The Lacuna

With Van gone, letters and drafts are starting to pile in a backlog inside Lev’s brain, but he won’t let these boys help much with secretarial work. He says it requires special skill; the best secretary to a writer must be a writer himself. (“Even, perhaps, a novelist,” he conspires with a twinkle.) Lev’s study table is mounded with papers, ink bottles, boxes of wax cylinders from the Ediphone. The calendar lying open on his desk must be excavated each morning, to turn the page on a new day. The books mount in polyglot piles: Russian, French, Spanish, and English all in one stack, representing different strata in his miraculous brain. A layer for each new country in his journey.

Now he means to add another: the United States. He is invited to travel there as a witness, in a trial before the Congress. A man named Dies wants him to testify against the American Communist Party. Lev is eager to do it. Their devotion to Stalin must be checked, he says. The American Communists still believe all Stalin’s charges against Lev, but when they know the truth, he says, they will shift their allegiance to the movement for socialist democracy in Russia. He believes this Dies Committee could be used to engage the world war as a platform for world revolution.

Jake and Charlie say it’s a trap, and Novack sent telegrams warning Lev not to cross the border. The United States seems ready to get in the war, most likely on Stalin’s side, against Hitler. What a goodwill gift Lev Trotsky would make, delivered to Stalin in chains. Natalya is terrified; the U.S. press uniformly say Lev is a monster. But still he makes plans to go. The Dies Committee has issued his papers and promised police protection for the journey. But won’t grant a visa for Natalya, or any Mexican assistant.

Lev can work around any obstacle. He plans to bring a secretary and translator whose legal status is without reproach: who has never belonged to any political party. Who holds a U.S. passport because his father is a citizen, working in a government accounting office. Lev even assumes the father will offer hospitality in Washington during the hearings, which will last several weeks.

If Father even recognized his son at his door, he would likely send him off to go and bunk with the Christers. And if Stalin has offered a bounty on Lev’s head, Father would gladly collect it. But Lev won’t believe it, this man to whom paternal affections come as naturally as beating to a heart. No dictionary has words that can make Lev understand estrangement between a father and son. Departure is set, November 19.

The bags are all packed, filled with papers. Natalya had to remind Lev to bring some clothes and a coat. It will be cold in the north. Important files have been excavated from the time of the Dewey Commission, in which Lev already worked hard to prove his innocence. His belief in justice still burns so brightly, it’s hard to watch.

Lorenzo will drive the car to the train station in the morning. Mexican police will provide bodyguards to the U.S. border. Marguerite Rosmer made a party here this evening for bon voyage, though Natalya finds little to celebrate. But Marguerite always cheers her, and so did the presence of other friends: the Hansens, Frida, and Diego of course. He and Lev get along famously now that they’re no longer friends.

And Frida: if anything can get her out of bed, it’s a party. She showed up in a wild tehuana dress with a bodice of ribbons, and her short hair brushed out in a wave like a motion picture star. She brought her sister’s two children, who adore Seva. Diego arrived late, wearing a hat like Pancho Villa’s. The children had firecrackers and caused Lorenzo a near collapse, he was so nervous about the possibility of an attack. He stopped the party four times, forcing everyone to clear the courtyard and go into the bunkhouse because the guards on the roof had sighted a strange vehicle in the street. Once, it was the Buick that dropped off the Rosmers. The car belongs to their friend Jacson, a young Belgian they’ve befriended who sometimes drives them places. Marguerite told a story during the party about how this same young man once chased Frida around Paris. “He won’t admit it,” Marguerite said. “But his girlfriend Sylvia says he was infatuated. Do you recall him? Apparently he followed you for days, trying to meet you.”

“How could I remember which one he was?” Frida asked, tilting her head so one gold earring danced against her black hair. There was no smile or dazzle, she was play-acting at being coy, a habit without feeling.

“On the day your show opened, Jacson apparently waited all afternoon outside the gallery with a bouquet the size of a Dalmatian. When you finally came, you told him to make a kite from his pants, and threw the flowers in the gutter!”

“The poor man,” Diego said. “Frida destroys them all.”

The look that passed between them held such awful sadness. If either of the two had painted such a thing, it would have to be torn down from the wall.

Marguerite was still in the thrall of her story, imagining this boy on the street with his broken flowers. “That’s true! He probably didn’t know she was married.”

Frida says the divorce will be final before the year’s end.

Natalya is ecstatic, Lev is irate, and everyone else holds an intermediate position. There will be no journey, no testimony. Lev didn’t even get on the train. Somehow the Dies Committee must have caught wind of his revolutionary intentions, or sensibly guessed them. At the last possible moment the Department of State wired a permanent revocation of his visa. He is never to be allowed to enter the United States.

Already the newspapers have their story. They interviewed Toledano and also the artist Siqueiros who is in league with him now, both of whom know less than Lev’s chickens about what really happened. But still they had plenty to say: Lev was foiled in a plot against the people, financed by the oil magnates and the American FBI.

Alejandro’s English improves, but not his conversation. His shyness suffocates him like a caul. But like any child he fights to be born, to land himself in the tribe of men. With the other guards around, he can piss off the roof with the best of them. He swears loyalty to the Fourth International, and also to Jesus, especially at Christmas and other holy days of obligation.

Lev counsels Lorenzo and the other guards to be lenient, the lad will develop a revolutionary discipline. Give him time. Alejandro is unschooled, afraid of being wrong.

February is the hardest month for Lev. Too many deaths have left their stains on its walls. On some days he drifts into memories, visiting with beloved ghosts of so many he’s known—his young first wife, friends, daughters and sons, coworkers and comrades, all murdered by Stalin, many of them for no better reason than Lev’s anguish. He and Natalya have frank talks about where she can go, if Lev is the next in that line. Joe and Reba vouch they can get her safely to New York; Van of course is already there. “Take me along for burial,” Lev said. “The United States would gladly admit me as a corpse.”