‘Designed to destroy your life’: Markus Zusak on the magic of mongrels
Perfect dogs, like perfect lives, are boring. But there are times when a mongrel with boundless enthusiasm can really test your limits.
By Markus Zusak
Reuben was a cross between “at least eight different dogs – all of them cranky”.Credit: Courtesy of Markus Zusak
As years go by as a dog owner, you hone and craft your answers to the most frequent comments and questions. In my time with Reuben and Archer, when someone said, “Beautiful dogs,” I’d reply, “Thanks, they’ve ruined my life.” If the person was taken aback, I would prove I was joking with a follow-up. “In the best possible way, of course!” We’d laugh and continue walking.
When people asked what breeds Reuben and Archer were, I would often point to Archer and say, “Well, that one’s probably a lab-greyhound cross.” Then I’d wave at Reuben. “And he’s at least eight different dogs, I reckon – all of them cranky.”
If I was in a particular mood, I’d form a composite answer. “They’re a special kind of breed,” I’d say, “designed to destroy your life.” But again, I’d be smiling, half-laughter. Love’s not always kind.
The more I think about Reuben now, all these years later, after his life and epic death, I’m sure he was many and varied percentages of six main possible prototypes: great dane and mastiff. Wolfhound and German shepherd. Greyhound and possibly werewolf. He made noises like Chewbacca.
I remember one afternoon in the valley of Centennial Park, near our home in Sydney. There was a mother and her young daughter – a little blonde girl in school uniform. They couldn’t get their German pointer back. Reuben was doing what he always did, rousting with other dogs, but never straying too far.
He ran with the German pointer, and as the mother and daughter kept calling her, growing more frustrated, I whistled for Reuben to come, and when the pointer followed, I grabbed her. I returned her and they were incredibly grateful.
Next day, things were different.
When a dog gets all talkative near another dog’s throat, it doesn’t help when he looks like Reuben.
The pair were in the park again, and Reuben and the pointer were chasing each other. Reuben started up some noise – one of his more casual versions of Chewbacca. In terms of its menace-metre, it was probably around mid-range, somewhere between a calm conversation in Wookie with Han Solo and his strangling of Lando Calrissian.
“Hey, your dog’s being vicious!” called the woman. “You have to do something about him!”
You remember me, don’t you? I wondered. I called and Reuben came.
Then I apologised, quietly seething. This is what I get for helping you yesterday. “I’m sorry he got a bit noisy,” I said, and we walked up into the forest. I guess it’s hard to know the difference sometimes between a vicious dog and a vocal one, and I realise it never sounds good. When a dog gets all talkative near another dog’s throat, it doesn’t help when he looks like Reuben.
When we left, he sauntered beside me, like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. What tall and rugged ears he had. What a galactic, terrorising growl!
He blended into the shade. His teeth showed when he smiled.
Markus Zusak with Archer and Reuben. Even the painful moments with his dogs were “gifts that just keep giving”, says the writer.Credit: Courtesy of Markus Zusak
Fast forward to the following summer, and really, there’s no non-humiliating way to put this: in January of 2011, Reuben knocked me out in the park. He busted my knee. I was knocked out cold.
Even to this day, all these years later, I love Reuben and miss the hell out of him – but honestly, what a prick.
As background, one of the nicer things about writing books, between the doubts, the fears and non-completions, is that you learn what your obsessions are, both the obvious and the hidden. There are certain threads that appear in almost everything I’ve written.
Running and training. Colours and sky.
Stories within stories.
And animals – and by animals, I mostly mean dogs.
Look at my first three book titles: The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, When Dogs Cry. Across almost everything I’ve published, there have been dogs, both central or as cameos. I’ve had a coffee-drinking dog called the Doorman in The Messenger. (One of my favourite characters I’ve written, the fact that I was poisoning him with caffeine notwithstanding.) There was the Pomeranian heart attack victim named Miffy in the Wolfe trilogy. Then Rosy the border collie, who rounds up the clothes line in Bridge of Clay.
Perfectly enough, it’s only The Book Thief that doesn’t have a dog – just the brief appearance of a bent-whiskered cat, modelled on Brutus, one of our cats. That aside, dogs have been an essential part of my writing personality. I’ve rendered them with care and devotion, I’ve written them with love and joy, which brings us to the necessary question.
What does that owe me in life? The answer, of course, is nothing.
