This was her hypothesis.
The result was a chorus of yelping.
Number 44: FEED ME!
Number 114: FEED ME!
Number 45, number 46, number 47, number 48, and number 113: FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME!
The second she pushed the food through the fence, they gathered around and began going for it, snapping at it, not even bothering to sniff it and see what it was.
No, they hadn’t yet learned to be wary—not at all. And since they had already been weaned from their mother’s milk, they had no problem eating the sort of “Russian dog food” the girl gave them. She gave them sheep hooves. Leftovers. But they chewed them all the same, licked them all over. There was a bit of meat and gelatin left, if only a little.
“Happy?” the girl asked. “You like that?”
They looked happy.
“You like stinky crap like that?”
WE’RE HAPPY, the dogs replied. WE LIKE IT.
“See, I knew it,” the girl said, the pride in her words not entirely matched by the unusual stiffness and, simultaneously, the slight relaxation of her expression. “I can make you mine as easily as they can. Look at you, wagging your fucking tails. Fucking morons. Fucking shitheads. That’s Russia for you. Eating this foul-smelling mutton crap because you’ll take any nutrition you can get.”
From that day on, she worked to prove her hypothesis. Each time she visited the puppies’ cage, she took food—stolen food. And she fed them. The seven puppies were always overjoyed to see her. They started wagging their tails the second they saw her. Woof woof, woof woof, they said. And the girl, watching them tear into the food, kept grumbling. In Japanese. Monotone. “Sometimes they feed me mutton too. Disgusting crap. Tastes so fucking strong. You seem to like it though, huh? Sure looks that way. But not me…fucking ass. It’s winter food, this crap. It makes your body feel toasty when you eat it, right? You know? That’s something I learned. Shit. I’m learning all kinds of fucking shit. Hey, c’mere,” she said, sticking her hand into the cage near the bottom of the chain-link fence.
Four or five puppies gathered around.
Licking her hand.
The girl gave one of their heads a rough pat.
“See how hot you are? Right, One hundred fourteen?”
One or two of the others rubbed their heads and bodies against her, evidently eager to be petted too. Rubbed up against her hand. Her fingers.
You’re hot, right?
YES.
Right?
FEED ME.
That was the end of the girl’s schedule. With this—for the time being at least—her job was over. Watch the tagged puppies, secretly feed them, fill their ears with Japanese. Lots of Japanese, complaining in Japanese. Monotonal Japanese. She had to accustom the puppies to the sound and rhythms of her speech.
The daily grind continued. And then one day, it ended.
Dramatically. It was unclear how many days…or weeks the new monotony of her routine had continued by then, in the Dead Town, from the beginning to the moment when it ended. She herself couldn’t have said. She wasn’t counting the days. What day was this? The question didn’t exist. I’m X years old. I don’t fucking need time.
So the day it happened was just another day.
They had finished lunch. The old lady was in the kitchen making jam. The girl observed her from behind. She was the invisible girl, monitoring the Old Bag. Reverse monitoring. You get what that means, Old Bag? Maybe, just fucking maybe, you’re my hostage. The girl hadn’t said anything. She spoke the words to herself. Silent Japanese. She snuck food from the kitchen all the time, for the puppies—she knew what went on in the kitchen was important. So she monitored the kitchen. She planted herself there in the same space as the old lady, day after day, and regarded her. Long and hard. Taking it all in. The old lady’s trunk, shaped like a barrel. Her thick glasses. Ingredients. Vegetables, herbs. Beets. Dill. Scallions. Heaped in baskets. Not the dill: it was in a glass. A bouquet. Buckwheat seeds, flour. Oil…sunflower seed oil. The girl could tell because of the enormous yellow flower on the label. And then the kitchen supplies. Pots, of course. Some with handles on both sides. Frying pans. Bowls. Ladles. Carving knives.
The old lady didn’t use any of this when she made jam.
She had masses of gooseberries and strawberries. She dropped them into wide-mouthed jars with an equal amount of sugar. And that was it. A very simple task.
Strawberries, the girl thought.
Is it the season for strawberries?
The girl had explored large swaths of the Dead Town on her walks, but she hadn’t seen a garden anywhere. Maybe the Old Bag gathered them in the forest? Was there a market nearby? She had no idea. When the fuck do you make jam anyway? What season? Before winter? This is fucking Russia, though. It’s fucking endless winter here.
There are no seasons, asshole. I’m X years old.
She kept thinking about the strawberries.
