The Man Who Loved Dogs (24 page)

The anxiety dulled as the days passed, but for weeks Lev Davidovich wandered like a ghost around the house in Domène. He barely came out of his daze when the news arrived from Moscow that Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the others who were “morally responsible” for Kirov’s death had
received sentences of between ten and five years in prison. Almost immediately, they found out that Volkov and Nevelson, the husbands of the deceased Zina and Nina, deported since 1928, had also received new sentences and that his ex-wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, despite her age, would be banished from Leningrad to the colony of Tobolsk, along with Kamenev’s wife, Olga Kameneva. All of those sanctions had a positive side that the Trotskyists clung to: if the known oppositionists and other members of the family were just jailed and deported, Sergei should be alive, even if he had been arrested. But why didn’t he write? Why didn’t anyone mention him?

Adopting her husband’s skepticism, Natalia drafted an open letter, directed at international opinion, in which she declared her conviction that Seriozha, a scientist from Moscow’s Technological Institute, had no political affiliation, and asked that his activities be investigated and his whereabouts revealed. She asked for the intercession of known figures such as Romain Rolland, André Gide, George Bernard Shaw, and various workers’ leaders, since she gauged that the Soviet bureaucracy could not elevate its impunity above public opinion, the leftist intellectuals, and the global working class.

Meanwhile, the voices clamoring against him had become so aggressive that every day Lev Davidovich was expecting to be the victim of a violent act, irrational or premeditated. Because of that, after making his bodyguards come from Paris, he once again mortgaged his hopes of asylum on the stubborn Norway, where the Labor Party had just won the general elections. In his request, he argued that he had health problems but, above all, personal security problems, and as he had done before with France, he reiterated his commitment not to participate in the country’s politics.

When he felt the siege of Stalinist and fascist pressures was about to trap him (there was talk of sending him to some colony, perhaps Guyana), the back door opened again with the arrival of the Norwegian visa. In contrast to what had happened two years earlier, when he left Büyükada, no residue of nostalgia accompanied him in the rushed departure from Domène, where he had lived for almost a year without acquiring a single happy memory.

Accompanied by Liova, they traveled to Paris, where they still had to fight to be given a visa that hadn’t arrived, while the French authorities demanded that they leave the country within forty-eight hours because
he had violated the restriction on traveling to the capital. At the moment of his departure, Lev Davidovich gave Liova a letter to be published in the
Bulletin
. In it he accused the politicians of Democratic France not only of having played dirty with him but also of doing so with the future of the Republic, making shady deals with Moscow while fascism extended throughout the country. “I leave France with a deep love for its people and with unshakable faith in the future of the working class. Sooner or later, they will offer me the hospitality the bourgeoisie has denied me,” he said at the end of the letter, showing his usual optimism. But as they crossed Paris, he felt sickened: he wondered whether a possible return to a proletarian France was not an illusion. Undoubtedly, it was: “Socialism has dug its own grave and I sense it will rot there for a long time,” he wrote.

The warmth with which the Norwegian journalist Konrad Knudsen welcomed him in his house was like a consolation prize after the months of solitude, tension, and confinement experienced in France. The silence and peace he found in the small town of Vexhall were so compact that he could push them aside with his hands, like a velvet curtain. In summer, the sunsets tended to unfold lazily, as if the day didn’t want to leave, while mornings seemed to come forth ready-made from between the tree branches. Ever since arriving at Vexhall, he had acquired the custom of watching those daybreaks as he drank his coffee in the Knudsens’ backyard and inhaled the aroma of the forest.

