The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  They ate their breakfast in silence and, as always, Lev Davidovich gave Maya some pieces of the soft part of the bread smeared with the rancid butter they were given. Later, Natalia Sedova would confess to him that at that moment, she had seen in his eyes, for the first time since they met, the dark flash of resignation, a frame of mind so removed from his attitude of a year before when, upon trying to deport him from Moscow, it had taken four men to drag him to the train station as he continued to scream and curse the faces of the Grave Diggers of the Revolution.

  Followed by his dog, Lev Davidovich returned to the bedroom, where he had already begun to prepare the boxes in which he would place those papers that were all that remained of his belongings, but that were worth as much as or more to him than his life: essays, proclamations, military reports, and peace treaties that changed the fate of the world, but above all, hundreds, thousands of letters signed by Lenin, Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, and so many other Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, revolutionary Socialists among whom he had lived and fought ever since, while still an adolescent, founding the romantic South Russian Workers’ Union, with the outlandish idea of overthrowing the Czar.

  The certainty of defeat pressed on his chest, as if a horse’s hoof were crushing him and asphyxiating him. So he picked up his boot covers and his felt galoshes and took them to the dining room, where Liova was organizing files, and began to put his shoes on, to the young man’s surprise, who asked him what he had in mind. Without answering him, he took the scarves hanging behind the door and, followed by his dog, went out into the wind, the snow, and the grayness of the morning. The storm, unleashed two days earlier, did not seem to have any intention of abating; and upon entering it, he felt how his body and his soul sank in the ice, while the air hurt the skin on his face. He took a few steps toward the street from which he could make out the foothills of the Tien Shan mountains, and it was as if he had hugged the white cloud until he melted into it. He whistled, demanding Maya’s presence, and was relieved when the dog approached him. Resting his hand on the animal’s head, he noticed how the snow began to cover him. If he remained there ten or fifteen minutes, he would turn into a frozen mass and his heart would stop, despite the coats. It could be a good solution, he thought. But if my henchmen won’t kill me yet, he told himself, I won’t do their work for them. Guided by Maya, he walked the few feet back to the cabin: Lev Davidovich knew that as long as he had life left in him, he still had bullets to shoot as well.

  Natalia Sedova, Lev Sedov, and Lev Davidovich had sat down to drink one last tea as they waited for the police escort that would conduct them into exile. In the bedroom, the boxes of papers were ready, following a first sorting out in which they had put aside dozens of books that were considered dispensable. Early in the morning, one of the police picked up the discarded books and had barely taken them out of the cabin when he set fire to them after pouring gasoline on them.

  Dreitser arrived around eleven. As usual, he entered without knocking and told them the trip would be postponed. Natalia Sedova, ever concerned with practical matters, asked him why he thought the storm would abate the following day. The head of the guards explained that he had just received the weather report but, above all, he knew because he could smell it in the air. It was then that Dreitser, once again in need of projecting his power, said that Maya the dog could not travel with them.

  The Exile’s reaction was so violent that it surprised the policeman: Maya was part of his family and was going with him or no one was going. Dreitser reminded him that he wasn’t in any position to issue orders or threats, and Lev Davidovich agreed, but he reminded him that he could still do something crazy that would end the guard’s career and send him back to Siberia—not to his hometown, but to one of those work camps that his boss in the GPU directed. When he observed the immediate effect of his words, Lev Davidovich understood that that man was under great pressure and decided to finish this game without showing any more cards: How was it possible that a Siberian could ask him to abandon a Russian wolfhound? And he lamented that Dreitser had never seen Maya hunt foxes in the frozen tundra. The policeman, slipping out the door, tried to demonstrate that he still had power: they could take the animal, but they would be responsible for cleaning up her shit.

  Dreitser’s Siberian sense of smell would be as wrong as the meteorologists’ predictions, and the storm under which they left Alma-Ata, far from abating, grew as the bus moved through the steppe. In the afternoon (he knew it was afternoon only because the clocks indicated so), when they reached the village of Koshmanbet, he confirmed that they had spent seven hours to cover twenty miles of flat road under the ice.

