It is a long autumn twilight. The hour between dog and wolf. Light and dark are mixed, fear mingled with possibility. Between dog and wolf, everything seems to hesitate, everything is neither, until the point when night, like a drawn-out exhalation, spreads over the city.

Romochka trailed along the side of the mountain, striking cans and other rubbish with his club. A bitter cold wind was blowing from the north, tossing small flocks of plastic bags up the sides of the mountain for take-off over the city. The heat was gone from the world and the smell of autumn was in the wind. Sweet dry grass heads, tea, and the smoke of fires. Out at the forest the birch trees stood out, golden and orange; the larch were a high haze of dull gold, and the pine and spruce seemed taller in their dark coats. The rowan fruit hung heavy and red, as yet too tart to eat. Romochka’s thick mane of hair blew across his face as he turned this way and that in aimless misery. Puppy was dead. He knew what that meant. Blood out, not in: a kill smell. Cold bones. Cold rot. He knew he would never see Puppy again. Every creature he had ever seen die had been afraid, and he couldn’t bear to think of Puppy like that.

He stared up at the bloodshot eye of the sky. What if someone, somewhere, were watching all this? Someone like Natalya, someone who knew nothing and lived outside everything, unable to smell, to touch, to rub; just watching, delighted, without comprehension? It was good, that day, standing beside Natalya and looking down at Puppy playing in the room. He had always known they were watching, and the satisfaction of finding out how blended with happiness that she had shared her secrets. She showed him the TV screens, and he looked at all the other children. He suddenly found them interesting, when they had been completely uninteresting before. It was a form of hunting. Everything the children did seemed changed, worth seeing and thinking about. He had been about to tell her his own secret, but then Dmitry found them and was angry.

A rat shot out of a faded bucket at his feet and he swung savagely. He missed, and a sudden rage flared behind his eyes. He battered the bucket with all the strength of his arms, but a rising fury swept over him as he did it. The bucket split, crackled and splayed out in shards. There was nothing satisfying about smashing a fucked-up bucket. Puppy was dead but not broken like this. Curled up. Warm…then cold. With Natalya and Dmitry watching.

His blows slowly stilled until his arms hung by his sides.

Romochka, Romochka. I am so sorry Romochka. It is bad news. We didn’t know how to contact you. He was very ill, Romochka. We did all we could.

He hadn’t said anything. He had wondered for a moment whether anyone had eaten any of Puppy, whether some hungry dogs had got to him when he was defenceless. Strangers. Then he had realised that Dmitry was trying to touch him. He had wanted then to smash Dmitry’s face with his club.

He sat down on the spreadeagled bucket with his club across his knees and stared out. He was on the slope nearest the cemetery, overlooking the wooded graveyard and the much thicker treetops of the forest. The trees in the cemetery seemed more wintry than those of the forest beyond. The wind could shake them more easily.

Autumn was nearly over. The tall oak tree nearest him was already almost bare; the black branches with their tattered remnants reached a hand of many fingers against the darkening sky. He could see the fur of lichen making a frayed upper edge to the silhouette. Where the forest met the cemetery, he could make out the occasional flicker of movement: squirrels bustling, hunting in the leaf fall, urgent with purpose. He should be hunting too, if only for the sake of Mamochka, who was heavy and soon to pup. Winter was coming. Winter without Puppy: neither warm and comforted with Romochka’s arms around that homely little body, nor soap-stinky in the centre under blankets.

He should have hit Dmitry. Puppy was Dmitry’s responsibility, and he must have done something very very wrong. But he felt all twisted and knotted in his belly at that. He tried to throw up to clear his belly, but nothing came and the knot stayed. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe; he began coughing to dislodge the heavy block of wood that seemed to have become stuck in his chest. He shut his eyes.

His neck-hair rose. Some dumb stray was stalking him, upwind. He could smell fear and hope and inexperience on this dog. He opened his lashes enough to see through the grey curtain they made. It was a big, thin dog, just a shape in the evening gloom. There was something wrong with it. It was rasping, making too much noise as it crept towards him, sending its weird sick smell straight at him.

He sighed twice, as though still in his own world, but gripped his club tight. When it finally lunged, he rose more swiftly than the rat from the bucket and swung with all his strength and speed. There was a satisfying, sinking crunch as the club caught the dog below the ear. Romochka’s fighting snarl dropped to a growl, and he watched with something like clean happiness as the yelping dog staggered briefly, its smashed head held low, its one good eye leading. It stopped, stood with its head swaying. Then it collapsed and lay still.

Romochka walked over to the dog. His happiness cooled and vanished as quickly as it had risen. The dog was twitching slightly, but leaving. He could see that distant, fearless look in its eye. He felt his own blood draining away, leaving him weak, wrecked. He had never killed one of his own kind. The knot inside him tightened.

He walked away from the dead dog, down the mountain towards home. He wasn’t hungry but thought he had better fill himself up tight, then sleep. White Sister and Grey Brother were waiting for him at the mountain meeting place, to his relief. He couldn’t have borne being alone for one step longer. White Sister licked his face. Grey Brother kissed his neck as he sat down with them. They smelled him over, looking for Puppy. For them Puppy had been, for a long time, the smell on him when he returned from the centre. His rage and misery returned as he licked them both. They would never smell Puppy again. Romochka’s throat and stomach clenched painfully.

A man staggered along the trail. He looked and smelled just like any other drunken bomzh, wearing a miscellany of ragged garments and an old soldier’s woollen hat. His grey hair was long and lank and dangled in strings over his scarves. He walked gingerly up the pathway, controlling his unsteadiness. Then he tapped his forehead with his middle finger.

Uncle.

The man turned his thin face briefly towards them. He was unmistakeable. Romochka bit down on a cry and then stiffened into the stillness of a hunt. The dogs looked at him in surprise.

Uncle had changed. The almost-respectable suit and greatcoat were gone. Even in this light it was clear that his body and face were gaunt. He was old. He was homeless. He gave the two dogs and boy plenty of room as he swayed, humming and cursing, up the path from the mountain towards the metro. In a dizzy moment, Romochka realised he knew the song the old man was trying to sing.

‘Am I to blame…Am I to blame…Fuck…Fuck!’

Romochka felt faint. His mother’s song from long long ago picked up his heart and tossed it about painfully. He followed and the two dogs fell in behind him, padding after the drunken man. They hadn’t harassed a drunk for a long time now, not since they were young and silly, but they never questioned Romochka’s choices.

Romochka kept Uncle close; he wanted to hear the song. Uncle trilled in falsetto over the first line, again and again, without getting any further. The whole song, as complete as when his mother sang it, plunged into Romochka’s chest and rang through him, while up ahead Uncle swore and slurred. A kind of yearning entangled itself with Romochka’s anger and misery. He placed his feet with the silence of a hunt, but it was the song he was stalking, not the thin old man. He picked up each halting word like a crumb, a pebble, dropped just for him to follow. He could recall each word: it seemed to become the only thing he truly knew.

‘Am I to blame, for being in love?!…Fuck, fuck, fuck!’

His mother’s voice battered at Romochka’s heart until his body sang with pain and longing. He felt the huge block rise in his chest and throat again and knew now that it was made not of wood but of tears, teeming like a ball of summer maggots inside him.

Uncle, unaware at first that he was being followed, swayed through the twilit alleys. But at a wide street corner, he turned and saw Romochka, the two dogs at his heels, staring openmouthed. Uncle stopped, frowning with concentration. He hummed the tune, slowly, mindlessly, as he stared back.

He gave Romochka a sudden gleaming look of drunken recognition and stopped singing. He pointed three times and left his hand hanging in the air at the end, a gesture as familiar as the song.

‘You little shit. I know you.’

Romochka held his breath. He raised supplicant hands. He had a sudden vision of his mother in an apron, cooking porridge for all three of them, singing, as Uncle laughed happily.

‘Yeah…I know you. You’re that weird little dog-fucker. I saw you just now, back there at the mountain, staring like an imbecile. What are you following me for?’

Romochka didn’t move. He was still impaled on the song. So broken open in that moment that, had his uncle really known him, had he shown one moment of softness towards him, Romochka would have wept. White Sister and Grey Brother, bewildered at all the strange crosscurrents in this hunt, had stiffened beside him, and he felt himself pulled away from Uncle’s eyes into the same defensive stance. A strange tension flickered for a moment between the wild child and the broken old man, but Uncle’s gaze flicked away nervously.

