Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

by Hideo Furukawa

  You had taken them down, trying to protect your master.

  You, a mongrel. You had watched your mother, Goodnight, and then…all on your own, you had learned, turned yourself into a military dog. You had guarded him as best you could.

  But your master died.

  Your second self died.

  You were surrounded. Because you were the only survivor. The humans were standing on the outskirts of the circle, and all you could see were dogs.

  You didn’t bark.

  You growled.

  The dogs watched you.

  Then suddenly one barked. Woof!

  Another barked. Woof!

  And another. Woof!

  Woof!

  Woof!

  Woof!

  You stopped growling, though you didn’t realize it. You were overwhelmed. Swept up in the phenomenon that had suddenly blossomed around you. For a moment you felt as if you were listening to a chorus. You were enclosed, and the enclosure was singing. Not loudly—the melody was, if anything, tranquility itself. So it seemed to you. Unable to look your enemy in the eye, because the enemy was all around you, three hundred sixty degrees, you lowered your gaze, stared down at your feet. That, you felt, was all you could do. The Hellhound was dead. Yeah, I’m dead, he was saying to you. YOU…YOU’RE DEAD? YOU’RE MY ALTER EGO, AND YOU’RE DEAD? And you listened to the song. All around you, three hundred sixty degrees of singing.

  Woof!

  Woof!

  Woof!

  Woof!

  Woof!

  You raised your eyes again.

  You didn’t growl. You barked. Woof!

  Forty-eight dogs fell silent. Then one stepped toward you. A male. A fairly large dog. His stride was dignified, leisurely.

  He stood in front of you.

  This is it, Guitar. This is the moment. This is the place where your destiny changes course again, one last time. Your alter ego was gone, and now only one being in the entire world had the right to flip the switch, to turn your destiny from one track to the other, and that was you. You. Two had become one. You felt a bolt of spiritual lightning slam through your body. You felt a sign. But that sign wouldn’t turn you into a devout Christian or a devout Muslim. You…you would be a dog. That was all. The dog standing in front of you spoke to you, first with his eyes, and then by speaking to you.

  ARE YOU A MONGREL? he asked. A DOG WHO MONGRELIZES?

  I’M ME, you answered. I’M ONE.

  YOU WANT TO LIVE?

  TO LIVE…YES, I’LL LIVE! I’LL NEVER DIE!

  COME, THEN.

  AM I A PRISONER?

  NO.

  NO?

  YOU’VE COME.

  I HAVE?

  YOU CAME TO US. SO WE CAME TO GET YOU.

  You shuddered when you heard those words, and then you pressed the switch. You would make the great change.

  The dogs spoke among themselves in dog language; the humans spoke Russian. A man in camouflage with no epaulettes was making a report over the radio. He was asking for a truck to come get them, and soon a six-wheel-drive vehicle arrived on the scene. The scene changed: now there were forty-eight dogs plus one, ninety-one bodies, thirteen people, and a six-wheel truck—an “S” rapid-deployment vehicle—carrying heavy machine guns and mortars. An officer dressed in an ordinary army uniform hopped out. The wind was still whipping wildly over the valley. The man who had spoken Russian over the radio had conveyed the dogs’ wishes, not his own, and the officer who had come was neither a company nor a battalion commander; he was a general. He was the man known as the Director.

  The thirteen living men saluted the general crisply with one motion.

  As he approached, the circle of dogs, the enclosure, broke.

  “You’ve accepted him?” the general asked.

  Two dogs stood before the general within the ring of “S” dogs: the mujahideen survivor and the male dog who had taken up a position opposite him. The general had addressed the latter. His gaze, however, was fixed on the survivor.

  Woof! said the male dog.

  “All right, then, Belka,” said the general. “He looks a bit rough around the edges, but you think it’d be a waste to kill him, huh? He’s got what it takes, I guess…he was born with it. Or maybe he’s got some amazing story too? I bet he does. You, boy, here in Afghanistan, serving the mujahideen.” The general was addressing the new dog now. “I believe it. Belka accepted you. You were chosen. Your blood is good enough, you can join the line. You are accepted. Come.”

