“Don’t mess with a yakuza girl.”
Who the f*cking hell do you think I am?
The girl ponders the question she asks. Age X, stranded between eleven and twelve, trapped in this f*cking cold Stone-Age country, Russia. F*cking dicks, f*cking around with me like this.
Are you planning to keep me hostage forever?
What am I, f*cking 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 f*cking hostage, right? You need me.
F*cking 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 F*ck,” 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 f*ck, go to a karaoke place if you want to sing. You creep me out. So that was his name: Opera.
Old F*ck, Old Bag, WO, WT, and Opera. And me.
These were the residents of the Dead Town.
This was how she catalogued them.
And these were the people she observed.
On some level, she was actively engaging with them. But at the same time, she made zero effort to communicate—to convey anything at all, feelings or intentions. She simply put herself in the same spaces and watched their every move. She stared at the five Russians.
And then there were the dogs.
A few dozen dogs, the other residents of this Dead Town unmarked on any map from the time it was built and now forgotten by history.
There was time in her schedule for observing the dogs.
Every day, she watched the old man train them. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon. He was teaching them more advanced techniques now, fighting and attacking, on a field that gradually came to encompass the whole of Dead Town. The dogs moved frequently from place to place, covering an enormous territory, rehearsing their destructive maneuvers; and the girl followed. Rehearsing—yes, because this was only a rehearsal. A dry run for some sort of field day of the dogs, a f*cking preview of the Great Doggie Festival. She understood, more or less, what was happening. That they were practicing. That one day they would take to the streets.
She kept her distance. She always stayed a few yards away, watching. Watching the dogs do their exercises. I don’t go in for this f*cking gym class shit, thanks, I’d rather sit out. Look at these shitheads, f*cking scampering around like maniacs. Woof--woof-woof-woof-woof-woof! Don’t you ever get tired? Actually, the dogs seldom barked. For the most part, they darted off and sprang at their simulated targets in total silence. They’d had it pounded into their heads that this was the way to do it: covert attacks. The old man, their trainer—the Old F*ck—had made this clear. And yet there was such ferocity in their movements that you almost seemed to hear them barking, baying, their voices rich and loud.
If one actually heard a sound, it was more likely to be a gunshot.
The bullets weren’t real, they were blanks. But they accustomed the dogs to the sound.
The dogs no longer regarded the girl as an intruder, no longer growled. Because the old man scolded them that first time. The dogs remembered. And so they kept quiet. A few had barked at her the second time, when she came to watch, to study them, and she herself had told them off.
“Shut the f*ck up,” she said, glaring. “You’re annoying me.”
She stared straight at them as she spoke, and they shut up.
The old man laughed when he saw this.
Upwards of forty dogs would participate in these exercises, learning specialized techniques. Honing their abilities. Seven or eight would take the day off. The old man let them rest before they got too worn out. He took stock of each dog’s condition individually and based his decision on his assessment, though for the most part he followed a fixed order. The dogs he released from training spent the day in their cages.
In the doghouse.
Outside, exposed to the air.
The girl went by the cages too. It was only natural that she incorporated a visit to this area, given over entirely to the dogs’ use, into her daily schedule. Every so often, a new dog would join the ranks. The newcomers tended to be young; they must have been captured outside. The new dogs stayed for some time in the cages with the dogs that had been released from training, all day every day. And there were puppies too. Little dogs, natives of the Dead Town, who had only just been removed from the cage they had shared with their mother, where they had sucked at her teats.
Now the whole litter was kept in a large cage of its own.
During the day, at least, it was theirs.
Only six or seven weeks old, these puppies had not yet learned caution. The girl watched them through the chain-link fence. The first time she saw the little bastards in their cage, she had a thought. There were old dogs here, and little ones. She remembered the old dog that had appeared on the roof and barked at her that time when the Old F*ck spoke in Japanese, “SHE-neh,” drop dead—that dog, she thought, was a senile old f*ck himself. The thing is, she sensed, whether they’re dogs or people, I f*cking hate old f*cks.
“Don’t get any ideas, though,” she told the puppies, speaking through the chain-link fence. “That doesn’t mean I think you’re cute.”
