The Man Who Loved Dogs (35 page)

When, at the end of November, Grigoriev reappeared on the base, Soldier 13 was already—even the trainers could guarantee it—a man of marble, convinced of the need to carry out whatever mission was asked of him, forged to resist a variety of attacks in silence, gifted with a visceral
hatred against the Trotskyist enemies, and ready to be turned into the person they were to assign him. His instructors’ satisfaction was obvious, indeed the diamond in the rough found by Grigoriev seemed like a marvelous stone, brilliant in all its facets—political, philosophical, linguistic, physical, psychological—and he had been reinforced with the best armor, because he was a man who was capable of remaining silent, of exploiting his hatred, of not feeling any compassion, and of dying for the cause. He had become an obedient and ruthless machine.

That afternoon Soldier 13 was wearing a black uniform similar to that of his personal trainer, but designed for winter temperatures. Grigoriev, accompanied by Marshal Koniev, entered the cabin, greeted him with a martial salute, and, without removing any of the garments with which he protected himself from the cold, crossed the room in search of the back exit. With an order from Karmin, Soldier 13 followed him and, upon arriving in the snowy yard, was about to smile when he saw, laid out on a small table, three knives similar to the ones he had been offered on the first day of his initiation. Soldier 13 immediately understood what was expected of him, and when he saw the instructor pushing a man from within the forest, dressed in rags, shuddering with fear and cold, he was set to give him the lesson that now, he was sure, he was capable of giving.

“Soldier 13!” Karmin said. “You already know . . . In front of you is a Trotskyist dog, enemy of the people. Kill him!”

Soldier 13 chose the English army field knife. He had barely grasped it when he felt his skin warming up to the point that he didn’t feel the cold as his muscles turned into an extension of the steel blade and his feet into snakes slithering toward the victim. The man was begging and Karmin, ten or so feet behind him, was kind enough to translate: “He swears he is innocent, that he hasn’t conspired, he says he hates Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and all of the traitors of the working class; he insists that Comrade Stalin is his father and asks that proletarian justice be carried out with him, please. Do you believe any of this?” Soldier 13 shook his head and kept walking toward the man, whose tremors seemed as authentic as the plea for mercy in his eyes. At that moment he thought he discovered a different strategy in the begging dog who was protesting with open arms, without retreating, as if he were melted into the snow. When he moved the knife to get momentum, he carried out a quick play of hands and changed his grip. He wouldn’t direct his attack at the abdomen but rather the neck, so that the supposed beggar could divert the
steel blade’s movement but not prevent him from kicking him then with all of his might in his crotch, first, and then, once he was on his knees, digging his heel into his chin, with a half turn of his legs.

Soldier 13 held his breath, ready for attack. He kept his eyes on those of his alleged victim and, with a closed arc, threw his arm from his right side in search of the jugular of the man, whose eyes did not lose their terrorized expression until the knife dug into his neck and, a second later, spurted a stream of blood that came out of his mouth and ended up on the chest of the black, quilted uniform of his executor. Soldier 13 felt the man’s deadweight on his shoulder, held up by the knife, until he saw how he crumpled and freed the dented steel, from which a few drops of blood fell onto the already reddened snow. Soldier 13 would never remember whether he felt cold at any point.

As the car moved forward and the forest thinned, Grigoriev recalled his arrival in Moscow, in the chaotic and violent days leading up to the October triumph. Without ceasing to listen, Soldier 13 thought that, just four months before, the young Ramón who had inhabited him would have loved to visit red revolutionary Moscow, the pilgrimage site of all the world’s Communists. But he had lost all curiosity and was now making the visit with the same discipline and lack of passion with which he would have followed an order. While he listened to his mentor’s words, he impressed on his mind the details of the trip with the meticulousness of a professional.

Grigoriev and Marshal Koniev had commented that they would take a break between his training sessions. Due to his excellent results, he had been given permission so he could enjoy a weekend in the capital. Soon, Soldier 13 would learn that he would be allowed to leave the base with other intentions.

