Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (29 page)

The sixteenth.

The seventeenth.

You felt the ocean. Yes, you could feel it. Surging beneath you. The canoe was your
cradle. The Pacific Ocean occupies fully one third of the earth’s surface. You sensed
its enormity. The double canoe had now drifted way off to the west of the planned
route. It had passed south of the equator, but if it kept going in this direction,
it would never reach Tahiti. If it kept going in this direction…it wouldn’t reach
Tahiti or any of the Society Islands. It was heading for another island group. As
it happened, another boat traveled regularly along more or less the same course. A
cargo ship. You noticed it, way off on the horizon.
AM I INVISIBLE
? you asked yourself. You watched the silhouette as it grew progressively larger.
AM I AN INVISIBLE BITCH
?

NO
, you told yourself.
I
’
M NOT
.

NO
,
I
’
M A MOTHER
, you told yourself. Mistakenly.

The mistaken memory that had burned itself into your mind was what brought you to
your feet, your teats aching with a mother’s love.

You stood up.

You sent out an SOS.
Woof! Woof! Woof!

At three o’clock on November 17, 1975, local time, having crossed to the east of the
international date line, the cargo ship picked you up. When you started barking at
the prow, the sound brought the Hawaiians at the stern back to their senses—they,
too, had been driven by extreme hunger into a state of delirium. For a moment they
had simply gaped at the sight of
hope
moving across the ocean, there, right in front of them, and then they had started
whistling, waving their arms. You didn’t wave, but you did wag your tail. The ship’s
crew noticed you, and your thirty-eight-day nightmare voyage came to an end.

It was over. And where, Goodnight, were you now?

The cargo ship was on its way from the American mainland to a point on the fourteenth
parallel south that was itself one of the United State’s unincorporated territories.
The ship was headed for American Samoa. It would be taking on a large shipment of
canned tuna on Tutuila, the main island in the archipelago. Approximately thirty percent
of the American Samoan labor force worked in the canneries, packing and sending can
after can of South Pacific tuna to the mainland. Shortly before the date changed from
November 17 to November 18, the three men, now identified in the ship records as “survivors,”
were taken ashore at Tutuila, after the ship docked in Pago Pago Harbor. The records
noted, too, the presence of one dog, also a “survivor.” She was a German shepherd.
You, Goodnight. You looked like a bag of bones. You were exhausted, both physically
and spiritually. You were a dog of the fourteenth parallel south now, though it would
take a few weeks for you to realize this. For the time being, you still had the illusion
that you were adrift in that canoe on the wide, wide sea, exiled from Oahu island,
exiled from your home on the twenty-first parallel north. But you weren’t. You had
become a Tutuilan dog. A dog of the fourteenth parallel south. From the American state
of Hawaii to the central island in the American territory of Samoa. The two islands
were separated by a distance of 2,610 miles, and even so you had simply moved from
one place to another within “America.”

Even after thirty-eight days adrift on the ocean.

The three survivors didn’t discuss the details of what they had endured. Those three
pure Hawaiians would not divulge the inside story of their thirty-eight days at sea.
They had violated various taboos. They had hallucinated. What were they supposed to
say? And so, in the end…they said very little. It was a hellish trip, they said, and
fell silent. One man added that he’d never get in a canoe again. Then they boarded
a plane at Pago Pago International Airport and flew back to Hawaii.

They did. But not you.

They intentionally left you behind. The Hawaiians were terrified of you and insisted
there was no need to take you back. They looked at you with horror in their eyes,
as if you yourself were the embodiment of a taboo, and they abandoned you. You made
no effort to follow them. Those three men who had lived until the end, gathered at
the stern of the canoe, were not your masters. If anything, they had been serving
you, because that was the ritual. Because the livers, the penises, the testicles had
become the custom. And then, later, the innards of the fish they caught. You had no
master, no new master appeared, and all you had to show for the horror you had endured
was a mistaken memory.
MY PUPPIES
!
FRUIT OF MY WOMB
! And now here you were, and here you stayed, from November to December 1975.

