The Man Who Loved Dogs (17 page)

Sometime in the fall of 1932, a diffuse light came to break up the darkness when the possibility arose for Lev Davidovich to travel to Denmark for a few days, invited by the social democratic students to participate in a conference commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. With a joy that he himself knew was frenzied, he immediately went into action. He was hoping that if he passed through France, Norway, or even Denmark, he could perhaps obtain at least transitory asylum that would allow him to regain space for his political work.

The weeks prior to the trip were charged with tension. Between the transit visas that weren’t arriving, the increasing restrictions the Danes were imposing on his stay, and the calls for anti-Trotsky protests in France, Belgium, and Germany, a less determined man would have given up on an adventure that began with so many discouraging omens.

On November 14, with a Danish visa that allowed them just eight days, the Trotskys left Istanbul, still moved by the news of the recent and dark suicide of Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s young wife. During the nine days it took them to get through Greece, Italy, France, and Belgium, his enemies made the Exile feel that he would have caused less of a commotion if he’d made that journey as the president of a belligerent country or as the leader of a working conspiracy and not as a man who was only accompanied by his past and his condition of exile. To think that his presence could still generate dread among leaders and enemies was, more than proof of adversity, a comforting confirmation that he was still considered someone capable of inciting revolutions.

But three weeks later, enclosed again in Büyükada, Lev Davidovich had to admit that he had only been received with some affability in Mussolini’s Italy, where he was allowed to visit Pompeii on the way out, and to spend a day in Venice on the return trip. The rest of his journey
had been a succession of police cordons (he was unsure whether they were meant to protect his life or control him), while the days spent in Copenhagen had passed under the tension of Moscow’s diplomatic protests and a petition from the Danish prince Aage that he be tried as one of the murderers of the family of the last czar who had been the son of a Danish princess.

Nonetheless, he could not deny that he had deeply enjoyed the occasion to talk about the Russian Revolution before a packed auditorium of more than two thousand people, who made him feel the comforting taste of agitation before the masses, to which he had always been so addicted. Moreover, the reencounter with an extreme climate, with a city of dim lights and pallid nights like those of St. Petersburg, had filled him with nostalgia. For that reason, even knowing the response he would receive, he insisted on presenting medical reports testifying to his state of health and the need for specialized treatment. When it was communicated to him that his request hadn’t even been considered by the Danish authorities, Lev Davidovich concluded that if many times he had had doubts about the faithfulness of his friends, he could be sure of the perseverance of his enemies, whichever party or faction they were in.

The return to his island prison, where his papers and books, his grandson Seva and his spoiled Maya were waiting for him, didn’t have the friendly scent of a return home but rather the stench of a seemingly endless marginalization. At the quay, there weren’t enthusiastic or cursing crowds, no police lines or trembling government workers, as there had been in each place they had passed through in recent days, but just some fishermen friends and the Turkish policemen who often sat down at his table. In Prinkipo, his presence didn’t cause any fights, and this fact would make him understand that if his name still generated excitement in Europe, it wasn’t due to what he could do but rather what his enemies demanded as payment for his actions: hostility, repression, rejection. Stalin’s hate, turned into a
raison d’état
, had put in motion the most powerful marginalization machinery ever directed against a solitary individual. More so, it had become exalted as a universal strategy of a communism controlled from Moscow and even as the editorial policy of dozens of newspapers. For that reason, swallowing the rest of his pride, he had to admit that while in the Kremlin they were determining the moment at which his life would cease to be useful to them, they would keep him trapped in an unbreakable ostracism that would be maintained until
they declared the fall of the curtain and the end of the masquerade. And for the first time he dared to think about his life as a tragedy: classic, Greek-style, without the faintest hope of appeal.

