The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  That conditional freedom was joined by, from the beginning, the distance with which Soviets of all ages and conditions treated him, which made him feel doubly a foreigner.

  “But you are a foreigner!” Eitingon lit one of his cigarettes. “Or did you think that because of who you are and because you spent years in prison studying Russian that you were going to be less of a foreigner? . . . The majority of the Soviets will never leave the country, and for them what is foreign is forbidden, damned. Although they feel curiosity and even envy (all you have to do is look at how you dress, Ramón: Did your wife also bring you that shirt? No one in Moscow has one like it), above all, you inspire fear. This is a country isolated from the world, and our leaders have made sure to demonize what lies beyond the reach of their power—in other words, everything having to do with damned foreigners. Remember that by your having unauthorized contact with foreigners, Stalin could order your execution or send you to a gulag for five, ten years. The genius of the Russian people lies in their capacity for survival. That’s why we won the war . . .”

  “It doesn’t happen to me so much anymore,” Ramón recalled, “but at the beginning, when I went out on the street, I looked at people and asked myself what they would think if they knew who I was . . .”

  “Think?” Leonid said and pointed at the sky, more or less from where the supposed order to think something should come. “Here, people almost never think, Ramón! Thinking is a luxury that is forbidden to the survivors . . . To escape the fear, it has always been best not to think. You don’t exist, Ramón; neither do I . . . Even less still, those six guys who protested over the invasion of Czechoslovakia . . .”

  The park, nonetheless, existed and exuded life. The Muscovites were making the most of the last month before the cold spending their hours in the open air: people were reading lying on the grass and there were even families that deluded themselves into thinking they were having a picnic in the forest. Because of that, the discovery of an open bench, protected by the shade of a linden tree, aroused suspicion in the two secret service veterans. While Ramón played with his dogs, Eitingon inspected the place and concluded that there were no microphones installed; despite what Stalin had always maintained, he said smiling, it was proven that coincidences could exist.

  Settled in on the bench, Ramón chose to change the subject and told him how he had met Roquelia Mendoza and how he immediately suspected she was part of the promised help. Roquelia, a girl from the middle class who had been a folkloric dancer, was the cousin of another Lecumberri prisoner named Isidro Cortés, who had been sentenced for killing his wife. Roquelia’s insistence on striking up a friendship with him revealed her true motivations.

  “It was the last thing I could do for you.” Eitingon smiled. “Beria authorized me to look for a sympathizer willing to help you. We sent Carmen Brufau, Caridad’s friend, to Mexico, and she found Roquelia, who accepted right away because she admired you and loved Stalin. They set aside a certain quantity of money to her for your needs, besides what your lawyer was receiving.”

  “In 1953, they stopped sending her money for almost a year, but she kept helping me. She’s ugly and rather unbearable, but I owe her a lot.”

  “Yes, I can imagine.”

  “Roquelia helped me withstand all of that . . . In prison, many people visited me, under many pretexts, but the truth is that they came to see me because they thought I was a strange bird . . . Once, a Spanish Communist came with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Now she’s very famous because of her movies. Her name is Sara Montiel.”

  “I’ve heard of her,” Lionia said, distracted. “They say she’s beautiful.”

  “You can’t imagine what it’s like to see an animal like that three feet away from you . . . She’s one of those women who makes you want to eat dirt, to do anything . . .”

  Eitingon tried to sound casual.

  “How long has it been since you last saw Caridad?”

  “She came to see me when I arrived and she has come back through three times. The last time, last year.”

  “Does she look well?”

  “She’s strong, with the same personality, but she appears to be two hundred years old. Well, I’ve turned fifty-five and I seem to be about a hundred and ten. Even though you’re bald, you look better than we do.”

  “I must be embalmed in cynicism,” Eitingon said, and laughed thunderously. “What’s she doing in Paris?”

