Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

by Hideo Furukawa

  Dogs, you dogs in Kita’s line, look at you—mongrelized almost beyond belief, with wolf seed part of the mix. The story keeps unfolding: seven wolfdogs join the family tree.

  These seven dogs, he told himself, would be his redemption. Imagine the team I can put together now! At the head a child of Kita’s, the hero, followed by seven dogs who are not only Kita’s grandchildren, but are the strongest possible hybrid. He was delirious with excitement. How strong, he wondered, are these seven puppies? What miracle of heredity is theirs? He was their master now, and he was dying to put them to the test. And so, incredibly, when they were still only three-and-a-half-months old, he harnessed them up and began their training. The puppies endured it; they had no other choice. Then, when the seven dogs were ten months old, the dreamer became obsessed by a new and glorious notion. The time had come to try them out for real.

  He didn’t enter them in a race.

  The dreamer decided to test his team’s true strength by taking them, Kita’s child and the seven wolfdogs, on a legendary route. Half a century earlier, a brilliant musher had run his dogs as far as the islands of the Canadian Arctic and made it back alive. I’ll duplicate that run, he thought. That’s what this man was like—he loved to try out old customs, see how he measured up to legends. He couldn’t restrain himself. Dazzled by dreams of glory and adventure, he often lost his sense of what was completely stupid and what was not.

  By the time we return from this trip, I’ll have one of the best teams around!

  The dogs were in trouble. Seven ten-month-old puppies following the lead of their mother, joined by four more completely worthless dogs, bound for the ice floes of the Arctic Ocean. This was an adventure, yes—the same adventure a brilliant musher had set out on fifty years earlier, in full knowledge that he was risking his life. The dreamer, of course, had no sense at this point that he was seriously gambling with his life. He and his twelve dogs crossed the Brooks Range and set out across the Arctic Ocean. And then came forty days of hell. One of the dogs put a leg through a patch of thin ice and drowned. Another ended up alone on a large chunk of ice while the team was sleeping one night and drifted off. One tumbled down a crevice in the ice and dragged several down with it as it fell. The tangled harness strangled another dog. Of the seven wolfdogs, only two lived to see their eleventh month. The survivors were utterly fatigued. Their master had started drilling them at three and a half months. It was too early. And too intense. He had pushed them too hard.

  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 nati
onality. 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.

  “What, are those fucking dog names?”

  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.