‘Fuck off, stinky, and take your dogs with you.’ He turned to lurch away.

The song, as soft and cruel as snow, faded from Romochka’s heart. He and the dogs followed in silence, without knowing why. Uncle knew they were still behind him; Romochka sensed the moment when he began to be afraid of them.

The knot filled his stomach and a confused anger seeped back.

Uncle picked up speed, glancing back at the three now and then. His step seemed steadier. Romochka guessed that he was heading for lights and crowds, a lone pebble rolling frantically towards strength in numbers. They turned into an alley that Uncle didn’t seem to know; he tried a few of the street doors to see whether one had failed to latch. Romochka felt his strength returning. Look at that foolish pebble, Puppy! Mark it closely, stalk it, get ready…No, don’t make a noise, not now! Ready…

He could feel the two dogs beside him wavering. They didn’t know this game. He gripped his club tight as Uncle turned into a smaller laneway. Romochka and the dogs rounded the corner wide. It was a rubbish-filled cul-de-sac between two buildings. Uncle stood in the middle, hunched a little; facing them with a knife in his hand. White Sister growled a low, uncertain warning.

Uncle spoke in a loud, firm voice: ‘Look kid, enough’s enough. Go home! I haven’t got anything. If you come any closer I’ll cut you, right?’ Romochka could hear the undertone of fear in Uncle’s voice. Puppy, look! Mark! Watch closely. Almost time!

He crouched slightly, White Sister to his left, Grey Brother to his right and his club gripped in both hands. He bared his teeth, lifted his face so that the matted black hair fell back. He snarled a drawn-out battle crescendo, White Sister and Grey Brother joining their voices to his, strengthened by his conviction. Uncle stepped back, and Romochka smelled his terror. Now, Puppy! He leapt forward so quickly that Uncle was still frozen on the spot when Romochka hit him hard in the thigh—a wide, swift full-body swing with the strength of his hard little body and his hatred behind it. Uncle shrieked and half dropped, breathing loudly in fear and pain. He lunged, grabbing Romochka’s hair. The dogs growled and crouched but did nothing, uncertain about the strange passions of this hunt.

Romochka twisted in an instant, dropping the club and clawing at Uncle’s face with his hands, while trying to bite the arm that held his hair. Uncle held on easily, even when Romochka got flesh between his teeth. Uncle was shaking him and yelping in pain, one knee on Romochka’s writhing body while he scrabbled with his free hand for the knife.

White Sister finally leapt, then, and Grey Brother followed. Romochka heard Uncle’s shriek close to his ear, then a hoarse gurgle as White Sister got him by the throat. Grey Brother sank his teeth into Uncle’s thigh, and Romochka was free. Romochka picked up his club, stood over Uncle’s body. His legs wide-straddled the braced form of White Sister and the man’s bony torso. White Sister had the kill grip. Romochka swung his club high, aimed, and smashed it down into the side of Uncle’s head. One rolling, terrified eye reached insistently, with an urgent childish inquiry, for Romochka’s glance. Romochka brought his club down again, then again; battering until that eye quieted and stared blankly.

He wiped his club clean in the dead grass on the pavement outside the cul-de-sac. The knot was gone from his stomach; he felt calm and still, floating in peace. Puppy was dead, but not like this. Just curled up asleep around a sick tummy, sick breath, then not breathing anymore. Then cold. Then after a while either frozen solid or smelly and inedible. Uncle shouldn’t have abandoned Puppy.

No…He felt a little dizzy. Puppy was not Uncle’s Puppy. He half turned to go back to the cul-de-sac; he looked down. White Sister had a red muzzle. He knelt and licked her face clean, tasting blood like his own. Or like Puppy’s. Then he turned to go. White Sister hesitated, and followed. Grey Brother fell in behind.

They didn’t understand this hunt at all.

Dmitry waited for a week and a half, then alerted the authorities and initiated the dogboy hunt. He did it without talking to Natalya, or indeed thinking of Natalya at all in the moment he made the call. He was sitting at his desk, his third coffee cooling in his mug, when the unpleasant churning of feelings that had troubled him since Marko’s death clustered suddenly, powerfully, at his anus, and rose like a hand through his belly to his throat. He swallowed. He didn’t think at all, just reached for the phone and dialled the number.

He was shocked at the blaze in Natalya’s eyes and the snarling curl of her lip. He suddenly remembered that Natalya had a stake in this story and should have been consulted.

‘Have you thought about what you have just done?’ She was shouting.

‘Natalya! Of course I have thought and thought! What else could I do? He can’t stay living as he is, alone with a pack of dogs!’

How could he explain to Natalya that this involved no thought? He was conscious that he had done a volte face, and was presenting as insupportable something they had both been happy to tolerate for months. He was exposed now in his belief that Romochka was special; he had violated their unspoken agreement that Romochka was an ordinary street kid.

She was so angry that she had turned white. Her clarion voice rang out, fierce, quivering. ‘Dmitry! How could you! Of all the poncy, do-good, gutless…I know this boy, Dmitry: you don’t. What will he think of us now? What is his future? How will I ever help him?’

‘Help him? H-Help…’ Dmitry choked on his outrage, ‘Natalya, when have you ever done anything that was not about you? Everything on principle, so you can avoid the pain of really…seeing! You think you have nothing to learn from me, from Romochka—from any…Never acknowledging…a-and you are still…won’t even show me your bedroom at home, you could not give up…Has it ever occurred to you that some people know, see, feel…less crudely than…Could you…Is… C-can…’ He ran his hands through his thinning hair. ‘Can you really think I am helped in some way rather than hampered by you…your know-it-all…You arrogant little girl! You…you, you…blockhead!’

Natalya was silent, her eyes huge and dark in a white face, her hair somehow electrified into a beautiful echo of Romochka’s.

He wanted to catch the words, that last word, haul them back in; but it was too late. He could not move. The silence lengthened between them. He shut his eyes. He felt the full horror of what he had done and what it was going to cost him. And where had it come from? All the times…how hard had he tried to talk to her, only to jam up; and then to spill nonsense like this, things he had never even thought! Under the influence of multiple stressors, the subject’s usual self alters…

A solitary life yawned before him, barren and confused, swinging without meaning between success and misery.

‘Oh, Dmitry.’ He heard Natalya sigh, her voice wavering slightly, but clear. ‘When you lose it you really…do, don’t you?’ She laughed uncertainly. ‘Did you mean it? No, I know you didn’t. You just wanted to hurt because…’ She breathed in, gathered herself up. ‘Dmitry, I am really worried about everything we have done to Romochka—it’s as if we have meddled unprofessionally, without direction or purpose or princip… Well, now we have this tragedy.’

He opened his eyes and sank into his chair. She was still pale, proud; but looking at him in a way that made him want to weep with relief.

‘I know,’ he said timidly. ‘This will be very terrible for him, but it is for the best. I’ll take responsibility for him personally.’

Natalya was suddenly animated. ‘Dmitry!’ Her eyes flashed. ‘I know exactly what to do! You will do more than take responsibility for him. No institutions for this boy, no scientific studies. We’re going to foster him! Take him into our home, and you bind yourself to him for good or ill until the day of your death.’

Strangely, Dmitry’s heart didn’t quail. He was in that moment complete, open, ardent. He did not even find her contrary or melodramatic; he saw how she too exposed herself and her affection for this boy. Something in him stilled and calmed and, for the first time since his vigil by Marko’s deathbed, he did not feel wretched. He looked up into Natalya’s radiant face.

‘Of course, Natalochka,’ he said quietly.

She kissed him then, drawing his lips into the taut circle of hers, drawing him in. He closed his eyes and melted into this new belonging for a long moment, and then felt the tears hot behind his eyelids.

It wasn’t her world that he was entering, he thought, but, hand in hand with her, Romochka’s. Romochka’s impenetrable, unknowable world that he, Dmitry, was going to smash to pieces with no way of predicting or tabulating the consequences. And, amazingly, he was to take his pure-hearted, incorrigible Natalya with him.