  “Nothing . . . Well, now she has gotten into painting”—Ramón smiled—“and into being a grandmother to my sister Montse’s children, despite Montse. The truth is that no one wants her around . . . She spent five or six years working at the Cuban embassy, I imagine as a KGB informant. She said that the Cubans are a bunch of thrill seekers who don’t understand what the hell socialism is and are unappreciative misers. According to what she says, she bought the ambassador’s newspapers with her own money so he would find out what was happening in the world, and now they don’t even invite her to receptions. But she blames Brezhnev; she said that he gave the order to have her removed from everything. Although she still receives the pension they send her from here . . .”

  “Times change. Caridad, you, and I are hot potatoes that no one wants to have in their hands. If they haven’t killed us, it’s because they trust that nature will soon do its job . . . ,” Eitingon stated, and lifted the bottom of his shirt to show a reddish scar. “In prison, they operated on me for a tumor. It’s a miracle I am alive, but I don’t know until when . . .”

  “Anyone who sees Caridad in Paris, posing as a grandmother and painting ugly, colorful landscapes, would they be able to imagine what kind of demon she is?”

  The borzois were running through the park and Ramón was watching them, proud of his dogs’ tangible beauty, when Leonid spoke again.

  “I owe you many stories, Ramón. I’m going to tell you some that perhaps you don’t want to hear but that I feel belong to you.”

  Ramón discovered at that moment that the person at his side was Kotov. His old mentor took the same position that years before he adopted in the Plaza de Cataluña, that of an alligator at rest, with a handkerchief in his hands that he used to dry his sweat.

  “You once asked me if we had something to do with the death of Sedov, Trotsky’s son, and I told you no. Well, it was a lie. We sent him off ourselves, thanks to Cupid, an agent we had placed very close to him. We also executed his other son, Sergei, after having him for a time in the Vorkuta camp and here at the Lubyanka, trying to get him to sign documents in which he admitted that his father had given him instructions to poison Moscow’s aqueducts . . . Like us, the ones who killed those kids were following direct orders from Stalin.”

  “Why did you lie to me? I could have understood it was necessary.”

  “Because you had to be as pure as possible when you went to the sacrificial altar. The letter I gave you to carry with you that day was a string of lies, and it didn’t matter whether anyone believed it or not. The plan was that you kill Trotsky and that the bodyguards kill you, as should have happened. Everything was going to be easier that way. That was how Stalin requested it. He didn’t want any loose ends and he could give a shit about your life. But Trotsky saved you . . .”

  Ramón felt bowled over by emotion. To hear, directly from the man who had plotted that operation with Stalin, the admission that not only had he been used to carry out revenge but that he was considered a more than dispensable piece brought down the last mainstay with which he had withstood the passing of those years full of disappointments and painful discoveries.

  “But you were waiting for me . . .”

  “The possibility always existed that you would manage to get out. Besides, I couldn’t tell Caridad that I had sent you to the slaughterhouse, and less still that if you managed to escape, the order was to leave you in the hands of other comrades.”

  “Just like Sheldon, right? So, did you kill him?”

  “Not directly. But nobody was k
illed without our authorizing it.”

  “If you were going to kill me, why did you protect me in jail, why did you pay for lawyers, why did you send Roquelia?”

  “Because if we killed you in jail after what we had done, everyone would know where the order came from. What saved you was that you kept your silence. With the Old Man dead, Stalin didn’t care very much about the rest, and least of all at that moment, with the Germans just around the corner . . .”

  “So why did the Mexicans’ attack fail?”

  “That was botched, but that was what Stalin wanted, something spectacular, with lots of noise, so no one would forget. I saw those people two or three times and realized that Trotsky was too big for them, they were wimps and they lacked balls. That’s why I didn’t mix you up with them or let them know about me or you . . . What I never understood was that our man in the group—Felipe, remember?—didn’t go in to confirm whether they had killed the Duck or not . . . That is a mystery I still haven’t solved . . .”

