The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  On March 2, Jacques followed the information on the radio about the opening of the first session of the Military Council of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union. According to reports, there were about five hundred people in the room, and their focal point was the aged and stammering Bukharin. Prosecutor Vyshinsky presented the charges, already known by all: The accused, in alliance with the absent Lev Davidovich Trotsky and his deceased son and deputy, Lev Sedov, were not only murderers, terrorists, and spies, but they had also been counterrevolutionary agents since the start of the revolution and even before. In 1918, Trotsky and his accomplices had already conspired to assassinate Lenin as well as Stalin and the first Soviet president, Sverdlov. In the prosecutor’s possession were legal statements declaring how Trotsky had become a German agent in 1921 and a British intelligence operative in 1926, along with some of his comrades in conspiracy there present. In his treacherous degradation, his last criminal efforts had been selling information to the Polish secret services and conspiring, with some of the accused, to cause mass poisonings of Soviet citizens, fortunately impeded by the tireless actions of the NKVD.

  Since Grigoriev came and went from the apartment without offering Jacques any explanations, the latter decided to take advantage of his time by taking long walks around Moscow, and wherever he went, the Belgian found a city that was shocked and outraged. Throughout those days of terrible revelations, the people even seemed less concerned by the awful quality of the bread or the lack of shoes and happy to know that their leaders had managed to dismantle another conspiracy. The people’s indignation grew as the accused admitted to ever more shocking crimes. But the surprise reached its climax when Bukharin admitted the monstrosity of his crimes and recognized that he was responsible, politically and legally, for promoting defeatism and planning acts of sabotage (even when he personally, he clarified, did not take part in the preparation of any concrete act and denied his participation in the most sinister acts of terrorism and sabotage). What was clear was that Bukharin had finalized his declaration in such a way that only made him a traitor. “Kneeling before the party and the country,” he said, “I await your verdict.” Jacques noticed that Bukharin’s declaration included a great number of present and past evils, almost inconceivable in a man who, until two years earlier, was moving at the highest levels of the party. But that night in the beer halls, streets, metro cars, in the lines and amid the drunks who milled around the sordid triangle of the three stations (Leningradsky, Kazansky, and Yaroslavl), Jacques heard the same words again and again: “Bukharin has confessed,” and the same conclusion: “Now they’re really going to shoot him.”

  When Grigoriev announced the following morning that he had a gift for him, Jacques thought that the time of their departure had come.

  “Today we’re going to the trial,” Grigoriev said, to Jacques’s great surprise, and added, “Yagoda is taking the stand.”

  It was just a little after eight when they exited Okhotny Ryad Station and walked toward the House of the Trade Unions. On the boulevard of theaters, at the plaza where the Bolshoi Theater rose up in front of the Hotel Metropol, a protest was taking place and people were shouting and waving signs demanding the death of the Trotskyist, anti-Bolshevik traitors. Their indignation was vehement but not chaotic, and Jacques confirmed that the groups were organized by unions, factories, and schools, and that their slogans came directly from Pravda editorials.

  Through the line of soldiers stationed at the top of Pushkinskaya Street, they managed to make their way toward the building where, prior to the October victory, the indolent Russian aristocracy had taken its pleasures. They went up the staircase, a tremendous display of marble, bronze, and glass, in search of the historic Hall of the Columns, where the geniuses of Russian music had played their scores and the great figures of the previous century had danced. Thanks to the revolution, the compound’s fate had changed, like that of the entire country: in it, the Bolsheviks had made many of their revolutionary speeches, and even between the twenty-eight magnificent marble-covered wooden columns to which the hall owed its name, Lenin’s corpse had had its wake before being moved to the mausoleum where he now rested; the trials of August 1936 and February 1937 had also been carried out there, marking the beginning and continuing the painful but necessary purge of a party, a state, and a government resolved not to stop even before history in order to give birth to a new History.

