The Man Who Loved Dogs (14 page)

The repression of the miners was brutal and that October Revolution ended up diligently crushed. The casualties—almost 1,400—and the arrested—more than 30,000—convinced Ramón that compassion doesn’t exist, nor can it exist, in a class struggle. And he trusted that someday their day would come: at least dogma stipulated that it would be so.

With the Asturian defeat, the Communists were placed on the black list of the most vigorously pursued enemies. Many were among those imprisoned for their participation in the Asturias events or simply because of their militancy and, as had happened in prerevolutionary Russia, recalled África, so conscious of history, so dialectic, the rest had had to go down into the catacombs, to work from there and wait for the moment (called “revolutionary situation”) to deal a blow to the system.

It was in these circumstances that the Young Communists’ leaders received the mission of creating clandestine cells in the city’s neighborhoods and factories. África went to work in Gràcia and Ramón went into El Raval and La Barceloneta, where he also organized literacy classes. With the goal of making the political work more efficient and of preparing members for future conflicts, Ramón organized a cell with Jaume Graells, Joan Brufau, and other comrades that would present itself as the Peña Artística y Recreativa, and they gave it the least suspicious name they could find: “Miguel de Cervantes.” The Joaquín Costa bar, at the end of Calle Guifré, turned into the meeting place. They went two and three nights a week, many times with África, who developed her skills as an agitator there, with a vehemence that left Ramón ever more entranced by the young woman’s passion and faith in the fate of a humanity without exploiters or exploited. Everything worked according to plan for several months, until they made the mistake of becoming too complacent and were surprised when the police burst in, carrying off seventeen of them (África managed to escape by leaping over a wall difficult for even a man to scale), accusing them of conspiring against the republic to subvert order and institute an atheist and communist dictatorship.

If Ramón had still needed any reasons to convince himself that the whole pantomime of a democratic republic was just a façade and that the system needed to be pulled out by the roots, the eight months he spent in jail in Valencia ended up deepening his convictions. It wasn’t that the accusations hurled at them were false: it was true that they were
conspiring to subvert order, but it was also assumed that they had the right to that option in a republic that, according to what was preached, existed in a supposedly democratic country since 1931.

Spain’s prisons were overflowing with prisoners, perversely mixing common prisoners with political ones, although the detained Communists were so great in number that the cell blocks turned into forums where they discussed the party’s projections, the dangerous ascent of fascism in Germany and Italy, the USSR’s economic successes, and the principles of class struggle. The unexpected directive from Moscow, that an alliance be established between the Communists and the leftist parties (except for Trotskyist opportunists) to throw themselves into the fight for power together, even made its way into prison, and Ramón accepted the order without daring to question that radical strategic change. For him, the real punishment of his prison stay was that África did not visit him during all those months or even send a letter, a breath of hope.

The elections of February 1936, won by the new political front of Socialists, Communists, and anarchists, returned power to the left and, immediately, the freedom of those detained for their activism or participation in the 1934 revolts. After eight months of prison, when Ramón stepped out onto the street, he was no longer an impulsive young romantic: he had turned into a man of faith, a terrifying enemy of everything that could block the path to freedom and the proletarian dictatorship. To that goal, he would dedicate every breath of his life, he thought: even if I have to pay the highest of prices for it.

Like many of his prisonmates, Ramón went directly from Valencia to Madrid, where the Popular Front parties had organized a great rally to celebrate victory and the formation of a new government. In the capital, they found that festive and nervous air that reigned over Spain until the start of the war. The wineskins leaped from the sidewalks to the trucks of the recently released, the women tossed flowers at them, and cries of “Long live liberty” and “Death to the monarchy, to the bourgeois, to the landholders, and to the Church” competed. The revolution could be smelled in the air.

In the meeting, Ramón heard General Secretary José Díaz’s speech and for the first time saw an exalted and dramatic woman who looked like a rally herself: Dolores Ibárruri, whom the world would know as La Pasionaria (Passion Flower). To his great pleasure, in the midst of that combative crowd, he felt the longed-for arms grab on to his neck, from
which came the perfume of violets that he had not ceased dreaming of during his imprisonment. With every cell of his body, Ramón enjoyed the sound of the voice of the woman for whom, like the world revolution, he was willing to give everything; but upon seeing her, he thought that miracles might exist, for África was a confirmation. In those months, she had become more beautiful, she was rounder and firmer, as if a beneficent cloak, capable of transforming her, had fallen over her face. A few minutes later, when they escaped the crowd inflamed by songs and wine, he would know that something moving really had taken hold of the woman’s body—something that had been distant from his life until that moment: a month and a half before, África had given birth to a girl. Ramón’s daughter.

Ramón Mercader would think, almost until the idea wore out, that in his life, so full of tremendous convulsions, one of the greatest and most instructive things that shook him from head to toe was receiving that news. África told him that she hadn’t gone to see him in prison or brought him up to speed on her pregnancy so as not to weaken him with feelings that were unnecessary for a revolutionary. Besides, she had preferred to deal with her pregnancy alone, since—from the moment she discovered it and was advised not to abort due to how far along she was, she had decided that the baby would not interfere with the greatest purpose of their lives: the revolutionary struggle. Because of that, as her due date approached, she had gone to Málaga, where her parents lived, and there had the girl, whom she had named Lenina de las Heras, to immediately hand her over to her grandparents and return to Barcelona to fight for the Popular Front’s electoral victory, as the party’s committee had ordered her. Her decision to keep the girl far away was irrevocable and nothing would change it: she was only fulfilling her duty to be honest by informing him of what had happened.

