Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (35 page)

And the corpse answered,
Yes
.

So the old man began working for cash.

He killed a punk with a tattoo on his right arm that glorified America. He killed
a prostitute with a pro-democratic slogan tattooed on her left arm. People asked him
to do it, and he did it. He killed bureaucrats. He killed police officers. Sometimes
he charged one hundred rubles, sometimes he charged one hundred dollars. When he returned
to his apartment at night, he talked to the globe. I will protect you, he said. Because
you’re the perfect match for me, he said, I will protect you. Yes, I am talking to
you, the skull of a dog whose destiny it was to die in space, sent up with no hope
that she would return, sent up to be killed, to continue wheeling around the earth,
in orbit, you, skull of a murdered hero.

Who will protect you? I am the only one. I will protect you.

One day, the old man had a guest. An invited guest. The first guest this apartment
had seen. A Slavic man, his head balding. He stroked the globe, humming some sort
of melody.

A military march? the old man asked.

The middle-aged man looked up. Ah, the song. I didn’t realize.

How is your mother?

She’s fine. She’s still grateful to you, Director. For those…splendid last days.

I am no longer the Director.

Sorry. We’re so used to calling you that at home. My father, and me.

Both my men.

The only ones in the unit. Father and son, wearing the same insignia.

And how are your sisters?

They’re fine too. They’ve started speaking a bit, two or three words a year.

Your family…did not dissolve.

I beg your pardon?

The Soviet Family Code predicted the dissolution of the family. In 1926.

As far as we’re concerned, you’re our father now.

Even though we are not related?

That’s right.

That is a good family. Except that…I am gone.

You’re gone?

The old mad nodded, then asked one last question.

And how are the dogs?

The dogs are well, the guest answered.

That afternoon, the tension that had been building between the mafia organizations
throughout the city finally erupted. According to the radio. The television reported
that the gangs had declared war on each other. The authorities issued a statement
calling for residents of the city to remain indoors. Newspaper reporters rushed hither
and yon. The two news agencies, Interfax News and the Russia News Service, transmitted
up-to-the-minute reports to every corner of the Eurasian continent. And to the New
World. The extraordinary number of dogs on the streets that day was not considered
newsworthy. Reports of abnormal sightings were treated as mere blather, vaguely occult
in nature, and ignored. Ordinarily one would have expected the tabloids to jump at
this kind of thing, but they didn’t that day, or the next, or later on. This, too,
had been carefully factored into the calculations—the kinds of stories the mass media
inevitably focus on, their blind spots. Elaborate preparations had been under way
for months in this city, laid on the foundations of hundreds of casualties.

The dogs were rebelling, but their rebellion was invisible.

Ordinary citizens noticed the disorder but assumed it was just the usual gang violence,
nothing they should be concerned about.

It helped to have the chaos noticed. Because the media fanned the flames. And when
the flames had been fanned hard enough, people snapped. Finally, the incident expanded
to encompass the entire nation.

Certain functions of the city were paralyzed, but the mass transit system was still
in order, more or less. The airports were fine. The trains were running. The planes
and trains carried “support troops” to the Russian Far East. Naturally, these newcomers
got into arguments with the police at the entrance to the city. Not the dogs, though.
By afternoon, the dogs were already lying low.

The dogs were guerrillas. They served no government. But they did have rules. Their
fighting techniques were as refined as those of any regular army.

But they were guerrillas. They conducted only surprise attacks.

The dogs seized control of several areas. Areas dotted with mafia facilities, the
scenes of deaths as yet unknown to the authorities. A printing house that produced
counterfeit dollars. A vast underground factory that manufactured counterfeit brand
items. A warehouse holding mountains of drugs (these were real, not counterfeit).
Another warehouse full of contraband antiquities. Yet another warehouse holding concentrated
uranium and disassembled nuclear warheads destined to be smuggled out of the country.
The dogs were waiting. Because sooner or later, someone would come to steal these
items back. Or some new players would come to make off with them, make them their
own. Or maybe someone would simply come looking.

Pretty much anyone who came along was killed.

