On the morning Lev and Natalya moved out of the Blue House, an egret came down from the sky, its broad white wings spread like a parachute, and landed in the courtyard. It extended the S-curve of its long neck until nearly as tall as a man, turning its long-beaked head this way and that, peering at each person present. Then it strode across the bricks to the front gate, lifting its long legs at the knee like a man riding a bicycle. The chief guard shoved the gate open, just a crack, and four men with pistols in their belts stood watching an egret cross Allende Street, disappearing around the corner.

Frida would have claimed it as an omen on Lev’s departure. But she is not here, she’s in Paris where everyone is an idiot, according to her reports. Natalya, unprepared to trust in signs, was swaddled in the same woolen suit and hat she wore the day they arrived on the ship from Norway. Lev was less armored, in a white shirt open at the collar. Each carried one small suitcase. Van, who has been inattentive since falling in love again (this time she’s American), kept his eyes down and stayed busy moving crates of papers into the car sent by Diego. Diego himself was not present.

Every person may have felt some accusation in the heron’s glare, for which member of the household was blameless? Frida went away, leaving Diego and Lev with only their needles of irritability to fill a space evacuated of desire. And Diego, poor man, can only be the person he is. An organizer who can’t get to meetings on time, a secretary who forgets to answer letters. He has the heart of an anarchist, not a party functionary.

Some blame of course goes to Stalin: his threats hanging over this house, the murders of Trotsky’s children, peers, and collaborators, the annihilation of his whole generation in Russia. Stalin’s cruelties have pressed the souls of this household flat as ancient skeletons in the dust.

But most to be blamed: the careless secretary who unraveled everything.

Diego wrote the newspapers about his split from Trotsky, reporting his desire to stand out of the way of a great man. “An accumulation of sufferings have had their effect,” he wrote, without naming them all: the affair with Frida, for example, though that’s said to be forgiven. The note he dashed off to Breton complained, “The bearded old goat is serious every minute. For God’s sake, can’t he let the Revolution rest for a night and get drunk with a friend who risked everything? Who’s housed and fed his entourage for two damn years? How can any mortal tolerate these overcast Russian temperaments?”

He scribbled the note in Lev’s own office and gave it over to be typed, a hasty act of bravado, while Lev was elsewhere. The letter should have been posted to France immediately. Instead, the preoccupied secretary, in his haste to get the evening’s cooking started, left it lying on the Ediphone table, where Lev later found it. The old man came in the kitchen later with his glasses off, rubbing his eyes, too tired, he said, for supper. Just a piece of toast, perhaps. Bed early, plans to make tomorrow.

What a knot of history one mistake can become. Trotsky was meant to succeed Lenin as president of the Soviet, but a small accident caused the job to fall to Stalin instead. Diego never told what the accident was. Only that small caprices alter fate. One letter, left out by accident. If Diego and Lev had kept their alliance, they might have forged a movement to overthrow Stalin. The peasant armies of Mexico worship Diego, but they need Lev’s strategic intelligence. From Michoacan, blazing through the brigades of Spain into all of Europe, the world might yet take up Lev’s dream of socialist democracy. But a careless mistake has torn this league asunder.

Why did Diego call his friend a goat? He expected the word to vanish with the afternoon post, that’s why. Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts. Diego meant nothing by that letter; his respect for Lev is undying. He had an eye infection that week, a cramp in his stomach after a lunch of too many pork sandwiches. From somewhere in that roil, a few poisonous sentences erupted. Now the world has them.

And the secretary? Was his sin sloth, or pride? The letter was in French, but why couldn’t he have asked for Van’s help to change the words, and type a tactful version? And why didn’t he post it at once, as requested? A remembrance of last year’s jacaranda in the window, the sound of something breaking in the kitchen—for no good reason he forgot, and left the letter on the table.

The mistake has left him panting like the victim in a crash: his loyalty to Lev bent like pieces of metal around his chest. The wrecked engine of Rivera spewing petrol, threatening flames. He must extricate himself by making a choice. Diego says stay, as typist-cook and errand boy, for the same coins that have rained down steadily since the first bewildered day of mixing plaster on the floor of the Palacio Nacional. But Lev also asks for continued service. He needs a trusted secretary more than ever, because of the perilous relocation, and Van’s increasing distractions. Lev offers a room and cot in a house of clear, bright dreams, which could all be murdered tomorrow. The Painter offers money, asking only to be worshipped.

At seven this morning, after a brief rainstorm, Lev Trotsky lifted his suitcase, stepped across the puddles in the brick walk, and left the Blue House for the last time. He and his wife climbed into the back of the car with Lorenzo the guard, his rifle lying across their knees, and Van in the front passenger’s seat, also armed. The driver sat very straight, as if his body were pierced like a Hindu’s with a thousand nails of guilt.

“We are ready, my son. Drive,” Lev said, and together the small party traveled six blocks to a wrecked, vacant house on Calle Viena, rented from a family called Turati, where they will make their new home.

 

If any brokenhearted man ever made a better show of good cheer, it could only have been in the moving pictures. Lev’s efforts to make the best of the new arrangement have buoyed everyone. Natalya has put away Phanodorm and taken up housecleaning: sweeping cobwebs from the high, pale green ceilings of this Porfirian mansion, washing its leaded-glass windows and arranging furniture. Sometimes she ties on an apron and makes Lev’s breakfast. Today she painted chair rails and all the wooden cabinets in the dining room, a nice combination of yellow and brown that Frida would have called boring. What a relief, that she is no longer reading these pages.

The Americans, Joe and Reba Hansen, have come here from the apartment where they had retreated from Rivera hospitality and Rivera complications. A new couple has arrived also, Mr. O’Rourke and his off-beat girl friend Miss Reed. Everyone seems relieved to gather over simple suppers in the main room here, with an old yellow-checked tablecloth on the long table and no one worrying about wine spills. Debating the day’s news instead, under no secret storm clouds of household intrigue. Van plays music programs on the wireless and whistles along while typing, when no one else is in the office. His happiness, as always, seems to be linked to a girl.

Only Lorenzo is cheerless, but that’s nothing new. He frets, whether on or off duty, a worried monument pulling on his huge black moustache, his face burned to red leather from the hours spent staring out at the menacing world. His forehead, a startling white above the line made by his hat, when he removes it for supper. Protecting Lev has been a terrifying charge since the day they walked off the planks at Tampico. Lorenzo has apprehended dozens of threats, not only the barefoot vigilantes but also the cool plots of Mexican Stalinists. Lately Toledano has been going to unionists’ meetings, offering cash to any man willing to put a bullet in Trotsky. Most men these days need the money.