When they were received in Norway, Lev Davidovich had harbored the fantasy that perhaps there he could escape the tensions that had pursued him throughout almost seven years of deportation and exile. Recently arrived in the country, he had found himself subject to the insults that, with nearly the same emphasis and very similar words, the communist and fascist press hurled at him, trying to turn him into a political problem for the Oslo government. But his Labor Party hosts had aborted the campaign with sharp statements, declaring that the right of asylum could not be a dead letter in a democratic nation and that the Norwegian people, and in particular its workers, felt honored by his presence in the country and would never allow any pressure from Moscow against the hospitality extended to a revolutionary whose name was linked to that of Lenin. In addition, to reduce the tension, numerous ministers had offered the assurance that he could consider the six-month visa a formality. The
demands were still that he not participate in internal affairs and that he establish residency outside of Oslo. Because of that, faced with the difficulty of finding the right place, they themselves had asked the social democratic politician and journalist Konrad Knudsen to host them at Vexhall, a town close to Hønefoss, thirty miles from the capital.

Lev Davidovich would always remember his first days at Vexhall as strange and confusing. Lodged in a large room, where a splendid mahogany desk had been placed, he and Natalia had to adapt to the rhythms of a house inhabited by a large family who, in the summertime, enjoyed the freedom to forgo schedules and the ability to shrink or grow without warning. The absence of bodyguards, unnecessary in the Labor Party’s and Knudsen’s opinion, made him look apprehensively at the garden’s open gate and think that the Norwegians’ trust played with limits that were unknown to Stalin and his secret police henchmen. But the most important adaptation to life in Vexhall was the establishment between Knudsen and his guest of what they called “a nonaggression pact,” through which they allowed themselves to discuss politics, but always without questioning their respective positions of Communist and Social Democrat.

If the Exile had any doubts regarding Norwegian hospitality, these disappeared when the minister of justice, Trygve Lie, came to visit him accompanied by Martin Tranmæl, the leader and founder of the Labor Party. Their talk, informal at first, led to an interview that Lie would publish in the
Arbeiderbladet
, the main labor newspaper, and in which the interviewer and interviewee shook hands despite their political differences.

A few weeks later, although Lev Davidovich’s mind felt a decrease in tension, his body responded with an ubiquitous discomfort that lasted for months. Nonetheless, he shut himself up in his room each day, resolved to withstand the headaches and joint pains to again take up the biography of Lenin that, with decreasing enthusiasm, his North American editor demanded, the only one who wanted it following his German editor’s withdrawal and the lack of interest in his work by the French. But some news that arrived from Moscow, at the beginning of August 1935, led him to wonder whether his efforts should be focused on the leader’s biography or if the reigning cynicism in the Soviet Union demanded a reflection about the horror of the present and the need to reverse it. The edition of
Pravda
that had alarmed him featured the chronicle of another
one of those parties at the Kremlin in which Stalin, after distributing decorations in abundance, had launched into an inevitable speech. This time his words were reduced to a simple victory cry: “Life is improved, comrades, life is happier here! Let’s drink to life and to socialism!” The experience that had allowed him to learn to interpret that man’s movements warned him that this could not be a casual phrase but rather the roar of a lion on a devastating hunt.

For months, Lev Davidovich had been considering each act, putting each fact in its place, trying to understand the goals of the policy of détente generated by the Kremlin after the trial at the beginning of 1935 against Zinoviev, Kamenev, and company, with which the investigation into Kirov’s murder had been closed. Since then, the arrests had decreased and a wave of official optimism, constantly reinforced by propaganda, had started to run through the country while in Moscow they feted distinguished workers and the representatives of various republics; banquets were offered to scientists, athletes, and distinguished government workers; and party leaders at all levels were recognized. After the hunger and the repression of recent years, Stalin was trying to create a climate of security to spread the idea that the difficult times were a thing of the past because they were already living in the times of socialist prosperity. But once that mirage was created, Lev Davidovich knew that the moment would come when Stalin would strike another blow that would shake the country and consolidate a system in which Stalin could, at last, reign without the interference of any rivals.

