The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  4

  “Today’s petrified crap . . .” Lev Davidovich threw the newspaper against the wall and left his study. As he went down the stairs, he smelled the scent of goat stew that Natalia was preparing for dinner, and that appetizing aroma seemed obscene. Behind his desk he contemplated the beautiful Sara Weber, who was typing with a speed that at that moment seemed automatic, definitively inhuman. He crossed the door to the barren garden and the Turkish policemen smiled at him, willing to follow him, and he stopped them with a gesture. The men acted like they were following his wishes, but they did not let him out of their sight, since the order they received was too precise: their lives depended on the Exile not losing his.

  The beauty of the month of April in Prinkipo barely affected him as he, followed by Maya, went down the dune that ended on the coast. He asked himself: What agony could grip the brain of a sensitive and effusive man like Mayakovsky to make him voluntarily decline the aroma of the stew, the magic of a sunset, under the gaze of feminine charms, to shut himself up in the irreversible silence of death? And he walked along the shore to observe his dog’s elegant trot, a gift of nature that also seemed offensively harmonious.

  Three years earlier, when they were on the verge of banishing him from Moscow and his good friend Yoffe had shot himself in the hopes that his act would cause a commotion capable of moving the party’s conscience and preventing the catastrophic expulsion of Lev Davidovich and his comrades, he had thought that the drama of the act made sense in the political struggle, even though he didn’t approve of such an exit. But the news he had recently read had shaken him due to the magnitude of the mental castration enclosed in its message. How far had mediocrity and perversion gone for the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—Mayakovsky of all people—to decide to evade its tentacles by taking his own life? Today’s petrified crap that so alarmed the poet in his final verses, had it overcome him to the point of suicide? The official note drafted in Moscow could not have been more offensive to the memory of the artist who had fought for a new and revolutionary art with the most enthusiasm, the one who had, with the most fervor, handed over to the spirit of a completely new society his poetry laden with screams, chaos, broken harmonies, and triumphant slogans; the one who had most insisted on resisting, on withstanding, the suspicions and pressures with which the bureaucracy besieged the Soviet intelligentsia. The note spoke of a “decadent feeling of personal failure,” and since in the rhetoric implanted in the country the word “decadence” was applied to bourgeois art, society, and life, by making the failure “personal,” they were reaffirming with calculated cruelty that individual condition that could only exist in the bourgeois artist that, they usually said, every creator always carries within, like original sin, no matter how revolutionary he claims he is. The death of the writer, they clarified, didn’t have anything to do with his “social and literary activities,” as if it were possible to separate Mayakovsky from actions that were no more and no less than his very way of breathing.

  Something all too malignant and repellent had to have been unleashed in Soviet society if its most fervent spokespeople were beginning to shoot bullets into their own hearts, disgusted before the nausea caused by today’s petrified crap. That suicide was, as Lev Davidovich knew well, the dramatic confirmation that more turbulent times had begun, that the last embers of the marriage of convenience between the revolution and art had gone out, with the predictable sacrifice of art: times in which a man like Mayakovsky, disciplined even to the point of self-annihilation, could feel the disdain of those in power boring into the back of his head, those for whom poets and poetry were aberrations on whom they could perhaps rely to reaffirm their preeminence and whom they could do without when they didn’t need them.

  Lev Davidovich recalled that many years before he’d written that history had conquered Tolstoy, but had not broken him. To the end, that genius had been able to maintain his precious gift for moral indignation and thus directed his cry of “I cannot be silent!” against the aristocracy. But Mayakovsky, forcing himself to be a believer, had remained silent and thus ended up broken. He lacked the courage to go into exile when others did so; to stop writing when others broke their pens. He insisted on offering his poetry to political activity and sacrificed his art and his own spirit with that gesture; he pushed himself so much to be an exemplary militant that he had to commit suicide to become a poet again. Mayakovsky’s silence was a harbinger of other silences that were as painful or more so, in all certainty, to come in the future: the political intolerance invading society would not rest until it suffocated it. “As they suffocated the poet, they are trying to smother me,” the Exile would write, stranded next to the oppressive Sea of Marmara that had been surrounding him for a year already.

