The Man Who Loved Dogs Read Free Page B

January 20, 1929, and he was in Alma-Ata, lying on a squeaking cot, and that at his side was his wife, Natalia Sedova.
    Taking care not to move the straw mattress, he sat up. He immediately felt the pressure of Maya’s snout on his knees: his dog greeted him, and he rubbed her ears, in which he found warmth and a comforting sense of reality. Dressed in a rawhide cloak and a scarf around his neck, he emptied his bladder in the toilet and moved to the room that was simultaneously kitchen and dining room, already lit by two gas lamps and heated by the stove on which rested the samovar, prepared by his personal jailer. In the mornings he had always preferred coffee, but he had already resigned himself to accept what was assigned to him by Alma-Ata’s miserly bureaucrats and its secret police guards. Seated at the table close by the stove, he began taking a few sips of that strong tea, too green for his liking, from a china cup while he caressed Maya’s head, without suspecting that he would soon receive the most perfidious confirmation that his life and even his death had ceased to belong to him.
    Exactly one year before, he had been confined to Alma-Ata, at the limit of Asian Russia, closer to the Chinese border than to the last station of any Russian railway. In reality, ever since he, his wife, and their son Liova had stepped out of the snow-covered truck in which they had covered the final stretch of their road to a malicious deportation, Lev Davidovich had begun to wait for death. He was convinced that if by a miracle he survived malaria and dysentery, the order to eliminate him was going to come sooner or later (“If he dies so far away, by the time people find out about it, he will already be well buried,” his enemies thought, without a doubt). But while they waited for that to happen, his adversaries had decided to make the most of their time and devoted themselves to annihilating him from history and memory, which had also become the party’s property. The publication of his books, just when he had reached the twenty-first volume, had been halted, and an operation was being carried out to remove copies from bookstores and libraries; at the same time, his name, slandered at first and then discredited, began to be erased from historical accounts, tributes, newspaper articles, even from photographs,until they made him feel how he was turning into an absolute nothing, a black hole in the memory of the people. For that reason, Lev Davidovich thought that if anything had saved his life until then, it was fear of the schism that the decision to eliminate him could cause, if there was indeed something still capable of altering the consciousness of a country deformed by fear, slogans, and lies. But one year of enforced silence, accumulating low blows without any chance to reciprocate, seeing how the remains of the opposition he had led were dismantled, convinced him that his disappearance was becoming more necessary every day for the macabre decline toward despotism of the great proletarian revolution.
    That year of 1928 had been, he didn’t even doubt it, the worst of his life, even though he had lived through many other terrible times confined in Czarist jails or wandering penniless and with little hope through half of Europe. But during each disheartening circumstance, he had been sustained by the conviction that all sacrifices were necessary when aspiring to the greater good of the revolution. Why should he fight now, if the revolution had already been in power for ten years? The answer was becoming clearer to him every day: to remove it from the perverse abyss of a reaction that was intent on killing human civilization’s greatest ideals. But how? That was still the great question, and the possible responses crossed his mind, in a chaos of contradictions with the capacity to paralyze him in the midst of his strange struggle as a marginalized Communist against other Communists who had stolen the revolution.
    With