Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (36 page)

The humans had it all wrong.

The city was full of dogs loitering, hanging around. So they thought.

They allowed the dogs to remain invisible. Even the dogs who had been trained, thoroughly
trained, in the deadly art of street fighting.

All morning, the barking continued back and forth in the distance. Echoing. The dogs
were on their way. The dogs were coming. The dogs were getting closer. From the taiga
beyond the city, from enclaves in the mountains dozens of miles away, from across
the Amur River, from the lands where Russian aristocrats were exiled in the nineteenth
century. Gradually, little by little, their numbers increased as they converged on
the city. In reality, however, three planes contributed the most to the great migration.
Three planes owned by private companies that took off one after the other from Moscow,
then landed together in the city. Dogs obeyed their own instincts. When a dog barked
somewhere far off, they responded. And humans too…mafia members, too, acted in accordance
with instincts they could not disobey. When an organization began to lose its grip
on an area, competitors moved in to gobble it up. The three planes brought in 220
members of the most powerful criminal organization in Russia: a far-reaching international
gang whose operations extended as far as the old Eastern Bloc, come now to overwhelm
the city by force of numbers. The organization could display its power by taking control.
We don’t need you little guys diddling around—we control the Russian underworld. That
was the message. The mass media had been waiting, they were ready to spread the news
across the Eurasian continent. They had been primed for two days now.

The timing was perfect.

That afternoon, there were two hours of hell. Hell for the mafia. Then an hour of
rest. Rest for the dogs. Intermittent gunshots continued into the evening, but that
was all—it was a scene, peaceful in a way, of ordinary mafia warfare. Then, suddenly,
the situation changed. First there were Strelka, Belka, and six other dogs; ten minutes
later there were Strelka and Belka and five other dogs. Number 114, a bitch, had died.
Belka’s sister. So there were Strelka and Belka and five other dogs, and then, two
minutes later, there were Strelka and Belka and three other dogs. Number 46 and number
113 had died. Belka’s brother and sister. Strelka barked. The old lady was yelling
frantically in Russian.
Pull back! Pull back!
One minute later Strelka and Belka and three other dogs had become Strelka and Belka
and one other dog. Number 44 and number 45 had died, been killed, and Strelka was
still barking, and Belka was watching.

The enemy had changed.

The enemy had noticed the canine rebellion.

The dogs in this city were no longer invisible.

All of a sudden, the humans began shooting them.

Belka stared. At the equipment of a group of a dozen men who had joined the fray.
They were not mafia. They wore bulletproof helmets that fighter pilots wear and camouflage
uniforms, and they had assault rifles with folding stock. They looked nothing like
gangsters. Belka stared as number 48 was shot, yelping; Belka heard the yelp, he had
to protect Strelka, the dogs are visible, and so Strelka is visible; the enemy will
not hesitate to eliminate her. Belka recognized their smell. Not their biological,
animal scent, but the smell of their group. Belka felt it. And he was right. The enemy
was a special unit belonging to the Russian Federal Security Service, the new Russian
secret police, successor to the Soviet KGB. The unit was in charge of domestic security.
It was in charge of fighting terrorism. The unit would destroy. The dogs. Their revolution.
Officials at the highest levels of the Federal Security Service had realized, during
a committee meeting with KGB veterans, that many of the dogs that had turned up in
the city were using the same combat techniques “S” had cultivated. The special forces
unit was briefed, and arriving on the scene, they killed the dogs very quickly. In
fewer than fourteen minutes, Strelka and Belka found themselves alone, with zero other
dogs.

At the same moment, in another part of town, a second special forces unit leapt out
of an eight-wheel-drive armored truck and started firing at dogs, killing them. None
of these extraordinarily talented dogs were allowed to survive. They brought in the
truck, jumped out, did their work quickly. Another human ran into the crowd of special
forces. Humming as he ran. Opera had bombs strapped to his stomach. He put his finger
on the switch.

Singing, now, at the top of his voice, he pressed the switch.

Two hours earlier. The old man said:
These are my terms
.

An hour earlier.

All right, the old man said, I have just injected two different chemicals into you:
the first is a truth serum, and the second—you may be surprised to hear—is a rabies
virus. It is a biological weapon, actually, he explained kindly, developed during
Soviet times. I have got to say it again and again to make the hypnosis work, so I
will keep repeating it as often as you like: now that I have captured you, I have
finally got what I was after. Now that you have come to this city with 220 of your
soldiers, you have finally given me the card I need to negotiate successfully. You
volunteered to take charge of this raid because you wanted to put yourself forward.
You wanted to be noticed. What are you, number three? Or is it number four? You are
the treasurer, right? Yes, it is very nice to rely on your mafia instincts, the old
man said to the hostage. I know, you wanted to do something big, he went on. I have
been waiting for you, you know, stupid thugs colluding with the government. Here,
look, this is a serum that kills the rabies virus, see? The incubation period for
rabies may last thirty days, but when you get sick, you will get sick, there is no
escape: you will feel uneasy, then terrified, you will have delusions, hallucinations,
and then your whole body will go numb and you will die, the old man told the hostage
kindly. All I want are the documents that show how the money moves, that is all I
ask for, the old man said. All I want to do is stir up a little scandal in the office
of the president. That is all, the old man said.

Ten minutes earlier.