  To the end of his days, Lev Davidovich would remember his first weeks of Turkish exile as a blind transit through which he had to move, feeling his way against walls in constant motion. The first thing that surprised him was that the GPU agents in charge of overseeing his deportation, in addition to giving him $1,500 that they said they owed him for his work, maintained a pleasant attitude toward him despite the fact that, once they had crossed into Turkish waters, he had sent a message to President Kemal Pasha Ataturk advising him that he was settling in Turkey only because he was forced to do so. Afterward, it was the diplomats from the Soviet legation in Istanbul who were as cordial as they would have only been to a first-class guest sent by their government. Because of that, in the face of so much faked kindness, he was not surprised when the European newspapers, encouraged by the rumors spread by Moscow’s ubiquitous men, speculated that perhaps Trotsky had been sent to Turkey by Stalin to foment revolution in the Near East.

  Convinced that silence and passivity could be his worst enemies, he decided to take action, and while he insisted on applying for visas from various countries (the president of the German Reichstag had spoken of his country’s willingness to offer him a “freedom asylum”), he wrote an essay, published by some Western newspapers, in which he clarified the conditions of his exile, denounced the persecution and the jailing of his followers in the Soviet Union, and declared Stalin, publicly for the first time, the Grave Digger of the Revolution.

  The change in attitude of diplomats and policemen was immediate and, curiously, coincided with the arrival of new refusals to house him from Norway and Austria, and with the news of what was happening in Berlin, where Ernst Thälmann and the Communists loyal to Moscow had started an uproar against the renegade’s possible acceptance there. Expelled without the least consideration from the Soviet consulate and divested of all protection, the Trotskys had to lodge at a small hotel in Istanbul, where their lives were exposed to the predictable aggressions of their enemies, red and white. Even so, as soon as they arrived, Lev Davidovich sent a telegram to Berlin with which he burned the last ship in which he had entrusted his luck: “I interpret silence as a very disloyal refusal.” But he had no sooner sent it off when it seemed insufficient and he reinforced his position with a last message to the Reichstag: “I am very sorry that the possibility is denied to me to study in practice the advantages of the democratic right to asylum.”

  The dawn of spring surprised them in that dismal hostel of cracked and dirty walls where they were lodging. Although he didn’t have the foggiest idea what his next steps could be, Lev Davidovich decided to take advantage of the season and get to know the exultant Istanbul in his spare time. But not even the discovery of an exquisite world that went back to the very origins of civilization could manage to shake him out of the pessimistic lethargy into which he had fallen and which made him feel like a stranger to himself: Lev Davidovich Trotsky needed a sword and a battlefield.

  A few weeks later he accepted, without much enthusiasm, his wife and his son’s proposal to travel around the Sea of Marmara to the Prinkipo islands. The small volcanic archipelago, an hour and a half from the capital, had been the refuge of dethroned Ottoman princes and the place in which, in 1919, a peace conference to en
d the Russian civil war had been proposed. Lev Davidovich would use that journey to take his mind off things, sunbathe, and taste the delicate Turkish pastries known as pochas and pides of which Natalia had become a fan. Two young Trotsky sympathizers whom his friend Alfred Rosmer had sent from France a few days before traveled with them to guarantee a minimum of security.

  The small steamboat sailed at nine in the morning. Covered in hats, they occupied the prow and enjoyed the scenery that Istanbul’s two halves offered. Lev Davidovich, nonetheless, tried to look beyond the buildings, the pointed churches, the convex mosques; he tried to look for himself in that city in which he did not have a single friend or a trustworthy follower. And he didn’t find himself. He felt that, at that exact moment, his exile was beginning—true, complete, without any support. Aside from his family and a very few friends who had reiterated their solidarity, he was a man who was overwhelmingly alone. His only useful allies for a battle like the one he had to initiate (how? where?) were still confined in work camps or had already given in, but all of them remained within the borders of the Soviet Union, and his relationship with them was snuffed out by distance, repression, and fear.

