The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  The elections of February 1936, won by the new political front of Socialists, Communists, and anarchists, returned power to the left and, immediately, the freedom of those detained for their activism or participation in the 1934 revolts. After eight months of prison, when Ramón stepped out onto the street, he was no longer an impulsive young romantic: he had turned into a man of faith, a terrifying enemy of everything that could block the path to freedom and the proletarian dictatorship. To that goal, he would dedicate every breath of his life, he thought: even if I have to pay the highest of prices for it.

  Like many of his prisonmates, Ramón went directly from Valencia to Madrid, where the Popular Front parties had organized a great rally to celebrate victory and the formation of a new government. In the capital, they found that festive and nervous air that reigned over Spain until the start of the war. The wineskins leaped from the sidewalks to the trucks of the recently released, the women tossed flowers at them, and cries of “Long live liberty” and “Death to the monarchy, to the bourgeois, to the landholders, and to the Church” competed. The revolution could be smelled in the air.

  In the meeting, Ramón heard General Secretary José Díaz’s speech and for the first time saw an exalted and dramatic woman who looked like a rally herself: Dolores Ibárruri, whom the world would know as La Pasionaria (Passion Flower). To his great pleasure, in the midst of that combative crowd, he felt the longed-for arms grab on to his neck, from which came the perfume of violets that he had not ceased dreaming of during his imprisonment. With every cell of his body, Ramón enjoyed the sound of the voice of the woman for whom, like the world revolution, he was willing to give everything; but upon seeing her, he thought that miracles might exist, for África was a confirmation. In those months, she had become more beautiful, she was rounder and firmer, as if a beneficent cloak, capable of transforming her, had fallen over her face. A few minutes later, when they escaped the crowd inflamed by songs and wine, he would know that something moving really had taken hold of the woman’s body—something that had been distant from his life until that moment: a month and a half before, África had given birth to a girl. Ramón’s daughter.

  Ramón Mercader would think, almost until the idea wore out, that in his life, so full of tremendous convulsions, one of the greatest and most instructive things that shook him from head to toe was receiving that news. África told him that she hadn’t gone to see him in prison or brought him up to speed on her pregnancy so as not to weaken him with feelings that were unnecessary for a revolutionary. Besides, she had preferred to deal with her pregnancy alone, since—from the moment she discovered it and was advised not to abort due to how far along she was, she had decided that the baby would not interfere with the greatest purpose of their lives: the revolutionary struggle. Because of that, as her due date approached, she had gone to Málaga, where her parents lived, and there had the girl, whom she had named Lenina de las Heras, to immediately hand her over to her grandparents and return to Barcelona to fight for the Popular Front’s electoral victory, as the party’s committee had ordered her. Her decision to keep the girl far away was irrevocable and nothing would change it: she was only fulfilling her duty to be honest by informing him of what had happened.

  A cloud of passionate feelings crowded Ramón’s head. To the surprise of learning he was a father was added África’s determination of keeping with her ideals. Although it all ended up being too overwhelming to digest in one piece, he was surprised to feel a sharp gratefulness toward the woman he loved so much and who showed him her political stature with a drastic and liberating action. Nonetheless, in the deepest recesses of his consciousness, he felt a sliver of curiosity about what the girl he had fathered was like, what it would be like to have her close and raise her. Didn’t África feel the same? Ramón knew that the needs of the struggle would soon erase that blip, and he thought, with more conviction: África is right, family can be a burden to a revolutionary. As they crossed the Plaza de Callao, he believed that much without knowing precisely why.

  África opened the door to a café on Gran Vía and, upon entering, the light from the street prevented Ramón from seeing the inside of the place, one of those old bars in Madrid with the walls done over in dark wood. África, as if guided by an interior light, walked to the back, skirting tables and chairs with that confidence so like her. He tried to follow her, leaning on the backs of the chairs, when he made out the silhouette of a woman, according to her hair, in the back, a tall, strong woman, he realized as he got closer. The shadow approached him, and before Ramón had identified her, he felt a tremor run through him when the woman kissed him, so close to the edge of his lips as to leave the unmistakable taste of aniseed in his mouth.