Everything is reported to Lev but not Natalya. She only learns the worst of it when the police are forced to arrest someone and the story makes the newspapers, wedged between the usual confabulations about the “Russian Traitor in Our Midst.” Lorenzo and the three young guards take six-hour shifts on the roof, around the clock, walking the perimeter on the brick parapet. The black rock wall around the courtyard was three meters tall to begin with, but the masons have raised it higher still, with brick turrets and notches for rifle bores. It will be good if Lev can purchase the house, because of the need for these alterations. Joe Hansen says money is coming from the Trotskyist party in the United States. The Socialist Workers.

The kitchen here is very adequate: a gas stove with four eyes, a plank counter and icebox. And within the high walls, the courtyard offers a bright relief of trees, shaped as a triangle between the main house and the long, narrow brick guard house running opposite at an angle. Here at last, guards and secretaries may have some privacy, the guard house has four rooms in a row downstairs and four above. The garden is shaded by an old jacaranda and some figs. Lev wants to retrieve the cactus specimens he collected in San Miguel Regla, which stand potted in some forsaken corner at the Blue House, so he can make a cactus garden. Today after lunch he pointed out where he intends to plant each one, with stone paths for roaming between the bits of garden, a park in miniature. It’s an impossibly small space for such an elaborate plan. But this tiny plot, measured in meters, is Lev’s last remaining homeland.

It seems an airy enough estate, from inside. The strange spectre of confinement becomes striking only from the outside, when one walks home to it from the market, for example. The compound occupies a flat-iron shaped lot in Coyoacán where Calle Viena and Rio Churubusco meet at an angle. The high, dark walls enclosing it come together at a point, looking exactly like the dark prow of an ocean liner: the great, slow ship of Trotsky’s fate setting sail down Churubusco, as if it were still a canal in the city on a lake, as Cortés found it. As if one could still build a ship in the desert, and set one’s sights on a new world.

 

Lorenzo’s mother came this week from the country, bringing one more pair of eager eyes for guard duty: her daughter’s boy, Alejandro. Also, two pairs of rabbits and some checkered hens. Lev is as happy as a lad with his new livestock. The rabbits now have hutches near the entry gate, but Lev says the chickens are “emancipated travelers,” free to roam the courtyard. Natalya objected on grounds of sanitation, and the hens’ safety.

“Nataloschka,” her husband said, “no wolves live here. The chickens are the only ones without the worry of a predator. Let them have an open visa.” Of course she conceded. In Lev’s new study, he sets his chair so he can see out the window into the courtyard where they scuttle around, cocking their heads at beetles in the dust.

 

Perpetua has walked down the street from the Blue House twice this week, to deliver some pottery Natalya liked especially. Her favorite is the white glazed platter with fish leaping over it, a gift from Frida when they first arrived. Natalya thanked Perpetua and put it away in a cabinet, but today she has brought it out and set it against the wall. In the years with Lev her world has been so constrained, with so few objects of beauty in it. She is not a bulldog, only a woman pressed into the shape of a small jar, possibly attempting to dance in there. It shows in the way she places a seashell on a window sill, a red-painted chair in the corner: she is practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence inside it.

 

Lorenzo’s nephew, Alejandro, is the youngest of the guards, nineteen or twenty perhaps. From a tiny village near Puebla, he’s the only one of the guards who is not from the political movement, but Lorenzo guarantees his loyalty. Lev welcomes a new recruit.

Alejandro seems happy just to escape a certain village misery. He has a shy, odd manner, precisely what Frida would call a queer duck. She would say she approved, then make sure everyone watched him like a fish in a bowl. Probably she can’t help that, she’s been watched that way herself since marrying Diego.

In New York and Paris when she flew high, the newspaper stories tried to shoot her down. Now that she is coming home, apparently washed up, what they say about her is worse. Like Natalya, she must feel the need to retreat into a small space, making still-life creations and painting herself inside. She doesn’t have to hide from assassins, but being Much-Discussed appears to be its own kind of prison.

 

The chickens are not the only emancipated ones here. Lev allows writing of any kind. While he himself works tirelessly on Lenin’s biography and a dozen political articles at once, he confessed that really no book can beat a good novel. He wishes he could write one himself.

What a strange discovery. He came in the office late this evening to look for a dictionary, surprised to find one of his assistants still banging at a typewriter.

“Young Shepherd! What business could keep you so late in headquarters?” Headquarters of the Fourth International is his name for the big office next to the dining room. Natalya moved in all three typewriter tables and her roll-top desk, the telephone, bookshelves, file cabinets, and all. It was her idea to make a separate office so all can work here—herself, Van, the Americans who’ve come to study with Lev—without driving the commissar out of his mind. Lev keeps to his little study in the other wing by their bedroom, writing in peace until he needs someone to come and take a dictation.

“I’m sorry, sir.” Gather up the pages quick, put them in a folder. No confession unless forced. “It’s nothing that will liberate the people.”

He waited for more, standing wide-eyed at the doorsill in his shirt and tie. His white hair stood on end from a long day’s work. He pulls his hair while he thinks.

“Sir, I’m reluctant to say.”

“Oh, no. Some secret report to the adversary?”

“Please don’t suggest such an awful thing.”

“What, then? A love letter?”

“It’s more embarrassing than that, sir. A novel.”

The muscles of his face collapsed like a dumpling, all dimples and wrinkled eyes behind the beard and round glasses. Lev’s smile is like no other. He pulled out Natalya’s desk chair and sat in it backward, straddling it like a horse, leaning his elbows on its back and laughing until he nearly wept. “Oh, this is a mechaieh!”

There was nothing to do but wait for a more comprehensible verdict.

“I’ve been worrying where it is you go, my son. When your mind is not here.” He clucked his tongue, said some words in Russian. “A novel! Why do you say this won’t liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!”

“It surprises me to hear you say it.”

His halo of white hair was lit from behind by the blue blaze of the street lamp outside. The windows facing the street are bricked up halfway, but light comes in from above. It looked like a setting for a detective film. He stood and walked to the back bookshelf, making his way between tables and the recording machine cabinet with its cords snaking across the floor. He clicked on the lamp near the bookshelf.

“I want to show you something. My first published book. An account of a young man only twenty-seven years old, imprisoned by the tsar for being a revolutionist, maneuvering a bold and dramatic escape to Europe where he plotted his return with the People’s Army.” Lev found the book and tapped it thoughtfully with his thumb. “This was a popular sensation among the workers of St. Petersburg. The entire Soviet, eventually. If a Russian can read, he has read this one.”

“A novel, sir?”

“Unfortunately, no. Every word of it is true.” He opened the book and turned a few pages. “And since then, only theory and strategy. What a bore I’ve become.”

“But your life is still a potboiler. Stalin’s assassins lurking, the Communist Party and Toledano scheming to poison your name. I hate to say it, but the newspapers might get on your side if you wrote it that way. They could carry your saga in weekly installments, the way they did for Pancho Villa during the war.”

