The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  “What are you talking about?” Ramón looked at his old mentor and thought that not everyone could cross the broad steppe of jail and torture with a lucid mind.

  Eitingon cleaned his fingers several times with a greasy paper napkin as if he were trying to get rid of some especially adhesive substance.

  “Poisons with no trace. Tests of resistance to radiation, activated thallium, uranium. They were traitors or war criminals; they were going to die anyway . . . Stalin was obsessed with the idea of making the atomic bomb. There were many tests . . . It was disgusting and cruel . . .”

  Ramón looked him in the eye and saw that the old Kotov had kept that sharpened transparency of his pupils that prevented knowing when he was lying and when he was telling the truth. On that occasion, something warned Ramón that Leonid was being more honest than ever.

  Eitingon took a cigarette and began to stroke it.

  “When Stalin died, Beria got me out of jail. They gave me back my party card and my rank. And despite everything they had done to me—I had dropped forty kilos, I knew terrible things—I thought justice existed and that the party would save us. That’s why, when I got to my house and my children told me that in those two years a couple of my friends had had the courage to go see them and offer them some help, I told them that those comrades and they had committed a grave mistake: if I was in prison, accused of being a traitor, nobody should worry about me or sympathize with me, not even them . . . What do you think? . . . That was my second-to-last act of faith. I was convinced that, without Stalin and his hate, the party would be just and the struggle would regain its meaning . . . But forget it, I was wrong again. Everything was rotten. How long had it been rotten?”

  “What do I know? Why are you telling me all of this?”

  Lionia lit the cigarette at last and moved the glass across the table as if he wanted to distance it from himself.

  “Because I think I owe you my whole story. I made you what you are and I feel indebted. I was a believer, and I forced you to believe in many things, knowing they were lies.”

  “That Stalin wanted to kill Trotsky not because he was a traitor but because he hated the Exile?”

  “Among other things, Ramón Pavlovich.”

  A few months after Stalin’s death, when Beria fell into disgrace, Eitingon was arrested again. In reality, his old boss was aspiring to power, but he had committed, according to Leonid, the same mistake as Trotsky, that of underestimating his adversary, thinking he was better equipped, the master of information that guaranteed his ascent and impunity. Beria had seen Khrushchev dance like a clown to amuse Stalin, although they all knew that he hated the Georgian for not giving clemency to Khrushchev’s son who had fallen into German hands during the war and for whom the Great Helmsman refused to trade other prisoners. Beria had seen Khrushchev cry after being scolded by the great man and had in his hands hundreds of orders of execution from the years of the purges in which Khrushchev’s signature appeared as the secretary of the party in the Ukraine. Beria considered Khrushchev miserable, of limited ambitions, and that was his mistake. Khrushchev proved to be more astute, and before Beria realized it, Khrushchev had already devoured him.

  The card up Khrushchev’s sleeve had been the army, Eitingon said, bringing a piece of bread to his mouth. The soldiers had not forgiven Beria for having been involved in the purge of the marshals in 1937, and they saw in Khrushchev the possible successor to a Stalin who had stolen all the credit for the military victory over fascism—obtained despite Stalin, sometimes even against Stalin. Khrushchev knew how to use to his advantage the ongoing investigation into the great spoils of war that many of the generals had taken from the occupied zones of Eastern Europe. Beria had in his hands the document from the council of ministers that itemized hundreds of leather coats, dozens of paintings from the Potsdam palace, the furniture, tapestries, rugs, and other valuable objects (thousands of yards of different kinds of fabric—he loved fabric!) that the hero Zhukov had brought back with him at the end of the war. That document had cost the marshal a demotion and his removal from Moscow, and he could still be tried by a civil court. But Lieutenant General Kriukov and General Ivan Serov had also taken their share of the spoils and knew that the great marshal’s fate awaited them. It was Serov, in agreement with Khrushchev, who incited his companions to carry out a coup de main against Beria, and because of that he was promoted to head of state security and head of military intelligence. The new school of generals created by Stalin did not much resemble the humble and poorly dressed officers of Lenin and Trotsky’s time.

  “With Beria, we all went down. Sudoplatov, me . . . my trial lasted one day, and the next I was in the first of the prisons I went through in those twelve years. I still ask myself why they didn’t kill me. Perhaps it was because they knew that I knew and that perhaps at some point they would need what I knew . . .”

  “So what does a man like you do when he no longer believes in anything?”

  Lionia poured himself more vodka and lit another of his foul-smelling cigarettes.

  “What can I do, kid? Flee, like Orlov? If I could do it—which is very improbable, since if I get within sixty miles of any border I get shot or they send me back to a work camp—could I leave with my children? Would I have the possibility of making a deal and offering my silence in exchange for my family’s life? Would someone dare to take me in? Let’s see, how many countries denied you a simple transit visa when you left jail?”

  “All of them. Except for Cuba, which gave me seventy-two hours.”

  “Do you understand that we’re like the plague? Do you realize that we’re Stalin’s worst creation and that, because of that, no one wants us, not here or in the West? That when we accepted the most honorable mission, we were condemning ourselves forever, because we were going to execute the revenge that Stalin’s sick mind thought was necessary to hold on to power?”

