Free The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura Page A

have any fellow believers at hand who’d been forged in the ovens of the revolution, nor the economic means and, less still, a party. But he still had what had always beenhis best weapon: the pen, the same one that had spread his ideas in the contributions he made to Iskra and that, during his first round of exile, had led him to the heart of the struggle on that night in 1901 in which he received the message capable of locating his life as a fighter right in the vortex of history: his pen had been called for at Iskra ’s headquarters in London, where he was expected by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, already known as Lenin.
    With a wave of his hand, Liova commented that the fishermen’s village visible on the coast was called Büyükada, and the young man’s words brought him back to the reality of an islet covered by pines and dotted with some white buildings. It was then that, tempting fate, he asked if they could disembark there to have lunch: almost without thinking, he added that he liked that place, since it was undoubtedly a calm enough place to write in and had good fishing to test his muscles. Natalia Sedova, who knew him like no one else, watched him and smiled: “What are you thinking, Liovnochek?”
    The woman would find out just a week later and be happy: they were going to live in Büyükada, the largest of the islets in the archipelago of exiled princes.
    It had not been hard to find the right house to fit their needs and pockets. Built atop a small promontory, about six hundred feet from the dock, its two levels seemed to reach higher and to place historic Propontis at the disposal of its inhabitants. They also appreciated the fact that the building was surrounded by a dense hedge that facilitated security, the responsibility of two policemen sent by the government and some young Frenchmen, fellows of his follower Raymond Molinier. In reality, the villa, the property of an old Turkish Baha’i, was as run-down as its owner, and Natalia Sedova was forced to roll up her sleeves to make it inhabitable. Between all of them—including policemen, watchmen, and even passing journalists—they cleaned, painted, and equipped the furnished spaces that were necessary to eat, sleep, and work. The temporary nature of their settlement in that refuge could be seen in the absence of any objects meant to make it beautiful; there wasn’t even a simple rosebush in the garden: “To plant a single seed in this land would be to accept defeat,” Lev Davidovich had warned his wife, since he still had his mind focused on the centers of battle to which, sooner or later, he thought he would manage to gain access.
    Throughout that first year of exile, the most tiresome task facing those guards charged with the revolutionary’s security had been to deal with the journalists intent on getting a scoop, that of welcoming editors from around the world (who had offered contracts for various books and made generous advances capable of alleviating the family’s economic difficulties) and verifying that the followers and friends who began to arrive were who they said they were. At the margin of these interferences, life on an island lost to history, inhabited throughout most of the year only by fishermen and sheepherders, seemed so primitive and slow that any outside presence was immediately detected. And although he was a prisoner, Lev Davidovich had felt almost happy for having found that place where a car had never driven and where things were transported as they were twenty-five centuries before, on the back of a donkey.
    Barely settled, the Exile began to prepare his counteroffensive and decided that the first necessity was to unite the opposition outside the Soviet Union, although he would soon discover the extent to which Stalin had anticipated this, tasking his peons in the Communist International with converting Trotsky’s person and ideas into the specter of the revolution’s greatest enemy. As could be expected, there were few