“Getting the newspapers on our side, oh, my boy. That is a career for circus acrobats and worthless politicians.”

“Sorry, sir.”

He smiled. “Well, it would win the Russians. Our brains have a weakness for morose and thrilling plots.” He snapped the book closed. “What is the subject of yours?”

He listened carefully to the idea of a historical adventure about ancient Mexicans, even if it is more adventure than history, and will never be any good. He pulled a pile of books out of his shelf that might inspire a novelist just starting off.

“Do you read Russian? No. Well, Jack London, certainly. And Colette, for the female view. Oh, and this one by Dos Passos, it’s called The Big Money.” He also offered one of his typewriters, the spare one that only needs a little oil to get working again, and a small table for use as a writing desk in the guardhouse room at night. “So you won’t again have to creep into headquarters on the sly,” he said. “With Lorenzo as nervous as he is, he might shoot you through the window by mistake. A fine potboiler you would make of yourself then, my son. And who would write it?”

 

Alejandro, the village boy, almost never speaks. Yet claims he wants to learn English. One quiet assertion at a time, he begins: I am. You are. His room is the one at the opposite end of the guard house, but he comes to this one every morning at four, after finishing his shift of pacing the roof with his rifle cocked in darkness. This room that has housed no secrets up to now, except for a box of things hidden under the bed: a small stolen idol. A partly written, entirely dreadful novel. The little woven finger toy called a trapanovio, souvenir of a remarkable humiliation.

Alejandro is the first one to see the trapanovio since that day in Xochimilco, and he didn’t laugh when he heard the story. He inhaled sharply, fists on his face, and wept.

At four o’clock while the world sleeps off its judgments, reliably he arrives. He has, they have. A strange kind of love it is. Or no kind of love at all. A solace of the soft tissues only, not the first or last of anything, grateful and urgent and terrified by turns. Afterward, in plain sight of his unsettled accomplice, Alejandro prays.

 

Frida is home a month, and unraveling like a yarn doll. Diego wants a divorce. She suspected it last autumn, but her plan was to stay away so long, he would learn he couldn’t live without her. Such plans rarely succeed. She’s moved out of the Double House, living in Coyoacán now, and it’s odd to see the Blue House filling up with her things. She has layered on more paint, the colors of blood and the depths of the sea. The bedroom that was Lev and Natalya’s, spare as a servant’s back then with its woven rug and neatly made bed, now is crammed with her dressing table, jewelry, doll shelves, and trunks of clothes. Lev’s former study holds her ruckus of easels and paints. It should not seem strange, as it was her house all along, and her father’s before she was born.

This morning Perpetua sent Belén running down the block for help because the mistress had gone mad. Frida spends madness the way she spends money; it was all over by the time help could arrive. Perpetua answered the gate, pointed without a word, and returned to the kitchen. Frida sat on a stone bench in the courtyard with her hair all cut off. It lay in thick black parentheses on the bricks, all around her feet.

“Natalya sent me to ask if there’s anything you need.”

Frida smiled insincerely at the lie, revealing new gold caps on her incisors. It seemed she might have been drinking, even at this early hour.

“What I need is to castrate the son of a bitch and be done with it.” She made some menacing snips at the air with her scissors, startling the black cat that had been disguised in the nest of hair. It stood and arched its back.

It seemed pointless to mention she has also been having affairs, in New York and Paris. At least, such things were much discussed in the press. A handsome Hungarian photographer. “Sorry, Frida. But with Diego and women it’s nothing new, right?”

“Is this the kind of mierda you walked over here to tell me? I’ve been miserable for a long time already, so I should be used to it now? Thank you, my friend.”

“Sorry.” The cat slunk away into the laurel bushes.

“Sóli, you’ll never guess: now I have fungus on my hands. A new ailment! One thousand operations, plaster corsets, medicines that taste like piss, collapsed organs, and there’s still something new that can go wrong with me. Maybe I could be a little miserable about this?” She held up her hands, mottled pink, raw and dreadful.

“All right. If you need permission.”

Even in her disconsolate state she looked like a peacock, perfectly dressed in a green silk skirt and enough jewelry to sink a boat. Even drowning, Frida would cling to vanity. “Don’t forget Paris and New York, Frida. They loved your show. Yesterday Van showed me a fashion magazine with you on the cover.”

“The opinion of me in Paris and New York, if you want to know, was the same as for a talking pony. Imagine it, a Mexican girl who dresses funny and curses like a soldier! Every day was, what do you call it? A bowl of fish.”

Translating Frida is no easy trick. “A kettle of fish? That means you’re in bad trouble. Or else a goldfish bowl, which means people are looking at you all the time.”

“Both. I was in a kettle of goldfish. People pointed on the street.”

“Because you’re famous. People saw your paintings.”

“Listen, don’t ever become famous. It’s killing. You should see what they wrote in the papers, those reviewers. They hardly bothered to look at the paintings, they only wanted to write about the painter herself. ‘She should be making nice pictures of nature instead of these nightmares. And always herself—she’s not even that good looking!’”

“We saw the reviews. A lot of them were good. Diego says Picasso and Kandinsky think you’re a bigger talent than both of them combined.”

“Okay, but that cockroach André Breton didn’t bother to pick up my paintings from the customs house until I got there and screamed at him. And it’s true what I’m telling you about the reviews. They write what they think you should be painting.”

That courtyard seemed more than ever like a fairy-tale house, with tree leaves for its ceiling and an ivy-covered floor. White calla lilies rose up through the ivy carpet, all of them bending their hooded heads toward Frida, like charmed cobras.

“Obviously you had a miserable time. But you can’t blame anyone for seeing you as a spectacle.”

She looked puzzled. Her earrings today were a pair of heavily embossed golden snakes, but with her newly shorn, glossy head she looked like a sea lion. With gold teeth. “What spectacle?”

Carmen Frida Kahlo de Rivera. Who could explain her to anyone, least of all herself? “You play a certain role. You have to admit that. Mexican peasant, queen of the Azteca or what. You don’t dress to blend in.”

Her gold incisors flashed. “If I don’t choose, they choose for me: Wife of the Much-Discussed Painter. The newspapers would wrap me in gauze and make me a martyred angel, or else a boring jealous wife. Above all, a victim—of Diego and life. Of disease. Look at this leg.” She yanked up the green silk to reveal her naked, lame leg. It was a more awful sight than the infected hands: thin as a stick because of the childhood polio, bent and scarred from the accident, years of limping and indignities uncountable.

“You’ve never seen it, have you?” she asked.

“No.”

“How long have you known me?”

“Nearly ten years.”

“And in that time, have you thought of me as this?”