  Every time he evoked that seemingly pleasant morning, Lev Davidovich would remember that he had felt the urgent need to press Natalia Sedova’s hand in his to feel human warmth close to him, to not suffocate from the anxiety caused by the threatening sensation of loss. But he would also remember that at that moment, he had confirmed his decision that, although he was alone, his duty was to fight. If the revolution for which he had fought was prostituting itself in the dictatorship of a czar dressed up as a Bolshevik, then he would have to rip it out by the roots and replant it, because the world needs true revolutions. That decision, he was well aware, would bring him closer to the death that was pursuing him from the Kremlin’s watchtowers. Death, nonetheless, could only be considered an inevitable eventuality: Lev Davidovich had always thought that, since individual sacrifice is often the firewood burned in the pyre of the revolution, the lives of one, ten, one hundred, one thousand men could and even should be devoured if the social tornado demanded it in order to reach its transformative ends. So he laughed when certain newspapers insisted on mentioning his “personal tragedy.” What tragedy were they referring to? he would write. In the superhuman process of the revolution, there was no room for personal tragedies. His tragedy, if anything, was knowing that in his struggle he didn’t have any fellow believers at hand who’d been forged in the ovens of the revolution, nor the economic means and, less still, a party. But he still had what had always been his best weapon: the pen, the same one that had spread his ideas in the contributions he made to Iskra and that, during his first round of exile, had led him to the heart of the struggle on that night in 1901 in which he received the message capable of locating his life as a fighter right in the vortex of history: his pen had been called for at Iskra’s headquarters in London, where he was expected by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, already known as Lenin.

  With a wave of his hand, Liova commented that the fishermen’s village visible on the coast was called Büyükada, and the young man’s words brought him back to the reality of an islet covered by pines and dotted with some white buildings. It was then that, tempting fate, he asked if they could disembark there to have lunch: almost without thinking, he added that he liked that place, since it was undoubtedly a calm enough place to write in and had good fishing to test his muscles. Natalia Sedova, who knew him like no one else, watched him and smiled: “What are you thinking, Liovnochek?”

  The woman would find out just a week later and be happy: they were going to live in Büyükada, the largest of the islets in the archipelago of exiled princes.

  It had not been hard to find the right house to fit their needs and pockets. Built atop a small promontory, about six hundred feet from the dock, its two levels seemed to reach higher and to place historic Propontis at the disposal of its inhabitants. They also appreciated the fact that the building was surrounded by a dense hedge that facilitated security, the responsibility of two policemen sent by the government and some young Frenchmen, fellows of his follower Raymond Molinier. In reality, the villa, the property of an old Turkish Baha’i, was as run-down as its owner, and Natalia Sedova was forced to roll up her sleeves to make it inhabitable. Between all of them—including policemen, watchmen, and even passing journalists—they cleaned, painted, and equipped the furnished spaces that were necessary to eat, sleep, and work. The temporary nature of their settlement in that refuge could be seen in the absence of any objects meant to make it beautiful; there wasn’t even a simple rosebush in the garden: “To plant a single seed in this land would be to accept defeat,” Lev Davidovich had warned his wife, since he still had his mind focused on the centers of battle to which, sooner or later, he thought he would manage to gain access.

  Throughout that first year of exile, the most tiresome task facing those guards charged with the revolutionary’s security had been to deal with the journalists intent on getting a scoop, that of welcoming editors from around the world (who had offered contracts for various books and made generous advances capable of alleviating the family’s economic difficulties) and verifying that the followers and friends who began to arrive were who they said they were. At the margin of these interferences, life on an island lost to history, inhabited throughout most of the year only by fishermen and sheepherders, seemed so primitive and slow that any outside presence was immediately detected. And although he was a prisoner, Lev Davidovich had felt almost happy for having found that place where a car had never driven and where things were transported as they were twenty-five centuries before, on the back of a donkey.

