The Lacuna (28 page)

Lev was quiet for an extremely long time. It seemed likely that Jacson and Sylvia would leave before this conversation moved forward at all. It was a bold question, possibly even rude. Van had said many times that Lev hates to talk about this, and won’t.

But finally he did. “Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, this you know. He had a stroke, soon after the Thirteenth Party Conference. He was exhausted by that conference, and I was also. I had been ill many weeks and came down with pneumonia during the sessions. Natalya insisted we go to the Caucasus afterward for a rest. She was right, I might have died otherwise. The conference concluded, and I embraced my comrade and friend Vladimir before departing.”

He paused, took off his gloves, and wiped his eyes.

“Natalya and I were on the train to the Caucasus. In the dining car, having a cup of tea. The porter came and handed us a telegram: Lenin was dead of a stroke. Stalin had sent the wire. ‘Dear comrade Lev,’ he said, or some such thing. In friendship and full solidarity he shared my grief, and gave details of a funeral. He said for various reasons, mostly for maintaining calm, the family and secretariat had decided against a large state funeral. They would hold a private burial the very next day. There was no time for me to return, of course, but Stalin assured that I should not worry. The family
understood. In due time, they would want me to eulogize Lenin in a state ceremony.”

“And so you went to the Caucasus.”

“We proceeded to the Caucasus, for a week of rest. And before the end of it, learned that Stalin had lied. The information he sent in the wire was false. The funeral had not been immediate or small. It was a large state funeral, three days after the wire. I could have managed to return in time, had I known. I should have been the one to speak there. To calm people, because it was a frightening time. With Lenin gone so suddenly, it was chaotic. People were very uncertain about the future.”

“But instead of you, Stalin spoke at the funeral.”

“The newspapers said I had refused to come, declining to be disturbed from my vacation. He told that story openly. But not from the platform, of course. At the funeral he spoke of leadership and reassurance. How he accepted the mantle of the people’s trust, when others had shirked it…. Everyone knew of whom he spoke.”

“You had their loyalty, a few days before. Did that count for nothing?”

“They were so afraid. In that moment their keenest desire was to lean on someone who seemed unfailingly strong.”

His eyes fixed on the sky, above the wall that enclosed him. No wound to his flesh could have pained Lev more than this memory. It was cruel to raise the subject, Van had been right about that.

“Sir, you couldn’t have known. It was not your mistake.”

“The mistake was to believe him. To accept the sympathy of a friend extended in a telegram. I was very ill of course, with a fever, Natalya reminds me of that. And the loss was disorienting, no one expected it so suddenly. But to take Stalin at his word, look what has come of this. A hundred thousand deaths. The whole revolution betrayed.”

“How long did it take you to get back to Moscow?”

“Too long. That is the simple truth. Stalin moved so quickly to fill
the bureaucracy with men who swore loyalty to him. These were supposed to be neutral positions, men dedicated only to the country. But loyalty to Stalin guaranteed the future of Stalin. It’s hard for a nation to retrieve itself from such a change of guard.”

“But people desire fair government. You say that constantly.”

“They want to believe in heroes, also. And villains. Especially when very frightened. It’s less taxing than the truth.”

Lev scrutinized the doorway to the dining room. The visitors were leaving. He waved the grain scoop. Jacson and Sylvia waved back. Natalya stood on the patio with a raincoat pulled over her shoulders like a cape. The sky was dark with a threat of rain.

“So that was the accident of history. A false telegram on a train.”

“It was no accident.”

22 August

This impossible thing cannot be. Something should have stopped this.

In the morning he was in the best spirits. He transplanted four cactus plants in a new garden. He was pleased about devising a new cactus-planting technology involving a canvas hammock, chicken wire, and a counterweight. “From now on
everything
will go faster!” he declared, as if he had invented internal combustion.

By lunchtime he’d finished revising the next-to-last chapter of his book on Stalin. In the afternoon he dictated an article on the American mobilization. From three thirty to four it rained pitchforks, and the day remained overcast. At five he took a break to have tea with Natalya, as always, and afterward asked for help with the rabbits. Two females had given birth to litters, in the same hutch. He needed to move one family lest the mothers cause trouble with one another’s young. Cannibalism is always a possibility.

