The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Jana said, “I’m going home.”

  As she started for home, I saw that she was still holding Tapka’s leash. It swung insouciantly from her hand. I called after her just as, once again, Tapka deposited Clonchik at my feet.

  “I need the leash.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t be stupid. I need the leash.”

  “No, you don’t. She comes when we call her. Even shithead. She won’t run away.”

  Jana turned her back on me and proceeded toward our building. I called her again, but she refused to turn around. Her receding back was a blatant provocation. Guided more by anger than by logic, I decided that if Tapka was closer to Jana then the onus of responsibility would be on her. I picked up the doll and threw it as far as I could into the parking lot.

  “Tapka, get Clonchik.”

  Clonchik tumbled through the air. I had put everything in my six-year-old arm behind the throw, which still meant that the doll wasn’t going very far. Its trajectory promised a drop no more than twenty feet from the edge of the ravine. Running, her head arched to the sky, Tapka tracked the flying clown. As the doll reached its apex, it crossed paths with a sparrow. The bird veered off toward Finch Avenue, and the clown plummeted to the asphalt. When the doll hit the ground, Tapka raced past it after the bird.

  A thousand times we had thrown Clonchik and a thousand times Tapka had retrieved him. But who knows what passes for a thought in the mind of a dog? One moment a Clonchik is a Clonchik, and the next moment a sparrow is a Clonchik.

  I shouted at Jana to catch Tapka and then watched in abject horror as the dog, her attention fixed on the sparrow, skirted past Jana and directly into traffic. From my vantage point on the slope of the ravine, I couldn’t see what happened. I saw only that Jana broke into a sprint and I heard the caterwauling of tires, followed by Tapka’s shrill fractured yip.

  “Pray for it.”

  By the time I reached the street, a line of cars already stretched a block beyond Goldfinch. At the front of the line were a brown station wagon and a pale-blue sedan blistered with rust. As I neared, I noted the chrome letters on the back of the sedan: D-U-S-T-E-R. In front of the sedan, Jana kneeled in a tight semicircle with a pimply young man and an older woman with very large sunglasses. Tapka lay on her side at the center of their circle. She panted in quick shallow bursts. She stared impassively at me, at Jana. Except for a hind leg twitching at the sky at an impossible angle, she seemed completely unharmed. She looked much as she did when she rested on the rug at the Nahumovskys’ apartment after a vigorous romp in the ravine.

  Seeing her this way, barely mangled, I felt a sense of relief. I started to convince myself that things weren’t as bad as I had feared, and I tentatively edged forward to pet her. The woman in the sunglasses said something in a restrictive tone that I neither understood nor heeded. I placed my hand on Tapka’s head, and she responded by opening her mouth and allowing a trickle of blood to escape onto the asphalt. This was the first time I had ever seen dog blood, and I was struck by the depth of its color. I hadn’t expected it to be red, although I also hadn’t expected it to be not-red. Set against the gray asphalt and her white coat, Tapka’s blood was the red I envisioned when I closed my eyes and thought: red.

  I sat with Tapka until several dozen car horns demanded that we clear the way. The woman with the large sunglasses ran to her station wagon, returned with a blanket, and scooped Tapka off the street. The pimply young man stammered a few sentences, of which I understood nothing except the word “sorry.” Then we were in the back seat of the station wagon with Tapka in Jana’s lap. The woman kept talking until she finally realized that we couldn’t understand her at all. As we started to drive off, Jana remembered something. I motioned for the woman to stop the car and scrambled out. Above the atonal chorus of car horns, I heard: “Mark, get Clonchik.”

  I ran and got Clonchik.

  For two hours, Jana and I sat in the reception area of a small veterinary clinic in an unfamiliar part of town. In another room, with a menagerie of afflicted creatures, Tapka lay in traction, connected to a blinking machine by a series of tubes. Jana and I had been allowed to see her once but were rushed out when we both burst into tears. Tapka’s doctor, a woman wearing a white coat and furry slippers resembling bear paws, tried to calm us down. Again, we could neither explain ourselves nor understand what she was saying. We managed only to establish that Tapka was not our dog. The doctor gave us coloring books, stickers, and access to the phone. Every fifteen minutes, we called home. Between phone calls, we absently flipped pages and sniffled for Tapka and for ourselves. We had no idea what would happen to Tapka; all we knew was that she wasn’t dead. As for ourselves, we already felt punished and knew only that more punishment was to come.