The fourteenth parallel south. Tutuila Island.

No one took you in as a pet, and yet you were fed. Days passed. At first they kept
you on the grounds of the government office. You still resembled a bag of bones. “Hey,
dog! You’re alive! Eat!” the Samoans who worked for the local government called to
you, tossing you scraps of taro and fish. More offerings…the same custom, you thought.
You began to put on weight, but you were still living in a daze. You stood out on
this island, a single pure German shepherd among a Tutuilan population made up entirely
of mongrels. You had style. The local dogs felt it. And so they avoided you. You went
out on the beach. You gazed at the ocean. At the horizon. The horizon, the horizon,
more horizon.
I
’
M ADRIFT
,
I
’
M LOST
,
THIS IS A CANOE IN THE FORM OF AN ISLAND
. You felt it. Coconut crabs scuttled on the shore. Slowly you grew accustomed to
the stench of rotting coconut. An island. You felt it. From the second week of December,
you began to understand that the island was an island.
THIS PLACE IS
…
AN ISLAND
? You were incapable of understanding that this island lay on the fourteenth parallel
south. The island had been home to an American naval base until 1951, and as a dog
who had served as a sentry until just ten months earlier, you could sense that history,
sense the lingering base-ness of the place like a scent buried just under the surface
of the earth, and it confused you. There was too much rain here for it to be that
other island on the twenty-first parallel north.

You took shelter from the rain in the shade of a banyan tree.

You were facing the road.

You watched the road.

You stared at it as you had stared at the horizon. Your eyes were blank. You weren’t
looking at anything in particular.

The road had two sides: a far side and a near side. Your empty gaze lingered on three
dogs standing on the far side. A father and his children. You were new to the island;
so were they.

The three dogs were about to cross the road, from that side to this side. To cut across
it at an angle. The road was narrow. It wasn’t a highway. But still it had two sides,
a near side and a far side, and to get from one to the other one had to cross it,
like a river.

Seconds before your listless gaze took in the car, your ears had picked up the roaring
of its engine. Then the car itself entered your field of vision. It was an expensive
car: a Jaguar. The first sports car on the island. The driver, and owner, was a thirty-seven-year-old
man who had made it big in the United Arab Emirates. He had paid for the car in US
dollars and brought it ashore the day before, and now he was driving it in as flamboyant
a manner as possible, showing off. Right now, he was pushing seventy miles per hour.
Driving like a nut. You saw what was coming. Those three dogs were about to be run
over. The father and his children. Three dogs, just like you.

Suddenly you were up and running.

Your premonition was confirmed by a noise. A shift in the sound of the engine. A sudden
slamming of the brakes.

Something was moving you.
CH
…you were thinking.
CH
…
CHILDREN
!

The father was hit. So was one of the puppies. The two dogs were thrown together six
feet into the air. The third dog was dangling by his neck from your mouth. You were
on the far side of the road; you had run, and you had made it. You had…you had saved
the puppy. You had been taught how to survive on a battlefield. You had almost been
sent to the front lines in Southeast Asia, to fight the Vietcong. You had been awarded
two medals for your outstanding service as a military dog: a Purple Heart and a Silver
Star. The puppy you saved was smaller than his dad, but at six months old he was heavy
enough. But you had saved him. An instant later, he would have been dead meat.

You shuddered. Somewhere inside, Goodnight, you were barking your pride.

There on the far side of the road, you set the puppy on the ground.

He was less a puppy, really, than a young dog. He was an odd-looking thing. His coat
was brown, but he had six thin black stripes on one side and a black spot on his haunch.
He looked a bit like a guitar. He was paralyzed with fear by the sudden catastrophe.
But then he started walking. Gingerly, unsteadily. His father’s body, and his brother’s,
lay sprawled on the asphalt. The Jaguar was long gone, of course. The driver didn’t
hang around to pay his respects to the two dogs he had killed. He didn’t come to apologize
to the child he had orphaned. Soon enough the dogs’ owner and his bodyguard would
track him down and beat him half to death. But that was still several hours off. The
time for that hadn’t yet arrived.

