The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  A few days before his birthday, Lev Davidovich received a report from his former correspondent V.V., who told him that now his boss at the NKVD, that midget Yezhov, had been removed and, shortly after, jailed under charges of abuse of power and treason. Like Yagoda, Yezhov was going to die, and the real reason was that, as always, Stalin needed a scapegoat in order to make his own innocence shine.

  V.V. told him in detail how, under Yezhov’s command, the labor camps had ceased to be Yagoda’s prisons, managed cruelly and with disdain, where people died from hunger and the elements. Under Yezhov, the propaganda about the excellence of the Soviet reeducation of criminals had been forgotten, and the so-called gulags had been turned into camps of systematic extermination, where the prisoners were forced to work until their deaths, or were murdered, in unprecedented numbers. But Yezhov’s terror had not been as irrational and sick as it seemed. For example, in February 1937, Stalin told his peon Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern general secretary, that the foreign Communists received in Moscow were “playing with the enemy” and immediately tasked Yezhov with solving the problem. One year later, of the 394 members of the executive committee of the International who lived in the USSR, only 170 were still alive, the rest having been executed or sent to death camps. There were Germans, Austrians, Yugoslavs, Italians, Bulgarians, Finns, Balts, British, Frenchmen, and Poles among them, while the proportion of sentenced Jews was once again noteworthy. In that witch hunt, Stalin eliminated more leaders of the German Communist Party from before 1933 than Hitler himself had. Of the sixty-eight leaders who, after obeying his policies and allowing fascism to rise, fled to seek refuge in the homeland of communism, more than forty had been executed or died in the camps; so many Poles were eliminated that their faction in the party had to be dissolved.

  As he read and wrote notes on V.V.’s letter, Lev Davidovich felt himself sinking under the weight of the revelations. Could he hold out hope that someday humanity would come to know how many hundreds of thousands of people had been executed by Stalin’s henchmen? How many true Communists had he taken out? He was convinced that both totals were dizzying, to which one had to add the millions of peasants who had died of hunger in the Ukraine and other regions due to the catastrophe of collectivization, and the millions who had perished in the resettlement of entire towns ordered by the former commissar for nationalities. In all certainty, he thought, we’re dealing with the greatest massacre in peacetime history, and the worst thing is that we will never know the true and terrible proportions of the genocide, since for many of those sentenced there was no criminal proceeding, trial, or sentence. The majority had died in jails, suffocated in trains, frozen in the Siberian camps, or been executed on the banks of rivers and precipices so that the corpses would be dragged under by the waters or covered by avalanches of earth and snow . . .

  The feeling of finding himself at the mercy of that terror was accentuated when Victor Serge and other friends from Paris confirmed that Étienne was the agent Cupid, linked to the deaths of Liova, Reiss, and Klement. In addition, they accused the young man of having manipulated Jeanne to cause the break that ended in the trial over Seva’s custody (favoring the Trotskys, fortunately) and of intervening in the investigation of Liova’s death, slowing down the police’s work rather than helping it. But, at the same time, the Rosmers and other comrades had tried in vain to find a gap in Étienne’s behavior, and Lev Davidovich still refused to accept the conclusion of his other friends. During all of those months, Étienne’s efficiency had been prodigious: never before had the Bulletin come out so regularly, and in all of his work prior to and following the establishment of the International, his dedication had been exemplary. He knew, nonetheless, that all of that diligence could have been a mask behind which an enemy agent was hiding. He decided that the only solution was to confront Étienne with the accusations against him and demand that he prove his innocence.

  Jeanne, in turn, refusing to acknowledge the court’s verdict, had fled from Paris, taking Seva and the part of the archives Liova had kept, reasoning that they belonged to her, since she had been his wife. Marguerite Rosmer, willingly and kindly, had taken it as a question of honor to find the boy and guaranteed Natalia that she would bring him to Mexico. Poor Seva! The woman then exclaimed that with his biological father in a concentration camp; his mother dead by suicide, practically in front of him; his adoptive father dead under strange circumstances that pointed to Stalin; his tutor seemingly gone mad, turning all of his frustrations against him; his grandparents in exile; another grandmother confined to a prison camp; dead aunts and disappeared uncles, siblings, and cousins who were never heard from again . . . was there ever a victim more innocent and at the same time more exemplary of Stalin’s hate than that small Vsevolod Volkov?

