The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  The beer hall at Leningradsky Station had not changed much in the last thirty years. Perhaps the steam produced by sweat in the August heat had increased that afternoon to a new level, but it continued to be accompanied by the stink of fish, yeast, and the rancid urine of drunks fighting over a pitcher of beer to fill it with a stream of vodka. The floor was still sticky, and the faces of the locals, with their noses crossed by dark veins and their eyes degraded behind a hepatic veil, were like a photograph immune to the passing of time; that in reality did not move, as if it feared the future promised so many times, in the same manner as those men (once upon a time hopeful of being new) fled from sobriety and the evidence that it usually reveals. Only the figures of a limping being, some time ago called Leonid Alexandrovich, or Kotov, or Tom, or Andrew Roberts, or Grigoriev, and one who was over a hundred kilos and had never again been called Ramón Mercader testified that things were no longer the same.

  “You’ve turned into a fatso, kid!” the first man said, and leaped into a hug that Ramón knew would end with a nauseating kiss from which he managed to escape.

  “And you’re an old baldy!” he countered, and gave him the opening to trap him in a second immobilizing hug that prevented him from resisting the Russian’s kiss.

  “Time and sorrows,” the Soviet man said, now in Spanish.

  “Let’s leave; this is a goddamned latrine.”

  “I see you’ve become picky. What do you think of our proletariat? They still need soap, right? But look at how you’re dressed! That clothing is foreign, right? It smells of the West and decadence . . .”

  “My wife brings it from Mexico.”

  “Does she have some to sell me?” he said, and laughed, guttural and sonorous.

  “They also know that Roquelia brings clothing to sell?”

  “They always know everything, kid. Always and everything.”

  They went out onto the street and Ramón placed the medals on the lapel of his jacket and they were able to take the first taxi in the noisy line at the station. They ordered the taxi driver to leave them at Okhotny Ryad, in front of the Hotel Moscow.

  “Why do you want to go in there? That hotel is full of microphones,” the Soviet man said in French when they saw the building’s façade, which the passing of years had turned even more incongruous and opaque.

  “Make sure you avoid them.” Ramón smiled. “Wait a minute, what is your name now?”

  The former Kotov again launched into his guttural laugh of old times.

  “Nomina odiosa sunt. Remember? How do you feel about me being called Lionia, Leonid Eitingon?”

  “They didn’t put you on trial with that name . . . Wasn’t it Nahum Isaakovich? Are you going to fucking tell me once and for all what the real one is?”

  “All of them are as real as Ramón Pavlovich López. You even owe your name to me, Ramón . . .”

  The Hotel Moscow was a symbol of the past that was still alive, like the two men who, thanks to their high-ranking insignias, entered the refrigerated bar that freed them from the Muscovite dogs. Leonid stopped Ramón and sniffed the air. He pointed at a table and, his limp more accentuated, led the way.

  “We even have spaceships already, but the KGB microphones and the razors they sell us are from the Paleolithic age . . . Look, here’s something that I’m sure no one has told you.” Lionia smiled. “Many of the walls of this hotel are double, do you understand? They’re made up of two walls, between which a man fits. They built the hotel like that to hear what certain guests were saying. What do you think of that?”

  Ramón asked for a pitcher of orange juice, a bottle of chilled vodka, a plate of strawberries, and slices of a Polish sausage that was only sold in stores for diplomats and foreign technicians.

  “And bring us caviar and white bread too,” Eitingon demanded of the surprised waiter.

  “Why did you call me? I thought you didn’t want to talk to me anymore.”

  “You know I got out of jail three years ago, right?” Eitingon asked, and Ramón nodded. “When they let me out, they told me not to look for you, and I don’t need to tell you what the word ‘obedience’ means. But a while ago I asked a friend who still works for the apparatus if anyone cared much if we saw each other and talked about old times . . . So a week ago, when they let Sudoplatov out, the friend called me and told me that, no, it didn’t matter too much if I saw you . . . as long as I told them a few things later.”

  “So are you going to tell them something?”

  “After what they did to us, do you think I’m going to help them? Did you know that they had Sudoplatov put away for fifteen years?” he said, and added in Spanish: “They can go fuck themselves and their superwhore mothers . . . I’ll see what I make up for them. Is it wrong to say ‘superwhores’ to indicate there’s a lot of them and they really are whores?”