Needless to say, she and the old lady didn’t speak. A few minutes later, the girl was outside. She had left the kitchen to wander around the Dead Town as she always did. Two blocks away from the building was a concrete wall. One of the walls that cut this place off from the outside world. One of the barriers that made it all too apparent that this place was her prison. As she walked, she happened to catch sight of WO and WT. They were wheeling a motorcycle out of a garage. This was unexpected. It looked like they were going to ride it together, sitting in its tandem seat. One of them, either WO or WT, was going to drive that thing. They were going to buy food. She knew, she could sense it. And so she started observing them, the way she always did. Except that this time she took a different approach—this time, she didn’t act as though she were invisible. Without even thinking, she concealed herself behind a building. Strawberries, she thought. Shadowing people had become part of her daily routine, but this time she wanted to go further: she wanted to see where they went. Did they pick the strawberries themselves? Or buy them? And where? The two middle-aged women, WO and WT, opened the gate to the outside world. One of the exits from the Dead Town, an iron gate that opened out to both sides. One of the exits. The girl had never considered trying to escape. If this were her prison, she might have struggled to scale the walls, tried to find some way out into the world beyond, the shaba, but she never had, not once. Because it would be a total fucking pain in the ass. What the fuck would she do once she was out? Gather fucking mushrooms in the forest, wrestle with bears? Like hell she was going to do that shit. But now she found herself wanting to see outside. WO and WT straddled the motorcycle. She was sneaking toward them. Keeping in their blind spot, creeping down the street, hugging the wall. She poked her head out from behind the wall of the building closest to them, low down. Strawberries, she thought.
Can I run after the motorcycle?
The door. There was no click.
There was no lock.
So she decided to try and see where WO and WT went. To get a good look, see what direction they went, and where they were going.
A forest? A garden? A market?
She rested her hand on the door. She was almost beyond the concrete wall. Half her foot was past the edge.
Just then, there was a tremendous explosion behind her. A gunshot. Not a blank this time. It was an actual bullet. A sliver of concrete burst from the wall. Blasted off. A deep hole appeared. Not that the girl noticed. She couldn’t have. The bullet had whizzed by so close she could have reached out and touched it. The air had trembled as the bullet passed; she could still feel it under her skin.
She was quaking.
…was he aiming for me?
She stiffened. All over her skin, her hair was standing on end.
Her face began to flush. She was still shaking, and her
face kept turning redder and redder, the redness moving quietly, ever so quietly up and up, like water rising, until it reached her ears. At the same time, a new expression appeared on her face. She was biting her bottom lip. Biting down. Hard. Very slowly, she turned around and looked behind her.
Straight behind her.
Just three meters away, the old lady who she had thought was in the kitchen stood holding a pistol with both hands. Her apron covered with juice from the berries.
“Old Bag,” the girl said.
The old lady didn’t reply.
“So you were watching me, huh? I’m not the invisible girl after all.”
The old lady’s thick-lensed glasses made it hard to read her expression. Her true feelings.
And those same lenses were watching her. Observing. Like a machine.
“Pleased with yourself, aren’t you, Old Bag? Firing your fucking pistol at me. You fucking asshole, dicking around with me. I’m used to this kind of shit, you know. Even more than the dogs. You think a fucking gunshot can scare me? Don’t mess with a yakuza girl.”
She spat this out. These words.
And yet she had wet herself.
The stain was spreading even now across the crotch of her jeans. She could feel it. And she suspected the old lady could see it too. So she said what she had to say. To the old lady standing there with the pistol, posed just as she had been when she fired that warning shot.
“Shit…I swear I’m going to stab you one day. You and the rest of the world.”
Ten minutes later, the girl was back in the room she had been given, changing her clothes. She put on new underwear. She threw away the pissed-on jeans. She put her feet through into a pair of pants she had been given as a spare—the old lady had provided these too. The girl had never worn them before. Look at these cheap-ass shitty pants, she thought, resenting them, hating them. Are you fucking making fun of me? Don’t try to fucking make me wear little kid’s clothes. Those jeans I just tossed aren’t for fucking middle class losers, you know. Those were Gucci. Those were brand-name jeans, you assholes. That’s why I kept wearing them, even if I never washed them. Those were my favorite fucking jeans. Fucking Gucci washed denim.
And now they’ve got piss on ’em.
The girl felt it. A feeling she couldn’t name. Humiliation.
She put on her coat. She put on her hat. She dressed herself against the cold as if she were donning some sort of armor, shielding her raging emotions from view, disguising herself as an ordinary Russian child. She could have been a member of some mongoloid Siberian minority. Except that the words brimming inside her were Japanese. Japanese imprecations. Expressions of boundless rage. She could no longer contain it. She needed to let it out, and in order to do that, she needed the puppies.
Those puppies.
Number 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 113, and 114.
That cage. The time she spent, day after day, standing before it.
But the puppies weren’t in the cage that afternoon. The girl knew why. Three or four days earlier, things had changed. Already, the dramatic new developments that would take place in her daily routine had been hinted at, foreshadowed. The puppies weren’t being trained to fight and attack like the other dogs, not really. They had been taken out to the grounds, leaving the cage empty, for only a short time. During that period, the old man checked them out. Checked to see whether they were naturally inclined to fight. To see how they reacted to gunfire. How they responded to smoke. They were being tested, in other words. They had moved on from playing with balls to the next stage. One stage before he began training them in earnest.
Would these puppies imitate the “finished” dogs, the adults the old man had already trained? Or rather, would they one day learn to imitate their seniors?
Did they listen to human commands? Would they eventually?
These were the questions the old man had to answer.
Already, then, in a small way, their training had begun.