It was hideous: the leg of a leper, a street beggar, a veteran of wars. Anything but the leg of a beautiful woman. “No.”

She tossed the long silk skirt back down, like covering a corpse. “People will always stare at the queer birds like you and me. We only get to choose if they’ll stare at a cripple, or a glare of light. The jewelry and everything makes people go blind. The gossips will say a million things, but they never ask, ‘That Mexican-Indian-Azteca girl, why does she always wear long dresses?’”

With the points of her naked toes she carefully set about pushing the locks of hair on the ground into a round pile. Everything with her is an artful project, flowers laid out on a table, even her own self-destruction. “So,” she said, “how is your wonderful story, the scandals of the ancients? Are you working on it every day?”

It was tempting to tell her about the writing desk in the guardhouse room, a newly oiled typewriter, a pile of pages growing higher every night. It would excite Frida to make her an accomplice. But she is no good at secrets. “What do you mean, queer birds like us? Nobody is staring at me.”

“So you think.”

The cat circled warily near her feet, eyeing the strange black pelt.

“And your dear comrade Van. How is he these days?”

“Not staring at me. That is for sure.”

The cat decided the new animal between his mistress’s feet was neither predator nor prey, so he crept away over the ivy, lifting his feet as if walking through shallow surf.

“Being a peacock is not the only way to hide yourself, Frida. A pigeon can hide.”

“Is that what you are? A pigeon hiding in a little hole in the bricks?”

“I’m a typist. And a cook. Sometimes now I get to clean rabbit cages.”

She sighed. “What a waste of time. I thought you had chispa. A spark, or some kind of discipline. It turns out you’re a little gray pigeon.” She smoothed her skirt over her leg and pulled her shawl around her shoulders, composing herself against what she had revealed.

“I’m sorry about your leg. I’d heard different things.”

“Sóli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.”

 

Twelve people living in this household now, and only one bathroom. Miss Reed calls it The Dance of the Hours. The four Americans always stay up late—the strange, funny Miss Reed (who dresses like a boy) and her husband sleep in one of the guard-house rooms but rarely retire to it until dawn, the same time Lev rises for his morning exercise. Joe and Reba still have their apartment, and take field trips to its bathroom. For everyone else the clock is ruled by quick dashes and rationed cups of coffee. Lorenzo and the other three guards have been known to piss over the side of the roof, declaring that the GPU must be defeated by every known weapon. But some weapons they hold in reserve. The competition of morning is not for the weak-hearted.

The secret hour is seven forty-five. Lev has long finished his ablutions by then, and Natalya as well. The late risers are no threat as yet, and the morning shift are still holding off, respecting Natalya’s privacy. It’s possible then to slip from the dining room into Lev and Natalya’s wing, tiptoe through Lev’s study. Lev will soon be in there, as surely as the map of Mexico will be on the wall. But at seven forty-five he’s still outside feeding the chickens.

The narrow bathroom runs alongside Lev’s study and bedroom under a tin shed roof, added on the house some time between Porfirio Diaz and modern plumbing. Its fixtures stand in a row like soldiers at attention: the bathtub on clawed feet, the lavatory on its pedestal, the cabinet with Lev’s medicines and everyone’s shaving things in a jumble. The pitcher and bowl on a stand. The dreadful hairy rug someone should throw out. Lev should write a paper: “The Political Challenge of a Commonly Held Bathroom: No One Has the Authority to Throw Out the Rug.” And at the end, the captain of this army: the commode. Its tank above, the pull chain awaiting the private’s salute.

Rather than exiting by the door into Lev’s study (he might be there now), it’s less awkward to exit through the empty end room Natalya calls “Seva’s room,” still hoping their orphan grandson can be brought here from Paris. For now it houses a wooden wardrobe of coats and jackets. This morning it also contained Natalya, standing at the laundry table folding a pile of Lev’s striped silk pajamas. Awkwardness sometimes cannot be escaped.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

It seemed necessary to say something else. “Lev has a lot of pajamas.”

“Yes, he does.”

“Nice ones. Most people don’t dress as well, even during the day.”

She said, “Most people don’t have to think of dying in their pajamas. And being photographed for the papers.”

“Dear God.”

“Don’t apologize. We’re accustomed.” She lifted her eyes briefly, a pair of gray stones, then looked back to her work. “I’ve been wanting to tell someone, and probably rather than Van, I should mention this to you. His blood pressure is higher.”

“Lev’s blood pressure? How high?”

“Extremely. The doctor yesterday was very worried.”

“Is Lev worried?”

She folded the last pajama. “Lev thinks a bullet will find him before the stroke arrives. If that answers your question.”

“But you wanted someone else to know. Understandably.”

“Probably there’s nothing you can do. He gets terrible headaches.”

“He seems calm.”

“Oh yes, Lev is calm, calm is Lev. What I said about wearing good pajamas when he is murdered. It’s not photographs he worries about. I don’t mean he is vain. I just cannot think of the word. My English.”

“The word is dignity, maybe?”

“Dignity, yes.”

“He could rest a little more. He’s out every morning taking care of the chickens, but any of us could do that.”

“Oh, he is crazy for those animals. I haven’t seen him so affectionate for something since Benno and Stella. Two dogs we had in France.” She grew quiet, visiting memories of dogs, and maybe living children. “I think the animals relieve him,” she said finally. “Something in the world he can keep safe.”

“But maybe it wouldn’t hurt to offer some help?”

“Yes. To you, he might listen. He calls you ‘son.’ You notice it, of course.”

“Of course. Lev has a large heart. He’s father to the whole world, it seems.”

“He said he finds you steadying.”

“He does?”

“In your manner you resemble Sergei. He wouldn’t have mentioned that, but it’s true. Sergei was quiet. Always paying attention. He was for the good of other people.”

“You must miss him. All of them.”

She shook her head side to side, looking out the window, her lips tightly closed.

Outside, the morning was cool, with puddles still standing from a rain in the night. In the far corner of the courtyard against a blaze of red bougainvilleas covering the wall, Lev stood in a circle of hens. He tossed out grain and clucked softly in some form of gallinaceous Russian, apparently engrossed. He looked up, startled.

“Oh! Have you come asking my friends for proof of their dedication?”

“No eggs needed just now. Breakfast is nearly ready.”

“Now you see, I was thinking, the hens make only a collective contribution. But the rabbits are fully dedicated, when called to serve. We may have two factions here.”

“Like the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.”

He pursed his lips and nodded. “The Omelletscheviks. And the Hassenpfefferviks.”

“Natalya thought you might need help with the animals.”

“No, no.” The flat shovel was out of the tool rack, leaning against the rabbit hutch beside a filled manure bucket. He had cleaned the little shed where the hens roost at night. Later he would take the manure and bury it around the garden.

