Leonardo Padura - The Man Who Loved Dogs

With the changing of the police team, at the head of which an agent named Bulanov was placed, the deportees held the hope of piercing the veil and finding out the fates assigned to them. However, Bulanov could only inform them that they would take a special train in the Frunze depot, without the order specifying toward where. So much mystery, thought Lev Davidovich, could only be the product of the fear of the improbable but nonetheless dreaded reactions of his decimated followers in Moscow. He also wondered if that entire operation was nothing but an orchestrated pantomime to create confusion and control opinions, a preferred technique of Stalin’s, who on various occasions throughout that year had made rumors circulate about his imminent exile, which, though later denied with greater or less emphasis, had served to spread the idea and pave the way for the sentence that the people would only have news of after the fact.

Only during the months prior to the expulsion, while suffering a political defeat that managed to tie his hands, had Lev Davidovich begun to appreciate, seriously and with horror, the magnitude of Stalin’s manipulative abilities. Incapable of appreciating the Georgian ex-seminarian’s genius for intrigue, his shamelessness in lying and putting together shady deals, Lev Davidovich understood too late that he had underestimated his intelligence, and that Stalin, educated in the catacombs of the clandestine struggle, had learned all the forms of subterranean demolition. He now applied them, for his personal benefit, in search of the same ends for which the Bolshevik Party had used them before: to achieve power. The way in which he disarmed and displaced Lev Davidovich while using the vanity and fears of men who never seemed to have fears or vanities before, the calculated turns of his forces from one extreme to another of the political spectrum, had been a masterwork of manipulation that, to crown the Georgian’s victory, had benefited from the unpredictable blindness and pride of his rival.

Beyond orchestrating his expulsion from the party, and now from the country, Stalin’s great victory had been to turn Trotsky’s voice into the incarnation of the internal enemy of the revolution, of the nation’s stability, of the Leninist legacy, and had crushed him with the wall of propaganda that Lev Davidovich himself had contributed to creating, and against which, due to inviolable principles, he could not oppose if it meant risking the permanence of that system. The struggle on which he had to focus from that moment on would be one against men, against a faction, never against the Idea. But how to fight against them if those men had appropriated the Idea and presented themselves to the country and the world like the very incarnation of the proletarian revolution? It was a question he would continue to ponder after his deportation.

The railroad odyssey of their pilgrimage began as soon as they left Frunze. The snow imposed a slow rhythm on the old English locomotive, which pulled four cars. Throughout his years at the head of the Red Army, when he had to cover the geography of a country deep in civil war, Lev Davidovich came to know almost the entire network of the nation’s railways. On that special train he had traveled, by his calculations, enough miles to go around the world five and a half times. Because of that, after leaving Frunze, he was able to deduce that they were crossing the Asiatic south of the Soviet Union and that his destination could be none other than the Black Sea, one of the ports of which would serve to get him out of the country. To where? Two days later, after a quick stay at a station lost in the steppe, Bulanov arrived with the news that ended their wait: a telegram sent from Moscow informed him that the Turkish government had agreed to receive him as a guest, on a visa for health problems. Upon hearing the news, the deportee’s anxiety felt as frozen solid as if he were traveling naked on top of the train: of all the destinations he had imagined for his exile, Kemal Pasha Ataturk’s Turkey had not figured among the realistic possibilities, unless they wanted to put him on the gallows and decorate his neck with a well-oiled piece of rope, given that, since the triumph of the October Revolution, this neighbor to the south had become one of the bases for the White Russian exiles most aggressively against the Soviet regime, and placing him in that country was like dropping a rabbit in a dog pen. That is why he yelled at Bulanov that he didn’t want to go to Turkey: he could accept being banished from the country the Kremlin had stolen, but the rest of the world did not belong to it and neither did his fate.

When they stopped in legendary Samarkand, Lev Davidovich saw Bulanov and two officers descend from the command headquarters car and disappear into the mosque-like building that served as a station; perhaps they were following through on the deportee’s demands and Moscow would arrange for another visa. On that day the anxious wait for the results of those consultations began, and when it became clear that the process would be delayed, they made the train move forward for over an hour before stopping it on a disused branch line in the middle of the frozen desert. It was then that Natalia Sedova asked Bulanov, while they waited for Moscow’s response, to telegraph her son, Sergei Sedov, and Anya, Liova’s wife, so that they could get together with them for a few days before leaving the country.

Lev Davidovich would never know if the twelve days during which they remained stranded in that spot in the middle of nowhere were due to the delays in the diplomatic consultations or if it was only because of the most devastating snowstorm he’d ever seen, capable of lowering the thermometers to forty degrees below zero. Covered with all of the coats, hats, and blankets at their disposal, they received Seriozha and Anya, who traveled without the children, who were still too little to be exposed to those temperatures. Beneath the occasional gaze of one of the guards, the family enjoyed eight days of pleasant small talk, fierce games of chess, and reading out loud while Lev Davidovich personally took charge of preparing the coffee brought by Sergei. Despite the skepticism of his audience, every time the guards left them alone, Lev Davidovich’s compact optimism was unleashed and he initiated talk of plans to continue the struggle and make his return. At night, when everyone else was sleeping, the deportee curled up into a corner of the car and, listening to the staccato breathing due to the cold epidemic that had run through the convoy, he made the most of his insomnia to write letters of protest directed to the Bolshevik Central Committee and oppositionist struggle programs that, in the end, he decided to keep to himself so as not to compromise Seriozha with any papers that very well could lead him to jail.

The cold was so intense that the locomotive had to turn on its motors from time to time and cover a mile or two just to keep its engines from seizing up. Prevented from going outside by the snow’s intensity (Lev Davidovich didn’t want to lower himself to asking for permission to see Samarkand, the mythical city that centuries before had reigned over all of Central Asia), they awaited the newspapers only to confirm that the news was always disheartening, since every day there were reports of new detentions of anti-Soviet counterrevolutionaries, as they had baptized the members of the opposition. The powerlessness, boredom, the pain in his joints, the difficult digestion of canned food, drove Lev Davidovich to the edge of desperation.

On the twelfth day, Bulanov offered a summary of the responses: Germany was not interested in giving him a visa, not even for health reasons; Austria made excuses; Norway demanded countless documents; France brandished a judicial order from 1916 by which he was not allowed to enter the country. England didn’t even deign to respond. Only Turkey reiterated its disposition to accept him. . Lev Davidovich was certain that, because of who he was and for having done what he had, for him the world had turned into a planet to which he lacked a visa.