And already the results were in. All seven were suitable. Of course. The old man had known to expect this. Considering their breeding, their lineage. So naturally he increased the difficulty of the tests. Two or three days earlier, he had started testing their ability to respond to basic commands like “Go,” “Stop,” and “Down,” and having them play, for instance, at attacking a target.
Of course, out here on the grounds they had models to follow. They could imitate the adult dogs. They had to catch their scent, grasp the mood. What was it like to attack? What precisely was required of them? The puppies’ every movement radiated youth, but that was okay, that was only natural. It was all a game. Indeed, the fact that they were only playing made it more clear how well, or how poorly, they were suited to the task that awaited them.
And so she knew.
She understood the situation. There was no point going to stand before the cage. Because the puppies weren’t there. They were on the grounds. Fucking asshole, after all the time I spent taming them, now that I’ve finally succeeded, you drag the fuckers out to train them? Don’t fucking steal them. Don’t fucking steal my doggies, you dick. She knew they would be back in the cage soon, in a half hour, maybe an hour. But she didn’t feel like waiting. She understood the situation, and so she headed out to the exercise grounds.
Directly.
Her coat buttoned up all the way, her hat pulled down low over her eyes, her head full of hatred, taking form in Japanese.
The girl saw what was happening. The old man gave the word, and the puppies responded. I fucking showered them with Japanese, fucking shit-ass Japanese. And now the Old Fuck is teaching the little doggie-shits Russian. What’s the fucking idea? He doesn’t want them to hear my voice, is that it? She listened. She focused on each command as it was given. Disgusted, annoyed, she nevertheless let the words soak into her brain. As sounds. Just sounds. Soon she found herself unable just to stand there watching as he trained the puppies. She couldn’t hang back, observing from several yards off. She went up right behind the old man, not hesitating at all, not at all afraid of the dogs. She was confrontational. She was filled with raw, real hatred. She saw Opera off in the distance. The Old Fuck’s buddy, Opera. He was playing the role of the target, his torso and arms swaddled in protective padding, but without the helmet. He was the target in this game the puppies were playing. You’re training them, the girl thought, I know. Training them to kill. I realize what you’re fucking doing, assholes. She was feeling emotions she couldn’t have expressed in words. Destruction. That’s what they were doing. She wanted it to happen. Yeah, do it! Bring it all down! The old man paid no attention to her. He wasn’t exactly ignoring her, but he was focused on the puppies, on seeing how well they suited his needs. He spoke only to them. Gave them commands in Russian. The girl was able to remember them. That Old Fuck spoke to me. I never asked to have a conversation with him, he just did it. SHE-neh, he said. Drop dead. Yeah, well two can play that game. I’ll fucking get in your way. This time, it’s my turn, right?
The seven puppies were waiting for the next command.
All of a sudden, she shouted. Imitating the sounds of Russian.
Sic him! She was thinking. Attack that asshole!
And those were the words she yelled: “Go! Sic him!” In Russian. The accent wasn’t perfect, but she had absorbed the sounds well enough.
There were the seven puppies. They had been doing these tests for days, they were used to the commands. They had a vague understanding of the concept—that these words the people spoke were instructions. And they were used to the girl’s voice. She had come and talked to them every day, after all. That had been part of her routine. And so.
The smartest puppy responded to her command.
One puppy started running.
It was number 47. He sprinted off at full speed. His l
ittle hind legs bending, their joints creaking. He ran faster. Heading for the target. Because a voice he knew had ordered him to attack. He was supposed to do something, he knew. THROW YOURSELF AT THE TARGET, that was it, maybe. Or maybe it was, RUN AT HIM. And then, BITE HIM, KILL HIM.
Number 47 understood the girl’s words.
He leapt at Opera.
He sprang at him and kept attacking until Opera pushed him down, and when the old man shouted “Down,” he turned and looked first at the girl.
The girl stared, dumbstruck, at number 47.
“I did it, right?” the puppy was asking.
Number 47 was a boy.
And then the girl…nodded. She nodded at number 47.
It had started. She’d had a conversation. For the first time since she had been brought here as a prisoner to the Dead Town, she had willingly communicated with another living creature. Not with a person, with a dog. But still, it had happened. This Japanese girl had spoken to a dog, and the dog had understood. True, the medium had been a monkey-see-monkey-do imitation of Russian, but that didn’t matter: the linguistic gap between the original Russian and her fake Russian was no more than a few millimeters.
A minute later, ten minutes later, an hour later, the shock was still sinking in.
Sinking in.
Night fell. At the dinner table, the girl had an announcement to make. The Old Fuck, the Old Bag, Opera, WO, and WT were all sitting there around the table when she made it. “That dog is mine,” she told them, speaking very clearly, in Japanese. Naturally no one understood. None of them had the slightest idea what she had said, at least not at this stage. But she didn’t care.
“You heard me, right? I asked for permission, and I got it,” she declared.
The old man sensed something. You made some kind of announcement, didn’t you? he asked.
In Russian. And that was it. He didn’t pursue the matter.
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 11