“How will you find us?” asked Nadya.
“It will be easier to find you than to find a dog, I think.”
With that, Ignatius turned and walked back the way they had come, rounding the corner in the direction of the hotel.
Nadya planted her hands on her hips and looked up and down the street. “If you were a dog, where would you be?”
Leonid raised his face and closed his eyes and revolved slowly in place. “We’ll know by the smell.”
NADYA CAUGHT the scent first, just a whiff of rotten meat and a nutty overtone of excrement. They walked in what they thought was the direction of the odor, but it diminished. They returned to their starting point, reacquired the smell, and headed in the opposite direction. The odor grew stronger, as if the air itself putrefied. Through a lane between two old houses, their stone walls coated with black ooze, Nadya and Leonid found the source.
The land sloped down to what had once been a creek, now stagnant with garbage. Decades if not centuries of refuse, heaped several feet high in some places, had turned the whole creek bed into a junkyard. The windows on the backs of all the houses at the top of the hill were boarded up or filled in with brick. Wood-paneled outbuildings, barely more than lean-tos, bent like crippled sentries behind each house. From some of them, underneath the rear panels, a gooey slick of human waste ran down the hill in rivulets.
Leonid planted his heels with each step as he descended the slope. He was glad to be wearing borrowed boots and not the polished shoes of his uniform. He would probably have to discard the boots down this very hill when they left.
“I thought we were looking for dogs,” said Nadya, “not diseases.”
“Back in the village,” said Leonid, “Kasha, the original Kasha, rooted through any pile of trash she came across. If we want to find another dog like her, then I can’t think of a better place to look.”
Nadya followed Leonid down the hill, taking cautious steps, not as if she was concerned about slipping but like she wanted to delay arriving at the bottom.
“If nothing else,” she said, “we can find a rat and bleach it.”
Leonid’s feet sank into the mud at the bottom. The boots fit loose, and he worried they would come off. He lifted his feet up and down in place. The wet suck of each step sounded like someone vomiting. Leonid whistled, a sound like a chirping bird that Giorgi had taught Leonid’s brother how to make, so Leonid had to learn it, too. A tin can plunked down the garbage pile to his left. Another item, something brown and rotting, tumbled from the pile in the same area. A large dog peered its head around a ridge of garbage. Its fur was pure black, the exact opposite of Kasha’s. It saw Leonid, curled its lip as if to snarl, but then seemed to change its mind. Turning its head, it barked once in the other direction. Several more dogs emerged from amid the trash, mutts of gray and brown, skinny more than they were sleek. The nearest, a tan-and-white hound with long fur that went wavy at the ends, held a cracked teacup in its mouth. The ghost of a face printed on the cup’s side still showed.
“Can you tell which one of us it is?” asked Nadya, leaning down for a closer look.
“Mars, maybe? Hopefully none of mine have faded so much so soon.”
Leonid walked down the path, surveying the mutts. They moved like fish through the sea of garbage. The tan-and-white dog dropped the teacup and followed him, and Nadya after that. The mud released his boots with wet smacks. Nadya walked on her toes. The dog was the only one that seemed to have no problem with the muck, though the long hair hanging from his legs was stained black.
“He has sad eyes,” said Nadya.
She now walked alongside the dog, regarding him the way she did the animals back in Star City, the only time her usual icy expression cracked. The dog had lost most of its tail. The nub jerked back and forth, a vigorous nod.
“We can’t take him with us,” said Leonid.
Nadya scratched the dog behind the ears as they walked.
“Besides,” said Leonid, “the last dog I brought with me to Star City is the reason we are now wading through garbage in search of another.”
“Is it fair?” asked Nadya.
“Is what fair?”
“To find another dog to die in the place of Kasha. Who are we to spare one animal and condemn another?”
“It’s a dumb death either way.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Leonid stopped. He kicked at a brick sticking up out of the mud.
“It’s like relativity,” he said.
“You’re an astrophysicist now?”
“Leading up to the launch, I was assigned more time with Giorgi. When he’s not painting or writing poetry, he likes to read up on science. Do you know relativity?”
“You’re not the only one who talks to Giorgi.”
“It’s good to know he lectures the rest of you, too.” Leonid started walking again. “It’s like how in relativity my perspective seems to dictate the very laws of the universe. As does your perspective and everyone else’s. To me, the speed of light is constant, but also to you, even if we travel in opposite directions and observe the same light. Light travels in as many ways as there are eyes to see it, but at the same time travels constantly for all.”
“This has what to do with dogs?”
“Relativity is both supremely individualistic and perfectly socialist. My perspective is essential, but only to me. I sometimes think that’s what Marx didn’t understand. Community is a myth, a convenient, perhaps essential one, but what community can there be if no two people see light the same way? So the idea of community is what lets us rationalize our selfishness as something noble, when in fact we’re stuck with only our own internal logic. The math of the logic is universal. We’re all looking at the same numbers, but the equation is unique for each of us.”
“You have been talking to Giorgi. You’re even starting to sound like him. But I still don’t understand you.”
Leonid turned and waded into the pile of garbage. He bent down and plucked up discarded items one at a time, inspecting each, and then setting them back down with care, as if he was arranging curios on a shelf.
“I’ll choose the dog I like more,” he said, “and I’ll let the other one die. That’s how the light moves from my perspective. And then I’ll try to convince myself that the light moves the same for everyone else. Otherwise I would be guilty. At least if I imagine a community, we’re all guilty together.”
Nadya joined Leonid amid the garbage, sorting through the trash and adding to Leonid’s curated collection of junk.
“Do you think the Chief Designer chose his favorite?” she asked.
“The opposite, I think. He’s a man without community, one who must carry the full weight of all his guilt. He sent his favorites to die so he wouldn’t feel guilty for choosing.”
“So I…”
“You’re his favorite out of all of us. Your injury saved him in a way. It saved him from having to make the decision himself. I sometimes wonder if he could have recovered from the loss of the first Vostok had it been you inside and not your sister.”
Nadya cradled an object in her hands. It was clumped with mud and shapeless.
“And me,” said Leonid, “I’m just the last of what was left behind.”
The tan-and-white mutt edged close, snatching a splinter of blackened wood from where Leonid had balanced it. The dog sprinted away down the muddy path, other dogs emerging to bark as it passed. None of the dogs looked like Kasha. Not at all.
LEONID WALKED BAREFOOT, having chucked his boots down the hill after they had climbed back to the top. There had been no sign of Ignatius since she left in search of a leash, and not even a glimpse of a dog that could pass for Kasha, much less Khrushchev’s Byelka, that little rodent of a dog, surely too frail to survive on its own, its only natural habitat a lap.