“You’re a very great thinker, sir. You shouldn’t be doing farm work.”

“You’re wrong about that, my son. Everyone should do farm work. Your name is Shepherd. Did you ever tend sheep?”

“No, sir.”

He took the shovel in hand, watching the hens make their excursionary expeditions into the garden. “Do you know that Stalin is murdering farmers now?”

“Why?”

“His idea for feeding the masses is to create enormous farms. Like factories, with vast machines and armies of unskilled labor. Rather than trust the wisdom of men of the land. He’s imprisoning yeoman farmers, trying to destroy their class.”

One of the hens caught a lizard, and it writhed wildly in her beak. She ran helter-skelter with all the others in zealous pursuit. Their aptitude for carnivory was impressive.

“That is enough talk of Stalin before breakfast. My young friend Shepherd with no sheep. I meant what I said. Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don’t respect his work?”

Lev carefully folded the garment he wears to greet the animals each day: an ancient green cardigan with holes at the elbows. Evidently he does not expect to be assassinated while feeding chickens. Or it’s his best hope. He took off his glasses and turned his face to the sun for a moment, boots planted wide, the peasant brow facing heaven. He looked the very image of the People’s Revolution in one of Diego’s murals. Then the former president of the Petrograd Soviet put away the manure shovel and went to his breakfast.

 

Today Van was married. Who could have imagined it two years ago, this very day, on a painted picnic boat in the canals of Xochimilco? Frida was correct, of course, Van didn’t need the trapanovio to catch his true love. Nor did Lev, it seems. He holds hands with Natalya, and together they stand on the deck of this ocean liner, a ship with trustworthy friends and cactuses planted in its hold, and they watch the sun set behind the high wall that encloses them. Frida has been less lucky in love or anything else, declining to get out of bed for weeks now. Her body threatens to fold up shop, and good riddance, she says, since Diego no longer wants it.

Van and his American girl Bunny were wed this morning in city hall, in the nuptial office whose door happens to be directly under Diego’s mural of the ancient Mayans harvesting cacao, though the lovers probably didn’t notice. They plan to move soon to an apartment in New York. Natalya shed a few tears, as tiny and undramatic as her black shoes. She has always known she would lose this son, along with every other.

Lev was more jovial, congratulating the couple with formal toasts and Russian love poems recited from memory. Bunny wore a crown of twined flowers, some old-world notion of Natalya’s, and somehow procured a bag of Van’s beloved licorice for a wedding present. In the courtyard he stood blue-eyed beside his bride making disheveled toasts, absent his shoes for some reason. When Bunny reached on tiptoe to set her floral crown on Van’s head, he smiled so broadly his molars gleamed. So grateful for her affection. He has no idea that everything about him can stop a heart: his shrug, like a little Dutch boy, shoulders raised high and then dropped. His beautiful white feet.

Celebrations are rare in this house, maybe all the more joyful for that reason. And if joy did not fill every quarter, at least no one spent the whole day cooking.

 

Britain has entered the war. Winston Churchill sent an Expeditionary Force into France, thousands of soldiers to defend the Maginot Line and prevent all of Europe falling to Hitler. Every evening after the plates are cleared, Lev turns on the radio receiver, and everyone goes quiet. All the boisterous opinions that normally fill this room are quashed by one thin voice quivering out of the air from some other world into the yellow-painted dining room. Why should Lev believe the wireless reports, when all others fail him? He struggles with the question himself. But is so hungry for knowledge, he casts his net wide and picks through the catch, hoping he can tell fish from flotsam.

It seemed impossible that this singular man, Hitler, could pull the whole world into the cauldron of his ambitions. Now it’s only a question of the order in which nations are pulled. And what unexpected arrangements, as nations find themselves shoulder to shoulder with others, or face to face against: Canadians on the soil of France, Germans in Poland, Russians and Finns on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Even in the horror of war, Lev is optimistic; he says it will make internationalists of us all. A modernized proletariat will unite, because war so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

“Surely the French munitions worker can see how his labors fill the pockets of war financiers in the city of London.” He says the factory worker and peasant of every nation will discover that their common enemy is the factory owner, exploiting their labor, keeping them poor and powerless.

But this boy in a French or British factory, standing in his leather overall welding the casing on a metal bomb: what can he see? That thing will fly through the air, fall hundreds of miles away, and kill boys in leather overalls in a German factory. The reports will roar victory or defeat, and boys will never know how alike their lives have been.

 

Seva has arrived from Paris, to put his arms around his grandparents for the first time in his memory. He calls Lev “Monsieur Grandfather,” it breaks Natalya’s heart. The Rosmers, who brought him, are their oldest friends: Alfred the cartoon Frenchman with his long neck, moustache, and beret, and round Marguerite, clasping everyone to her bosom. Lev says he and Alfred have fought Stalin together since Prinkipo. The Rosmers will stay some months now in Mexico, they are renting a house. France is uncertain, to say the least, and the boy needs time to adjust. He’s lived with the Rosmers most of the time since Zinaida died, after Marguerite located him in a religious orphanage. Lev never talks about any of that. Zinaida was his eldest, the story unfolds a little at a time: tuberculosis, leaving the USSR with her baby for treatment in Berlin. Her visa revoked by Stalin, the husband Platon disappearing in a prison camp.

Seva is now thirteen, a tall schoolboy in short pants and leather sandals. He speaks Russian and French and not a word of Spanish, and walks carefully around the courtyard watching the hummingbirds that hover at the red flowers. Marguerite wanted to know what they are called. In France, she said, they don’t have such things. It must be true, because Seva dashed in red-faced with excitement over the creature. Marguerite made him slow down so she could translate his desires. A net or a pillowcase, he wanted. Anything in which he could capture it.

Natalya hugged him hard, already torn with remorse over the forces that govern this family. “No, Seva, you won’t be allowed to capture it,” she said. “Your grandfather believes in freedom.”

Folded into an envelope, it was another letter left lying in the office for someone to see, this time not an accident. With Van’s name typed on the outside, and then for good measure the address also, it looked like one of the endless messages delivered in the courier’s bag. A memorandum to be filed. A cowardly disguise, yes, but who in this world who ever wrote a love poem wants to stand by blushing while the lover reads it? Such things should be tucked in a coat pocket and read in a different room, or somewhere else altogether. He and Bunny leave tonight on the evening train.

His valises were all packed and his mind too; he seemed halfway in New York when he came into the office looking for his black shoes. He took the jacket off the peg by the door, one last time, and put it on as he always does, shifting it across his shoulders to get it settled. The shoes were located, absurdly, on top of the file cabinet. Probably set there by Natalya when she swept.

“Well, comrade Shepherd. We have had a go at the world together in this little headquarters, have we not?”

