The Man Who Loved Dogs (89 page)

Luis had assured him that he knew Moscow like the back of his hand and that they wouldn’t have any problems finding apartment 18-A, stairway F, of building 26-C, block 7, of Karl Marx Street, in the neighborhood of Golianovo. Eitingon had given them the statue of Lenin with his arm extended toward the future as a reference: from there, they would go as far as the Friends of the Militia kindergarten and, after turning to the left—always to the left, he repeated—they would find the street, the block and the building just next to the Ernst Thälmann kindergarten.

From the very day that, for his services to the Soviet homeland, he was assigned that nationally manufactured car—that, fresh from the factory, already needed a shove for its doors to close—Ramón had handed it over to his brother, since, despite his position as an engineer and university professor, a militant in the party and a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, Luis Mercader had still not managed to climb the ladder and obtain his own vehicle. That night, Luis went to pick him up a little bit before seven and, since Roquelia preferred to stay at home, Galina, Luis’s wife, chose to leave her children with Ramón’s so to better enjoy the adventure.

Golianovo reeked of Stalin. The housing blocks, square and gray, with tiny windows where the residents hung their clothing to dry, were separated by flattened dirt paths plagued with trees fighting for space. The monotony of that rushed architecture, insistent on demonstrating that a few square feet of ceiling were enough for a person to live socialistically,
caused vertigo with its uniformity and depersonalization. The numbers that ought to identify blocks, buildings, and stairways had been erased long ago by the snow and the rain. The street signs had disappeared and, over each recycled pedestal (they counted four), rose one of the statues of a frowning and watchful Lenin forged in series by voluntary labor. But none of those Lenins were pointing anywhere. When they asked the few passersby out defying the cold about the address—it was Galina’s mission, since she was a native—it always ended up being familiar, but did they mean Marx Street, Marx and Engels Street or Karl Marx Avenue? And yes, of course, they had heard of the Friends of the Militia kindergarten, and invariably they told them to turn to the left—always to the left—and ask around there, pointing at an unspecific point in the labyrinth of buildings copied from the template with the most terrifying faithfulness.

Since Leonid Eitingon was not one of the few privileged ones to whom the regional council had granted a private telephone, when Luis found himself lost in a corner of the satellite city, after searching for almost an hour, Ramón proposed they give up. He regretted that his former mentor would have invested time and savings in preparing them a worthy meal, and that they would not be able to give him the bottles of vodka that clinked next to Galina every time Luis went over a pothole, but they had to admit that they were hopelessly lost in the middle of the proletarian metropolis. At that moment Luis discovered the miracle of a taxi right in the middle of Golianovo and, after he gave the driver a bottle of vodka, he led them, in two minutes, to building 26-C of block 7. Galina then left the car and went to knock on the door of the closest apartment. A woman who still had traces of the countryside came out to the street with her and pointed at the second-to-last staircase of the large building and, with her hands, counted the floors they had to climb to reach the apartment they were looking for.

Eitingon received them with a big smile and they all had to submit to his bear hug and his alcohol-flavored kisses. While he thanked them for the vodka, he introduced his wife, Yevgenia Purizova, fifteen, perhaps twenty years younger than her husband, although she seemed even more wrinkled than him. According to what Ramón had managed to find out, when he left jail, Eitingon had resumed his relationship with his first wife, Olga Nahumova, who died shortly after, and he had been living with Yenia, who became his fifth wife, for two years.

The host and his visitors settled around the table in the center of a room
that was sometimes a living room and that, as they would later find out, also served as the bedroom for Yenia’s two daughters, who lived with them. On the table, covered with an oilcloth sheet, there were already plates with copious appetizers of extreme flavors with which Russians padded their stomachs in order to drink more vodka: sliced ham, pickles, tomato and apple, strips of herring and salmon, a little bit of red caviar, scallions, Russian salad and fresh salad, sausage links, little squares of lard, and black bread.

