The result of those imperial conquests was that the old Europe was being crushed by the weight of Hitler’s swastika and the Soviet hammer and sickle. Which of the two, when the moment came, would take the first swipe at the other? Lev Davidovich asked himself. He sensed that times of great suffering for his people were approaching. Relying on the scarce optimism he had left, he came to consider that perhaps the country needed a new quota of pain in order to wake up and put the revolutionary dream back in its place.
Lev Davidovich was surprised to receive a visit from General Núñez and Colonel Sánchez Salazar, who came to inform him that thirty people, almost all of them members of the Mexican Communist Party, had been arrested in connection with the May 24 attack. Salazar asked his forgiveness for not forwarding the evidence that allowed them to continue the investigation, and Lev Davidovich responded that if the results warranted it, he not only forgave him but he also congratulated him . . . on his luck.
According to Salazar, shortly after the Exile’s public statement, the police had the incredible good fortune of hearing the comments of a drunk that had put them on the trail of the men in charge of obtaining police uniforms used in the attack. Following this thread, they started to find accomplices until they came to one of the attackers, David Serrano, who led them to discover, on one side, two women tasked with watching the house and distracting the police guards and, on the other, a certain Néstor Sánchez, who, upon being arrested, gave the crucial information that the attack had been led by the painter Siqueiros and a French Jew whose identity none of the detained seemed to know. They already knew that in the attack the brothers-in-law of Siqueiros had been involved, along with his assistant, Antonio Pujol, and the Spanish Communist Rosendo Gómez, all veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Although the statements were confusing, Salazar thought that the French Jew and Pujol had been the ones directly responsible for the attack, since Siqueiros had remained outside the house, next to the police cabin. The order to arrest the painter had been issued, but they didn’t have the least idea where he could be and they feared he was already far from the country. Regarding the French Jew, perhaps the real architect of the plot, only Siqueiros and Pujol seemed to have been in contact with him. The arrested men even contradicted each other, with some claiming he was Polish.
As he listened to Salazar, Lev Davidovich thought about the degree of perversion that Stalin’s influence had injected into the souls of men like those who, after embracing the Marxist ideal and living through betrayals like those committed in Spain, continued to follow Moscow’s orders and were even capable of attacking other human beings. What made him laugh, in contrast, was the nerve of “El Coronelazo” Siqueiros, who, after organizing the attack, didn’t dare enter the house and direct it. It was regrettable that an artist of his scale had turned into a third-rate gunman, terrorist, and liar.
A few days later, the worst hypothesis was confirmed when the police found the corpse of Bob Sheldon buried in the kitchen of a hut up in Santa Rosa, in the desert of Los Leones. At four in the morning, some of Salazar’s emissaries went to get Lev Davidovich to identify him, but Robbins refused to wake him up and sent Otto Schüssler instead. Nonetheless, in the morning, when Natalia told him what had happened, he asked to go to Santa Rosa, where he met Salazar and General Núñez.
Bob Sheldon’s corpse was on a coarse table in the yard of the house. Although they had washed him, he had remnants of the dirt and lime that had covered him. His body was perfectly preserved, and on the right side of his head were two bullet holes. When Lev Davidovich saw him, he felt deeply moved, since he was certain that, in collusion with the GPU or not, Bob Sheldon had been another victim of Stalin’s fury against him, and that that corpse could just as well have been that of Liova, to whom he couldn’t say a final goodbye, or little Yakov Blumkin, or the efficient Klement, or Sermux or Posnansky, his old and close secretaries from the days of the civil war, or perhaps the obstinate Andreu Nin or the kind Erwin Wolf—all of them devoured by terror, all of them murdered by Stalin’s criminal fury. The police respected his silence and remained silent themselves for a few minutes. Salazar concluded that Sheldon’s death confirmed his participation in the attack, but Lev Davidovich again refused to accept that theory and asked to return home. He wanted to be alone, with his guilt and his thoughts.
