The Man Who Loved Dogs (22 page)

Liova’s messages, weighed down with uncertainty before the path of the events, soon brought news that directly affected the Exile of Büyükada. The prohibition of
Bulletin Oppozitsii
and, almost immediately, the confiscation of his works from bookstores and libraries and the public burning of entire boxes of the recently published
History of the Russian Revolution
, was a clear sign that the fascist inquisition had him and his group on their list of enemies. He then decided that it wasn’t the time for running risks and ordered Liova to leave Berlin without delay.

Lev Davidovich’s indignation exploded when he found out that the executive of the Communist International had issued a shameless declaration of support for the German Communist Party, whose political strategy it qualified as impeccable, while it repeated that the victory of the Nazis was just a transitory situation from which progressive forces would emerge victorious. The most worrying thing was that it was not only the domesticated Germans but also the rest of the parties affiliated with the Comintern who had silently complied with that incriminating document of political suicide with predictable consequences. How could the Communists submit themselves to such a crude manipulation? Wasn’t there a drop of responsibility left in those parties that would put them on their guard against a tragedy that threatened their survival and peace in Europe? If they did not at the very least accept the imminence of the danger, he wrote, on the brink of rage, they had to admit that Stalinism had degraded the communist movement to such an incurable degree that trying to reform it was an impossible mission. One of Lev Davidovich’s most intense political doubts was settled at that instant: it was time to throw it all on the fire. With the pain produced by rejecting a son who had gone off the path until he turned into an unrecognizable being, he decided that the moment had arrived to break with the International and, perhaps, to
create a new one that would oppose fascism with concrete acts and not with propaganda slogans that hid macabre ulterior motives.

Just a week after Maya’s death, the anticipated news that Daladier’s government was giving him asylum arrived to pull him out of the morass of depression. Although he immediately knew how limited the hospitality being offered him was, he didn’t hesitate to accept: according to the visa, he was authorized to reside in one of the departments in the south, on the condition of not ever visiting Paris, and of submitting to the control of the Ministry of the Interior. More than a refugee, he would again be a prisoner, only now in a central corridor and not in a confinement cell. And from there he thought he could act.

The morning on which the retinue of secretaries, bodyguards, fishermen, and police were going down to the dock where their bags were already waiting, Natalia and Lev Davidovich remained for a few minutes in front of what had been their home. They wanted to say goodbye to Prinkipo, where he had finished his autobiography and written the
History of the Russian Revolution;
where he had ceased to be a Soviet and had cried over the death of a daughter; and where, in the midst of the worst abandonment, he had decided that his fight was not finished and that he needed to live—to harass the most ruthless power that one man alone, without resources, who was aging by the day could conceive of confronting. Good Kharalambos, who was silently watching him from the path, must have asked himself if it was true that that lonely man had ever been an explosive leader capable of inspiring the masses to revolution. No one would have said so, he surely concluded, as he saw him close the garden gate and lean over to pick some wildflowers on the ground where four years before he had prohibited the planting of a rosebush. When they came close to him, Kharalambos smiled at them, his eyes watering, and accepted the flowers that the deportee extended to him. Without saying a word, Lev Davidovich raised his eyes to the pines hiding the white walls of the cemetery of the islands of the exiled princes.

Nine days later, without the jubilation they expected, Lev Davidovich, Natalia, and Liova arrived at Les Embruns, the villa that Raymond Molinier had rented in the outskirts of Saint-Palais, in the French Midi. The former commissar of war’s entrance into the house had not exactly been
dignified: he was trembling with fever, thinking that the pounding in his temples would burst his skull, and felt as if his waist was being broken by a biting and unrelenting pain. Because of that, as soon as he crossed the threshold, he fell on a couch and immediately accepted the aspirins and sleeping pills that Natalia Sedova gave him.