Right now, it was just the young dog who looked like a guitar peering down at two
dead bodies. Tragedy. Trickling blood. It had happened so suddenly, this…death. The
shock of it. The guitar dog had been through this once before. Only this time around,
the number of dead had increased—doubled. This time it wasn’t just one dog stretched
out on the ground, it was one plus one. It was two.

He backed away.

He sensed that he was losing them. He was scared. Terrified. He was being pushed back
to his earliest memory, his first experience of fear.

He stepped back off the road. Onto the ground.

And there you were. You, Goodnight, were waiting. As the guitar dog backed away step
by step from the bodies, he pushed slowly up against your warm body. Your fur was
short, and under it was your skin. It was warm. Soft. The young dog was afraid of
things that were cold and hard. And there you were.

He collapsed into you.
Bam
, just like that. He cuddled desperately against you. He needed to feel safe…truly
safe. He nuzzled for your teats. He had responded in the same way to his mother’s
body, but this time the infantile impulse was even stronger. You had teats. Five pairs
of them, ten in all. They had never produced milk. But as he moved from the first
to the second, the third, the fourth…each teat he tried exuded warmth. Living warmth.

So he pressed desperately against you and kept sucking.

And you understood.

I
’
M A MOTHER
.

You felt it.

I
’
M SUCKLING HIM
.
HE IS MY CHILD
.

Destiny was doing its work, and you were confused, you were reconstructing your memory.
You had given birth to this child with the guitar-like stripes—he was yours. That
was how you remembered it now. And so you told him:
GO ON
,
SUCK
. You gazed down at this mongrel who looked nothing like you, a purebred German shepherd,
and you told him:
GO ON
,
YES
,
DRINK MY MILK
. In 1957, on the American mainland, another dog in the same situation had spoken
those same words. At the edge of a highway in Wisconsin, another German shepherd had
told seven mongrel puppies, monstrosity embodied, the same thing. You had no idea
of this. No knowledge of that fact, no ability to grasp the connection.

You understood.
MY CHILD HAS COME TO ME
.

This scene took place in December 1975. Soon 1975 turned into 1976, which turned into
1977, which turned into 1978, which turned into 1979. And in December 1979, we come
to the other big event. The second of the two strikingly similar wars that took place
in the second half of the twentieth century. In April 1975, Saigon fell. That’s what
had happened in Southeast Asia. The capital of South Vietnam was taken. The United
States gave up supporting South Vietnam. And so, that same year, the first of the
two limited wars, the one that has come to be known as the Vietnam War, came to an
end. And so we move to Central Asia. December 1979: the USSR sent its army into Afghanistan.
It decided to initiate “direct intervention” in a nation torn by civil war. The Soviet
Union’s own ten-year quagmire had begun.

The Afghan War.

The fuse blew on December 25, 1979.

Another limited war, another offshoot of the Cold War. Obviously.

War number two.

And so, dogs—mother and child, as you had now become, incognizant incarnations of
the circularity of time—where were you, four years later?

Woof, woof, woof!

A bright red, gaudily painted truck barreled along the highway that headed west out
of Peshawar, the old capital of the North-West Frontier Province. It was a mile out
of the city, then two, three, four, five miles. A gate appeared. A checkpoint. This
was not a national border. Through this gate lay the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA). Administered by the Pashtuns, the Tribal Areas were home to two and
a half million people belonging to a number of tribes, each of which lived in accordance
with its own Pashtunwali, an ethical code prescribing notions of warfare, loyalty,
bravery, revenge, hospitality, the isolation of women, and so on. The land was populated
by men with beards and veiled women. It was a region of steep hills whose major industries
were the manufacture of weapons, smuggling, and farming illegal drugs. The truck drove
into a village. It stopped. A dog leapt down from the bed. A second followed.