This too, she said in Japanese.
After that, she came every day to grumble outside the puppies’ cage. Objectively speaking, they were adorable. Roly-poly with ears that poked out from their round heads, bodies covered with light, soft hair. That wasn’t how the girl saw it. “Morons. Idiots. F*ckheads. F*cking little doggie-shits,” she said. She twined her fingers around the chain-link fence. “Look at you. So f*cking tame. Some f*ck feeds you and you’re his.” Each puppy had a tag. She couldn’t read the names, of course, because they were written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but she could read the numbers. Arabic numerals were okay: 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, and then 113, 114. Seven in all. As far as she was concerned the numbers might as well have been names, and so she added them to her list.
She recognized the puppies through the numbers they had been assigned.
This, in part, was what allowed her to focus so intently on them. This, in part, was why she sometimes looked so enchanted as she stood before their cage. Though at the same time, there was something in the unpredictability of their actions that fascinated her, kept her from getting tired of standing there looking.
So she went on visiting the cage, grumbling to the puppies.
“Look at you, tripping like that,” she said. “Can’t even walk right.”
“Little doggie-shits, f*cking gnawing on each other,” she said.
“Think you’re so grown up, huh?” she said. “F*cking think again.”
“A*sholes,” she said.
There was something good about this part of her schedule. She felt better.
One day, she decided to see how dumb the puppies were. She searched the kitchen and the stores of dog food. She knew what they were fed. Obviously. I watch the Old Bag preparing the shit. She had a hypothesis she wanted to test. “All people have to do is feed you and you’re theirs, right? You f*cks. Yeah, I’m talking to you Forty-four. And Forty-five, Forty-six, Forty-seven, Forty-eight, One hundred thirteen, and One hundred fourteen, all of you. F*ckers. I bet you’ll let me feed you too.”
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 f*cking tails. F*cking morons. F*cking 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 f*cking strong. You seem to like it though, huh? Sure looks that way. But not me…f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*ck do you make jam anyway? What season? Before winter? This is f*cking Russia, though. It’s f*cking endless winter here.
There are no seasons, a*shole. 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 f*cking pain in the ass. What the f*ck would she do once she was out? Gather f*cking 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 f*cking pistol at me. You f*cking a*shole, dicking around with me. I’m used to this kind of shit, you know. Even more than the dogs. You think a f*cking 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 f*cking making fun of me? Don’t try to f*cking make me wear little kid’s clothes. Those jeans I just tossed aren’t for f*cking middle class losers, you know. Those were Gucci. Those were brand-name jeans, you a*sholes. That’s why I kept wearing them, even if I never washed them. Those were my favorite f*cking jeans. F*cking 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. F*cking a*shole, after all the time I spent taming them, now that I’ve finally succeeded, you drag the f*ckers out to train them? Don’t f*cking steal them. Don’t f*cking 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 f*cking showered them with Japanese, f*cking shit-ass Japanese. And now the Old F*ck is teaching the little doggie-shits Russian. What’s the f*cking 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 F*ck’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 f*cking doing, a*sholes. 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 F*ck 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 f*cking 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 a*shole!
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 little 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 F*ck, 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.
The rest of the meal was like any other. A salad with beets in it, cold kidney beans, borscht, some sort of sour bread.
Already her routine was disrupted. After dinner, the girl left the building. This was the first time since her arrival that she had been out after dark. She headed straight for the area with the kennels. She had no trouble finding her way. She carried something in her hand: the remains of a mutton rib roast that she had walked off with without even trying to hide what she was doing, as the old lady watched, while she was cleaning up the kitchen and getting things ready for the following day. The girl had taken what was left after the meat was carved, the extras.
She came to the puppies’ cage.
The seven puppies welcomed her, yelping. One was half asleep, but the smell of the meat woke it up. In the other cages, the adult dogs began making noise as well, attracted by the odor. The girl ignored them, gave all the meat to the puppies.
The mutton rib roast.
She waited for her eyes to get completely used to the dark. She didn’t have a flashlight, of course. She waited until she could recognize the puppies gathered around the roast.
