Free The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura Page B

European Communists who dared to adopt the “Trotskyist” heresy, especially when it didn’t seem to offer any practical advantages and, soon, would lead to immediate excommunication from the party and even from the ranks of revolutionary fighters. Nonetheless, Lev Davidovich insisted, and he unloaded on the shoulders of his son Liova the organization of the oppositionist movement while he focused on working personally with the most noteworthy followers. The rest of the time he would spend writing an autobiography he had begun in Alma-Ata and gathering information for a planned History of the Russian Revolution .
    Among the visitors he received in those initial months were his old comrades Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, the ever politically complicated Pierre Naville and Boris Souvarine, and the impulsive Raymond Molinier, who, with the same enthusiasm with which he would embark on a summer excursion, had dragged along his wife, Jeanne, and his brother Henri. But the first to arrive, as could be expected, had been his good friends Maurice and Magdeleine Paz, whom he had not seen since the Trotskys were expelled from France in the middle of the Great War. The couple’s arrival, weighed down with French cheeses, brought a breath of happiness wrapped in the certainty of a freedom that allowed them theluxury of welcoming old comrades. Throughout the year of deportation in Alma-Ata, the Pazes had been their representatives in Paris and had traveled to Prinkipo to update their accounts and duties and to reconfirm their unshakable solidarity.
    One of the conversations they had with the Pazes would take on a strange dimension a few months later when Stalin broke the sacred blood barrier. It had taken place on an afternoon in early May, when Natalia, Liova, Maurice, Magdeleine, and Lev Davidovich, with Maya the dog running ahead, had gone down to the coast to enjoy the afternoon breeze with a carafe of Greek red wine while the Turkish policemen prepared a seafood-based dinner in the Ottoman fashion, seasoned with spices. Due to his excessive exertions in setting up the villa, Lev Davidovich was suffering from a lumbago attack that barely allowed him to make headway on the many writings he was engaged in. After the first glasses of wine, the Pazes had given free rein to their enthusiasm over the possibility of being able to fight alongside the mythical Lev Trotsky. It pleased them that the Exile who was watching the sunset with them in Prinkipo in 1929 was not the same man to whom they had bid goodbye in Paris in 1916, when he moved with an exalted voice but without a specific role in the clandestine movement on whose success very few were betting. Now they said that he was the Exile, known around the world as Lenin’s companion, the leader of the October uprising, the victorious commissar of war and creator of the Red Army, the cheerleader of the Third International, which he had founded with Vladimir Ilyich. Even Maurice, perhaps convinced that his host was in need of encouragement, reminded him that he had been at a height from which it was impossible to descend, from which he was not allowed to withdraw, and he spent his time exalting his historical responsibility, since no Marxist, with perhaps the exception of Lenin, had ever had so much moral authority, as a theorist and as a fighter. And he had concluded: “Your rival is History, not that upstart Stalin who will fall at any moment under the weight of his own ambitions . . .”
    The Exile tried to downplay that historic greatness, reminding his interlocutor that, besides his back pain, he had nothing else behind him. The hostility surrounding him was infinite and powerful and his main conflict was with a revolution that he had led to triumph and with a state that he had helped to found: that reality was tying one of his two hands.
    Despite praises like these and the proofs of affection that arrived withhis correspondence every day, Lev Davidovich knew that those followers