The first major militzia attack came near home in territories they knew quite well. They were making their way single file past the abandoned warehouses towards the allotment, when Mamochka stopped and lifted her head, good ear swivelling. They all halted and listened. Romochka couldn’t hear anything but all the dogs could. Then before he knew what was happening the dogs moved, fast and silent. Mamochka slid herself under the warehouse demolition fence; White Sister, low to the ground, backtracked to slip with Little Patch and Little Gold into a narrow trail that led between, through and under buildings, the long way round to the last meeting post and the mountain.

Romochka recognised a melt-away but dithered. By the time he decided to follow Mamochka under the fence, the dogs had all vanished, and even he could hear something. Then, half under the fence, he turned and peered back under the hessian. The unmistakeable padded dark blue trouser legs, many of them. He panicked and, breathing hard, wriggled through the fence and ran across the broken concrete of the yard.

He’d explored this warehouse before with the dogs and knew which way Mamochka would have gone. There was a narrow alley through to the car park behind the apartment blocks and an old tin car shed. But now, with the yelling men’s voices, the clank of chains parting, and gates opening behind him, he still dithered. What if they caught Mamochka in the car park, trapped them all in that little tin box? What would they do to the dogs? He was dizzy with terror, unsure whether he should try to follow the dogs or lose the militzia by himself.

He ran over to the buckled tin facing of the warehouse loading gates and tried to pull up a piece and slip inside. He could see into the huge first floor. It was spread with the usual discarded plastic bags and occasional pieces of tatty, comfortable-looking furniture. This building was the one inhabited by kids and their dogs. The dogs who lived here were not fighters and not organised. They too were often puppies. The kids were very sweet with them, and with each other, but exceedingly vicious if they caught outsiders. There were enough of them to beat off any intruders or kill anyone they hated, especially drunken adults or lone members of rival gangs. But he knew he was safe from the kids this once—he was, after all, trailing five uniformed militzi. They would have melted away too by now, if they were awake.

The tin wouldn’t budge, flimsy and old as it looked. He wrestled with it, cutting his hand. He couldn’t squeeze in. He glanced back. The five men were huge. They were inside the yard now and had slowed down, holding back. Yes, he could see it: they thought they almost had him cornered and knew enough to conserve their reaction time by not getting too close. He scuttled from the loading bay, hugging the wall, looking for an opening. When he got inside, he’d lose them in the spangled dust and light beams that crisscrossed the darkness: it was a space so bewildering it was worse than darkness. But leading them away from Mamochka took him away from the part he knew, and his flooding panic was making him fuzzy and slow. His heart pounded in his temples. Let there be an opening around this corner! He forgot that the next warehouse abutted this one, and the gap, what there was of it, was too narrow for a dog. The men fanned out, their boots clumping through the weedy concrete, stilling as best they could into the silence of a clumsy hunt. He rounded the corner to find a pile of rubbish and no pathway. Just an impossible, narrow gap in the rusty tin and flaking brick. He could see a sliver of freedom: the sunset glowing orange off the apartment blocks in the distance through the long narrow crack, but there was no chance he could squeeze through and run down those grassy trails. He squeaked and turned to face them, crouching low and flailing too hard, breathing too hard. He’d have to draw them in close, then trust that he was faster and more agile. If he could make it out of this horrible yard and into the long weedy growth of the allotment, they would never catch him.

‘Steady little man, steady,’ said the tallest militzioner. ‘We are not going to hurt you.’

‘Hell, Vasya, he’s just a bomzh kid.’

‘Nup—he’s the dogboy. Didn’t you see those dogs with him when he went through the underpass? Didn’t you see the weird way he ran? Just close in slow and easy, Misha, and catch him without hurting him.’ Vasya looked at Misha, flicked the cuffs at his belt with his finger and dipped his eyes meaningfully. Misha shrugged and nodded.

Romochka saw movement at the far hessian fence; then, at the corner, closer, just behind the leader, he saw Mamochka’s muzzle. Vasya was very alert for a house man and noticed the slide of Romochka’s eyes. He turned to look too; saw nothing. Turned back.

‘Drop the club, little man. Come quiet and easy. We’ve got you—you know we’ve got you. Just come quiet. I’ll give you a lollipop when we get in the van. I’ll buy you McDonald’s. Bet you’re hungry, hey?’ Vasya kept up a stream of gentle chat.

Romochka kept his eyes on the men, on Vasya, the leader. The dogs were here and had the advantage of surprise. He couldn’t give them away with his eyes, he mustn’t. The sweat sprang out all over his body and he was shaking. He drew himself in, pretending to be ready to fight, waiting for the moment in which he had to incite Mamochka, and then run, run, run.

When Vasya made the sign to move, Romochka yelped in unfeigned terror, sharp and loud, and six of the eight dogs also slipped out of their hiding places and sprinted in hunting quiet across the asphalt towards the men. Romochka’s teeth shook. In the last second, as claws scrabbled and scraped on broken glass and concrete, Vasya sensed it and spun. The six dogs were already upon them. Their snarls woke and swelled, and the men, screaming and roaring in fear, covered their faces, fumbling at their belts for guns and batons. Romochka was just in time to see Mamochka land on Vasya’s back, lips drawn back over her snapping teeth, and Vasya falling, flailing with his hands in the air to fend her off. Now! Romochka ducked under the brawling and ran as fast as his shaking legs would go. He wriggled under the broken fence, scraping the backs of his thighs on the wire. Little Patch and Little Gold were waiting for him on the other side of the hessian. They ripped through the allotment and bolted together for the lair entrance.

Don’t fight them long, don’t lock on! pleaded Romochka into the darkness, hugging himself on the nest with the two frightened young dogs pacing in front of him.

The rest were not far behind. The dogs had made more noise and show than real savaging—Mamochka knew only too well that they had to melt away again as quickly as possible once Romochka was free. Romochka knew, too, what a fuss he had to make of them, and have them make of him.

Once Romochka realised the militzia were using dogs to track him, he knew he had to keep his smell off the ground. He clambered up onto ledges and slippery tin windowsills whenever he could. He bounded up onto parked cars and traversed whole streets and alleys leaping from one hood to another. He never let his trail lead beyond the last meeting place. Black Dog staggered under his weight but accepted this strange new custom. The trained tracking dogs knew what he had done, but couldn’t communicate it; and they were being asked, insistently, to track him, not the dog he was riding.

Then, for a while, Romochka decided to clean the streets of his smell and stay in the lair with Mamochka. He had never spent time with her immediately before she whelped, and this time he found a mellow peace in lying with her, stroking her big belly, feeling the milk begin to fill her undercarriage.

Dmitry was shaken by the revelation that the militzia had captured Romochka—it had to be Romochka—more than a year before. But he spoke calmly, even forcefully to the major, his mind racing. It was a win–win situation, he said: track the dogs and you find the boy, hopefully capturing him with minimum trauma. At the same time some idea of the life and territory of the feral clan could be established for scientific purposes. Everyone had seen feral clans, yes—even as close to the Kremlin as Neskouchni Sad there was a well-known, rather annoying clan given to chasing cyclists. But they were a phenomenon that had never been studied, and the mere fact that this one had included two human boys made them worthy of attention. Dmitry was glad Natalya wasn’t with him.

Dmitry was troubled that Romochka had disappeared. The boy hadn’t been sighted for a week now. Romochka’s dogs were recognisable as a pack, even without him. They had been seen twice. He stared down at the large photos Major Cherniak had put in his hands, pictures of the dogs running with Romochka, a blurred sequence taken on a rainy day. One image caught his attention. The dogs were spread out: one white, one grey, three pale yellow, two black-backed, one gold with an eye patch. All large, with husky mask and tail, all clearly related. Romochka hunched in the centre, his head turned towards the camera, his legs caught in a wide lope. One of his hands resting lightly on the dog running next to him. Dmitry felt a frisson of excitement and a knot of strange dismay looking at these images. It was like seeing the image of the last of an extinct species, something precious and, even in the moment of being photographed, doomed. It was also like seeing a photo of what he had once imagined Romochka to be.