  Barely settled, the Exile began to prepare his counteroffensive and decided that the first necessity was to unite the opposition outside the Soviet Union, although he would soon discover the extent to which Stalin had anticipated this, tasking his peons in the Communist International with converting Trotsky’s person and ideas into the specter of the revolution’s greatest enemy. As could be expected, there were few European Communists who dared to adopt the “Trotskyist” heresy, especially when it didn’t seem to offer any practical advantages and, soon, would lead to immediate excommunication from the party and even from the ranks of revolutionary fighters. Nonetheless, Lev Davidovich insisted, and he unloaded on the shoulders of his son Liova the organization of the oppositionist movement while he focused on working personally with the most noteworthy followers. The rest of the time he would spend writing an autobiography he had begun in Alma-Ata and gathering information for a planned History of the Russian Revolution.

  Among the visitors he received in those initial months were his old comrades Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, the ever politically complicated Pierre Naville and Boris Souvarine, and the impulsive Raymond Molinier, who, with the same enthusiasm with which he would embark on a summer excursion, had dragged along his wife, Jeanne, and his brother Henri. But the first to arrive, as could be expected, had been his good friends Maurice and Magdeleine Paz, whom he had not seen since the Trotskys were expelled from France in the middle of the Great War. The couple’s arrival, weighed down with French cheeses, brought a breath of happiness wrapped in the certainty of a freedom that allowed them the luxury of welcoming old comrades. Throughout the year of deportation in Alma-Ata, the Pazes had been their representatives in Paris and had traveled to Prinkipo to update their accounts and duties and to reconfirm their unshakable solidarity.

  One of the conversations they had with the Pazes would take on a strange dimension a few months later when Stalin broke the sacred blood barrier. It had taken place on an afternoon in early May, when Natalia, Liova, Maurice, Magdeleine, and Lev Davidovich, with Maya the dog running ahead, had gone down to the coast to enjoy the afternoon breeze with a carafe of Greek red wine while the Turkish policemen prepared a seafood-based dinner in the Ottoman fashion, seasoned with spices. Due to his excessive exertions in setting up the villa, Lev Davidovich was sufferi
ng from a lumbago attack that barely allowed him to make headway on the many writings he was engaged in. After the first glasses of wine, the Pazes had given free rein to their enthusiasm over the possibility of being able to fight alongside the mythical Lev Trotsky. It pleased them that the Exile who was watching the sunset with them in Prinkipo in 1929 was not the same man to whom they had bid goodbye in Paris in 1916, when he moved with an exalted voice but without a specific role in the clandestine movement on whose success very few were betting. Now they said that he was the Exile, known around the world as Lenin’s companion, the leader of the October uprising, the victorious commissar of war and creator of the Red Army, the cheerleader of the Third International, which he had founded with Vladimir Ilyich. Even Maurice, perhaps convinced that his host was in need of encouragement, reminded him that he had been at a height from which it was impossible to descend, from which he was not allowed to withdraw, and he spent his time exalting his historical responsibility, since no Marxist, with perhaps the exception of Lenin, had ever had so much moral authority, as a theorist and as a fighter. And he had concluded: “Your rival is History, not that upstart Stalin who will fall at any moment under the weight of his own ambitions . . .”

  The Exile tried to downplay that historic greatness, reminding his interlocutor that, besides his back pain, he had nothing else behind him. The hostility surrounding him was infinite and powerful and his main conflict was with a revolution that he had led to triumph and with a state that he had helped to found: that reality was tying one of his two hands.

  Despite praises like these and the proofs of affection that arrived with his correspondence every day, Lev Davidovich knew that those followers did not have the scars that can only be left by real combat. Because of that, he silently entrusted the future of his battle to the deportations of oppositionists that Stalin would undoubtedly order; the tempering of those men forged by repression, torture, and confinement, with their convictions unaltered, would strengthen the movement.