The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  “Comrade Stalin thinks the moment has arrived . . . We’re going to prepare Trotsky’s exit from this world.”

  Ramón couldn’t avoid the shock. He wanted to think he had misheard, but he knew that he had understood perfectly well and that at that same moment, due only to having heard those words of Kotov’s, his life had fallen into an extraordinary dimension.

  “What do you mean by ‘prepare’?” he managed to ask.

  “To start working toward it. Putting together the masterstroke. That’s why you and other Spanish Communists are here.”

  “You’re going to prepare us to kill him?”

  “We’re going to prepare you for lots of things.”

  “So why in the hell do we have to be Spaniards?”

  Kotov smiled and moved a giant pinecone with his foot. He said that, in his opinion, Spaniards would never be good secret agents. Although in their favor they had a mixture of recklessness and innate cruelty that made them capable of killing or dying (that is a great virtue) and they were also fanatical (you need a good dose of fanaticism for this job), they also carried the defect of being too spontaneous, at times even friendly and dramatic, and at heart they were all a little bit boastful, and their boastfulness made them talkers, and this was difficult to eradicate . . .

  “What you’re saying isn’t very encouraging. I don’t understand—”

  “This mission is for men who speak Spanish as their first language. That’s the first reason. The second is that they’re capable of overcoming any scruples.”

  Ramón thought to what point those defects and virtues were also his and concluded that Kotov was mostly right, except for the boastfulness.

  “But the real reason for all of you being here is because I think you can do it,” Kotov concluded.

  Ramón looked at the forest. A flame of pride had been lit in his mind, displacing any other fear. What would África have thought if she had overheard this conversation? Would she really have thought he was too weak? What had Kotov seen in him?

  “Tell me, Ramón: if necessary, would you be able to kill an enemy of the revolution?”

  The young man looked at Kotov and he held his gaze.

  “If it were necessary, of course I would do it.”

  The adviser smiled and his look recovered the twinkle he had lost in the last few days. He pointed at Ramón’s chest with one finger.

  “Can you imagine the honor of being chosen to take that treacherous scum Trotsky out of this world? Do you know that for years and years that renegade has been working to destroy the revolution and that he is a filthy rat who has sold out to the Germans and the Japanese? That he has even planned massive poisonings of Soviet workers to sow terror within the country? That his adventurist philosophy can put the future of the proletariat in danger, here, over in Spain, in the entire world?”

  Ramón looked at the forest again. His mind was blank, as if all the channels of his intelligence had been broken, but he said:

  “What I don’t understand is why you’ve waited until now to do away with that traitor.”

  “You don’t have to understand anything. I already told you: Stalin has his reasons and we the duty to obey . . . By the way, how many times have you heard the word ‘obedience’ in the last two days?”

  “I don’t know—several.”

  “And you’ll hear it a thousand more times, because it’s the most important word. After it come ‘loyalty’ and ‘discretion.’ This is the holy trinity and you should tattoo it on your forehead, because after having heard what I’ve told you, you’ll have noticed that there are only two paths for you: one to glory and another to the work camps, where you don’t have the least idea of how little the life of a poor guy who doesn’t even have a name and is considered a traitor is worth . . . Let’s go, they must be waiting for us.”

  When they entered the cabin, Marshal Koniev and Karmin stood up and gave military salutes. While Soldier 13 settled into his desk, Grigoriev said something to the two soldiers. Then Grigoriev and the marshal sat down on the armchairs in the back. Karmin, with his black suit, went to the blackboard and seemed to melt into it. Ramón noticed that his hands were clammy and he heard Kotov’s last words echo in his brain.

