Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (7 page)

The two surviving puppies lost their mother.

The sled was hardly moving. Some days the dogs’ bodies would be frozen stiff, each
hair on their bodies like an icicle. A fierce blizzard gusted down over them, and
the dogs’ master, the dreamer, came down with bronchitis.
Fuck, I’m done for
, he thought.
Whiteout. I can’t see anything, I don’t know where I am.

I’m dying.

He died. It was their fortieth day on the Arctic Ocean. Only one of the wolfdogs was
still alive. His name was Anubis; he was now almost a year old. Amazingly enough,
three of the worthless dogs had survived. These four surviving dogs lay in a circle
around their master’s corpse. They couldn’t have run away if they wanted to—they were
still tied to the harness. They survived for four days on their master’s flesh.

And then they were saved.

They were hunters, members of one of the tribes of Arctic natives that would later
come to be known collectively as the Inuit. Residents of these regions had no government.
They weren’t Canadians, they weren’t Americans. Neither were they citizens of the
Soviet Union. Until 1960, they had no fixed abode. During the winter—what they considered
winter—they traversed the frozen sea from camp to camp hunting ringed seals and polar
bears, setting out on an occasional trip to kill musk oxen. They traveled by dogsled.
Eventually they would switch to snowmobiles, but at this point, when the hunters saved
Anubis and the three others, dogs were still their only means of transport. They could
see what had happened. Some stupid white guy had died. An adventurer who fell victim
to his own incompetence. Leaving the dogs behind. Four of them!

Hilarious.

The dogs were teetering on the verge of starvation. The hunters fed them just a little,
took possession of them.

Two years passed. Anubis was still alive. The other team members, too, were alive,
with the exception of one dog that had died in an accident. The hunters, their new
masters, directed their sleds with whips. It stung, but the dogs got used to it. Anubis
learned to read the weather. He could pull a sled to the hunting grounds and back,
but he also showed himself to be a capable hunter, able to find game, chase it down,
attack. He noticed that when he helped his masters hunt, they treated him somewhat
better, so he tried even harder. He exhibited a special ability to sense various impending
dangers. This, the hunters realized, was no ordinary dog. He was made of different
stuff from the other three they had found him with—they were worthless. There was
something in this animal, hidden deep inside…a rare talent for doing exactly what
he was told. Not only that—faithful as he was to his human masters, he also had a
wild animal’s instinct for battle.

This was how they saw Anubis two years later.

In November 1955, an unusual man visited the camp where Anubis’s masters were living
at the time—one of several they moved between. Anubis’s masters were citizens of no
country; this man was a citizen of the USSR. He was a researcher at the Arctic and
Antarctic Research Institute in Leningrad, commonly known as AARI. The Soviet Union
was gathering secret data about the Arctic Ocean for military purposes. The Soviet
Union wasn’t alone—its greatest enemy, the US, was using its intelligence agencies
and military to collect the same sort of information. Both countries acted covertly.
The Soviet Union had erected numerous observation stations in the Arctic, building
them on the ice floes. “Drifting ice stations,” they were called. They were constantly
moving. It was a dangerous business. The AARI researchers were having problems with
the polar bears that turned up at their bases from time to time. Hence the visit to
the camp where Anubis’s masters lived. The man drove up in a snow tractor. The camp
and the observation station were adjacent to each other then—a mere twenty miles apart,
which made them neighbors by Arctic standards—but this was purely a coincidence, owing
to the drifting of the station and the movement of the camp.

The AARI researcher said he wanted to buy a dog to keep the bears away.

They negotiated a deal. In exchange for supplies that had been brought in on a transport
plane the previous week, the researcher got the best dog for the purpose.

Anubis was three years and one month old.

He spent the next year or so drifting on the Arctic Ocean, between 73 degrees and
84 degrees north latitude, and between 120 degrees east and 160 degrees west longitude.
Early in December 1956, they were to the east of Wrangel Island, on the Chukchi Sea.
The Bering Strait lay somewhere way off to the south, and beyond it the Bering Sea.
The Bering Sea came to an end at a line of islands. The Aleutians. But Anubis felt
no longing for home.

