Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

by Hideo Furukawa

  Sumer, destiny’s toy, you were the mother of seven puppies.

  For a month.

  But destiny wasn’t finished with you.

  This was 1957. A year that will remain etched in dog history.

  One day, you returned from an excursion in search of food to find the door to the boxcar pushed wide open. A man sat on the ledge, his feet dangling in pointy-toed cowboy boots, smoking a cigarette and reading a book. He had a mustache and wore an oddly shaped hat. He was obviously a drifter, probably in his mid-thirties. Not that you, Sumer, had any notion of his age. The thing that got your attention, stunned you, was your children, who were clustered around him. Frisking, frolicking, around him. The man looked up. He stared at you, cocked his head.

  What’re you doing here? he asked, speaking your thoughts. You’re a shepherd. You can’t be related to these kids.

  YES, I AM, you barked. Was it best to threaten him? The puppies were within reach, and he didn’t seem to have harmed them. And that smell—the foul odor of his cigarettes. That same smell clung to the walls of your nest. Your sensitive nose noticed that instantly.

  The puppies saw you and started barking: MOM, MOM, MOM!

  You’re kidding me, the man said. You’re their mother? He grinned.

  THEY’RE MY CHILDREN, you barked.

  Looks that way, the man said, answering his own question with a nod. All right, then. C’mon over. I got food.

  THEY’RE MY CHILDREN, you barked.

  Listen here, dog, the man said clearly, shutting his book and looking you straight in the eye. This is my train.

  On October 22, 1957, the boxcar you had chosen as your nest was coupled to an electric engine and became a link in a very, very, very long chain. You were inside. Your children were with you: they were still too young to make it on their own, of course, and since they were less than two months old it would have been dangerous to try and leave the nest. The man adored them, he loved their mixed-up mongrel appearance, and he treated you with respect. He saw you for what you were: the elegance of your comportment, your physical beauty as a purebred, a perfect German shepherd, and at the same time, the terrible violence your beauty concealed, the instincts that ran, invisible, in your blood. The man fed you. He made all eight of you, the whole family, his pets.

  He said you would make a good guard dog.

  You didn’t yet understand what that meant. But you acknowledged him, just as he did you. And so you became his pet. You felt no hesitation about being a pet. It was only natural: your nest belonged to him.

  You slid along the iron rails. Traversed the continent without ever leaving home.

  Heading south.

  The man who claimed ownership of the train belonged to the transport underworld: he ran a smuggling operation, bribing conductors and overseeing a vast network of migrant laborers. He shipped goods brought in from across the continent south of the border. The operation was much larger than he could have managed on his own. He had a sponsor: a prominent Mexican-American who lived in Texas. His family had been living on the same land since before the Mexican-American War; they were Catholics, and they ran an orchard of orange and lemon trees, the product of sophisticated irrigation techniques. The orchard was harvested by gringo laborers the man in the train provided, and by illegal workers brought up over the border from Mexico. Since at the time United States law didn’t prohibit the employment of illegal immigrants, the Texan had no need to conceal what he was doing, hiring men and women who would have been his compatriots in the last century—until the 1840s, at any rate. The illegality lay, not in employing the immigrants, but in “shipping” them into the country in the first place, and this task was left to the man in the train. That was how he had developed his underworld transport network.

  The man hadn’t been lying: the train was his. Usually, it carried products destined to be sold. Sometimes it carried people. Even now, the other cars in the train were full. Only this boxcar was different: there was nothing here but a family of dogs, lying in the corner.

  On October 26, the nest stopped moving. The man, Sumer, and the puppies were close to the border now. Listen here, the man said to Sumer. I’m going to see you live a good life, okay? You’re not like other dogs, you’re smart—I can see that. So here’s what I’m going to do. You listening? I’m going to give you to the Don and you’ll be his guard dog, watch his orchard. The puppies too, of course. You’ll do a good job, right? You can do it? You do that, and he’ll be grateful to me, see, and that’ll be your repayment. You can do that, right?

  You won’t let me down, will you?

  When the man, Sumer, and the seven puppies descended from the nest at the station, the Don’s men were waiting, rifles in their hands. And after that, Sumer, you took your children and went to work at the orchard. You understood what was being asked of you. You spent a day on the orchard, a second day, a third day, and gradually you got used to it. A fourth day, a fifth day, a sixth day. Your children were growing. They were doing fine. All seven survived to the end of their second month.

  November. November 1957.

  Horses whinnied. Frogs croaked. Roosters crowed in the mornings. A dozen ducks swam in the pond in the mansion’s courtyard. There were times when the orchard misted over, and you were struck by its beauty. Your children too, with the high concentration of northern blood in their veins, loved these moments. THE MIST IS GOOD, they thought. COOL AND GOOD.

  The beauty of an orchard in November.

  In 1957—a year that would go down in the history of a race of dogs that first came into being here, on this earth, more than ten thousand years ago.