The year 1933 arrived with an overwhelming invasion of discouragement. Zina wanted Seva sent to Berlin without any more delays, and, just barely returned from Copenhagen, Lev Davidovich and Natalia had said goodbye to the boy. During the brief meeting they had had as he passed through France, Liova had spoken to them about Zinushka’s lamentable state and the medical suggestion that the presence of a son to take care of her could perhaps provide some benefit for her broken spirit. Although Lev Davidovich and Natalia had thought the same thing many times, they had decided to put the boy’s mental health before his mother’s; but their authority over Seva was limited, and faced with Zinushka’s insistence, they had to compromise. The morning they saw him depart, tearful over having to leave his great friend Maya and Kharalambos’s children, he and Natalia, trained in farewells and losses, could not help but feel that a piece of their hearts was being taken.

The only way that Lev Davidovich found to combat the void was immersing himself in the rewrites, always obsessive, to which he submitted his
History of the Russian Revolution
, and in the review of materials with the idea of undertaking one of his projects: the history of the civil war, a joint biography of Marx and Engels, a biography of Lenin. Nonetheless, a constant worry kept him alarmed and unfocused, as if he were waiting for something. He never imagined it would arrive in such a cruel way.

The first cable sent by Liova was succinct and devastating: Zinushka had committed suicide in her Berlin apartment and Seva’s location was unknown. The paper in hand, Lev Davidovich closed himself in his room. The impossibility of being close to the events was as painful as what had happened, and he couldn’t stand to hear or see anybody. Although he’d already been expecting an end like this and his bad premonitions of recent days had been centered on the young woman, more painful was the feeling of guilt that assaulted him. He knew perfectly well that Zinushka’s terrible life, and now her death at just thirty years of age, were the fruit of his political passion, of his insistence on leading the salvation of the great masses while he threw the fates of those closest to him onto the fire, sacrificed on the altar of vengeance of a perverted
revolution. But what hurt him the most was to think that something could have happened to Seva: the feeling of agony that the boy’s fate caused him was revealed as a new reaction in him, and he chalked it up to old age and exhaustion.

At the end of the afternoon, one of the secretaries arrived in the capital bringing a second cable from Liova that gave some hope. He ran his eyes over the text, skipping over the details of the suicide, until he found the certain relief he was looking for. In a letter left by Zinushka, she noted that she had taken Seva to a Frau K., of whom she gave no other details, but Liova and his comrades were already searching all of Berlin. Tied to that hope, he spent the night awake, trying not to look at the clock. He had decided that in the morning he would get on the first ferry to Istanbul, to try to communicate with Liova by telephone. To his sorrow, he recalled the ill-fated lives of his two daughters too many times, and he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind that a similar misfortune could also mark the lives of Liova, young Seriozha, Seva. Then he wondered whether the moment had not come to execute the only radical measure able to stop that chain of sacrifices: because perhaps his own death could calm the anxiety for revenge that was directed at his clan, hostages of the limitless confrontation. Many times he looked at the mother-of-pearl revolver that Blumkin had brought him from Delhi. Did a revolutionary have the right to abandon the battlefield? Was the life of his children worth more than the fate of an entire class, more than a redeeming idea? Would he give Stalin that gift? Although he knew the answers, the idea of using the revolver fixed itself in his mind with a force he had not known until that day.

At the dock, shaking with the cold breeze coming from the sea, he saw the morning’s first ferry arrive. Among the few passengers traveling at that time and in that season, he made out the figure of his collaborator Rudolf Klement, in whose face he encountered the most encouraging smile and from whose lips he received the most desired news: they had found Seva. For a moment Lev Davidovich was about to give thanks to some god, and he recognized how egotistical he was for the happiness caused by this news. That same afternoon, overcome by tension, he felt how the reserves of energy keeping him afloat were running out and fell on his bed in the throes of a bout of malaria.