“I don’t know what you have to complain about,” Ramón said as he cut one of the sour pickles, of which he had, curiously, become a fan.

Leonid served vodka in glasses almost to the brim and asked his wife to bring the pitcher of orange juice, specially prepared for Ramón, as he rarely drank alcohol. From the small kitchen came the pungent smell of boiled cabbage, and Ramón begged that the
pelmenis
serving as the main course not be loaded with the spicy pepper capable of making him cry.

“I didn’t expect you so early,” Lionia said as he handed Galina and Luis their glasses.

“But we’ve been driving around for an hour . . . !” Ramón began, giving free rein to his annoyance.

“It’s normal. What do you think of my neighborhood?”

“It’s horrible,” Ramón admitted, and took a bite of caviar on black bread.

“That’s the word, ‘horrible.’ Beauty and socialism seem to play on opposite teams. But you get used to everything. Do you see how lucky you are to live overlooking the Frunze and to have three bedrooms and even a balcony? . . .
Da dna
?” he challenged Galina and Luis, and the three raised their glasses and hurried their vodka in one gulp, until they saw the bottoms of their glasses as their host requested.

“I didn’t always live like that. When Roquelia arrived, they gave us an apartment a little bit bigger than this one, in Sokol . . .”

“That can’t be compared to this. Sokol is the waiting room to paradise, Ramón. You walk a little bit and you’re in Utopia.”

Ramón recalled his wanderings through Utopia, as Eitingon called it. In the 1930s, when the repression and the scarcity were at their highest, a group of artists, mostly painters, had obtained the Leader’s permission to create an ideal commune in Sokol, and even received materials to make single-family houses with backyards and gardens. Many built izbas and Nordic cabins, but also, here and there, you could see a small Moorish
palace or a house with a Mediterranean air. With full intent, they made sinuous streets with parks on the corners, on which they built beautiful pigeon houses in a variety of designs. The private areas and the communal ones were planted with a variety of trees not found anywhere else in the city, like rhododendrons, almond trees, and quince trees distributed in such a way that in autumn their leaves offered a spectacular chromatic show. From the rushed uniformity of the buildings built by Khrushchev where he had been confined, Ramón only needed to cross two streets to enter that singular space in Moscow, where the free will of its inhabitants had determined the kinds of houses in which they wanted to live and the trees they wished to plant. That part of Sokol was like a museum of the never-achieved socialist dream of beauty, a paradoxical individualized and human wart on the body designed in iron molds of the strict Soviet city planned by Stalin ever since he set out to “perform a cesarean section on old Moscow,” too chaotic and stately for his tastes as the Supreme Urbanist.

“Stalin ordered Golianovo built after the war. As always, he gave a deadline to finish the buildings, without it mattering too much how they turned out,” Eitingon said as he made space for his wife to place a casserole on the table with
kholodets
, pig’s-foot gelatin, for which she brought a bottle of mustard and a plate with rounds of strongly flavored wild radish as accompaniments. “But if the apartments are small and ugly, the fault, of course, is of imperialism, which is also responsible for Soviet shoes being so hard and for there being no deodorant and for the toothpaste irritating your gums.”

Luis smiled, denying something with his head, as he served himself the
kholodets
with the spicy radishes that Ramón detested.

“You’re such a funny man, Kotov . . . Man, I remember when I met you in Barcelona. I was practically a boy and look, I’m already bald.”

Lionia looked quickly at the kitchen, to where his wife had returned, and warned in a low voice, making use of Catalan:

“It’s forbidden to mention Caridad.”

“Does Yenia understand Catalan?”

“No. But just in case. Don’t we have the most educated people in the world here?”

It was now Ramón who smiled.

“Stop fucking around and speak in Russian,” Galina demanded in Spanish. “Besides, Caridad is an ugly old woman full of wrinkles.”

“The devil doesn’t get wrinkly inside,” Eitingon said, and the rest agreed.

“I remember when Kotov talked to me about the Soviet Union,” Luis recalled, and took his wife’s hand. “I dreamed of this, and the day I arrived was one of the happiest in my life. I had arrived at the future.”