“Hey,” she said. In Japanese, as always. “That’s mutton. I told you before, right? When you gnaw on mutton, your body gets hot. So how the f*ck is it, huh? That’s why I brought it.”
The girl rested her hands on the cage door. A rectangle of iron pipes covered with chain-link. The lock was just a latch. All that mattered was that the dogs couldn’t open it and run out. The girl raised the latch. She stepped into the cage, gingerly scooped up one of the puppies. She cradled number 47 in her arms.
“Hey, f*cker. Come keep me warm,” she said.
Number 47 didn’t struggle.
“You’re okay coming to my room? Being my heater?”
Number 47 didn’t struggle.
That night, the bed in the girl’s cell became a double bed for one girl and one puppy. Her cell was now a cell for two. She hugged number 47 tightly in the narrow bed, five feet wide at most, petting him roughly but with profound emotion. She couldn’t have put her feelings into words. Number 47 didn’t struggle. Far from it, he jumped at her. Burrowed under her squishy stomach.
One girl and one dog slept.
Nice and warm.
She got up right away when she woke the next morning. Already her new routine had been established. The old schedule had fallen apart, she knew that. Everything was just beginning. Something was just beginning. She was no longer the invisible girl, and she no longer had to observe the Old F*ck, the Old Bag, WO, WT, and Opera. She had realized that they were, in fact, observing her. And so…what?
She, along with her dogs, would find a third position.
Making adjustments along the way.
So she got up the next morning and went outside with number 47. They went to the bathroom. It was a good thirty feet away from the building, and she went there every morning to wash her face. She peed, as she always did. Number 47 found a place to pee too. After that, they headed over to the kennels. This time the girl didn’t pick number 47 up; she let him walk, and they made their way together toward the cages. They stopped before the puppies’ cage. Number 47’s siblings looked out, puzzled, through the chain-link fence. WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT THERE? they asked number 47. “I picked him,” the girl said. “He’s the one I chose.” YOU DID? the six puppies asked. “He’s my guard, this guy. Forty-seven,” the girl said. Number 47 confirmed her statement with a silent yelp. SO THAT’S WHY YOU WEREN’T AROUND LAST NIGHT? IS THAT TRUE, BROTHER? the six puppies asked. “Listen to me. He’s going to stay here in the cage with you in the morning and during the day and stuff. I’ll bring Forty-seven back every morning. He’ll stay here and play with you, and he’ll train with you too. You got that? So I’m telling you, don’t you f*cking ignore him. You do that, and I’ll f*cking kick the shit out of you. I’ll get a bat and I’ll f*cking pulverize you. I mean it. Because he’s going to be my guard…” The girl turned to number 47. “I’m gonna make you top dog, you hear? I’m gonna turn you into a real f*cking dog. You got that, Forty-seven? You hear what I’m saying? But when you’re with the other dogs, you’ll just be a dog. A little doggie-shit. That’s how you’re gonna live.”
Live, the girl said.
Number 47, standing right next to her, replied with a silent yelp.
And the girl returned him to the cage.
His six siblings obediently welcomed him back. Though they did sniff him.
That morning, number 47 ate the same dog food he always had. And the girl ate the breakfast the old lady prepared. Number 47 devoured the “Russian dog food” that WO and WT left in the cage, while the girl had rye bread and some sort of sour drink. Already the new routine had begun. The girl struck a dauntless figure at the breakfast table. No more watching for her, no more being watched. If you want to try, go the f*ck ahead. Her attitude made it clear she wouldn’t take questions from anyone at the table.
Number 47 frolicked all morning with his siblings in the large cage. Playing at fighting, at attacking. Running around. Rolling on the ground.
The girl stood before the cage as usual, observing them.
Everything was okay. She could feel it.
Lunchtime.
The afternoon. The girl joined in the training. She made it clear she was participating. This, above all, was the core of her new routine. The test period had essentially ended now, and the puppies were being given the early training appropriate for dogs in their first four months. They did their best to learn the basics. The girl was right there on the grounds with the old man and Opera. She didn’t interfere. She did, however, help number 47 learn his lessons. She made sure he didn’t slack off, came up with little tricks to keep him from losing interest, taught him commands: Good, no, roll left, roll right.
