The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  Barbizon’s pleasant season reached its end with spring. The strange arrest of Rudolf Klement (he had broken the speed limit on his small moped) by a policeman who, previously uninformed by the Sûreté, only now “discovered” Trotsky’s presence in the area, was able to generate a virulent campaign against the government, led by Communists and fascists, who even managed to make a deportation order against him effective.

  Fearful of the reprisals announced by the Stalinists and the fascist Cagoulards, Lev Davidovich and Natalia left Barbizon during the night. In order to disguise himself, Lev Davidovich shaved his mustache and beard and changed his rounded glasses, and they escaped to Paris, where they would consult with Liova about what to do.

  They chose to disappear from life in Chamonix, the Alpine village near the Swiss and Italian borders, from where expeditions of climbers to Mont Blanc left. A few weeks later, after they were mysteriously discovered by a journalist, the Trotskys were forced by the region’s prefect to go on the move once again. Looking for a lost place on the map, Lev Davidovich made his way to Domène, a small town near Grenoble, where he even decided to go without bodyguards or secretaries. There, he would be a nobody.

  Until the end of his life, Lev Davidovich would recall that on the morning of December 2, 1934, he went out to the patio of the house in Domène, where Natalia had hung the recently washed bedclothes. The smell of soap and the morning’s aroma painted a peaceful picture that had seemed definitively unreal before the weight of the news he had just heard on the radio: Sergei Kirov had been killed in his office at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. The Exile’s mind envisioned the scenes of commotion that undoubtedly reigned in the Soviet Union and the assumptions about what would happen from that moment on, which, he knew so well, marked a point of no return.

  The reports he heard spoke of massive detentions and of preliminary investigations that linked the intellectual authorship of the murder to the Trotskyist opposition (in which they said the assassin, Leonid Nikolayev, had been active) and the plot against the government, which even included the participation of the Latvian city consul, a Trotskyist “agent,” according to them. Because of that, when he told Natalia what had happened, the woman asked the question that would pursue the man until the end of his days: “What about Seriozha?”

  An entire week of anguish ended when Seriozha’s letter arrived, brought from Paris by Liova. In contrast to his previous letters, warm and personal, always directed to his mother, this one was permeated by a cry of alarm. The situation in Moscow had become chaotic, the arrests were endless, everyone was living under the fear of being interrogated, and the apolitical scientist considered his situation “more serious than could be imagined.” When she finished reading the letter, Natalia broke out in sobs. What was happening to her son? Why was the situation so serious? Was this simply to be expected because he was a Trotsky? The anxiety to obtain new news of Sergei grew from then on and left his parents’ lives in suspense, awaiting any confirmation of his fate.

  The path events would take became clearer with the news that on December 2, the GPU had executed about one hundred people—all of them arrested before Kirov’s murder—while numerous party members had been imprisoned. Nonetheless, much more light was shed by the series of articles that Bukharin wrote for Izvestia, in which he spoke of the illegality of any type of dissidence within the country, while at the same time repeating Stalin’s motto that opposition only leads to counterrevolution, and exemplified that degradation with the cases of Zinoviev and Kamenev, labeling them as “degenerate fascists.” Because of that, when on the twenty-third of December he heard that Zinoviev and Kamenev had been arrested, accused of being “moral” accomplices to the attack, he had no doubt that a storm had been unleashed of potentially devastating power. Two times Stalin had expelled those old Bolsheviks, Lenin’s comrades; two times he had readmitted them to the party, on each occasion devouring pieces of their human and political stature until they became hovering shadows with no weight but the history of their names. Now, however, the moment of truth seemed to have arrived for two ghosts from the past that he would brutally crush because Stalin owed his ascent to power precisely to them. If at Lenin’s death they had not allied themselves with the (as they believed) limited and clumsy Stalin, all of them insistent on closing off Lev Davidovich’s access to power, Soviet history could have perhaps been different.

  Lev Davidovich recalled Zinoviev’s murky stare and Kamenev’s elusive one (he had never understood how his younger sister Olga had been able to marry him) when they accused him of wanting to take power. Joyous about the success they hoped to achieve, they assumed the visible leadership of the offensive against Lev Davidovich and his ideas, accusing him of being a man anxious to be the protagonist, capable of throwing himself into propagating revolution throughout Europe while putting the sacred fate of the Soviet Union at risk. That tragic duo would never regret enough that Faustian hour in which they accepted the hand of that man from the mountains who, in his other hand, concealed a dagger.

