The Man Who Loved Dogs (84 page)

When Ramón arrived in Moscow, in May 1960, the KGB officer assigned to him during the first months had the deference to inform him that his former mentor sent his greetings of welcome from the prison where he was confined, carrying out a sentence of twelve years for the crime of participating in a conspiracy against the government. But before that, through various letters that Caridad sent him through the lawyer Eduardo Ceniceros (who took care of Ramón after Medellín Ostos’s death), the prisoner in Lecumberri had learned a little about his mentor’s strange run of luck. Although the letters were intentionally confusing, incomprehensible for someone without any background, Ramón managed to gather that when his mentor returned to the USSR, after fulfilling the most important mission of his life, he had been promoted to general and given the first of his orders of Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded to him personally by Comrade Stalin. Mr. K., or the Gimp (as Caridad would call him in those letters), continued working with Sudoplatov in the so-called foreigners’ department of the secret service, training the agents charged with infiltrating and sabotaging the German rear guard. For that work (what things must he have done? Ramón asked himself, although he could guess the response) he would again be decorated as Hero of the Soviet Union and promoted to brigadier general. But in 1946, Beria was transferred from the intelligence agencies to the department of
investigations, and the development of nuclear weaponry turned into the greatest obsession of Stalin, who was preparing himself for atomic war. This left Mr. K. up in the air, and he was immediately withdrawn from service by the new director of the Cold War espionage and sabotage agencies. According to other letters from Caridad, who was already established in Paris by that time, everything was apparently normal in the life of that agent until, in 1951, he was imprisoned under Stalin’s orders, along with his sister Sophia, a doctor, both of them caught in the net of the most recent raid of doctors, scientists, and high officers (led by the very same minister of state security, Abakumov), all of them of Jewish origins. This time they were accusing them of nothing more and nothing less than trying to poison Stalin, Khrushchev, and Malenkov in order to take power for themselves. The case had come out in the newspapers and in Lecumberri Jacques Mornard could read French, English, and Mexican dailies that gave the details of the so-called conspiracy of the Jewish doctors discovered by Muscovite intelligence, which had prevented the assassination of Comrade Stalin and the deaths of a great number of Soviets. The tone of those accusations, laden with the same rhetoric as the trials of the 1930s, awoke the fear that Ramón had managed to exorcise after more than ten years of a relatively peaceful stay in prison. For him, the story of that dismal conspiracy could only have one lesson: behind the charges of a plot lay plans to eliminate men who knew uncomfortable secrets about Stalin’s past. And it was precisely his mentor, who moreover was Jewish, who knew one of the most compromising secrets. If they killed Kotov, how much time would Ramón have left? Would the kindness of the prison officials continue to be purchased by Moscow? The prisoner spent two years living with that anxiety, waiting each day to receive the news of the execution of general Nahum Isaakovich Eitingon, as the official journalistic dispatches called him. Until, in March 1953, the news of Stalin’s death arrived at his prison.

Around that time, Roquelia started to take him the messages sent by Caridad from Paris. In one of the first, his mother told him that Mr. K. and all of the supposed authors of the plot, imprisoned since 1951, had been released by Beria. Ramón breathed in relief. But not for long. When the new Soviet leadership team headed by Khrushchev brought down and executed Beria, Eitingon was swept up in the raid, now accused of conspiring with his old boss to perpetrate a coup d’état, and he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Caridad assured him in a letter
that that was how Soviet gratitude was expressed and warned him to never let his guard down, since that gratitude could cross the Atlantic.

“What have you been doing with your life since they released you?” Ramón served himself the juice while Leonid drank his first swig of vodka.

“They insinuated that Khrushchev’s treatment of me and other old soldiers of Beria’s had been excessive. They gave me back my pension, but not my medals; they got me a job as a translator; and they gave me an apartment in Golianovo—a shell without its own bathroom. Those buildings aren’t made with cement but with hate . . . Haven’t you ever heard the song of the taxi drivers?” he asked, smiling, and immediately sang in Russian: “ ‘I’ll take you to the tundra, / I’ll take you to Siberia, / I’ll take you any place you want to go, / but don’t ask me to take you / to Golianovo . . .’ ”

Leonid tried to smile but couldn’t manage it.

