The Man Who Loved Dogs (15 page)

With the letters that Liova began to send him from Berlin, the old fighter managed to get a better sense of the inexorable disaster at the door of the German Communists. Again and again he asked himself how Moscow was displaying such political clumsiness. You didn’t have to be a genius to notice the significance of the rise of Nazism that, without taking power, had already begun a violent offensive, backed by attack forces that in just two months had grown from 100,000 to 400,000 members. The facts
revealed that it could not be due to political blindness: the suicidal strategy of the German Communists must have a reason, beyond the explicit guidelines dictated by the masters in Moscow, he thought and wrote.

Some words pronounced in the heart of the Soviet Union revealed a truth that alarmed him. In a hunger-stricken Moscow, where shoes and bread were a luxury, in which dozens of men and women were detained every night without fiscal orders so that they could be sent to Siberian camps, Stalin proclaimed that the country had reached socialism. Socialism? Only then did Lev Davidovich manage to see a ray of light in the darkness: that had to be the origin of the suspicious apathy, the absurd triumphalism that tied the hands of the German Communists, preventing them from any alliance with the country’s forces on the left and center. He was terrified when he understood the real reason behind all of those surprising attitudes was that Stalin, to achieve the concentration of power, could not rely on the ghosts of the possible aggressions of French imperialism or Japanese militarism, but rather needed an enemy like Hitler to cement, with the threat of Nazism, his own ascent. Although Lev Davidovich had always been opposed to the possibility of founding another party, out of respect for Lenin’s ideas and out of the concrete fear of what the schism could cause, the proof of the betrayal that Stalin was carrying out, whose consequences would be devastating for Germany and dangerous even in the Soviet Union itself, had begun to stir doubts in his mind.

Luckily, the presence of little Seva mitigated his fears. Lev Davidovich established a close relationship very different from the one he, so absorbed in the struggle, had had with his own children. The grandson had managed to appropriate the few hours of free time that his grandfather could give him, and between them they had started the habit of going down to the beach every afternoon, where Seva ran with Maya and, whenever the affable Kharalambos allowed it, boarded the fisherman’s boat and navigated out to the cliffs. The affection he felt for the boy lessened his political concerns, and on many occasions he was surprised by a great peace, which allowed him to feel like a grandfather who was beginning to grow old; and for the first time in thirty years he managed to free himself from the urgencies of the struggle. Seva and Maya’s races, the conversations with Kharalambos about the art of fishing, the rides around the Sea of Marmara, would soon become pleasant images that he would cling to in the even more difficult moments that awaited him.

One predawn morning in that first summer he spent with Seva, Lev Davidovich would save his life and that of his family thanks to the insomnia of which he’d always been a victim. Lying on his bed, he let one of those weary nights go by while he listened to nocturnal sounds and thought of his son Sergei. That same morning he had received a letter in which Seriozha assured them that his life in Moscow was following a normal course; he spoke of his recent marriage and of his progress in his scientific studies. Although the young man maintained his aversion to politics, his father’s intuition told him that that distance could not last much longer and that any day now politics would show up at his door. Because of that, after discussing it with Natalia, he had decided not to put off the proposal any longer that Seriozha begin the procedures that would allow him to travel to Berlin to be reunited with his brother. Wrapped up in those deliberations, it had taken him a while to notice Maya’s restlessness; the dog had approached the bed various times, and he had even heard her sniveling. Suddenly a sense of alarm had made him regain his lucidity: the smell of burning wood was unmistakable, and without another thought he had awoken Natalia and run to the room where Seva had been sleeping with the young secretaries ever since his mother had moved to Istanbul to be operated on.

The fire had started on the wall outside the room he used as his office, and Lev Davidovich immediately understood the saboteur’s intention: his papers. While the Turkish policemen, awakened from their slumber, threw buckets of water over the fire that was spreading to the living room, he had left Seva and Maya in Natalia’s care and, with the help of his secretaries, the bodyguards, and the recently arrived Rudolf Klement, he had started moving the papers that represented his memories and most of his life. Amid the smoke and the water being thrown, they had managed to remove the manuscript folders, the files, and many of the books before the ceiling of that part of the villa gave a groan prior to falling.

In those predawn hours, among boxes of papers and books thrown on the floor, Natalia and Lev Davidovich had watched the fire do its work while he caressed the ears of the shaking Maya. Although the work of improvised firemen had prevented the total destruction of the villa, at sunrise they saw that it was left in such a state that it would have to be
entirely rebuilt to again be inhabitable. While the rest of them removed the objects and clothing that had been saved, he devoted himself to gathering dozens of books, water-damaged but perhaps salvageable, and to regretting the loss of other volumes and documents (the photos of the revolution! he would always lament) consumed by the fire.

Rudolf Klement, the young German who had traveled to take over for Liova in the secretary’s office, found a house that offered some security, in the Anglo-American residential suburb of Kadıköy, in the outskirts of Istanbul. The residence, in reality, ended up being too small for the family, the secretaries, the bodyguards and the police (four of them since the fire), but above all too small to live with Zina, who—recovered from a surgery that would soon reveal itself to be a complete failure—had begun to demand, with unhealthy vehemence, greater responsibility in the political work.

Several strange events would mark the months that they lived between the oppressive walls of the house in Kadıköy. The first was the possibility, very soon cut short by the joint work of fascists and Communists, that he would travel to Berlin to give some lectures. That predictable setback was a painful disappointment for him: he had again felt on his back the price he had to pay for his past actions and the insuperable weight of a confinement that made him think of that which Napoleon suffered. Do they fear me so much? he had written, exasperated by the invulnerability of the siege that confined him to Turkey and removed him from any possibility of direct participation.