  “Soldier 13,” Karmin said in a clean and southern French that evoked his days in Dax and Toulouse, “your mentor has told us that you’re ready to begin training. But before beginning our work, you’ll be subjected to a variety of physical and psychological tests so we can get an exact evaluation of you. If the results are satisfactory, as we expect, you’ll begin to receive history lessons about the Bolshevik Party, international politics, Marxism-Leninism, and psychology. We’ll also teach you survival, interrogation, and hand-to-hand combat techniques and you’ll practice parachuting and using a variety of firearms. The most important part of your training, however, will be the work we do on your personality. You’ll learn, above all, that you will never again be the person you were before arriving at this base. We’re going to completely remake you from the inside out. It’s slow and difficult work, but if you’re able to overcome it, you’ll be ready to receive any of the identities we decide to choose for the mission. This identity still hasn’t been determined, but whatever it may be, you will never again be a Spaniard, nor should you speak in Spanish or, less still, in Catalan. For now, you will speak in French and think in French. We’ll even try to make you dream in French. Our specialists will help you in this task, but I repeat: your will is essential to obtaining success.”

  Soldier 13 thought that the expectations were perhaps too high, but he nodded in silence, as he already sensed that all of that knowledge could be useful for the mission Kotov had spoken about to him.

  “Good. To begin, we need you to pass a very simple but definitive test, since it will teach you many things. Come with me!”

  Karmin walked to the back door and Soldier 13 followed him. Behind them went Grigoriev and Koniev. The morning was now warmer and from the pine forest came a perfumed scent. On a small wooden table, Soldier 13 saw three different kinds of knives and he thought he’d be taught how to use them. From amid the pines at that moment came a soldier, dressed like Karmin, who was dragging a dirty man with greasy hair, dressed in rags, whose stench was stronger than the forest’s aroma.

  “Take a good look at this man,” Karmin said. “He’s scum, an enemy of the people.”

  Soldier 13 barely looked at the destitute man when, without using any other words, Karmin yelled:

  “Kill him!”

  Soldier 13, surprised by the cry, felt doubly confused: Was the order real? And who was it being given to: Soldier 13, Ramón Mercader, or the ephemeral Román Pavlovich? But he didn’t have time to think any further, since Karmin took his standard-issue Nagant out of the case and cocked it.

  “Yob tvoyu mat! Are you going to liquidate him or do I have to do it?” Soldier 13 looked at the daggers and took one with a short, wide blade that, without knowing why, seemed the most appropriate. Appropriate? To kill an enemy of the revolution? He felt his legs tremble when he took the first step. He tried to convince himself that this could only be a test: when the moment came, they would order him to stop and would take that beggar out of there. He walked to the stinking man, in whose eyes he noticed a growing fear. The man said something in Russian that he couldn’t understand, although he perceived it as a plea in which the word tovarich was repeated as he took one, two steps backward, his body trembling. Soldier 13 kept walking forward with the dagger at his hips, waiting to hear the order to stop, the command that wasn’t coming, while he got closer and closer to the foul-smelling beggar.

  Soldier 13 saw the plea in the man’s eyes, just five feet from him, and he could hear the silence. Nothing else. In his mind, a word took shape: “obedience,” and a question: “weak?” África’s image passed like lightning through his brain. Then he took another step, moved the dagger back to give it momentum, and understood that the other man was incapable of fleeing or even of moving back.
Terror had paralyzed him and made him start sweating. Should he kill a man like that, in cold blood, to prove his loyalty to a grandiose cause? Was this the ruthlessness with which you had to treat the enemies of the people in the land of justice? What did that have to do with Trotsky’s betrayals, with the excesses of the Spanish fascists? No, he told himself, the order would come, they would stop him, they would all laugh, and he moved the dagger a few more inches until it was in the position to attack. And then he didn’t think about it anymore: he launched his weapon hand in search of the beggar’s abdomen and found that, at that moment, he was Soldier 13, that Ramón Mercader had disappeared, that he was fulfilling the first sacred principle: obedience. The dagger continued its journey in pursuit of a defenseless man, paralyzed by fear, and when it was about to sink into his abdomen, over which the man’s hands were crossed in an attempt to protect himself, those same hands moved at an inconceivable speed, diverted the course of the piece of steel, and Soldier 13 received a very strong kick in the chin, which toppled him backward, unconscious.