Major Cherniak sighed. ‘Look, Pastushenko. We’ll give it one try. You supply the equipment and personnel. We’ll catch you one of the dogs. We’ve got a unit that does castrations on street dogs: they are pretty experienced. If it’s no good, and if he’s sighted again, then plan B. I’ve got journos and politicians breathing down my neck on this one, you know. It’s really bad’— he pointed vaguely at the roof and waggled his finger— ‘that there have been two of ’em.’

Romochka, on the lookout, stared up at the sky. A bitter wind was tearing through the ruin. Tatty clouds, spread out like a clan of dogs hunting, scudded low beneath the leaden sky, each with a heavy black belly bearing a small flurrying snowstorm. The snow melted as soon as it landed, but the earth and streets looked slick, darker than the clouds. Romochka saw Black Dog creep back into the ruin with the snow melting on his shoulders. His head hung low, his ears were flattened, his usually jaunty tail was clamped between his legs and his back hunched in pain. He looked broken hearted.

Romochka scrambled down from the cupola. He entered the lair to see them all pull back from the big dog. Romochka alone dropped to his knees, threw his arms around that thick neck and buried his face in Black Dog’s coat. Black Dog smelled terrible. He gave off a sickly-sweet acrid stink—people, and a harsh alcohol. He smelled also of blood, but Romochka couldn’t see a wound in the dim light. He pulled the big dog over to his bower. Black Dog lay down and began licking himself to try to clean the smell off while Romochka felt him over. The others hovered around looking disoriented by all the strange smells that assailed them.

The hair had been shaved off Black Dog’s foreleg in a square patch. Black Dog licked it as if it hurt after Romochka had found and stroked it. Romochka pushed him onto his back and found the dried blood between his hind legs. Black Dog’s nose followed Romochka’s fingers, and then he began licking the open wound where his beautiful egg-sized balls had been. Romochka felt around the empty sac and whimpered softly with the big dog. Mamochka crept up and began licking him too, cleaning off the terrible stink with her own reassuring saliva. Romochka’s hands felt for that big head to cuddle it and the others all came closer and began licking as Romochka held Black Dog’s head in his lap. He caressed the thick jowls and the familiar scars. His hands moved over Black Dog’s head and neck and back. Then his fingers found a thick lump under the skin at the back of Black Dog’s neck. Black Dog yelped as he fingered it. It was solid, small and round. He squeezed it and Black Dog spun round and bit him. He snarled back warningly and held onto the lump. He smelled it. To one side of it there was a small wound. He leaned low over the dog and began to lick the wound gently. It was like licking an insect— small spiny threads stuck out of it every which way.

Everyone was now lying in the bower. Black Dog still smelled terrible but they were getting used to it, and they could all smell themselves on him again.

Still, none of them could settle. Something had invaded their lair with Black Dog’s strange smells and nothing felt safe. It was near midnight. Romochka suddenly jumped up. They would go to Laurentia’s and have a big hot feed. He hadn’t been on the streets for ages, and Mamochka was hungry. It would be good to get out. They all followed. Black Dog was too weak to carry him, so Romochka had to cross the allotment on foot.

The city seemed as safe as it had been many seasons before. They encountered no troubles, but they ate quickly at the Roma, hurried on by Romochka. He hadn’t settled—if anything he felt worse. This was a bad idea. He hovered near Black Dog, unsure what to do. Everyone was heading home, belly full, but he knew clearly now that above all they couldn’t go back home with Black Dog. He wasn’t completely sure why, but somehow Dmitry had done something to Black Dog. First Puppy, now Black Dog. He reached over and felt the lump again. It was a little swollen from his attentions. Black Dog growled.

The militzia would find them. It was certain that the militzia would find them. He remembered, dizzy with foreboding, that Dmitry had had no doubt. Romochka’s heart was pounding and Mamochka eyed him strangely, jumpy too now, as if she could hear the beat and smell what he was fearing. He would have to be quick. Black Dog would fight and would hurt him. He tried to calm himself and Mamochka and the now uneasy Black Dog but he couldn’t.

He couldn’t wait any longer. They were in a long dark alley. He tried to reach and touch the disc, but Black Dog knew his touch was not loving and snarled at him. He trotted hunting-quiet, stilling his heart for the moment. He pictured the disc and the little wound to the side of it. Now.

He leapt with all his strength and speed. He ripped at the thick hair with his hands, raising and parting it, and he sank his teeth deep into the wound, feeling his jaws clamp all the way round the disc. Black Dog spun savagely, raking Romochka’s head with his teeth. Romochka had turned his thick hair that way, hoping to fill those huge jaws, but he still felt his scalp part. He held on with hand and jaws as Black Dog scrabbled and twisted for a better grip. Romochka tucked his elbows in and held on. In a second Black Dog would twist and whip round the other way and bite into his face. His mouth was full of blood. He could feel the disc coming away. He was vaguely aware that the others hadn’t attacked him. Nor had they attacked Black Dog. Black Dog was up and turning hunting-kill quick. Then the disc was his, and he rolled off in a ball, guarding his face and belly with his back and hair.

Black Dog stood over him snarling, bewildered. Romochka could feel Black Sister behind him, tense, growling too. He thought for a moment that he would need Mamochka to help him fight the two of them, but Black Sister did nothing.

Romochka whipped round and stood up over Black Dog. He growled a low, reassuring warning: gentle, warm—speech for a puppy who has not understood. He spat the blood from his mouth and the disc into his hand. He held it out to Black Dog to sniff. The others all came up to sniff the alien thing sliding in Black Dog’s blood. Romochka growled out the danger of it, long and low. Then he threw it far from them and turned to run home. Black Dog fell in behind him.

Romochka was at peace. Mamochka would clean his bleeding scalp. He would lick Black Dog’s wound clean and hold Black Dog tight and all would be well.

Mamochka pupped in the pre-dawn. Romochka alone lay with her, stroking her, feeling the mysterious pressures and currents ripple through her body. Not even Black Dog was allowed near. Romochka received with her each slick, squirming sac, helping her part the skein to find the blind mewling baby inside. He helped her clean them in turn. Mamochka’s sage eyes shone in the gloom, and Romochka helped each of the four cleaned newborns to their first milk. He sat on his haunches staring down at his exhausted mother and the new babies. He was filled with a vast calm. The raw flesh smell was sweeter and stranger than food, mingled as it was with Mamochka’s unique scent and the dribbled sticky-sweet first milk. Everything depended on him, and he could be, and do, anything at all that might be needed. He stroked Mamochka’s sunken flank, his cheeks wet with tears as mysterious as the glistening, struggling sacs of life she had pushed from her body.

Before when the clan had small pups, he had always considered Mamochka no fun and had tolerated and despised the little ones themselves for weeks following their birth. This time Mamochka fascinated him, and he noted every small change in the puppies. He felt truly grown up, even feeling, as he once had, that he owned these creatures, the grown and the new, his mother and his brothers and sisters and all her children; but this time it was different, because he also felt that they owned him. All of him, to the very last gristle of his strength and intelligence; and they had a right to demand of him sustenance and safety for every breath they took.

For a week and a half, Romochka stayed close to home and stole food for Mamochka from the army of dumpsters that had now crept into the neighbourhood. He watched her become easy with the pups sleeping alone, and become proud when the others sniffed and licked them. The rituals of greeting began to encompass them too. Romochka was there when the biggest opened his bleary eyes for the first time.

A full moon hangs high over the cold city. Howl of dog, siren, swell and ebb of mingled engines, car horn, squealing tyres, backfire, gunshot. Moonlight washes everything, covering and revealing. The city is dressed with wide swathes of cold light and deep velvet shadows. The air promises frost and numbs fingertips and noses. The gaps between buildings are stark bars of light. The gaps between trees invite. People roam for as long as they can stand the cold, their thoughts open to what if… Dogs lope; their eyes glisten. Nothing sleeps. On such a night, for human and animal, anything could happen.

Romochka is dangling his legs over the edge of the cupola above the lair. He has seen few such nights in his four years as a dog. Romochka breathes in the cold air of the magnificent city. He sighs. He misses Laurentia, Pievitza, Natalya. He misses human company. He yips for the dogs, nagging Mamochka to leave the sated, sleeping puppies. They all head for town.