They had barely left Istanbul when he had felt a crisis of lumbago, accompanied by a return of malaria. During the entire crossing, Lev Davidovich had remained in his cabin and even refused to speak with the journalists who were waiting for him in El Pireo, attracted by the rumors of his imminent return to the Soviet Union, after his meeting in France with Stalin’s new commissar of foreign affairs. When Marseille came into sight, dozens of journalists, policemen, and protesters opposed to his presence in France were also waiting for them, and his wife had surprised him with the news that Liova and Molinier had come from the port in a ferry to avoid encountering the crowd that could have upset the authorities. Seeing his son again after a tense separation, and hearing him say that in the course of a few days Jeanne would travel from Paris to bring Seva to him, brought him happiness capable of dulling his pains. He then found out that Molinier had prepared everything so that they disembarked in Cassis, from which they traveled in cars to Saint-Palais. But that almost two-hour-long journey on narrow roads had ended up conquering the recently arrived man’s physical resistance.

The pills were starting to take effect, when Lev Davidovich heard some voices ripping him away from that kind lethargy. He would confess to Natalia Sedova that at first he thought he was dreaming: in his dream someone was screaming “Fire! Fire!” But he had enough lucidity not to brush away the nightmare returning him to the nights of arson in Büyükada and Kadıköy as insignificant. He managed to open his eyes just as he felt his arm being pulled and saw the terrified expression on Liova’s face. Then he knew that reality was greater than the ramblings of his fever, and, leaning on his son, he managed to go out to the garden, above which smoke was floating, and he had the feeling of carrying hell with him. Shit! he thought, and fell on the grass, where he at last found out that the fire (seemingly caused by a train spark that had fallen on the very dry earth) had only affected the hedge and the backyard’s wooden shed.

Liova and Molinier were in a rush to speak with Lev Davidovich, as in just one month the founding assembly of the Fourth International planned by the Exile would take place in Paris. However, stopped by Natalia
Sedova, the men had to contain their impatience and give the sick man a few days of peace. Nor could Seva’s anxiously awaited arrival be celebrated as it should have been, due to the fevers overtaking him; he asked Natalia to let him talk to the boy, though, since he wanted to see how his spirits were and explain why his beloved Maya was not with them.

When the fever receded a bit, and particularly when the lumbago pains began to decrease, Lev Davidovich put a deaf ear to his wife’s prohibitions and held a meeting with Lev Sedov, Raymond Molinier, and his coreligionist Max Shachtman, who had accompanied him from Prinkipo. The Exile knew that he was racing the clock and that the four weeks until the constitutive meeting in Paris were forcing them to be especially efficient, since he sensed that he was playing the most important card of his exile. His main concern was Liova and Molinier’s capacity for gatherings, since they would not only be in charge of organizing the meeting but also be his voice, impossible as it was for him to travel to Paris due to the conditions of his asylum. Weighing each of his collaborators’ judgments, the old revolutionary listened to their opinions and immediately was sure that the Fourth International was hanging on a precipice, affected by his own contradictions and created at an adverse time, perhaps too quickly. While Liova offered the dismal panorama (fear and doubts in Germany, dispersion and rivalries in France and Belgium, adventurism in the United States), Molinier trusted in the Exile’s authority to overcome the doubts of many followers and in the possibility of taking advantage of the rise of fascism to call for unity.

Before returning to Paris, Liova would confess to his mother that, for the second time in his life, he had felt compassion for Lev Davidovich and even asked himself if it was worth continuing to fight. Although his father hadn’t given up, the truth was that only his pride, his historic optimism, and his responsibility made him insist on his ideas: at the end of thirty years of revolutionary struggle it was clear, seeing how the world was breaking under the weight of the reaction around him, the totalitarianism, the lies, and the threat of a devastating war, that the man was on his own.

It was precisely that optimism about the future and the laws of history that constituted Lev Davidovich’s mainstay throughout the weeks in which, from his sofa, he devoted up to fifteen hours daily to drafting the thesis to be discussed in Paris. His political perception, altered by events of recent years, allowed him to clarify some of his purposes in calling for
a new International, to which he hoped to attract the dispersed Trotskyist groups and those unhappy with the Stalinist policy applied in Germany, and also some radical sectors, which were always difficult to discipline. But its great contradiction continued to be the policy the meeting of parties should adopt regarding the Soviet Union: the situation there was different, and for the time being caution was the priority, since the struggle had no reason to attack the basis of the system if it managed to unmask it and, when the time came, dethrone the bureaucratic excrescence.

