Read Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Online
Authors: Hideo Furukawa
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (34 page)
We were born of that event, on November 3, 1957—Marxism-Leninism’s single greatest
achievement. We are its progeny.
“We are a corps centered on dogs, and it is our job to support our dogs,” the creator
of “S” told his men. “We ourselves are the progeny of the bitch named Laika.”
So their legitimacy could never be in doubt.
And so, he said, pledge allegiance to the “S” insignia!
The men pledged their allegiance. They saluted the skull in its globe.
And so, when Gorbachev declared that perestroika was revolution in July 1986, the
members of “S” could deny this without batting an eye, smiles on their faces. The
revolution had already happened, in 1917, and we were its progeny—we, the members
of “S.” Gorbachev’s statement was a joke. They knew it. But sometimes even words mumbled
in sleep can alter the course of history. It doesn’t matter who is legitimate, who
is the renegade.
The Afghan War continued. The two sides were in a stalemate, to put it simply, and
it was slowly becoming apparent how closely this Central Asian quagmire resembled
those ten years of war that America had initiated…America’s Southeast Asian quagmire.
First there was the massive scale of the two conflicts—endless wars of attrition fought
against guerrillas. Then there were all the other, smaller similarities. Young Soviet
conscripts were destroying themselves with drugs. They smoked hashish the way young
American conscripts had used LSD, heroin, and marijuana during the Vietnam War. Indiscriminant
massacres were committed because it was impossible to tell civilians from guerrillas.
During the Vietnam War, unspeakable tragedies had unfolded in villages the Americans
regarded as Vietcong strongholds—everyone in these villages was slaughtered, from
infants to the elderly; even domestic animals were shot; and naturally the women were
raped—and now, in the same manner, villages the Soviets regarded as mujahideen strongholds
were completely wiped out. Everyone in these villages was slaughtered, from infants
to the elderly, even domestic animals were shot, and naturally the women were raped,
gang-raped. Limited use was made of chemical weapons, albeit in secret. In the Vietnam
War, the American army had done the same thing, in secret.
The Soviets were confronted with the fact that the Afghan War was “our Vietnam.”
And there was Gorbachev. There was Gorbachev, singing his slogan:
Perestroika! Perestroika!
He initiated a completely new foreign policy. Relations with the West would now be
aimed at fostering dialogue, guided by the notion of “new thinking” diplomacy. Gorbachev
was trying to change the direction of the Soviet-American arms race. The Soviet economy
was stagnating. It had been subsiding into stagnation for some time, but Gorbachev
was the first to acknowledge this. In fact, the USSR was on the verge of bankruptcy.
He admitted it. And their enormous military expenditures were putting the most pressure
on the treasury. One aim of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” diplomacy was to make it possible
to cut the military budget. He pushed ahead with negotiations concerning nuclear non-proliferation,
and finally he was able to improve relations not only with America, Britain, and France,
but even with China. Red China—the third player in the Cold War. The whole shift was
described by the term
détente
.
Something was changing.
Something was speeding up.
And then Gorbachev made the announcement: “Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is
also perestroika
.
”
The United Nations had gotten involved in peace negotiations relating to the Afghanistan
problem in 1982 but had failed to make any progress. In April 1988, with this statement
by Gorbachev, everything happened in a flash: a peace accord was signed. Now it was
settled. The Soviet army would withdraw from Afghanistan.
The withdrawal began officially in May 1988 and was completed in February 1989.
On February 25. But did the Afghan War really end on that day? No, it did not. Because
the Afghan government was still communist, and it was still friendly with the USSR,
and it was still at odds with the mujahideen. And to make matters worse, the mujahideen
organizations were at odds with each other as well, divided by all sorts of factors:
were they composed largely of Pashtuns or non-Pashtuns, were they Sunni or Shi’a,
and so on. Obviously the country was bound to descend into civil war. The USSR decided,
first of all, that it would be unprofitable to allow Kabul’s pro-Soviet communist
government to collapse; second, that since the Soviet Union shared a twelve-hundred-mile
border with Afghanistan, any exacerbation of the situation within Afghanistan would
pose a threat to the safety of the border regions; and third, that if the current
government were to fall and be replaced by an Islamic government, the ensuing confusion
was bound to spread to the Central Asian members of the USSR, including Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan, and the other Islamic autonomous republics.
