No door in that village fitted its frame so snugly. The thick oak door remained just as the father had skilfully fitted it to the oak frame ten or twelve years earlier. But along the joint between door and frame, the cold had laid brittle frost, and both hinges were coated with hard, smooth, grey ice. Soon, when the boy and his father opened the door to go out, the ice on both hinges would shatter with a sickening creak.
The boy named Armik Mnatsakanyan stood by the door, waiting for his father. The stove did not yet smell of fire and food; timid flames occasionally cast a gleam through its little door, while the windowpanes were frozen. In the murky half-light, the colour of dishwater and dog slop, by the stove’s faint glimmers, his father knelt on one knee, picking nails from a drawer, feeling them and dropping them into his leather jacket pocket if they were not too crooked. His mother was making their bed and noticed every nail he dropped into his pocket. She thought both the nails and the pocket deserved better; each time she wanted to remark that the bare nails would tear the pocket, but did not. Before the war, when the boy could not yet reach the cupboard drawer, his father had kept many straight nails there. Now he could scarcely find any and thought he had never had them, while the adolescent named Armik Mnatsakanyan was ashamed to remember that he had once been a child and ruined his father’s nails. Those nails were now in rotten wood, in the ground and in other needless places. Wherever it was soft and a nail went in easily, the boy had held it and struck with a hammer.
What stood on the stove was not food but dishwater and slop. They had no dog: the wolves had taken it. The slop was for the pig; it had not warmed up and had not been carried outside. Its sour smell mingled with the house’s half-light. The wolves had snatched his dog from the adolescent named Armik Mnatsakanyan. He had chosen that dog himself from his grandfather’s bitch’s litter; with his grandfather he had buried the unwanted others. He had raised it himself on half his share of milk. As a grandfather instructs his grandson, he had instructed himself to protect the dog from wolves this winter: next winter it would be able to defend itself. The dog struck the door and yelped in alarm. The boy sprang out of bed and, beyond the cowshed and this side of the old pear tree, saw the dog still alive in the snow. There was even a moment when boy and dog were together among the wolves. But afterwards the boy was alone in the snow. Beyond the old pear tree, on the empty white slope, he seemed to glimpse the white dog’s high leap; its piercing yelp was smothered among the wolves. The wolves were no longer a pack, they were leaving one by one, but the dog did not come back. Cautiously, bewildered and horrified by what had happened, the boy called it, but it was not there. Standing in the snow glittering under the moon, he called again, even heard its soft rush and panting, but that was an illusion. Beneath the great moon, in the clean snow, he found not a drop of blood: they had torn it apart and devoured it in mid-air, in its leap. The bewildered boy stood for an eternity where the wolves and dog had been, their dreadful commotion still in his ears. A little later his mother came out and stood at the cowshed door. The boy approached, looking back again and again; then beside his mother, at the cowshed door, he stood looking at the white, clean slope. He had not been afraid, he had been among the wolves, he was now naked and barefoot in the glittering frost, but his mother’s words were no praise: had he not foolishly rushed into the pack, the dog would not have rushed in either and would have escaped. Later, back in the house with its sleeping children and dead stove, she praised him, but it was false praise. Her real opinion was the reproach she never repeated, though it had already branded the boy’s heart.
His sister woke, sat up in bed and, still seeing nothing and no one, began telling how Daddy had come in her little girl’s dream, kissed her but brought her nothing… As she spoke, she saw her father and exclaimed:
“Oh! You came in my dream!”
Her father was looking for nails in front of the stove. There was no joy in him, but for the little girl he found something like tenderness. “I came in your dream,” he said. “I really came in your dream.”
Tenderness was difficult in that poor, cold, grey house steeped in the smell of slop. But it was more than enough for the little girl’s happiness: sitting in bed, cheeks radiant and eyes shining, she smiled silently, then said:
“Will you come every time I see you in a dream?”
Kneeling before the stove, her father froze in wonder. “Every time you see me,” he said, “I’ll come.”
Her mother had folded their bedding and was throwing a cover over it. She said:
“Every time you see him, he’ll come. But don’t see him too often.”
“I’ll see him every night,” the little girl said. “I’ll keep seeing him so you won’t go away. I’ll close my eyes like this and see you.”
She covered her shoulders with the blanket, squeezed her eyes shut and rocked.
“You’ll see him,” her mother said, “you’ll bring him back, and they’ll catch him and send him to someone else’s work. There’s no end to other people’s work.”
“That can happen too,” her father said. “I can’t find any nails.”
“There are some here in the ash,” her mother said. “But will they do?”
“What are nails doing in the ash?”
The boy shrank into his corner by the door. Sweating with shame, he huddled up not only because, in the end, he had put the nails into the stove himself: his mother had burned the rotten fence boards, exposing the old nails he had driven in as a child. He shrank still more to keep his little sister from seeing him. In the stove’s glimmer, the boy named Armik Mnatsakanyan was wearing the homespun woollen dress his mother had worn as a girl and his sister would wear in another year or two. The little girl knew the bright red dress would be hers; sometimes she held it up against herself, sometimes climbed into it. Despite fully understanding their need, the boy found the garment humiliating. But when his mother had almost forced him into it, he could not protest aloud: the children, his little brother and sister, would wake. Now, too, he could not reveal his place by the door, because the little girl would see her future red dress in the firelight and be hurt. She would say nothing, but would fall ill from grief.
The only thing the boy could do against that girl’s dress was to strap a rope around it: he wound it across his chest, over his right shoulder and under his left arm, and waited for his father by the door like a Russian soldier with his greatcoat belted across his chest.
The boy himself had lowered the door bar for his father during the night. From the cold outside, his father had entered carrying the scent of fresh beech sawdust, paused in the doorway before the room’s family warmth, and laid his heavy, tired hand on the boy’s head as though stroking it. Then, seeming to fall apart with exhaustion, he kissed the sleeping children, and the little girl said: “What have you brought me?” What she had seen was no dream: it had happened exactly like that. But when the village authorities had managed to discover that his father was in the village, when they had put him to work—that seemed like a dream even to the boy. Apparently someone had happened to see him walking through the village and hurriedly remembered that the bulls had broken the cowshed door up in the mountains…
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