  Moved to silence, Jacques took the seat Grigoriev pointed out to him. Party civil servants, leaders of the Komsomol, directors of the Comintern, foreign diplomats, and accredited journalists were filling the hall when, at nine on the dot, the judges, the prosecutors, and finally the accused and their lawyers made their entrance. The tension in the air was dark and unhealthy, when Jacques Mornard leaned toward his mentor to whisper in his ear:

  “Is Comrade Stalin coming today?”

  “He has too many important things to do to waste his time listening to these treacherous dogs confess.”

  When Vyshinsky called Genrikh Yagoda to make his statement, a murmur went through the hall. Jacques Mornard saw a man stand who was rather small, nearly bald, with a Hitleresque mustache that made him look like a ferret. It was difficult to recognize in that individual, incapable of keeping control over his hands, the man who for many years possessed the power to decide the life and death of so many citizens and who, for many years, had hidden a traitor.

  “Are you willing to confess the crimes of which you are accused, Genrikh Yagoda?” Vyshinsky inquired.

  “Yes,” the prisoner said immediately, and paused before continuing. “I confess because I have understood the perversity of what I and the rest of the accused have done and because I believe that we shouldn’t leave this world with such terrible crimes on our conscience. With my confession, I hope to serve the Soviet brotherhood and inform the world that the party has always been right and that we, criminals outside the law, have been wrong.”

  Vyshinsky, satisfied, began the interrogation with questions laced with sarcasm, and each one of Yagoda’s responses caused a stir or a cry of indignation in the room. Jacques Mornard, still capable of being surprised before certain Russian attitudes, noticed the theatricality emanating from those figures, from their words, their outfits, their gestures, and even from the scenery: their actions reminded him of certain puppet and marionette tableaus that he had enjoyed in the South of France, those mise-en-scènes in which, with necessary haughtiness, the inexhaustible tales of Robert the Devil, Roland, and the Knights of the Round Table were told.

  Yagoda admitted to having conspired to carry out a coup d’état, in collusion with the German, English, and Japanese secret services; he admitted his participation in the Trotskyist plot to make an attempt on Stalin’s life, in some poisonings, and in the murder of Maxim Gorky; he accepted having planned a restoration of the bourgeoisie in Russia and, carrying out one of Trotsky’s plans, of having committed an excess of repressive operations aimed at destabilizing the country. But when Vyshinsky, more than happy over what he had reaped, asked him about his role in the murder of Max, son of Gorky, Yagoda didn’t answer. Vyshinsky demanded a response, but the prisoner maintained his silence. The tension became thick and the prosecutor’s voice resonated between the columns when he yelled at the prisoner to confess his role in Max’s murder. From his chair, tensely, Jacques noticed that Yagoda’s hands were trembling in an uncontrollable way when, looking at the court, in a barely audible voice, he denied having participated in the murder of Gorky’s son and added, in a pleading tone:

  “I want to confess that I lied during the proceedings. I haven’t committed any of the crimes I am accused of and that I admitted to. I ask you, Comrade Prosecutor, not to interrogate me about the motives for my lie. I was always loyal to the Soviet Union, to the party, and to Comrade Stalin, and as a Communist, I can’t incriminate myself in crimes I didn’t commit.”

  Jacques Mornard understood that something strange was happening. Vyshinsky’s face, those of the
judges, the expressions around the courtroom and even of the accused, revealed a bewilderment that, from the public area, had turned into a wasp’s nest of voices revealing disbelief, surprise, and indignation, when the principal judge’s voice rose above the cacophony and declared a recess until the afternoon.

  “How interesting!” Grigoriev said to him, excited. “Let’s go and eat. I promise that this afternoon you’re going to see something you will never forget.”

  When they returned, Jacques Mornard saw entering the Hall of Columns a Yagoda who appeared to have aged ten years in just five hours. When the judge demanded it of him, the accused rose with difficulty. He looked like a corpse.

  “Does the accused maintain this morning’s declaration?” the judge wanted to know, and Yagoda shook his head in the negative.