  It was night. There was a television in the Don’s mansion, and the whole family was inside staring at its screen. They were in the living room, gasping in wonder. In awe, in disbelief. The servants were in the garden, gazing up at the sky. Their expressions focused, intent, as if they were hoping, somewhere up there, to find the truth. Is that it? No, no. How about that, over there? Hey, we’re not looking for a falling star, okay?

  And you, Sumer, and your children—you felt it.

  A kind of buzzing in your hearts that made you lift your heads to the clear, starry sky.

  A man-made satellite flew overhead. It took about 103 minutes for it to orbit the earth. The previous month, the Soviet Union had beaten America in the Space Race. The Soviet Union, having poured astonishing amounts of money into the program, had succeeded in launching into orbit the very first man-made satellite: Sputnik 1. Now, less than a month later, in an effort to demonstrate the overwhelming superiority of Communism to the entire world, it had done something even more extraordinary. Sputnik 2 had been outfitted with an airtight chamber, and a living creature had been loaded inside. The first Earthling to experience space flight. The creature was not human. It was a dog. A bitch.

  The airtight chamber had a window.

  The bitch looked down at the earth.

  She was a Russian laika. In the initial reports of her flight, conflicting information was given regarding her name. She was said to be named Damka, Limonchik, and Kudryavka, but within a few days Laika had stuck. She was Laika, the laika. Laika the space dog. One of the USSR’s top-secret national projects. A dog.

  She orbited the globe, alive.

  Gazing out, down, in zero gravity.

  You felt her gaze.

  You, Sumer, and your children: you felt it. And so, there on the Mexican-American border, you raised your heads to look up at the sky. You and several thousand others. On November 3, 1957, all at once, 3,733 descendants of a Hokkaido dog named Kita and 2,928 descendants of a German shepherd named Bad News, scattered across the surface of the globe, unaware of the lines that separated communist and capitalist spheres, all those dogs raised their heads to peer into the vastness of the sky.

  “Don’t mes
s with a yakuza girl.”

  Who the fucking hell do you think I am?

  The girl ponders the question she asks. Age X, stranded between eleven and twelve, trapped in this fucking cold Stone-Age country, Russia. Fucking dicks, fucking around with me like this.

  Are you planning to keep me hostage forever?

  What am I, fucking invisible?

  Something had changed, ever since that day when she went out onto the grounds to watch the old man train the dogs. Somehow, suddenly and inexplicably, the situation had shifted in that moment when she told the old man to drop dead, and he handed her the word right back: Shi-ne. SHE-neh. She often put on her coat and went outside. She left the building that contained her little room—her cell, at least in theory—and the kitchen and dining room and other rooms and went out to wander through the Dead Town. She did this every day. This, the girl thought, was her job, the daily grind. Until then she had spent the better part of every day lying on her bed, shouting, cursing, making a show of her rage. During meals she would hurl imprecations at the Russians who sat around the table with her, spit her hatred at their faces. No longer. She went out now, all the time. On her own, of her own free will, she wandered the Dead Town, inspecting it and the concrete walls that enclosed it. One by one she walked the paved roads that segmented the expanse of land within the walls. She left footprints in the snow that filled the potholes. This was her routine, now, and no one objected.

  Hey, I’m a fucking hostage, right? You need me.

  Fucking around with me.

  Why don’t you guard me, you dicks? What am I, the invisible girl?

  And so she decided to fight back. All right then, she thought. If I’m invisible, let’s see what it’s like to be invisible. I’ll do the seeing. She began following the other inhabitants of the Dead Town, observing them at close range. She gave all five of them names. The old man was “Old Fuck,” of course. The old lady with the glasses who managed the kitchen was “Old Bag.” Or, alternatively, “Russian Hag.” She came to think of the two middle-aged women who looked so alike and were always with the Old Bag as Woman One and Woman Two, because they had no distinguishing characteristics. Soon these were shortened to WO and WT. The last of the five, the bald middle-aged man, was Opera. Because he sometimes hummed to himself. He favored old workers’ songs, revolutionary marches—melodies the girl found unnerving. He could belt them out at considerable volume. What the fuck, go to a karaoke place if you want to sing. You creep me out. So that was his name: Opera.

  Old Fuck, Old Bag, WO, WT, and Opera. And me.

  These were the residents of the Dead Town.

  This was how she catalogued them.

  And these were the people she observed.

  On some level, she was actively engaging with them. But at the same time, she made zero effort to communicate—to convey anything at all, feelings or intentions. She simply put herself in the same spaces and watched their every move. She stared at the five Russians.

  And then there were the dogs.

  A few dozen dogs, the other residents of this Dead Town unmarked on any map from the time it was built and now forgotten by history.

  There was time in her schedule for observing the dogs.

