Kuzma and the Puppy

short story

It's probably not something I should mention in polite company, but I'm fascinated by brainwashing and interrogation techniques, and the "violentization" of human beings past the point where your reason remains your own. This tale grew out of a course on the subject given by a survivor of Nazi concentration camps.

y the second year of our incarceration, all of us had basically given up all hope of ever being freed, and in true Golding fashion, had reverted to a state of almost pure animalistic behaviour. We had, it seemed, nothing to lose, and nothing to gain. The already primitive and demeaning state of our existence, and the ill treatment we received from our captors, was exacerbated suddenly when my fellow prisoners and I became subjects in an experiment in dehumanization.

It didn't make me feel any better, believe me, to know that the prisoners of my side were being experimented on in much the same manner. At any rate, most of what I believed in to any degree about my homeland and our reasons for fighting the war were replaced slowly with first a mechanical parroting of enemy slogans, and finally a grudging respect for people I still saw as adversaries, but no longer as in the wrong in the war being fought around, but without, me. Insidiously, my impression of my captors changed until, at my release, I railed more against my rescuers than those that had mistreated me and kept me prisoner for years.

The methods used to so warp my beliefs that I would hardly recognize my wife on my return to my own country, and scream for hours against the very ideals I had gone to the war to defend? Nothing surprising. They used a system of deprivation mostly. Smokers would be denied access to cigarettes until they repeated an enemy slogan or piece of dogma. Some men were shown a chocolate bar or other luxury that they had missed since the beginning of their incarceration.

I had believed, erroneously, in my own incorruptibility, assuming as we all do that I couldn't be bought. I ended up one of our tutors' prize pupils. My fall was accomplished very quickly; as soon, in fact, as one of the brain washers found me a copy of the New York Times, two months old and battered, but still legible. I must have realized that I had been pegged. I laboured on anyway in the mistaken belief that I was fooling them somehow: that in repeating their words and saying I had stopped believing in my own country, I was being exceedingly clever, and only pretending to my defeat to gain the news of the outside world I so desperately craved.

How quickly we forget ourselves.

I was not immune. There was, however, a certain type of nut that the brain washers never learned how to crack. These were the true incorruptibles. There was little similar from one to the next. Often, they would be the ones you'd least expect, not terribly strong-minded or stoic, one or two were even noticeably slower-witted than the rest of us. No pattern seemed to exist to indicate an incorruptible. The brain washers were as uninformed as us. The incorruptibles were taken through the same paces as the rest, and it was often months before the enemy would admit defeat.

Whatever it was, the incorruptibles were afforded a kind of special status, from both the other prisoners and our captors. They were generally treated well, and got the best food while the rest of us went hungry. I assume this was so that, at the end of the war, those that hadn't been indoctrinated would have little to complain about regarding their treatment, and would prove a testament to the humanity of the enemy.

One such incorruptible was Kuzma. It surprised me; from his brusque manner, I had assumed he was much more swagger than substance. Maybe he was just too full of crude cynicism, and too much the opportunistic mercenary to be affected by the material pleasures offered by our captors as rewards for obedience. He had the air of a man who had not only looked into the abyss and found it looking back, but had managed to stare it down.

Kuzma was a man who recognized his unique position in the camp immediately, and took every opportunity to exploit us, knowing there was little punishment that would be used on him.

Every day was a little pageant of torture with Kuzma, he a master of precipitating conflict, setting us all against each other in violence. If one of us turned on him, he would beat the offender senseless. He was more than a match for any of us, being at once less harshly treated by our captors, and also one of the biggest men I have ever seen in my life.

By the following year, the second in the enemy's experiment, Kuzma was seen less and less frequently around the camp, preferring to mete out punishments through his chosen "deputies". He would emerge from the several cells he had captured as his personal "apartments" only to deliver discipline to the most severe reprobates among his fellows. He took pleasure, it seemed, in inventing new humiliations for the least imagined offense.

I remember well the day we found the puppy. I personally had been the object of Kuzma's "justice" that very day, and had a long strip of flesh missing from my side for a reminder. I recall the smarting of my clothes rubbing across the rawness of my flayed side, a little bit of life in the sea of numbness that had become my life.

