The Man Who Loved Dogs (86 page)

But Moscow was waiting for him, domineering, willing to challenge the world. The transit through a revolutionary and presocialist Cuba was so brief that he barely had a fleeting vision of Havana when the immigration police took him out of the Cubana de Aviación machine, coming from Mexico, and took him to the Soviet ship in which he would travel on to Riga. From the porthole of the cabin to which they took him, he observed the rocky image of the city’s buildings, castles, and churches, its resplendently green trees and overwhelmingly clear sea, and he could feel the effects of the nostalgia for that mystical country, acquired through the memories of his maternal family, rooted for years in that land where even Caridad had been born.

The first impression he had when he arrived in Moscow was of having entered a place that smelled of cockroaches and where he would never again find the man he had once been, since the city in 1960 was no longer the capital of the same country he had visited twenty-three years before. Renamed Ramón Pavlovich López, he was confined to a KGB building in the outskirts of the city, until one morning they sent him a new suit and ordered that he be ready to be picked up at six in the evening. That night, Ramón Pavlovich entered the Kremlin again and received from the hands of head of state Leonid Brezhnev the orders of Lenin and of Hero of the Soviet Union, the plaque that proved he was among the most honorable in the KGB, a huge bouquet of flowers, and the inevitable kisses. Meanwhile, from a small record player, the melody of “The Internationale” blasted again and again. And Ramón felt calm, proud, and rewarded. The KGB officer taking care of him, and with whom he dined following the ceremony in a small hall of the Great Palace of the Kremlin, promised him that they would soon give him the keys to an apartment where he could receive his companion, Roquelia Mendoza, but at the same time he warned him that his movements in the USSR should be approved by a special office of the KGB. He could maintain contact only with the Spanish émigrés and with his relatives residing in the USSR. He was still required to remain silent, said that dinosaur, without a doubt a survivor of Beria and Stalin’s times, kindly but clearly.

That conditional freedom was joined by, from the beginning, the distance
with which Soviets of all ages and conditions treated him, which made him feel doubly a foreigner.

“But you
are
a foreigner!” Eitingon lit one of his cigarettes. “Or did you think that because of who you are and because you spent years in prison studying Russian that you were going to be less of a foreigner? . . . The majority of the Soviets will never leave the country, and for them what is foreign is forbidden, damned. Although they feel curiosity and even envy (all you have to do is look at how you dress, Ramón: Did your wife also bring you that shirt? No one in Moscow has one like it), above all, you inspire fear. This is a country isolated from the world, and our leaders have made sure to demonize what lies beyond the reach of their power—in other words, everything having to do with damned foreigners. Remember that by your having unauthorized contact with foreigners, Stalin could order your execution or send you to a gulag for five, ten years. The genius of the Russian people lies in their capacity for survival. That’s why we won the war . . .”

“It doesn’t happen to me so much anymore,” Ramón recalled, “but at the beginning, when I went out on the street, I looked at people and asked myself what they would think if they knew who I was . . .”

“
Think
?” Leonid said and pointed at the sky, more or less from where the supposed order to think something should come. “Here, people almost never think, Ramón! Thinking is a luxury that is forbidden to the survivors . . . To escape the fear, it has always been best not to think. You don’t exist, Ramón; neither do I . . . Even less still, those six guys who protested over the invasion of Czechoslovakia . . .”

The park, nonetheless, existed and exuded life. The Muscovites were making the most of the last month before the cold spending their hours in the open air: people were reading lying on the grass and there were even families that deluded themselves into thinking they were having a picnic in the forest. Because of that, the discovery of an open bench, protected by the shade of a linden tree, aroused suspicion in the two secret service veterans. While Ramón played with his dogs, Eitingon inspected the place and concluded that there were no microphones installed; despite what Stalin had always maintained, he said smiling, it was proven that coincidences could exist.

