Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (23 page)

His mother’s body rotted, stank.

AWFUL
, the nameless puppy thought. The stench grew worse with every passing day until at
last it drove him away. He would go. You see, DED, how clever your son is? He wandered
quietly, secretly, through the fourth layer. There was a need for secrecy—he knew
this from his mother’s actions, he had figured it out. It wouldn’t come as a surprise
to you, DED, even on the other side, to learn that the labyrinth of tunnels and branches
had been completely transformed. There were new passageways, and others that had been
closed off. All the paths too narrow for humans to pass through had been abandoned.
But if you were a puppy? Could they be used? Yes, they could. And so the fourth layer
was now connected to the third, and so to the second, and to the first.

You would have been impressed by your son’s intimate knowledge of the map’s coordinates.
He had grasped it all. He appeared and vanished without warning in this “new new world,”
faster even than the humans.

Yes, he was fine.

Relax, no need to worry.

You need not linger.

Spring came and the nameless puppy was growing healthily. He was an orphan, but he
had never suffered from hunger. He knew well where in the network of tunnels he could
find food, and what it was safe to take. He knew everything. Everything relating to
this world, that is. But he wasn’t satisfied with this…this routine, with no aim beyond
survival. At this early stage in life, he placed no stock in omniscience. He wanted
the unknown. It was this, the things he had never experienced, that called to him.
And so, even as he surpassed the humans, he spied on their doings. Explored the new
munitions storeroom they had dug. The cave next to the underground kitchen, where
they kept live chickens that began laying eggs day after day. When an operating room
was added to the underground hospital after a medical unit was sent down from Hanoi,
he tried to get as close as possible to the astonishing thing they had in there: a
light bulb powered by a bicycle-powered generator that the surgeons used when they
operated. He was doing all kinds of things, seeing all kinds of things.

Early summer.

The nameless puppy began encountering difficulties. He was growing healthily…in fact,
he was now fully grown. He was no longer a puppy, and he was no longer the size of
a puppy. His body had filled out remarkably. But this bewildered him: how could the
world have shrunk so? The narrow paths that led in and out of the fourth layer were
now impassable.

WHAT
’
S HAPPENED
? the nameless dog asked himself in his frustration.

He shouted,
IT
’
S TOO TIGHT
!
EVERYTHING IS TOO CLOSE
!

This circumscribed world didn’t satisfy him. It wasn’t enough. He didn’t feel fulfilled.
And he started losing track of his coordinates, which made it difficult to keep hidden.
Everything had changed, his measurements were all wrong! He was no longer omniscient,
he realized that. So what was he to do?
What?

He was approaching an answer.

First there was the fourth layer. Then there was the third. Then he found the second
and finally the first. He kept probing the network of tunnels for things he didn’t
know. And at last…at last…

Summer. He was crawling through the first tunnel. It stank. It stank. He crawled.
He kept crawling and crawling. He forgot all the coordinates he had carried in his
head.
WHO CARES
, he thought.
WHO CARES ANYWAY
! His body tingled with a heightened sensitivity. An unnameable sense growled within
him. He was biting through to something new. Which way had he come, which branches
had he chosen? Which forks in which paths had he entered? It didn’t matter, he was
being led on. By a voice. You, nameless dog. A nameless sense dispensed its commands
to you, a nameless dog. The voice spoke to you. And you heard it, didn’t you?

To live. Live. Live at the edge of starvation. Hunger to live.

YES
, you replied.
YES
,
YES
,
YES
.

Woof!

At last, nameless dog, you, too, barked.

Unsatisfied, you set out, beyond the confines of the world you knew by smell. You
sniffed, inhaled the odors, searching for the unfamiliar. Finally, you crawled out
aboveground. Your fixation on the unknown had made it happen. The smell of grass,
undergrowth, moss on a stone, a dangling vine. It was hot. That’s what it was like
up there. On the Indochina peninsula, in the tropics, just above the seventeenth parallel
north. You had emerged into North Vietnamese territory, outside the DMZ. The exit
from the network of tunnels, incidentally, was a camouflaged wooden trap door of the
same sort used at crucial junctures underground, so you knew how it worked. You scratched
at it, broke through. There was no sentry on guard. You pressed forward over a terrain
devoid of humans, devoid of any trace of humanity, and you were out. You stood there,
dazed.