  7

  Kharalambos moved the rudder slightly and, under the afternoon sun, the boat entered the golden river over a sea that the young fisherman had learned to navigate with his father, his father with his grandfather—just as his grandfather had with his great-grandfather—in an accumulation of knowledge that went back, perhaps, to the days in which Alexander’s armies passed through those waters with the fury and glory of the great king of the Macedonians. More than once, observing Kharalambos’s seafaring expertise, Lev Davidovich had asked himself if the time had come for him to carry out an act of utmost wisdom and throw off all of his defenses to give himself the chance to breathe, for the first time in his adult life, the simple air that nourished the fisherman’s blood, far from the maelstroms of his epoch.

  Four years of exile, five of being marginalized, dozens of deaths and deceptions, revolutions betrayed and ferocious repressions, Lev Davidovich added them up and had to admit that there were few reasons for hope. The cosmopolitan man, the protagonist of the struggle, the leader of the multitudes, had begun to grow old at fifty-two: he had never imagined that the corner of the world in which he was living would one day cause him to feel that perhaps he had that which is called a home. And still less that, for a moment, he would wish to give everything up and throw his weapons into the sea.

  It had been a year since he had seen Liova leave by the route that Kharalambos now navigated. With a mix of concern and relief, he had accepted the young man’s decision to live his own life, far from his father’s shadow. The receipt of a scholarship to continue studying math and physics at Berlin’s Technische Hochschule had facilitated the paperwork, and Lev Davidovich had decided to make the most of the situation of the young man being transferred to a privileged position, where he would serve as his eyes and voice while he remained immobile in Turkey.

  As the date of his departure drew near, Lev Davidovich had evoked, too frequently, the memory of those cold mornings in the tormented Paris of 1915, when Liova had been initiated into political work at just barely eight years of age. They then lived on rue Oudry, close to the place d’Italie, and he spent his nights writing antiwar articles for the Nashe Slovo. In the morning, on the way to school, with young Seriozha by the hand, Liova was in charge of handing over the recently written pages to the print shop. Only with the certainty of separation could Lev Davidovich understand the immense space that Liova occupied in his heart and regretted the outbursts of anger in which, so unfairly, he had accused him of laziness and political immaturity. As happened to him two years before when he separated from Seriozha, after his departure he was seized by the same disastrous feeling that perhaps he would never again see his beloved Liova, but he managed to dispel that feeling through the most realistic inversion of equations: if they didn’t see each other again, it wouldn’t be because Liova would miss their next meeting. The absent one would surely be Lev Davidovich himself, who with each passing day was feeling older and attacked by rivals who wished for his absolute silence.

  But the young man’s departure was not Lev Davidovich’s greatest concern during those weeks. With his best foot forward, although full of fears over his inability to deal with domestic problems, he also had to prepare himself for the announced arrival of Zina, his oldest daughter, who had final
ly obtained a Soviet permit to travel abroad with the purpose of undergoing treatment for her advanced tuberculosis.

  In the letters that she sent from Leningrad, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, Zina’s mother, had kept him up-to-date on the girl’s physical and mental deterioration in recent years, above all as she devoted herself to taking care of her sister Nina at the same time that, due to her activism in the opposition, she experienced political repression that had culminated in the deportation of her husband, Plato Volkov, and with her own expulsion from the party and the loss of her job as an economist. Zina would experience the personal touch of pettiness, however, when her exit permit from Soviet territory excluded her little daughter, Olga, who would become a political hostage. With the sentence imposed on an innocent girl, Lev Davidovich would once again see proof of what Piatakov had assured him of years before: Stalin would take revenge on him, treacherously, until the third or fourth generation.

