Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

by Hideo Furukawa

  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.”

  “This is not 1991.”

  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 polic
e 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?”

  And the corpse answered, Yes.

  So the old man began working for cash.

  He killed a punk with a tattoo on his right arm that glorified America. He killed a prostitute with a pro-democratic slogan tattooed on her left arm. People asked him to do it, and he did it. He killed bureaucrats. He killed police officers. Sometimes he charged one hundred rubles, sometimes he charged one hundred dollars. When he returned to his apartment at night, he talked to the globe. I will protect you, he said. Because you’re the perfect match for me, he said, I will protect you. Yes, I am talking to you, the skull of a dog whose destiny it was to die in space, sent up with no hope that she would return, sent up to be killed, to continue wheeling around the earth, in orbit, you, skull of a murdered hero.

  Who will protect you? I am the only one. I will protect you.

  One day, the old man had a guest. An invited guest. The first guest this apartment had seen. A Slavic man, his head balding. He stroked the globe, humming some sort of melody.

  A military march? the old man asked.

  The middle-aged man looked up. Ah, the song. I didn’t realize.

  How is your mother?

  She’s fine. She’s still grateful to you, Director. For those…splendid last days.

  I am no longer the Director.

  Sorry. We’re so used to calling you that at home. My father, and me.

  Both my men.

  The only ones in the unit. Father and son, wearing the same insignia.

  And how are your sisters?

  They’re fine too. They’ve started speaking a bit, two or three words a year.

  Your family…did not dissolve.

  I beg your pardon?

  The Soviet Family Code predicted the dissolution of the family. In 1926.

  As far as we’re concerned, you’re our father now.

  Even though we are not related?

  That’s right.

  That is a good family. Except that…I am gone.

  You’re gone?

  The old mad nodded, then asked one last question.

  And how are the dogs?

  The dogs are well, the guest answered.

  That afternoon, the tension that had been building between the mafia organizations throughout the city finally erupted. According to the radio. The television reported that the gangs had declared war on each other. The authorities issued a statement calling for residents of the city to remain indoors. Newspaper reporters rushed hither and yon. The two news agencies, Interfax News and the Russia News Service, transmitted up-to-the-minute reports to every corner of the Eurasian continent. And to the New World. The extraordinary number of dogs on the streets that day was not considered newsworthy. Reports of abnormal sightings were treated as mere blather, vaguely occult in nature, and ignored. Ordinarily one would have expected the tabloids to jump at this kind of thing, but they didn’t that day, or the next, or later on. This, too, had been carefully factored into the calculations—the kinds of stories the mass media inevitably focus on, their blind spots. Elaborate preparations had been under way for months in this city, laid on the foundations of hundreds of casualties.

  The dogs were rebelling, but their rebellion was invisible.

  Ordinary citizens noticed the disorder but assumed it was just the usual gang violence, nothing they should be concerned about.

  It helped to have the chaos noticed. Because the media fanned the flames. And when the flames had been fanned hard enough, peo
ple snapped. Finally, the incident expanded to encompass the entire nation.

  Certain functions of the city were paralyzed, but the mass transit system was still in order, more or less. The airports were fine. The trains were running. The planes and trains carried “support troops” to the Russian Far East. Naturally, these newcomers got into arguments with the police at the entrance to the city. Not the dogs, though. By afternoon, the dogs were already lying low.

  The dogs were guerrillas. They served no government. But they did have rules. Their fighting techniques were as refined as those of any regular army.

  But they were guerrillas. They conducted only surprise attacks.

  The dogs seized control of several areas. Areas dotted with mafia facilities, the scenes of deaths as yet unknown to the authorities. A printing house that produced counterfeit dollars. A vast underground factory that manufactured counterfeit brand items. A warehouse holding mountains of drugs (these were real, not counterfeit). Another warehouse full of contraband antiquities. Yet another warehouse holding concentrated uranium and disassembled nuclear warheads destined to be smuggled out of the country. The dogs were waiting. Because sooner or later, someone would come to steal these items back. Or some new players would come to make off with them, make them their own. Or maybe someone would simply come looking.