“We have. It has been very great, Van. You taught me worlds of things. It’s hard to say how much.”

He shrugged. Glanced at the envelope on the corner of the desk. “More filing, on a Sunday?”

“I think it’s old, maybe from Friday.”

“But it’s for me, you’re sure? Not for the commandant?”

“It’s your name on it. Probably just a news clip or something. It couldn’t be very important.”

He smiled and shook his head, sliding his eyes toward the dining room where Lev plowed his way through the daily quotient of newspapers. “Long live the Revolution and work that never ends. But mine here is done.”

He dropped the envelope in the wastepaper basket.

 

The rains have ended. Soon the migrant birds will come back from the north.

The Trotskyist Party in the United States continues to send migrants too, a small, steady flow of young men eager to work for Lev. They are good boys with plenty of heart and muscle, put to work mostly as rooftop guards and kitchen help. Socialist Workers, they call their party, and most are from what they call the “Downtown Branch” in New York. Jake and Charlie were first to arrive, with a fat, smuggled envelope of cash, support from the worldwide movement that is well put to use in this household. As was the bottle of brandy they produced in time for Van’s wedding.

The newest one is Harold, who “bunks” with Jake and Charlie, speaking their same language of conk and dig me and togged to the bricks. Mother would have adored these boys, though she’d probably lose patience with their praise for the common man.

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.”

What a vast tapestry Lev must have woven in sixty years of living, the meetings of minds and bodies, armies of joined hands and pledged oaths—and now this household is nearly all that’s left of it. Only these few could tell a story of him from memory when he is gone. It’s such a small measure to stack against the mountain of newsprint fables, the Villain in Our Midst. What will people find in libraries one day, if they go looking? So little hope he will be honestly remembered. No future history in this man.

Today he turned over a handwritten letter to be typed. It seemed more private than public, some sort of will or testament. The heading said only: “February 27, 1940.”

“For forty-three years of my thinking life I have been a revolutionary; for forty-two of those years I fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to start all over again, I would of course try to avoid this or that error, but the general course of my life would remain unchanged. I will die a proletarian revolutionist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is firmer today than it was in the days of my youth.

“Natalya has just come up from the courtyard and opened my window so the air may come in. I can see a wide strip of green grass along the wall, the pale blue sky above, and sunlight on everything. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

 

Natalya declared today it was time for a “walk.” It’s the name she and Lev use for outings, long drives into the country where Lev can scramble through cactus-filled ravines while Natalya spreads a picnic blanket in a grapefruit grove. “He needs to get out of this coffin,” she said at breakfast, even though she worries herself sick whenever he leaves the fortress. But she knows his hungers. With every passing month lived outside of Frida’s shadow, Natalya seems to be more of a person, a wife. That blue house was a mouth that swallowed her down. Or a dark necessity they passed through together.

Some words that have meaning in this house: Forgiveness. Trust.

As the Commissar of Picnick, she commanded the kitchen troops in the packing of lunch, while the Steering Committee of Outings spread out maps on the dining room table and made a reconnaissance. Keeping to deserted roads would be safe. They decided on Cuernavaca, by a route that would afford good views of the volcanos Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl. It was noted that the American Faction would amuse the Mexican Faction by trying to pronounce these names.

The Rosmers were telephoned, as this adventure would require two automobiles: the old Ford on permanent loan from Diego, and their friend Jacson’s Buick. He appears willing to take his friends anywhere on short notice, probably because he likes being inside that immense car. Reba and Joe, Miss Reed, Lorenzo, food, wine, blankets, and one machine gun all fit in the Buick, along with the Rosmers. In the smaller Ford, the bodyguards Alejandro and Melquiades crammed into the front seat with the driver, who contained his displeasure with the cantankerous Ford. (Oh, for Diego’s Chevrolet Roadster, its powerful engine and smooth gearshift.) Lev and Natalya sat in back with their excited grandson, and the equally wide-eyed lad Sheldon, newest volunteer from the States.

Lev kept his head down as always, lying across the others’ laps in the back seat until the car was well outside the city, climbing a dirt road out of the dusty central valley. Large stretches of land lay uncultivated, studded with spiny plants fiercely defending their territory from no one who wanted it. Stockmen in wide-rimmed hats rode along the roadsides driving their cattle, whose large, down-turned ears gave them a look of hopeless sadness in the inhospitable landscape. Nopal plantations and occasional sugarcane fields gave the only glimpses of green.

“Shepherd, I was thinking,” Lev said, after it was deemed safe for him to sit up and look about. “We should always have a second driver in the vehicle. Do you think you could teach Melquiades?”

“Yes, sir.” Lev meant: in case the first driver is shot by a sniper. The passengers would need the protection of escape. It’s the kind of horror Lev needs to anticipate and solve daily, like working out the finances or fixing a broken hinge.

In time the road gained purchase on the shoulder of the mountain. Rolling fields of brown grass and oaks gave way to dry pine forest. The plan was to avoid the city of Cuernavaca, taking rugged roads to a gorge near Amecameca. The day was jueves santo, the Thursday before Easter, so every village church in the land was cloaked in a purple drape, mourning the dead Christ who was expected to return shortly. Alejandro crossed himself each and every time a church was passed. He did it inconspicuously, probably embarrassed in the present company: just a tiny movement of a curled hand at his chest, the smallest possible gesture that might still be visible to a sharp-eyed God.

At certain bends in the road, the pine forests opened onto breathtaking views of Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl, the dazzling snowy peaks of the twin volcanoes. “Killer!” Sheldon sighed from the back seat. This boy was already known to Jake and Charlie when he arrived, from “the Downtown Branch,” and had never traveled outside New York before. Now he remarked on each vista, as unfailingly driven to it as Alejandro was to cross himself at each church. “Popo, po—” Sheldon tried, and gave up, which was just as well. The others were tired of laughing.

“Try Cuernavaca,” offered Seva, into whose mouth both Spanish and English have run like water in a faucet, since the day the Rosmers brought him.

“Cornavaca! Thanks, pal! And now I think I’m done in for the day.”

The little boy is especially fond of Sheldon, quick to come to his defense when the other guards tease. It’s no wonder Seva wants to follow him around, Sheldon is such a good joe: first to volunteer for the worst guard shifts, never taking offense at a joke, never taking a second pan dulce off the plate until they’ve gone around. On his first great adventure, Mexico has struck Sheldon star-eyed. Mexico, he says, is keen.

“The Aztecs called the city Cuauhnahuac,” Lev said. “It means, ‘near the woods.’” Who knows where Lev learns such things? He reads everything.

“But Grandfather, Cuernavaca means cow horn, yes?” Seva asked. “Why did the Spaniards change it?”

Melquiades suggested that the Azteca changed it themselves to keep from laughing to death when they heard the Spaniards try to say “Cuauhnahuac.”