The work, in any event, would not be easy. Stalin had already ordered the “friends of the USSR” to initiate a campaign destined to get hold of the antifascist monopoly, at least on the verbal level, since, when it came to action, they didn’t seem too interested in opposing the necessary enemy that had finally emerged from the German ashes. Stalin’s new campaign propagated the myth that the Soviet system was the only possible choice against Hitler and barbarism. While they accused the democracies of being sympathetic to and even having been the cause of fascism, they reduced the ethical and political options to just two: on the one hand terror, made incarnate by fascism; and on the other, hope and the common good, represented by the Communists led by Stalin. The trap was set and Lev Davidovich started to predict the fall of almost all of the West’s progressive forces into the abyss.

Throughout the four weeks he worked on preparing the conference, the pain and fever would not leave him. Many times Natalia tried to tear him away from his work, but he refused, promising that, after the meeting, he would submit to the regimen of her choice. On the brink of collapse, he finished drafting the documents and bid goodbye to van Heijenoort, begging him to forget his wife’s orders and keep him up-to-date.

The anxiety soon gave way to disappointment before a predictable fiasco. The parties and groups represented in Paris were a reflection of the dispersal experienced by the European and American left, discouraged by failure and frightened by Moscow’s pressures. More than a current, his followers formed small grouplets, the majority being dissidents from communist parties, and they stepped back, scared by that new affiliation that demanded a defined anti-Stalinist position and a philosophical practice that was essentially Marxist, guided by the doctrine of permanent revolution as an ideological principle. Lev Davidovich thought that perhaps
Molinier’s unrestrained energy and Liova’s inexperience had led to the impossibility of achieving important strategic agreements and because of that, when he found out that only three of the invited parties accepted to join a new coalition, he advised Liova that, to save his honor, he desist from founding the International and announce that the meeting had been just a preliminary conference for the future organization.

Overcome by exhaustion and disappointment, he put his body in Natalia’s hands; she began by confining him to a room without a desk, to which all visitors were forbidden, including Liova. Nonetheless, his mind kept going around in circles, and for several days he thought about the reasons for the failure in Paris. That fiasco proved how much his political power had diminished in five years of almost complete marginalization, although he had to recognize that the political situation in which he now had to act was decisive, so different from that of 1917: the revolutionary positions were withdrawing and it was utopian to wait for a situation capable of unleashing a wave of rebellion to advance through Europe and reach Moscow’s doors. By any measure, the clamor for permanent revolution and the image of a leader who would subvert the Muscovite order as well as the capitalist one began to seem anachronistic.

A few weeks later, when the French authorities lifted some restrictions on his asylum (now he was prevented only from living in Paris and in the Seine department), Lev Davidovich decided to leave Saint-Palais and cut off his dependent relationship with Raymond Molinier. Due to his limited finances, he chose to establish himself in the outskirts of Barbizon, the small town that Millet, Rousseau, and other landscape artists had made famous. Located on the edges of the Fontainbleau forest and less than two hours from Paris, Barbizon represented the advantage of being closer to his followers, although it forced them to again use a corps of bodyguards.

The house was a two-story building, from the turn of the century, that its owners baptized “Ker Monique,” and was only separated from the forest by a dirt path that barely fit a car. Since moving to that place, always perfumed by the scent of the forest, he felt himself regaining his ability to work and was again writing and receiving visits from his followers, to whom he proselytized on an almost individual basis. Thus, he tried to prevent new dissent from forming, as had just occurred in Spain, where the
group led by his old friend Andreu Nin had decided to found a party independent of any International, or the one that was led in France by fighters like Simone Weil and Pierre Naville. The most regrettable thing was discovering how much the proposed International had been hurt by Molinier’s political ambitions, capable of planting chaos in the French opposition to the point that, he wrote, they would need years of work to bring together the scarcely hundred or so militants who still followed him.