Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

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.

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.