Previous to having my own dogs, I’d always conjured up images of optimism – of dogs who lived only for loyalty. Dogs who followed me everywhere. Dogs who were great and golden. And I’ve received that, I really have, but it’s not the entire picture.
As it stands now, the gifts have been far greater, because perfect dogs, identical to perfect lives, are pretty dull. Do you want your dog to be uncultured, unkempt, uncivilised? Of course not. Do you want him to roll in human waste in those haunted bushes in the park? No way on this planet, believe me – I’ve scrubbed those necks and collars.
And of course, the moment I’ve been leading to: do we want our nearly 40-kilo, fit, formidable mongrel of a dog to come crashing into us from the side, while we’re holding our six-month-old child? Answering that one is pointless.
Reuben’s head was more lethal than kryptonite; I went down, hit the ground, knocked out.
The morning it happened was cloudy. When accidents happen, I have a tendency, probably like most people, to wonder if things might have gone differently if I hadn’t made one small decision. On that morning, just before six o’clock, I made two.
First, I had coffee before I took Reuben out, whereas normally I’d wait till we returned. Second, whenever I took our son Noah with me, which was rare, I carried him on my right arm, walking Reuben on-lead with the left. Then I’d let him off in the park. (We never had problems bringing Noah along, and carrying him was easier than pushing the pram, dealing with the grass, the tree roots, the rocks.) This time, though, I’d finally figured out how to work the BabyBjörn carrier, and Noah was strapped to my chest.
“That dog was born for stories,” says Zusak of Reuben.Credit: Courtesy of Markus Zusak
Maybe if I hadn’t made either of those decisions, I’d have made it through that morning conscious.
Around quarter past six, we walked down to the valley of dogs, maybe 50 metres from the monument. There was a handful of people and their charges. I was talking to a woman named Valerie, who was also talking to Noah. Usually, I kept a good eye on Reuben, but that morning I was distracted.
Imagine being hit by an iron bar, or a woodchopper’s axe, at the knee. That was how Reuben got me. He and Valerie’s dog – a ridgeback with the innocent name of Bertie – had come galloping in our direction.
Reuben’s head was more lethal than kryptonite; I went down, hit the ground, knocked out. On the way, I said, “Is he OK?” I was trying to get a look at Noah.
When I woke up, he was bouncing happily in the arms of a young woman named Molly – and Reuben, showing all his love and gratitude, was still tearing around with Bertie.
As if the morning hadn’t been mortifying enough, while I was regaining my senses, an ambulance was called. There were park rangers, more people, dogs in all directions, and Noah laughing his head off.
When I climbed back to my feet, it was difficult to stand or walk, and things were about to get worse. My wife, Mika, was called by someone at the scene. She was still in bed with Kitty, our daughter.
When they came down, it was Mika who convinced me to just get in the goddamn ambulance, okay, and I did and felt like an idiot. By then I was sure I could walk.
Before I left, we got Molly’s number, and a few days later, we sent her a gift. (It was a notebook with Shaun Tan illustrations; I can still see it. When it comes to humiliating history, our memories are at their sharpest.) In the ambulance I made a decision, in the foglands of shame and embarrassment, but one I could never quite keep.
Our days in Centennial were over. I could never go down there again.
But what is it about moments like those, and dogs we own like Reuben? Depending on how we look at them, they’re gifts that just keep giving.
Just as life not going to plan will give us the best of our stories, the nobbling incident was a favour, and with Reuben it was just the beginning. Within the next year, he would have the first of two knee reconstructions, at $5000 a pop.
Then, to bookend the whole experience, nearly a decade later, in June 2020, after Reuben was no longer with us, I finally needed knee surgery myself, from that fateful morning in the park. It was definitely very Reuben. He even got me from the grave, and I’m grateful. I’m also glad it was me he injured, and not Noah or someone else. That could have been catastrophic.
To be honest, I even loved him later that same morning, when I’d returned from my trip in the ambulance and the very brief check in hospital. He was back inside the house, and walked past me in the kitchen, stepping right into the flesh of my toes. The reflex ignited my knee, and I nearly hit the ceiling.
“What’s that f---ing dog doing in here?!”
But by then it was pretty obvious.
I knew exactly why Reuben was in the house, and in the kitchen, and in my life: that dog was born for stories. For love and projects of mayhem. And more in the world to come.
This is an edited extract from Markus Zusak’s Three Wild Dogs and the Truth (Picador, $37), out September 10.
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