  Despite so many losses and the charged atmosphere in the Casa Azul—especially since Frida’s departure for New York, where an exhibit of hers had been organized—Natalia Sedova decided to celebrate her husband’s fifty-ninth birthday. A few trusted friends came to see him (Otto Rühle, who had stayed to live in Mexico; Max Shachtman; Octavio Fernández; Pep Nadal; and others), joined by secretaries and bodyguards. Natalia had prepared various dishes, mostly Mexican but also Russian, French, and Turkish. Rivera’s bad taste was on display when he gave him a Day of the Dead candied skull with the label “Stalin” on its forehead. Meanwhile, Shachtman gave a sort of speech, half in jest, half-serious, and made a portrait of the feted man: “His hair is messy, his face tan, his blue eyes are as penetrating as always. L.D. is still a good-looking man. A dandy, as Victor Serge says, who gave me this tidbit, with which Lenin tried to explain who our beloved Trotsky was, and is. ‘Do you know what Lev Davidovich’s response will be when the dour-faced officer in charge of his execution squad asks him his last wish?’ Lenin asked. ‘Well, our comrade will look at him, approach him respectfully and ask him: is there any chance, sir, that you have a comb so I could smooth my hair?’ ”

  But the real portrait was sketched by the person who knew him best, Natalia Sedova, who wrote: “L.D. is alone. We walk through the small garden in Coyoacán, and are surrounded by ghosts with their foreheads riddled with holes . . . Sometimes I hear him, when he’s working, and he sighs and talks to himself out loud: ‘how exhausting . . . I can’t go on!’ Many times friends surprise him talking alone with famous shadows, their skulls broken by the henchmen’s bullets, friends of yesteryear become penitents, overshadowed by infamy and lies, accusing L.D., Lenin’s companion . . . He sees Rakovsky, his beloved brother who, like a prince, offered his enormous fortune to the revolutionary movement. He sees Smirnov, brilliant and happy; Muralov, the general with the enormous mustache, a Red Army hero . . . He sees his children Nina, Zina, Liova, his beloved Blumkin, Yoffe, Tukhachevsky, Andreu Nin, Klement, Wolf. All of them dead. All of them. L.D. is alone.”

  22

  Jacques Mornard truly felt happy when he saw Sylvia Ageloff’s thin figure in the airport hall. She was wearing one of those black dresses that, on Gertrude Allison’s advice, she had begun to wear ever since her stay in Paris, since, according to the bookseller, that color highlighted the whiteness of her skin. Since then, so conscious of her ugliness, the woman had followed the advice with the hope of offering something more enticing to her adored Jacques, against whose chest she threw herself, shuddering with emotion.

  The week before, with the year 1940 barely begun, Tom had told Jacques that the Spanish agent Felipe, one of those who was frozen after Orlov’s desertion, had arrived in Mexico. Felipe was coming back from Moscow to take charge, as the operative officer at the head of the action, of the group of Mexicans—former combatants in Spain—who were training to strike against the renegade. The Spaniard, who had been turned into an ambiguous French—or was it Polish—Jew, would be to his local subordinates a man without a name, he would just be the Jewish Comrade. Grigulievich, who had remained in the shadows the whole time, would pass the reins on to Felipe, while Tom would begin to devise and prepare other
actions. The second piece of encouraging news was that, if everything went as planned, the American spy would arrive in two to three months to take the place of one of the bodyguards whose period of service in the Exile’s house was about to end. Tom assured him that the operation was entering the adjustment period, but was careful to mention to him that at that moment Jacques Mornard had moved back to the second or third line of attack. In other words, his stock had fallen.

