Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (13 page)

Yeah, she thought. It is like Dad’s office after all.

Just then, she caught sight of a shrine. Something, at any rate, that felt like a
shrine in the context of this room. There were no paper lanterns, and there was no
Japanese sword resting on its stands, but it had the same aura. That was it. The source
of whatever it was she was feeling. The globe.

It was on a shelf. Displayed. Set out to be seen, regarded. Revered.

That, the girl sensed, was the most important thing in the room.

She knew it right away.

So she went to take it in her hands.

She walked around the table, reached out. She picked it up. She had expected it to
be fairly heavy, but it was surprisingly light. It felt like metal, though. It felt
old. She had assumed it would be hollow like other globes, but it didn’t seem to be.
She turned it in her palms. Rotated the earth. It was bigger than her head.

She sensed it. This isn’t empty.

She sensed it. There’s something here.

She sensed it. Something
alive
.

But what?

Is it…inside?

She turned it in her palms, looking for a seam. The northern and southern hemispheres
looked like they might crack apart. That was the line. Ever so carefully, she opened
it. And out it came. Bone. An animal’s skull. It looked like it had been burned…bits
of skin or something clinging to it, hanging. Skin like a mummy’s, desiccated.

…what the hell?

Are you kidding me?

Number 47 was trying to communicate something. Trying to tell her something. It had
nothing to do, however, with the skull in the globe. He was trying to draw her attention
to the figure now standing in the doorway. No, not the figure—the figures. Like the
girl and number 47, they were two: a person and a dog.

A person and a dog, both old.

At number 47’s urging, the girl turned around.

“You have opened the coffin, have you?” the old man said.

“What…the hell?” the girl said.

“You wanted to hold it? Is that it, girl?”

The dog standing beside the old man was very old. The girl remembered him, of course—she
had seen him before. He was fairly large, stately. This was the same dog that had
barked down at her once before, from the roof.

“You wanted to touch the very first dog?” the old man said in Russian. Then, “But
it is not Belka, you know.”

“I didn’t break it,” the girl said in Japanese. “I just opened it.” Then, suddenly
realizing what was inside, she continued. “Fuck, you asshole, keeping a fucking creepy
skull like this, hidden in this thing. What is it…a fucking dog? Is that what this
is, you Old Fuck?”

“That is the first great Soviet hero. A dog who did not make it back to the earth
alive. Those are her remains. That is not Belka.”

“What the fuck are you saying?” the girl asked.

The old man pointed to the old dog beside him. He looked the girl in the eye.

“This is Belka,” he said.

“It’s a dog, isn’t it…a fucking dog’s skull.”

“You understand, little girl? He is the one dog I did not kill, the year before the
Soviet Union, the Homeland, disappeared. I let him go.
This
Belka. I could not bear to destroy the bloodline I helped to create with my own hands.
And yet that was what they ordered me to do.”

“Why do you have a dog’s skull in a shrine? Like some dog religion…”

“That was what Russia ordered me to do. Russian history. I betrayed history. I entrusted
this
Belka to her, the woman who looks after you, your nurse. I wanted to let him live
out his life, nothing more. I had no intention of reviving his line. I did not. I
had retired. I was serious about my retirement.”

The old man advanced two or three steps into the room.

This time he pointed down at number 47.

The girl stepped closer to her dog, as if to protect him. Without thinking about what
she was doing, she lifted the skull up and rested it on her head.

She was holding it in both hands. Over her head.

“See,” the girl said. “Kind of spiritual, right? Kind of religious?”

“Very amusing.” The old man chuckled.

Number 47 sat like a good dog.

“You are going to put that on, are you?” the old man said in Russian.

“What were you saying about Forty-seven?” the girl shot back in Japanese.

“As it happens, number forty-seven is the child of
this
Belka. Is that not right, old boy?”

The old man turned to look at Belka. The old dog barked in reply.

“He is old, but he still had what it took, luckily. We made it just in time.”

“Forty-seven is related to that old shit? Is that it?”

“I have the feeling we are getting through to each other. You understand me, little
girl? You, with the skull of that great dog over your head, like a dog-clan shaman.
Do you understand what I am saying? Seven puppies were born. A new generation. One
of them will be our Belka. Or Strelka, if it is a bitch. That will be the name of
the leader. Once they graduate from number to name. And number forty-seven may be
the one, the next Belka, it looks to me. The possibility is there. There is a good
chance.”