Laurentia looked pale and unhappy. She handed Romochka the bowls in silence. He placed them on the ground in the alley in front of Mamochka and then signed everyone out of the shadows. Laurentia handed him his meatballs and spaghetti, and stood back in the shadowed doorway, face averted. She wasn’t singing. Something was wrong. He started to eat but with a bad feeling in his chest, in his stomach. All over his skin. He glanced up. Tears were rolling down Laurentia’s cheeks. His neck hair stood on end.

‘I am sorry, bello. So sorry. The militzia…they give me big trouble.’

He stopped chewing, his mouth half filled and trailing spaghetti, and stared at Laurentia. His pulse picked up. She was sobbing, now, in heaving, messy gusts. He heard a strange, soft thud behind him and turned.

Mamochka had fallen.

His bowl dropped to the ground and smashed.

He is at Mamochka’s side, on his knees. Everything is silent, except his pounding heart. Mamochka shaking and crying through clenched teeth, his arms around her neck, his mouth open, but he cannot hear himself. Her faint whimper comes from far away, up in the sky. He holds her chest to his chest and lifts his eyes unwillingly to the others.

The whole world slows—one beat, then the next, then the next, measuring everything. The beats rock him, slow, slower, Golden Bitch staggers, tries to run, falls. Black Dog almost reaches him and Mamochka, tumbles, begging, slow, slower, his bewildered eyes fix on Romochka’s face. White Sister heaves, stumbles…Grey Brother, Little Gold, Little Patch each…crash…slow, slower. Black Sister, eyes intent, staggers forward, falls, against his thigh. The world is filled with whispers. Their voices all leaving him in sighs, silent yelps…Slow… slower. Their coats, black, grey, gold, white, shine in the street-lamps and moonlight. Their beauty is unbearable. Their eyes glitter. They blink at him, asking, asking.

He is losing them all.

Romochka’s heart burns in his chest and throat; he is crying unawares. Slow…slower…Slow…slower…

…Still.

Mamochka is dead in his arms. A frightening smell seeps from her in a last slow rush.

Militzia, like a nightmare, like a dream, are tumbling in from the corners of his mind. He closes his eyes and begins to slow-lick Mamochka’s dead face.

‘Get him off! Get him off! He might get some of it in his mouth!’

He is wrenched off by many hands. He waits, feeling deep for his upwelling rage, feeling for his strength. He hangs limp for seconds, like a meek human child, like Puppy, then he explodes like a cat with all the fighting strength that he has in him.

‘His name is Romochka,’ Dmitry shouted, pushing through the throng of militzia, searching desperately for Major Cherniak. Natalya was just behind him, and he reached for her hand.

Dmitry had their attention and lowered his voice.

‘He can talk; please stop barking at him. The famous dogboy Marko, who was in my care at the Makarenko Children’s Centre, was his brother.’ He no longer had much clout anywhere on the subject of Marko, so this was a gamble. Militzia also were a problem: they despised the centre, he knew, and tended largely to the view that street children were the larval stage of killers and drug lords. But he had to keep Romochka out of the internats somehow. And he had to fulfil his promise to himself and Natalya.

The young officer who had been barking looked sheepish. Dmitry squeezed Natalya’s hand tightly, and pitched his voice to carry over the din Romochka was now making in the back of the van. ‘I am Dr Dmitry Pavlovich Pastushenko. I am to foster him. He knows me.’

The militzia were hovering, looking haggard. Destroying strays was more accepted these days, especially since the Sokolniki rabies case, but many of them were still quite squeamish about killing dogs. Then that Italian cook had shamed them, sobbing like that over the corpses. But you can’t have feral dogs terrorising the district and you can’t have homeless kids becoming canine. And now that they had the dogboy wreaking havoc on the interior of the cage vehicle, they were unsure what to do next.

‘He’s like a wild beast,’ an officer holding a bleeding arm said doubtfully.

‘He knows me,’ Dmitry insisted, although the noise now coming from the van shook his confidence. Finally, he found Major Cherniak, who looked relieved to see him. ‘You can take him to the secure section at the centre to begin with, but I expect to transfer him to my home once he calms down and has had some health checks.’ He leaned in close and murmured. ‘Don’t panic anyone, Major, but everyone who has been bitten must go immediately to Emergency for rabies immunoglobulin and a course of vaccinations, just to be safe.’

The Major turned to look at him, shocked for a moment, then nodded. ‘That would be just about all of us,’ he muttered with a wry smile.

They watched the van pull away.

‘Why didn’t you try to talk to him?’ Natalya asked.

Dmitry didn’t answer immediately. Why indeed? Would Romochka have listened? He might have calmed the boy down. Why the reluctance? Had he feared what he would see? The noise was inhuman, bestial. That, yes; and what else? Then he knew: he was wary of being associated with the capture. No act in that moment could have been right for the boy he was going to foster, so he chose not to act.

‘Why didn’t you?’ he asked coldly.

‘I don’t want him to hate me!’

That’s why she had held back meekly and uttered no word, waiting for Bloody Dmitry to act. Dmitry felt anger wash over him and then leave as quickly as it had come.

There was a silence. They both thought it: Romochka must surely have heard Dmitry; and maybe he had smelled them both. They had made an awful mistake in leaving him as if he were an animal screaming in the van. Waiting for that van to make the journey from wilderness to hospital, from animal to human, before they would touch him or help him.

Natalya sighed. ‘Oh well.’

Dmitry suddenly felt very sorry for her and for her sadness, and sorry for both of them and all the mistakes they would be making together. A strange streak of joy shot through him, completely at odds with everything: here they were, inexpert and foolish, together, as parents. Their love story, so small and ordinary, would include all the ordinary mistakes too.

He reached his arm around her shoulders, patting her awkwardly.

‘You’ll be the best foster mother,’ he said.

Dmitry pored over his map as Natalya frowned at the skyline. The city was unfamiliar. Even the names were strange to him and the topography bewildering. He rotated the map through one-eighty degrees. Here it was. Yes, they were in the alleys of Zagarodiye now, the known territory of the pack, and very likely the precise area in which the lair was situated, according to the militzia. The restaurant was a very long way from home for these dogs. Incredible as this hunting range seemed, there was no doubt: Dmitry had the tracking routes marked in orange on the map from the brief five hours that one of the restaurant dogs had had the implant. He had planned on going everywhere but this forgotten fragment of Moscow was disturbing and his resolve faltered. He felt as though they had entered an alien land and were strangers. They were attracting attention—watched with hostility, skirted as though diseased.

To Dmitry’s dismay, he noticed they were being followed by a silent gang of children and adolescents. A cold sweat broke out all over his body. He knew all the theories on gangs and the reasons why children and youth gravitated to them (the twin drawcards of power and group belonging), and the miraculous fact that if they lived, they grew out of the need for gangs at a certain point. But he had always felt gut-clenching fear at being followed by kids like these. They had secret codes, secret incomprehensible wars. These ones all had 88 or 18 on their shirts and bomber jackets. The only certainty was that they were merciless.

He glanced at Natalya. Except for a quickening of her step, she seemed unconcerned, ridiculously unafraid. Natalya, he knew by now, had never once seriously considered that rape or violent death might come her way. Natalya had a stand-up-and-talk-your-way-out-of-it reaction to all confrontations, a dangerous, naïve confidence that her small universe of right and wrong could prevail and, with the force of her eloquence and personality, be imposed on anyone. She was often right.

But Dmitry knew she couldn’t be right here, now, and he was annoyed that he had to have the double terror—for her as well as for himself. He couldn’t trust her to follow his lead. She might do something crazy like talk to them. He would fight for her with all his strength. He was ready—but what if he failed? His heart pounded as he tried, unremarked, to assess their numbers. About fifteen, at least half of them past puberty. He felt his feet sliding in the sweat that filled his shoes.

After a while the children veered off, and Natalya slowed, making him slow down too. His terror settled. She must have had some inkling of danger, or she wouldn’t have quickened her step. He wanted to hug her as he glanced back to make sure the 88s had really disappeared.

They listened hard now for anything that might give them a sign of dogs. A pack of eight dogs, and one of the bitches had had dugs. There should be puppies. It was autumn, though; perhaps too late.

Where would you hole up if you were a dog?

