I found a 1968 paperback of Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog at a bookstore today.
It was in the bargain bin for five dollars. I knew before I touched it that it was coming home with me.
I collect his work. I like finding old copies in different translations, partly because I like seeing what different translators do with the same lines. This one is the Michael Glenny—the first English translation, published years after Bulgakov wrote the book because the Soviets wouldn’t publish it at home.
I stood there holding it and let my thoughts drift to a dog.
Not the one in the book. A different one.
I was down at the river earlier this week with my friends’ two dogs.
It's late August in Sacramento, so by mid-morning it was already hot. The kind of heat that stills the cottonwoods and makes getting into the river seem like an excellent idea.
We were walking the trail along the American River. The dogs were doing what dogs do—noses down, pulling a little ahead and off to the side, sometimes checking back to make sure I was still there.
One of them, a big doodle named Marley, slipped his collar when a bunny crossed the trail.
It took about half a second.
He twisted his head, backed out, and disappeared into the brush.
Not an accident. He knew how to do it. He'd obviously done it before.
The bunny was faster.
A few minutes later, Marley came trotting back and stood in front of me while I put his collar back on.
He was completely calm. Maybe a little self-satisfied. Like the whole thing had gone pretty much according to plan.
I slipped the collar around his neck, buckled it, and we started walking again.
That's the part I keep thinking about.
Not the running. The running made sense.
It was the standing there afterward.
He could have kept going.
He'd just demonstrated how little the collar actually had to do with whether he stayed.
And yet he came back.
He didn't come back sulking. He didn't look like he'd been caught. He didn't seem particularly interested in unpacking what had happened.
He just stood there and let me put the collar back on.
Because standing there with that empty collar in my hand, I realized he'd been wearing it all week. For every walk we'd taken.
He could have gotten out of it whenever he wanted.
That half second wasn't a fluke. That's how quickly he could do it when he decided to.
Which meant that everything else—every time he stayed near, every time he moved more or less where the leash suggested—wasn't the collar doing that.
The collar gave me somewhere to clip the leash.
It gave me something to hold.
But the staying was happening somewhere the collar couldn't reach.
He came back on his own.
I'm not going to make him into more than he is. He's a dog. I had the food, and I knew where the good treats were kept.
But it wasn't the collar that kept him near.
I'm sure of that.
The book has a dog in it.
Bulgakov called him Sharik, which is Russian for “little ball,” more or less the sort of name you'd give a mutt. The surgeon who finds him, Preobrazhensky, has a name that means something like “the one who transfigures.”
Sharik is half-starved, scavenging in the Moscow snow. He's already been scalded by a cook who didn't want him near the trash.
He's waiting to die in a doorway when a surgeon holds out a piece of sausage.
That's it.
The dog follows him home.
And almost immediately, Sharik decides he loves this man.
Completely. Without reservation. He has been fed. He has been given a warm place to sleep. As far as he's concerned, the matter is settled.
You fed me.
I'm yours.
It's one of the things I love about dogs. They don't seem particularly interested in keeping a ledger.
And then Preobrazhensky puts him on the table.
He cuts the dog open and replaces parts of him with parts from a dead man—a criminal, an alcoholic thief. A pituitary gland. Testicles.
The surgeon is trying, in his strange way, to make something new.
The dog stands up.
The fur goes.
Something that used to be Sharik starts talking. He picks a name from a calendar and wears it like it belongs to him.
But the good part doesn't make it through.
What comes back has Sharik's face but not his gratitude. He informs on the man who fed him. He chases women down the hall. He becomes crude and cruel and entirely certain of himself.
The surgeon went in to improve him.
And somehow, in the process, he destroyed the thing that was already good.
That was what I was thinking about in the bookstore, holding that five-dollar paperback.
You can't get there by cutting.
I keep thinking about what the heart actually is.
Maybe it's coming back without resentment.
Marley got out. He chased the bunny. He lost the pursuit. And then he trotted back to me as if we were peers.
He didn't come back sorry.
He didn't come back angry.
He just came back.
Maybe it's staying without keeping score.
Or maybe it's simpler than that.
Maybe it's knowing you could leave whenever you want and making the choice to come back.
That's the part I hadn't put there.
I brought the leash. I brought the treats. I built the little arrangement that made it possible for me to feel like I knew where everyone was.
And for a week, I let myself believe the arrangement was why he stayed close.
It wasn't.
He showed me that in half a second.
The collar held nothing.
Here's the part I don't love.
Because when I look at how I move through my own days, I can find both of them in there.
The dog and the surgeon.
The dog is the part of me that stays without always having a reason I can explain. The part that shows up. Comes back. Loves people without first making sure they've done enough to deserve it.
The surgeon is the part that can't leave that alone.
The check-in.
The careful phrasing.
The explanation before anyone has asked for one.
The little adjustment I make so someone else won't have to feel uncomfortable.
The managing.
I can call all of that care, and sometimes it is care.
But sometimes it's me with the scalpel out, trying to improve something that was already whole.
I've done it in relationships.
I've done it at work.
I've done it with people I love.
I've tried to make staying safer by managing the conditions around it.
I've tried to make something reliable by reaching into it.
And I think that's the tragedy in Bulgakov's book.
The surgeon doesn't understand that the thing he's trying to create is already there.
He reaches in because he has the audacity to assume what is already there is improvable.
And then he has to live with what he destroyed trying to improve.
I know that impulse.
Maybe that's why I keep thinking about that collar in my hand.
Because it's very easy to mistake the thing you can hold for the thing that's actually keeping someone close.
The collar was real.
The leash was real.
I could hold them both.
But neither one was responsible for Marley coming back.
Marley trotted along beside me for the rest of the walk.
Every so often he'd pull lightly towards the brush off the trail.
He didn't have to come back.
But he did.
And somehow, that mattered more to me than the fact that he'd gotten away.
It felt surprisingly good to know he had a choice and that, for whatever reason, he chose to come back to me.
I hadn't realized how different that would feel from making sure he stayed.
The book is on my shelf now, next to the other Bulgakovs. A different translation of the same story.
And Marley is home, wearing his collar.
I'm the one who came and went.
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