  For several days, Jacques and Sylvia lived a kind of honeymoon in their room at the Montejo. At Jacques’s insistence, the woman delayed her Coyoacán visit more than she wanted in order to say hello to her admired Lev Davidovich, for whom she brought correspondence and to whom she wanted to reiterate her willingness to help in anything he needed while she was in Mexico. When Sylvia made the appointments to be received at the house on Avenida Viena, Jacques offered to take her in his car, but only on the condition that under no circumstances would he mix himself up with her friends. It was that he simply wasn’t interested, and just as he respected Sylvia’s political passions, he wanted her to accept his lack of interest in that whole pathetic story about Communists fighting with other Communists.

  “You don’t understand anything,” Sylvia said, smiling, enjoying the superiority she felt, at least in that terrain.

  “More than you know,” Jacques refuted her. “Have you already read in the papers what the Mexican Communists are doing to each other?”

  “It’s a Stalinist purge. They removed the general secretary, Laborde, and Valentín Campa not because they were bad Communists but because they didn’t want to obey some order from Moscow. It’s the usual . . .”

  Jacques laughed, so much that tears came to his eyes.

  “My God, they’re all the same. That side says that everything bad that happens is due to agents and Trotskyist provocations, and all of you see Stalin’s ghost and his policemen even in your soup.”

  “The difference is that we are right.”

  “Please, Sylvia . . . The world can’t live between Stalinist and Trotskyist conspiracies.”

  “Do me the favor of not comparing the two. Stalin is a murderer who has killed with hunger and executed millions of Soviets and thousands of Communists throughout the world. He invaded Poland and now Finland in agreement with Hitler and he’s obsessed with murdering Lev Davidovich and . . .”

  Jacques gave a half turn and entered the bathroom.

  “Let me finish! Listen to me for once!”

  Jacques returned to the room and stared at her. He got close to her and, with the tips of his fingers, forcefully, he tapped her two or three times on the temple. He felt an almost uncontrollable desire to hurt her and Sylvia didn’t know how to react to his new attitude.

  “Get it well into your head that I could care less about all of these stories. Are you going to Coyoacán or not?”

  Already in the car, Jacques assured her that he had an approximate idea of how to get to the suburb where the Exile lived, although he had to ask a few times to be sure that he was going the right way. When at last they turned onto Avenida Viena, a quagmire because of the recent rains, he couldn’t avoid exclaiming, “My God, where has this man put himself?”

  “The only place he was given asylum. And if he lives like this, it is because, as you say, he’s obsessed with Stalinist conspiracies.”

  Jacques had stopped the car in front of the building and a Mexican policeman approached him. When the woman got out of the car, they yelled from the watchtower it was okay. Then Jacques moved the car to the opposite side of the road and parked it farther away from the armored gate. Sylvia, in front of the visitors’ door, waited for them to open it, and just as she entered, the heavy barrier closed behind her.

  Despite the fact that the temperature was fairly low, Jacques got out of the Buick and, with a cigarette at his lips, leaned against the hood, willing to wait.

  When Sylvia emerged, three quarters of an hour later, she came in the company of a man as tall as Jacques but perhaps stockier. Sylvia introduced him as Otto Schüssler, one of Comrade Trotsky’s secretaries. Jacques held out his hand, introducing himself as Frank Jacson, and exchanged the usual polite phrases with Otto. He had the impression he was being examined and opted for an attitude halfway between shyness and arrogance, a bit stupid and boisterous, the one that best seemed as if it could express his ignorance of politics and his indifference to everything that place signified.

  “Sylvia tells us that you’re going to be here for a while,” Otto noted casually.

  “Well, I don’t know for sure; it depends on business. For now, everything’s going well. And if there’s easy money to be made, then I’m here.”

  “Jacques—” Sylvia said, and stopped herself, conscious of her mistake and a little embarrassed by her lover’s words. “I mean Frank . . . came to open an office in Mexico.”

  Otto Schüssler arched his eyebrows. Jacques didn’t give him time to think about it any further.

  “My name is Jacques Mornard, but I travel as Frank Jacson. I am a Belgian army deserter and I don’t know when I’ll be able to return to my country. I’m not willing to fight for something the politicians didn’t know how to take care of when they had the chance.”

  “It’s a point of view . . .” Otto paused. “Mornard . . . Jacson?”