WHAT IS ALL THIS
?
EVEN THE SOIL SMELLS DIFFERENT
?

IT
’
S ALL SO DIFFERENT
!

You were moved. The scent in your nostrils was the earth baked by the sun. But it
wasn’t daytime now. When you emerged from that cramped world, it was the dead of night.

July 1969.

The moon was out. You turned to look at it. It was dazzling. This was nothing else,
only moonlight, but for you, born and raised underground, it might as well have been
as bright as the sun. You had seen the Vietnamese doctor’s light in the tunnels, so
your eyes were familiar with illumination. They had been educated by the bulb in the
operating room, and they had felt awed by its vivid round glow. But the moon hovering
up there in the sky…this was different. The shock of it was altogether different.
You were moonstruck. Any number of stars twinkled in the sky along with the moon,
but it was the moon that got you. An American reconnaissance plane carrying an infrared
camera flew by, but you were enchanted by the moon.

That summer, humans, too, found their gazes drawn to the same celestial body. The
whole world was focused on the moon that season, because the US National Aeronautics
and Space Administration had launched Apollo 11 and, for the first time in human history,
landed a man on the moon. That was the human world, though, not the dog world. Dogs
had been the ones to open the door to space travel, but now the man-made satellite
Sputnik 2 was all but forgotten. Twelve years had passed since then.

The human twentieth century continued, that summer, as though Anno Canis didn’t exist.

You cried.

Nameless, gazing straight up at the moon, you were pained. Your eyes hurt. You had
been born underground, where vision was useless, and the moonlight was too strong
for you. Tears welled in your eyes. Tears fell. But you didn’t look away.

You kept staring up at the moon, overwhelmed.

You sensed something behind you.

You turned around. Your eyesight still blurred by tears.

It was a human. He held a night vision device in one hand and a military map in the
other. He was different from all the other humans you had seen…spied on…so far. There
was a difference in race—in build, in odor—but of course that meant nothing to a dog
like you. You were on the edge of a firebase to the north of the DMZ, an area that
was on the front lines but which had been cleared of North Vietnamese soldiers.

You were unsure how to react.

Because instinct told you there was no need to run.

WHAT IS
…
WHAT
…?

You, nameless dog, were at a loss. How could a human do what he was doing, stand there
opposite you as he was, in the darkness?

The human spoke: “Are you crying?”

His voice sounded like a dog’s whine. It radiated through your body with the same
warmth as the commands the unnameable sense issued. You had no way of knowing, of
course, but the language the man spoke was not Vietnamese. Neither was it Chinese.
Or English.

WHAT IS IT
,
HUMAN
?

“I saw you,” the human said. Then, holding up the night vision device, “I saw you
with this. Crawling up out of the ground. Like the earth was giving birth to you.
You were looking up at the moon.”

ARE YOU A GUIDE
? you thought, your vision clouded with tears.
A GUIDE TO THIS OTHER WORLD
?

“You’re the opposite of those dogs who returned from outer space. But not unrelated.
And look at that physique of yours…you’re purebred, huh? Purebred German shepherd?
You don’t look that old either. Young, in fact. You’ve just graduated from puppyhood.”

HEY
,
HUMAN
, you say.
THIS IS A GREAT
,
MYSTERIOUS WORLD
.

“Strange…are you an American dog?”

I CAME ABOVEGROUND
.

“They set you loose in the tunnels to explore them in secret, and you got lost—is
that it? No, it can’t be. You don’t have that kind of attitude at all. Are you Chinese,
then? One of the dogs in that platoon they talk about, the one they say the PLA sent
in four years ago? No…that’s not right either.”

YOU WERE HERE
.

“Anyway, I was here, and then you turned up,” the human said. He spoke the same words,
dog, nameless dog, that you yourself had just said. Not in Vietnamese, or in Chinese,
or even in English. In Russian.

“Come. I’ll take you with me. Can your children be the next Belka, the next Strelka?”

The KGB officer held out his hands, and you barked.
Woof!