  The following day, heading over the frozen track, the bus managed to reach the mountain post of Kurdai, but the attempt to use a tractor to move the seven-car caravan in which they would all travel from that point on was useless and inhumane: seven members of the police escort froze to death along with a notable number of horses. Then Dreitser opted for the sleighs on which they would glide for two more days, until Pishpek was in sight, on flat roads again, where they got into cars.

  Frunze, with its mosques and aroma of goat fat escaping from the chimneys, seemed like a saving oasis to the deporters and the deported alike. For the first time since leaving Alma-Ata, they were able to bathe and sleep in beds, and be relieved of the foul-smelling coats whose weight practically prevented them from walking. Confirming that in misery every detail is a luxury, Lev Davidovich even had the opportunity to taste a fragrant Turkish coffee, which he drank until he felt his heart speed up.

  That night, before they went to bed, the soldier Igor Dreitser sat down to drink coffee with the Trotskys and inform them that his mission at the head of the guards ended there. Many weeks of cohabitation with the sour-faced Siberian had turned him into a habitual presence, so at the moment of his departure Lev Davidovich wished him good luck and reminded him that it didn’t matter who the party secretary was. It was all the same if it was Lenin, Stalin, Zinoviev, or him . . . Men like Dreitser worked for the country, not for a leader. After listening to him, Dreitser shook his hand and, surprisingly, told him that, despite the circumstances, it had been an honor for him to know him; but what truly intrigued him was when the agent, practically in a whisper, informed him that, although the order specified that they burn all of the deportee’s papers, he had decided only to burn a few books. Lev Davidovich had barely managed to process that strange information when he felt the Siberian pressure of Dreitser’s hand on his fingers as the soldier turned around and went out into the darkness and snow.

  With the changing of the police team, at the head of which an agent named Bulanov was placed, the deportees held the hope of piercing the veil and finding out the fates assigned to them. However, Bulanov could only inform them that they would take a special train in the Frunze depot, without the order specifying toward where. So much mystery, thought Lev Davidovich, could only be the product of the fear of the improbable but nonetheless dreaded reactions of his decimated followers in Moscow. He also wondered if that entire operation was nothing but an orchestrated pantomime to create confusion and control opinions, a preferred technique of Stalin’s, who on various occasions throughout that year had made rumors circulate about his imminent exile, which, though later denied with greater or less emphasis, had served to spread the idea and pave the way for the sentence that the people would only have news of after the fact.

  Only during the months prior to the expulsion, while suffering a political defeat that managed to tie his hands, had Lev Davidovich begun to appreciate, seriously and with horror, the magnitude of Stalin’s manipulative abilities. Incapable of appreciating the Georgian ex-seminarian’s genius for intrigue, his shamelessness in lying and putting together shady deals, Lev Davidovich understood too late that he had underestimated his intelligence, and that Stalin, educated in the catacombs of the clandestine struggle, had learned all the forms of subterranean demolition. He now applied them, for his personal benefit, in search of th
e same ends for which the Bolshevik Party had used them before: to achieve power. The way in which he disarmed and displaced Lev Davidovich while using the vanity and fears of men who never seemed to have fears or vanities before, the calculated turns of his forces from one extreme to another of the political spectrum, had been a masterwork of manipulation that, to crown the Georgian’s victory, had benefited from the unpredictable blindness and pride of his rival.

  Beyond orchestrating his expulsion from the party, and now from the country, Stalin’s great victory had been to turn Trotsky’s voice into the incarnation of the internal enemy of the revolution, of the nation’s stability, of the Leninist legacy, and had crushed him with the wall of propaganda that Lev Davidovich himself had contributed to creating, and against which, due to inviolable principles, he could not oppose if it meant risking the permanence of that system. The struggle on which he had to focus from that moment on would be one against men, against a faction, never against the Idea. But how to fight against them if those men had appropriated the Idea and presented themselves to the country and the world like the very incarnation of the proletarian revolution? It was a question he would continue to ponder after his deportation.