A few days later Lev Davidovich received a letter from Alexandra Sokolovskaya, written in Leningrad, where she was at the limit of her ability
to resist. As could be expected, it was a letter full of pain and resentment, in which she accused him of having marginalized Zinushka from the political struggle and of having thus pushed her to her death. Without the physical or moral energy to respond to a wounded mother, he chose to accept the blame that was his and to pass on the rest that was not. With the begrudging mental coldness he was capable of, he prepared an open letter to the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee accusing Stalin of Zina’s death, a political exile only because she was part of his family, separated from her daughter, her mother, and her husband for the same reason, thrown out of the party and dismissed from her job only out of the most perverse revenge. Revenge, when it involves innocent people, is even more cruel, more criminal, and more treacherous, he said. But, to his pain, Lev Davidovich had to recognize that Joseph Stalin was as guilty of Zinushka’s death as the supposed Communists, who, in a surfeit of shamelessness at the recently closed party congress had proclaimed Stalin “Genius of the Revolution” and “Father of the World’s Progressive Peoples,” while millions of peasants were dying of hunger throughout the country, hundreds of thousands of men and women languished in labor camps and colonies of deportees, millions of people were without shoes, and Soviet policy was offering up the fate of German and European workers to Nazi voraciousness.

The secretaries prepared the copies that would go out to Moscow and to the newspapers, parties, and political groups of Europe the following day. Lev Davidovich was counting on Zina’s death resonating as Blumkin’s murder hadn’t, and having the capacity to generate compassion that his own exile had not generated. But again History came to yell in his ear, and the echo of more thunderous events buried his hopes, for at the time that his letters were leaving Prinkipo, a wave of justified fear was running through Europe and the world: Hitler had proclaimed himself chancellor of Germany and fascist banners were unfurling across the country amid the cheers of millions of Germans. Berlin was the city of a triumphant Hitler, not that of a young communist political exile and suicide.

8

As soon as he arrived, Ramón had the feeling that Barcelona had aged.

The order from the Popular Army’s chiefs of staff calling him back to the city had arrived at the camp a week after Caridad’s visit to him in the Sierra de Guadarrama. Full of doubts and weighed down with a good dose of shame, Ramón had taken leave of his company members and, his clothing covered with mud, stepped onto the military transport that evacuated the wounded from the front.
No pasarán!
he had yelled to his trench mates, who responded with the same words:
No pasarán!
Ramón Mercader did not imagine it would be the last time he would use that slogan.

Six months before, when he returned to Barcelona with the remains of his military regiment destroyed by Franco’s first offensive on Madrid, Ramón had found a city in such a state of political effervescence that, in a few days, he’d already managed to organize a new battalion willing to join the recently created Popular Army. The majority of his surviving comrades joined behind him and dozens of young people from the Columna de Hierro de las Juventudes Socialistas, elated at the possibility of leaving for the Madrid front, where everything seemed to be decided. Faith in victory was the oxygen the city breathed.

For Ramón, in those early days at the start of the conflict, Las Ramblas
synthesized the spirit of an exultant Barcelona, drunk with anarchist, communist, and syndicalist dreams. Even when the malignant winds of war and death no longer felt like a viscous presence, hundreds of people ran around dressed in blue workers’ overalls, wearing the badges of a variety of recently created militias, all of them wrapped up in the strident revolutionary marches that clamored from the speakers placed on practically every building, from which hung slogans and banners of the parties loyal to the government. To be a worker, activist, militia man, or soldier of the Republic had become a sign of distinction and one could think that the moneyed classes, like his own family, who had adorned the geography of the place for decades, had disappeared from the face of the rejoicing earth where people greeted each other with their fists held high, exchanged slogans, and prepared themselves for sacrifice, convinced that they had to fight for a human dignity that had been only recently discovered by many.

Ramón had partaken in that crazed atmosphere in which no one seemed to have any true notion of the tragedy pursuing them, and had felt elated, more ready to push forward the wheel of history. A few weeks later, at the war’s most critical moment, when the lifesaving Soviet decision to provide military help to the Republic had arrived, the news, joyously received, had given support to the party and its militants, who had been abandoned during the early weeks swamped by an anarchist tide enjoying the best summer in its history.