  In just a few weeks, Soldier 13 became aware of a mutation in the colors of his consciousness. As the theoretical classes were filling his brain with philosophical, historical, and political arguments to make his faith unbreakable, the sessions with the psychologists were draining his mind of the deadweight of experiences, memories, fears, and illusions forged over the course of a life and of a past that he detached himself from as if they were skinning him. He was overwhelmed to see how his personal history was becoming a foggy haze and how even recent events, like Kotov’s last recommendations before he returned to Spain, seemed so diffuse that he sometimes asked himself if he hadn’t lived them in another remote and murky existence.

  During those months was when Ramón really began to stop being Ramón and only became him again when the man they were turning him into was suffocating and, to save him, the former Ramón Mercader had to come to the surface. Or whenever they ordered him to go out and get some sun. But he was never again the same Ramón Mercader del Río.

  The man who in his nebulous past had adopted communist ideals through his juvenile romanticism and África’s harangues now began to assume a scientifically maintained faith, whose materialization was the new Soviet society where humanity had finally achieved the greatest height of dignity. The revolutionary struggle, intuitive and chaotic, that had been carried out against the oligarchy, the bourgeoisie, fascism, and traitors was made concrete with new coherence and foundations in the historic necessity of the struggle of the proletariat to materialize the utopia of equality and in the mission of the party to lead this great contest. He learned that if that struggle could appear ruthless at times, it was always just. At the root of each of these ideas were Stalinist theories and practices, the wisdom and the strategic vision of Comrade Stalin, the general secretary who stood above history, at the front of the world’s proletariat, as the brilliant heir of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The conviction that the future of humanity belonged to socialism turned into his creed, and he learned that, for the Soviet Union to reach that future, any sacrifice, any act, was historically justified and not even the most minimal dissidence was admissible. On this point they added to his studies lessons about class hatred and, visualizing his class enemies, his convictions became more solid.

  October arrived and the temperatures started to drop. Karmin announced that, without stopping the theoretical sessions and the meetings with psychologists, they would begin the physical training. Soldier 13 had the hope that he would at last leave the base and would perhaps see with his own eyes part of the shining reality of the country of the Soviets. However, except for the two weeks during which they moved to the Ural Mountains to submit him to resistance tests in extreme conditions (from which he returned six kilos lighter, but proud of having been congratulated by Karmin), the rest of his education was carried out in the forests of Malakhovka. There he mastered shooting with a rifle, pistol, and machine gun; learned to fight with a knife, a sword, and an axe, acquired personal defense methods that used only his hands and feet, and was taught how to be precise in the lobbing of grenades as well as the art of scaling walls and the processes of demolition. With the first cycle complete, they insisted on his learning how to eliminate one or more enemies with the various weapons he was skilled in using, first identifying the weak points in his opponents’ defenses and then the corners of their anatomy where the desired effects might be achieved with the most efficiency. The enemies with whom he trained, specialists in various forms of aggression, were always labeled Trotskyist dogs, Trotskyist renegades, Trotskyist traitors, until the mere mention of that adjective caused a hormonal discharge.

  Soldier 13 would recall that the most crucial moment of his conversion and training was when they taught him to resist the psychological methods of torture and interrogation, in which they included, in order to achieve the necessary realism, acts of physical aggression that demonstrated to him the incredible human faculty of invention in inflicting modes of suffering on fellow human beings. The goal of that lesson, nonetheless, was not just the acquisition of the ability to stay silent but rather, and above all, to not allow himself to be manipulated by the interrogators, to cut off any bridge of understanding that could open a channel to his weaknesses, and, further still, to get the interrogators to believe stories that would confuse them and distance them from the truth. They showed him that it was much harder to keep a secret than to get it out of someone, and they educated him in roundabout psychological games, like the evocation of dreams or the reflection of supposed sick obsessions.

