The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  The former commissar of war noticed that, in contrast to the trials carried out in the previous year, Tukhachevsky and the other generals were not accused of Trotskyism but rather of being members of an organization in the service of the Third Reich. Even when it was already known that the old officers of the Red Army were in Stalin’s sight, Lev Davidovich had not been able to imagine that, unless they had more solid proof of the existence of the conspiracy, the Grave Digger would dare to decapitate the country’s military cupola at a moment in which war seemed inevitable. He knew that ever since Tukhachevsky’s substitution as deputy commissar of defense two months before, many detentions must have been ordered among the high officers; furthermore, he was sure that the fate of those soldiers had been decided when it was made public that the administrative and political person responsible for the army, the old Bolshevik Gamarnik, had committed suicide, while four of his advisers mysteriously disappeared.

  The next morning, Moscow reported the summary execution of the accused, who, they assured, had confessed their treason. Stupefaction and pain had paralyzed Lev Davidovich: he knew that perhaps Stalin was right in fearing that the leaders of the army could plot a conspiracy to remove him from power, but it was inadmissible to accuse those men—military mainstays of the revolution from its darkest days—of being the agents of a fascist power, especially when the list of prisoners was headed by, precisely, Communists and Jews such as generals Yakir, Eidemann, and Feldmann. But if in reality the soldiers had conspired, why hadn’t they acted? Why had they delayed the coup when they were warned that they were sought after?

  Never before had Lev Davidovich felt fear like that for the future of the revolution and the country, at the same time that he was convinced that if Stalin dared to take that mortal leap, it was because he had Hitler’s promise in hand to respect the borders of the USSR in case of war. If that was not the case, the fascist leaders had to think that Stalin was definitively crazy to accept the story of a conspiracy that no rational being would believe, since the mere fact of placing three high-ranking officers of Jewish origins as the heads of a pro-German plot would have been incredible even for the Nazis themselves, the supposed friends of the traitors. The inevitable conclusion had been that, with that process, Stalin was taking another step in his rapprochement with Hitler, whom he had denounced so many times since the electoral rise of Fascism.

  For several days Lev Davidovich had ceased to look for Frida in order to take refuge in the sure comfort of his Natasha, for whom the death of Tukhachevsky, like so many others who stirred in her memory, were losses of people for whom she felt affection. How many more was Stalin going to kill? Natalia asked him one night as they drank coffee in their room, and he offered his response to her: as long as there remained one Bolshevik with the memory of the past, the henchmen would have work. The war to the death was no longer against the opposition but against history. To do it right, Stalin had to kill all those who knew Lenin, and those who knew Lev Davidovich, and, of course, those who knew Stalin . . . He had to silence all those who had been witnesses to his failures, to the genocide of the collectivization, of the murdering madness of his work camps . . . and then he would still have to remove from the world those who had helped annihilate the opposition, the past, history, and also annoying witnesses . . . “And Sergei? Liova? Why hasn’t he already come for us?” the woman then asked herself. He saw that Natalia Sedova’s eyes had the vague glimmer of pain and felt in his chest the pressure of the shame over his weaknesses and refused to tell her that his sons were as condemned to die as the two of them. Perhaps tormented by the pain, at that moment he committed one of the most unforgivable slips of his life and asked Natalia if she was afraid of dying. From dull blue, her eyes went to the color of steel, like that of a wet dagger, and he felt a fear that he had never had of anything in his life: no, she didn’t fear death, the woman said. She worried only that respect and trust might die.

  Feeling himself drowning in shame, Lev Davidovich thought the time had come to put an end to his relationship with Frida.

  Days later, Lev Davidovich would tell himself that another piece of news, this time arriving from Spain, had been the one to blame for delaying the decision to cut off his clandestine affair. The confirmation that his old colleague Andreu Nin had disappeared after being detained, accused of charges similar to those used in Moscow, threatened to drown him in depression and prevented him from overcoming his compulsive need for the voracious sex of Diego Rivera’s wife.