  “I recognize my guilt for everything of which I am accused,” he said, and made a long pause until the applause, whistles, and cries of “Death to the treacherous dog” from many of the spectators were silenced by the judge’s gavel. “I don’t think it’s necessary to repeat the list of my crimes and I don’t expect to tone down the seriousness of my crimes. But since I know that Soviet laws know no revenge, I ask for forgiveness. I address you, my judges; you, from the Cheka; you, Comrade Stalin, to say: Forgive me!”

  “No, there will be no forgiveness for you!” Vyshinsky yelled at that moment, unable to hide his satisfaction and his hate. “You will die like a dog! You all deserve to die like dogs!”

  Grigoriev nudged a pale-faced Jacques with his elbow and motioned with his head, standing up.

  “There’s nothing else to see anymore,” he said to him, leaving the hall.

  Jacques Mornard couldn’t help feeling confused. It took great effort to find any reasoning behind Yagoda’s disparate actions. Out on the street, Grigoriev asked the chauffeur driving them around the city to take them directly to the safe house. When they got out, he bid goodbye to the chauffeur with the order to come pick them up in a couple of hours. Instead of going up the stairs, Grigoriev motioned to Jacques and they went out to the building’s courtyard, through which they accessed a street by which, always in silence, they walked toward the crowded Three Stations Square. Without stopping, Grigoriev made his way to Leningradsky Station. Nearly elbowing their way through, they entered the only place serving alcoholic beverages and the adviser asked for two pints of beer.

  “What did you make of what you saw?”

  Jacques Mornard immediately knew that the question had too many layers and that his response could be of value to his future.

  “Do you want the truth?”

  “I expect the truth,” the other man said, and served himself a second glass, which he filled with a stream of the vodka he carried in his pocket.

  “Yagoda didn’t confess of his own volition. Everything sounded like a play.”

  Grigoriev looked at him, pensive, drank a big sip of the yorsh, and, his eyes fixed on Jacques Mornard’s, poured more than half of the chekushka of vodka into his pitcher and drank it.

  “Yagoda knows all the methods in existence to make someone confess. He invented many of them and I can assure you that he was very creative. Of course, some were already applied to him before the trial. Didn’t you notice how his teeth moved? Who knows who that set of teeth belonged to . . . But that wretch, in his delirium, believed he could resist . . . Three days ago, Krestinsky thought the same thing and ended up confessing everything . . . Yezhov didn’t even need three hours to convince Yagoda that it’s not possible to resist if one is guilty. Only absolute innocence can save you, and even then, many innocents are capable of confessing that they crucified Christ as long as you leave them alone and kill them as soon as possible.”

  “Are you telling me that Yagoda is guilty of everything the prosecutor says?”

  “I don’t know about everything, or almost everything, or just a part, but he’s guilty. And that made him weak. Despite that weakness, he fought; you can’t deny his determination. Today has been a good day for you, Jacques. I wanted to show you how a man grovels, but you’ve had the privilege of seeing how he collapses and sinks. I hope you’ve learned the lesson: no one resists. Not even Yagoda. Neither will Yezhov when his turn comes.”

  Jacques Mornard drank almost his entire pint of beer in one gulp. He felt his lungs congest, threatening to suffocate him, until his nasal passages snorted like a locomotive starting up; he still had to wait a few seconds to recover his breath. That lesson might have been extremely arduous, but he at least learned that ethyl alcohol vapor had the advantage of removing the stench of the atmosphere from his nose.

  “Are you going to tell me now what happened with Andreu Nin?” he asked when he was at last able to speak.

  Grigoriev smiled while he shook his head.

  “You’re so stubborn . . . What do you want me to say? That Catalan was so crazy that he didn’t confess. He pissed off everyone and—”

  “I knew all along he was not going to confess,” he said, and moved the pitcher of beer to Grigoriev. His mentor dropped a stream of vodka into it. “Not even if you’d drowned him in vodka . . .”