There was no longer any doubt that fate or Stalin’s inscrutable designs had given him an extension, even though he was convinced it would be a short one. He fluctuated between a rush to tie up outstanding issues and depression over the certainty that everything would very soon be over and his work and dreams would remain in the hands of the unforeseeable fate that posterity would award them. For too many years he had been a pariah, a captive who should behave so as not to bother his hosts. He had been converted into a puppet at whom the rifles of lies were aimed, into a man who was completely alone, who walked through the walled yard of a far-off country, in the company of just a woman, a boy, and a dog, surrounded by dozens of corpses of family members, friends, and comrades. He didn’t have any power, he didn’t have millions of followers, nor did he have a party; barely anyone read his books anymore, but Stalin wanted him dead and in a short while he would swell the lists of Stalinism’s martyrs. And he would do so leaving behind an enormous failure: not that of his existence, which he considered a barely significant circumstance for history, but that of a dream of equality and freedom for the majority, to which he had given his passion . . . Lev Davidovich trusted, nonetheless, that future generations, free of the yoke of totalitarianism, would do justice to that dream and, perhaps, to the stubbornness with which he had maintained it. Because the greater struggle, that of history, would not end with his death and with Stalin’s personal victory—it would start again in a few years, when the statues of the Great Leader were knocked down off their pedestals, he wrote.
Although Lev Davidovich knew that he should forget this turbid attack, each revelation pulled him back to it like a magnet. The story of the supposed Polish or French Jew seemed to lead the Mexican and U.S. police to the trail of an NKVD officer with years of experience in missions carried out in France, Spain, and Japan. Salazar had found out that, under the Jew’s orders, they had rented two houses in Coyoacán to use as support for the attack. Despite those advances, Lev Davidovich was convinced that the identity of the mysterious Jew would remain unknown, as would be the reasons for which a professional like him had not gone into the room and executed the condemned man himself.
The tension experienced in the fortress at Coyoacán turned into a quicksand that sucked in the days. Lev Davidovich couldn’t go back to his previous routine, abnormal in and of itself, but to which he had become accustomed. Nonetheless, whenever he could, he escaped that prison in search of a horizon. The worry over his safety had reached the point that some of his American friends sent him a bulletproof jacket, but he refused to wear it, just as he also forbade that every person who visited him be frisked or that one of his secretaries be present with him for interviews, be they with journalists or with friends like Nadal, Rühle, or others who came by occasionally.
Around that time Sylvia Ageloff returned from New York, and at Lev Davidovich’s insistence she was invited to come over one afternoon, with Jacson, to have tea. He wanted to thank Jacson for his care with the Rosmers and apologize for not having received him as he should have that afternoon on which, pressed by work, he couldn’t sit down to talk. On that more relaxed occasion, they had a pleasant meeting. Sylvia, who had always revered Lev Davidovich, seemed to be on cloud nine over his deference to her and her companion, while Jacson, loyal to his bourgeois education, had brought Natalia a box of fine chocolates and a gift for Seva.
After that meeting, Lev Davidovich commented to Natalia that Jacson had come across as a peculiar guy. First of all, it was unusual that, without the least shame, he claimed that he didn’t care at all about politics, but when he and Sylvia had argued about her sympathies for Shachtman’s faction, he had taken Lev Davi
dovich’s side and, with a certain vehemence, had reproached her for her Yankee attitude of thinking Americans are always right. Shortly before leaving, when they were talking about dogs and he had touched on the topic of raising funds for the International’s work, Jacson offered him his experience in the stock market and even the credit and contacts of his affluent boss. At that moment Lev Davidovich recalled that one of his secretaries had commented on that offer of Jacson’s, which he had rejected, convinced that he couldn’t get mixed up in monetary speculations even to support the most idealistic of political projects. In the face of the Exile’s reaction, Jacson excused himself, saying he understood. Lev Davidovich felt at that moment that there was something in that man that didn’t quite come together: the story of the passport bought in France so he wouldn’t have to fight in the war, his willingness to use his boss’s capital to earn money for him, his apathy toward politics despite having worked as a journalist and being the son of diplomats, his open talk about his financial possibilities . . . No, something wasn’t coming together. Although the Exile thought the origins of that inconsistency perhaps came from his bourgeois talkativeness, he told Natalia that perhaps it was worth learning more about Jacson. For now, his care of the Rosmers repaid, the best thing would be not to receive him again, he added.