  The story of Nin’s detention and disappearance was full of contradictions and, as usual, challenged credulity. Through various sources, the Exile managed to establish that on June 16 the police had taken the Catalan Communist out of Barcelona to Valencia. The last confirmed news placed him, on the night of June 22, at a special prison in Alcalá de Henares, from where, according to the official press, he had been bizarrely rescued by a German commando, charged with taking him to fascist territory and, later, of sending him to Berlin.

  The accusation that Nin was one of Franco’s spies was crude and unsustainable: Stalin’s men in Spain hadn’t even concerned themselves too much with the believability of their accusations. The disappearance and almost certain death of that friend who more than ten years earlier Lev Davidovich had met in Moscow and who had joined the opposition without ever renouncing his own political criteria as a convinced and anarchic Communist could only be due to the shocking capacity Nin had to resist the tortures of the GPU without signing the statements that, with all certainty, were placed before him. A fighter like Nin would’ve known, from the beginning of his Calvary, that his fate was decreed, but that the prestige of his party and the lives of his comrades, accused of promoting a coup d’état, depended on his lips. So conquering Stalin must have become his last obsession as he was tortured and he refused to sign the condemnation of the Spanish left and of his own memory.

  The image of a young, always war-like Tukhachevsky who had become one of the mainstays in the middle of the civil war of the recently created Red Army, and Andreu Nin’s awkward and passionate image, that of a man dazzled by the Soviet reality but always questioning it, would accompany Lev Davidovich to the burial of his last grasp of youth. Yet after the first erotic encounters, Frida had started to send him signals that could be read as holding back that the man, drunk with sex, had refused or been incapable of understanding, even when it hadn’t gone unnoticed that, after the first meetings, she had tried to evade him (her political and sexual curiosity perhaps satisfied, her possible revenge against Rivera’s infidelities fulfilled), causing him to pursue her with even more fury. When at last they lay down in intimacy, she tried to finish quickly as he confessed over and over again how much he loved her, desired her, dreamed about her.

  The tension went up like a barricade inside the Casa Azul, and it was Natalia Sedova who, at the beginning of July, lit the fuse when, without consulting with anyone, she moved to an apartment in the city center, giving Rivera the excuse that she preferred to be alone as she underwent medical treatment for “feminine problems.” Faced with that situation, Frida must have understood that their foolishness was beginning to reach the limits of what could be controlled, and that same afternoon had entered the guest room and attacked her lover along the flank he least expected: they had to clarify things once and for all, and he should make a definitive decision: was he leaving his wife or staying with her? The challenge had stirred the man, but he responded without thinking and he told her he had never thought of making such a choice. With difficult steps, Frida approached him and caressed her lover’s face and, calling him Piochitas—from the name Mexicans give to a goatee—told him the game had ended. It was no longer fun and they could hurt other people who didn’t deserve it, and she didn’t say it because of Diego, an alcoholic pig, nor because of herself, whom Diego had turned into an untamed pig; she said it because of Natalia, who was a queen.

  At that moment Lev Davidovich had understood that perhaps he would never manage to kn
ow through exact science what chemical reaction had burned inside Frida to make her throw herself into their affair. He would ask himself whether he had been used just as an instrument of revenge against Rivera (was it possible that the painter hadn’t noticed anything?); whether his historic halo might have motivated the young woman’s dazzling curiosity; even whether pity at seeing him suffer before her sister’s rejection had convinced Frida, who was so liberal, that indulging the sexual appetite of a man who was twice her age was just an act of enjoyable pity that didn’t impact her relaxed morality at all. But when Frida’s perfume had gone from the air in the room, Lev Davidovich managed to smile. Had the game really ended? Only for Frida. It was now up to him to clean up the filth dammed up in his spirit and try to salvage, with the least amount of damage possible, Natalia Sedova’s trust and love. But thirty years of companionship warned him that he would have to deal with an indomitable animal who devoted the same vehemence to her solidarity as to her hate, to her love as to rejection. I’m scared, he thought.