The persistent snow of recent days covered plazas and buildings, cupolas and parks, and the Moscow River was a sinuous mirror. As soon as they began the tour, Ramón felt as if he were entering a city with the air of a feudal town with vast spaces, which caused a feeling of inconsistency between his reality and his ambitions, an impossibility of definition that would only reveal its origins to him years later when he understood that, despite its grandeur and arrogance, the Soviet capital was still a territory in conflict, the meeting point of two worlds with fluid borders there—East and West, Christianity and Orthodoxy, the European and the
Byzantine—that lost their original nature and gave way to something different, definitive and essentially Muscovite. Red Square was, as he expected, the first stop, and, as they crossed it, its dimensions gave the impression of being vaster than the photographs of the parades had forged in his imagination. Although Saint Basil’s colorful onion-shaped cupolas surprised him with their colors and shapes, in reality they seemed exotic and indecipherable, as if they were speaking Russian or some other Eastern language; the red walls and towers of the Kremlin, by contrast, seemed closer, more representative of the country’s ancestral grandeur. With a special pass, they were able to avoid the line that, in those temperatures of twelve degrees below zero and between the floral offerings petrified by the cold, men, women, and children, from all parts of the USSR and the world, was made in respectful silence to spend a scarce few minutes before the mummified corpse of the founder of the Soviet state. The excitement he expected to feel upon entering that mausoleum, half Pharaonic and half Greek, escaped him, for it took him some effort to absorb, through a glass whose reflections broke the mummy’s face into poorly fitted panes, the emanations of grandeur of the man who had achieved the materialization of humanity’s most prized and elusive dream: a society of equals.

With another authorization permit, meticulously reviewed by the guards, they walked to the Trinity Tower, through which they entered the Kremlin’s walls, against which the snow had been shoveled. While Grigoriev led Soldier 13 through the interior streets that led to the plaza in front of the cathedral, he showed him the places where alterations had been made after demolishing some old chapels from the time of the first czars and nearly stopped the tour to signal, at the closest possible range, the windows of the administrative offices from where the greatest country on earth was led.

“Comrade Stalin works there?”

“Part of the day,” Grigoriev responded. “And up until a few years ago, he had his apartment there.” He pointed at the old senate building, built under Catherine the Great. “Ever since his wife committed suicide, he left those rooms and always sleeps at his dacha in Kuntsevo. He likes to settle the most important matters there, since he almost always works all night. He sleeps very little and works a lot, but he’s strong as an ox.”

When they left the walled compound, they went by the huge GUM department store, where people from all over the city came with the
hope, often disappointed, of treating their stomachs to a surprise. In front of the Museum of History, they took former Nikolskaya Street, renamed October Twenty-Fifth, to go up the hill leading to the small plaza reigned over by a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, behind which rose the nation’s most feared building.

Grigoriev pointed. “Voilà, the Lubyanka.”

Soldier 13 knew the history of that edifice and devoted himself to contemplating it in silence. The former insurance house, ocher-colored and bleak, had twenty years before received the men—converted into apocalyptic proletarian scourges of the Earth—who had assumed the responsibility of defending the revolution, by any means necessary, when besieged by its internal and external enemies. Just by looking at the building, so dense that it appeared to be set in the ground, and flanked by a sidewalk completely devoid of people, one could feel the force of the most real ruthlessness emanating from it—a ruthlessness that, like the will of an unforgiving god, decides over life and death, without respect for procedure or indeed law. Soldier 13 knew that behind those walls his own fate was being handled, and that, in some way, he had turned into one more brick in that magnificent building that, in darkness, had done so much for the survival of the revolution. The enslaving power of the Lubyanka would soon be his power, he thought.

“As you can see, people avoid passing by here,” Grigoriev said, and paused. “This is the plaza of fear. It’s a fear that we have cultivated with great care, a necessary fear. A lot of stories about the Lubyanka are told, almost all of them terrible. And you know what? The majority of them are true. The bourgeoisie uses fear very well, and we had to learn it and practice it. Without fear, you can’t lead or push a country into the future.”

