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