  The railroad odyssey of their pilgrimage began as soon as they left Frunze. The snow imposed a slow rhythm on the old English locomotive, which pulled four cars. Throughout his years at the head of the Red Army, when he had to cover the geography of a country deep in civil war, Lev Davidovich came to know almost the entire network of the nation’s railways. On that special train he had traveled, by his calculations, enough miles to go around the world five and a half times. Because of that, after leaving Frunze, he was able to deduce that they were crossing the Asiatic south of the Soviet Union and that his destination could be none other than the Black Sea, one of the ports of which would serve to get him out of the country. To where? Two days later, after a quick stay at a station lost in the steppe, Bulanov arrived with the news that ended their wait: a telegram sent from Moscow informed him that the Turkish government had agreed to receive him as a guest, on a visa for health problems. Upon hearing the news, the deportee’s anxiety felt as frozen solid as if he were traveling naked on top of the train: of all the destinations he had imagined for his exile, Kemal Pasha Ataturk’s Turkey had not figured among the realistic possibilities, unless they wanted to put him on the gallows and decorate his neck with a well-oiled piece of rope, given that, since the triumph of the October Revolution, this neighbor to the south had become one of the bases for the White Russian exiles most aggressively against the Soviet regime, and placing him in that country was like dropping a rabbit in a dog pen. That is why he yelled at Bulanov that he didn’t want to go to Turkey: he could accept being banished from the country the Kremlin had stolen, but the rest of the world did not belong to it and neither did his fate.

  When they stopped in legendary Samarkand, Lev Davidovich saw Bulanov and two officers descend from the command headquarters car and disappear into the mosque-like building that served as a station; perhaps they were following through on the deportee’s demands and Moscow would arrange for another visa. On that day the anxious wait for the results of those consultations began, and when it became clear that the process would be delayed, they made the train move forward for over an hour before stopping it on a disused branch line in the middle of the frozen desert. It was then that Natalia Sedova asked Bulanov, while they waited for Moscow’s response, to telegraph her son, Sergei Sedov, and Anya, Liova’s wife, so that they could get together with them for a few days before leaving the country.

  Lev Davidovich would never know if the twelve days during which they remained stranded in that spot in the middle of nowhere were due to the delays in the diplomatic consultations or if it was only because of the most devastating snowstorm he’d ever seen, capable of lowering the thermometers to forty degrees below zero. Covered with all of the coats, hats, and blankets at their disposal, they received Seriozha and Anya, who traveled without the children, who were still too little to be exposed to those temperatures. Beneath the occasional gaze of one of the guards, the family enjoyed eight days of pleasant small talk, fierce games of chess, and reading out loud while Lev Davidovich personally took charge of preparing the coffee brought by Sergei. Despite the skepticism of his audience, every time the guards left them alone, Lev Davidovich’s compact optimism was unleashed and he initiated talk of plans to continue the struggle and make his return. At night, when everyone else was sleeping, the deportee curled up into a corner of the car and, listening to the staccato breathing due to the cold epidemic that had run through the convoy, he made the most of his insomnia to write letters of protest directed to the Bolshevik Central Committee and oppositionist struggle programs that, in the end, he decided to keep to himself so as not to compromise Seriozha with any papers that very well could lead him to jail.

  The cold was so intense that the locomotive had to turn on its motors from time to time and cover a mile or two just to keep its engines from seizing up. Prevented from going outside by the snow’s intensity (Lev Davidovich didn’t want to lower himself to asking for permission to see Samarkand, the mythical city that centuries before had reigned over all of Central Asia), they awaited the newspapers only to confirm that the news was always disheartening, since every day there were reports of new detentions of anti-Soviet counterrevolutionaries, as they had baptized the members of the opposition. The powerlessness, boredom, the pain in his joints, the difficult digestion of canned food, drove Lev Davidovich to the edge of desperation.

