Russia is both a destination in Adrián Gallardo’s wartime past and a hinge in the novel’s account of his disappearance and assumed identity. His service there precedes his defense of Berlin; afterward, the trail goes cold. In Madrid, the old gym remembers the boxer who left for Russia, keeps his unclaimed luggage, and preserves a letter in which he imagined returning to professional boxing. Russia thus marks a real journey, but also the point from which the people searching for Adrián can no longer establish where he went or what became of him.

The journey and the disappearance

In the account at the gym, Adrián had gone to Russia after enlisting. His former gym owner recalls him as the Tiger of Treviño: strong, slow, and promising enough to have become Spanish champion before he suddenly fell away. The owner does not know why his career ended. Even the nickname and remembered promise belong to a past that cannot explain the missing years.

The gym still has Adrián’s suitcases. He never came back to collect them. A few years before the 1947 inquiry, he wrote from Russia to ask about contacting his trainer because he was considering a return to professional boxing. The owner encouraged him and offered to find him another trainer, since the original trainer, Pirulo, was in prison. No further letter came. The uncollected luggage and the unfinished plan make the absence tangible: the boxer had once imagined a return, but left no trace of carrying it out.

Russia in the search for Adrián

By 1947, Meg had already searched the lists available to the Allied Control Council in Spain. Adrián did not appear as wounded, a fugitive, a prisoner, or even an officially recorded missing person. The last known report placed him in the defense of Berlin; after that, he seemed to have vanished. Russia is therefore not presented as the place where the search finds him, but as an established fact in his earlier history that cannot resolve the mystery of his later whereabouts.

The gym visit adds a different kind of evidence. Its owner remembers the letter from Russia, the proposed return to boxing, and the luggage left behind. These details support a limited conclusion: Adrián had been alive and in contact from Russia at some point after enlisting, but the letter offers no account of his subsequent route. The evidence trails—official records and the recollection of a former sporting associate—converge on absence rather than an answer.

From the Russian front to Berlin

Adrián’s connection to Russia also shapes the story others tell about him. In a meeting with Clara Stauffer, the man living under the identity Rafael Cuesta presents Adrián as a Spanish division volunteer abandoned to poverty after his service. He claims that seeing Adrián beg for work made the treatment of the former volunteers a matter of decency and dignity, and invokes a dead friend, Manuel, who had also died in Russia. The speech is a calculated appeal to Clara’s sympathy, not a neutral account: the supposed Rafael uses the memory of Russia and a lost comrade to make his intervention on Adrián’s behalf persuasive.

Later, Adrián himself reaches his former employer, Antonio Ochoa, who tells him he knows that Adrián defended Berlin to the end and is wanted by the Allies. Ochoa’s information comes through José Luis Barrios, a friend in Portugalete serving as a military liaison at the Ministry of the Navy and working with Messerschmidt. For the returning Adrián, this is the first moment of the conversation that makes sense. The fact that he served in Russia is part of the old life people associate with him; the more immediate danger is that his later actions in Berlin have made him a wanted man.

Russia as a measure of changing loyalties

The novel places Russia in sharply different political and personal contexts. Adrián’s departure for the front belongs to the history that made him a Spanish volunteer and a boxer remembered by his gym. In postwar Germany, Jan Schmitt’s clandestine commitments take another form: he pays monthly dues to associations that preserve Nazi ideas and to Spain-or-Death, which helps leaders who must choose between Spain and death. His wife, Agneta, resents the risk he continues to take with the family’s livelihood and freedom, particularly after Adrián returns to her life. Russia’s wartime shadow is thus not simply a distant battlefield; it persists in postwar loyalties, rescue networks, and arguments over what people owe to former comrades.

The reference to Russia also appears in Manuel Arroyo’s attempt to make Clara Stauffer care about the veterans he says are reduced to begging. He asks whether his friend died in Russia only for Adrián to be left in such circumstances. That appeal connects a remembered death to a present demand for assistance, while also revealing the narrator’s capacity to exploit a plausible grievance. Across these episodes, Russia carries memory and political consequence, but it does not supply a single moral meaning: it is at once a place of service, a source of loss, and a resource that characters invoke for their own purposes.

A recurring geography of displacement

Russia belongs to a wider pattern in which the novel’s characters cross borders under pressure and acquire identities that do not settle the question of who they are. Adrián leaves Spain for wartime service and is last known in Berlin; his later movements are obscured by missing records and by the stories others construct around him. Manuel, meanwhile, enters Spain through Gibraltar in 1946 under an American identity, while his earlier exile had taken him to Geneva, where he worked under the name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez. These trajectories are not interchangeable, but together they make movement across Europe a condition of survival rather than a simple passage from one home to another.

The gym’s suitcases and the unanswered letter give Russia its most concrete narrative weight. They preserve the outline of a life before the gap: a boxer who left, hoped to return to his sport, and did not come back for what he had left behind. The later reports of Berlin and the shifting identities around Adrián extend that gap without closing it. Russia matters because the novel can name it as part of his past while showing how little a place-name, a letter, or a remembered journey can prove about the fate of someone who has disappeared.