The commands were in Russian.
The girl was now making a conscious effort to learn the Russian words.
The puppies’ training didn’t last very long.
After an hour or two, they were put back in their cage.
I guess the Old F*ck doesn’t want to wear them out, the girl thought.
“Are you tired?” the girl asked number 47.
The dog looked fine. But she let him rest. Him and the other puppies, his siblings.
That was the right thing to do. She could feel it.
That night, she took number 47 out of the cage again. To have him sleep with her in her room. One person and one dog, bonding, enveloped in each other’s warmth. “Tired?” she asked him again. I’M BEAT, the dog said—not in words, of course, but with his body—and buried himself in the folds of her flesh, the odd fatness that was hers and no one else’s.
At night, the dog was not a dog.
At night, the girl was no longer just a human girl.
The dog and the girl became, here in the Dead Town, a third being.
And stayed that way until morning.
Morning came. Once again, the girl repeated the new routine. Making adjustments as she went along. Essentially, though, the content stayed the same. The essential elements remained unchanged. The girl had planned her schedule well. On the first day, the first morning, she had set it all out in her mind. Now she just had to push ahead, uncompromising, and make it happen. Night fell. Morning came. Night fell. Morning came. Days passed, some number of days passed, untallied. The girl, X years old, never counted them.
During the day, number 47 recognized the girl as his master. He obeyed her commands unfailingly. The girl could now control his moods, stirring him to excitement or bringing him to his senses. She had the words to do that. She had mastered the Russian she needed to issue her commands. Though she had made no particular effort to encourage number 47’s six siblings to respond to her orders on the grounds, they did. The puppies were now large enough to be considered adolescent and were on their way to becoming young dogs. One day, the old man stood and watched the girl for some time. He tracked her movements as she skillfully handled the dogs, number 47 and his six siblings. It was clear: she was their master.
What are you looking at? the girl asked.
You’re doing great, the old man said.
Don’t you dare take number 47 from me, the girl said.
Some little girl you are, the old man said. You’re a trainer already.
Just you try and take him, the girl said. I’ll f*cking kill you.
Or maybe you’re a dog? Is that it? the old man asked.
“Anyway, you Old F*ck, it’s you’re fault—you and the Old Bag. F*cking shooting at me and shit. With a f*cking pistol…scared the shit out of me. So this is f*cking self-defense. You hear me, a*shole? I’m gonna train number 47 to be my guard. Just you try and f*ck with me again, see what happens. I’ll f*cking sic him on you.”
Is that it? Are you a dog too? the old man asked again in Russian. He cocked his head. Are you, is it possible…her?
Self-defense. The girl’s own dog, dedicated to her protection. Hovering nearby, ready to be of assistance. Night fell. Morning came. Night fell. Morning came. The young number 47 acquired a new technique—to attack a person in silence. Without barking, darting out from behind a building, for instance, in a flash—the power to kill in a second, noiselessly. Still he had learned only the very basics. He had to be faster, had to use all five senses for the purpose for which they were meant. To attack. All the while, he watched the other dogs putting their knowledge to use. He was there on the grounds, a young dog, looking on as the adults practiced what they had learned. Subversive activities. He was there, observing. Always. Night fell. Morning came. Slight adjustments were made in the routine. One day, one afternoon after the young dogs had finished their training, number 47’s siblings were taken back to their cage but number 47 was not. A person and a dog, “off duty,” as it were. It was like an outgrowth of the night. The girl took number 47 with her as she traipsed through the Dead Town, now a stage for simulated bouts of street fighting. They ran together through a white, four-story building. Climbed the stairs. Ran back down. Up. Down. They climbed to the top of a tall observation tower. A person and a dog, looking down over the Dead Town. Hey, number 47, the girl said, as she gazed out over the landscape. Sometime…someday, we’re going to kill the world. Number 47 stood perfectly still, listening to the girl’s voice. To her muttering in Japanese. These words weren’t Russian, they weren’t commands. A person and a dog went back down. On the paved road, number 47 scrambled up alone onto the roof of a burnt-out car. He hadn’t yet learned to jump a moving car. To spring toward it as it approached, to leap over it, spring onto the hood—it was too early for that. But he could imitate the others. He knew to watch the adult dogs, engaged in their subversive activities, and he could grasp the essence of what they were doing, instantly. He could copy them.
