But tell me, dogs, you other dogs—what has become of you?
Three other dogs ended up in the communist sphere. Jubilee, News News (known as E Venture), and Ogre were captured on the Korean Peninsula by the People’s Liberation Army. The pure German shepherds changed their nationality. In 1953, the situation was totally different. Truman was no longer president of the United States. Stalin, former general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had died of a brain hemorrhage on March 5. The two men no longer had a personal relationship. In the confusion that accompanied the UN forces’ retreat, these three dogs were left behind on the “other side” of the 38th parallel. They would never return. An armistice was signed in July, but the dogs were not handed over like other prisoners.
Come 1956, all three dogs were still among the dogs of the People’s Liberation Army War Dog Battalion. The two males, News News (E Venture) and Ogre, had been castrated; the bitch, Jubilee, remained as she had been born. She had not yet given birth.
And what of the capitalist sphere?
Two lines of dogs lived in its center, on the American mainland.
Sumer and Ice.
“What, are those fucking dog names?”
It’s winter, the girl muttered, winter winter winter winter. Over and over again, ferociously annoyed. Once more. In Japanese, monotonal. How could she not be annoyed? She flung herself down on the narrow bed, not even fifty centimeters wide, and screamed. She noticed a coat lying on the floor. Look at that fucking dipshit coat, she hissed, the kind of thing middle-class fucks wear, fucking assholes! If you’re gonna kidnap someone, treat ’em a bit fucking better, fucking dicks. Gimme Louis Vuitton!
Her shouting drew no response.
Winter winter, the girl repeated, winter winter winter.
Fucking cold.
Her once carefully arranged hair was a mess. Not having a blow dryer had been one of the first things to piss her off. Fucking Russia, it’s like the fucking Stone Age. Forget blow dryers, there wasn’t even a bath! They’d ordered her into some fucked-up little hut full of steam a few times, but that was it. The girl was not familiar with saunas. She assumed it was some kind of torture.
Fucking assholes, dicking around with me.
The girl hadn’t lost any weight. She remained as fat as ever, radiating a sense of precarious imbalance in every direction. She bellowed some more. In Japanese. They never understood, not a word. She knew they wouldn’t understand her now either.
She turned to the window. There had been a blizzard in the morning, but by now the snow had largely stopped. Fine flakes pirouetted through the air. An image of a decadent, delicious dessert rose up in her mind’s eye, then fizzled. Something light, sweet, melting… Gone. What the fuckity fuck had she been thinking of, anyway? This was intolerable. Just wait. She would crush those assholes.
She was on the second floor. Outside, a vista of white extended off into the distance, directly in front of the building, and to the right and left. That was all there was, in other words. Just the ground. The grounds. Exercise grounds. How did she know? Because they exercised there. They were born to exercise. Even when it snowed, in the midst of a blizzard. They hadn’t started barking yet this morning.
This place was huge. There was a whole town inside, if a small one. Closed in. Concrete walls separated the inside from whatever lay outside. Beyond the walls, all sorts of enormous structures massed together. Inside, in the corner, a stand of dead trees.
The town was out there somewhere, to the right. Several white buildings, a very tall observation tower, a paved road pockmarked with holes. The depressions were filled with snow. At the end of the road, way down, past even the concrete wall that marked the compound’s boundary, was a small clearing. There, in that direction only.
The town looked dead, shrouded in snow. To her eyes, at least.
It was being engulfed on three sides, it seemed, by the taiga.
At the same time, the sight of that concrete wall shutting out whatever was beyond it called to mind a familiar word. That land out there, excluded, was shaba. The outside world, the world where the ordinary fucks lived—or, from the perspective of an unlucky member of the gang, the world past the prison walls. And here she was, doing time. Prison, that was the closest thing to this fucked-up “dead town.” She could feel it in her skin.
That was as much as she knew. Maybe they had explained the situation to her, but if they had, they’d done it in Russian. It meant nothing. Fucking assholes, fucking around, she muttered at least twenty times a day. Fucking Russia, it’s always always ALWAYS winter here, for like a million fucking years or a billion years or something this fucking cold.
Still cursing monotonally, the girl moved to the room with the fireplace.
She could move about freely inside the building. The door to her bedroom wasn’t locked. There was no chain shutting her in. No iron balls chained to her legs. This freedom pissed her off too. Obviously they didn’t take her seriously. But what was she supposed to do? Break out?
Fucking pain in the ass.
She went down to the first floor. She had more or less gotten a handle on the layout of the building. The others were probably pretty similar. They looked like dorms, capable of housing dozens at once. Dorms for stupid fucks who spent their days doing nothing but exercise. Her instincts weren’t far off. She wasn’t entirely right, but she wasn’t far off. The Dead Town had been created in the 1950s, and until 1991 it had been known by a number. It was one of many such towns whose presence was never marked on any map. One of any number of such spaces that served as bases or military cities. Not only were people outside the party and the military rarely allowed into these areas, but also ordinary people—ordinary Soviets—didn’t even know they existed. That held even for the residents of nearby cities. They were kept secret, and they stayed that way for almost forty years.
Until they lost their strategic value and were abandoned.
The girl was living in the barracks.
The old man who had kidnapped her had always known about this Dead Town. This town whose location, even now, was not marked on maps.
The old man lived in the Dead Town with the girl. It wasn’t clear whether or not he lived in the same building, but they often sat down together to eat. Perhaps once a week, he came to her room with a video camera. He filmed her. The tape would be used, no doubt, as proof that the hostage was alive and well. This was part of the extortion. Every time the old man turned the camera on the girl, she would spit out, “Hurry up and fucking save me, old man.” “What the fuck’s taking so long, you senile dick.” “So you gotta give ’em a million. I’m worth it, right? Fucking rob the bank if you have to. You’re a yakuza, right?”
Fucking asshole, fucking around like this. Save your princess.
At the end, after the old man had finished his filming, he always talked to her. For instance, he might say: Japanese “soldiers” are killing Russians, everyone is talking about it.
In Russian, of course.
Seems like your dad really loves you, he says.
Whatever… there’s more money in it if you stay here.
The filming took place once a week or so, probably. She wasn’t exactly counting the days. She never thought she’d be here this long. So after her fourth or fifth day as a hostage, she stopped paying attention—who cared whether it was the fourth or fifth, or even the third day, it didn’t fucking matter. Later on, she came to find this infuriating. Because she had no way of knowing when her birthday came. She was pretty sure she must be twelve by now, but maybe not. She probably wasn’t eleven anymore, but maybe she was. Or maybe… she was neither?