“And you got to the future . . . ,” Eitingon said through some pieces of lard in his mouth, and rinsed his mouth with a glass of vodka. “According to our leaders,
this
is the future. The West is the decadent past. And the most fucked-up thing is that it’s true. Capitalism already gave everything it could. But it’s also true that if the future is like Golianovo, people are going to prefer the decadence with deodorant and real cars for a long time. The world is at the bottom of a trap and the terrible thing is that we squandered the opportunity to save it. Do you know what the only solution is?”

“You’re joking that you have a solution!” Luis was surprised, and Eitingon smiled, satisfied.

“Close this shop and open another one, two streets down. But start the business without deceiving anyone, without fucking anyone over because he thinks differently from you, without looking for reasons to shut you up and without telling you that when they give it to you up the ass, it’s for your own good and for the good of humanity, and that you don’t even have the right to protest or say it hurts, because you shouldn’t give ammunition to the enemy and all of those justifications. Without blackmail . . . The problem is that the ones who decide for us decided that a little bit of democracy was okay but not too much . . . and in the end, they even forgot about the little bit we were due, and that whole thing that was so beautiful turned into a police station dedicated to protecting power.”

“So you’re no longer a Communist?” Luis asked, lowering his voice.

“They’re different things. I’m still a Communist, I will be until I die. The ones who became the masters of everything and prostituted it all, are they Communists? The ones who deceived me and deceived Ramón, were those Communists? Please, Luis . . .”

Galina drank her vodka and spoke into the bottom of the glass.

“Was Trotsky a Communist? Khrushchev invited Natalia Sedova to visit Moscow. She refused, but the fact that they invited her shows something.”

“Khrushchev was always a clown,” Eitingon pronounced, and filled his glass.

Without making a comment, Ramón touched his hand where the half-moon scar showed. It was pathetic to him that his former boss was
playing the victim. Eitingon, for his part, seemed upset. He picked a little bit from each plate, as if he were anxious, and at that moment Ramón remembered the lavish dinners, with delicate wines, that they allowed themselves in Paris, New York, and Mexico in their days as agents with expenses paid by the coffers of the Soviet state. How much of that money, he wondered, came from Spanish treasures?

“The country of the future. Stalin ordered the killing of millions of people,” Eitingon railed. “But what they ordered us to do was excessive. We should have left the old man to die of loneliness or to mess things up in his desperation, leaving only himself covered in shit. We saved him from oblivion and made him a martyr—”

“That’s enough,” Ramón cut him off, refusing to listen to that reasoning. “Do we have to talk about this?” And he dropped a stream of vodka into his orange juice.

“What else can we the shipwrecked talk about but the sea, Ramón Pavlovich? Let’s toast—to the shipwrecked of the world! To the bottom!” And he drank the vodka.

Following his cry, silence fell over the small room, but from the kitchen came Yevgenia Purizova’s voice announcing that the
pelmenis
were ready. Leonid, Luis, and Galina focused on finishing their appetizers, and did so meticulously, something that always frightened Ramón. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Eitingon stood up, and while the visitors cleared the table of empty bottles and plates, the host placed another basket of black bread, the tray with pickled cabbage and lard, a plate with meats and boiled potatoes, oil, and vinegar, and finally handed out clean plates, from different sets. Yenia entered with a slightly dented casserole and placed it in the center of the table; Ramón found that the sight of the
pelmenis
brought back his appetite.

“The girls ate already. They’re watching television at a neighbor’s house. Serve yourselves as much as you like.”

She sprinkled the
pelmenis
with vinegar and Ramón tasted how Eitingon’s wife’s
pelmenis
, full of lamb meat, were much better than the ones Galina usually cooked.

“Lionia told me that your wife travels to Mexico every year,” Yenia commented, trying to sound casual in the middle of the din of silverware, the clinking of glasses, and the noise of chewing jaws.