“The proletariat has the right to defend itself in any way,” Soldier 13 said, and Grigoriev smiled.

“I see that they’ve stuffed you full of slogans. You can save them when you’re with me.”

Limping slightly, Grigoriev led him to the boulevard of theaters and they entered Petrovka Street, where Soldier 13 found a pulsing life that contrasted sharply with the sidereal solitude of the Lubyanka. His mentor had told him they would look for an adequate place to eat and talk, safe from indiscretions. Before a building with a modernist air that reminded Soldier 13 of Barcelona, a man at the top of a flight of stairs that went down to a basement from the sidewalk was marching on the spot to
battle the cold. Soldier 13 was certain the man was waiting for them, since he observed them determinedly as he marched: one arm moved to the rhythm, and the hand of his other arm, crossed over his chest in a strange position, moved two restless fingers up by his lapel. As they passed him, Grigoriev mumbled a “
Nyet
,” and they went down to the semibasement, whose skylights were on street level, and went into what Soldier 13 would be hard-pressed to qualify as a beer hall. Elbow to elbow at high tables, without any chairs around, were several clusters of men and women shouting as they drank big sips of a hop-colored liquid to which they added generous streams from the small bottles of vodka they carried in whichever of the many pockets of their coats. Without ceasing to talk and drink, they all greedily ate small fillets of smoked herring on pieces of black bread and strips of dark meat from some kind of dried fish that they beat several times against the table in order to facilitate the extraction of the fillets, which they swallowed almost without chewing. The stench of the fish, the stinking draft beer, the smoke of that unbearable Russian tobacco called
mahorka
, and the smell of human sweat under coats that reeked of damp sheepskin resulted in an environment that was too disagreeable, and Soldier 13, prepared to resist a wide variety of discomforts, begged Grigoriev to find somewhere else. Grigoriev smiled understandingly.

“Yes, this requires special training. The truth is that the people chosen by the providence of history need more soap and water, right?”

When they left, the man with two fingers on his lapel was continuing his exercises, but this time he didn’t even look at them. As they went back to the boulevard, Grigoriev finally revealed the mystery of the solitary marcher: he was a drinker looking for two companions with whom to share some glasses of
yorsh
, the mixture of vodka and beer that everyone was drinking in the basement.

“Russians are great drinkers, but they’re competitive drinkers. There are two things they don’t like: beer that isn’t loaded with vodka, because it seems like a waste of time and money, and not having a point of reference regarding the quantity of drink they’re swallowing. That’s why they drink together or compete against each other. And that comrade, as you saw his two fingers, was looking for some partners for the job . . .”

After walking for a few blocks back toward the Kremlin, they went into Manezh Plaza, and Grigoriev, holding on to his arm to stop him, asked him to look at the monumental building rising before them. On the main entrance, Soldier 13 saw a sign in Cyrillic that he was able to
read:
HOTEL MOSCOW
. He contemplated that block of masonry, several stories high (ten, twelve—its structure made it difficult to know), with a colonnade supporting a terraced roof that projected out, and he immediately noticed a strange lack of balance.

“Do you see it?” Grigoriev said, and added, “It’s the first great hotel built by Soviet power. A triumph of socialist architecture.”

Soldier 13 nodded and remained silent, as he had been taught. The building seemed monstrous, something hideous fallen from the sky and embedded by force into a plaza with whose spirit it painfully contrasted. The most unusual thing was the asymmetry of the two halves of the structure, which opened out behind the façade. One had supporting columns and the other one didn’t; the floors above the left tower had arched windows, while the one on the right tower looked strict and square; the two cornices were of different heights—in an incompatible juxtaposition of proportions and styles that produced a disconcerting effect, capable of reaffirming the first sensation of aggressive ugliness.

“It’s horrible,” he whispered.