  A few days later, observing the arid mountains of San Miguel from his window, a Lev Davidovich already resolved to sacrifice his dignity and overcome his fears took a piece of paper and began the most intense and strange correspondence, of up to two letters per day, in which he recognized his emotional and biological dependence on his wife. When she left the Casa Azul, Natalia had left him a note capable of wounding him like a dagger. She had looked at herself in the mirror, she said, and seen the death of her charms at the hands of old age. She didn’t reproach him for anything, but she stated that what he had done was an irreversible act. Lev Davidovich had understood the meaning of the message: that her old age was coming at the end of thirty years of a life in common, throughout which Natasha had lived by and for him. At that moment he began to write pleas, often signed as “Your faithful old dog,” a sort of increasingly plaintive knocking on the doors of a heart he was trying to reconquer with memories of yesterday and sentimental and physical needs of the present, expressed at times in language so direct that he surprised himself . . . When at last he received a letter from her, concerned by the pessimism that prevented her husband from focusing on his work, he knew the battle was won and that the victor had been his dear Natasha’s sense of kindness: “You will continue to carry me on your shoulders, Nata, as you have carried me throughout your life,” he wrote to her, and on the following day, with the inevitable entourage, he took the road to the capital in search of the woman of his life.

  An event in Paris, of which Liova informed him, attracted his attention when they returned to the Casa Azul. Ignace Reiss, the nom de guerre of one of the heads of the Soviet secret service in Europe, had approached Lev Sedov to communicate his intention to desert. The young man, with understandable caution, held two meetings with the agent, who told him, among other horrors, that Yezhov and several soldiers designated by Stalin had been the ones who, in agreement with the Germans, fabricated the false accusations used to try the heads of the Red Army. According to Reiss, the purge of soldiers, which was still in progress, was not only necessary for Stalin’s political security but also part of the collaboration sustaining Stalinism and Nazism, under the cover of their respective hates, and had the objective of facilitating the alliance with which they would arrive at the war. The secret services were playing the most active role, for the time being, in that cooperative effort, and what most horrified Reiss was the betrayal that such a machination represented for all the revolutionaries in the world who were enlisting in the antifascist struggle along with the USSR—for the Communists who, despite what happened in Moscow, still obeyed.

  As Trotsky read the reports about Reiss, the Exile felt growing disgust at the betrayal of the most sacred principles. And despite the disgraces that Reiss had surely committed due to his profession, he couldn’t help but feel admiration for a man who, he knew well, had placed his neck under the executioner’s axe. His greatest fear, however, was that Reiss’s break had implicated Liova and the Fourth International, and that when in anger Stalin let loose his henchmen, the Trotskyists were going to once again be his scapegoat.

  Lev Davidovich didn’t have to wait much longer to find out the denouement of that story that would end up touching the very center of his life: on September 6, Liova gave him the news that, a few days earlier, Reiss had been killed on a highway close to Lausanne. The police suspected that the committee for the repatriation of Russian citizens, one of the NKVD fronts created in Paris, was responsible. That same day, by a parallel route, he received another letter, sent by his collaborator Rudolf Klement, in which he commented that Reiss had assured him that one of the plans of the Stalinist police was the elimination of the Trotskyists outside the USSR and that Lev Sedov topped the list. Thus, Klement advised the evacuation of the young man, who was already on the edge of a physical and nervous breakdown due to the political and economic tensions under which he was carrying out his work, exacerbated by personal complications ever since his wife, Jeanne, had declared herself a supporter of her ex-husband Raymond Molinier’s political faction. Because of that, following a conversation with Natalia in which they weighed the options for the young man’s future, Lev Davidovich wrote to Liova, asking his opinion regarding Klement’s fears, before proposing any alternative measures to protect his life.