  When Ramón arrived in Moscow, in May 1960, the KGB officer assigned to him during the first months had the deference to inform him that his former mentor sent his greetings of welcome from the prison where he was confined, carrying out a sentence of twelve years for the crime of participating in a conspiracy against the government. But before that, through various letters that Caridad sent him through the lawyer Eduardo Ceniceros (who took care of Ramón after Medellín Ostos’s death), the prisoner in Lecumberri had learned a little about his mentor’s strange run of luck. Although the letters were intentionally confusing, incomprehensible for someone without any background, Ramón managed to gather that when his mentor returned to the USSR, after fulfilling the most important mission of his life, he had been promoted to general and given the first of his orders of Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded to him personally by Comrade Stalin. Mr. K., or the Gimp (as Caridad would call him in those letters), continued working with Sudoplatov in the so-called foreigners’ department of the secret service, training the agents charged with infiltrating and sabotaging the German rear guard. For that work (what things must he have done? Ramón asked himself, although he could guess the response) he would again be decorated as Hero of the Soviet Union and promoted to brigadier general. But in 1946, Beria was transferred from the intelligence agencies to the department of investigations, and the development of nuclear weaponry turned into the greatest obsession of Stalin, who was preparing himself for atomic war. This left Mr. K. up in the air, and he was immediately withdrawn from service by the new director of the Cold War espionage and sabotage agencies. According to other letters from Caridad, who was already established in Paris by that time, everything was apparently normal in the life of that agent until, in 1951, he was imprisoned under Stalin’s orders, along with his sister Sophia, a doctor, both of them caught in the net of the most recent raid of doctors, scientists, and high officers (led by the very same minister of state security, Abakumov), all of them of Jewish origins. This time they were accusing them of nothing more and nothing less than trying to poison Stalin, Khrushchev, and Malenkov in order to take power for themselves. The case had come out in the newspapers and in Lecumberri Jacques Mornard could read French, English, and Mexican dailies that gave the details of the so-called conspiracy of the Jewish doctors discovered by Muscovite intelligence, which had prevented the assassination of Comrade Stalin and the deaths of a great number of Soviets. The tone of those accusations, laden with the same rhetoric as the trials of the 1930s, awoke the fear that Ramón had managed to exorcise after more than ten years of a relatively peaceful stay in prison. For him, the story of that dismal conspiracy could only have one lesson: behind the charges of a plot lay plans to eliminate men who knew uncomfortable secrets about Stalin’s past. And it was precisely his mentor, who moreover was Jewish, who knew one of the most compromising secrets. If they killed Kotov, how much time would Ramón have left? Would the kindness of the prison officials continue to be purchased by Moscow? The prisoner spent two years living with that anxiety, waiting each day to receive the news of the execution of general Nahum Isaakovich Eitingon, as the official journalistic dispatches calle
d him. Until, in March 1953, the news of Stalin’s death arrived at his prison.

  Around that time, Roquelia started to take him the messages sent by Caridad from Paris. In one of the first, his mother told him that Mr. K. and all of the supposed authors of the plot, imprisoned since 1951, had been released by Beria. Ramón breathed in relief. But not for long. When the new Soviet leadership team headed by Khrushchev brought down and executed Beria, Eitingon was swept up in the raid, now accused of conspiring with his old boss to perpetrate a coup d’état, and he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Caridad assured him in a letter that that was how Soviet gratitude was expressed and warned him to never let his guard down, since that gratitude could cross the Atlantic.

  “What have you been doing with your life since they released you?” Ramón served himself the juice while Leonid drank his first swig of vodka.

  “They insinuated that Khrushchev’s treatment of me and other old soldiers of Beria’s had been excessive. They gave me back my pension, but not my medals; they got me a job as a translator; and they gave me an apartment in Golianovo—a shell without its own bathroom. Those buildings aren’t made with cement but with hate . . . Haven’t you ever heard the song of the taxi drivers?” he asked, smiling, and immediately sang in Russian: “ ‘I’ll take you to the tundra, / I’ll take you to Siberia, / I’ll take you any place you want to go, / but don’t ask me to take you / to Golianovo . . .’ ”

  Leonid tried to smile but couldn’t manage it.

  “Was it very hard?” Ramón, his own prison experience behind him, felt he had the right to ask that question.

  “Surely harder than your jail, and I know that a Mexican jail can seem like the closest thing to hell. But you knew you were protected and I didn’t even have a nail to hang on to; you knew that you were going to be there for twenty years, but I had no expiration date. And while the Mexicans could kill you and go out to party, they’re not capable of conceiving of the things that occur to our comrades when they want you to confess something, whether you’ve done it or not. And the worst is when you know that you are paying for faults that aren’t yours. And worse still when it’s your own people turning the screws . . . Add to that the fucking cold . . . How I hate the cold . . .”

  Leonid wolfed down two slices of the Polish kielbasa and drank his second vodka, perhaps to warm up the cold of his memory. He moved his head, denying something remote. In reality, he said, since 1948 he had felt his luck could change. That year, Stalin started the purge of the old European antifascist fighters who were not adapting to the new Stalinist bureaucratic model demanded by socialism in expansion and by the rules of the recently debuted Cold War. The Prague purge was the sign that the clowns of the past had to be sacrificed, but Eitingon made the mistake of thinking that those new trials had nothing to do with men like him, true professionals, so useful in times of hunting.

  The failure experienced by the Great Helmsman in his attempt to gain influence over the nascent state of Israel (which, after receiving support and Soviet money, opted to go under Washington’s sphere) took the lid off of his passionate, long-standing hatred of the Jews. The general secretary pulled the conspiracy of the poisoning doctors out of the air and, with his sense of economy, made the most of the trial to take out of circulation other Jews and non-Jews who were potentially dangerous because of their ideas or their knowledge of troublesome secrets.