Eventually, a young dog grows up.
Eventually, number 47 would mature.
One day, while they were off duty, the girl found herself in a room. A room in one of the other buildings, not the one that served as their base, where she had her bedroom and where the kitchen and the dining room were—a different building. She had known about this place, she knew the old man and Opera were always going in and out of it. But it didn’t interest her. She assumed it was just a place for storing the paraphernalia they used to train the dogs. And in fact it was. But that wasn’t all it was. There was more than one room in there. More than one kind of room.
Number 47 was the first to become curious. He had caught some sort of scent, and it had led him to the door. The sound of singing came from inside. As the voice echoed off the concrete walls, it acquired a sort of vibrato. Opera. The melody was catchy. The girl, however, found it as eerie as ever. Loouu, loooouuuuoo! Looooouuuuuuoo! Number 47 ignored the singing. He kept sniffing the ground, the lingering traces of whatever it had been. “I thought they just kept their shit in here. Is there something else?” the girl asked. “Hey, Forty-seven, have other dogs come by here? Is that it?”
Not just people? she asked in Japanese. Dogs too?
Number 47 answered in dogspeech: ANOTHER DOG HAS BEEN HERE.
“It smells like a f*cking dead Hawaii in here,” the girl muttered as she stepped through the door into the building. Of course, this was Russia—that made sense. An eternal summer killed forever. Actually, it smelled like a locker room. The smell called up a memory of the time before she turned X years old. F*cking shit…now I’ve got those f*cking moneyless a*sholes in my head, the f*cking world.…Shit. A person and a dog, off duty, striding rapidly through the dim interior. The building was laid out along the same pattern as the one they used as their base, so there was no fear of getting lost. She went into the main hall.
The room was at the end of the hall. And now here she was, inside it.
It’s like a yakuza office, one of the branches. The thought hit her immediately. And then she was putting it into words, muttering to herself. It reminded her of the wide-open office her dad’s organization rented, one whole floor of a building shared by various other companies and groups. Only this place had none of the bold, forceful calligraphy hanging on the walls, characters reading “Spirit” and “Kill One to Save Many” and that sort of shit. Instead, there was a map. A really, really old map of the world. Her dad’s office had a little Shinto shrine on one wall, up close to the ceiling, but there was nothing like that here. No Russian Orthodox icons. Instead, there was a television. The first television she had seen in the Dead Town. It wasn’t on. The screen was blank. Of course, there was no one in the room. And yet, somehow, she felt something. A strong sense of something. “I bet there’s a f*cking dead body under the floor or something. Can you smell it, Forty-seven?” The dog didn’t answer. The sound of Opera singing echoed down the corridor at the other end of the main hall. As it had before. There was no leather sofa like the one in her dad’s office, but there was a table and some seats. There was a mound of money on the table. Rows and rows of bundled banknotes that seemed, at first sight, to be neatly stacked but weren’t really. No rubles as far as she could see. Look at all this cash, the girl thought, glancing it over. That’s f*cking American money, isn’t it? Dollars or whatever?
Yeah, she thought. It is like Dad’s office after all.
Just then, she caught sight of a shrine. Something, at any rate, that felt like a shrine in the context of this room. There were no paper lanterns, and there was no Japanese sword resting on its stands, but it had the same aura. That was it. The source of whatever it was she was feeling. The globe.
It was on a shelf. Displayed. Set out to be seen, regarded. Revered.
That, the girl sensed, was the most important thing in the room.
She knew it right away.
So she went to take it in her hands.
She walked around the table, reached out. She picked it up. She had expected it to be fairly heavy, but it was surprisingly light. It felt like metal, though. It felt old. She had assumed it would be hollow like other globes, but it didn’t seem to be. She turned it in her palms. Rotated the earth. It was bigger than her head.
She sensed it. This isn’t empty.
She sensed it. There’s something here.
She sensed it. Something alive.
But what?
Is it…inside?
