy died almost effortlessly the following evening.