The destination was a forested ravine with a shaded glen and a cold, rushing stream for swimmers with strong hearts. Lev took his grandson on a hike and they came back triumphant, Lev carrying his burlap-wrapped prize like a stout log over his shoulder. It was his favorite cactus, the viejito, “little old man” they call it because it grows long white hair instead of spines. Melquiades and Lorenzo together hefted the cactus into the trunk of the Buick and swear it weighed thirty kilos, at least. Stalin and high blood pressure notwithstanding, Lev may outlive us all.

His happiness, when it comes to him, is so pure. He has a ridiculous old straw hat he wears only for these outings. No one could remember when they’d seen it last, or his smile. Or the camera. For a change, here was a day worth remembering, and Lev wanted to record everything: Natalya and Marguerite on a blanket at the feet of pines, setting out plates of batter-fried chicken. Natalya in her little brimmed hat, seated on a rock by the water, smiling at the camera. The bodyguards clowning. Seva in his swim trunk posing on the cliff for a high dive he did not—under a hail of alarmed Russian from Natalya—actually execute. Sheldon took the camera and made Lev get in most of the photographs. Of the many vicissitudes to be recorded that day, most important was Lev’s joy.

An hour before sundown the party elected an Executive Committee of Packing Up, and everything went into the cars. A white egret picked through the minor leavings of lunch strewed on the ground. This bird had spent the afternoon stalking snails along the riverbank, ignoring the acrobatics of bodyguards leaping off rocks, shaking water from their ears, and complaining of frozen cojones. It looked like the same bird that strangely appeared in the courtyard of the Blue House, the day Lev left it. That day had felt like a sad, terrible pageant: the Children of God cast from Eden. But it was not Eden; that leavetaking was a good one for Lev and Natalya. And of course the egret today looked like that other one. All egrets look the same.

 

Of all things, a letter has come from Father. Dated in April but arrived today in May, on Mother’s birthday, by strange coincidence. Its arrival at all is a miracle; it was addressed to the house in San Angel, care of Diego, and anything that falls to the care of Diego could well be shoved under the leg of a wobbling table, or put in a sandwich. That address must have been sent him by Mother years ago, when she was still living.

Father didn’t have a great deal to say. He was ill last year, and has bought a car. He mustered two paragraphs describing the car, and none of the illness. Synchromesh in the lower gears, floor-mounted shift lever and clutch on the floor. A Chevrolet Roadster like Diego’s, apparently, but a later model, and white. He closed with the hope that Mother’s passing might provide occasion for a closer rapport between father and son. Rather than use his own address, because he said he intended to be leaving his apartment shortly, he gave the address of his solicitor, located on I Street in Washington, D.C.

“A closer rapport” could mean, for example, one letter in every year divisible by four. It’s worth considering.

24 May

They must have parked somewhere down Viena Street and crept toward the house, two hours before dawn. The men wore city police uniforms, Lorenzo swears, so he was confused when they approached in the usual friendly way and then forced his arms behind his back, tying and gagging him. Alejandro was near the gate on the other side, taken at the same time in the same way. They held a pistol to his head and asked about locations of the telephone lines. He told them nothing, but the men still found and cut them quickly, along with the new electric alarm. They knocked on the gate, and Sheldon opened it, not understanding Alejandro’s distress when he gave the password at gunpoint, or perhaps failing to ask for it. Alejandro can’t clearly remember.

The gunmen rushed through into the courtyard, opening fire on the guardhouse where the thunder of machine guns woke everybody at once. Round after round also went through the windows of the main house into Lev and Natalya’s bedroom. The tat-tat-tat kept going, for as long as it took to scramble under a bed in the blackness, feel the cold floor, and consider the end of life. Outside in the courtyard was a peculiar glow, not the moon or the streetlight. The air smelled of gunpowder, and then came the scent of riot gas—a bizarre memory. Incendiary bombs, thrown into the house.

Natalya and Lev had rolled onto the floor beside their bed and lay flat. Natalya says she kept her hand on Lev’s chest the whole time, to know if his heart was beating. The doorway from their room to Seva’s filled with flames. A black silhouette of a man appeared there for a few seconds. They watched him raise a pistol and fire, four times, into the blankets that lay in a jumbled pile on their bed.

Seva, Seva, she said when the phantom had gone, Seva must be dead or they’ve taken him. It was the most horrible sound, and also a terrible relief, when she heard her grandson scream. She crawled to the doorway and found him bleeding from his foot, under his bed. He was already there, he said, when he’d seen the man’s feet come in. The gunman had fired into Seva’s bed too. One bullet went through, striking Seva’s foot.

One at a time, the bodies in the guard house stood up from the floor, put their hands on their own heartbeats, and struggled to put life back on like a suit of clothes ripped away. Every body alive. We have survived. Only Sheldon is missing. Alejandro believes he might have been shot—he thinks he saw him collapsed by the gate, maybe dragged away by the assailants. Seva won’t stop asking where he is. If we are alive, he insists, then Sheldon is alive.

Lorenzo says the man who nearly broke his arms out on the street was a person he recognized. Wearing a false moustache, but it was the muralist, Diego’s old friend who became his enemy: Alfaro Siqueiros. No one quite believes it. But Lorenzo is not a fanciful man, and he is sure.

The police came today and used kitchen knives to dig the lead slugs from the walls of Lev’s bedroom. Seventy-six bullets. The pocked, crumbling wall, what’s left of it, looks like the face of a leper. Bullet holes only centimeters from Lev’s pillow. The officers worked all day, collecting evidence. The survivors stood in the ruined courtyard blinking at the light, with eyes unprepared to see the life that is spared into their custody.

 

Survival, by itself, is not reason enough to rejoice. If life was a suit of clothes momentarily ripped away and put back on, the tearing has ruined it. Today seems harder than yesterday. Night is worse than day, and day is bad. No one has slept. The whistle of a teakettle causes every heart to lurch. Natalya’s arms are bandaged, she burned them putting out the fire in Seva’s bed. She sits in a chair with tears in her eyes, holding her arms forward as if to embrace a ghost. Lev paces, his thoughts scrambled. With so many others already dead, he must see this assault as a rehearsal for the inevitable. Everyone else in the house must surely harbor secret thoughts of leaving here. Those thoughts layer the misery of guilt upon the misery of terror.

Lorenzo is furious over the breach, and now tediously repeats the security drills everyone knows too well already. “When the horse is gone, it’s too late to shut up the barn,” Lev warns gloomily. “They won’t come by the front gate next time.” But Lorenzo can’t stop himself, driven by anger or embarrassment at his failure. “When the bell rings for changing the night guard, the man inside is to pull one bolt only. Are you listening? One bolt only! The bolt that opens the grille. Ask the pass word. If correct, the entrant may pass only into the vestibule.” But the vestibule is controlled by an electric button, and the electricity was cut. Alejandro was blind with panic. And whatever Sheldon’s excuse for opening the gate, he can’t defend it.