“Was it very hard?” Ramón, his own prison experience behind him, felt he had the right to ask that question.

“Surely harder than your jail, and I know that a Mexican jail can seem like the closest thing to hell. But you knew you were protected and I didn’t even have a nail to hang on to; you knew that you were going to be there for twenty years, but I had no expiration date. And while the Mexicans could kill you and go out to party, they’re not capable of conceiving of the things that occur to our comrades when they want you to confess something, whether you’ve done it or not. And the worst is when you know that you are paying for faults that aren’t yours. And worse still when it’s your own people turning the screws . . . Add to that the fucking cold . . . How I hate the cold . . .”

Leonid wolfed down two slices of the Polish kielbasa and drank his second vodka, perhaps to warm up the cold of his memory. He moved his head, denying something remote. In reality, he said, since 1948 he had felt his luck could change. That year, Stalin started the purge of the old European antifascist fighters who were not adapting to the new Stalinist bureaucratic model demanded by socialism in expansion and by the rules of the recently debuted Cold War. The Prague purge was the sign that the clowns of the past had to be sacrificed, but Eitingon made the mistake of thinking that those new trials had nothing to do with men like him, true professionals, so useful in times of hunting.

The failure experienced by the Great Helmsman in his attempt to gain influence over the nascent state of Israel (which, after receiving support
and Soviet money, opted to go under Washington’s sphere) took the lid off of his passionate, long-standing hatred of the Jews. The general secretary pulled the conspiracy of the poisoning doctors out of the air and, with his sense of economy, made the most of the trial to take out of circulation other Jews and non-Jews who were potentially dangerous because of their ideas or their knowledge of troublesome secrets.

“Stalin knew he was in decline and began to identify the survival of the revolution with his own. He really thought that he was the Soviet Union. Well, he almost was. He was close to seventy years old, and after fighting so long to gather all the power in his hands, after having turned into the most powerful man on earth, he felt exhausted and began to sense what was going to happen: that when he died, his own dogs were going to villify him. No one can generate so much hate without running the risk that at some point it will overflow onto the recipient, which is what happened when he died. That’s why he entered a sick world of obsessions. After the war, with the euphoria of having won and with so many things to rebuild, people were calmer and better controlled. That son of a bitch Stalin knew very clearly that, to reign until the end, he would have to make sure that no one could feel safe—ever. I really think that period after the war was much harder than the years 1937 and 1938. You don’t think so? Look, kid, although he had men who had enjoyed his trust, such as Beria, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, and that son of
superwhores
Vyshinsky—and other useless ones like Molotov and Voroshilov—he suspected all of them, because he was a man sick with mistrust and fear, lots of fear. Can you imagine that, when they interrogated us, they always asked if any of those men, the ones in the highest positions, the ones he trusted, were implicated in our anti-Soviet plot? Do you know that each one of them was submitted to a terrible test? He put Polina, Molotov’s wife, in a gulag for being Jewish. Kalinin’s wife was imprisoned while he was president of the country, and when she got sick he had to ask Stalin, as a personal favor, for a better bed than the straw mattress on which he found her nearly dead . . . The president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, kid! At that time I understood that Stalin’s cruelty not only obeyed political necessity and the desire for power, it was also due to his hatred of men—worse still, to his hatred of the memory of the men who had helped him create his lies, to fuck and rewrite history. But the truth is, I don’t know who was sicker, Stalin or the society that allowed him to grow . . .
Suka!
”

“This was the same Stalin whom you adored and taught me to adore?”
Every time he entered those waters, Ramón felt dislocated, as if he were hearing a story removed from his own, of a reality different from the one Ramón himself had created in his head.

“He was always the same, a son conceived by Soviet politics, not the abortion of human evil . . . ,” Leonid replied, and paused. “When they took me to Lefortovo Prison, I knew everything was over. They told me that they would subject us to a public trial and asked me to sign statements in which I admitted, among a thousand other things, being up-to-date on the murderous plans of the doctors and of having given them political and logistical support. But I told them I wasn’t going to sign.”