The puppy was a pitiful, sickly thing, almost unrecognizable in its emaciated condition. One of our number discovered it during our duties around camp, found it scratching awkwardly at the dirt at the perimeter of our barbed wire enclosure. One of its legs was obviously broken, and its face was flat and almost comically ugly.

Where it came from I never knew, never knew in fact where our camp was in reference to any civilization, whether it was a runt escapee from drowning or the spawn of some camp cur judged too weak to be of interest.

We took it to Kuzma, possibly hoping that he might for a time take out his sadistic punishments on the puppy, and deflect his violence from us. It was obvious that the creature wouldn't survive long anyway. Most of us were too far sunk into the half-crazed lunacy that followed constant beatings for almost three years to even recognize the dog as a peace-time pet. It was an offering, to our cruel and irrational god.

Kuzma took the puppy and retreated into his private quarters. It was several days before we heard from him again, and by then, most of us had forgotten the miserable little creature.

It was naturally a surprise, then, for us to first hear the rumours, then the confirmation, that Kuzma had saved the puppy's life. Not only merely declined killing it, but actually splinted its injury, fed and warmed it, played with it... An impossibility. But there it was, confirmed very ably by our network of spies.

In the second week after finding the little dog, Kuzma emerged from his cells for one of his infamous walk-abouts, and the puppy was under his arms, looking still for all the world like a bag of butcher's rejects. Kuzma was seem more often in the next month, and began taking an active role in the punishments he had once decreed god-like from his self-imposed solitude. But we all noticed that a certain humanity had crept into Kuzma's dealings with us -- things that may not occur as humane to those that read this. For example, instead of letting his toadies whip and beat an offender to unconsciousness for the crime of insubordination, Kuzma would now inflict a short beating himself while the puppy wandered lopsidedly around his master's feet like the crown prince of the compound.

Life was comparatively easy on us inmates after the puppy's arrival. Kuzma, it seemed, now had more to occupy him than merely the torture of his fellows, and took to the care of the puppy with a gentleness that none of us had imagined him capable of.

We, of course, were eager to take advantage of any development that could improve our wretched situation. Bringing morsels of food, or toys, or just kind words for the puppy became a new way of gaining status in the camp, and we were all guilty of some measure of transparent pandering for Kuzma's favour. The puppy became in some ways our guardian angel, though an unpredictable one to be sure; Kuzma would every now and then loose the puppy and mark the man it came to for petting, and single that individual out for a larger ration, or some special privilege. If the puppy pissed on your shoe or growled, you were beaten. It seemed that for the first time since our capture, there was some sense of unity, some sense of hope among the prisoners, directed mainly towards the continued good health of the puppy. The ugly little animal was a shield, an unimposing flaming sword standing between us poor mortals -- and the wrath of Kuzma.

The puppy was a mascot, and more, an idol. We treated it with as much respect and deference as the Indians show to their cows. There was no where within our compound the puppy could wander where it was in the least danger of ill treatment.

Or so we thought. I suppose the enemy must have watched us from the start, first noticing the puppy's arrival with unconcern, then probably with amusement, then finally with alarm at the strange unity we showed in our care of the little dog. It was naturally to the enemy's advantage to keep us at odds, which is the reason the situation again became explosive on one sweltering hot night three and a half years into our captivity.

Perhaps it is wrong to imagine that the enemy set out deliberately to drive Kuzma back into his previous vicious cruelty. Perhaps the incident that pushed him back was really as unplanned as it seemed. But the fact is, that one night, the dog was out wandering its domain as usual, a rather small dog still, but no longer a puppy. All of us were used to the dog's forays, and no one thought about there being any harm in letting it wander where it would. It still walked off-kilter, its leg never having healed quite straight. So, like a wounded veteran, the dog visited each of us in turn, accepting proffered morsels and pats, and continuing on.

So far as I know, no one saw its final moments. We were all inside the cells waiting for twilight to dissipate the heat of the day. When the shots rang out, my first response was just to sit back and sigh. A mood of impotent mourning settled over the ten or eleven of us in that particular cell. It was infrequent that one of us was executed, but still not infrequent enough that I wasn't quite sure of what had happened.