The newspapers have been unspeakable. They say it was a pantomime, mounted by Trotsky himself to gain publicity. The police questioned everyone here, and poor Alejandro they held for two days, probably guessing his vulnerability. Keeping him awake, shoving a rifle butt into his shoulder, the police interrogated him about the so-called fake attack: if it had been real, they asked again and again, how could anyone have survived it? How could seventy bullets fill a room, and every one miss its mark?

In desperate logic, Alejandro pointed out that Seva was actually hit. It was only on the toe, but still. If this were staged, what grandfather would choose a child as victim?

The police reported his words to the press, neatly turned: The ruthless villain chose his innocent grandchild as the victim in his charade! In their haste to repeat the scurrilous story, some of the papers even reported Seva dead.

Alejandro is beside himself now, feeling that he caused these vicious reports. He was never quick to come to words, but now he won’t ask for coffee at the breakfast table. He is wrung out and sick over his poisoned words, and may not speak again.

28 May

The Rosmers have departed for home, or whatever they find in Europe. Marguerite looked miserable to be leaving her friends at this moment, not so concerned with France’s upheaval, as with Natalya’s. But the passage is booked and can’t be changed. But good news—when they came to the house this morning to say good-bye, they managed to talk Natalya into coming with them as far as the seaport. A small vacation on the coast. Reba went with her, they will come back next week on the train. Natalya’s burns are almost healed. She didn’t want to part from Lev, but he insisted. This is perfect, they don’t even have to take the train to Veracruz: Jacson agreed to drive them in his beautiful Buick, of course.

The good-byes in the courtyard were unmercifully long. Every kiss now between Lev and Natalya is heavy with grief. And Marguerite hugs everyone twice. By the time it all finished they had nearly lost their driver. Jacson was finally located in the house with Seva, playing with a model glider.

25 June

Sheldon Harte has been found, in the village of Tlalminalco, at a house owned by relatives of Siqueiros. Seva hasn’t been told yet, but his friend Sheldon will not be back. The police found him under four feet of quicklime in the bottom of a pit.

Thirty people have been arrested, including Siqueiros, though he will probably be allowed to leave the country. The Mexican newspapers are calling him a “half-mad artist” and “irresponsible pirate.” Guilt and blame in this story are already established—Trotsky did it himself—and so finding a true culprit creates some awkwardness. In a strange extension of their logic, one newspaper suggested the mad painter had sold himself to Trotsky, who paid him for the simulated attack. “The simulated attack,” no longer even posed as a speculation, but the fact of the matter. Once a truth is established in newsprint, none other can exist.

Sheldon was a good joe. A friend: one more word that has sprouted leaves of meaning in Casa Trotsky.

 

Diego is gone, already in San Francisco. While the police were busy avoiding any trail that actually led to the Stalinist culprits, they accused Diego of participating in the attack. Now the charge is moot, with Siqueiros in custody, but the presses are locked in their own frenzy: the much-discussed painter a murderer! What reporter could contain his enthusiasm for that particular theory? Diego had to leave without a farewell, and Lev is sad of it. Through all its stages, the camaraderie of these men is remarkable.

Now Lorenzo is behaving like a madman: he installed metal doors three inches thick, on both entrances to Lev and Natalya’s bedroom. Lev says going to bed now is like getting in a submarine. Lorenzo also has drawn up plans for a bomb-proof redoubt, three new brick turrets to overlook the streets, and barriers of barbed wire and mesh that will withstand grenade attacks.

Lev is plainly tired of mentioning the barn and the horse already escaped. He says they won’t come in the same way again. “Lorenzo, my friend, if they were that foolish, you would have nothing to worry about.”

 

The gloom may yet lift. Natalya has taken out her summer dresses finally, and put away her ancient Russian fur-trimmed coats. Of course, the weather in this city is exactly the same in any month, give or take a chance of rain. Yet Natalya follows the seasons scrupulously, wearing light-colored prints in the spring, dark coats in autumn. Her sense of order is still ruled by the weather of Paris, or Moscow. And because of it, she survives. Lev survives. The past is all we know of the future.

 

Another good sign: Natalya accepted guests for tea. In the Melchor market Reba ran into the faithful chauffeur Jacson and his girlfriend Sylvia. On a whim she suggested they stop by, so Natalya could thank Jacson for driving them all to Veracruz. Reba worried whether it was right to ask without Lev’s permission, but Natalya said of course it was fine, the Rosmers have known Sylvia for years and Jacson has shown a thousand kindnesses in recent months. Natalya seemed to enjoy Sylvia and Jacson. She said they should come again, bringing a little diversion into this fortress.

Lev seems to have his own opinion of the couple. He took an unusually long time to check on the chickens before coming in to join the visitors for tea. Natalya grew a little exasperated and sent a messenger to get him.

“Pardon, sir, but your wife is wondering why it would take forty-five minutes to feed eleven hens.”

“Tell Natalya these hens are more interesting company than her guests. No, no, don’t tell her that. He’s a good sort, this Jacson. But he fancies himself a writer.”

“What’s he writing?”

“Well, that’s the problem. He doesn’t know. He showed me a draft. It’s supposed to be some sort of analysis, Schachtman’s theory of the Third Camp. But really it’s a tedious mess. His thinking is very shallow, if he’s thinking at all.”

“Oh.”

“And he’ll want me to critique it.”

“That’s difficult.”

“Difficult. Oh, my son. I have faced the GPU and the gulag. But somehow I cannot face a young man who has been very kind to my wife, and say to him, ‘Well, my friend, you are a shallow thinker. And tedious.’”

“Would you like me to tell Natalya the hens are extremely hungry today?”

He sighed, rattling the grain scoop. The hens tilted their heads, watching his every move. “Look at this. In 1917 I commanded an army of five million men. Now I command eleven hens. Not even a rooster at my service.”

“More often than not, Commissar, it’s the roosters that give the trouble.”

He chuckled.

“If you’d like a little help with passing the time here, sir, I have a question to ask you. About being commander of the Soviet. I’ve been wanting to ask for a long time.”

“Well, then, don’t wait. The doctor says my blood pressure is through the roof. What can this question be?”

“Diego told me you were meant to succeed Lenin. You were his second in command, with the people’s support. You would have led the revolution to a democratic Soviet Republic.”

“This is the case.”

“Then why did Stalin come to power instead of you? The books say ‘an unsettled transition,’ that kind of thing. But Diego said it differently.”

“How did he say it?”

“An accident of history. Like a coin toss, that could have gone either way.”

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.