Four
PM
. A middle-aged man was directing the dogs. A balding Slavic man. He gave signals
to the dogs, eliminated everyone who approached. The dogs’ unusual fighting techniques
had been used before, in the 1980s, somewhere in Afghanistan. They had been used,
as well, west of the line that divided Europe, to assassinate a senior NATO officer.
The middle-aged man hummed loudly as he led his lightning squad into battle. He had
a submachine gun that he used to cover the dogs’ tails, as it were, very precisely.
He was the man Strelka called Opera.

At 4:30
PM
, still humming, he mowed down four mafia fighters without bothering to send in the
dogs. A bit of rapid-fire action was all it took.

The sun had already sunk well below the horizon.

The dogs remained invisible to human eyes.

Other dogs saw them, however. There was barking in the distance. Distant barks answered
by distant barks—a conversation. Someone had been cutting the chains on pet dogs’
collars. In the forests outside the city, hunters’ dogs disappeared. Wild dogs ran
through the city streets as if gone mad. Slowly, little by little, something was happening.
Little by little, one by one, the dogs were being freed. Various mafia were heading
by land toward the Russian Far East. To join the conflict—to enlist in a war that
was, they still believed, with other mafia. To steal the drugs that had been left
behind, to play their part in what they still believed was a tug-of-war among different
criminal organizations.

Mafia all across Russia watched the city very closely.

Here and there, gates were opened. Whole trains were bought. They would screech to
a halt a mile short of the station, and dozens of men would descend. Counterfeit papers
worked their magic in airports. Police squads that had set up inspection stations
on the highway saluted as their old buddies, the mafia kingpins, passed in their motorcades:
Welcome to the Far East!

Around midnight, the nature of the street fighting changed as a new strategy was introduced.
Now the dogs were taking hostages. They no longer lunged at the throats of their targets
but brought them back alive, as they had been commanded to do. They brought the hostages
back, presented them to the old man.

First one.

Then another.

And another.

All night long.

Barks echoed back and forth across the city.

“I can prepare a table for us to negotiate at,” the old man said.

What is all this? the other man said. What the hell are these dogs?

“You remember 1812?” the old man asked.

Who are you? the other man asked. The head of their tribe?

“The Napoleonic Wars. You remember? You are a Russian, right? Or rather, you are a
former Soviet? You must have learned your history. How that stupid French emperor
marched into Moscow in 1812 with an enormous army, 110,000-men strong—marched into
the capital, which the Russian army had decided, strategically, to give him. You remember
what happened then?”

What the hell?

“They let the city be destroyed so that Russia would survive. Moscow’s residents abandoned
the city. Napoleon’s army marched into a capital that was all but empty. That night,
Moscow burned. It was set on fire. By the Russians. The city burned for a week, two-thirds
of it reduced to rubble. And the French…they occupied the rubble and starved. All
110,000 men died of starvation. They ate crows. They ate cats. And still they did
not last a month. And what is happening now?”—the old man asked, speaking now to himself,
and then answering himself—“This is not 1812. This is not 1991. That is your explanation.
You understand? We, the dogs, we condemn Russia! There is your answer.”

The hostage’s face was deathly white.

1991. Moscow in the winter. The temperature was below five degrees Fahrenheit. Sunset
was still a ways off. A blizzard. The old man was walking. He saw three hundred people
lined up outside the US Embassy. He stared at the snaking line of visa applicants.
People standing without talking, exhaling clouds of white breath. Snow dusted their
hats, their hair. The line progressed hardly at all.

It was decided. The end of a state so huge it covered one-sixth of the earth’s landmass.
Soon, the white-, blue-, and red-striped Russian flag would be hoisted up the pole
in front of the Kremlin. Four months had passed since those summer days, and during
that time a handful of men who acted in secret had won, and the Soviet Union was finished.
Dead.

The old man reached his destination. A closed kiosk on the corner, a large umbrella
in a stand in front. A man in an Italian designer suit, his features instantly branding
him Caucasian, from the Caucasus, stood waiting. He was young. In his late twenties,
perhaps—no older than thirty-one or thirty-two.