  That’s what happened on the battlefields of Afghanistan in the second week of December 1983.

  An epoch-making event in dog history.

  Woof, woof, woof, woof!

  The Afghan War continued, but “S” pulled out. For the time being, that is. Because General Secretary Chernenko had stripped it of much of its authority, steered clear of it. Then, in March 1985, General Secretary Chernenko himself pulled out—of Soviet politics, of the world. And the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen as the next general secretary. Gorbachev was much, much younger than his predecessor, Chernenko, and than Chernenko’s predecessor Andropov, and than Andropov’s predecessor Brezhnev. Party personnel at other levels began changing too, as one generation gave way to the next.

  General Secretary Gorbachev insisted that reform was necessary.

  Under General Secretary Gorbachev, the Communist Party leadership announced one new policy after the next.

  He made perestroika his slogan. “Restructuring.”

  The Afghan War continued. It wasn’t over yet. Of course not. It was a ten-year quagmire, after all.

  In July 1986, Gorbachev declared in a speech that he “would equate the word perestroika with revolution.” He stated explicitly that he was aiming to reform the USSR fundamentally. But how could this be? Hadn’t the Soviet leadership always regarded as absolutes the bourgeois revolution of February 1917 and the socialist revolution in October the same year? So there were those who voiced their doubts. And there were others who had doubts but kept them to themselves, became confused. And there were those who declared, smiles playing on their faces, that only the revolutions of 1917 could ever have real meaning for the homeland.

  Those, for instance, who belonged to “S.” The humans, of course, not the dogs.

  The general of “S,” the Director, had pounded this into their heads.

  The Director himself had taught them how to fight without weapons, how to kill without a sound, how to survive. And he had filled their minds with rigid, unyielding ideas. We will not allow the counter-revolutionaries to take control; we must defend the achievements of socialism at home and abroad; Marxism-Leninism alone is strong, legitimate. If you can’t be a true believer, you might as well be a priest. Indeed, when new members were inducted into “S” they were required to sign a document pledging their loyalty to the unit—any member who betrayed the unit would be killed. So even if they had wanted to, it would have been impossible for anyone to start having doubts about their ideology—to abandon their faith in the Revolution—and go back to the Russian Orthodox Church. If you changed your mind, if you had a change of heart, you would be executed. It was as simple as that. Though in actual practice, this was never a problem. Once a man entered “S,” no one from the general on down ever had the slightest doubt about the legitimacy of his work. The men were fervent in their belief. The unit’s insignia proved their legitimacy.

  Their insignia featured a skull.

  Not a human skull. An animal skull. A dog’s skull.

  A dog’s skull with the earth in the background.

  That was the badge “S” used.

  The earth was angled so that the north of the Eurasian continent was visible. S
o that this part of the globe faced the viewer, so that it was the front.

  Every member of the unit had seen the skull on which the insignia was modeled. Once or twice, maybe three times, they had been granted an audience. There, in the room known as the Director’s Office, they had trembled with emotion at the sight. The real thing was preserved in a sort of casket shaped like the earth. In a globe specially constructed for that purpose. It was burned, blackened, little scraps of flesh clinging to it, hanging from it, here and there. Those were the traces that had been left when it was immolated on its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, when the man-made satellite began to burn, to disintegrate. This was the skull of the first living creature from Earth to look down at the planet from outer space. These were the remains, in other words, of the space dog, the Russian laika, that had extended the reach of Soviet territory, of the homeland, into outer space.

  “We will wage war against the counter-revolutionary movement and fight with the power of heroes—and of this hero! We are the embodiment of legitimacy!” The words reverberated through the Director’s Office.