  “Stalin wasn’t sick. No sick man leads half the world for thirty years. You yourself said that: ‘Stalin knows what he’s doing . . .’ ”

  “It’s true. But part of him was sick. They say he killed about twenty million people. A million could be a necessity, the other nineteen million are an illness, I say . . . But I already told you that Stalin wasn’t the only sick one.”

  In his long years in prison, Ramón had had a lot of time to think about his life’s actions and dream about that parallel existence, created by his mind in the vain attempt to overcome depression and agony. In the beginning, he managed to control his fear when he discovered that they would not withdraw the promised protection and that they were forging some plan to get him out of prison; then he forced himself to discard all of the doubts he had had when he made his way to Coyoacán that twentieth of August 1940. If he fulfilled his promise of keeping his mouth shut, he thought, his bosses, and with them history, would reward him for what he was: a man capable of sacrificing his life for the great cause. But the years passed and the escape never went further than being an idea in Caridad’s mind, although the protection remained and Ceniceros the lawyer always had money to ease his life in jail as much as possible. From that point on, resignation was his only mainstay, and he tried to fight to keep his mental balance.

  “I’m going to tell you something that no one knows,” Ramón said, and this time poured himself a glass of vodka. He drank it Russian-style, in one shot, and felt it cut his breath short. He waited to get his breath back as he watched how Leonid devoured the slices of sausage, placing them on rounds of white bread as the starved do. “In 1948, my lawyer managed to get a letter through to me inside a book. It came from a Jew living in New York, but as soon as I read it I knew who—”

  “Orlov,” Eitingon jumped in, and Ramón nodded. “That faggot loves writing letters.”

  “It was signed by a certain Josue I-don’t-know-what and it said that he was going to tell me something that an old Soviet counterintelligence agent, a close friend of his, had confided in him, things he thought I should know . . . I
n truth, he didn’t say anything I hadn’t thought, but, said by him, everything took on a different dimension and made me think . . . He told me about deception—deceptions, actually. He said that Stalin had never wanted for the Republicans to win the war and that his friend had been sent to Spain precisely to avoid, first of all, a revolution and, of course, a Republican victory. The war only lasted long enough for Stalin to use Spain as a chip in his discussions with Hitler, and when the time came, he abandoned us to our fate, but with the honor of having helped the Republicans and, as an additional reward, having the Spanish gold in his hands. He also told me about Andreu Nin’s murder. His friend participated in that whole show, and he told me that the supposed proofs against Nin, like the ones against Tukhachevsky and the marshal, had been put together in Moscow and Berlin as part of the collaboration with the fascists.”

  “That’s exactly how it was,” Leonid said, and drank another shot of vodka. “Stalin and his people, that son of a bitch Orlov among them, put everything together. And the best part is that they even managed to keep many people believing in them . . . Those old and unconditional ‘friends of the USSR,’ do you remember? How we pulled the wool over their eyes! How they liked for us to pull the wool over their eyes!”

  “And he talked to me about Trotsky . . .” Ramón went silent, lit a cigarette, rubbed his nose. “He told me something that you knew very well. The old man had never made any agreements with the Germans. The proof had been the Nuremberg trials, in which not a single trace of Trotsky’s supposed collaboration with the fascists appeared . . . He told me that I had been an instrument of hate and that, if I didn’t believe him, he hoped I would live long enough to see how that drama would come to light . . . When I read Khrushchev’s speech, in 1956, I thought of that letter a lot. The most difficult thing about all of those years was knowing those truths and being certain that, despite the deception, I couldn’t say anything.”

  “Do you know why? Because at heart, we are cynics, like Orlov. But above all, we are cowards. We’ve always been afraid and what has motivated us is not faith, as we told ourselves every day, but rather fear. Out of fear, many kept their mouths shut: what else could they do? But we, Ramón, went beyond that, crushing people, even killing . . . Because we believed, but also out of fear,” he said, and to Ramón’s surprise he smiled. “We both know that there’s no forgiveness for us . . . But luckily, since we don’t believe in anything anymore, we can drink vodka and even eat caviar in this dialectical, materialist hell that is our lot because of our actions and our thoughts . . .”

  They had agreed to meet at five, at Gorky Park, since at seven they would cross the river and go up to Ramón’s apartment, where Roquelia (be-grudgingly, as she always did when her husband invited someone over) would “lavish” Lionia with a Mexican meal.

  That afternoon, his old mentor arrived with the news, obtained from a very reliable source, that two days before, while they were talking at the Hotel Moscow, six Soviets, holding up small signs, had gone down to Red Square to protest what they called the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Of course, neither the newspapers nor the television commented on the event, which was quickly brought under control and squashed, and had not reached the ears of the foreign accredited correspondents in Moscow. Save for the very few people in the know, that protest had never existed nor would it ever exist.

  “What nerve! You have to be crazy to do that,” Ramón commented.

  “Or have some balls and be very, very tired of everything,” Eitingon answered. “Those six guys knew they wouldn’t get anywhere, they knew what was in store for them, they were sure they would never again be people in this country, but they dared to say what they were thinking. Something you and I and I don’t know how many millions of other Soviets would never do, right? . . . Maybe we passed them when we were going into the hotel . . .”