  Seriozha’s silence hung over the Trotskys in the transition to the year 1935, which arrived with the worst of omens. On the evening of December 31, despite the cold coming down from the mountains, the couple went out for a walk through the nearby fields with the intention of removing themselves from the radio that from Moscow was transmitting patriotic marches, versions of triumphant speeches by the leader, and news such as that the murderer Nikolayev, his wife, his mother-in-law, and thirteen other party members had been executed after they had admitted their links to the Trotskyist opposition and their direct or indirect participation in Kirov’s death. At one point in their walk, Natalia asked him to stop and she sat down on the leaves, surprised by her fatigue. He watched her and saw how her suffering was making her age with a betraying swiftness. Nonetheless, she never complained about her fate and, when she heard her husband complaining, pushed him to take up the path again. Lev Davidovich asked her if she felt ill and she responded that it was just a bit of fatigue, then she fell silent again, as if she had imposed a vow of silence on herself that prevented her from speaking of her agonies: her desperation over the lack of news from Seriozha was in a way admitting that that son could also have been devoured by the crushing violence unleashed by a revolution whose first principle was peace.

  The anxiety dulled as the days passed, but for weeks Lev Davidovich wandered like a ghost around the house in Domène. He barely came out of his daze when the news arrived from Moscow that Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the others who were “morally responsible” for Kirov’s death had received sentences of between ten and five years in prison. Almost immediately, they found out that Volkov and Nevelson, the husbands of the deceased Zina and Nina, deported since 1928, had also received new sentences and that his ex-wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, despite her age, would be banished from Leningrad to the colony of Tobolsk, along with Kamenev’s wife, Olga Kameneva. All of those sanctions had a positive side that the Trotskyists clung to: if the known oppositionists and other members of the family were just jailed and deported, Sergei should be alive, even if he had been arrested. But why didn’t he write? Why didn’t anyone mention him?

  Adopting her husband’s skepticism, Natalia drafted an open letter, directed at international opinion, in which she declared her conviction that Seriozha, a scientist from Moscow’s Technological Institute, had no political affiliation, and asked that his activities be investigated and his whereabouts revealed. She asked for the intercession of known figures such as Romain Rolland, André Gide, George Bernard Shaw, and various workers’ leaders, since she gauged that the Soviet bureaucracy could not elevate its impunity above public opinion, the leftist intellectuals, and the global working class.

  Meanwhile, the voices clamoring against him had become so aggressive that every day Lev Davidovich was expecting to be the victim of a violent act, irrational or premeditated. Because of that, after making his bodyguards come from Paris, he once again mortgaged his hopes of asylum on t
he stubborn Norway, where the Labor Party had just won the general elections. In his request, he argued that he had health problems but, above all, personal security problems, and as he had done before with France, he reiterated his commitment not to participate in the country’s politics.

  When he felt the siege of Stalinist and fascist pressures was about to trap him (there was talk of sending him to some colony, perhaps Guyana), the back door opened again with the arrival of the Norwegian visa. In contrast to what had happened two years earlier, when he left Büyükada, no residue of nostalgia accompanied him in the rushed departure from Domène, where he had lived for almost a year without acquiring a single happy memory.

  Accompanied by Liova, they traveled to Paris, where they still had to fight to be given a visa that hadn’t arrived, while the French authorities demanded that they leave the country within forty-eight hours because he had violated the restriction on traveling to the capital. At the moment of his departure, Lev Davidovich gave Liova a letter to be published in the Bulletin. In it he accused the politicians of Democratic France not only of having played dirty with him but also of doing so with the future of the Republic, making shady deals with Moscow while fascism extended throughout the country. “I leave France with a deep love for its people and with unshakable faith in the future of the working class. Sooner or later, they will offer me the hospitality the bourgeoisie has denied me,” he said at the end of the letter, showing his usual optimism. But as they crossed Paris, he felt sickened: he wondered whether a possible return to a proletarian France was not an illusion. Undoubtedly, it was: “Socialism has dug its own grave and I sense it will rot there for a long time,” he wrote.

