The Man Who Loved Dogs Read Online Free Page B

Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, and so many other Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, revolutionary Socialists among whom he had lived and fought ever since, while still an adolescent, founding the romantic South Russian Workers’ Union, with the outlandish idea of overthrowing the Czar.
    The certainty of defeat pressed on his chest, as if a horse’s hoof were crushing him and asphyxiating him. So he picked up his boot covers and his felt galoshes and took them to the dining room, where Liova was organizing files, and began to put his shoes on, to the young man’s surprise, who asked him what he had in mind. Without answering him, he took the scarves hanging behind the door and, followed by his dog, went out into the wind, the snow, and the grayness of the morning. The storm, unleashed two days earlier, did not seem to have any intention of abating; and upon entering it, he felt how his body and his soul sank in the ice, while the air hurt the skin on his face. He took a few steps toward thestreet from which he could make out the foothills of the Tien Shan mountains, and it was as if he had hugged the white cloud until he melted into it. He whistled, demanding Maya’s presence, and was relieved when the dog approached him. Resting his hand on the animal’s head, he noticed how the snow began to cover him. If he remained there ten or fifteen minutes, he would turn into a frozen mass and his heart would stop, despite the coats. It could be a good solution, he thought. But if my henchmen won’t kill me yet, he told himself, I won’t do their work for them. Guided by Maya, he walked the few feet back to the cabin: Lev Davidovich knew that as long as he had life left in him, he still had bullets to shoot as well.
    Natalia Sedova, Lev Sedov, and Lev Davidovich had sat down to drink one last tea as they waited for the police escort that would conduct them into exile. In the bedroom, the boxes of papers were ready, following a first sorting out in which they had put aside dozens of books that were considered dispensable. Early in the morning, one of the police picked up the discarded books and had barely taken them out of the cabin when he set fire to them after pouring gasoline on them.
    Dreitser arrived around eleven. As usual, he entered without knocking and told them the trip would be postponed. Natalia Sedova, ever concerned with practical matters, asked him why he thought the storm would abate the following day. The head of the guards explained that he had just received the weather report but, above all, he knew because he could smell it in the air. It was then that Dreitser, once again in need of projecting his power, said that Maya the dog could not travel with them.
    The Exile’s reaction was so violent that it surprised the policeman: Maya was part of his family and was going with him or no one was going. Dreitser reminded him that he wasn’t in any position to issue orders or threats, and Lev Davidovich agreed, but he reminded him that he could still do something crazy that would end the guard’s career and send him back to Siberia—not to his hometown, but to one of those work camps that his boss in the GPU directed. When he observed the immediate effect of his words, Lev Davidovich understood that that man was under great pressure and decided to finish this game without showing any more cards: How was it possible that a Siberian could ask him to abandon a Russian wolfhound? And he lamented that Dreitser had never seen Maya hunt foxes in the frozen tundra. The policeman, slipping out the door,tried to demonstrate that he still had power: they could take the animal, but they would be responsible for cleaning up her shit.
    Dreitser’s Siberian sense of smell would be as wrong as the meteorologists’ predictions, and the storm under which they left Alma-Ata, far from abating, grew as the bus moved through the steppe. In the afternoon (he knew it was afternoon only because the clocks indicated so), when they reached the village of