Settled in on the bench, Ramón chose to change the subject and told him how he had met Roquelia Mendoza and how he immediately suspected she was part of the promised help. Roquelia, a girl from the middle
class who had been a folkloric dancer, was the cousin of another Lecumberri prisoner named Isidro Cortés, who had been sentenced for killing his wife. Roquelia’s insistence on striking up a friendship with him revealed her true motivations.

“It was the last thing I could do for you.” Eitingon smiled. “Beria authorized me to look for a sympathizer willing to help you. We sent Carmen Brufau, Caridad’s friend, to Mexico, and she found Roquelia, who accepted right away because she admired you and loved Stalin. They set aside a certain quantity of money to her for your needs, besides what your lawyer was receiving.”

“In 1953, they stopped sending her money for almost a year, but she kept helping me. She’s ugly and rather unbearable, but I owe her a lot.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

“Roquelia helped me withstand all of that . . . In prison, many people visited me, under many pretexts, but the truth is that they came to see me because they thought I was a strange bird . . . Once, a Spanish Communist came with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Now she’s very famous because of her movies. Her name is Sara Montiel.”

“I’ve heard of her,” Lionia said, distracted. “They say she’s beautiful.”

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to see an animal like that three feet away from you . . . She’s one of those women who makes you want to eat dirt, to do anything . . .”

Eitingon tried to sound casual.

“How long has it been since you last saw Caridad?”

“She came to see me when I arrived and she has come back through three times. The last time, last year.”

“Does she look well?”

“She’s strong, with the same personality, but she appears to be two hundred years old. Well, I’ve turned fifty-five and I seem to be about a hundred and ten. Even though you’re bald, you look better than we do.”

“I must be embalmed in cynicism,” Eitingon said, and laughed thunderously. “What’s she doing in Paris?”

“Nothing . . . Well, now she has gotten into painting”—Ramón smiled—“and into being a grandmother to my sister Montse’s children, despite Montse. The truth is that no one wants her around . . . She spent five or six years working at the Cuban embassy, I imagine as a KGB informant. She said that the Cubans are a bunch of thrill seekers who don’t understand what the hell socialism is and are unappreciative misers. According
to what she says, she bought the ambassador’s newspapers with her own money so he would find out what was happening in the world, and now they don’t even invite her to receptions. But she blames Brezhnev; she said that he gave the order to have her removed from everything. Although she still receives the pension they send her from here . . .”

“Times change. Caridad, you, and I are hot potatoes that no one wants to have in their hands. If they haven’t killed us, it’s because they trust that nature will soon do its job . . . ,” Eitingon stated, and lifted the bottom of his shirt to show a reddish scar. “In prison, they operated on me for a tumor. It’s a miracle I am alive, but I don’t know until when . . .”

“Anyone who sees Caridad in Paris, posing as a grandmother and painting ugly, colorful landscapes, would they be able to imagine what kind of demon she is?”

The borzois were running through the park and Ramón was watching them, proud of his dogs’ tangible beauty, when Leonid spoke again.

“I owe you many stories, Ramón. I’m going to tell you some that perhaps you don’t want to hear but that I feel belong to you.”

Ramón discovered at that moment that the person at his side was Kotov. His old mentor took the same position that years before he adopted in the Plaza de Cataluña, that of an alligator at rest, with a handkerchief in his hands that he used to dry his sweat.

“You once asked me if we had something to do with the death of Sedov, Trotsky’s son, and I told you no. Well, it was a lie. We sent him off ourselves, thanks to Cupid, an agent we had placed very close to him. We also executed his other son, Sergei, after having him for a time in the Vorkuta camp and here at the Lubyanka, trying to get him to sign documents in which he admitted that his father had given him instructions to poison Moscow’s aqueducts . . . Like us, the ones who killed those kids were following direct orders from Stalin.”

“Why did you lie to me? I could have understood it was necessary.”

