Leonardo Padura - The Man Who Loved Dogs

“Today’s petrified crap. .” Lev Davidovich threw the newspaper against the wall and left his study. As he went down the stairs, he smelled the scent of goat stew that Natalia was preparing for dinner, and that appetizing aroma seemed obscene. Behind his desk he contemplated the beautiful Sara Weber, who was typing with a speed that at that moment seemed automatic, definitively inhuman. He crossed the door to the barren garden and the Turkish policemen smiled at him, willing to follow him, and he stopped them with a gesture. The men acted like they were following his wishes, but they did not let him out of their sight, since the order they received was too precise: their lives depended on the Exile not losing his.

The beauty of the month of April in Prinkipo barely affected him as he, followed by Maya, went down the dune that ended on the coast. He asked himself: What agony could grip the brain of a sensitive and effusive man like Mayakovsky to make him voluntarily decline the aroma of the stew, the magic of a sunset, under the gaze of feminine charms, to shut himself up in the irreversible silence of death? And he walked along the shore to observe his dog’s elegant trot, a gift of nature that also seemed offensively harmonious.

Three years earlier, when they were on the verge of banishing him from Moscow and his good friend Yoffe had shot himself in the hopes that his act would cause a commotion capable of moving the party’s conscience and preventing the catastrophic expulsion of Lev Davidovich and his comrades, he had thought that the drama of the act made sense in the political struggle, even though he didn’t approve of such an exit. But the news he had recently read had shaken him due to the magnitude of the mental castration enclosed in its message. How far had mediocrity and perversion gone for the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky — Mayakovsky of all people — to decide to evade its tentacles by taking his own life? Today’s petrified crap that so alarmed the poet in his final verses, had it overcome him to the point of suicide? The official note drafted in Moscow could not have been more offensive to the memory of the artist who had fought for a new and revolutionary art with the most enthusiasm, the one who had, with the most fervor, handed over to the spirit of a completely new society his poetry laden with screams, chaos, broken harmonies, and triumphant slogans; the one who had most insisted on resisting, on withstanding, the suspicions and pressures with which the bureaucracy besieged the Soviet intelligentsia. The note spoke of a “decadent feeling of personal failure,” and since in the rhetoric implanted in the country the word “decadence” was applied to bourgeois art, society, and life, by making the failure “personal,” they were reaffirming with calculated cruelty that individual condition that could only exist in the bourgeois artist that, they usually said, every creator always carries within, like original sin, no matter how revolutionary he claims he is. The death of the writer, they clarified, didn’t have anything to do with his “social and literary activities,” as if it were possible to separate Mayakovsky from actions that were no more and no less than his very way of breathing.

Something all too malignant and repellent had to have been unleashed in Soviet society if its most fervent spokespeople were beginning to shoot bullets into their own hearts, disgusted before the nausea caused by today’s petrified crap. That suicide was, as Lev Davidovich knew well, the dramatic confirmation that more turbulent times had begun, that the last embers of the marriage of convenience between the revolution and art had gone out, with the predictable sacrifice of art: times in which a man like Mayakovsky, disciplined even to the point of self-annihilation, could feel the disdain of those in power boring into the back of his head, those for whom poets and poetry were aberrations on whom they could perhaps rely to reaffirm their preeminence and whom they could do without when they didn’t need them.

Lev Davidovich recalled that many years before he’d written that history had conquered Tolstoy, but had not broken him. To the end, that genius had been able to maintain his precious gift for moral indignation and thus directed his cry of “I cannot be silent!” against the aristocracy. But Mayakovsky, forcing himself to be a believer, had remained silent and thus ended up broken. He lacked the courage to go into exile when others did so; to stop writing when others broke their pens. He insisted on offering his poetry to political activity and sacrificed his art and his own spirit with that gesture; he pushed himself so much to be an exemplary militant that he had to commit suicide to become a poet again. Mayakovsky’s silence was a harbinger of other silences that were as painful or more so, in all certainty, to come in the future: the political intolerance invading society would not rest until it suffocated it. “As they suffocated the poet, they are trying to smother me,” the Exile would write, stranded next to the oppressive Sea of Marmara that had been surrounding him for a year already.

To the end of his days, Lev Davidovich would remember his first weeks of Turkish exile as a blind transit through which he had to move, feeling his way against walls in constant motion. The first thing that surprised him was that the GPU agents in charge of overseeing his deportation, in addition to giving him $1,500 that they said they owed him for his work, maintained a pleasant attitude toward him despite the fact that, once they had crossed into Turkish waters, he had sent a message to President Kemal Pasha Ataturk advising him that he was settling in Turkey only because he was forced to do so. Afterward, it was the diplomats from the Soviet legation in Istanbul who were as cordial as they would have only been to a first-class guest sent by their government. Because of that, in the face of so much faked kindness, he was not surprised when the European newspapers, encouraged by the rumors spread by Moscow’s ubiquitous men, speculated that perhaps Trotsky had been sent to Turkey by Stalin to foment revolution in the Near East.

Convinced that silence and passivity could be his worst enemies, he decided to take action, and while he insisted on applying for visas from various countries (the president of the German Reichstag had spoken of his country’s willingness to offer him a “freedom asylum”), he wrote an essay, published by some Western newspapers, in which he clarified the conditions of his exile, denounced the persecution and the jailing of his followers in the Soviet Union, and declared Stalin, publicly for the first time, the Grave Digger of the Revolution.

The change in attitude of diplomats and policemen was immediate and, curiously, coincided with the arrival of new refusals to house him from Norway and Austria, and with the news of what was happening in Berlin, where Ernst Thälmann and the Communists loyal to Moscow had started an uproar against the renegade’s possible acceptance there. Expelled without the least consideration from the Soviet consulate and divested of all protection, the Trotskys had to lodge at a small hotel in Istanbul, where their lives were exposed to the predictable aggressions of their enemies, red and white. Even so, as soon as they arrived, Lev Davidovich sent a telegram to Berlin with which he burned the last ship in which he had entrusted his luck: “I interpret silence as a very disloyal refusal.” But he had no sooner sent it off when it seemed insufficient and he reinforced his position with a last message to the Reichstag: “I am very sorry that the possibility is denied to me to study in practice the advantages of the democratic right to asylum.”

The dawn of spring surprised them in that dismal hostel of cracked and dirty walls where they were lodging. Although he didn’t have the foggiest idea what his next steps could be, Lev Davidovich decided to take advantage of the season and get to know the exultant Istanbul in his spare time. But not even the discovery of an exquisite world that went back to the very origins of civilization could manage to shake him out of the pessimistic lethargy into which he had fallen and which made him feel like a stranger to himself: Lev Davidovich Trotsky needed a sword and a battlefield.