  “If you’re not the immigration police, however you like.”

  “Jacson, then.” Otto smiled and held out his hand. “Take good care of little Sylvia. All of us here love her and her sisters a lot.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, and, after opening Sylvia’s door, walked around the car, avoiding the mud, and took his place behind the wheel.

  “Nice car,” Otto commented through Sylvia’s window.

  “And very safe. Since I have to travel throughout the whole country . . .”

  Schüssler patted the roof softly and Jacques began to drive away.

  “Will they approve of me to be your boyfriend?”

  Sylvia looked ahead, her cheeks flushed.

  “I couldn’t avoid it, dear. It’s not the bodyguards’ paranoia. They are expecting something. Things have gotten really heated. Please understand.”

  “I understand. A Stalinist conspiracy,” he said and smiled. “So how’s your boss?”

  “He’s not my boss . . . And he’s fine, working a lot. He wants to finish the biography of Stalin as soon as possible.”

  “Trotsky is writing a biography of Stalin?” Jacques’s surprise made him slow down.

  “He’s the only one who can tell the truth about that monster. The rest are dead or are his accomplices.”

  Jacques moved his head, as if he were denying something remote, and sped up.

  “I am dying of hunger. What do you want to eat?”

  “Whitefish from Pátzcuaro,” she said, as if she had already thought about it.

  “Where have you tasted it?”

  “I just learned that it’s one of Lev Davidovich’s favorite dishes.”

  “I know somewhere where they make it . . . Let’s go see if your boss has good taste.”

  “You’re an angel,” Sylvia said, and moved her left hand between Jacques Mornard’s legs. It appeared that being so close to her admired Lev Davidovich awoke all of her appetites.

  Tom and Caridad had disappeared again. A few days before, at the Shirley Court apartment, Tom had warned Jacques that at any moment he would leave Mexico to receive orders, perhaps definitive ones. During the length of his absence, the young man would have just one mission: to get closer, with the most carefree attitude, to the Duck’s house and become familiar with his guards. Under no circumstances should he ask Sylvia to introduce him into the fortress, but if they invited him, he should not refuse. If he had the opportunity to meet the Exile, he should demonstrate respect and admiration, but in rather low doses, and he should even act a little shy. In his mind, he should photograph the territory and start to plan an exit strategy in case he or anyone else was tasked with carrying out the mission.
The escape was just as important as the action, Tom insisted. His eventual entrance should be gained on the belief that a guy like him could never be a threat against anyone.

  Jacques had a glimpse of how his fate was linked to that of the renegade when Sylvia was required by her idol to assist him in his work for two or three weeks: Mademoiselle Yanovitch, tasked with transcribing the recordings of articles the Exile dictated in Russian, had taken ill, and Sylvia’s presence in Mexico was a blessing. Jacques, who had a few days free, since Mr. Lubeck was in the United States on important business, offered to take her every morning to the house on Avenida Viena and return in the afternoon to pick her up. While she helped her “boss,” he would be updating papers and correspondence in the rented office of the Ermita building. The only problem was that if Sylvia finished early, she had to wait for him, because, with typical Mexican inefficiency, the phone Jacques had requested two months earlier had yet to be installed.

  Throughout the month of February, the couple showed up in front of Trotsky’s house three or four days a week, and Jacques, without getting out of the car, blew his horn a few times to announce Sylvia’s arrival; the door was immediately opened for her. In the afternoons, when he returned, Sylvia was rarely waiting outside, and because of that he had to park the car and smoke a cigarette as she finished her work. In those first days, Jacques Mornard smoked without paying too much attention to the house. He became a regular presence for the guards, who, always seeing him dressed so elegantly, took to calling him “Sylvia’s husband” or “Jacson.” Thus the distance between them faded. Otto Schüssler, a car enthusiast, was the one who returned to break the ice and, whenever he could, went out to the street to speak with him, since the Belgian man was practically an expert on race cars. More than once Sylvia, sitting in the Buick already, had to wait for Jacques, Otto, and even some of the other guards covering the tower to finish their conversation about engines, clutches, and brake systems.