Free Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov Page B

unblinking eyes to hismaster. There was still some uneaten food on the table, but from youth Ruslan had been strictly taught not to beg, and he did not even look at the food. His glum stare, in fact, was not asking for anything, but only a fool or a blind man could have failed to read what it was saying: “You’re being unkind, Master. That was a bad joke. And in front of strangers, too.”
    The Shabby Man suddenly frowned, grabbed a slice of bread from the table and put it on the floor. Ruslan neither noticed it nor looked down.
    “Aha, so you thought he’d take it!” Master smirked in great satisfaction. “Of course, he’s been dreaming all his life of eating a piece of bread from your hands.”
    “O.K., you’re the boss. Give it to him yourself.”
    The other customers in the restaurant were no doubt expecting to see Ruslan perform a simple but always successful trick. Our hearts are invariably touched when our four-footed friend displays the rudiments of reason and does violence to his own nature by refusing food from a stranger and then immediately grabbing it, drooling with hunger, from the hand of his master. This time, however, the trick turned out to be even more entertaining than anyone expected: the bread did not leave the Master’s hand, and Ruslan merely looked at it and backed away—carefully, so as not to overturn the slice of bread by mistake.
    “Aha!” the Shabby Man was triumphant. “That shows that you mean nothing to him now, don’t you see?”
    “What’s the matter with you, Ruslan? Fussy?” Master asked. A pink flush spread slowly over his face. “Suppose you found enough to eat somewhere else. Don’t waste much time, do you? All right then”—he put the slice of bread on the floor—“pick it up. D’you hear me?”
    “Stop throwing food around, Citizen.” The barmaid intervened again. “As if I didn’t have enough to do, without having to clear up after your dogs!”
    “Why? He’ll take it, Just you watch.”
    Still grinning, though his cheekbones were turning pale, Master picked up the bread and jauntily waved his fork in the air. He dug the fork into a pot on the table and began thickly spreading mustard on the slice of bread.
    “Don’t do it,” the Shabby Man begged him.
    A man standing in line at the counter also spoke up:
    “Don’t play the fool, Sergeant.”
    “Impossible,” Master explained. “It’s impossible for him to disobey my order. Don’t worry, he knows he’s committed an offense by not obeying the first time. So he’s got to take the consequences. This dog’s loyal to the Service; he’ll show you right now just how loyal he is.… Afraid I’ve used up all your mustard, ma’am!” Master grinned cheerfully at the barmaid.
    He broke the slice of bread into two and put the halves together with the mustard inside.
    “Feed, Ruslan, feed. Take it, I say!”
    A man in a leather coat, sitting with his back to Master, turned around, the whites of his squinting eyes ablaze:
    “Have you gone crazy, by any chance?”
    “I’ll give you ‘crazy’ in a moment,” said Master. “Mind your own damn business!”
    The leather-clad man did not, however, turn away. The woman sitting with him, who was wearing a gray headscarf and feeding a child with a spoon, put down the spoon and covered the child’s eyes with her palm.
    “Keep out of it, Tolya,” she begged. “You know better than to get mixed up with them. We won’t look.”
    But she did look, frowning and biting her lip. The whole restaurant was now watching and muttering:
    “Don’t be cruel to the dog, soldier!”
    “Monsters—they learned that sort of thing in the prison camps.…”
    “He’s drunk, can’t you see?”
    “Why doesn’t somebody take the dog away? …”
    “Take the dog away? He’d tear you to pieces if you tried to …”
    Held in his master’s hand, the piece of bread swayed in front of Ruslan.
    “Come on, take it! You know you’ve got to take it!”
    What did