  Zina arrived on a sunny morning in January 1931 with young Seva at her side. Natalia, Liova, Jeanne, the secretaries, the bodyguards, the Turkish police, and even Maya followed Lev Davidovich to the dock to welcome them. Each of their moods was as festive as the circumstances allowed and was rewarded by the smile of a thin woman, exultant and expansive, and by the scrutinizing look of a boy, intensely blond, who had rejected the attention of grandparents and uncles to bestow his favoritism on Maya the dog.

  Despite her calamitous state of health, Zina immediately proved that she was the daughter of Lev Davidovich and the indefatigable Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who in the clandestine meetings of Nikolaiev had placed in the hands of the young fighter the first Marxist pamphlets he would read in his life. With wheezing breath and besieged by nocturnal fevers, the young woman arrived demanding a role in the political work, willing to show her abilities and her passion. Conscious that she needed medical attention more than additional responsibilities, her father had assigned her the lightest task, although overwhelming in and of itself, of organizing his correspondence, while he charged Natalia with accompanying her to Istanbul, where the doctors started to work with her.

  With the letters that Liova began to send him from Berlin, the old fighter managed to get a better sense of the inexorable disaster at the door of the German Communists. Again and again he asked himself how Moscow was displaying such political clumsiness. You didn’t have to be a genius to notice the significance of the rise of Nazism that, without taking power, had already begun a violent offensive, backed by attack forces that in just two months had grown from 100,000 to 400,000 members. The facts revealed that it could not be due to political blindness: the suicidal strategy of the German Communists must have a reason, beyond the explicit guidelines dictated by the masters in Moscow, he thought and wrote.

  Some words pronounced in the heart of the Soviet Union revealed a truth that alarmed him. In a hunger-stricken Moscow, where shoes and bread were a luxury, in which dozens of men and women were detained every night without fiscal orders so that they could be sent to Siberian camps, Stalin proclaimed that the country had reached socialism. Socialism? Only then did Lev Davidovich manage to see a ray of light in the darkness: that had to be the origin of the suspicious apathy, the absurd triumphalism that tied the hands of the German Communists, preventing them from any alliance with the country’s forces on the left and center. He was terrified when he understood the real reason behind all of those surprising attitudes was that Stalin, to achieve the concentration of power, could not rely on the ghosts of the possible aggressions of French imperialism or Japanese militarism, but rather needed an enemy like Hitler to cement, with the threat of Nazism, his own ascent. Although Lev Davidovich had always been opposed to the possibility of founding another party, out of respect for Lenin’s ideas and out of the concrete fear of what the schism could cause, the proof of the betrayal that Stalin was carrying out, whose consequences would be devastating for Germany and dangerous even in the Soviet Union itself, had begun to stir doubts in his mind.

  Luckily, the presence of little Seva mitigated his fears. Lev Davidovich established a close relationship very different from the one he, so absorbed in the struggle, had had with his own children. The grandson had managed to appropriate the few hours of free time that his grandfather could give him, and between them they had started the habit of going down to the beach every afternoon, where Seva ran with Maya and, whenever the affable Kharalambos allowed it, boarded the fisherman’s boat and navigated out to the cliffs. The affection he felt for the boy lessened his political concerns, and on many occasions he was surprised by a great peace, which allowed him to feel like a grandfather who was beginning to grow old; and for the first time in thirty years he managed to free himself from the urgencies of the struggle. Seva and Maya’s races, the conversations with Kharalambos about the art of fishing, the rides around the Sea of Marmara, would soon become pleasant images that he would cling to in the even more difficult moments that awaited him.