Then there was another attempted fire. Fortunately, this one reached only the backyard shed, and investigators deemed it an accident upon finding the remains of a box of matches Seva had played with on the heating boiler.

The third event, more intriguing and at the same time revealing, happened when they were visited by a high-ranking Turkish domestic security officer charged with informing them that the country’s police had detained a group of Russian émigrés who were preparing an attempt against his life. The leader of the plot had turned out to be former general Turkul, one of the White Guard leaders that the Red Army defeated during the civil war. According to the officer, the conspiracy had been
dismantled and he could remain calm, under the hospitality of the Honorable Kemal Pasha Ataturk.

As soon as they said goodbye to the officer, Lev Davidovich commented to Natalia that the framework of the story was shaky. The danger that the Russian émigrés stationed in Turkey would commit violent acts against his person had always been latent. But nothing had happened in over two years, which proved that the White Russians did not deem it a priority or understood that attacking him when he was considered a personal guest of the implacable Kemal Ataturk was a challenge that could only prejudice them.

The worst experience of that time, however, were the tensions caused by Zina’s instability: she was more demanding every day regarding the participation in partisan jobs, but her behavior oscillated between enthusiasm and depression. Although he insisted, in the kindest ways, she had refused to submit herself to psychoanalytic treatment, since, she repeated, she didn’t feel like unearthing all the filth she had accumulated within her. Her disorder had reached a critical point when the failure of her operation was discovered, since the Turkish surgeons had invaded her remaining healthy lung. Fearful for Zina’s life or of a direct confrontation with her, Lev Davidovich ordered Liova to make the necessary arrangements for the woman to travel to Berlin and be seen there by specialists capable of mending her body and her spirit.

Once Zina’s reservations had been overcome, the woman left for Berlin, leaving her father feeling a mixture of relief and a cutting feeling of guilt. Lev Davidovich had promised her that, as soon as she recovered a bit, she would begin to work with Liova and they would send Seva to her. Meanwhile, for his own stability, the young boy would stay in Turkey, although his grandfather knew that behind the decision to keep the boy was a dose of selfishness: Seva had turned into his best medicine against exhaustion and pessimism.

Zinushka had left in the company of Abraham Sobolevicius, Senin the Giant, one of Lev Davidovich’s collaborators based in Berlin, who, coincidentally, had spent a few days at the house in Kadıköy. For the last two years, Senin and his younger brother had turned into his most active correspondents in Germany, but since Liova had been placed at the head of the German followers, relations with the Sobolevicius brothers had undergone a period of tensions, and he attributed it to the preeminence
he had given his son in the terrain where the brothers had reigned. The strangest thing in the changed attitude from those comrades was the more or less direct rejection of certain guidelines destined to unmask the irresponsible Stalinist policies regarding the German situation. The resistance of the Sobolevicius brothers, precisely because it came from men who were so experienced, worried Lev Davidovich.

Just a few days after Zina’s departure, information filtered in from Moscow to illuminate like a flash of lightning the darkness in which the Exile had spent two years. The source of the information was trustworthy: it came from Comrade V.V., whose existence only Liova and he were aware of, since his role within the GPU made him especially vulnerable and useful. V.V. warned in a report that he had heard just an echo of a comment about the Sobolevicius brothers carrying out espionage work for the GPU within Trotsky’s closest circle. But placed in its precise context that comment gave form to the riddle of the brothers’ strange attitude.

The discovery of the true nature of the agents—who disappeared as soon as Lev Davidovich made their real affiliation public—plunged him into deep concern. The fact that he had trusted those men to the point of having handed over his daughter to them—of having let them sleep in his house, play with Seva, speak privately with Natasha and with him—warned him of the fragility of any possible system of protection and made evident the dominion Stalin had over his life: for now, the Grave Digger was satisfied with knowing what he was doing and what he was thinking, but what about tomorrow? He was convinced that the fires and the presumed conspiracy of former general Turkul had only been distraction maneuvers in an attack that had barely begun and whose denouement would require neither spectacular actions nor the conspiracies of old White Russian enemies. The final shot would come from a hand, trained by Stalin himself and capable of passing through all the filters of suspicion, until it became the closest thing to a friendly hand. The actions of the Sobolevicius brothers showed him, nonetheless, that his life still seemed necessary for the general secretary to rise to the most absolute of powers. Terrified before the evidence that clarified the reasons for which he’d been allowed to go into exile instead of being killed on the steppes of Alma-Ata, he understood that, while he was alive, he would be the incarnation of the counterrevolution, his image would stain all demands for internal political change, his voice would sound like the perversion of any voice that clamored for a minimum level of truth and justice. Lev
Trotsky would be the measure of justifying all repression, the basis for all the explosions of critics and inconvenient people, a side of the enemy coin of the world Communists: the piece that, to be perfect, would soon have the image of Adolf Hitler on its reverse side.

When the reconstruction work on the Büyükada villa was completed, Lev Davidovich demanded to return. Throughout the nine months he lived in Istanbul, the vertigo of transience and the feeling of finding himself at the edge of a cliff never left his spirit, and he had not even managed to progress as he had hoped on the writing of
History of the Russian Revolution
. For that reason, he trusted that the return to what he now considered his house would allow him to concentrate on what was truly important.