The Man Who Loved Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page A

Koshmanbet, he confirmed that they had spent seven hours to cover twenty miles of flat road under the ice.
    The following day, heading over the frozen track, the bus managed to reach the mountain post of Kurdai, but the attempt to use a tractor to move the seven-car caravan in which they would all travel from that point on was useless and inhumane: seven members of the police escort froze to death along with a notable number of horses. Then Dreitser opted for the sleighs on which they would glide for two more days, until Pishpek was in sight, on flat roads again, where they got into cars.
    Frunze, with its mosques and aroma of goat fat escaping from the chimneys, seemed like a saving oasis to the deporters and the deported alike. For the first time since leaving Alma-Ata, they were able to bathe and sleep in beds, and be relieved of the foul-smelling coats whose weight practically prevented them from walking. Confirming that in misery every detail is a luxury, Lev Davidovich even had the opportunity to taste a fragrant Turkish coffee, which he drank until he felt his heart speed up.
    That night, before they went to bed, the soldier Igor Dreitser sat down to drink coffee with the Trotskys and inform them that his mission at the head of the guards ended there. Many weeks of cohabitation with the sour-faced Siberian had turned him into a habitual presence, so at the moment of his departure Lev Davidovich wished him good luck and reminded him that it didn’t matter who the party secretary was. It was all the same if it was Lenin, Stalin, Zinoviev, or him . . . Men like Dreitser worked for the country, not for a leader. After listening to him, Dreitser shook his hand and, surprisingly, told him that, despite the circumstances, it had been an honor for him to know him; but what truly intrigued him was when the agent, practically in a whisper, informed him that, although the order specified that they burn all of the deportee’s papers, he had decided only to burn a few books. Lev Davidovich had barely managed to process that strange information when he felt the Siberian pressure of Dreitser’s hand on his fingers as the soldier turned around and went out into the darkness and snow.
    With the changing of the police team, at the head of which an agent named Bulanov was placed, the deportees held the hope of piercing the veil and finding out the fates assigned to them. However, Bulanov could only inform them that they would take a special train in the Frunze depot, without the order specifying toward where. So much mystery, thought Lev Davidovich, could only be the product of the fear of the improbable but nonetheless dreaded reactions of his decimated followers in Moscow. He also wondered if that entire operation was nothing but an orchestrated pantomime to create confusion and control opinions, a preferred technique of Stalin’s, who on various occasions throughout that year had made rumors circulate about his imminent exile, which, though later denied with greater or less emphasis, had served to spread the idea and pave the way for the sentence that the people would only have news of after the fact.
    Only during the months prior to the expulsion, while suffering a political defeat that managed to tie his hands, had Lev Davidovich begun to appreciate, seriously and with horror, the magnitude of Stalin’s manipulative abilities. Incapable of appreciating the Georgian ex-seminarian’s genius for intrigue, his shamelessness in lying and putting together shady deals, Lev Davidovich understood too late that he had underestimated his intelligence, and that Stalin, educated in the catacombs of the clandestine struggle, had learned all the forms of subterranean demolition. He now applied them, for his personal benefit, in search of the same ends for which the Bolshevik Party had used them before: to achieve power. The way in which he disarmed and displaced Lev Davidovich while using the vanity and fears of men who never seemed to have