  15

  Throughout the last week of November and the month of December 1977, I had six meetings, all arranged beforehand, with the man who loved dogs. The winter, an indecisive one, would dissolve toward the end of the year in two or three cold fronts that exhausted themselves in their transit through the Gulf of Mexico, bringing only a few drizzles to the island that were incapable of altering the thermometers and some murky waves that broke the peacefulness of the sea in front of which we held our conversations. Captivated by the man’s words, I would run from my job to the beach barely thinking about anything but our next agreed encounter. Listening to and trying to digest that story, in which nearly all the incidents constituted revelations of a buried reality, of a truth that wasn’t even imagined by me or by the people I knew, had turned into an obsession. What I was discovering as I listened, added to that which I had started to read, deeply disturbed me, while the flame of a visceral fear devoured me, without being able, despite everything, to burn away desire to know.

  Ever since the man began to paint the journey of his friend Ramón Mercader, starting with his childhood and youth in Barcelona, the doors began to open for me to a universe of whose existence until then I’d had only vague and orthodox notions, with categorical distinctions between the good and the bad but whose inner workings I didn’t know: professions of a sincere and all-consuming faith mixed with intrigue, dirty games, lies always believed as truth, and never-suspected truths that highlighted my innocence and ignorance with dazzling flashes. As López moved through his story, on several occasions I was on the verge of refuting him, of yelling at him that that couldn’t be, but I always held back and limited myself to asking some question when I felt things went beyond my credulity or understanding, and I kept listening to an account that melted away many of my beliefs and reorganized some of the other notions that they had instilled in me.

  After the second conversation, I drew the insidious conclusion that something very important didn’t click in the story of the man who loved dogs. Although I still hadn’t completely developed the cosmic mistrust that I would acquire precisely as a consequence of those meetings (that vocation for suspicion that would bother Raquelita and my friends so much, since it led me to react in an almost mechanical way and to qualify any story capable of minimally challenging plausibility as impossible, as sheer lies), as I listened there was a disquieting but ubiquitous lack of logic that, to begin with, would make me wonder whether some of the episodes of Ramón’s history weren’t being manipulated by his friend and storyteller Jaime López. But only at the end of the third conversation, already in the middle of December, did I discern with certain clarity the crack through which the logic was escaping: How was it possible for López to have such precise information about his friend’s life and feelings? No matter how explicit or detailed Ramón was during the conversations held in Mos
cow over ten years before, when they met after such a long time without seeing each other and the deceived Ramón Mercader opened all the channels to the most incredible corners of his life to his old comrade Jaime López, the knowledge displayed by the narrator seemed undoubtedly exaggerated and could only be due to two reasons. The first possibility had been cooking in my mind since our initial exchange: López was an out-and-out fabulist who could be coloring the story with brushstrokes from his own palate; the second struck me like a bolt of lightning as I was traveling on the bus to Havana after our third meeting, and it almost drove me to madness: Was Jaime López Ramón Mercader himself? Could that phantasmagoric being relegated to a stormy and lost corner of history, that faceless protagonist of a past plagued by horrors, still exist? Although the only possible responses to those questions was a resounding no for each, the seed of doubt had fallen on fertile ground and would remain there because a persistent suspicion prevented me from cultivating it: If the man who loved dogs was Ramón Mercader, what the hell was he doing in Cuba? Why in the devil was he telling me his story? What was all that bullshit about Jaime López and his mystery?

  One of the considerations that had encouraged my doubts about Jaime López’s role in that story arose from the fact that at the time I was listening to him I had some clues that I did not have when I first met him. It was after the second conversation, knowing already where the story was leading, that I decided to go and see my friend Dany in the offices of the publishing house where he had started to work as a “specialist in promotion and distribution.” Although it wasn’t the job Dany had dreamed of, he had accepted it with the hope that, once his two years of social service were over, a coveted editor’s position would become available, and he would have better chances of filling it if he positioned himself in the publishing house’s administrative department.