  Every day, she watched the old man train them. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon. He was teaching them more advanced techniques now, fighting and attacking, on a field that gradually came to encompass the whole of Dead Town. The dogs moved frequently from place to place, covering an enormous territory, rehearsing their destructive maneuvers; and the girl followed. Rehearsing—yes, because this was only a rehearsal. A dry run for some sort of field day of the dogs, a fucking preview of the Great Doggie Festival. She understood, more or less, what was happening. That they were practicing. That one day they would take to the streets.

  She kept her distance. She always stayed a few yards away, watching. Watching the dogs do their exercises. I don’t go in for this fucking gym class shit, thanks, I’d rather sit out. Look at these shitheads, fucking scampering around like maniacs. Woof--woof-woof-woof-woof-woof! Don’t you ever get tired? Actually, the dogs seldom barked. For the most part, they darted off and sprang at their simulated targets in total silence. They’d had it pounded into their heads that this was the way to do it: covert attacks. The old man, their trainer—the Old Fuck—had made this clear. And yet there was such ferocity in their movements that you almost seemed to hear them barking, baying, their voices rich and loud.

  If one actually heard a sound, it was more likely to be a gunshot.

  The bullets weren’t real, they were blanks. But they accustomed the dogs to the sound.

  The dogs no longer regarded the girl as an intruder, no longer growled. Because the old man scolded them that first time. The dogs remembered. And so they kept quiet. A few had barked at her the second time, when she came to watch, to study them, and she herself had told them off.

  “Shut the fuck up,” she said, glaring. “You’re annoying me.”

  She stared straight at them as she spoke, and they shut up.

  The old man laughed when he saw this.

  Upwards of forty dogs would participate in these exercises, learning specialized techniques. Honing their abilities. Seven or eight would take the day off. The old man let them rest before they got too worn out. He took stock of each dog’s condition individually and based his decision on his assessment, though for the most part he followed a fixed order. The dogs he released from training spent the day in their cages.

  In the doghouse.

  Outside, exposed to the air.

  The girl went by the cages too. It was only natural that she incorporated a visit to this area, given over entirely to the dogs’ use, into her daily schedule. Every so often, a new dog would join the ranks. The newcomers tended to be young; they must have been captured outside. The new dogs stayed for some time in the cages with the dogs that had been released from training, all day every day. And there were puppies too. Little dogs, natives of the Dead Town, who had only just been removed from the cage they had shared with their mother, where they had sucked at her teats.

  Now the whole litter was kept in a large cage of its own.

  During the day, at least, it was theirs.

  Only six or seven weeks old, these puppies had not yet learned caution. The girl watched them through the chain-link fence. The first time she saw the little bastards in their cage, she had a thought. There were old dogs here, and little ones. She remembered the old dog that had appeared on the roof and barked at her that time when the Old Fuck spoke in Japanese, “SHE-neh,” drop dead—that dog, she thought, was a senile old fuck himself. The thing is, she sensed, whether they’re dogs or people, I fucking hate old fucks.

  “Don’t get any ideas, though,” she told the puppies, speaking through the chain-link fence. “That doesn’t mean I think you’re cute.”

  This too, she said in Japanese.

  After that, she came every day to grumble outside the puppies’ cage. Objectively speaking, they were adorable. Roly-poly with ears that poked out from their round heads, bodies covered with light, soft hair. That wasn’t how the girl saw it. “Morons. Idiots. Fuckheads. Fucking little doggie-shits,” she said. She twined her fingers around the chain-link fence. “Look at you. So fucking tame. Some fuck feeds you and you’re his.” Each puppy had a tag. She couldn’t read the names, of course, because they were written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but she could read the numbers. Arabic numerals were okay: 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, and then 113, 114. Seven in all. As far as she was concerned the numbers might as well have been names, and so she added them to her list.

  She recognized the puppies through the numbers they had been assigned.

  This, in part, was what allowed her to focus so intently on them. This, in part, was why she sometimes looked so enchanted
as she stood before their cage. Though at the same time, there was something in the unpredictability of their actions that fascinated her, kept her from getting tired of standing there looking.

  So she went on visiting the cage, grumbling to the puppies.

  “Look at you, tripping like that,” she said. “Can’t even walk right.”

  “Little doggie-shits, fucking gnawing on each other,” she said.

  “Think you’re so grown up, huh?” she said. “Fucking think again.”

  “Assholes,” she said.

  There was something good about this part of her schedule. She felt better.

  One day, she decided to see how dumb the puppies were. She searched the kitchen and the stores of dog food. She knew what they were fed. Obviously. I watch the Old Bag preparing the shit. She had a hypothesis she wanted to test. “All people have to do is feed you and you’re theirs, right? You fucks. Yeah, I’m talking to you Forty-four. And Forty-five, Forty-six, Forty-seven, Forty-eight, One hundred thirteen, and One hundred fourteen, all of you. Fuckers. I bet you’ll let me feed you too.”