Victor found him by the roadside in October.
The puppy sat on the edge of the highway, wet and very small, watching the passing cars as if waiting for someone specific. Victor was driving to his country cottage for potatoes that day. He stopped for a second, thinking he would just look. But the puppy lifted its head, and that was that. The potatoes stayed in the ground for another week.
He named him Mars. The name came from the neighbour, Vera, when she saw the ginger, big-eared creature with paws too large for its body in the hallway.
“Ginger, nosy, hopeless,” she said. “Mars. Fits perfectly.”
Victor laughed then.
Mars grew fast. By spring he already occupied the entire left half of the sofa and considered it his right. Victor grumbled at first, then stopped. Sleeping alone in the flat was worse than sleeping with a dog that snored and sometimes twitched a leg in its sleep.
They became friends not immediately, but gradually, the way people befriend each other when neither is in a hurry. Morning walk. Food bowl at seven in the evening. Television. Sometimes Victor talked to Mars out loud. Mars sat next to him and listened with a serious expression, only occasionally yawning, showing all his teeth.
“You’re right,” Victor would say. “Enough.”
And he would turn off the television.
***
The accident happened in April, when they were returning from the evening walk.
Victor later remembered little of the exact details. Slippery road, a car swerved onto the pavement from around a corner. Mars was on the lead, and then the lead snapped. Victor was thrown onto the kerb. He hit his side, lay there for several seconds, hearing only his own breathing and someone’s distant scream.
When he got up, Mars was gone.
The lead lay on the asphalt. The plastic clip had cracked in two.
He searched until midnight. Covered three blocks, called out the name, asked passers-by. They shook their heads. Someone said they saw a ginger dog running towards the railway crossing, but that was about forty minutes ago, and they hadn’t seen it since.
At home Victor sat in the kitchen and stared at the empty bowl for a long time.
Then he got up. Wrote an advert, printed twenty sheets. In the morning he put them up around the block, then called three veterinary clinics and the shelter on Factory Lane.
“If a ginger dog comes in, a mixed breed,” he said into the phone. “Please call. Here’s my number.”
A week passed.
Then a month.
The adverts faded under the May rain, and Victor replaced them. Then he replaced them again in June. The veterinary clinics stayed silent. The shelter on Factory Lane called twice, both times wrong, both times it was the wrong dog.
In July, Vera said cautiously from behind the door:
“Victor, maybe take another one. There are so many at the shelter.”
“No,” Victor replied.
She never suggested it again.
The flat without Mars became different.
Not empty, no. Things were in their places, the fridge hummed, the neighbours stomped above at half past nine as usual. But something had changed.
Victor picked up the old ball that Mars used to chase down the hallway. Put it on the shelf. Thought about it and put it in a drawer. Then took it out again and left it on the shelf.
In the mornings his hand habitually reached for the lead by the door. The lead hung there. Nowhere to go.
He started going for walks alone. The same route, at the same time, only without Mars. He couldn’t explain why. He just walked.
In August his daughter called from Manchester.
“Dad, come stay with us. Rest a bit.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
He paused. Then said: “What if he comes back?”
His daughter paused too. Then she said “okay” in that tone people use when they want to say something else but decide not to.
Mars came back in October.
Victor heard scratching at the door just before seven in the evening. At first he thought he imagined it. Noise from the stairwell, a draught, who knows. But the scratching came again. Insistent, with pauses, as if someone knew the door would open, they just had to wait a little.
He opened it.
On the doormat sat Mars.
Older. The fur was trimmed in a few places, where wounds had apparently been. His left side looked a bit sunken. And he wore a collar. A different one—leather, brown, with a brass buckle and a small tag that read “Buddy”.
Victor stood in the doorway for a long time, looking at him. Mars sat and looked at Victor. Right ear drooping, a ginger patch on his forehead shaped like an uneven star. The same eyes, amber with a dark rim.
“Where have you been?” Victor said.
Mars stood up, stepped across the threshold and walked into the hallway the way someone walks who knows the layout by heart. Right turn, to the bowl. The bowl was still there, where it always was. Empty, of course.
Victor closed the door. Went into the kitchen. His hands trembled slightly as he opened the fridge.
“Alright,” he said. “Alright.”
The next morning he drove to the veterinary clinic.
Mars was examined, given the necessary vaccinations, and checked for a microchip. Victor asked about the collar. The vet picked up the tag and read it aloud:
“‘Buddy’. Is that another name?”
“Someone gave him another name,” Victor said.
“Did he live with someone?”
“He lived somewhere for six months. I don’t know where.”
The vet looked at Victor, then at Mars, then back at Victor.
“It happens,” she said. “Dogs sometimes leave, then come back. Especially smart ones.”
Victor didn’t answer. He watched Mars sit on the metal table with a calm expression, tolerating the examination.
On the reverse side of the tag was a phone number.
Victor called from the car, while Mars sat on the back seat looking out the window.
The call connected after the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” Victor said. “You had a dog. A ginger one. You called him Buddy.”
A long silence.
“Yes,” said the voice. Female, not young. “We did. He left us in September. We looked for him.”
“He’s with me. He’s my dog. His name is Mars. He got lost in April.”
Another silence. Then the woman said: “He lived with us. We fed him, treated him. He had injuries.”
“Thank you,” Victor said.
“He’s a good dog.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Are you far from Birch Street?” the woman asked.
“Different area.”
“Good Lord. He came on his own in April. Just lay down by our fence and wouldn’t leave.”
Victor stared through the windscreen at the grey courtyard with leafless poplars.
The conversation ended on its own. Victor put the phone away. Mars snored on the back seat, lying with his head on his folded paws.
At home Victor removed the stranger’s collar from Mars. Put it on the table, studied it for a long time. Brown, leather, with the “Buddy” tag. Good quality, not cheap.
For half a year the dog had been somewhere. And still came back.
Victor thought about the woman from Birch Street. How she fed him every day, stroked him, grew attached, probably. And then one September morning she came out and he was gone. And she searched. Called, maybe, after adverts.
He picked up the phone.
“It’s me again,” he said when she answered. “I wanted to say. If you’d like to visit him, I don’t mind.”
Silence.
“Really?” she said.
“Really.”
She came on Saturday. Gail, sixty-four years old, in a grey coat and a string bag that held apple jam and a bag of dog food—the kind Mars had grown used to those six months.
Mars saw her from the hallway. He didn’t rush, no. He just walked over and pressed his nose into her palm. Wagged his tail happily.
They had tea. Gail told how she found him at her fence in April, how she took him to the vet, how he was scared the first few days and then settled in. Victor told about the accident, the broken lead, the adverts he had stuck up.
Mars lay between them on the floor, dozing. Sometimes he lifted his head, looked at one, looked at the other.
“He chose both of us,” Gail said.
Victor looked at the dog. Then at the woman beside him.
“Seems that way.”
Victor put the stranger’s collar in the desk drawer. Didn’t throw it away.
Mars began occupying the left half of the sofa again and chasing the ball down the hallway at one in the morning. The adverts on the lamp posts grew soaked under the November rain and peeled off on their own.
Gail came on Saturdays. Brought jam, sometimes asked for advice about her currant bushes—she had a garden on Birch Street, and Victor knew about gardens. They talked while Mars dozed between them.
One evening Victor took the leather collar with the “Buddy” tag from the drawer. Looked at it. The tag glinted under the lamp.
In the hallway hung two leads. One red, old. One blue, new—the one Gail had brought one Saturday and hung up in silence, without asking permission.