So the USSR continued to supply the communist, pro-Soviet Afghan government with vast
quantities of aid, both financial and in the form of weapons.
And then something else happened.
This was just before the last of the one hundred thousand occupying soldiers withdrew.
On January 24, 1989, a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union ratified a top-secret report that gave permission to the
KGB Border Guards, then stationed in the north of Afghanistan, to carry out a certain
strategic mission.
Needless to say, this was in violation of the peace accord.
The USSR’s quagmire, the Afghan War, wasn’t over yet. The Soviet Union itself refused
to let it end. It kept going until the end of the year. But only in secret. The KGB
took control, and only units that knew how to keep their activities secret were involved.
Once again “S” was called in. Its fighters were special operations professionals,
and they would keep quiet about their achievements in battle. Its fighters were the
most powerful unconventional troops in the entire Border Guard. As for Gorbachev…Gorbachev
was content to let this happen, as long as the Afghan “problem” was settled, as long
as it didn’t cause any disruption domestically. He wasn’t concerned that the plan
“stank of Khrushchev,” as Chernenko and Brezhnev had been. Indeed, as far as he was
concerned “S” was just another useful organization—he wasn’t even aware that it had
originated in Khrushchev’s time. And so once again “S” was granted authority to carry
out illegal assignments in secret. It eliminated targets marked for elimination. In
public, Gorbachev continued shouting his slogan as before:
Perestroika! Perestroika!
And in December 1989, he finally pushed his “new thinking” diplomacy to the limit.
A Soviet-American summit was held off the shore of Malta, on a Soviet missile cruiser
named
Slava
. Gorbachev welcomed American President George H. W. Bush with a smile. He announced
that the Soviet Union and the United States were now friends. The Cold War was over.
Lasting peace had been achieved between the two states. A press conference attended
by reporters from all around the world was held on December 3. All across the globe,
people stared at their television screens. This was a day that would go down in the
history of the twentieth century. In human history. And as for dog history…dog history…
On that same day, December 3, a secret order was issued.
“Destroy all the evidence,” read the order, which had come by way of Moscow. “Leave
no trace of the top-secret operations in Afghanistan. There is no Cold War. Kill the
dogs.”
And then the street fighting began.
This was not a rehearsal. This was no simulation in the life-sized model of an abandoned
city. Eighty-two people died the first day. Among them were seven bosses in the two
largest criminal organizations. Three from the Russian mafia, four from the Chechen
mafia. No one was paying attention anymore to whether the bloodshed was balanced.
Then there were casualties among the various criminal organizations that had started
streaming into the city from all across Russia, all over Asia. Many, many casualties.
The dogs began by paying house calls. There were groups on the move with lists of
the members of the mafia organizations, photographs affixed. Three or four of them.
One of the groups comprised an old Slavic woman with thick glasses who was built like
a barrel, a Japanese girl still in her early teens, and seven dogs. Their list had
the names and addresses of the mafia headquarters, affiliated facilities, and businesses,
and the names and home addresses of their leaders, along with other details. The old
lady led the dogs on a leash. The girl wore a
shapka
, pulled down low over her forehead against the cold; her face, as she walked, wore
no expression at all. She looked, somehow, like the old lady’s granddaughter. She
was obese. Obese in a combative sort of way. A cold glitter shone in her eyes. She
was Japanese, but not in the usual way. She was Japanese like a Hokkaido dog is Japanese.
Yes, indeed: she wasn’t a person, she was a dog.
Why? Because she had a dog name.
Given to her as a sign of her legitimacy: Strelka.
House calls. They’d finish one, then go on to the next. The old lady managed the gun,
the dog-girl handled the dogs. Their first target lived in a luxury apartment complex.
They could make him open the door himself, or they could blast it open with the gun.
The girl-dog gave the commands, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in a dog language
made up solely of gestures. The dogs dashed in. Keeping low, keeping out of sight.
Seven dogs entered, one in charge. He was a male. The dog that was once known as number
47, the dog the girl-dog used to call Forty-seven. He went by a different name now.
Now he was Belka. His dad had died, so he had graduated from a number to a name.
Belka sprang, killed. Fell into formation with the other six dogs, leapt instantly
at the target, and it was over. Just like that.
At the same time, in another place, on the grounds of a grand estate, a guard dog
was killed. Teeth ripped silently into his throat. First the dogs killed their brethren,
then they killed the target’s guards, then they killed the target. In some locations
the target knew immediately that he was under attack and tried to escape in his car.