Sánchez Salazar went to see him to inform him that they had arrested Siqueiros in a town in the interior. According to the police, since the initial interrogations, always very petulant (and, Lev Davidovich thought, convinced that someone would rescue him from justice’s hands), Siqueiros had denied that the NKVD had been involved in the attack and refused to admit that any French or Pole had participated. He assured them that the idea for the attack had been conceived of by him and his friends in Spain when they learned of the Mexican government’s betrayal of the world proletariat by giving asylum to Trotsky, an apostate capable of ordering his followers to rise up against the Republic in the midst of a civil war. They had resolved to carry out the attack when the war in Europe started, since they believed that they could prevent the traitor from returning to a USSR eventually occupied by his allies, the Nazis. On that point, Lev Davidovich even smiled and asked the policeman if Siqueiros knew that he was a Jew and a Communist. Sánchez Salazar himself admitted that the contradictions were blatant, since the painter had added that the objective of the attack was not to kill him (we would have done so if we had wanted to, he repeated) but to pressure Cárdenas to throw him out of the country. He assured the police that they had prepared the assault without the party’s support, which seemed even more incredible, since all of the commando members were militant Communists. The only thing that made Lev Davidovich happy about that arrest was thinking that probably there would be a trial, and it would provide him the occasion denied to him by the Norwegians to denounce Stalin’s criminal methods and the lies of his regime in a public forum.
It was the afternoon of August 17, while Lev Davidovich was set to distract himself with the rabbits and Azteca, when Sylvia’s boyfriend showed up. The reason for his visit was that, after the conversation he had heard between the girl and the Exile, he had written an article about the defection of the American Trotskyist leaders Shachtman and Burnham. And he recalled that he had mentioned his interest in writing something about those subjects to him and desired to get the old revolutionary’s verdict. Lev Davidovich himself, before they said goodbye, had told him he would review the draft, although he no longer remembered that commitment.
For the next four days, several times Lev Davidovich would ask himself why he had agreed to receive Jacson when he had already decided not to see him again. He would comment to Natalia that he felt sorry for the young man’s political naïveté and for the resounding way in which he had refused to accept his financial assistance. Whatever the reason, he had allowed the Belgian into his study and started to read the article in order to convince himself definitively that the guy was a fool. Jacson’s piece repeated the four ideas Lev Davidovich had said in the conversation with Sylvia and suddenly jumped to the situation in occupied France without in any way linking one story with the other. What kind of journalist was this character?
In his anxiety to hear Lev Davidovich’s opinion, Jacson had stood behind him the entire time, leaning on the edge of the worktable, reading over the Exile’s shoulder what he was marking in the text. That warm pressure over the back of his neck soon provoked the Exile’s fear. As he folded the pages, he called Natalia so she would accompany Jacson to the door and he explained to the young man that he had to rewrite the article if he intended to publish it. The man took the pages with the face of a beaten dog, and, upon seeing him, Lev Davidovich again felt sorry for him. Perhaps because of that, when the Belgian asked if he could bring him the rewritten text, he said yes, thinking that the appropriate and necessary response was no. Nonetheless, during dinner he told Natalia that he didn’t want to receive him again; he didn’t like that man, who, for starters, could not be Belgian, since no Belgian with the least education (and this one was the son of diplomats) would even think to breathe down the neck of a person he barely knew.