To their left, pale gold grass half covered a meadow dotted with miscellaneous rubbish. In the middle distance the grass ended at the feet of serried ranks of huge apartment blocks, once cream- and blue-tiled but now streaked with grime and riddled with snow crazing. They were typical of their era. Probably a thousand people per building, Dmitry thought. He had heard about this precinct Zagarodiye, he realised. Popularly known also as Svalka, Rubbish Dump. He had had something to do with a couple of teenagers, juvenile killers, who had lived, he guessed, in these same apartments somewhere.

Tiny squares of washing fluttered gaily on myriad far balconies. Really, these buildings were just like hundreds of others clustered around Moscow’s outer ring route, yet Dmitry found the whole tableau, even these flags of lace and gaily coloured cloth, awful somehow; tainted by the fact that a boy (two boys) had lived with a pack of dogs here and been unremarkable. To the side of the blocks, unfinished constructions were slowly disintegrating in a weedy waste land. They looked blackened, even burnt in places, and Dmitry guessed that gangs or bomzhi lit fires in them. High up on the bare façades burnt holes showed here and there, with fire marks around them like theatrical eyelashes.

With a foetid chemical-and-rot smell in their nostrils, they crossed an empty allotment, as big as a communal garden plot. The smell was getting stronger, until it was almost a physical barrier, pushing them back. Dmitry had the feeling that it was coating their lungs, infecting them somehow. He pulled out some tissues, clamped one over his mouth and nose, and handed one to Natalya.

Then Dmitry realised that the great flat-topped hill to their right was made of rubbish. A mountain of rubbish. He had never known that Svalka was literal, not metaphoric. The mountain loomed over the forest and the land, compelling attention with its height and breadth and stink. They walked down the lane towards it, and the city dropped away behind them, leaving Dmitry feeling as though he had entered a different world. This wasn’t Losini Ostrav National Park, that was for sure. This was forgotten land. Waste land, marsh and forest, stench-blasted. You could see occasional dachas here and there, looking unkempt. Pre-mountain, no doubt.

They passed a developer’s sign that depicted the rubbish mountain as ski slopes and Natalya snorted into her tissue. Dmitry looked around with a new awareness. Actually, this was all extremely valuable. Vacant real estate. In Moscow. Incredible. If he were ever to consider buying a little block of land, this would be the place. Perhaps it was already too late; perhaps all this had already been sold for impossible prices. Powerlines buzzed audibly overhead, sagging almost to treetop level in between huge steel pylons. He could see movement on the mountain now, although nothing that resembled the brightly dressed skiers of the billboard. Tiny stooped figures inched over the rubbish in the middle distance.

‘There,’ Natalya said, pointing again and holding her nose. ‘Somewhere in those buildings—Oh! It’s a cemetery.’

They made their way slowly in that direction with a quiet footfall, listening. Natalya grimaced, looking around, and then said almost in a whisper, ‘Remember what Dostoevsky had to say about animals? God gave them joy untroubled. They are without sin, and you, in all your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you… something like that!’

Dmitry laughed. He kicked a plastic bottle towards the place marked for a future chairlift. ‘But which is our dogboy to be, Natalochka? The sinless or the defiling?’

Natalya thought of Romochka, locked now in the spare room of their apartment: bereft, wild, furious, betrayed. Shaved. He would be awake by now, groggy. She was thankful for the sedative; and trusted Konstantin to prevent the boy doing himself any physical harm.

She was even more certain now that this was their one chance to regain the boy’s trust: to convince him to stay and, long term, to give him a life. He had an exceptionally strong and healthy body. Worms, sure; and the worst ear mite infestation she had ever seen, but they had been able to clean, microchip and inoculate him; and treat practically everything while he was unconscious. Lab results were back, too. No HIV; and one big surprise: Romochka was completely unrelated to Marko. She’d given Dmitry the data summary. But she hadn’t told Dmitry everything: certainly not what she had seen, looking at Romochka’s naked, cleaned body.

On the plus side, clean, asleep and shaved, Romochka had a striking face, and, unlike many severely neglected children, the look of a child. Despite the scars, quite beautiful. Faintly Tartar. But—she couldn’t get it out of her mind. Who had carved the word into the child’s chest?

She had a strong sense that the whole story was more tainted by human cruelty than they could ever know. The story of Mamochka who loved her sons was merely something they had been told because they wanted to hear it. She said nothing of these doubts either. Something about her former certainty made her feel vaguely ashamed—an alien and unpleasant sensation. Well, she told herself, Romochka had lied brazenly and put on a very convincing performance, and she didn’t want Dmitry getting cold feet because a child was not what he seemed. Not now when she could see clearly that he needed this child in his life.

The word on Romochka’s chest would be there for life. Natalya was more determined, having seen it, that it wouldn’t define him and that she would see to it that he was rehabilitated. That word ‘dog’ made her really want this boy.

Dmitry was losing hope. Yes, he agreed, on the balance of probabilities, there might be puppies, but even in the territory the militzia map had identified, finding them would be near impossible. They wandered around with their ears straining for every tiny sound under all the sounds, finding this quiet dead land, to their surprise, too busy, too rich in noises. Underneath the buzzing all manner of things twittered and clanked, revved and rattled. Ravens yowled, gulls screeched, engine noise ebbed and flowed nearby; in the distance the steady whisper-roar of the great motorway. Natalya was not confident that they hadn’t missed what they were seeking amidst all this racket.

‘See, Dmitry! We are becoming dogs to try to keep him!’

‘Let’s smell them out then,’ laughed Dmitry, releasing his nose briefly. He was mulling over something Natalya had said when they first thought Romochka too was a dogboy. This boy was better off living with dogs than with humans. In a way she was right. No drugs, for starters. No glue or petrol. Probably no rapes. Eight-year-olds living in the street were almost invariably victims of all three. And even if they had once been Romochka’s family pets, these dogs had evolved to function as a pack. They were close enough to being feral, and probably very loyal and protective. His readings on feral dogs gave him some confidence: how organised and disciplined their social structure can be. What strong codes and laws they live by. The whole clan remaining one family, working together to feed each other. Most females and males remain non-breeding. An outsider is not even approached, even if it is a bitch in oestrus. So rigidly familial that, were they to survive in peace for any length of time, they would become hopelessly inbred. Genetically speaking, they needed disasters to smash the clan so that lone survivors could begin new clans with unrelated dogs.

Well, disaster had struck, no doubt about it.

But really, a very focused and disciplined life. A homeless boy could be a lot worse off, all things considered. Romochka had scars and parasites, but no major diseases. And physically he was frighteningly strong. His clan had been sleek, healthy, fast and, if the rumours were to be believed, very dangerous. Dmitry smiled, remembering a headline: MUTANT DOGS TERRORISE MOSCOVITES. According to that article they were smart enough to use limited sign language and catch the metro to whatever part of Moscow they wanted to hunt in. Humans were on the menu, it seemed: bodies found here and there, partly eaten.

Dogs did catch the metro. He had seen that for himself.

They turned a corner into a lane that seemed almost a potholed farm track. A woman was walking towards them. She was dressed in a bulky military overcoat gathered with string at the waist. Her head was covered with a lace kerchief, perhaps once white, from which dishevelled ropes of long straw-coloured hair fell over her shoulders. She stopped and looked them up and down from a little distance away. Dmitry could see a broad imbecilic smile, but the rest of her face was strangely hard to make out. She held out one hand in a gesture to welcome or perhaps delay them, wrestling with the overcoat and rummaging in her bodice with the other.

She pulled out a bundle of rags which she began to cradle in exaggerated movements, lifting her gaze from it to nod and smile widely at them both as she approached. She seemed a figure in a pantomime, playing with a prop. A thin birdlike piping came from the bundle and Natalya caught Dmitry’s eye with an angry look. It really was a baby. The woman stepped nimbly to head them off as Dmitry shifted his weight. She wasn’t going to let them past. She stopped rocking the baby, looked up and leaned towards them in awful intimacy, as if they shared something. Dmitry realised she wasn’t old. Her face was young, thin and horrifically disfigured by the scar of a deep knife or axe wound that had cut through her brow above one eye, through her nose, and down through her lips and her chin. It had healed without stitches to give her an unnaturally sinister expression, with the cut somehow dividing her face into uneven halves. Her small deformed nose had been severed too, he realised, and was half gone. Saliva pooled behind the two flaps of her bottom lip and she sucked, hissing now and then, to control it.

