On the second day, there was an uncomfortable moment when Boris accidentally referred to them as “the prisoners”. Right away, he tried to laugh it off as a joke, but it had obviously been a slip. Technically they aren’t prisoners, they are equipment, like the armoured vehicles and artillery guns we’ve been seizing. But we all know they aren’t just equipment. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d even call them prisoners. A prisoner must on some level acknowledge his imprisonment. These sea pigs acknowledge no such thing. And I think Boris is as afraid of them as I am.
Most of the aquarists at the Institute are Russians like us, so they still come into work despite all the turmoil. But the men in charge of the combat dolphin programme were Ukrainians who took their orders directly from Kiev, so they’ve been refusing to cooperate. We’ve warned them that without their help we can’t vouch for the wellbeing of their trainees. But maybe they don’t care. Maybe we should be grateful they didn’t poison the dolphin pens before they went home. At the beginning of the first world war, the head of the Belgian Pigeon Service burned 2,000 pigeons alive rather than let them fall into German hands. Imagine the smell.
So I’m supervising the dolphins until a specialist can be sent from the Department of Naval Research in Murmansk, which may take weeks. Boris won’t tell me why he stuck me with the job, but I think it’s because I once mentioned that when I was growing up we used to keep goldfish, and because Boris doesn’t like me very much. In this army those are reasons enough. I asked why we couldn’t just reassign them to one of the other departments at the Institute. The turtle guys never look very busy. But apparently these dolphins are classified as top-priority captured armaments. After all, they’ve been trained to fight with knives and guns, to plant bombs on enemy submarines. So there are rules against handing them over to civilians.
Every night I go out to the dolphin pen and turn on the floodlights to make a head count, pressing myself against the wall, keeping as far away from the water’s edge as I can. I’d rather not go out there at all, but I can’t sleep unless I know for certain they’re all still there. I can feel them watching me, biding their time. Dolphins can stay awake for five days at a stretch, like some terrible predator from the collective unconscious. They have 250 teeth, more than any other mammal. They have foot-long retractable penises. I found a video online of a dolphin masturbating with the body of a decapitated eel. I found another one of a dolphin trying to rape a buoy.
One night in 2007, a drunk from Yalta went for a dip off Massandra beach and was mobbed by a pod of dolphins. They tried to drown him, and he was only saved because the coastguard happened to be patrolling nearby. The Interfax report noted that: “Black Sea dolphins lack the reputation of friendliness and love of humans enjoyed by dolphins in wealthy nations.” I don’t agree with the implication that other dolphins are lapdogs of the decadent compared with our flinty subspecies. I believe all dolphins are the same. Monsters.
Everyone’s heard stories – unsubstantiated hippy stories – of dolphins protecting humans from sharks, or pushing them up to the surface when they’re foundering, or leading them back to shore. But we don’t know how many times a dolphin has, on the contrary, looked on implacably as a dying swimmer begged for help, or forced a child’s head underwater with its prehensile tail. I have come to the conclusion that dolphins save some and condemn others. They love to play god. They relish their power over life and death. Of all the mammals they are the most like clever reptiles.
Normally prisoners of war are ordered to keep silent until they’re processed. But we can’t do that with the dolphins. What are they planning? These dolphins have been drilled in warfare. God help us’
And they talk to each other, of course. Normally, prisoners of war are ordered to keep silent until they’re processed, and if they persist in conferring they’re beaten. The dangerous ones are kept isolated. But I can’t do that with our cetacean matériel. What are they planning? These dolphins have been drilled in warfare. God help us. What if they escape and teach the others?
Boris sometimes talks about a Greater Russia stretching from the Great Wall of China to the Carpathian mountains. Sometimes he’ll throw in the Czech Republic, Afghanistan, Tibet just for the hell of it. I don’t dream imperial dreams. But I was proud when we marched into Crimea. Our cause is just. The aquarists I overhear chatting in the canteen are happy to answer to Moscow instead of Kiev. These are Russian people and this is Russian land.
In Moscow there’s a monument to Laika, the mongrel sent into space on Sputnik 2 in 1957. People sometimes put flowers on it. Perhaps those people would say that Laika gave her life for Russia. I don’t believe that an animal can be really said to give its life when it doesn’t even understand that it’s going to die. I don’t see those roasted Belgian pigeons as martyrs. But I do believe that if Laika was loyal to her handlers at the Cosmodrome she was in some sense loyal to her country. An uncomprehending loyalty can still be a patriotic loyalty. Patriots need not dream imperial dreams. They need only follow orders in Russian. That is the test.
Except the test doesn’t apply to these dolphins. They may deign to prance for their trainers, but they’re not Russian or Ukranian, or Varangian for that matter, or Gothic or Hunnic or Scythic. They never have been.
The sea pigs must have realised that there’s been a change of regime here. But it’s impossible to know whether they had any affection for their previous wardens. Perhaps they just tolerated their confinement at the Institute for the free food, the commando training, and the chance to study human behaviour at close quarters. Or perhaps they genuinely miss the Ukrainians and object to the annexation.
Either way, Boris and I don’t feel safe here. When were the pens last maintained? How secure are they, really? If the specialist eventually arrives from Murmansk and finds that the dolphins have visited upon us the kind of baroque violence that would only occur to an alien intellect, he shouldn’t be surprised. We haven’t conquered anything on this coast, because everything was already Russian. Everything was already Russian except the dolphins, and we haven’t conquered them either.
- Ned Beauman is an award-winning author. His third novel, Glow, was published this year by Sceptre.
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