In March 1969, the Sino-Soviet split finally escalated into armed conflict. The two
armies exchanged serious gunfire in the area around Zhenbao, aka Damansky Island,
in the Ussuri River, on the border between the nations. In June a similar border dispute
broke out along the edge of Xinjiang Province, and in July the same thing happened
around Bacha Island, aka Gol’dinskii, in the Heilong River. The participants in the
conflicts were always border guard troops. The tension had been building for some
time. In 1967, as China was pressing ahead with the Great Cultural Revolution, the
Red Guard attacked the Russian Embassy in Beijing. They set fire to effigies of Soviet
leaders. A more offensive demonstration would not have been possible. And did this
shift in Sino-Soviet relations have an effect on the Vietnam War? Of course. As if
the Vietnam War weren’t already chaotic enough. In June 1965, the USSR and the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam signed two agreements concerning “free Soviet aid in the development
of the national economy of the DRV” and “strengthening the DRV’s defensive capabilities.”
Just one month after the PLA marched through Friendship Pass to provide secret aid
to Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, the Soviet Union and Vietnam were building a new relationship.
Ho’s health went into a decline that year, and the party secretary took control. The
USSR exploited this shift to try, in a variety of ways, to chip away at the Sino-Vietnamese
friendship. During the first half of the Vietnam war—America’s quagmire—the world’s
two great communist powers were in fact engaged in a tug-of-war, each trying to attract
that small communist country, North Vietnam, to their side. In the end, Vietnam chose
the USSR.

History revealed itself almost prophetically. On September 3, 1969, Ho Chi Minh died.
Just like that, the personal relationship he and Mao Zedong had cherished was over.
And by then Vietnam had already made its move. It chose to leave China, move closer
to the USSR. Fully fifty percent of the aid that poured into North Vietnam from communist
countries in 1968 came from the Soviet Union. This aid didn’t only take the form of
weapons; the USSR actually put feet on the ground. It sent military advisors to the
Indochina peninsula, to the front. The series of “Sino-Soviet conflicts” in March
and June 1969 led the Soviets to include a large number of officers from the Border
Guard among these specialists. The men on the ground weren’t only specialists in fighting,
they were specialists in fighting and maneuvering against China.

And so a certain Russian KGB officer found his way, that summer, to that spot.

Or could it be…that it was
your
history, dogs, that called him there?

Could it be?

Dogs, dogs, where will you bark next?

Woof, woof!

1975: one dog was in Hawaii, one was in Mexico. To be precise: one bitch was on the
island of Oahu, at the twenty-first parallel north, and one male was in Mexico City,
at the twentieth parallel north. Their names were Goodnight and Cabron. Goodnight
was a purebred German shepherd; Cabron was a mongrel whose father had been a purebred
boxer—who had sprung, that is to say, from boxer seed. Goodnight’s origins have already
been discussed. Her brother, DED, died in 1968, underground, on the Indochina peninsula,
at the seventeenth parallel north. His neck had been torn open by a dog belonging
to the PLA Military Dog Platoon, a dog descended from Jubilee. Jubilee had been the
aunt of Goodnight and DED’s great-great-great-grandfather, five generations earlier.
Okay. What of Cabron, the mutt in Mexico City? Where did he spring from?

It’s complicated.

Cabron wasn’t descended from Bad News. But if you were to trace his line back through
his mother’s side, you would find that, in a way, he was directly descended from Bad
News. Four generations earlier, Cabron’s great-great-grandmother had had six maternal
aunts and uncles. Cabron’s great-great-grandmother’s mother and her six siblings—a
litter of seven in total, each dog entirely different in appearance from the rest—had
basked in the love of two mothers. The first was their birth mother. She had suckled
them for the first half month of their lives. Their second mother was the one who
raised them. She, too, had suckled them for a few weeks, until the time came for them
to be weaned off her milk. Their birth mother’s pregnancy with them had been her fourth.
Her name was Ice; her father had been a Hokkaido dog, her mother was a Siberian husky,
and one of her grandmothers had been a Samoyed. The Hokkaido dog was Kita, of course.
Their adoptive mother had given birth several times before she took charge of the
seven puppies, but after that she never gave birth again. She was a lovely purebred
German shepherd, and her name was Sumer. She was Bad News’s child.