  When, at the end of November, Grigoriev reappeared on the base, Soldier 13 was already—even the trainers could guarantee it—a man of marble, convinced of the need to carry out whatever mission was asked of him, forged to resist a variety of attacks in silence, gifted with a visceral hatred against the Trotskyist enemies, and ready to be turned into the person they were to assign him. His instructors’ satisfaction was obvious, indeed the diamond in the rough found by Grigoriev seemed like a marvelous stone, brilliant in all its facets—political, philosophical, linguistic, physical, psychological—and he had been reinforced with the best armor, because he was a man who was capable of remaining silent, of exploiting his hatred, of not feeling any compassion, and of dying for the cause. He had become an obedient and ruthless machine.

  That afternoon Soldier 13 was wearing a black uniform similar to that of his personal trainer, but designed for winter temperatures. Grigoriev, accompanied by Marshal Koniev, entered the cabin, greeted him with a martial salute, and, without removing any of the garments with which he protected himself from the cold, crossed the room in search of the back exit. With an order from Karmin, Soldier 13 followed him and, upon arriving in the snowy yard, was about to smile when he saw, laid out on a small table, three knives similar to the ones he had been offered on the first day of his initiation. Soldier 13 immediately understood what was expected of him, and when he saw the instructor pushing a man from within the forest, dressed in rags, shuddering with fear and cold, he was set to give him the lesson that now, he was sure, he was capable of giving.

  “Soldier 13!” Karmin said. “You already know . . . In front of you is a Trotskyist dog, enemy of the people. Kill him!”

  Soldier 13 chose the English army field knife. He had barely grasped it when he felt his skin warming up to the point that he didn’t feel the cold as his muscles turned into an extension of the steel blade and his feet into snakes slithering toward the victim. The man was begging and Karmin, ten or so feet behind him, was kind enough to translate: “He swears he is innocent, that he hasn’t conspired, he says he hates Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and all of the traitors of the working class; he insists that Comrade Stalin is his father and asks that proletarian justice be carried out with him, please. Do you believe any of this?” Soldier 13 shook his head and kept walking toward the man, whose tremors seemed as authentic as the plea for mercy in his eyes. At that moment he thought he discover
ed a different strategy in the begging dog who was protesting with open arms, without retreating, as if he were melted into the snow. When he moved the knife to get momentum, he carried out a quick play of hands and changed his grip. He wouldn’t direct his attack at the abdomen but rather the neck, so that the supposed beggar could divert the steel blade’s movement but not prevent him from kicking him then with all of his might in his crotch, first, and then, once he was on his knees, digging his heel into his chin, with a half turn of his legs.

  Soldier 13 held his breath, ready for attack. He kept his eyes on those of his alleged victim and, with a closed arc, threw his arm from his right side in search of the jugular of the man, whose eyes did not lose their terrorized expression until the knife dug into his neck and, a second later, spurted a stream of blood that came out of his mouth and ended up on the chest of the black, quilted uniform of his executor. Soldier 13 felt the man’s deadweight on his shoulder, held up by the knife, until he saw how he crumpled and freed the dented steel, from which a few drops of blood fell onto the already reddened snow. Soldier 13 would never remember whether he felt cold at any point.

  As the car moved forward and the forest thinned, Grigoriev recalled his arrival in Moscow, in the chaotic and violent days leading up to the October triumph. Without ceasing to listen, Soldier 13 thought that, just four months before, the young Ramón who had inhabited him would have loved to visit red revolutionary Moscow, the pilgrimage site of all the world’s Communists. But he had lost all curiosity and was now making the visit with the same discipline and lack of passion with which he would have followed an order. While he listened to his mentor’s words, he impressed on his mind the details of the trip with the meticulousness of a professional.

  Grigoriev and Marshal Koniev had commented that they would take a break between his training sessions. Due to his excellent results, he had been given permission so he could enjoy a weekend in the capital. Soon, Soldier 13 would learn that he would be allowed to leave the base with other intentions.