  “So what’s going on in Prague?”

  “It’s the beginning of the end . . . Brezhnev went at it with all his might, twenty-nine infantry divisions, seven thousand five hundred tanks, a thousand airplanes . . . A show of force. The myth of the unity of the socialist world died in Prague, and also the possibility of renewing communism. Stalin had already fucked it up when he butted heads with Tito, and later Khrushchev crushed the Poles and the Hungarians, and even attacked the Chinese and the Albanians for being too Stalinist . . . But this is the requiem. The next time something similar arises—and it will arrive, sooner or later—it will not be to revise anything but rather to destroy it all. Don’t look at me like that. This is a sick body, because Stalin invented everything that exists here and Stalin’s only objective was that no one could take power away from him. That is why we are going to keep swimming, even though we will arrive dead on the shore at the end . . . And to think that Khrushchev planned the jump from socialism to communism for 1980. Na khuy! The things he thought of . . .”

  As they killed time until dinner, they wandered the park’s paths, watching the wolfhounds trot. Ramón—his former mentor’s predictions gnawing away at him—had begun to think back on the time of his arrival in Moscow and his difficulties in finding his bearings in the world to which he had given the best part of his life and the loss of his soul.

  When the Mexican minister of the interior agreed to the petition of inmate Jacques Mornard, to bring forward his release from prison by a couple of months, and thus avoid the scandal that journalists willing to travel to Mexico on August 20, 1960, would cause, Ramón had the conviction that he would just be going from one prison to another. His exit from the Santa Marta Acatitla jail, where he had spent the last two years of his long sentence, had been fixed for Friday, May 6, at the end of strange negotiations. Because inmate Jacques Mornard did not legally exist and, as such, did not have Belgian nationality but continued to deny his Spanish origins—proven ten years before with fingerprints from his police record prior to the Spanish Civil War—the Czechoslovak consulate agreed to issue a passport for him with the name under which he had entered prison and served his sentence. Ramón had an exact idea of his situation when Great Britain, the United States, and France refused to even give him a transit visa for the necessary layover on his way to Prague . . . Just as had happened to the renegade thirty years before, now for him the world had turned into a planet for which he had no visa. Again the macabre conjunction of fate between victim and murderer, which had exploded with the point of an ice axe, was stalking Ramón once more, only he wasn’t accompanied by the remains of glory or the disproportionate hate or fear that the Exile would provoke for years. He was pursued and marginalized by disdain, disgust, the useless blood, and his role in a story that everyone wished to forget. His only refuge was a Soviet Union where, he knew well, his presence wouldn’t be gladly accepted, either, since at the end of the day he was merely one of the more annoying proofs of Stalinism that the country was fighting to shake off. Throughout the last weeks of his imprisonment, avidly reading Khrushchev’s new speeches in which other “excesses” of the Stalinist period were revealed, he came to fear that not even the possibility of traveling to the USSR would materialize. Would they now publicly and ostentatiously admit that Jacques Mornard or Ramón Mercader had always been an obedient Spanish Communist recruited as a soldier of the Soviet ideal to commit the most hateful and repulsive crime? Did anyone ever think he would survive that attack and all the dangers of prison, and that one day he would return from the great beyond? . . .

  But Moscow was waiting for him, domineering, willing to challenge the world. The transit through a revolutionary and presocialist Cuba was so brief that he barely had a fleeting vision of Havana when the immigration police took him out of the Cubana de Aviación machine, coming from Mexico, and took him to the Soviet ship in which he would travel on to Riga. From the porthole of the cabin to which they took him, he observed the rocky image of the city’s buildings, castles, and churches, its resplendently green trees and overwhelmingly clear sea, and he could feel the effects of the nostalgia for that mysti
cal country, acquired through the memories of his maternal family, rooted for years in that land where even Caridad had been born.

  The first impression he had when he arrived in Moscow was of having entered a place that smelled of cockroaches and where he would never again find the man he had once been, since the city in 1960 was no longer the capital of the same country he had visited twenty-three years before. Renamed Ramón Pavlovich López, he was confined to a KGB building in the outskirts of the city, until one morning they sent him a new suit and ordered that he be ready to be picked up at six in the evening. That night, Ramón Pavlovich entered the Kremlin again and received from the hands of head of state Leonid Brezhnev the orders of Lenin and of Hero of the Soviet Union, the plaque that proved he was among the most honorable in the KGB, a huge bouquet of flowers, and the inevitable kisses. Meanwhile, from a small record player, the melody of “The Internationale” blasted again and again. And Ramón felt calm, proud, and rewarded. The KGB officer taking care of him, and with whom he dined following the ceremony in a small hall of the Great Palace of the Kremlin, promised him that they would soon give him the keys to an apartment where he could receive his companion, Roquelia Mendoza, but at the same time he warned him that his movements in the USSR should be approved by a special office of the KGB. He could maintain contact only with the Spanish émigrés and with his relatives residing in the USSR. He was still required to remain silent, said that dinosaur, without a doubt a survivor of Beria and Stalin’s times, kindly but clearly.