“So how did you get out of signing?”

“Oh, Ramón,” Leonid laughed. “Why was I going to sign? Let’s see, so that you understand. How many sons did Trotsky have?”

“Four.”

“I have three and several stepchildren . . . What happened to Trotsky’s children?”

“They were killed, they committed suicide . . .”

“Do you remember if Trotsky had a sister?”

“Olga Bronstein, the one who had been Kamenev’s wife.”

“And?”

“They say she disappeared in a work camp.”

“Well, I also have a sister who was one of the accused doctors . . . They sentenced her to ten years . . . Do you remember the day we went to the trial to hear Yagoda’s statement?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think it was worth it for me to cover myself in shit, thinking that I was going to save my wife, my children, and my sister that way? That incriminating myself in any infamy was going to help the Republic of the Soviets and, maybe, save me? What happened to Zinoviev and Kamenev? Did they save their families when they confessed that they were Trotskyist conspirators? Stalin changed the penal code to kill their children who were minors . . . If I confessed something, not only was I killing myself, but I was also going to kill other people. So I told myself I was going to take it all, and I took it, without talking. Do you know how? Well, by letting myself die bit by bit, turning myself into a skeleton that could come apart in their hands. It was the only way to avoid them torturing me . . .”

Ramón stayed silent. He remembered the upheaval he felt when he read Khrushchev’s speeches, which Roquelia brought him, in which
Stalin’s excesses were recognized. As soon as they put names and faces to them, the “excesses” began to be called crimes. He would never forget when, already established in Moscow, his brother Luis again stirred that pot: very secretly they had given him Bukharin’s letter “To a Future Generation of Party Leaders” to read, which the Bolshevik’s wife had kept in her memory for twenty years. It was the political testament of a man who, after labeling Stalinist terror an infernal machine, warned the henchmen—he must have been looking at Ramón, Kotov, and others like them—that “when dealing with indecent matters, history can’t stand witnesses,” and that the time of their sentencing was getting closer and closer.

“Just like them, I wasn’t completely innocent, either. In the new logic, no one in this country is completely innocent . . .” Lionia had lost part of the vibrating depth of his voice. “Beria had his plans for the future and had told me about them. But not having signed that confession and Stalin’s death saved me from the firing squad. Because they were going to execute me. I was the only one who knew everything about you, and also some other things that were more or less shocking, like the attack in Ankara against German vice chancellor von Papen and certain medical experiments with prisoners during the war.”

“What are you talking about?” Ramón looked at his old mentor and thought that not everyone could cross the broad steppe of jail and torture with a lucid mind.

Eitingon cleaned his fingers several times with a greasy paper napkin as if he were trying to get rid of some especially adhesive substance.

“Poisons with no trace. Tests of resistance to radiation, activated thallium, uranium. They were traitors or war criminals; they were going to die anyway . . . Stalin was obsessed with the idea of making the atomic bomb. There were many tests . . . It was disgusting and cruel . . .”

Ramón looked him in the eye and saw that the old Kotov had kept that sharpened transparency of his pupils that prevented knowing when he was lying and when he was telling the truth. On that occasion, something warned Ramón that Leonid was being more honest than ever.

Eitingon took a cigarette and began to stroke it.

“When Stalin died, Beria got me out of jail. They gave me back my party card and my rank. And despite everything they had done to me—I had dropped forty kilos, I knew terrible things—I thought justice existed and that the party would save us. That’s why, when I got to my house and my children told me that in those two years a couple of my friends had
had the courage to go see them and offer them some help, I told them that those comrades and they had committed a grave mistake: if I was in prison, accused of being a traitor, nobody should worry about me or sympathize with me, not even them . . . What do you think? . . . That was my second-to-last act of faith. I was convinced that, without Stalin and his hate, the party would be just and the struggle would regain its meaning . . . But forget it, I was wrong again. Everything was rotten. How long had it been rotten?”