  The warmth with which the Norwegian journalist Konrad Knudsen welcomed him in his house was like a consolation prize after the months of solitude, tension, and confinement experienced in France. The silence and peace he found in the small town of Vexhall were so compact that he could push them aside with his hands, like a velvet curtain. In summer, the sunsets tended to unfold lazily, as if the day didn’t want to leave, while mornings seemed to come forth ready-made from between the tree branches. Ever since arriving at Vexhall, he had acquired the custom of watching those daybreaks as he drank his coffee in the Knudsens’ backyard and inhaled the aroma of the forest.

  When they were received in Norway, Lev Davidovich had harbored the fantasy that perhaps there he could escape the tensions that had pursued him throughout almost seven years of deportation and exile. Recently arrived in the country, he had found himself subject to the insults that, with nearly the same emphasis and very similar words, the communist and fascist press hurled at him, trying to turn him into a political problem for the Oslo government. But his Labor Party hosts had aborted the campaign with sharp statements, declaring that the right of asylum could not be a dead letter in a democratic nation and that the Norwegian people, and in particular its workers, felt honored by his presence in the country and would never allow any pressure from Moscow against the hospitality extended to a revolutionary whose name was linked to that of Lenin. In addition, to reduce the tension, numerous ministers had offered the assurance that he could consider the six-month visa a formality. The demands were still that he not participate in internal affairs and that he establish residency outside of Oslo. Because of that, faced with the difficulty of finding the right place, they themselves had asked the social democratic politician and journalist Konrad Knudsen to host them at Vexhall, a town close to Hønefoss, thirty miles from the capital.

  Lev Davidovich would always remember his first days at Vexhall as strange and confusing. Lodged in a large room, where a splendid mahogany desk had been placed, he and Natalia had to adapt to the rhythms of a house inhabited by a large family who, in the summertime, enjoyed the freedom to forgo schedules and the ability to shrink or grow without warning. The absence of bodyguards, unnecessary in the Labor Party’s and Knudsen’s opinion, made him look apprehensively at the garden’s open gate and think that the Norwegians’ trust played with limits that were unknown to Stalin and his secret police henchmen. But the most important adaptation to life in Vexhall was the establishment between Knudsen and his guest of what they called “a nonaggression pact,” through which they allowed themselves to discuss politics, but always without questioning their respective positions of Communist and Social Democrat.

  If the Exile had any doubts regarding Norwegian hospitality, these disappeared when the minister of justice, Trygve Lie, came to visit him accompanied by Martin Tranmæl, the leader and founder of the Labor Party. Their talk, informal at first, led to an interview that Lie would publish in the Arbeiderbladet, the main labor newspaper, and in which the interviewer and interviewee shook hands despite their political differences.

  A few weeks later, although Lev Davidovich’s mind felt a decrease in tension, his body responded with an ubiquitous discomfort that lasted for months. Nonetheless, he shut himself up in his room each day, resolved to withstand the headaches and joint pains to again take up the biography of Lenin that, with decreasing enthusiasm, his North American editor demanded, the only one who wanted it following his German editor’s withdrawal and the lack of interest in his work by the French. But some news that arrived from Moscow, at the beginning of August 1935, led him to wonder whether his efforts should be focused on the leader’s biography or if the reigning cynicism in the Soviet Union demanded a reflection about the horror of the present and the need to reverse it. The edition of Pravda that had alarmed him featured the chronicle of another one of those parties at the Kremlin in which Stalin, after distributing decorations in abundance, had launched into an inevitable speech. This time his words were reduced to a simple victory cry: “Life is improved, comrades, life is happier here! Let’s drink to life and to socialism!” The experience that had allowed him to learn to interpret that man’s movements warned him that this could not be a casual phrase but rather the roar of a lion on a devastating hunt.

  For months, Lev Davidovich had been considering each act, putting each fact in its place, trying to understand the goals of the policy of détente generated by the Kremlin after the trial at the beginning of 1935 against Zinoviev, Kamenev, and company, with which the investigation into Kirov’s murder had been closed. Since then, the arrests had decreased and a wave of official optimism, constantly reinforced by propaganda, had started to run through the country while in Moscow they feted distinguished workers and the representatives of various republics; banquets were offered to scientists, athletes, and distinguished government workers; and party leaders at all levels were recognized. After the hunger and the repression of recent years, Stalin was trying to create a climate of security to spread the idea that the difficult times were a thing of the past because they were already living in the times of socialist prosperity. But once that mirage was created, Lev Davidovich knew that the moment would come when Stalin would strike another blow that would shake the country and consolidate a system in which Stalin could, at last, reign without the interference of any rivals.