She grabbed the baby by the rags at the back of its neck and thrust the whole bundle towards Natalya. The baby was only weeks old, its malnourished face almost like that of a baby chimpanzee: small, wizened, with bulging vacant blue eyes and blue lips. Its mouth was dry and crusted. It reeked of petrol.

The woman caught Dmitry’s eye and held out her other hand in an unmistakeable request. She winked, pushing the dying baby into Natalya’s face, fending off any move from either of them. He was about to give her something for her pitiful child, and for her terrible disfigurement, when she suddenly broke the shuffling silence between them.

‘You’re late, doctor,’ she said, hissing softly, but with a startling voice. ‘But a deal is a deal, isn’t it? 5,000 roubles? That’s what the Roof said. Clean, too; no drug baby, this one.’ That voice. Melodious, nuanced. Deep and lovely. His scalp crawled: it scared him. She was raising her arm high to make her coat drop. She grabbed her sleeve in her teeth and held her exposed arm towards Dmitry. It was thin and smooth, without needle scars. Dmitry looked at it numbly, as if the arm could help him, then shook his head and held up both hands to the sky.

‘You…ah…y-you have made a mistake,’ he stuttered. She shook the bundled baby sharply to halt Natalya, who was trying to edge by.

Natalya shuddered and pushed past. Dmitry followed. As he passed, he reached for the young woman’s hand to press some money into it, but Natalya swung round and stared at him so fiercely that he retracted it, feeling all the more ridiculous for having tried at all. He looked back as they stumbled down the cracked pavement and away. The young mother was smiling again. That was how her face fell out in repose, he realised. It was no smile at all. Her face couldn’t say what she wanted it to. She stared after him, then shook her head at him, the appalling smile unwavering, before she turned away.

They didn’t talk. Dmitry concentrated hard on the map, although he knew already which of these little orange trails they were now stepping out. He felt completely jangled, as if he were an instrument and someone had banged his strings all at once with an unloving hand. He couldn’t get that voice out of his head. That monstrous face, that smile. Natalya stomped on in angry silence.

They had all but given up when their newly sharpened hearing picked up a faint yabbering. High-pitched, forlorn. Natalya smiled in relief and triumph. In front of them was a ruined church. The single cupola was burnt and had fallen in, leaving wooden framing like a gaunt half-closed hand and the odd beauty of ornamental brickwork casements silhouetted against the sky. Long grass grew along the tops of walls, even along the top of the brickwork of the cupola. It had never been a prepossessing building. Even new it would have been modest, bordering on plain. A small village church once, perhaps, long before the city crept up; then abandoned as all communal life drained from centres of worship. The countryside around greater Moscow was dotted with these ruins: Natalya had seen a few but this was the only one she could recall seeing in the city itself. Mostly such useless buildings had given way long ago to housing developments, or had been restored and made useful again.

Natalya pushed cautiously through the crumbling gate and stepped into the tiny courtyard. Dmitry followed. Five dead apple trees were festooned in coloured plastic bags, clearly the work of some human hand. These insane flags fluttered and snapped over drifts of rubbish blown off the mountain. Inside the building itself there was nothing except rubbish and rank weeds under an open sky. Its desolation made it seem emptier than bare concrete. The path to the corner was clear. They picked their way through until they reached a jagged hole in the floor. They lowered themselves gingerly through the cracked floorboards and scrambled down the rubble tunnel into the dark den.

It was a large cellar, much larger than they had expected: almost as long as the building itself. Natalya looked around in the gloom, overwhelmed now by what they had taken on. This awful hole had probably been his home, their home. Any clinging faith she had in Mamochka vanished. She now imagined Romochka and Marko’s mother as a female Bluebeard, a Fagin, someone like the grotesque Madonna mother they had just encountered.

The floor underfoot was sticky. The smell was disgusting, overpowering: the air was thick with the rankest dog smell she had ever experienced, and more. Death and decay. She switched on her torch and breathed in sharply as its yellow light played over the mess around her. There was a huge pile of rags in a corner, covered in dog hair. Plastic bags everywhere. She noticed bones lying here and there at her feet, then the torch picked out the splayed and dismembered carcasses of some large animals—a glimpse of ragged skull holes and an intimate dirty grimace. These bones were brown, not white. She counted three skulls and several shredded lengths of desiccated skin and hair. A rib cage with a battered plastic sword threaded through it.

She shuddered. They looked like big dog skulls. Did they eat each other? That idea pulled another out of the tumbling darkness in her chest. She tried not to look further into the shadows, suddenly fearful that there might be human bones here too.

She was both shaken and affronted that a human child had lived here among these ghastly things, and had most probably taken it as normal, invisible. Nothing could have said more starkly that they lived here on the very brink of death. Against the far wall she picked out the supine form of Lenin, staring upward in blank-eyed serenity, and shuddered. It all seemed to have some deranged meaning. Worst of all, wherever she looked there were children’s toys. A broken pedal car was upturned against Lenin’s shoulder. Large red, yellow and blue building blocks lay scattered around, all half chewed.

She looked down. She was standing on two battered peacock feathers. There were more of them, lying all about. She stared at them stupefied for a moment, then remembered when Khan had escaped from the Moscow Zoo. So this is where that prized jewel had ended up. There was something terrible about that. Frightening. Nothing lost was ever really lost. A peacock was once here, had lived and died rigidly a peacock. It died purely from being a fraction out of line, a fraction outside the boundary of where a peacock in Moscow should be. A boy was here—two boys—lost but not-lost, with nothing so firm about their weird jelly selves.

And, of course, at last, there were puppies, cowering and silent now in the mound of rags that she had seen first. She inched her way over to Dmitry, who was squatting near them. Three living; one, out to the edge of their putrid corner, dead. All grey-gold with paler masks. They were very young, eyes just open, very weak. It had been two days now since Romochka was caught.

She touched the edge of this bed, feeling that with every breath, every touch, she was being contaminated by something far worse than a dog-den church cellar. What had they been thinking, that they could rehabilitate an eight-year-old boy who had slept in this for three or four years? They were the experts, for God’s sake. They knew full well that he was past the plastic stage, incapable of any kind of grafting into life. She avoided Dmitry’s eye, dreading the moment he would scent her rising fear and begin to crumble.

She felt a touch at her waist, and Dmitry put his arm around her. He was no longer holding his nose. He looked at her in the gloom and breathed in deeply, as if savouring it. ‘What a boy, eh Natalochka? What an amazing kid—he was king here.’ He grinned. ‘He’ll have to learn how to be a pauper, now.’

She knew Dmitry didn’t for a moment really mean this. He was nothing if not a realist. She laughed, shakily.

‘He’ll be pretty unhappy, I should think.’ Her voice sounded thin. Of course Romochka was unsaveable. Clever, yes, but irredeemable. The same as any experienced bomzh child beyond the age of reclamation. Really, she thought then, they should kill these puppies too, put them out of their misery. Then wash their hands very thoroughly so Romochka didn’t smell it on them. Romochka probably couldn’t get the care he needed except in a specialist institution.

She could hear Dmitry smiling as he spoke.

‘He is human. All this is because he is human. There is no turning back, Natalochka, either for him or for us.’ He reached for the snarling mites, shoved them into his overcoat pockets and led her stumbling out of the revolting hole.

Natalya felt better as soon as they reached clean air. She shuddered, laughing, trying to shake out the wild darkness that had clouded her. ‘Phuuu! We stink! What a place. Here, let me carry one; too many might bring on your asthma.’

She had left all but a vestige of her defeat behind in the ogre’s lair. They walked to the nearest metro station, itching furiously and scratching themselves under their clothes and by the time they sighted the welcome red M of the entrance, Natalya had commandeered all three puppies, juggling them between hands and pockets, teasing Dmitry about his imaginary allergies, trying to erase her awful uncertainties with bright and busy talk.

On the landing of their floor, despite padded doors, they could hear Romochka screaming in alien shrieks and growling riffs. There was no time to feed or wash the puppies.

‘Let him do it,’ gasped Natalya, rushing up the stairs, handing two of the puppies back to Dmitry.

They let themselves in quickly and locked the padded outer door. Better not let the neighbours hear much of this shrieking. Outside the door of their spare room they paused, looked at each other, then walked in.

