“Don’t mess with a yakuza girl.”
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.
Old Fuck, 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 fucking 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 fucking gym class shit, thanks, I’d rather sit out. Look at these shitheads, fucking 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 Fuck—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 fuck 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 Fuck spoke in Japanese, “SHE-neh,” drop dead—that dog, she thought, was a senile old fuck himself. The thing is, she sensed, whether they’re dogs or people, I fucking hate old fucks.
“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. Fuckheads. Fucking little doggie-shits,” she said. She twined her fingers around the chain-link fence. “Look at you. So fucking tame. Some fuck 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.