“That business this morning,” the young man said. “Truly professional.”

The old man grinned. “Who did you have following me?” he asked. “And why did you want
to see me? Was the guy I killed one of your associates?”

“No, no,” the young man said. “He was an enemy. You did me a favor. You know, having
a real professional out there…”

“A professional?” the old man said. “You mean me?”

“Yeah. Having a professional like you running around…unchecked… don’t know if I like
it. Seems dangerous, to tell the truth.”

“You want to kill me?”

“No, the opposite,” the young man said. “I want to give you what you deserve.”

“You want to give me a job, you mean? In your organization?”

“Exactly. Is that against your policy?”

“No,” the old man said. I have no policy, his eyes said, twinkling.

Twinkling with scorn…for history.

“Well then, shall we discuss terms? Contract period, benefits, compensation…by the
way, I was wondering, what should I call you?”

“My name, you mean?”

“Yes, your name.”

“Listen.”

“Hmm?”

Silence. Two seconds later, a bell began chiming. It hung in the belfry of a church
that had been destroyed long ago, in pre-perestroika times, whose restoration began
in the late 1980s. It rang and rang as the snow skittered lightly in random patterns
over Moscow.

“Call me the Archbishop,” the old man said.

One morning, Strelka awoke to a smell in the air, all over the city—it was the scent
of the dogs. One morning, Strelka noticed that the temperature in the city had risen.
HOT
,
ISN
’
T IT
? she said to the dogs.
ARE WE ACTUALLY KILLING THAT FUCKING COLD RUSSIAN WINTER
? she asked Belka.
Winterwinterwinterwinterwinter, the fucking billion-year-long Russian winter is finally
ending!
she sang to herself, again and again. She lifted her face to the sky, looked once
more at the billowing black smoke. She was about to blow up a mafia weapons storehouse
she had been guarding until a few minutes ago. She’d watched the old lady making explosives
with TNT. You old bag, you’re
good
, she had said. And then she had listened to the old lady talking to her—You have
no way of knowing this, of course, darling, but my husband was a commissioned officer
in the special forces, and so was my son, and I myself used to look after the dogs
in the breeding facility, and part of my job was to set up explosives in the training
grounds. I know what I’m doing. Since the old lady was speaking in Russian, she didn’t
understand a word, but she nodded. When someone died, the old lady continued, the
Director always took care of the family left behind. Strelka listened, then replied:
You’re half dog yourself, aren’t you? Not that I’m one to speak—I’m
all
dog. She said that in Japanese. Strelka knew that last night, WO and WT had gone
around cutting the chains on pet dogs, setting them loose, and agitating the wild
dogs. She knew that when WO and WT breathed, their breath smelled like a dog’s breath.
I’m a dog, so I can tell. They’re half dogs too.

I’m a dog. They won’t kill me.

With all this street fighting going on, we’re invisible.

Belka protected Strelka. He carried out her commands immediately. He was the older
brother, watching over the others—and more. There was also the name. He had become
the next Belka, so the other dogs acknowledged him, acknowledged that one day, at
some point in the future, he would lead them all. Belka slept, awoke, ran. Belka slept
stretched out beside Strelka, awoke, ran. Belka lay low, watching passively as gangsters
had shootouts in the streets in the early morning, as black cars with tinted windows
were blown into the air with rocket launchers. Belka understood. He knew the humans
didn’t realize that the flames of this war they were fighting were being fanned by
dog guerrillas. He knew the humans were looking for human enemies, so they wouldn’t
suddenly start shooting dogs, or Strelka for that matter, because Strelka was a dog,
and because in human eyes she looked like a defenseless human girl. So, Belka said,
they’ll let Strelka kill them, they’ll be killed, and even as they die they won’t
understand what’s happening, and all along, all throughout the town, the dogs…we dogs…
we
will multiply. Belka could feel it happening. He didn’t think it, he felt it—all
across the Eurasian continent, his brethren, the other dogs…they were setting out,
heading for this land, the Russian Far East, a massive migration.