  Save for the news that Seriozha was alive and sequestered in an apartment in Moscow, nothing good would happen during the final weeks of November and the first of December, when his body declared itself exhausted to the point that he feared the end was approaching in that vulgar manner: “Death by exhaustion, how horrible!” he would write . . . Nonetheless, perhaps the same awareness that he could die leaving so many unfinished projects resulted in working the miracle of getting him out of bed, almost from one day to the next, with his energy practically recovered. Despite his stiff muscles, an overwhelming feeling of rebirth overcame him, and because of that he dared to accept Knudsen’s invitation to participate in an outing to the countryside in the north of Hønefoss, ideal for skiing at that time of year. In his memory, the most notable event would be when he sunk in the snow to his thighs and required a rescue operation directed by Knudsen and carried out by Jean van Heijenoort and his new assistant, the recently arrived Erwin Wolf.

 
; Shortly after, in the first weeks of 1936, Lev Davidovich received a letter capable of revealing, better than all the available psychoanalytic literature, the most dramatic and exact notion of what fear could be and the unpredictable human mechanisms that it can mobilize. It was written to him by his former adversary Fyodor Dan, exiled in Paris since shortly after the Bolshevik victory. He had known Dan since 1903, when he had been one of the revolutionary Social Democrats who, at the Congress of Brussels, voted against Lenin and, with the rest of the opponents, established Menshevism within the party. Although Dan had been one of the Mensheviks who worked the most to bring the factions together, his loyalty to his group had placed him in the current that was contrary to the proletarian revolution, since he defended the establishment of a parliamentary system in Russia, to which Lev Davidovich was opposed in the month prior to the October coup. Once the Bolshevik victory was definitively established, Dan tried to engineer a rapprochement and later had the decency to recognize defeat and withdraw in silence.

  After greeting him and wishing him good health, Dan explained that he dared to write him, after so many years of physical and political distance, because a mutual friend, Dr. Le Savoureux, had insisted that he tell him something that, on many levels, had to do with Lev Davidovich’s past as well as his foreseeable future.

  Dan explained to him that Bukharin, despite having been marginalized by Stalin after several castrations, had been sent to Europe with the mission of purchasing some important documents by Marx and Engels that Stalin wanted to deposit in the archives of the former Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, recently augmented with the inclusion of his own name. Bukharin, with enough money to buy the archives and for his maintenance, had been in Vienna, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Berlin before arriving in Paris, where the German Social Democrats possessing the documents had taken the bulk of the archives after Hitler’s rise to power. Bukharin was to negotiate in Paris with a former acquaintance of the old Russian fighters, the Menshevik Boris Nikolayevsky, who was also a friend of Dr. Le Savoureux. In conversation, Bukharin had always seemed reserved, nervous, indecisive, like a man under great stress; and although Nikolayevsky needled him, it was impossible to obtain from him an opinion about what was happening in the USSR, about Kirov’s murder or the imprisonment of Zinoviev and Kamenev, whom Bukharin himself had placed on the pillory with his public accusation that they were fascists. “At the beginning he seemed like a man who was gravely mistrustful,” assured Dan, who, on two or three occasions, in the company of his wife, had seen him and spoken with him about the only subjects Bukharin allowed: French cheeses and literature, his friendship with Lenin and the documents he had to buy. Dan managed to have him comment on Stalin’s politics and, perhaps in a moment of sincerity, Bukharin confessed the great pain he felt about the way the general secretary was demolishing the spirit of the revolution. To anyone knowledgeable about Soviet politics, Dan said, it would have seemed at least curious that Stalin would have picked Bukharin for that operation, more commercial than philosophical or historical, since the direction of the political housecleaning suggested that sooner or later Bukharin, who had dared to defy Stalin at one moment, would be the next victim. But the greatest surprise about Stalin’s decision had yet to come: without Bukharin having even dared to suggest it, the dictator had sent Anna Larina, Bukharin’s young wife, several months pregnant, to Paris. What kind of strange play was that? Why would Stalin open his captive’s door and allow him to desert without leaving his wife behind? Did he prefer to have Bukharin outside of the Soviet Union and not inside the country, where he would always be able to destroy him with the same impunity with which he had expelled Zinoviev and Kamenev, or have him killed like Kirov? Was it a move destined to turn Bukharin into a deserter before he became a martyr? Dan asked himself, forcing Lev Davidovich to ponder this as he read.