  It was never made clear how exactly the skull of this dog—once both a hero of the state and a popular idol—found its way into the Director’s hands. Because all information, even the most trivial, relating to the space dogs was classified as top secret. But the man who created “S” was closer than anyone else to those secrets. He had control of the space dogs’ bloodline. And he determined that nothing as insignificant as Khrushchev’s fall from power would derail the project, now that his posse at the breeding ground in South Siberia was unquestionably approaching the ideal. This project could not be allowed to die…this lineage could not be allowed to die. These dogs. This was where a master spy showed his true value as a master spy. And so, at the age of twenty-six and seven months, this young man who was expected to go far, who had been promoted within the KGB to the rank of lieutenant, responded to nonexistent expectations by contacting various branches of the KGB, trying this and that, working to realize a plan of his own. For the dogs…to guarantee their survival.

  And one day a door opened, and out came the skull of the first space dog.

  Someone told him Sputnik 2 wasn’t designed for recovery, so it had broken to pieces when it entered the atmosphere on May 14, 1958. Someone else insisted that the date had been April 4, not May 14, and the satellite burned up. One document, however, indicated that the wreckage of Sputnik 2 had in fact been recovered. The real thing, the secret document itself, remains in some KGB office. A copy is held, as well, in the secret vaults of the Council for the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics. They may have been there from the beginning, or perhaps they found their way in at some later date. Either way, the documents are there.

  And the door opened. The same door that opened to admit the wrecked cockpit of the MiG fighter Yuri Gagarin—the first human to fly in outer space, on the Vostok 1 in April 1961, known for his famous comment “The earth is blue”—had been riding in when he was killed in a mysterious crash in 1968. It opened, and out came the skull.

  It was a real laika skull, from a mid-sized dog.

  Documents proved that this was her skull.

  “S” came into existence toward the end of the 1960s. It was a code-named unit under the administration of the KGB Border Guard Headquarters, but with its own authority. “S” had been inspired by Khrushchev’s dreamy romanticism, but the cheesiness of its origins had been eliminated, and it now had a rational basis for its existence. The involvement of that dog, the bitch who demonstrated to the world the greatness of the Soviet homeland, proved that we, “S,” were not just some group of renegades.

  We were born of that event, on November 3, 1957—Marxism-Leninism’s single greatest achievement. We are its progeny.

  “We are a corps centered on dogs, and it is our job to support our dogs,” the creator of “S” told his men. “We ourselves are the progeny of the bitch named Laika.”

  So their legitimacy could never be in doubt.

  And so, he said, pledge allegiance to the “S” insignia!

  The men pledged their allegiance. They saluted the skull in its globe.

  And so, when Gorbachev declared that perestroika was revolution in July 1986, the members of “S” could deny this without batting an eye, smiles on their faces. The revolution had already happened, in 1917, and we were its progeny—we, the members of “S.” Gorbachev’s statement was a joke. They knew it. But sometimes even words mumbled in sleep can alter the course of history. It doesn’t matter who is legitimate, who is the renegade.

  The Afghan War continued. The two sides were in a stalemate, to put it simply, and it was slowly becoming apparent how closely this Central Asian quagmire resembled those ten years of war that America had initiated…America’s Southeast Asian quagmire. First there was the massive scale of the two conflicts—endless wars of attrition fought against guerrillas. Then there were all the other, smaller similarities. Young Soviet conscripts were destroying themselves with drugs. They smoked hashish the way young American conscripts had used LSD, heroin, and marijuana during the Vietnam War. Indiscriminant massacres were committed because it was impossible to tell civilians from guerrillas. During the Vietnam War, unspeakable tragedies had unfolded in villages the Americans regarded as Vietcong strongholds—everyone in these villages was slaughtered, from infants to the elderly; even domestic animals were shot; and naturally the women were raped—and now, in the same manner, villages the Soviets regarded as mujahideen strongholds were completely wiped out. Everyone in these villages was slaughtered, from infants to the elderly, even domestic animals were shot, and naturally the women were raped, gang-raped. Limited use was made of chemical weapons, albeit in secret. In the Vietnam War, the American army had done the same thing, in secret.

  The Soviets were confronted with the fact that the Afghan War was “our Vietnam.”