But the surrounding roads had been closed. By dogs. They ringed the expensive car
with its bulletproof windows, leapt at it, caused the target to panic, to err—to die.
They led him to kill himself.
It was a canine rebellion. On the first day, no one noticed how many mafiosos had
been killed. Aside from the mafia themselves, that is, and the authorities and the
company executives the mafia had bought.
Then, late at night, the city caught fire.
That
people noticed…And there was rioting. That same night, an old man surrounded by dogs
read coordinates from a military map. To the dogs. And then into a radio handset.
1991. Moscow in the summer. In the early hours of the day, before dawn, the government
declared a state of emergency. Now it was the afternoon. Already more than five hundred
tanks were positioned at various points around the city. The man who had been elected
the first president of the Soviet Union in March of the previous year had suddenly
been removed from power. A conservative coup d’état was underway. The ringleaders
included the defense minister, the head of the KGB, and the vice president. The troops
in the tanks were prepared to conduct a mass arrest of everyone in the reformers’
camp. Television was censored, and the radio played the “Declaration of the Soviet
Leadership” again and again. Nevertheless, the people were out in the streets. Gathered
before the Russian Parliament, the reformist faction’s base. They linked arms to form
a human chain, tried to keep the tanks and armored cars from entering. They built
barricades—barricades behind barricades, barricades behind barricades behind barricades.
Already several thousand demonstrators had converged in the square.
The old man was among them.
All beard and moustache.
He listened to the cheering crowds. The man emerged from the building. The reformists’
standard-bearer, the man who stood with the people, who had come to office just two
months earlier as the first president of the Russian Federation…of a new Russia that
was no longer Soviet—no longer the homeland. His last name began with the letter
E
.
In the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds, the
E
became a
Y
. In German, it became
J
. It was a
J
in Dutch as well. In French it remained an
E
.
This man could change everything, even his initials.
E climbed up onto a T-72 tank stranded among the crowds. The old man watched him,
then glanced down at his watch. It was 1:15. The old man watched as E exchanged a
few words with the lieutenant in the tank. He read the two men’s lips.
Did you come to kill me?
E asked. And the lieutenant replied,
No.
E was smiling.
The cheering reached a crescendo. The square shook with the chanting:
Ura! Ura!
Only the old man spoke a different word. “Awful,” he said, “awful.” With only the
slightest of gestures, E urged the crowd to be silent and listen. The people understood
his body language and, like well-trained dogs, obeyed. The old man, all beard and
moustache, kept muttering to himself. “Awful, awful.” E lambasted the reactionary
right. E called upon the people to resist. From up there on the tank—rubbing his boots
on the tank. The old man glanced at his watch. Soviet time, the homeland’s time, had
stopped. It was 1:21 now, but only in Russia.
The old man kept grumbling under his breath. “Awful, awful, awful—the whole thing.”
He could see what was coming. Four months down the road. There would be no Soviet
Union. E would have destroyed it. He wouldn’t be picky about how he accomplished this,
anything would suit him as long as the Union was destroyed. And it wasn’t only the
Union. At the same time, E would have brought something else, something much larger,
to an end.
The dogs set fires. The fires were a trap. They forced the police to disperse, fan
out to different areas of the city. A second area was burning, then a third, then
a fourth. The police converged on each of these locations. They searched for the arsonists
but couldn’t find them. The arsonists had vanished into the darkness, leaving no traces.
Or perhaps they had left footprints, but no one noticed, because they weren’t human.
The pads of dog feet, front and back. No one even saw them. Sometimes the dogs remained
on the scene, as if they had nothing to do with what had happened, as if they were
someone’s pets. Others left and wandered the streets, pretending to be wild dogs.
Acting the part of a dumb animal was all it took—people were deceived. The dogs climbed
trees, if there were any nearby, and hid in the foliage. The arsonists’ targets were
bases for organized crime, so when the fires started, members of the gangs would come
running out, ready to fight.
Who did this? Who’s responsible? What group is it?
Reports had been flying back and forth since shortly after noon, so they were ready
to give chase. They set out to catch whoever it was. And then the dogs, concealed
in the leaves of the trees, would leap down on them, and the men would die. By the
time the fourth blaze had been brought under control, people were panicking over the
sixth. All the fire engines were out on call.