  One predawn morning in that first summer he spent with Seva, Lev Davidovich would save his life and that of his family thanks to the insomnia of which he’d always been a victim. Lying on his bed, he let one of those weary nights go by while he listened to nocturnal sounds and thought of his son Sergei. That same morning he had received a letter in which Seriozha assured them that his life in Moscow was following a normal course; he spoke of his recent marriage and of his progress in his scientific studies. Although the young man maintained his aversion to politics, his father’s intuition told him that that distance could not last much longer and that any day now politics would show up at his door. Because of that, after discussing it with Natalia, he had decided not to put off the proposal any longer that Seriozha begin the procedures that would allow him to travel to Berlin to be reunited with his brother. Wrapped up in those deliberations, it had taken him a while to notice Maya’s restlessness; the dog had approached the bed various times, and he had even heard her sniveling. Suddenly a sense of alarm had made him regain his lucidity: the smell of burning wood was unmistakable, and without another thought he had awoken Natalia and run to the room where Seva had been sleeping with the young secretaries ever since his mother had moved to Istanbul to be operated on.

  The fire had started on the wall outside the room he used as his office, and Lev Davidovich immediately understood the saboteur’s intention: his papers. While the Turkish policemen, awakened from their slumber, threw buckets of water over the fire that was spreading to the living room, he had left Seva and Maya in Natalia’s care and, with the help of his secretaries, the bodyguards, and the recently arrived Rudolf Klement, he had started moving the papers that represented his memories and most of his life. Amid the smoke and the water being thrown, they had managed to remove the manuscript folders, the files, and many of the books before the ceiling of that part of the villa gave a groan prior to falling.

  In those predawn hours, among boxes of papers and books thrown on the floor, Natalia and Lev Davidovich had watched the fire do its work while he caressed the ears of the shaking Maya. Although the work of improvised firemen had prevented the total destruction of the villa, at sunrise they saw that it was left in such a state that it would have to be entirely rebuilt to again be inhabitable. While the rest of them removed the objects and clothing that had been saved, he devoted himself to gathering dozens of books, water-damaged but perhaps salvageable, and to regretting the loss of other volumes and documents (the photos of the revolution! he would always lament) consumed by the fire.

  Rudolf Klement, the young German who had traveled to take over for Liova in the secretary’s office, found a house that offered some security, in the Anglo-American residential suburb of Kadıköy, in the outskirts of Istanbul. The residence, in reality, ended up being too small for the family, the secretaries, the bodyguards and the police (four of them since the fire), but above all too small to live with Zina, who—recovered from a surgery that would soon reveal itself to be a complete failure—had begun to demand, with unhealthy vehemence,
greater responsibility in the political work.

  Several strange events would mark the months that they lived between the oppressive walls of the house in Kadıköy. The first was the possibility, very soon cut short by the joint work of fascists and Communists, that he would travel to Berlin to give some lectures. That predictable setback was a painful disappointment for him: he had again felt on his back the price he had to pay for his past actions and the insuperable weight of a confinement that made him think of that which Napoleon suffered. Do they fear me so much? he had written, exasperated by the invulnerability of the siege that confined him to Turkey and removed him from any possibility of direct participation.

  Then there was another attempted fire. Fortunately, this one reached only the backyard shed, and investigators deemed it an accident upon finding the remains of a box of matches Seva had played with on the heating boiler.

  The third event, more intriguing and at the same time revealing, happened when they were visited by a high-ranking Turkish domestic security officer charged with informing them that the country’s police had detained a group of Russian émigrés who were preparing an attempt against his life. The leader of the plot had turned out to be former general Turkul, one of the White Guard leaders that the Red Army defeated during the civil war. According to the officer, the conspiracy had been dismantled and he could remain calm, under the hospitality of the Honorable Kemal Pasha Ataturk.

  As soon as they said goodbye to the officer, Lev Davidovich commented to Natalia that the framework of the story was shaky. The danger that the Russian émigrés stationed in Turkey would commit violent acts against his person had always been latent. But nothing had happened in over two years, which proved that the White Russians did not deem it a priority or understood that attacking him when he was considered a personal guest of the implacable Kemal Ataturk was a challenge that could only prejudice them.