I
’
M AN ARCTIC OCEAN DOG
, he thought.

He lost that sense of himself. The researchers completed their surveys, and the ice
stations were dismantled. They took Anubis on the icebreaker with them. But that was
the end. They sold him at a small harbor town at the eastern edge of Siberia. The
town’s inhabitants were all dressed in reindeer hides. They used reindeer bones to
beat the snow from the hides they wore. These people became Anubis’s new masters.
For the fourth time.

He was in the middle of nowhere, but still he had made it to the mainland, the great
Soviet continent. He was walking, now, on Eurasian soil.

But tell me, dogs, you other dogs—what has become of you?

Three other dogs ended up in the communist sphere. Jubilee, News News (known as E
Venture), and Ogre were captured on the Korean Peninsula by the People’s Liberation
Army. The pure German shepherds changed their nationality. In 1953, the situation
was totally different. Truman was no longer president of the United States. Stalin,
former general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had died of a
brain hemorrhage on March 5. The two men no longer had a personal relationship. In
the confusion that accompanied the UN forces’ retreat, these three dogs were left
behind on the “other side” of the 38th parallel. They would never return. An armistice
was signed in July, but the dogs were not handed over like other prisoners.

Come 1956, all three dogs were still among the dogs of the People’s Liberation Army
War Dog Battalion. The two males, News News (E Venture) and Ogre, had been castrated;
the bitch, Jubilee, remained as she had been born. She had not yet given birth.

And what of the capitalist sphere?

Two lines of dogs lived in its center, on the American mainland.

Sumer and Ice.

It’s winter
, the girl muttered,
winter winter winter winter
. Over and over again, ferociously annoyed. Once more. In Japanese, monotonal. How
could she not be annoyed? She flung herself down on the narrow bed, not even fifty
centimeters wide, and screamed. She noticed a coat lying on the floor.
Look at that fucking dipshit coat,
she hissed,
the kind of thing middle-class fucks wear, fucking assholes!
If you’re gonna kidnap someone, treat ’em a bit fucking better, fucking dicks. Gimme
Louis Vuitton!

Her shouting drew no response.

Winter winter
, the girl repeated,
winter winter winter
.

Fucking cold.

Her once carefully arranged hair was a mess. Not having a blow dryer had been one
of the first things to piss her off.
Fucking Russia, it’s like the fucking Stone Age.
Forget blow dryers, there wasn’t even a bath! They’d ordered her into some fucked-up
little hut full of steam a few times, but that was it. The girl was not familiar with
saunas. She assumed it was some kind of torture.

Fucking assholes, dicking around with me.

The girl hadn’t lost any weight. She remained as fat as ever, radiating a sense of
precarious imbalance in every direction. She bellowed some more. In Japanese. They
never understood, not a word. She knew they wouldn’t understand her now either.

She turned to the window. There had been a blizzard in the morning, but by now the
snow had largely stopped. Fine flakes pirouetted through the air. An image of a decadent,
delicious dessert rose up in her mind’s eye, then fizzled.
Something light, sweet, melting…
Gone. What the fuckity fuck had she been thinking of, anyway? This was intolerable.
Just wait. She would
crush
those assholes.

She was on the second floor. Outside, a vista of white extended off into the distance,
directly in front of the building, and to the right and left. That was all there was,
in other words. Just the ground. The grounds. Exercise grounds. How did she know?
Because they exercised there. They were
born
to exercise. Even when it snowed, in the midst of a blizzard. They hadn’t started
barking yet this morning.

This place was huge. There was a whole town inside, if a small one. Closed in. Concrete
walls separated the inside from whatever lay outside. Beyond the walls, all sorts
of enormous structures massed together. Inside, in the corner, a stand of dead trees.

The town was out there somewhere, to the right. Several white buildings, a very tall
observation tower, a paved road pockmarked with holes. The depressions were filled
with snow. At the end of the road, way down, past even the concrete wall that marked
the compound’s boundary, was a small clearing. There, in that direction only.

The town looked dead, shrouded in snow. To her eyes, at least.

It was being engulfed on three sides, it seemed, by the
taiga
.