Lev had one of them by her nape, the big spotted one called Minuschka, when Jacson arrived unexpectedly from the gatehouse. Lev handed over the hare with instructions on where to move her kits.
Jacson also appeared to have his hands full: a folder of papers, his hat, a raincoat over his arm. He was leaving for New York shortly, he said. But had finished his first article. Please, could Lev give it an honest critique?

Lev looked back, shooting a certain feckless glance, nearly comic:
Help! I would sooner face the gulag!
But he said, “Of course. Come into my office.”

They went in the house, he probably asked Natalya to make a cup of tea for the visitor, and then they must have proceeded to Lev’s office. It’s easy to picture: Lev sitting down, rooting out a clearing on his desk to set down the pages, collecting the patience to read it and make some tactful comment. The future waits. The world revolution waits, while Trotsky gives his full attention to a shallow-thinking but hopeful fellow, because nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness.

He would have asked Jacson to sit down opposite him in the armchair. But instead he stood, probably a little nervous to have this great man examining his syntax and logic. Fidgeting, annoying Lev to no end. Fingering things on Lev’s desk: the glass paperweight, wedding gift from Natalya. Cartridge cases in the pen tray, souvenirs of the Siqueiros raid in May. Jacson laid his raincoat on the table.

And we heard the roar. A scream or a sob but really a roar, indignation.

Joe and Melquiades scrambled down the ladder from the roof, and everyone else from everywhere. Natalya cried out from the kitchen, “Lev?” Two baby rabbits fell to the ground and squirmed in the dust. The strangest sight had appeared in the window of Lev’s study: Lev standing with his arms around Jacson—he seemed to be embracing the man—and screaming. There was blood. Joe and Lorenzo and Natalya all were shouting at once. Somehow Joe got there first, on his long legs, and already had Jacson pinned to the floor, and Natalya was white as chalk, collapsed against the door. Lev was seated now at his desk, glasses off, his face and hands covered with blood. On
the floor lay a strange small pickax, with its handle cut short. Not a kitchen tool. Some other thing.

“You’re going to be all right, old man,” Natalya said quietly. Melquiades had his rifle cocked, trained on the writhing man on the floor. Joe was kneeling on Jacson’s chest, grappling to control the man’s flailing arms.

Lev spoke: “Don’t let Seva in. He mustn’t see this.”

And then Lev said to Joe, or Melquiades, “Don’t kill him.”

“Lev,” Joe said, almost sobbing the word. He had Jacson’s wrists pinned now, his own large knuckles white against the stained floor. Lorenzo eased the Colt .38 out of Lev’s desk drawer. It was always kept there, with six bullets in the magazine. A .25 automatic had also been lying on the table by the Dictaphone, within easy arm’s reach of where Lev had sat reading Jacson’s paper. And the security alarm bell is wired under the desk. They don’t come the same way again.

Melquiades didn’t lower the rifle. Both guns were trained on the man on the floor, aimed at his head. Intermittently he bucked and twisted under Joe’s knees.

Lev held his hands away from his face and stared at the blood. There was so much of it. His white cuffs were soaked like bandages. It dripped onto the papers, this morning’s typed drafts. Very slowly he repeated, “Don’t kill him.” It was an impossible spectre, an impossible request.

“It’s no time for mercy,” Joe said, his voice strange.

Lev closed his eyes, obviously struggling for words. “There is no hope they will…tell the truth about this. Unless. You keep that man alive.”

When the Green Cross ambulance came, Lev was alive but half paralyzed, his body suddenly seeming terribly thin and strange to the touch, colder on that side when lifted onto the stretcher. Reba, Alejandro, and most of the others stayed at the house with Seva. Natalya rode in the back of the ambulance. It was dark. Streetlights were on.
At the hospital Lev began to speak in French, and later in Russian, just before they took him to surgery. Languages fell away, a long exile peeled from him like the layers of an onion.

The surgeons found that the blade had penetrated through Lev’s skull, seven centimeters into the brain itself. He died the next day without waking again. Yesterday.

His last sentence in English had begun, “There is no hope.” Natalya remarked later that those words were so strange to hear, from a man who lived decades on nothing but hope. But hope was not the issue, nor was mercy. There is no point discussing it with Natalya or Joe, but that was a clear instruction: No hope they will tell the truth, unless you keep that man alive.

He meant the newspapers. A dead assailant could become anyone, a victim himself. Another mad artist hired by Trotsky in a plot gone wrong, his final practical joke. Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.