  “Why did you throw Clonchik?”

  “Why didn’t you give me the leash?”

  “You could have held on to her collar.”

  “You shouldn’t have called her shithead.”

  At six-thirty, my mother picked up the phone. I could hear the agitation in her voice. The ten minutes she had spent at home not knowing where I was had taken their toll. For ten minutes, she had been the mother of a dead child. I explained to her about the dog and felt a twinge of resentment when she said, “So it’s only the dog?” Behind her I heard other voices. It sounded as though everyone were speaking at once, pursuing personal agendas, translating the phone conversation from Russian to Russian until one anguished voice separated itself: “My God, what happened?” Rita.

  After getting the address from the veterinarian, my mother hung up and ordered another expensive taxi. Within a half hour, my parents, my aunt, and Misha and Rita pulled up at the clinic. Jana and I waited for them on the sidewalk. As soon as the taxi doors opened, we began to sob uncontrollably, partly out of relief but mainly in the hope of engendering sympathy. I ran to my mother and caught sight of Rita’s face. Her face made me regret that I also hadn’t been hit by a car.

  As we clung to our mothers, Rita descended upon us.

  “Children, what, oh, what have you done?”

  She pinched compulsively at the loose skin of her neck, raising a cluster of pink marks.

  While Misha methodically counted individual bills for the taxi-driver, we swore on our lives that Tapka had simply got away from us. That we had minded her as always but, inexplicably, she had seen a bird and bolted from the ravine and into the road. We had done everything in our power to catch her, but she had surprised us, eluded us, been too fast.

  Rita considered our story.

  “You are liars. Liars!”

  She uttered the words with such hatred that we again burst into sobs.

  My father spoke in our defense.

  “Rita Borisovna, how can you say this? They are children.”

  “They are liars. I know my Tapka. Tapka never chased birds. Tapka never ran from the ravine.”

  “Maybe today she did?”

  “Liars.”

  Having delivered her verdict, she had nothing more to say. She waited anxiously for Misha to finish paying the driver.

  “Misha, enough already. Count it a hundred times, it will still be the same.”

  Inside the clinic, there was no longer anyone at the reception desk. During our time there, Jana and I had watched a procession of dyspeptic cats and lethargic parakeets disappear into the back rooms for examination and diagnosis. One after another they had come and gone until, by the time of our parents’ arrival, the waiting area was entirely empty and the clinic officially closed. The only people remaining were a night nurse and the doctor in the bear-paw slippers, who had stayed expressly for our sake.

  Looking desperately around the room, Rita screamed, “Doctor! Doctor!” But when the doctor appeared she was incapable of making herself understood. Haltingly, with my mother’s help, it was communicated to the doctor that Rita wanted to see her dog. Pointing vigorously at herself, Rita asserted, “Tapka. Mine dog.”

  The doctor led Rita and
Misha into the veterinary version of an intensive-care ward. Tapka lay on her little bed, Clonchik resting directly beside her. At the sight of Rita and Misha, Tapka weakly wagged her tail. Little more than an hour had elapsed since I had seen her last, but somehow over the course of that time Tapka had shrunk considerably. She had always been a small dog, but now she looked desiccated. She was the embodiment of defeat. Rita started to cry, grotesquely smearing her mascara. With trembling hands, and with sublime tenderness, she stroked Tapka’s head.

  “My God, my God, what has happened to you, my Tapkochka?”

  Through my mother, and with the aid of pen and paper, the doctor provided the answer. Tapka required two operations. One for her leg. Another to stop internal bleeding. An organ had been damaged. For now, a machine was helping her, but without the machine she would die. On the paper, the doctor drew a picture of a scalpel, of a dog, of a leg, of an organ. She made an arrow pointing at the organ and drew a teardrop and colored it in to represent blood. She also wrote down a number preceded by a dollar sign. The number was fifteen hundred.