  On the twelfth day, Bulanov offered a summary of the responses: Germany was not interested in giving him a visa, not even for health reasons; Austria made excuses; Norway demanded countless documents; France brandished a judicial order from 1916 by which he was not allowed to enter the country. England didn’t even deign to respond. Only Turkey reiterated its disposition to accept him . . . Lev Davidovich was certain that, because of who he was and for having done what he had, for him the world had turned into a planet to which he lacked a visa.

  As they headed toward Odessa, the former commissar of war had time to make a new account of the actions, convictions, and greater and lesser mistakes of his life, and he thought that, even though they had forced him to turn into a pariah, he did not regret what he had done and felt ready to pay the price for his actions and dreams. He was even more firm in those convictions when the train passed through Odessa and he recalled those years that now seemed tremendously remote, when he had entered the city’s university and understood that his future lay not in mathematics but rather in the struggle against a tyrannical system; thus had begun his endless career as a revolutionary. In Odessa he had introduced the recently founded South Russian Workers’ Union to other clandestine groups, without having a clear idea of their political influence; there he had suffered his first imprisonment, had read Darwin and banished from his young Jewish man’s mind, already too heterodox, the idea of the existence of any supreme being; there he had been judged and sentenced for the first time, and the punishment had also been exile. That time the Czarist henchmen had sent him to Siberia for four years, while now his former comrades in arms were deporting him outside of his own country, perhaps for the rest of his days. And there, in Odessa, he met the affable jailer who supplied him with paper and ink. This was the man whose resounding name he had chosen when, having fled Siberia, some comrades gave him a blank passport so that he could embark on his first exile and, in the space reserved for the name, Trotsky wrote the jailer’s last name, which had accompanied him ever since.

  After going around the city by the coast, the train stopped at a branch line that went all the way to the port’s quays. The spectacle that unfolded before the travelers was moving: through the blizzard beating at the windows, they contemplated the extraordinary panorama of the frozen bay, the ships planted in the ice, their spars broken.

  Bulanov and some other Cheka agents left the train and boarded a steamship called the Kalinin
, while other agents introduced themselves in the car to announce that Sergei Sedov and Anya should leave, since the deportees would soon be embarking. The farewell, at the end of so many days of cohabitation within the walls of the train car, was more devastating than they had imagined. Natalia cried while caressing the face of her little Seriozha, and Liova and Anya hugged as if wanting to transmit through their skin the feeling of abandonment into which they were being thrown by that separation without any foreseeable end. To protect himself, he bid farewell briefly, but as he looked into Seriozha’s eyes, he had the premonition that it was the last time he would see that young man, so healthy and handsome, who had enough intelligence to spurn politics. He hugged him strongly and kissed him on the lips, to take with him some of his warmth and being. Then he withdrew to a corner, followed by Maya, and struggled to drive out of his mind the words Piatakov said to him, at the end of that dismal Central Committee meeting in 1926, when Stalin, with Bukharin’s support, had achieved his expulsion from the Politburo and Lev Davidovich would accuse him in front of the comrades of having turned into the Grave Digger of the Revolution. As he was leaving, the redheaded Piatakov had said to him, with that habit of his of speaking into one’s ear, “Why? Why have you done it? . . . He will never forgive you this offense. He will make you pay for it until the third or fourth generation.” He asked himself: Was it possible that Stalin’s political hate would end up extending to these children who represented not just the best of the revolution but of his life? Would his cruelty one day reach Seriozha who had taught the young Svetlana Stalina how to read and count? And he had to answer himself that hate is an unstoppable illness as he stroked his dog’s head and observed for the last time—he felt it deep down inside—the city where thirty years before he had wed himself to the revolution forever.