“Because you had to be as pure as possible when you went to the sacrificial altar. The letter I gave you to carry with you that day was a string of lies, and it didn’t matter whether anyone believed it or not. The plan was that you kill Trotsky and that the bodyguards kill you, as should have happened. Everything was going to be easier that way. That was how Stalin requested it. He didn’t want any loose ends and he could give a shit about your life. But Trotsky saved you . . .”

Ramón felt bowled over by emotion. To hear, directly from the man
who had plotted that operation with Stalin, the admission that not only had he been used to carry out revenge but that he was considered a more than dispensable piece brought down the last mainstay with which he had withstood the passing of those years full of disappointments and painful discoveries.

“But you were waiting for me . . .”

“The possibility always existed that you would manage to get out. Besides, I couldn’t tell Caridad that I had sent you to the slaughterhouse, and less still that if you managed to escape, the order was to leave you in the hands of other comrades.”

“Just like Sheldon, right? So, did you kill him?”

“Not directly. But nobody was killed without our authorizing it.”

“If you were going to kill me, why did you protect me in jail, why did you pay for lawyers, why did you send Roquelia?”

“Because if we killed you in jail after what we had done, everyone would know where the order came from. What saved you was that you kept your silence. With the Old Man dead, Stalin didn’t care very much about the rest, and least of all at that moment, with the Germans just around the corner . . .”

“So why did the Mexicans’ attack fail?”

“That was botched, but that was what Stalin wanted, something spectacular, with lots of noise, so no one would forget. I saw those people two or three times and realized that Trotsky was too big for them, they were wimps and they lacked balls. That’s why I didn’t mix you up with them or let them know about me or you . . . What I never understood was that our man in the group—Felipe, remember?—didn’t go in to confirm whether they had killed the Duck or not . . . That is a mystery I still haven’t solved . . .”

Ramón lifted his gaze toward the edge of the park, where the river flowed. He felt the disappointment eating away at his insides and he felt empty. The remains of pride to which, despite the doubts and marginalization, he had clung tooth and nail started evaporating in the heat of the all-too-cynical truth. The years of confinement in prison, fearing every day for his life, had not been the worst part. The suspicions first and the evidence later that he had been the puppet of a dark and miserable plan had robbed him of sleep more nights than the fear of being knifed by another prisoner. He painfully recalled the impression of having been deceived when he read the not-so-secret report of Khrushchev to the Twentieth
Party Congress and the feeling of unease that seized him from that moment on: What would become of his life when he got out of prison?

“So why didn’t they shoot me when I got to Moscow? . . . Until they gave me the medals, I was waiting for them to take me out . . .”

“You yourself said it: you had arrived in a different world. If Stalin and Beria had still been alive, you wouldn’t have crossed the Atlantic. But Khrushchev would even have thanked you for telling the truth, although he could not encourage you because Stalin’s spirit was alive—no, is alive—and Khrushchev didn’t want to nor could he wage that war, so he preferred to look the other way and leave you alone. Now that Khrushchev has been defeated by Stalin’s spirit, you don’t matter to anyone anymore . . . As long as you remain silent and don’t try to leave the Soviet Union.”

“So what did Caridad know?”

“More or less the same as you. Remember, we never trusted too much in the nature of you Spaniards. When she returned, she tried to convince Beria to help you escape. After giving her the runaround many times, Beria finally said yes, that they would help you, but that she herself had to take care of arranging things in Mexico. Caridad was given a passport and a lot of money, and Beria sent a thug from the Comintern to give her a good scare as soon as she arrived in Mexico. Caridad just barely saved herself. She learned her lesson, went to Paris, and has laid low, without protesting again. So now she’s taken to painting pictures?”

“Must I believe all of these atrocities? Were you always this cynical? Did you know they were going to kill me? Did you apply yourself to that?”

“You have to believe what I tell you: we were more cynical than you can imagine. You weren’t the only one who was going to die for an ideal that didn’t exist. Stalin perverted everything and forced people to fight and die for him, for his needs, his hate, his megalomania. Forget that we were fighting for socialism. What socialism, what equality? They tell me that Brezhnev has a collection of antique cars . . .”