The Man Who Loved Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page B

snowstorm he’d ever seen, capable of lowering the thermometers to forty degrees below zero. Covered with all of the coats, hats, and blankets at their disposal, they received Seriozha and Anya, who traveled without the children, who were still too little to be exposed to those temperatures. Beneath the occasional gaze of one of the guards, the family enjoyed eight days of pleasant small talk, fierce games of chess, and reading out loud while Lev Davidovich personally took charge of preparing the coffee brought by Sergei. Despite the skepticism of his audience, every time the guards left them alone, Lev Davidovich’s compact optimism was unleashed and he initiated talk of plans to continue the struggle and make his return. At night, when everyone else was sleeping, the deportee curled up into a corner of the car and, listening to the staccato breathing due to the cold epidemic that had run through the convoy, he made the most of his insomnia to write letters of protest directed to the Bolshevik Central Committee and oppositionist struggle programs that, in the end, he decided to keep to himself so as not to compromise Seriozha with any papers that very well could lead him to jail.
    The cold was so intense that the locomotive had to turn on its motors from time to time and cover a mile or two just to keep its engines from seizing up. Prevented from going outside by the snow’s intensity (Lev Davidovich didn’t want to lower himself to asking for permission to see Samarkand, the mythical city that centuries before had reigned over all of Central Asia), they awaited the newspapers only to confirm that the news was always disheartening, since every day there were reports of new detentions of anti-Soviet counterrevolutionaries, as they had baptized the members of the opposition. The powerlessness, boredom, the pain in his joints, the difficult digestion of canned food, drove Lev Davidovich to the edge of desperation.
    On the twelfth day, Bulanov offered a summary of the responses:Germany was not interested in giving him a visa, not even for health reasons; Austria made excuses; Norway demanded countless documents; France brandished a judicial order from 1916 by which he was not allowed to enter the country. England didn’t even deign to respond. Only Turkey reiterated its disposition to accept him . . . Lev Davidovich was certain that, because of who he was and for having done what he had, for him the world had turned into a planet to which he lacked a visa.
    As they headed toward Odessa, the former commissar of war had time to make a new account of the actions, convictions, and greater and lesser mistakes of his life, and he thought that, even though they had forced him to turn into a pariah, he did not regret what he had done and felt ready to pay the price for his actions and dreams. He was even more firm in those convictions when the train passed through Odessa and he recalled those years that now seemed tremendously remote, when he had entered the city’s university and understood that his future lay not in mathematics but rather in the struggle against a tyrannical system; thus had begun his endless career as a revolutionary. In Odessa he had introduced the recently founded South Russian Workers’ Union to other clandestine groups, without having a clear idea of their political influence; there he had suffered his first imprisonment, had read Darwin and banished from his young Jewish man’s mind, already too heterodox, the idea of the existence of any supreme being; there he had been judged and sentenced for the first time, and the punishment had also been exile. That time the Czarist henchmen had sent him to Siberia for four years, while now his former comrades in arms were deporting him outside of his own country, perhaps for the rest of his days. And there, in Odessa, he met the affable jailer who supplied him with paper and ink. This was the man whose resounding name he had chosen when, having fled Siberia, some