But the shots continued, and the whole group of us in the mud-walled cell began to stir. They were shooting, not at a man, not at something that stood and waited for its death with dull resignation behind blindfolded eyes, but at something moving, something that didn't accept another's execution order. We flew outside as one man, and saw the most horrible thing.

A patrol of six enemy soldiers, guns still to their shoulders, were poised just beyond the barbed-wire enclosure of our compound. And just on our side, in a mess of blood and bone and short white fur, was our puppy, obviously already dead. Nothing could have lived for even a moment with its brain blown through and its stomach out-turned.

I think I felt, more than heard, Kuzma's approach. Like a berserker god, he rose, like a Titan from the depths of Tartarus, and attacked. Suddenly, miraculously, or so it seemed at the time, he was through the barbed wire, and beating the enemy guards as viciously as he had ever beaten us, his subjects. He was all fists and claws and boots lashing and striking in all directions. Blood flew in streams of red and foam, and much of it was his own.

Standing a little apart from the melee was another smaller group of soldiers, and here I could see the true effect of what Kuzma was doing. It was a quandary for them: to join in and beat Kuzma to a pulp, or to leave the fight to finish itself. I admit the odds were fairly even at six to one.

Kuzma was still incorruptible, and therefore untouchable, and they were unsure. It was a case for them of struggling against their own conditioning not to interfere with the incorruptibles, and a more immediate desire to intervene on behalf of their comrades. I saw one raise a gun, and another put a hand to the barrel to lower it again to the ground.

In all, the stalemate lasted two, maybe three minutes. Then, the rest of us within the barricades finally realized what Kuzma had done. He had forced a hole in the hedge of barbed wire with his body, and most of the blood on him was streaming from long gashes made by the jagged metal. In a surge of brown, tattered cloth, we were at, then through the hole. This gave the rest of the soldiers the opportunity they needed to bring the situation under control. They were under no compunction to spare the rest of us bodily harm. I saw Kuzma fall, a soldier kicking his back as he writhed on the ground.

It was over very quickly. One soldier shot off a flare, and reinforcements arrived from all directions. Since there was very little real camaraderie between us, no one resisted. Kuzma was unconscious. The soldiers would say later that it had been accidental, that it had happened in the confusion of battle, and the commander of our camp would probably have smiled to himself.

Kuzma came close to dying that night. His injuries were severe, but the damage to his mind was worse. Naturally, we were uninterested in helping Kuzma recover from his physical and emotional hurts, and turned, like dogs on an abusive master. Every single man who had taken punishments from our "untouchable", which was close to all of us, got his revenge on the invalided Kuzma, and he never was the fit man he had been before.

But something else happen to Kuzma, beyond the obvious permanent physical injury he had suffered. The cold, calculating sadism that had characterized him previously was gone, but so was the gentle side he had shown to the puppy. Gone too was the incredible strength of will that had so distinguished him from the broken majority.

Kuzma was beaten to death by some of the fellows he had most severely abused, sometime more than a month after the death of the puppy. The enemy collected his tags and sent them back to our army. They asked me to make a note of what had happened to confirm the story they would send. Following their directions, I called the death "accidental", and laid no blame on either the enemy or on my fellows. They said, the enemy I mean, that I was obviously the one to write, since I took the paper and would understand the sensitivity of writing that a man had been murdered by people supposedly on the same side as him.

But that was the madness. To imagine that I could write a letter, to need to explain a single death when all around us was death, to need to justify Kuzma’s when the battlefield was littered with corpses whose story need never be told.

I sit now, and feel the scar up my side where Kuzma took a strip of flesh from me the night we found the puppy. I feel lucky, I suppose, that this wound is here to remind me of them. But then, what I should feel when I remember I still don’t know.

And I eat my dinner, trying to recall a time when I was hungry for four years, this scar I will never be free of pressing against the arm of my chair. I believe that everyone in his lifetime gets a second chance to make something of his life. This is mine. If the puppy was Kuzma's, unlike me, his came at the wrong time.

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