“He does look like him, come to think of it. Are you saying that old shit is his dad?”

“He is Belka,” the old man said, nodding at the old dog, to the girl.

And right away, the girl replied, “BEL-kah.”

“That is right. And you know what? I had a feeling. In this new litter there is no
bitch who is fit to be the next Strelka. Number forty-seven might be the next Belka,
but there is no Strelka—not, at any rate, among the dogs. None of them will take that
name. And you know why not? Because—” For the third time he pointed, this time at
the girl. “Because I am giving that name to you.”

Hey, dick, the girl, X years old, barked. She glared at the old man. Don’t fucking
point your finger at me.

“Because you are Strelka,” the old man said, chuckling.

He had given the girl a dog name.

Dogs, dogs, where are you now?

1958. Still the world was divided along the same lines. Every patch of ground across
the surface of the earth had been categorized as belonging to one of two ideologies.
Either you were communist or you were capitalist. Or else you wanted to be one or
the other. Except for you, dogs—you belonged to both sides.

First of all, four dogs entered communist territory. Three became Chinese. Originally
American, these purebred German shepherds were captured on the Korean Peninsula by
the People’s Liberation Army. They had been the pride of the US Army, part of the
military dog elite: Jubilee, News News (aka E Venture), and Ogre, siblings by different
mothers. They had been fathered by Bad News, which meant that their grandparents,
on their father’s side, were Masao and Explosion. That was their lineage. And now
they were Chinese. The last of the four dogs belonged to Kita’s line. But while his
lineage could be traced back to Kita, a Hokkaido dog, his blood was far from pure;
he was an Arctic mongrel, a “hybrid breed.” A wolfdog. And so far, he belonged to
no nation. He was on Soviet land and was destined eventually to become a Soviet dog,
but for now, in 1958, he still had no experience of the thing we call a nation.

Anubis, there you were on the Eurasian continent.

On that vast expanse of land, in Soviet territory.

But this was the Arctic. You hadn’t yet left Far East Siberia, though it was only
a matter of weeks before you would. Already you had moved away from the coast of the
East Siberian Sea, crossing the Kolyma River. You, Anubis, were pulling a dogsled.
And in a little more than a year—between December 1956 and the beginning of 1958—you
had passed from your fourth master to your fifth, and from your fifth to your sixth.
Why? Because there was something wrong with you. It had nothing to do with your abilities;
you were extraordinarily capable. Your senses were more acute than those of any ordinary
dog, and you could anticipate all kinds of danger before they appeared. You identified
passable routes faster than your masters, dashed easily over the most arduous terrain.
You were a magnificent sled dog. The problem, Anubis, was that the dogs you ran with
feared you. Most of the dogs in Far East Siberia were Russian Laikas. You weren’t
at home in that environment. Or rather, you were—but only at first. In the beginning,
things went smoothly. Because people trusted you and you communicated well with them.
Because you always tried to do your duty. The problem was that face of yours…your
mien. You were nothing like the others. You were no ordinary dog. Something in you
was decidedly different.

You were, it almost seemed, half beast.

Because you were.

And so, for no apparent reason, the other dogs were struck with fear.
WHAT
’
S GOING ON
? they asked.
WHY IS THIS ENEMY AMONG US
? He smelled like a wild wolf, and their master had ordered them to watch out for
wolves. He smelled just like the members of those
other
packs, the ones that lived on the outskirts of human territories, watching for a
chance to slip in and take down a reindeer or some domesticated animal. His features
were half wolf. And so—
WHAT
’
S GOING ON
? Eventually, hard as they tried to keep in line as they pulled the sled, they lost
the rhythm. They fell out of sync, and the sled capsized. Other times, they might
get so spooked that they would ignore their master and his whip and start running
on their own. Because they were afraid, every one of them. Of him. Of you.

Anubis. It was your fault.

But you didn’t let it bother you.

As the dogs scrambled for food, you bit them, ever so calmly. You bit them as if you
were their leader. You liked dried fish. You liked reindeer meat that had been boiled
with barley and allowed to cool. You ate seal meat. You devoured…the peace.

That, Anubis, was your problem.

So your masters let you go. They made the trip from one town to the next, and when
they headed back, you were no longer hitched to the sled. They traveled from a town
to a village, and left you—only you—behind. They would never abandon you; they passed
you on to a new master. “He’s a good dog,” they all said. “He just doesn’t get along
with my team. I don’t know what it is. So you can have him,” they said.

