Selections from FM GALICIA
10.02
Some time ago, I came to realize that if a weapon is aimed at you it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, because if it truly is aimed at you, then there is nothing you can do about it, and if it is only vaguely aimed at you, then it will not be shot. I have been aimed at many times and nothing really came of it. I needed to just stay calm, even though, in the past, I’ve been commanded to do some ridiculous things with a weapon pointed at me—jump out of a moving train or off a towering bridge, give up something that was very important to me, or some other impossible feat. But these are all fragments that are soon forgotten. They rarely actually fired and almost always inaccurately. I was only accurately shot at once—I almost died instead of my buddy. But nothing came of it. They missed me. And this is what bought my buddy a bit more life. I seldom had such reliable buddies. And such ideal ones. His name was Rudko. I named him. Large, wolf-like, but yellow and with long hair. With the marvelous eyes of a tiger or bobcat—amber, deep and wise. And those eyebrows. Completely human-like, brown eyebrows. He was all grown up, and with a massive collection of nasty experiences, when he showed up on our mountain. He immediately became attached to me. In the beginning, he would occasionally bark at me when I would pet him, because tenderness seemed somewhat strange and cunning to him. But he soon got used to it. Only I was capable of petting him the way he wanted to be petted. Even though he began living with us, Rudko never entered the house. I suspect that he was claustrophobic. He kept order in the yard—he didn’t allow anyone into it but members of the family, he mercilessly harassed postal carriers, he barked at all the trains. He hated anything that represented the slightest change in the rhythm of our lives. And besides that, for some reason, he defended me from certain family members and determined that I should not have anything to do with them. Infrequently, he could get upset and gnaw someone. Gnaw them, not bite them. Soon, the list of those who had been gnawed was identical to the list of those who lived near us. And it was then that the older adult neighbors decided that it was time to get rid of him. One of them had a rifle; the others would stake out Rudko. The dog sensed something and stopped visiting the neighboring territories.
I was running in the ravine when a buck-shot whistled over my head. Surprisingly, I didn’t fall to the ground. I peeked out of the ravine and heard a couple more whistles by my head and saw the neighbors-hunters, who were shooting in my direction. They were shooting because the only thing sticking out of the ravine was my head, which, with its color and shagginess, recalled some part of Rudko’s body. After the sharpshooters had come to their senses, they kissed and hugged me for a long time. And, as if speaking to someone who had returned from the dead, they promised me they would no longer harass my buddy. Of course, as it is written in ancient books, in time, they simply rescinded on their promise. I think that if they had shot and killed me that day, this would have happened even sooner.
Translated by Mark Andryczyk