Lev was right; the man lives, and the world will know what he was. The police have him, already they’re starting down the trail that now spools backward through our memories as a terrible thread: Reba running into him in the Melchor market last week, not by chance. Driving Natalya to Veracruz, not a whim but a calculation. The gift he gave Seva that day, the little glider: a chance to get inside the house, memorize the rooms. His attachment to the Rosmers’ old friend Sylvia, and then befriending the Rosmers themselves. Driving them everywhere in his elegant Buick. Even his possession of the Buick. Where did he get such money? We didn’t think to ask.

In custody he admitted it proudly, right away: he is a trained agent of Stalin, in the pay of the GPU for many years. Jacson is not his only name, or his real one. How many avenues did he have to try, before finding one door ajar? The trail goes back years, even back to Paris, his stalking of Frida, waiting outside her gallery with the bouquet of flowers. So much careful work, for the chance to sink a blade into the brain of Lev Trotsky.

No Specific Reason Is Cited, but Fear of
Demonstration Is Believed Cause

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Today is a Saturday, the last of August. This train rocks, sliding north. It’s four in the afternoon and the sun is bright on the left side of the train, beaded like a salt crust on the dirty windows, so that much is sure: the train is headed north. The last ten days are like shreds in a bag of scraps. Nothing in memory makes sense. Everything is gone, pockets full of ashes.

Lev was right to the end. The story of Jacson Mornard is so vile, the newspapers have been bound to tell it. President Cárdenas has condemned Russia and the United States as well, a league of foreign powers that dishonored our country with the attack. Three hundred thousand Mexicans walked down Paseo de la Reforma in the funeral procession, after walking here from mines and oil fields, from Michoacán and Puebla. Half made the journey without shoes. A quarter of them might not be able to say the name of Lev Davidovich Trotsky. Only that he was one of the generals in their Century of Revolution, as the president says. A man cut down by outsiders who refuse to believe the people can succeed.

On which day was the funeral? The attack was on a Tuesday, his death on Wednesday, and everything else is gone. Papers, books, clothes, and every memory ever recorded in a notebook. The police took everything from the guard house rooms, confiscated as evidence. The only hope of sorting out anything now is to put it in this little book. Starting with today, working backward: Day Last in Mexico, the train slides north; the train begins to move; the train is boarded at the Colonia Buenavista station; a packet of sandwiches and a small
notebook bound with a wire coil are purchased at the new Sanborn’s in the downtown station, using pesos out of the little purse from Frida.

Already the rest is a jumble. On which day was that, when Frida handed over the purse with the money and the documents for getting her crates through customs?

It was after the murder, but before the funeral. After the interrogation at the police station. They even questioned Natalya, for two hours. Everyone else they held for two days at least. Frida was ready to bite those men for making her sleep on a cot in that cold, stinking room. She was nowhere near, on the day of the murder. Joe gave the best statement, he remembers the most, even though he was on the roof when Jacson arrived, so didn’t see him come into the courtyard.

No one else saw that: his nervous smile when asking the favor, one more critique of this paper he’d written. The raincoat over his arm: the weapon must have been underneath his coat. No one else saw Lev’s silent glance back over his shoulder:
I would rather face the gulag!
His plea. A secretary’s only work is to protect his commissar—Van would have done it. Any small discouragement could have sent Jacson Mornard away: Sorry, but as you know, Lev is awfully busy. He has to finish his article on the American mobilization. Maybe if you could just leave your paper, he’ll have a look at it when he gets the chance. That could have happened. Lev could have been saved.

Now Miss Reed sits on the side of the bed holding Natalya’s hand, whether it is Tuesday or Sunday, morning or midnight. Joe and Reba are in Lev’s study packing up the papers and files. In that room only, the police left everything in place. They didn’t take much from the house, either. But from the guard house: everything. It was astonishing. To be driven home from a blank brick cell at the police station, walk through the gate, and see Lev’s cactuses still standing in place as if nothing had happened, the hens waiting to be fed. And then the guard house: the doors to every room standing open and nothing at
all inside, only blank brick cells. The metal cots, the mattresses. The floors swept as clean as the day of moving in. The little table loaned from Lev was still there, but nothing on it, not even the typewriter. The books, gone. The trunk and boxes under the bed, gone. Clothes, tooth powders, the few photographs of Mother. And every one of the notebooks from the very beginning, from Isla Pixol. Also the box of typed pages that had grown to weigh as much as a dog, and had been that kind of faithful friend at the close of each day. The stack of pages growing fatter and more certain all the time. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters.