At the same time, the sight of that concrete wall shutting out whatever was beyond
it called to mind a familiar word. That land out there, excluded, was
shaba
. The outside world, the world where the ordinary fucks lived—or, from the perspective
of an unlucky member of the gang, the world past the prison walls. And here she was,
doing time. Prison, that was the closest thing to this fucked-up “dead town.” She
could feel it in her skin.

That was as much as she knew. Maybe they had explained the situation to her, but if
they had, they’d done it in Russian. It meant nothing.
Fucking assholes, fucking around
, she muttered at least twenty times a day.
Fucking Russia, it’s always always ALWAYS winter here, for like a million fucking
years or a billion years or something this fucking cold.

Still cursing monotonally, the girl moved to the room with the fireplace.

She could move about freely inside the building. The door to her bedroom wasn’t locked.
There was no chain shutting her in. No iron balls chained to her legs. This freedom
pissed her off too. Obviously they didn’t take her seriously. But what was she supposed
to do? Break out?

Fucking pain in the ass.

She went down to the first floor. She had more or less gotten a handle on the layout
of the building. The others were probably pretty similar. They looked like dorms,
capable of housing dozens at once. Dorms for stupid fucks who spent their days doing
nothing but exercise. Her instincts weren’t far off. She wasn’t entirely right, but
she wasn’t far off. The Dead Town had been created in the 1950s, and until 1991 it
had been known by a number. It was one of many such towns whose presence was never
marked on any map. One of any number of such spaces that served as bases or military
cities. Not only were people outside the party and the military rarely allowed into
these areas, but also ordinary people—ordinary Soviets—didn’t even know they existed.
That held even for the residents of nearby cities. They were kept secret, and they
stayed that way for almost forty years.

Until they lost their strategic value and were abandoned.

The girl was living in the barracks.

The old man who had kidnapped her had always known about this Dead Town. This town
whose location, even now, was not marked on maps.

The old man lived in the Dead Town with the girl. It wasn’t clear whether or not he
lived in the same building, but they often sat down together to eat. Perhaps once
a week, he came to her room with a video camera. He filmed her. The tape would be
used, no doubt, as proof that the hostage was alive and well. This was part of the
extortion. Every time the old man turned the camera on the girl, she would spit out,
“Hurry up and fucking save me, old man.” “What the fuck’s taking so long, you senile
dick.” “So you gotta give ’em a million. I’m worth it, right? Fucking rob the bank
if you have to. You’re a yakuza, right?”

Fucking asshole, fucking around like this. Save your princess.

At the end, after the old man had finished his filming, he always talked to her. For
instance, he might say:
Japanese “soldiers” are killing Russians, everyone is talking about it.

In Russian, of course.

Seems like your dad really loves you,
he says.

Whatever…there’s more money in it if you stay here.

The filming took place once a week or so, probably. She wasn’t exactly counting the
days. She never thought she’d be here this long. So after her fourth or fifth day
as a hostage, she stopped paying attention—who cared whether it was the fourth or
fifth, or even the third day, it didn’t fucking matter. Later on, she came to find
this infuriating. Because she had no way of knowing when her birthday came. She was
pretty sure she must be twelve by now, but maybe not. She probably wasn’t eleven anymore,
but maybe she was. Or maybe…she was neither?

Maybe…maybe she was caught in between? In a hole without age, without time?

Some things she could count. The old man sat at the same table with her for roughly
two out of every three meals. And not just him. There were others living in this Dead
Town too, and most of the time they came for the meals. First there was the old lady
who worked in the kitchen. She was a grandmotherly type with broad shoulders, big
ass, thick glasses. She made all three meals and looked after the girl’s needs. Then
there were two middle-aged women with almost identical faces, most likely the old
lady’s daughters. And then there was a middle-aged guy, probably the old lady’s son,
whose head was completely bald. None of these four seemed to be related to the old
man. Not by blood anyway. Neither did the old lady and the old man appear to be married.

Still, here in the Dead Town, they sat down to take their meals together. Not just
them, but the girl too. She was just old enough to be the old man’s granddaughter,
except that she wasn’t related to him. She didn’t even belong to the same race.

Still, the pseudo family ate together. All six. All the time.