  As they waited for Liova’s response, the long-awaited verdict of the Dewey commission finally arrived. As Lev Davidovich had foreseen, Dewey and the rest of the members of the jury had reached the conclusion that the Moscow trials of August 1936 and January 1937 had been fraudulent and, as a result, declared him and his son innocent. Excited, he sent a telegram to Liova, demanding that he get as much publicity for the results of the counterproceeding as he could, and that he gather journalists and reporters to initiate a propaganda offensive. At the same time Lev Davidovich would devote himself to preparing the articles to accompany the text of the sentence in a special edition of the Bulletin.

  Just a few months later, Lev Davidovich would try to clarify the ways in which his personal life and history became intertwined in those moments until they drove him to his greatest tragedy, because in the middle of the storm of optimism unleashed by the verdict they received Liova’s response. The young man (like his father) considered that for the time being he was irreplaceable in Paris and could not delegate his duties to Klement, who was already tasked with coordinating the Fourth International, or to Étienne, his most responsible collaborator. It was true, he confessed, that he had financial problems, that he was living in a cold attic, that his relationship with Jeanne had become complicated, and that what had happened in Moscow had affected him more than he originally thought it would, since practically all of the men he had grown up surrounded by and who had been his role models had gone down one by one after admitting to horrible betrayals. Natalia and Lev Davidovich again discussed Liova’s fate, and at that moment it seemed to them unfair to ask him to come to Mexico, almost certainly without his wife, to shut himself away, since, if he didn’t hide, he would just be substituting one danger for another. Lev Davidovich then told his wife that he trusted in Liova’s ability to take care of himself, and that perhaps Stalin would think that killing him would be excessive. “Nothing is excessive for him,” Natalia commented. Despite agreeing with her husband, she would have preferred to have the boy closer to them.

  It was around that time that a certain Josep Nadal showed up in Coyoacán. The man said he was Catalan, a POUM militant, and a very close friend of Andreu Nin. In light of the repression unleashed in Spain against his party, Nadal had preferred to get as far away as possible. Since he was asking for an interview with Comrade Trotsky, van Heijenoort held a meeting with him and, upon returning, confessed to Lev Davidovich that he had felt a stinging in his back as he talked to the man. The deaths of Nin and Reiss warned Lev Davidovich and his inner circle of the new Stalinist offensive outside the USSR, and they all knew that any humble Spanish worker, any German refugee, any French intellectual, could be t
he black angel sent by Moscow. But, motivated by what the Catalan seemed to know about Nin’s disappearance, Lev Davidovich decided to see him on the condition that Jean van Heijenoort be present during the interview.

  The Catalan ended up being a loquacious man with sharp reasoning who, despite his excessive love of cigarettes, captivated Lev Davidovich. According to him, there was no doubt: Nin was dead and his murderers had been directed by the men in Moscow who were imposing their rule on the Republican alliance. The comments he had heard pointed at a Soviet adviser named Kotov and the French Communist André Marty, famous for his brutality, as the organizers of the operation charged with kidnapping Nin and eliminating him when he refused to sign confessions of his collaboration with Franco’s supporters.

  Nadal, who, due to his proximity to Nin, was familiar with many political secrets, would confirm to Lev Davidovich several of his suspicions about Moscow’s strategy in Spain. For him, it was clear that Stalin was playing for the domination and eventual sacrifice of the Republic with several cards, and one of them was financial. After getting Negrín, in his days as the minister of finance, to authorize the Spanish treasury to be moved to Soviet territory, an enormous amount of money seemed to have evaporated and now new payments in cash were demanded of the Republican government for military assistance. The weapons received, Nin had told him, were sufficient for the Republic to resist in the short term but insufficient to stand up to the fascists supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and the real reason that they didn’t sell more war matériel to the government was that Stalin wasn’t interested in a Republican army that was well enough equipped to aspire to victory; once they reached that point, they could end up being uncontrollable . . . But since the financial yoke didn’t guarantee control, Stalin had also ordered the political manipulation of the Republic.