Frida says the police are stupid cockroaches, they confiscated anything written in English because they couldn’t tell what it was, the idiots couldn’t see it’s only diaries and stories. The Scandals of the Ancients, evidence of no crime except Mistaken Identity: a young man possessed of the belief he was a writer. So distracted by his dreams, he was a careless secretary, the type to leave letters lying around. Or leave his boss at the mercy of a tedious visitor, one more deadly supplicant with a badly written article.

Joe and Reba will pack up what’s left of Lev, his thoughts crammed on paper, so it all can be sent to a library somewhere, sold for enough money to help Natalya get away. Van might arrange the sale, if he can be found. His last letter came from Baltimore; he was teaching French. He may not even know about Lev’s death. Unthinkable. All of this is unthinkable, however much Lev and Natalya did think of it, anticipating death with each day’s dawn. To think is not always to see.

Natalya will finish out the bottle of Phanodorm day by day, holding tight to Miss Reed’s hand until she can open her eyes and walk on a ship and sail away. The United States won’t let her come back with Joe and Reba. So Paris, then, to live with the Rosmers. She has to go. Lorenzo believes she’s now a target, a highly watched symbol of her husband. She can’t sleep for fear of the GPU, the wolves of her dreams.

Frida is going to San Francisco, where Diego is already. As usual she has a plan: her friend Dr. Eloesser will cure all her illnesses, and Diego will want her back. Melquiades plans to go south where he has relatives, Alejandro may go that way too. San Francisco, Paris, Oaxaca, the four winds—everyone scatters. Lev’s writings will be kept together somewhere, but what of the secretaries who recorded them, their small contributions to his logic? Or even the contribution of a good breakfast, the satisfied stomach on which the greatest plans were launched, who will remember that? The New York boys versus the Mexicans in courtyard football, Casa Trotsky is gone, as if it never existed. The house will be swept and sold to new owners who will tear down the guard towers, puzzle over Lev’s cactus gardens, and give away his chickens, or eat them.

This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulations of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable. That particular handful of coins had no special meaning together, it seems, except to pay a particular price. It might remain real, if someone had written everything in a notebook. No such record now exists.

Frida says everybody had better knock the Trotsky dust off their shoes and get out of here. “Sóli, I have a plan for you,” she said, seated at the little wooden desk in her studio. She’d sent Perpetua running down the street with an urgent summons—Frida wants to see you right away. “We have to get you away from here, you’re not safe. The police took everything from your room, even your socks. It’s because of all those things you wrote. I’m sure they’re watching you.” The police took many things from many people, but she believes words are the most dangerous. She says maybe Diego was right about “your damn diaries,” the confiscated notebooks might put their author in jeopardy.

But she has a plan. She needs to send eight paintings to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for a show:
Twenty Centuries
of Mexican Art
. And after that another show is planned,
Twentieth-Century Portraits
. Frida has become a fixture of her century. The Levy Gallery may be interested as well. She needs a consignment marshal. “Or whatever the hell you call it in English,” she said; she’ll look it up for the documents.
Pastor de consignación
is what she called it, a “shipping shepherd,” a legally authorized agent to accompany the paintings on the train all the way to New York. “Your passport is already fixed up. You were ready to go with Lev last fall, for that hearing.”

“Frida, the police won’t allow an emigration. Not with a murder investigation still open.”

“Who says you’re emigrating? I already talked with them about this. Leaving the country for a short time is okay, as long as you’re not a suspect. I told them you’re my consignment marshal.”

“You already talked with the police?”

“Sure. I told them you have to oversee this delivery because I can’t trust anybody else to do it,” she said, tapping her pencil against the wooden desk. This plan had no complications at all, in her mind, beyond selecting which portraits to send for the show.

“And then?”

“No
and then
. You’ll have to carry all these customs forms, one for each painting. You show them at the border, and get each one stamped. Declarations of value and all that. You have to be really careful to hold on to all the receipts from the lockup.”

“The lockup?”