  At the sight of the number, Rita let out a low animal moan and steadied herself against Tapka’s little bed. My parents exchanged a glance. I looked at the floor. Misha said, “My dear God.” The Nahumovskys and my parents each took in less than five hundred dollars a month. We had arrived in Canada with almost nothing, a few hundred dollars, which had all but disappeared on furniture. There were no savings. Fifteen hundred dollars. The doctor could just as well have written a million.

  In the middle of the intensive-care ward, Rita slid down to the floor and wailed. Her head thrown back, she appealed to the fluorescent lights: “Nu, Tapkochka, what is going to become of us?”

  I looked up from my feet and saw horror and bewilderment on the doctor’s face. She tried to put a hand on Rita’s shoulder, but Rita violently shrugged it off.

  My father attempted to intercede.

  “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.”

  “Rita Borisovna, I understand that it is painful, but it is not the end of the world.”

  “And what do you know about it?”

  “I know that it must be hard, but soon you will see.… Even tomorrow we could go and help you find a new one.”

  My father looked to my mother for approval, to insure that he had not promised too much. He needn’t have worried.

  “A new one? What do you mean, a new one? I don’t want a new one. Why don’t you get yourself a new son? A new little liar? How about that? New. Everything we have now is new. New everything.”

  On the linoleum floor, Rita keened, rocking back and forth. She hiccupped, as though hyperventilating. Pausing for a moment, she looked up at my mother and told her to translate for the doctor. To tell her that she would not let Tapka die.

  “I will sit here on this floor forever. And if the police come to drag me out I will bite them.”

  “Ritochka, this is crazy.”

  “Why is it crazy? My Tapka’s life is worth more than a thousand dollars. Because we don’t have the money, she should die here? It’s not her fault.”

  Seeking rationality, my mother turned to Misha—Misha who had said nothing all this time except “My dear God.”

  “Misha, do you want me to tell the doctor what Rita said?”

  Misha shrugged philosophically.

  “Tell her or don’t tell her, you see my wife has made up her mind. The doctor will figure it out soon enough.”

  “And you think this is reasonable?”

  “Sure. Why not? I’ll sit on the floor, too. The police can take us both to jail. Besides Tapka, what else do we have?”

  Misha sat on the floor beside his wife.

  I watched as my mother struggled to explain to the doctor what was happening. With a mixture of words and gesticulations, she got the point across. The doctor, after considering her options, sat down on the floor beside Rita and Misha. Once again, she tried to put her hand on Rita’s shoulder. This time, Rita, who was still rocking back and forth, allowed it. Misha rocked in time to his wife’s rhythm. So did the doctor. The three of them sat in a line, swaying together, like campers at a campfire. Nobody said anything. We looked at each other. I watched Rita, Misha, and the doctor swaying and swaying. I became mesmerized by the swaying. I wanted to know what would happen to Tapka; the swaying answered me.

  The swaying said: Listen, shithead, Tapka will live. The doctor will perform the operation. Either money will be found or money will not be necessary.

  I said to the swaying: This is very good. I love Tapka. I meant her no harm. I want to be forgiven.

  The swaying replied: There is reality and then there is truth. The reality is that Tapka will live. But, let’s be honest, the truth is you killed Tapka. Look at Rita; look at Misha. You see, who are you kidding? You killed Tapka and you will never be forgiven.

  | 2003 |

  THE PROMOTION

  I was a dog in my former life, a very good dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being. I liked being a dog. I worked for a poor farmer, guarding and herding his sheep. Wolves and coyotes tried to get past me almost every night, and not once did I lose a sheep. The farmer rewarded me with good food, food from his table. He may have been poor, but he ate well. And his children played with me, when they weren’t in school or working in the field. I had all the love any dog could hope for. When I got old, they got a new dog, and I trained him in the tricks of the trade. He quickly learned, and the farmer brought me into the house to live with the family. I brought the farmer his slippers in the morning, as he was getting old, too. I was dying slowly, a little bit at a time. The farmer knew this and would bring the new dog in to visit me from time to time. The new dog would entertain me with his flips and flops and nuzzles. And then one morning I just didn’t get up. They gave me a fine burial down by the stream under a shade tree. That was the end of my being a dog. Sometimes I miss it so I sit by the window and cry. I live in a high-rise that looks out at a bunch of other high-rises. At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak to anyone all day. This is my reward for being a good dog. The human wolves don’t even see me. They fear me not

