The Man Who Loved Dogs Read Free Page A

world have insisted, since the dawn of time, on worshipping stones.
    The six days that the police and the exiles had spent traveling from Alma-Ata to Frunze, through Kyrgyzstan’s icy steppe, enveloped by an absolute whiteness in which any notion of time and distance was lost, had served to reveal the futility of all human pride and the exact dimension of its cosmic insignificance in the face of the essential power of the eternal. The waves of snow coming down from the sky, in which all trace of the sun had vanished and that threatened to devour everything that dared to challenge its devastating persistence, proved to be an indomitable force which no man could stand up to; it was then that the apparition of a tree, the outline of the mountain, the frozen gully of a river, or a simple rock in the middle of the steppe, turned into something so noteworthy as to become an object of veneration. The natives of those remote deserts have glorified stones, because they assure in their capacity for resistance, that there is a force, enclosed forever inside of them, like thefruit of an eternal will. A few months earlier, while already in the midst of his deportation, Lev Davidovich had read that the sage known as Ibn Battuta, and farther east by the name of Shams ad-Dina, was the one who revealed to his people that the act of kissing a sacred stone results in a comforting spiritual pleasure, since upon doing so the lips experience a sweetness so deep that it leads to the desire to keep kissing it until the end of time. For that reason, wherever there is a sacred stone, it is forbidden to wage battles or kill enemies, as the pureness of hope must be preserved. The visceral wisdom inspiring that doctrine seemed so lucid that Lev Davidovich asked himself if the revolution really had any right to disrupt an ancestral order, perfect in its own way and impossible for a European mind affected by rational and cultural prejudices to gauge. But the political activists sent from Moscow were already in those lands, focused on turning the nomadic tribes into collective farm workers, their mountain goats into state livestock, and in showing Turkmens, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Kyrgyzstanis that their atavistic custom of worshipping stones or trees in the steppe was a deplorable anti-Marxist attitude that they should renounce in the name of progress of a humanity capable of understanding that, at the end of the day, a stone is only a stone and that you don’t feel anything besides simple physical contact when cold and exhaustion have eaten up all human will, and in the middle of frozen desert, a man armed with only his faith finds a piece of stone and takes it to his lips.
    A week before, Lev Davidovich had seen how they wrested away from him the last few stones that still allowed him to orient himself on the turbulent political map of his country. He would later write that that morning he’d awoken petrified and overwhelmed by a bad premonition. Convinced that he was not just shaking because of the cold, he had tried to control his spasms and had managed to make out the tattered chair-turned-night-table in the shadows. He had felt around until he found his glasses, the shakes making him fail twice at placing the metallic stems over his ears. In the milky light of the winter dawn, he had finally managed to spy on the wall the almanac adorned with the image of some statues of young people from the Leninist Komsomol that had been sent to him from Moscow a few days before without his knowing who sent it, since the envelope and the possible letter from the sender had disappeared, like all of hiscorrespondence in recent months. Only at that moment, as the numbered evidence of the calendar and the rough wall it hung from brought him back to his reality, did he have the certainty that he had woken up with that anxiety due to having lost the notion of where he was and when he was waking. For that reason he felt a palpable relief upon discovering that it was