  And there was Gorbachev. There was Gorbachev, singing his slogan: Perestroika! Perestroika! He initiated a completely new foreign policy. Relations with the West would now be aimed at fostering dialogue, guided by the notion of “new thinking” diplomacy. Gorbachev was trying to change the direction of the Soviet-American arms race. The Soviet economy was stagnating. It had been subsiding into stagnation for some time, but Gorbachev was the first to acknowledge this. In fact, the USSR was on the verge of bankruptcy. He admitted it. And their enormous military expenditures were putting the most pressure on the treasury. One aim of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” diplomacy was to make it possible to cut the military budget. He pushed ahead with negotiations concerning nuclear non-proliferation, and finally he was able to improve relations not only with America, Britain, and France, but even with China. Red China—the third player in the Cold War. The whole shift was described by the term détente.

  Something was changing.

  Something was speeding up.

  And then Gorbachev made the announcement: “Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is also perestroika.”

  The United Nations had gotten involved in peace negotiations relating to the Afghanistan problem in 1982 but had failed to make any progress. In April 1988, with this statement by Gorbachev, everything happened in a flash: a peace accord was signed. Now it was settled. The Soviet army would withdraw from Afghanistan.

  The withdrawal began officially in May 1988 and was completed in February 1989.

  On February 25. But did the Afghan War really end on that day? No, it did not. Because the Afghan government was still communist, and it was still friendly with the USSR, and it was still at odds with the mujahideen. And to make matters worse, the mujahideen organizations were at odds with each other as well, divided by all sorts of factors: were they composed largely of Pashtuns or non-Pashtuns, were they Sunni or Shi’a, and so on. Obviously the country was bound to descend into civil war. The USSR decided, first of all, that it would be unprofi
table to allow Kabul’s pro-Soviet communist government to collapse; second, that since the Soviet Union shared a twelve-hundred-mile border with Afghanistan, any exacerbation of the situation within Afghanistan would pose a threat to the safety of the border regions; and third, that if the current government were to fall and be replaced by an Islamic government, the ensuing confusion was bound to spread to the Central Asian members of the USSR, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the other Islamic autonomous republics.

  So the USSR continued to supply the communist, pro-Soviet Afghan government with vast quantities of aid, both financial and in the form of weapons.

  And then something else happened.

  This was just before the last of the one hundred thousand occupying soldiers withdrew.

  On January 24, 1989, a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ratified a top-secret report that gave permission to the KGB Border Guards, then stationed in the north of Afghanistan, to carry out a certain strategic mission.

  Needless to say, this was in violation of the peace accord.

  The USSR’s quagmire, the Afghan War, wasn’t over yet. The Soviet Union itself refused to let it end. It kept going until the end of the year. But only in secret. The KGB took control, and only units that knew how to keep their activities secret were involved. Once again “S” was called in. Its fighters were special operations professionals, and they would keep quiet about their achievements in battle. Its fighters were the most powerful unconventional troops in the entire Border Guard. As for Gorbachev…Gorbachev was content to let this happen, as long as the Afghan “problem” was settled, as long as it didn’t cause any disruption domestically. He wasn’t concerned that the plan “stank of Khrushchev,” as Chernenko and Brezhnev had been. Indeed, as far as he was concerned “S” was just another useful organization—he wasn’t even aware that it had originated in Khrushchev’s time. And so once again “S” was granted authority to carry out illegal assignments in secret. It eliminated targets marked for elimination. In public, Gorbachev continued shouting his slogan as before: Perestroika! Perestroika! And in December 1989, he finally pushed his “new thinking” diplomacy to the limit. A Soviet-American summit was held off the shore of Malta, on a Soviet missile cruiser named Slava. Gorbachev welcomed American President George H. W. Bush with a smile. He announced that the Soviet Union and the United States were now friends. The Cold War was over. Lasting peace had been achieved between the two states. A press conference attended by reporters from all around the world was held on December 3. All across the globe, people stared at their television screens. This was a day that would go down in the history of the twentieth century. In human history. And as for dog history…dog history…