The room stank of fresh faeces. Konstantin Petrovich was standing by the door looking harassed. He had bites and scratches rising in raw welts on his arms, and it was clear that Romochka had thrown shit both wildly and with excellent aim. The sight of the boy was a shock to Dmitry. He barely recognised him. Romochka’s hair was shaved off, leaving an unexpectedly small face, a small child with a red raised scar across his scalp. He was naked and, like Marko, quite hairy. He had been dressed in a white shirt and some sort of white pyjama pants, but these lay at different corners of the room, shit-smeared. Konstantin had cuffed the boy’s hands behind his back.

Romochka looked at Dmitry, disoriented. His rage and feeling of nakedness receded and he was overwhelmed with confusion. How could this be? He could smell a cold hint of Mamochka. He could smell home and more. How? How? He could sense Dmitry’s excitement and nervousness. He was bewildered, fuzzy headed. Raw sound hurt: his ears were new roaring air tunnels deep into his head. He was terribly exposed without his hair. Dmitry had betrayed him, but what now? What had he done, where had he been? The teeming pain of it all welled up and he screamed with fury and grief, squeezing the terrible tears from his eyes and shaking his head to clear them.

Dmitry was horrified. This unrecognisable Romochka snarled and shook himself from side to side. The pale face was twisted, his teeth prominent in an animal grimace, his body held low in an inhuman form. The scarred simian body, the tear-stained cheeks, bared teeth and wild eyes, this posture, all added to a most alienating appearance. His torso, criss-crossed with terrible scars, was awful to see. He seemed wolf-like but at the same time unnatural: truly degraded, worse than any wolf. Dmitry could see the shock and revulsion in Konstantin’s face. He waited until Romochka had stopped screaming and was looking at him with dull black eyes. He signed to Konstantin to release the boy.

‘Romochka, Romochka,’ Dmitry talked while Konstantin reluctantly snipped the plastic cuffs at the boy’s wrists. The boy growled all the while. ‘You know me. I am here to help you. Remember Mar…Schenok.’

Romochka lunged but, before Dmitry could stop her, Natalya had stepped in front of him and was roaring at the boy with a spectacular and savage snarl from all her adult height, at the same time pulling a suddenly mewling puppy from her coat. Dmitry saw her as if in a painting, frozen: a goddess or witch, with a helpless beast in hand, arched over a cowering caliban.

‘THEY ARE NOT ALL DEAD!’ she was roaring into Romochka’s shocked, young-boy face. ‘We found three for you.’

Romochka dropped back to the wall, his face suddenly blank and truly eight years old. He covered his ears with his shit-smeared hands, cradling his own face. No one moved or spoke. There was a silent tableau in the room as two tears rolled down his cheeks. He reached out his hands for the puppy, waggling one hand in a strangely demanding gesture that was made all the more odd by him simultaneously dropping his eyes and averting his face. The hand wagged and flapped imperiously as if independent from the rest of his body. Dmitry pulled out the other two puppies, tears prickling his own eyes. The boy reached greedily for the yabbering babies and buried his nose in them, breathing in deep, licking their faces, tongues, open mouths, whimpering now into their dirty fur, worrying his fingers over their hungry bodies.

Romochka sat on the floor with the wriggling, yelping puppies scooped to his belly and chest, sobbing, head down.

Dmitry squatted down next to the boy and began stroking the black stubble of his head, avoiding the red welt. Romochka didn’t stop him.

‘They are yours, all yours, and safe if you stay here,’ Dmitry said softly. He had an inspiration then. He could never have said how, but he knew, in that moment, exactly what he should say and what it meant.

‘We are the only dish on the table.’

Romochka held his breath. He looked up sideways at Dmitry with a large, quiet, child’s eye. His scarred wet cheek rested in his armful of puppies. His rather fine-featured face was pale and gentle. He smiled, his eyes sliding from Dmitry’s face and focusing on nothing. His face was transformed, mysterious, alight behind the pallor. For a moment Dmitry was reminded of Marko.

Dmitry motioned to Konstantin, who was leaning against the wall grinning, weeping, shaking his head. They left Romochka alone with the door open, Konstantin first, hands outstretched for the bathroom, Dmitry following. Natalya glanced at Dmitry, then raced to the kitchen to prepare some bottles of milk.

Dmitry was sure Romochka would stay, even if this was the softest moment he would ever see in the boy. He was buoyant with the success of it all, charged with electric happiness at Natalya’s glance. She was surprised, admiring. Impressed. It was the right thing, and it was well done—and not just because now he felt that he and Natalya were a true team: lovers and partners. Parents. A family, now, with a child and three dogs. He couldn’t wait to clean him up, straighten him out and see what sort of boy he made, what sort of boy they had. If they formally adopted him, Romochka would even be able to go to school, eventually—especially if Natalya got up to her usual tricks and faked his papers. Romochka would have the best, with a behavioural scientist for a father and a paediatrician and scamming queen for adoptive mother!

He looked around his stylish lounge room. The chipped old matrioshka on the sill was a new addition—one of Natalya’s few things. After their big fight she had, without a word, moved in properly and he had been surprised and humbled to find how few things she had, and that these were precious to her not for their own sake, but for the sake of the person who had given them or the use she had made of them. She brought her piano, all her slightly gypsy clothes, her matrioshka; and everything he had ever given her. This last made him suspect her of uncharacteristic tact, but then he gave up analysing it all and just felt grateful.

He’d need a new vacuum cleaner for the dog hair. Perhaps even a Kirby. Yes, there would be quite a shopping list, and it would be a long while before they could have a dinner party again. His friends and colleagues would talk about this for months, years, that was certain. Most would say he was a fool; but some might think it was noble of him. And of course: all would think it was Natalya’s influence.

He smiled to himself, savouring the feeling of being at last a family man. They were going to be a very unusual family. Maybe Romochka and Malchik next door would get along.

Three dogs. Perhaps eventually they could wean him onto one. One was enough for the purposes of this transitional phase; and after all, what boy ever has more than one dog? Three dogs might hold him back. Make him yearn for the old life. No, it would have to be one dog, and it would have to go to obedience classes. He had a sudden vision of himself at the dog school by the Krylatskoe line, a charming, well-behaved dog at heel beside him, commuters whizzing by, looking on. He’d have to watch to see which was the most intelligent. No, the most loyal, or perhaps the most docile and least boisterous. A single dog that was gentle, smart and loyal like Malchik, but not boisterous or drooly, would be ideal. One that would tip its head back to look at you the way Malchik did.

Then he thought, ashamed, that ideal was not what he should be angling for. He should just hope they wouldn’t be noisy eaters or lick their genitals in front of visitors.

Then, alone in the living room, he felt dizzy—even sick—with fear.

The shower roared and the microwave in the kitchen dinged. He sniffed his hands. They stank of fresh faeces. He held them stiffly away from his body, unable to go to the bathroom until Konstantin finished. Now he could smell shit on everything.

How does one really raise a child? This child? Wouldn’t it have been better for everyone, a small inner voice suddenly chipped in, if this awful unimaginable boy had quietly succumbed to cold or disease and malnutrition out there beyond the perimeter of the known? He could have bought his Natalochka a pedigree dog. He could have let her adopt a clean, normal, drug-free newborn.

He froze. Their strengthened relationship. They could have had a child biologically and lived happy ordinary lives.

His scalp crawled with foreboding. What had he reeled in on his puppy-baited hook? What had he taken on?

If you were to look now through the window—while on the other side of the thin wall Dmitry takes his turn in the shower, while Natalya in the kitchen farewells Konstantin and begins slicing onions with verve, cooking up a dinner to mark their new lives—you would see Romochka alone in that room still cradling the three puppies. The empty milk bottle stands beside him.

His face is in profile. He strokes the pups until they sleep. Then he stands and begins to weep, his shoulders tense and shaking. He turns. His face is raised towards you now, and he is sobbing in earnest, mouthing a scream. He stays like this, his body stiff, his fingers outstretched.

He stops. His breathing stills and he stands limp at the window for a while, his eyes huge and dark in a white face. Then he turns swiftly and, bending down to the puppies, bites through each of their skulls in turn.

He has chosen to stay.