  Ramón lifted his gaze toward the edge of the park, where the river flowed. He felt the disappointment eating away at his insides and he felt empty. The remains of pride to which, despite the doubts and marginalization, he had clung tooth and nail started evaporating in the heat of the all-too-cynical truth. The years of confinement in prison, fearing every day for his life, had not been the worst part. The suspicions first and the evidence later that he had been the puppet of a dark and miserable plan had robbed him of sleep more nights than the fear of being knifed by another prisoner. He painfully recalled the impression of having been deceived when he read the not-so-secret report of Khrushchev to the Twentieth Party Congress and the feeling of unease that seized him from that moment on: What would become of his life when he got out of prison?

  “So why didn’t they shoot me when I got to Moscow? . . . Until they gave me the medals, I was waiting for them to take me out . . .”

  “You yourself said it: you had arrived in a different world. If Stalin and Beria had still been alive, you wouldn’t have crossed the Atlantic. But Khrushchev would even have thanked you for telling the truth, although he could not encourage you because Stalin’s spirit was alive—no, is alive—and Khrushchev didn’t want to nor could he wage that war, so he preferred to look the other way and leave you alone. Now that Khrushchev has been defeated by Stalin’s spirit, you don’t matter to anyone anymore . . . As long as you remain silent and don’t try to leave the Soviet Union.”

  “So what did Caridad know?”

  “More or less the same as you. Remember, we never trusted too much in the nature of you Spaniards. When she returned, she tried to convince Beria to help you escape. After giving her the runaround many times, Beria finally said yes, that they would help you, but that she herself had to take care of arranging things in Mexico. Caridad was given a passport and a lot of money, and Beria sent a thug from the Comintern to give her a good scare as soon as she arrived in Mexico. Caridad just barely saved herself. She learned her lesson, went to Paris, and has laid low, without protesting again. So now she’s taken to painting pictures?”

  “Must I believe all of these atrocities? Were you always this cynical? Did you know they were going to kill me? Did you apply yourself to that?”

  “You have to believe what I tell you: we were more cynical than you can imagine. You weren’t the only one who was going to die for an ideal that didn’t exist. Stalin perverted everything and forced people to fight and die for him, for his needs, his hate, his megalomania. Forget that we were fighting for socialism. What socialism, what equality? They tell me that Brezhnev has a collection of antique cars . . .”

  “And you, why did you fight?”

  “At the beginning, because I had faith, I wanted to change the world, and because I needed the pair of boots they gave to the Cheka agents. Afterward . . . We already talked about fear, right? Once you enter the system, you can never leave. And I kept fighting because I turned into a cynic—me, too. But after spending fifteen years in prison for having been an efficient cynic, with a few deaths under my belt, you begin to see things in a different light.”

  “So how can you live with that?”

  “Just like you, Ramón Mercader! The day you killed Trotsky, you knew why you were doing it, you knew you were part of a lie, that you were fighting for a system that depended on fear and on death. You can’t fool me! . . . That is why you entered that house with your legs shaking but resolved to do it, because you knew well that there was no way back. When you talk to Caridad again, ask her what I told her when you arrived in Coyoacán. I told her: ‘Ramón is shitting himself with fear, but he’s already like us, he is one of the cynics.’ ”

  “Shut up for a while, please,” Ramón said, though he didn’t know if it was a demand or a plea.

  With the edge of his shirt, he cleaned the lenses of his glasses, which had fogged up. In the hands that had held the ice axe, that tortoiseshell frame, purchased by Roquelia on one of her trips to Mexico, seemed like a strange and remote object. At the end of the day, Eitingon was right, he had wrapped his faith tightly around himself, in the conviction that he was fighting for a better world, to then use that faith to avoid the truths about which he did not want to think: the murders, among others, of Nin and Robles; the party’s manipulations before and during the civil war; the murky stories surrounding Lev Sedov, Bob Sheldon, and Rudolf Klement; Yagoda’s strange confession that he himself had witnessed; the manipulation of the events of May 1937 in Barcelona; the vagabond he’d had to kill like a pig in Malakhovka; the lies about Trotsky and his collaboration with the fascists; the malevolent use of Sylvia Ageloff . . . just one of those truths would have been enough for him to recognize that not only was he a ruthless being but he had turned into a cynic.