A cloud of passionate feelings crowded Ramón’s head. To the surprise of learning he was a father was added África’s determination of keeping with her ideals. Although it all ended up being too overwhelming to digest in one piece, he was surprised to feel a sharp gratefulness toward the woman he loved so much and who showed him her political stature with a drastic and liberating action. Nonetheless, in the deepest recesses of his consciousness, he felt a sliver of curiosity about what the girl he had fathered was like, what it would be like to have her close and raise her. Didn’t África feel the same? Ramón knew that the needs of the struggle
would soon erase that blip, and he thought, with more conviction: África is right, family can be a burden to a revolutionary. As they crossed the Plaza de Callao, he believed that much without knowing precisely why.

África opened the door to a café on Gran Vía and, upon entering, the light from the street prevented Ramón from seeing the inside of the place, one of those old bars in Madrid with the walls done over in dark wood. África, as if guided by an interior light, walked to the back, skirting tables and chairs with that confidence so like her. He tried to follow her, leaning on the backs of the chairs, when he made out the silhouette of a woman, according to her hair, in the back, a tall, strong woman, he realized as he got closer. The shadow approached him, and before Ramón had identified her, he felt a tremor run through him when the woman kissed him, so close to the edge of his lips as to leave the unmistakable taste of aniseed in his mouth.

7

Kharalambos moved the rudder slightly and, under the afternoon sun, the boat entered the golden river over a sea that the young fisherman had learned to navigate with his father, his father with his grandfather—just as his grandfather had with his great-grandfather—in an accumulation of knowledge that went back, perhaps, to the days in which Alexander’s armies passed through those waters with the fury and glory of the great king of the Macedonians. More than once, observing Kharalambos’s seafaring expertise, Lev Davidovich had asked himself if the time had come for him to carry out an act of utmost wisdom and throw off all of his defenses to give himself the chance to breathe, for the first time in his adult life, the simple air that nourished the fisherman’s blood, far from the maelstroms of his epoch.

Four years of exile, five of being marginalized, dozens of deaths and deceptions, revolutions betrayed and ferocious repressions, Lev Davidovich added them up and had to admit that there were few reasons for hope. The cosmopolitan man, the protagonist of the struggle, the leader of the multitudes, had begun to grow old at fifty-two: he had never imagined that the corner of the world in which he was living would one day cause him to feel that perhaps he had that which is called a home. And
still less that, for a moment, he would wish to give everything up and throw his weapons into the sea.

It had been a year since he had seen Liova leave by the route that Kharalambos now navigated. With a mix of concern and relief, he had accepted the young man’s decision to live his own life, far from his father’s shadow. The receipt of a scholarship to continue studying math and physics at Berlin’s Technische Hochschule had facilitated the paperwork, and Lev Davidovich had decided to make the most of the situation of the young man being transferred to a privileged position, where he would serve as his eyes and voice while he remained immobile in Turkey.

As the date of his departure drew near, Lev Davidovich had evoked, too frequently, the memory of those cold mornings in the tormented Paris of 1915, when Liova had been initiated into political work at just barely eight years of age. They then lived on rue Oudry, close to the place d’Italie, and he spent his nights writing antiwar articles for the
Nashe Slovo
. In the morning, on the way to school, with young Seriozha by the hand, Liova was in charge of handing over the recently written pages to the print shop. Only with the certainty of separation could Lev Davidovich understand the immense space that Liova occupied in his heart and regretted the outbursts of anger in which, so unfairly, he had accused him of laziness and political immaturity. As happened to him two years before when he separated from Seriozha, after his departure he was seized by the same disastrous feeling that perhaps he would never again see his beloved Liova, but he managed to dispel that feeling through the most realistic inversion of equations: if they didn’t see each other again, it wouldn’t be because Liova would miss their next meeting. The absent one would surely be Lev Davidovich himself, who with each passing day was feeling older and attacked by rivals who wished for his absolute silence.

But the young man’s departure was not Lev Davidovich’s greatest concern during those weeks. With his best foot forward, although full of fears over his inability to deal with domestic problems, he also had to prepare himself for the announced arrival of Zina, his oldest daughter, who had finally obtained a Soviet permit to travel abroad with the purpose of undergoing treatment for her advanced tuberculosis.

In the letters that she sent from Leningrad, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, Zina’s mother, had kept him up-to-date on the girl’s physical and mental deterioration in recent years, above all as she devoted herself to taking
care of her sister Nina at the same time that, due to her activism in the opposition, she experienced political repression that had culminated in the deportation of her husband, Plato Volkov, and with her own expulsion from the party and the loss of her job as an economist. Zina would experience the personal touch of pettiness, however, when her exit permit from Soviet territory excluded her little daughter, Olga, who would become a political hostage. With the sentence imposed on an innocent girl, Lev Davidovich would once again see proof of what Piatakov had assured him of years before: Stalin would take revenge on him, treacherously, until the third or fourth generation.

Zina arrived on a sunny morning in January 1931 with young Seva at her side. Natalia, Liova, Jeanne, the secretaries, the bodyguards, the Turkish police, and even Maya followed Lev Davidovich to the dock to welcome them. Each of their moods was as festive as the circumstances allowed and was rewarded by the smile of a thin woman, exultant and expansive, and by the scrutinizing look of a boy, intensely blond, who had rejected the attention of grandparents and uncles to bestow his favoritism on Maya the dog.

Despite her calamitous state of health, Zina immediately proved that she was the daughter of Lev Davidovich and the indefatigable Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who in the clandestine meetings of Nikolaiev had placed in the hands of the young fighter the first Marxist pamphlets he would read in his life. With wheezing breath and besieged by nocturnal fevers, the young woman arrived demanding a role in the political work, willing to show her abilities and her passion. Conscious that she needed medical attention more than additional responsibilities, her father had assigned her the lightest task, although overwhelming in and of itself, of organizing his correspondence, while he charged Natalia with accompanying her to Istanbul, where the doctors started to work with her.