You kept moving.

You crossed Far East Siberia, from one village to the next, from a village to a town,
from a town to a town, from a town to a village.

Heading west.

To a village further west.

To a town further west.

Purely by chance, you kept tracing a path west across the Eurasian continent, skirting
the mountains that marked the southern border of the Arctic Circle. You crossed from
Chukchi lands to Koryak lands, then on into Evenk territory. You had a fifth master,
and then a sixth, and after that you didn’t count. Neither, Anubis, did you care at
all what ethnicity (what “traditional ethnic minority”) your successive masters belonged
to.

THERE
’
S THE ARCTIC OCEAN AGAIN
, you thought. Yes, because you had once been a dog of the Arctic Ocean. You had lived
on the ice, on one of those “drifting” observation stations. For about a year, from
the time you were three to sometime after your fourth birthday, you had been carried
by the tides across the Arctic Sea.

I HAVEN
’
T LEFT THE ARCTIC OCEAN
, you thought. And it was true—you were still within the Arctic Circle, still following
the shore. Limning the ocean’s edge. Circling.

Circling west.

You had set out from the shores of the East Siberian Sea, which is part of the larger
Arctic Ocean. Though in that season, there was no border between water and land. You
had traveled for a little over a year, until you found yourself gazing out at another
sea, also part of the Arctic Ocean, but with a different name. The Laptev Sea, to
the west of the Novosibirsk Islands.

Then, Anubis, sometime in 1958, you left Far East Siberia.

Anubis, Anubis, where are you now? You were on the Lena Delta, in the port town of
Tiksi. There, around you, the waters of the Lena River flowed. The second largest
river in the USSR, 2,650 miles long—it ended in this port, fanning out into an enormous
delta as it streamed into the Laptev Sea. And what, Anubis, were you doing here?

Pulling a sled, of course.

Only now you were pulling it in a different direction. You were no longer heading
west. You moved along a north-south axis. It was winter, and the Lena was frozen over—a
perfect way to travel. The river had been transformed into a well-equipped sledding
route. That’s where you were running. That’s where you were made to run. The thick
pads on your feet hit the frozen river, forelegs and hind legs, crossing the ice.
The Lena River had two sources: one in the Baikal Range, the other in the Stanovoy
Range. Both lay south of the Laptev Sea, the Lena Delta, and the port town Tiksi.
In the interior of the Eurasian continent. And so you could tell, Anubis—you could
sense it.
SOMETIMES
,
I MOVE AWAY FROM THE ARCTIC OCEAN
. You moved for a time along a north-south axis. Up and down the frozen Lena, up and
down, with Tiksi as your base.

Midway along the Lena was the town of Yakutsk, capital of the Yakutia Republic, one
of the members of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic within the Soviet
Union. Half the town’s inhabitants were Yakuts. Your new master was one of them. Not
that you, Anubis, cared who your master was. In the beginning, in Tiksi, you had a
different master. Then one day your master changed; he was someone else now, only
with the same face.

These two men were twins. In their late thirties. The younger brother lived just outside
Yakutsk and worked as a fur hunter, using supplies provided by the kolkhoz. He could
never fulfill his quota, however, and so he lived in wretched poverty. The older brother
had been granted a transport license that made it possible, in an age when ordinary
people, ordinary Soviets, were forbidden to travel from town to town or region to
region without an “internal passport,” for him to run his dogsled up and down the
Lena, from the lower reaches to the middle. He carried goods. Only specialists could
do this kind of work, and the pay was good. Needless to say this was before snowmobiles
became common in Siberia, when it was hard to move things fast, and he did such consistently
excellent work that he had been officially recognized for his service. In short, the
older brother succeeded. And his younger brother seethed with envy. So one day, when
they met in Yakutsk after months apart, the younger brother secretly killed the older
brother. Clubbed him to death. He buried the body in the forest, near the hut he stayed
in when he went hunting. And he became his brother. He made the older brother’s privileges
his own and went back to the port town Tiksi.

No one noticed.

People’s comings and goings were strictly monitored in Tiksi, which was home to a
base, but the evil younger brother was easily mistaken for his good older brother;
they let him right in without subjecting him to a security check or anything.