  —JAMES TATE | 2002 |

  PET SCAN

  JEROME GROOPMAN

  Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, is awakened each morning around seven by Tess, her purebred Border collie. When I spoke with Ostrander not long ago, a steady cold rain was falling, but the weather had not deterred her and Tess from their morning ritual in a park near her house. Ostrander runs Tess hard for fifteen minutes, and then they play for fifteen minutes, with Ostrander throwing a ball to the far end of a field, and Tess fetching it. Border collies are herding dogs, bred for alertness, focus, and determination. “They like to be kept busy,” Ostrander says. “She needs to burn off her early-morning energy.” They return home, clean off the park mud, and go together to the Hutchinson Center. Ostrander’s laboratory there has all the standard steel and enamel fittings of molecular biology, including high-speed centrifuges, DNA sequencers, and P.C.R. machines. The only clue to her particular specialty comes from the art on the laboratory walls: framed prints and photographs of dogs. Tess nestles into her place on the floor next to Ostrander’s desk. When a visitor enters, Tess gets up and approaches. “She helps keep order in the laboratory,” Ostrander says. “She herds my students and postdocs.”

  A forty-year-old woman with straight brown hair and sharp green eyes, Elaine Ostrander, along with a small network of colleagues and collaborators, is mapping the dog genome. The DNA of dog and that of man are sufficiently alike so that gene maps of inherited canine diseases will help identify the genes for their human counterparts. Moreover, the dog genome promises to help with the search for the genetic basis of behavior. Purebred dogs have distinct temperaments, and with an accurate map the genes that determine their behavior can be identified—telling us what makes, say, Border collies li
ke Tess so attentive, tenacious, and goal-driven. By contrast, cowering huskies and snappish spaniels may hold clues to treating psychiatric disorders in human beings. People and their pets, it turns out, may resemble each other even more than you’d think.

  Dogs, as a species, were created by man. In the standard Darwinian model, natural forces in the wild would have selected for the perpetuation of those genes that favored survival and procreation. But dogs came into being through a process of artificial selection, when human beings, probably around a hundred thousand years ago, began to domesticate gray wolves into Canis familiaris. Man bred these animals to suit his work purposes and to be compatible with his social structures and his social behavior. Canines were trained to serve as hunters, trackers, herders, and sentinels, as well as playmates for children and companions for adults. The lives of man and dog became so closely integrated that we began to breed them for behaviors that were functional surrogates of our own. In the ancient Middle East, where grain was cultivated and livestock was husbanded, people bred dogs that had protective instincts. During the Middle Ages in Europe, many dogs were bred in monasteries, with preference given to traits seen as Christian, such as loyalty, cooperation, and affection. And over the past century man has shaped canine evolution even more systematically, by establishing breeds that meet kennel-club standards.

  The way to select for prized physical and behavioral attributes—the ability to hunt foxes, say, or to guide the blind—is tight inbreeding. A chosen sire is often mated within a closed gene pool, and sometimes within its family: fathers may be paired with daughters, or brothers with sisters. But, although inbreeding of this sort preserves the desired trait, it also brings together dangerous recessive genes, which are normally diluted by mating outside the family. After several generations of inbreeding, valued lines of purebred show and performance dogs frequently develop serious physical ailments and behavioral disorders.

  For a medical geneticist, these problems present an opportunity. Many of the hereditary canine illnesses have close human analogues. But they’re vastly easier to find and study in dogs. Purebred dogs are far more genetically homogeneous than any human population, and that makes it easier to trace and identify recessive genes in them. You can amplify recessive traits by directed breeding, and, since dogs produce many more offspring than people do, it’s easier to study how different disease-linked genes interact. And, of course, research into behavioral genetics has come to rely heavily upon separated-at-birth siblings—a circumstance that is the norm with puppies but not with people.