“Don’t worry, you’re not going to jail.” Her hair has grown back, just barely long enough to coronate herself again, with the help of plenty of ribbons. When did she cut it off? The conversation of that morning is gone, that notebook is gone. Every time it hits like a rock. In Frida’s studio, in front of the window, exactly where Van used to sit for dictation, she now had a half-finished portrait on her easel: Frida in a man’s suit, cutting off her hair.
Keeping your damn diaries
, but these paintings are her own version of it.

Today she rattled like a gourd full of seeds, talking and fidgeting with the things on her desk. “Okay, the porter captain on the train will make the guys bring the crates to a special part of the baggage car, where they have a cage. You follow him in there to see him do it. He’ll lock the crates inside and give you a receipt for getting them back. So you don’t want to lose that.”

“A cage?”

“Not the kind of cage for lions. Well, maybe they would put lions in there if they were expensive ones.” She seemed desperate to be cheerful. She picked up tubes of paint, like big silver cigars with brown paper labels around their middles, then fingered the brushes standing together in a cup. She was afraid. It took a while to understand that this was the problem: fear. Not for herself but for her friend, whom she had thrown to the lions many times before. This time she wants him saved.

“Oh. So the paintings won’t just be in a big suitcase or something?”

“Oh my God, wait till you see. They build a traveling crate for each one. Diego has a man who does this, he’s very expert. He wraps them in layers and layers of kraft paper like a mummy and then fits each painting in two wooden crates, one inside the other. There’s a space in between that’s stuffed with straw, to prevent damage during shipping. The crates are huge. You could get inside one yourself.”

That was on a Friday, because Perpetua was cooking fish. The day before the funeral? How long did it take to build those crates?

The police returned a few things the following week, but not much, not even clothing. Knowing those pigs, she said, they stole anything useful and burned the rest. Reba had to ask Natalya to open the wardrobe and pass around Lev’s shirts, so the possessionless guards could have something to wear. His shirts were so familiar. It was startling to see them from the back, walking through the garden. Of all of us, they fit Alejandro best: small devout Alejandro, no one would guess they were the same size. Lev was so much larger than his body.

One day (which?), Frida said she went to the police station and screamed until they returned a few more items. Probably the officers locked the doors in terror, and threw things out the windows. So she had a small suitcase of items to hand over, along with the documents, for the trip to New York. That was yesterday. In the dining room of the Blue House, after one last look round the place, those mad blue walls and yellow wicker chairs. That glorious kitchen. Embraces from Belén and Perpetua.

“The police already had destroyed a lot of your things,” Frida said flatly when she produced the suitcase. “This is what you’ll need for the trip, and the rest you wouldn’t want. There were some really old clothes and things, but you won’t need that junk right away. I had it packed up and stored in a trunk at Cristina’s.”

“Anything else? Papers?”

“Only some books I think you borrowed from Lev, so I gave them to Natalya. Your room was all in a big metal box marked ‘C,’ maybe the third one they tore apart. I could tell because it was your clothes. There was hardly anything else, just some old magazines. We can send you the trunk after you get an address in Gringolandia. Sóli, jump! You’re going to be a gringo!”

“This is all?”

She had packed the suitcase herself. It was hard to look inside: the unbearable persistence of hope. Of course there were no notebooks, no manuscript. Only shirts and trousers. A lot of woolen sweaters; Frida believes the sky of New York flings down snow at all times, even August. Also milk of magnesia, aspro gargle, and Horlick’s powder for nerves, furthering Frida’s vision of Gringolandia. Toothbrush, razor. She says it’s not a good idea to bring more than this. A large trunk would draw suspicion.

“Remember, this is not an emigration.”

But her embrace was like a child’s farewell, dramatic and desperate. She didn’t want to let go. “Look, okay. I brought you two presents. One is from Diego. He doesn’t know yet. But I’m sure he would
want you to have this. For Sóli, the drifter between two houses, to commemorate your journey. Look, it’s the codex!”

It was the codex. The ancient book of the Azteca, a long tableau in pictures on accordion-folded paper, describing their journey from the land of the ancients, wandering until they found home. It was a copy, of course, not the original. But probably worth some money. Diego might not be pleased about this. It can always be returned.

Her face brightened. “The other one is from me. I made a painting for you!”

Frida only gives paintings to people she has loved. It was unexpectedly hard to keep from crying as she fetched the crate from the other room and lugged it in. It must be a small portrait; the outer crate is only the size of a suitcase, easily managed with regular baggage. But heavy as lead, for its size. She must have put a lot of paint on that canvas.