A Song for Laika

A while ago, as we stood outside the terrace of a bar in Madrid, a friend asked me suddenly: out of all of God’s creatures who ever lived or walked this earth, which do you pity most? My answer, spoken over an overpriced cocktail, ice-cubes melting in the dry Spanish night, was a Russian mongrel terrier. Her name was Laika, and I was not lying. Scoff at me all you like (he certainly did) but I will not budge. My heart goes out to the sad creature plucked from the streets of Moscow and sent to a cold grave in a steel coffin, tracing lazy circles around the globe.

I have seen the postcards, cartoons, the granulated photographs. A little white-and-brown face, ears bent at the tips like the folded corners of a book’s pages. Her head, cocked with an air of playful inquisitiveness, mouth hanging open, moments before she was sent to die, alone and scared. Barely clinging to the memory of the human touch she had dreamed of, in fitful snatches, as she rooted through greasy dustbins on Muscovite streets speckled with frost.

How proud she looked, unsung canine hero that paved the way for us shambling apes to plant our flagpoles on lunar sand and tighten a girdle around the cosmos.

What a sin for us to live with, that we watched as man’s best friend lay belly-up before our path to please us, then pressed our boots upon her furry stomach to step towards the heavens. Yet even then, she would have still trotted at our heels, tail vibrating, wet nose nudging at our thighs. Staring with round, black marbles, portals to love, unconditional and infinite, that we do not know how to understand, or how to give.

No number of statues cast in bronze and emblazoned with trite slogans can do you justice. For all its shining pallor as it strikes the sun, metal does not have a heart as bright as the one (barely the size of a hand) that beat within your breast as solitary days with nothing but hunger for company gave way to a world of engineers, doctors and cosmonauts fussing over your every move. Showering you with precious names, so unlike the curses and kicks a street-dog would learn. Mutt and beast became Kudryavka, meaning ‘little curly,’ for your snail-shell tail, Zhuchka: ‘little bug’, squashed by human indifference. So many new friends! A world of play and touch as alien to you as the distant suns where you would pass your final moments. As rough and calloused hands stroked your fur, I wonder if you felt safe for once. If you stored beneath your fragile, shaggy chest, a kernel of affection to keep you warm.

A scientist took you to his home, to be with his children, as the clock shaved away the minutes before your life was snuffed out. Scampering to and fro, barking with excitement to the squeals and giggles of little ones that showered you with kisses, rolling on the floor and squirming, legs kicking in satisfaction as stubby fingers scratched away your itches. Curling up, nose pressed against the scent of a family and a home, rocked to sleep by the slow rise and fall of a human’s lap as he breathed.

A brief memory of what should have been, before the terror of tight, sharp metal confines and the bellowing of rocket fuel. The engines, screeching whirlwind of pure fear, overpowering every animal instinct with their heaving, juddering, rattling steel. Belching out their bitter kerosene, hurtling you away from the figures you had worshipped with the tenderness of paw-prints scratching at a trouser-leg, into the lifeless waste.

I can see your breath fogging the grimy windows of your shuttle, as you saw what no other being before you ever had. Could you have possibly understood that the sapphire marble, speckled with shards of green, was not a tennis ball lying out of reach for you to gnaw at?

I set the scene: by the light of the sun, within a silver capsule floating before the threshold of eternity, a four-legged friend watches. In her inkwell eyes she holds galaxies. She waits for when she will be let out of this tight, wintry box. Fitfully, her tail drums a beat against the iron walls, impatient for when she will return to hugs and praise and food. She sounds off one or two barks, calling out names known only to her. The answer is a mindless hum from the shuttle. Her pleas fade into echoes, choked in the satin sheets of space.

With a low, whine of confusion, she slumps on the floor, a tired sigh puffing from her coal-black button nose.

For the first time in aeons, the crackling quasars and solar winds are underscored by soft yelps and twitches as she chases sticks in her sleep. The dance of meteorites and stardust stops for a second, interrupted by the lapping of a pink tongue washing fur. The street-mutt does not know it. Could not know it.

She is the loneliest creature in the Universe.

In a better world, she would not have perished. I smile to myself as I daydream of the surface of the moon, a wreck bearing the faded letters CCCP nestled in a lunar crater. There, a little figure in a clunky spacesuit, glass dome on her head already misted over as she pants, sprints and jumps. She strides, mammoth leaps free from the confines of gravity, tongue flapping as she runs after the rabbit of Chang’e. The rings of Saturn are marked with pawprints as she chases her tail in an endless circle, and she sniffs the dusty trails of comets that remind her of the snow back home.

Call it childish fantasies, mock their lack of substance. Better to dream of this, than think on the last moments of the world’s finest canine cosmonaut as she struggled to breathe. Her vision blackening as precious air ran out, the shuttle collapsing, shrieking like a fallen angel, plummeting back to Earth. Turning cherry-red then blinding white in the hellish furnace of re-entry, five measly kilograms of life scorched to ash, scattered to dot the rapids of the Milky Way. The wreck of the shuttle dissolving into a dart of light, until it is but another flaming trace in the sky to make a wish upon.

When I hear the howls of your compatriots as they turn their snouts to the sky, I think they sing a song for you, Laika. A yowling cry in honour of the stray that sailed the winds of space. Their eulogy will keep you company, the way we never could.

I step away from my desk as I write this, and leave my computer screen to pulsate, beckoning back to finish this tale. A pinned-up picture of my West Highland Terrier catches my eye, her face straining to break out of the photograph and onto my chest in a wet, snuffling heap. She would lick away my tears, salty treats brushed away by a sandpaper tongue. Laika, no-one was there to wipe away yours.

It is 10:30 in the evening and night has snuck up on me outside the streets of Edinburgh. I look outside my window, ignoring the neon logo of a convenience store and the orange fuzz of streetlamps. Above Arthur’s Seat, a golden streak arcs across the heavens.

In my mind’s eye, a shooting star becomes a dog, running into the waiting arms of her master.

The End

-First draft originally published at Student Journalism | The Broad Online | Edinburgh