Attacks were launched simultaneously on all the casinos.
The banks were targeted. Sirens wailed endlessly late at night. You could hear them
outside, echoing down the streets. Until the police arrived. Or until the mafia who
secretly backed the financial institutions got there. Or until dawn broke.
When morning came, the city was enveloped in clouds of black smoke that announced
the collapse of order. Arsonists had struck in seventy-two locations; the temperature
across the city had risen a full two degrees.
A two-seated motorcycle was driving along the otherwise empty highway. The speedometer
remained fixed at forty miles per hour. Two middle-aged women were riding it. The
one gripping the handlebars looked just like the one sitting behind her. The two Slavic
sisters that Strelka called WO and WT.
A large posse ran behind the motorcycle.
Down the highway. Incredibly fast.
Eight o’clock in the morning. Before people headed to work. The dogs following the
motorcycle split into two groups, one going right and the other left. Then they spilt
into four, one for each direction.
Also at 8:00
AM
: Strelka woke up.
As she stirred, the seven dogs around her lifted their heads. They had been sleeping
in the garage of a mafia estate they had taken. The old lady wasn’t there. She was
inside, in the kitchen. Making breakfast for Strelka and the seven dogs.
Did you sleep? Strelka asked her dogs.
WE SLEPT
, they answered.
DID YOU DREAM
? Strelka asked Belka.
NO
, Belka replied.
I FEEL LIKE I DID
.
I WAS X YEARS OLD
,
I THINK
,
AND HUMAN
.
FUNNY TO DREAM THAT
,
SINCE I
’
M A DOG
.
TIRED
,
HUH
? Belka licked Strelka’s face. His tongue was soft.
WE
’
LL ERASE HUMAN TIME
, Strelka said.
ERASE IT
,
AND MAKE IT
…
MAKE THIS
…
WHAT
? Belka asked.
WHAT YEAR WILL IT BE
? the other six dogs asked.
“A year for dogs. The year nineteen-ninety…X,” Strelka said. “For starters.”
LET
’
S DO IT
! barked Belka.
He barked. Already Strelka and the six other dogs were on their feet. They sensed
something. But it was over. By then a sort of
phut
had sounded—a gun with a silencer. Outside the garage. A mafia fighter lay on the
ground. Moaning. Twice more:
phut
,
phut
. And then the old lady appeared in the door to the garage, gun in hand.
“Breakfast is ready,” she said. In Russian.
Strelka’s face remained blank for a moment; then, slowly, slowly, she began to smile.
“You meant ‘breakfast’?” she said in Japanese. “For us.”
1991. Moscow in the autumn. The old man was crazy. He listened intently to the military
radio transmissions he intercepted. He played with money. He killed. Russians, Armenians,
Georgians, Chechens. He fooled around with mounds of banknotes: rubles, US dollars.
He was living in an abandoned building. It stood on the outskirts of Moscow, near
a garbage dump. For some reason, people were throwing away huge quantities of meat
and vegetables. In secret. To control how much went to market. The dump was a sort
of graveyard, suspended between the controlled economy and the free-market economy.
The old man stared down at the dump from a paneless window. Sometimes he’d stare at
it all day long. People came to pick over the trash. Housewives plowed through it,
collecting cabbages. Ignoring the rotting meat. Meat on the verge of rotting…they
grabbed. There were old men too, and people out of work, and alcoholics. They took
bars of soap. They took empty bottles, which they exchanged for two or three rubles
at the recycle center. They picked up old clothes to sell on the black market. The
old man watched a man dig up a tattered red flag someone had thrown away, then throw
it away again.
In the eyes of the scavengers that autumn, the old man hovering by the window of the
abandoned building looked like a ghost. His beard and moustache had been left to grow
until his cheeks, his chin, his upper lip were buried in white. Look at him—he is
a ghost, lower than the scavengers themselves. So they ignored him.
Earlier, near the end of summer, someone noticed him.
A burglar had broken into his apartment and tried to steal the only thing he had left
in his possession.
Fucking stinks in here
, the burglar said as he scanned the room. He went over and reached out to it. The
globe. A second later he was dead. The old man had killed him. The burglar had brought
a knife. The knife was stuck in the burglar’s heart.
“Even the bones?” the old man had asked the corpse. “The skull? You would go that
far?”