She turned it in her palms, looking for a seam. The northern and southern hemispheres looked like they might crack apart. That was the line. Ever so carefully, she opened it. And out it came. Bone. An animal’s skull. It looked like it had been burned…bits of skin or something clinging to it, hanging. Skin like a mummy’s, desiccated.
…what the hell?
Are you kidding me?
Number 47 was trying to communicate something. Trying to tell her something. It had nothing to do, however, with the skull in the globe. He was trying to draw her attention to the figure now standing in the doorway. No, not the figure—the figures. Like the girl and number 47, they were two: a person and a dog.
A person and a dog, both old.
At number 47’s urging, the girl turned around.
“You have opened the coffin, have you?” the old man said.
“What…the hell?” the girl said.
“You wanted to hold it? Is that it, girl?”
The dog standing beside the old man was very old. The girl remembered him, of course—she had seen him before. He was fairly large, stately. This was the same dog that had barked down at her once before, from the roof.
“You wanted to touch the very first dog?” the old man said in Russian. Then, “But it is not Belka, you know.”
“I didn’t break it,” the girl said in Japanese. “I just opened it.” Then, suddenly realizing what was inside, she continued. “F*ck, you a*shole, keeping a f*cking creepy skull like this, hidden in this thing. What is it…a f*cking dog? Is that what this is, you Old F*ck?”
“That is the first great Soviet hero. A dog who did not make it back to the earth alive. Those are her remains. That is not Belka.”
“What the f*ck are you saying?” the girl asked.
The old man pointed to the old dog beside him. He looked the girl in the eye.
“This is Belka,” he said.
“It’s a dog, isn’t it…a f*cking dog’s skull.”
“You understand, little girl? He is the one dog I did not kill, the year before the Soviet Union, the Homeland, disappeared. I let him go. This Belka. I could not bear to destroy the bloodline I helped to create with my own hands. And yet that was what they ordered me to do.”
“Why do you have a dog’s skull in a shrine? Like some dog religion…”
“That was what Russia ordered me to do. Russian history. I betrayed history. I entrusted this Belka to her, the woman who looks after you, your nurse. I wanted to let him live out his life, nothing more. I had no intention of reviving his line. I did not. I had retired. I was serious about my retirement.”
The old man advanced two or three steps into the room.
This time he pointed down at number 47.
The girl stepped closer to her dog, as if to protect him. Without thinking about what she was doing, she lifted the skull up and rested it on her head.
She was holding it in both hands. Over her head.
“See,” the girl said. “Kind of spiritual, right? Kind of religious?”
“Very amusing.” The old man chuckled.
Number 47 sat like a good dog.
“You are going to put that on, are you?” the old man said in Russian.
“What were you saying about Forty-seven?” the girl shot back in Japanese.
“As it happens, number forty-seven is the child of this Belka. Is that not right, old boy?”
The old man turned to look at Belka. The old dog barked in reply.
“He is old, but he still had what it took, luckily. We made it just in time.”
“Forty-seven is related to that old shit? Is that it?”
“I have the feeling we are getting through to each other. You understand me, little girl? You, with the skull of that great dog over your head, like a dog-clan shaman. Do you understand what I am saying? Seven puppies were born. A new generation. One of them will be our Belka. Or Strelka, if it is a bitch. That will be the name of the leader. Once they graduate from number to name. And number forty-seven may be the one, the next Belka, it looks to me. The possibility is there. There is a good chance.”
“He does look like him, come to think of it. Are you saying that old shit is his dad?”
“He is Belka,” the old man said, nodding at the old dog, to the girl.
And right away, the girl replied, “BEL-kah.”
“That is right. And you know what? I had a feeling. In this new litter there is no bitch who is fit to be the next Strelka. Number forty-seven might be the next Belka, but there is no Strelka—not, at any rate, among the dogs. None of them will take that name. And you know why not? Because—” For the third time he pointed, this time at the girl. “Because I am giving that name to you.”
Hey, dick, the girl, X years old, barked. She glared at the old man. Don’t f*cking point your finger at me.
“Because you are Strelka,” the old man said, chuckling.
He had given the girl a dog name.