  “In jail, I read Trotsky,” he said, when he adjusted his glasses and observed, with regained clarity, the half-moon scar on the back of his right hand. “All of the prisoners knew I had murdered him, although the majority had no idea who Trotsky was or understood why I had murdered him. They killed for real reasons: the woman who cheated on them, the friend who stole from them, the whore who found herself another pimp . . . One day, when I returned to my cell, I had on my bed a book by Trotsky. The Revolution Betrayed. Who had left it there? The fact is that I started to read it and I felt very confused. About a month later another book appeared, Stalin’s Crimes, and I read that as well, and I was even more confused. I thought about what I had read and for months I waited for another book, but it never came. I never found out who put them in my cell. What I did know is that if, before going to Mexico, I had read those books, I believe I would not have killed him . . . But you are right, I was a cynic on the day I killed him. That’s what all of you turned me into. I was a puppet, a wretch who had faith and believed what people like you and Caridad told him.”

  “Kid, they fooled all of us.”

  “Some more than others, Lionia, some more than others . . .”

  “But we gave you all the clues so you could discover the truth, and you didn’t want to discover it. Do you know why? Because you liked being the way you were. Don’t come to me with any stories, Ramón Mercader . . . Besides, things were clear from the beginning: ever since you knew what your mission was, there was no going backward. It didn’t matter what you would read later . . .”

  For Ramón, walking around Moscow during the month of September was like entering a concert when the last movement of the symphony is being executed. The volume of the music rises, all of the instruments participate, the climax is reached, but the notes reveal a sad tiredness, like the warning of an inexorable farewell. As the foliage on the trees changed colors, filling the air with ocher tones, and the sleepy afternoons began to get shorter, the threat of October and the arrival of the cold, the darkness, and the forced enclosure became palpable to Ramón. When the winter came, the old feeling, discovered thirty years before, that the Soviet capital was an enormous village stuck between two worlds would become more agressiv
e, oppressive. The forests that grew within the city, the steppe that seemed to infiltrate itself through its disproportionate avenues and squares, would become painted with snow and ice, turning Moscow into an inscrutable territory, even more remote, populated by wrinkled brows and gross insults. Then his dream of returning to Spain would attack him with renewed insistence. With increasing frequency, as he read or listened to music, he discovered how his mind would escape from the letters or the notes and go to a Catalan beach, with rocky sand, enclosed between the sea and the mountains, where he would find himself again, free from the cold, the loneliness, the rootlessness, and the fear. He was even again called Ramón Mercader and his history disappeared like a bad memory that is finally exorcised. But Spain’s doors were shut to him with a double lock, one on each side. That he had to spend the rest of his days in that world, always feeling like a prisoner between the impassable four walls of the earth’s largest and most generous country, had turned into an underhanded sort of punishment from which, he well understood, there was no redemption. In search of a relief that he knew to be false, many summer afternoons Ramón escaped from his apartment, with or without Roquelia, and dragged his frustration and disappointment toward the monument to the defeat and the nostalgia of the Spaniards left stranded in Moscow.

  “So, at the beginning, how did it go with your compatriots?” Eitingon wanted to know when, on the following Sunday, they met in front of the old kofeinia on the Arbat, which was shut down in Stalin’s time because the general secretary came and went down that avenue every day on his way to his dacha in Kuntsevo. By decree, on that whole route there could not be any meeting places, or even trees: in the country of fear, even Stalin lived in fear. In Khrushchev’s time, the place had been turned into a record shop where Ramón had become an assiduous seeker of symphonic treasures at laughable prices.