That is all I need, that is enough to topple the eight leading figures in the government.
With this information I could do it tomorrow, the old man said. I have prepared channels
to pass the information along to the Western media—a little international pressure
is all it takes in these cases, am I right? Then the whole system will collapse. This
is a real revolution, my friend, not like that stuff they pulled in Moscow in the
summer of 1991, that was no revolution. Not bad, this, huh? A revolution carried out
entirely by dogs, the old man said. The problem is, dogs cannot disappear in Moscow,
it is too urban, too much of a national capital, you know what I mean? But out here
in the Far East!
A kak zhe?
I am sure you have guessed this already, my friend, but I have totally lost my mind.

One minute earlier.

The old man had trapped his prey in a room in a thirteen-story hotel. The commander
of a force of 220 mafia fighters in a room on the twelfth floor. The room had windows,
but the shades were drawn. You could hear things, though, from outside. Even through
the thick soundproofed glass he could hear the roar of military helicopters hovering
over the city. He stood up.

The window exploded. A spray of bullets shattered the glass, shredded the curtains.
Quick work, the old man thought. They are fast, faster than I thought, if only by
a…he thought. But he never finished his thought.

Now.

The old man’s body danced as the bullets pounded it.

Dogs, dogs, where are you now?

Early in 1990, you lay sprawled on the ground at an execution site. You lay in a sea
of blood. You had been part of the unit before, part of “S,” but now, with one exception,
you had been eradicated. The one survivor was looking up, devotion in his eyes. Peering
up at the man who stood at the top of the chain of command. At the man known as the
Director, the General, and by various other names.

The man had aged.

Our own homeland, he said. To the dog. The Soviet issued the command, he said. That
we be eliminated. They ordered it. We are the evidence, they say, that must never
be discovered. And so we must be destroyed.

The old man raised his gun, aimed it at the dog.

The dog did not flinch. He listened.

All around the man and the dog a terrible stench hung in the air. The smell of countless
deaths, of so much spilled blood.

The old man gazed at the dog.

The dog’s name, this dog’s name, was Belka.

The unit has disbanded, the old man said. Do you understand that?

Belka listened. He heard. And he answered:
Woof!

Tears spilled from the old man’s eyes. His right hand, gripping the pistol, trembled.
I just, he said, I just…I just, I just…

Woof!
the old man cried.

“I am going to lose my mind,” he told Belka. “And you, you are going to live.”

Dogs, dogs, here you are.

You penetrated the military’s encirclement of the city. Strelka, Belka, the old lady,
WO and WT, and a dozen dogs managed to escape. By the next morning, however, WO, WT,
and their motorcycle were blown to smithereens. Orders were issued in cities throughout
the Russian Far East that dogs were to be hunted down and killed, and as a consequence
four thousand dogs died, including many unrelated to the rebellion. Three days after
they fled, Strelka’s band was reduced to Strelka, who would disguise herself, depending
on the situation, as a Chinese-Russian, a Korean-Russian, or a Mongolian-Russian;
Belka, who disguised himself as an ordinary pet; and the old lady. It was easier this
way; they had greater freedom of movement. Though they did have one bulky bit of luggage.
They had the globe. The old lady had presented it to Strelka in an abandoned cabin,
in a region midway between the taiga and the wetlands. Strelka accepted it, she pondered
its meaning. She decided the old lady was asking her where they should go. She spun
the globe.

They had to get out of Russia.

Out, off the Eurasian continent altogether.

For a moment she thought to point at Japan, but then she reconsidered. Like I’d fucking
go back there. She moved the tip of her finger up to Sakhalin, then up over the Sea
of Okhotsk to the Kamchatka Peninsula. East. They’d keep heading east, off the continent,
beyond. But not as far as North America—too fucking
worldly
to go to a fucking English-speaking country, she decided. She jabbed her finger down
randomly to the east of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

On an archipelago sandwiched between the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

The old lady understood.

She got them on a train, which took them to the ocean. They crossed the ocean. The
old man’s bank account hadn’t been frozen yet, so funds were not a problem. They flew
in an eight-seat charter plane from Sakhalin to the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Three weeks later, they crossed to another island in the Pacific, though they still
hadn’t left Russian territory. The crossing took twenty or thirty minutes on a fishing
boat that set out from a small coastal village on the southeast edge of the peninsula.
They got off the boat, went ashore. The island was unpopulated, but there were a few
old wooden buildings. A factory that had all but rotted away. A seafood processing
plant run by Japanese capital in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War; it had, apparently,
produced canned crab and salmon and had been the base of the North Atlantic fishing
industry. You stayed there, preparing, for three months.

You. Three of you. First: Strelka. You watched as the old lady did this and that,
working toward the goal. You watched, trusting her. You obtained fake identities,
fake pasts, and still you remained there, on the uninhabited island, biding your time.
The old lady made trips to the village on the peninsula to buy food and eventually
a boat. You and Belka went to the village a few times and learned that sled dogs were
kept there, and that there were puppies, four or five months old. The old lady chose
seven puppies, bought them.

Little by little, you were getting ready to set sail.

It would happen in secret.

And I ask you: Where will you go? And you answer: We’ll leave the world behind, we’ll
go to Dog Heaven. Who are you? I ask. And you answer: I’m me, fucking asshole.

And then there’s you. The other you.

You stand on the beach on the island’s eastern shore, gazing out over the vastness
of the ocean, beyond the fog. You hear the other dog talking to you, in Japanese.
Asking you, “Belka, why don’t you bark?”

Soon you will cross the ocean together. And you will kill the twentieth century. You
will build a heaven for dogs, only dogs, on that island within the fog, and from there
you will declare war on the twenty-first century.