  “Stalin knew he was in decline and began to identify the survival of the revolution with his own. He really thought that he was the Soviet Union. Well, he almost was. He was close to seventy years old, and after fighting so long to gather all the power in his hands, after having turned into the most powerful man on earth, he felt exhausted and began to sense what was going to happen: that when he died, his own dogs were going to villify him. No one can generate so much hate without running the risk that at some point it will overflow onto the recipient, which is what happened when he died. That’s why he entered a sick world of obsessions. After the war, with the euphoria of having won and with so many things to rebuild, people were calmer and better controlled. That son of a bitch Stalin knew very clearly that, to reign until the end, he would have to make sure that no one could feel safe—ever. I really think that period after the war was much harder than the years 1937 and 1938. You don’t think so? Look, kid, although he had men who had enjoyed his trust, such as Beria, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, and that son of superwhores Vyshinsky—and other useless ones like Molotov and Voroshilov—he suspected all of them, because he was a man sick with mistrust and fear, lots of fear. Can you imagine that, when they interrogated us, they always asked if any of those men, the ones in the highest positions, the ones he trusted, were implicated in our anti-Soviet plot? Do you know that each one of them was submitted to a terrible test? He put Polina, Molotov’s wife, in a gulag for being Jewish. Kalinin’s wife was imprisoned while he was president of the country, and when she got sick he had to ask Stalin, as a personal favor, for a better bed than the straw mattress on which he found her nearly dead . . . The president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, kid! At that time I understood that Stalin’s cruelty not only obeyed political necessity and the desire for power, it was also due to his hatred of men—worse still, to his hatred of the memory of the men who had helped him create his lies, to fuck and rewrite history. But the truth is, I don’t know who was sicker, Stalin or the society that allowed him to grow . . . Suka!”

  “This was the same Stalin whom you adored and taught me to adore?” Every time he entered those waters, Ramón felt dislocated, as if he were hearing a story removed from his own, of a reality different from the one Ramón himself had created in his head.

  “He was always the same, a son conceived by Soviet politics, not the abortion of human evil . . . ,” Leonid replied, and paused. “When they took me to Lefortovo Prison, I knew everything was over. They told me that they would subject us to a public trial and asked me to sign statements in which I admitted, among a thousand other things, being up-to-date on the murderous plans of the doctors and of having given them political and logistical support. But I told them I wasn’t going to sign.”

  “So how did you get out of signing?”

  “Oh, Ramón,” Leonid laughed. “Why was I going to sign? Let’s see, so that you understand. How many sons did Trotsky have?”

  “Four.”

  “I have three and several stepchildren . . . What happened to Trotsky’s children?”

  “They were killed, they committed suicide . . .”

  “Do you remember if Trotsky had a sister?”

  “Olga Bronstein, the one who had been Kamenev’s wife.”

  “And?”

  “They say she disappeared in a work camp.”

  “Well, I also have a sister who was one of the accused doctors . . . They sentenced her to ten years . . . Do you remember the day we went to the trial to hear Yagoda’s statement?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think it was worth it for me to cover myself in shit, thinking that I was going to save my wife, my children, and my sister that way? That incriminating myself in any infamy was going to help the Republic of the Soviets and, maybe, save me? What happened to Zinoviev and Kamenev? Did they save their families when they confessed that they were Trotskyist conspirators? Stalin changed the penal code to kill their children who were minors . . . If I confessed something, not only was I killing myself, but I was also going to kill other people. So I told myself I was going to take it all, and I took it, without talking. Do you know how? Well, by letting myself die bit by bit, turning myself into a skeleton that could come apart in their hands. It was the only way to avoid them torturing me . . .”

  Ramón stayed silent. He remembered the upheaval he felt when he read Khrushchev’s speeches, which Roquelia brought him, in which Stalin’s excesses were recognized. As soon as they put names and faces to them, the “excesses” began to be called crimes. He would never forget when, already established in Moscow, his brot
her Luis again stirred that pot: very secretly they had given him Bukharin’s letter “To a Future Generation of Party Leaders” to read, which the Bolshevik’s wife had kept in her memory for twenty years. It was the political testament of a man who, after labeling Stalinist terror an infernal machine, warned the henchmen—he must have been looking at Ramón, Kotov, and others like them—that “when dealing with indecent matters, history can’t stand witnesses,” and that the time of their sentencing was getting closer and closer.

  “Just like them, I wasn’t completely innocent, either. In the new logic, no one in this country is completely innocent . . .” Lionia had lost part of the vibrating depth of his voice. “Beria had his plans for the future and had told me about them. But not having signed that confession and Stalin’s death saved me from the firing squad. Because they were going to execute me. I was the only one who knew everything about you, and also some other things that were more or less shocking, like the attack in Ankara against German vice chancellor von Papen and certain medical experiments with prisoners during the war.”