Ukha, smoked salmon, borscht, some kind of boiled dumpling things.

Sour bread.

Pickled mushrooms, again and again. Always these fucking pickles.

The girl glared across the table at the four or five others.

No one glared back. They were unfazed.

The old man even smiled.

“You all creep me out,” the girl said. “What are you, fucking ghosts?”

Speaking, of course, in Japanese.

Would you like some more? the old lady asked in Russian.

The old lady didn’t only cook for the girl, and she didn’t only cook for the pseudo
family. The old lady spent her time in the kitchen preparing large quantities of food
not meant for human consumption. Dog food. This Dead Town, which had been left empty
ever since the Russian Federation abandoned it, was now home to a few people and an
even larger nonhuman population.

A few dozen dogs.

Kept in special kennels outside.

Left exposed to the atmosphere, in this region of bitter winters, to keep them wild.
So that their fighting instincts wouldn’t dull. Often the old lady cooked mutton for
the dogs. She had a store of it that she bought in large quantities and kept in an
underground freezer. Every other day she would take some out and cook it. Mutton legs,
mutton heads, mutton skin, mutton fat. She used just a few spices. Enough to give
a slight Central Asian flavor. This, too, was supposed to keep the dogs wild. To keep
them from forgetting the odor of flesh.

This way, they wouldn’t hesitate to attack a living person.

The old lady’s “Russian dog food” recipe had been carefully thought out.

The dogs also drank milk, sheep’s milk.

The girl watched from the spacious first-floor room with the fireplace as the dogs
wolfed down their meal. Stared at them across a distance of a few dozen meters. The
windowpanes were clouded from the heat inside, but she had swept three fingers down
the glass and peered out through those three lines. She had used her right hand, moving
it in a furious sweep…her fingers held together, a single motion. After that, she
stared out without moving, absolutely still. She had known it was time because she
heard the dogs barking. She knew the others were feeding the dogs because there was
no one in the room.
Woof woof
. A few dogs started barking. The girl watched them. The middle-aged women were carrying
over a giant pot of milk, together. An enormous silver pot that reminded her of school
lunch.
Fucking lunch ladies
, she thought,
for the fucking dogs
. That’s why they had to take the pot to the kennel. It would say
MILK
on the calendar.

The dogs were barking wildly.
GIVE IT TO US
! they seemed to be saying.

GIVE IT TO US
!
GIVE US MILK
!

Released from their cages, the dogs devoured the milk. Clouds of white breath rose
from their mouths, drops of white milk dribbled down.
Fucking Russians
, the girl thought.
Fucking eat anything as long as it’s got fucking nutrients. Middle-class shit dogs.

Too much white. Your breath. Your slobber.

Assholes.

Such a fucking cold color!

But she went on watching them through the glass. She kept cursing them in her thoughts,
but she was a hostage, what else could she do? She had to watch the dogs. She would
watch as they ate, and then she would watch them exercise in the exercise grounds.
Exercise. A field day for dogs.
Or maybe
…
they’re practicing for doggie field day
, she thought. Their exercise—or maybe their practicing—went on for two hours every
morning. And that was just the morning.

The dogs were being trained.

In different ways. They were given different tasks. There were also various breeds
of dogs. The only two the girl had seen before were Doberman pinschers and German
shepherds. She didn’t recognize most of them. They weren’t like the Western dogs she
knew. They looked sort of odd, somehow—their bodies. Most were mid-sized with ears
that stood straight up, pretty long hair, muscular hind legs. Their coats were all
different colors, and yet they seemed, overall, to make sense together. Ten to twenty
of them probably had the same blood running in their veins.

…blood?

The girl began to sense something, a sort of authoritative aura, in the ten to twenty
similar dogs.
I bet you cost a lot, you shits,
she thought, getting angry.

I bet you’ve got good parents
.

The dogs barked, and the training got under way. The girl stared fixedly at them,
unmoving, as they ran around. Caught somewhere between the dogs’ dynamism and the
girl’s stasis was a man, or rather two men, exposed to the same minus-twenty-degree
air as the dogs. Two men out there with the dogs on the exercise grounds, directing
their movements.