The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura Page A

island. But Lev Davidovich thought that they should hear what that man wanted, linked as he was to Lev Davidovich ever since the latter exercised the most dramatic of all his powers: that of letting Blumkin live or sending him to his death.
    Twelve years before, when the newly made commissar of war Lev Trotsky had called for him in his office, Blumkin was a callow youth—like a character out of Dostoyevsky—who faced charges that the military tribune would penalize with a death sentence. That young man had been one of two militants in the social-revolutionary party that had tried to kill the German ambassador in Moscow with the intention of discrediting the disputed peace with Germany that the Bolsheviks had signed in Brest-Litovsk at the beginning of 1918. The evening before the trial, after reading some poems written by the young man, Lev Davidovich had asked to meet with him. That night they spoke for hours about Russian and French poetry (they shared an admiration for Baudelaire) and about the irrationality of terrorist methods (if a bomb could solve everything, what was the good of parties, of class struggle?), at the end of whichBlumkin had written a letter in which he regretted his action and promised, if he was forgiven, to serve the revolution on any front to which he was assigned. The influence of the powerful commissar was decisive enough to pardon his life, while the German government was informed by official means that the terrorist had been executed. That day Yakov Blumkin’s second life had begun, thanks to Lev Trotsky.
    During the civil war, Blumkin had stood out as a counterintelligence agent, something which earned him decorations, promotions, and even militancy in the Bolshevik Party. Considered a traitor by his former comrades, he miraculously escaped two attempts on his life. In the final months of the war, as he recovered from the wounds from the second attempt, he was an adviser to Lev Davidovich, who recommended him to the military academy upon seeing his aptitude. His capacity for espionage missions would lead him to the world of intelligence, and for many years he had shined as one of the stars of the secret service, for whom he still worked despite the fact that everyone, even the GPU’s highest leader, knew that, because of his devotion to Trotsky, his political sympathies were with the opposition.
    When Liova relayed the details of his meeting with Blumkin (the former terrorist had gone to India, and now to Turkey, to sell some very old Hasidic manuscripts in order to obtain funds for the government), Lev Davidovich was convinced that the secret agent still had the same affection for him as always. And despite all of Natalia Sedova’s precautions, he agreed to see him.
    When Lev Davidovich saw the unmistakably Jewish face of little Yakov, as he used to call him, his large eyes sparkling with intelligence again, he felt a deep happiness infused with waves of nostalgia. They melted in a hug and Blumkin kissed his host’s face and lips many times, only to cry later, as he did on the night in which he had written the saving letter in the office of the powerful commissar of war.
    The three visits that Blumkin made to Büyükada in the second week of August were like a reviving breath of air against the discouragement that was overcoming Lev Davidovich. Between evoking the past and news of the present, they laughed, cried, and argued (even about Mayakovsky and the lamentable state of Soviet poetry), and Blumkin, in addition to bringing him up-to-date about the desperate situation for the opposition inside the country, insisted on serving him as a courier during his imminent return to Moscow, since he thought that his work inintelligence had the mission of neutralizing enemies outside of the USSR, but was not incompatible with his oppositionist political ideas.
    From the agent’s mouth, Lev Davidovich also heard Radek’s arguments to dramatize a surrender that, according to the young man, could