On what would be the second-to-last sunrise of his life and the last of which he would be conscious, Lev Davidovich awoke with the feeling of having slept like a child. The sleeping pills he had been prescribed had a relaxing effect that allowed him to sleep and awaken with energy, in contrast to the ones he had taken a few months before, which caused a sticky inertia. In the morning, he spent more time than usual with the rabbits, since just to see them confirmed how much he had abandoned them since the doctor had recommended rest in light of his elevated blood pressure. He had tried to explain that being with the rabbits and with Azteca, far from exhausting him, comforted him. But the doctor insisted that he not make physical efforts, and even prohibited him from writing. The bastard must be from the GPU, he thought.
The work morning lasted longer than usual. He had insisted on drafting an article for his American comrades about the theories of revolutionary defeatism and the way to adopt it in a situation different to that of 1917, keeping in mind that the current imperialist war, as he had declared on more than one occasion, was a development of the previous one, a consequence of the deepening of the capitalist conflicts, for which it was necessary to look at reality with a new lens.
The good news of the day had been the cable brought by Rigualt, his Mexican lawyer, confirming that his papers were finally in safe hands at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Rigualt had also brought him a gift, two tins of red caviar. At lunchtime he asked Natalia to open one and he himself served it. As soon as the caviar touched his taste buds, he felt a wave that took him back to the first days of the Bolshevik government, when they had just installed themselves at the Kremlin. In those days he and his family lived in the Knights’ House, where before the revolution the czar’s civil servants had lived. The house had been divided into rooms, and in one of those lived the Trotskys, separated by a hallway from the rooms occupied by Lenin, his wife, and his sister. The dining room they used was common to both rooms, and the food they were served was terrible. They didn’t eat anything but salted beef, and the flour and the pearl barley they used to prepare the soup were full of sand. The only thing that was appetizing and abundant (because they couldn’t export it) was red caviar. The memory of that caviar had forever become associated with those first years of the revolution, when the political tasks they faced were so big and unknown that they lived in perpetual vertigo and, even so, Vladimir Ilyich, whenever he could, dedicated some minutes to playing with Lev Davidovich’s children. That final midday, as he devoured the caviar, he again asked himself if all great dreams were condemned to perversion and failure.
After a brief siesta, he returned to his study, determined to finish various projects in order to dedicate himself fully to revising the biography of Stalin. Now he wanted to include in the book what was apparently the last letter that Bukharin had written to the Grave Digger while he waited for the verdict
to his appeal. They were a few lines, very dramatic, even worse, sullen, that some friendly hands had sent on to him and that, ever since then, he had not been able to stop thinking about. In the letter, Bukharin, sentenced to death, didn’t even ask for clemency anymore but rather for a reason: “Koba, why do you need me to die?” Bukharin didn’t know? Because he knew why Stalin wanted them dead—all of them.
He took up his work again, dictating some ideas for an article with which he intended to respond to the new verbal attacks of the Mexican Stalinists, but at some point he lost his concentration and remembered that Jacson, Sylvia’s boyfriend, had announced he would return that afternoon with his rewritten article. Just thinking about seeing that man and reading his string of banal remarks disgusted him. I’ll get rid of him in a couple of minutes and then I’ll give the definitive order that I will not receive him anymore, under any pretext, he thought.
While he was waiting for Jacson, he observed that, outside his study, it was a beautiful afternoon. The Mexican summer could be hard but not cruel. Even in August, at least in Coyoacán, there was always a breeze. Lev Davidovich lamented that the windows facing the streets were covered and cut off the flow of fresh air and the possibility of seeing people pass by, the fruit and flower vendors with their perfumes and colors. He knew that, despite the misery, the war, and death, beyond the walls he lived between there crawled a normal and small life that tried to make do day by day, a life he had dreamed of many times as if it were a great privilege that had been taken away from him.
The Man Who Loved Dogs Page 56