Save for the news that Seriozha was alive and sequestered in an apartment in Moscow, nothing good would happen during the final weeks of November and the first of December, when his body declared itself exhausted to the point that he feared the end was approaching in that vulgar manner: “Death by exhaustion, how horrible!” he would write . . . Nonetheless, perhaps the same awareness that he could die leaving so many unfinished projects resulted in working the miracle of getting him out of bed, almost from one day to the next, with his energy practically recovered. Despite his stiff muscles, an overwhelming feeling of rebirth overcame him, and because of that he dared to accept Knudsen’s invitation to participate in an outing to the countryside in the north of Hønefoss, ideal for skiing at that time of year. In his memory, the most notable
event would be when he sunk in the snow to his thighs and required a rescue operation directed by Knudsen and carried out by Jean van Heijenoort and his new assistant, the recently arrived Erwin Wolf.

Shortly after, in the first weeks of 1936, Lev Davidovich received a letter capable of revealing, better than all the available psychoanalytic literature, the most dramatic and exact notion of what fear could be and the unpredictable human mechanisms that it can mobilize. It was written to him by his former adversary Fyodor Dan, exiled in Paris since shortly after the Bolshevik victory. He had known Dan since 1903, when he had been one of the revolutionary Social Democrats who, at the Congress of Brussels, voted against Lenin and, with the rest of the opponents, established Menshevism within the party. Although Dan had been one of the Mensheviks who worked the most to bring the factions together, his loyalty to his group had placed him in the current that was contrary to the proletarian revolution, since he defended the establishment of a parliamentary system in Russia, to which Lev Davidovich was opposed in the month prior to the October coup. Once the Bolshevik victory was definitively established, Dan tried to engineer a rapprochement and later had the decency to recognize defeat and withdraw in silence.

After greeting him and wishing him good health, Dan explained that he dared to write him, after so many years of physical and political distance, because a mutual friend, Dr. Le Savoureux, had insisted that he tell him something that, on many levels, had to do with Lev Davidovich’s past as well as his foreseeable future.

Dan explained to him that Bukharin, despite having been marginalized by Stalin after several castrations, had been sent to Europe with the mission of purchasing some important documents by Marx and Engels that Stalin wanted to deposit in the archives of the former Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, recently augmented with the inclusion of his own name. Bukharin, with enough money to buy the archives and for his maintenance, had been in Vienna, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Berlin before arriving in Paris, where the German Social Democrats possessing the documents had taken the bulk of the archives after Hitler’s rise to power. Bukharin was to negotiate in Paris with a former acquaintance of the old Russian fighters, the Menshevik Boris Nikolayevsky, who was also a friend of Dr. Le Savoureux. In conversation, Bukharin had always seemed reserved, nervous, indecisive, like a man under great stress; and although
Nikolayevsky needled him, it was impossible to obtain from him an opinion about what was happening in the USSR, about Kirov’s murder or the imprisonment of Zinoviev and Kamenev, whom Bukharin himself had placed on the pillory with his public accusation that they were fascists. “At the beginning he seemed like a man who was gravely mistrustful,” assured Dan, who, on two or three occasions, in the company of his wife, had seen him and spoken with him about the only subjects Bukharin allowed: French cheeses and literature, his friendship with Lenin and the documents he had to buy. Dan managed to have him comment on Stalin’s politics and, perhaps in a moment of sincerity, Bukharin confessed the great pain he felt about the way the general secretary was demolishing the spirit of the revolution. To anyone knowledgeable about Soviet politics, Dan said, it would have seemed at least curious that Stalin would have picked Bukharin for that operation, more commercial than philosophical or historical, since the direction of the political housecleaning suggested that sooner or later Bukharin, who had dared to defy Stalin at one moment, would be the next victim. But the greatest surprise about Stalin’s decision had yet to come: without Bukharin having even dared to suggest it, the dictator had sent Anna Larina, Bukharin’s young wife, several months pregnant, to Paris. What kind of strange play was that? Why would Stalin open his captive’s door and allow him to desert without leaving his wife behind? Did he prefer to have Bukharin outside of the Soviet Union and not inside the country, where he would always be able to destroy him with the same impunity with which he had expelled Zinoviev and Kamenev, or have him killed like Kirov? Was it a move destined to turn Bukharin into a deserter before he became a martyr? Dan asked himself, forcing Lev Davidovich to ponder this as he read.