Free The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura

which he burned the last ship in which he had entrusted his luck: “I interpret silence as a very disloyal refusal.” But he had no sooner sent it off when it seemed insufficient and he reinforced his position with a last message to the Reichstag: “I am very sorry that the possibility is denied to me to study in practice the advantages of the democratic right to asylum.”
    The dawn of spring surprised them in that dismal hostel of cracked and dirty walls where they were lodging. Although he didn’t have the foggiest idea what his next steps could be, Lev Davidovich decided to take advantage of the season and get to know the exultant Istanbul in his spare time. But not even the discovery of an exquisite world that went back to the very origins of civilization could manage to shake him out of the pessimistic lethargy into which he had fallen and which made him feel like a stranger to himself: Lev Davidovich Trotsky needed a sword and a battlefield.
    A few weeks later he accepted, without much enthusiasm, his wife and his son’s proposal to travel around the Sea of Marmara to the Prinkipo islands. The small volcanic archipelago, an hour and a half from the capital, had been the refuge of dethroned Ottoman princes and the place in which, in 1919, a peace conference to end the Russian civil war had been proposed. Lev Davidovich would use that journey to take his mind off things, sunbathe, and taste the delicate Turkish pastries known as pochas and pides of which Natalia had become a fan. Two young Trotsky sympathizers whom his friend Alfred Rosmer had sent from France a few days before traveled with them to guarantee a minimum of security.
    The small steamboat sailed at nine in the morning. Covered in hats, they occupied the prow and enjoyed the scenery that Istanbul’s two halves offered. Lev Davidovich, nonetheless, tried to look beyond the buildings, the pointed churches, the convex mosques; he tried to look for himself in that city in which he did not have a single friend or a trustworthy follower. And he didn’t find himself. He felt that, at that exact moment, his exile was beginning—true, complete, without any support. Aside from his family and a very few friends who had reiterated their solidarity, he was a man who was overwhelmingly alone. His only useful allies for a battle like the one he had to initiate (how? where?) were still confined in work camps or had already given in, but all of them remained within the borders of the Soviet Union, and his relationship with them was snuffed out by distance, repression, and fear.
    Every time he evoked that seemingly pleasant morning, Lev Davidovich would remember that he had felt the urgent need to press Natalia Sedova’s hand in his to feel human warmth close to him, to not suffocate from the anxiety caused by the threatening sensation of loss. But he would also remember that at that moment, he had confirmed his decision that, although he was alone, his duty was to fight. If the revolution for which he had fought was prostituting itself in the dictatorship of a czar dressed up as a Bolshevik, then he would have to rip it out by the roots and replant it, because the world needs true revolutions. That decision, he was well aware, would bring him closer to the death that was pursuing him from the Kremlin’s watchtowers. Death, nonetheless, could only be considered an inevitable eventuality: Lev Davidovich had always thought that, since individual sacrifice is often the firewood burned in the pyre of the revolution, the lives of one, ten, one hundred, one thousand men could and even should be devoured if the social tornado demanded it in order to reach its transformative ends. So he laughed when certain newspapers insisted on mentioning his “personal tragedy.” What tragedy were they referring to? he would write. In the superhuman process of the revolution, there was no room for personal tragedies. His tragedy, if anything, was knowing that in his struggle he didn’t