The dogs didn’t know what was what. It was precisely on occasions like this, however,
that you showed your mettle. You, Anubis, helped the younger brother. You were
too
skilled a dog. Your new master was an amateur—though as a member of a tribe of nomadic
horse riders he was used to driving horse-drawn sleighs, and he had ridden in dogsleds
a few times—but you could divine his intentions, you knew in advance what it was he
wanted you, your team, to do. You subjugated yourself to his will. And you led. The
other dogs feared you, and because they recognized a crisis, they obeyed you. You
appraised the situation, Anubis, and they fell in line.

Rather than let your stupid master’s flimsy orders play havoc with them, they recognized
your authority.

The pack cohered.

The team functioned as a team.

You terrified the other dogs because you were a wolfdog. But still, a dog is a dog.
Once the hierarchy was established, terror bred obedience. You inspired fear in the
other dogs, not as a wolfdog, but as the leader of the pack. That, at any rate, was
how they themselves, subject to their fear, understood the situation.

You ruled them, Anubis.

You brought the team into harmony.

The sled. Traveling down the Lena.

You ran. You were made to run. You were no longer pawned off on anyone else. Your
new master—strictly speaking he was your fake master, the evil younger brother with
the same face as the good older brother—had no intention of giving you away. “Good
dog,” he said. “You get along great with the other dogs, you keep them in line so
well,” he said. “I wouldn’t give this dog to anyone,” he said, “no matter how many
thousand rubles I was offered.” And he ran the hell out of you. He pushed you and
the other sled dogs to the limit. Show me what you can do! Show me what you can do!
Move these goods! Move it! Move it! You ran. You were made to run. You understood
the intentions behind your amateur master’s ambiguous commands, and you communicated
them to the rest of the dogs, led the team back and forth across the frozen waters.
Again and again, dozens of times, along a north-south axis.

“I’m in transport!” your idiot master howled. “It takes a specialist to do this kind
of work, and I’m that specialist! I’m a transporter, the pride of the Soviet Union!”

The winter was endless. The Lena remained covered with a thick layer of ice. And then,
all of a sudden, it was spring.

Just like that, the thaw had come.

The amateur “transporter” didn’t recognize the signs. In certain regions, the thawing
of the Lena breeds natural catastrophes. It etches an enormous, awful hymn to the
power of nature, there in the landscape itself. In Yakutsk, for instance, it often
causes massive flooding.

You, Anubis, were the first to notice. You heard the spring of 1958 coming. To the
Lena. It was a sort of cracking sound. Something snapped. You were running. You had
left the port and were headed somewhere upriver. Headed south. As you ran, you sensed
something.
I
’
M MOVING FARTHER FROM THE ARCTIC OCEAN
,
FARTHER AND FARTHER
. You pulled the sled, you made sure the other dogs did their part. And then it happened.
Your ears caught the sound, and the pads of your feet, forelegs, hind legs—they
heard
it too. Crick. Crick. Crack. Craaack.

You tried to stop.

You felt instinctively that
WE HAVE TO STOP
!

You whined in warning.

“Shut up!” your master said.

The harness and your place at the head of the team made it impossible for you to stop
on your own. If you tried to stop anyway, you would be dragged along, tangled in the
ropes. In the worst case you might suffocate and lose your legs, and the team would
be thrown instantly out of line. But you had noticed what was happening.
IT
’
S BREAKING
,
IT
’
S BREAKING
,
IT
’
S BREAKING
. You whined a warning to the other dogs. But how could you convey the force of the
vision that rose before you?

You wanted to tell them:
THIS PATH IS BREAKING UP
!

“Hey! Don’t stop!” your master commanded, cracking his whip violently in the air.
“Keep running! Run until you die!”

Little did he realize what these ominous words foretold.

A second or two later, the frozen Lena was roiling. It had happened. In a sudden,
dramatic burst, the thaw had begun. The route snapped apart into countless chunks
of ice that heaved and churned, creaked and snapped and strained. The earth was sliding,
roaring. Rolling. Flipping. Fissures crisscrossed the river’s surface. No—the river’s
surface
was
a mass of fissures. The ice that had stretched off into the distance before them
had vanished. Their destination was gone. A few dogs tumbled in and sank. The icy
water gurgled around them as they drowned. They kept moving their legs even in the
water, as if they were still running. “Run until you die!” indeed. The ropes dragged
the sled toward the hole.
Sink!
The ropes intoned.
Drown! Submit to your death!
The man with the whip seemed to be blowing bubbles. Anubis, your master was an idiot.
Your master didn’t know anything. But you, Anubis, you knew.