Leon Trotsky
Coyoacan, August 1940
It is a few weeks after the violence of election day and the gun battles in the street. Finally the results have been announced. Trotsky thinks of the articles he should write about this election. He is still annoyed that Life magazine wanted to interview him, wanted Robert Capa to take photos of him, and yet they had refused to publish his article on Stalin a few months before, claiming it to be libellous.
Twelve months earlier he had argued with Diego Rivera about the election candidates. They had fallen out over Rivera's support for Almazan, the bourgeois candidate who had the backing of American oil interests.
It had been an accumulation of things, this falling-out.
One time, early on, Diego thought to help by feeding the rabbits for him at the Casa Azul. Trotsky came upon Diego at the hutch and launched into an attack - what business did he have with the rabbits? No one knew the rabbits like he did. No one was as well qualified to feed them. How could Diego know their particularities, their peculiar needs? Diego had crossed the line of friendship. This was exactly the sort of behaviour that was the ruin of the Mexican section. "Stay with your walls," Trotsky told him. "That's how you serve us best." The Old Man tantrumed, threw down his gloves.
Diego was bewildered and hurt. He shut the mesh door, his short fat fingers (like sausages, said Frida) carefully bolting the rabbits in. "To hell with your rabbits," he muttered sotto voce, but loud enough for the Old Man to hear, and gathered his hippopotamus body about himself and moved away, fiercely stroking the green-and-red parrot on his shoulder.
It was a prelude to the break between them.
Ah, the incident with the rabbits! Lev Davidovich reflected on how right he had been about Diego's rampant individualism. There had been Diego's insistence that he have a key role in the Mexican section of the Fourth International, a role for which he was ill-suited. Diego did not have the discipline to be an organiser. He was an artist. It was as simple as that.
Then of course there had been the unstated - Frida - between them. A memory from that time returns, before the split with Diego . . . A few months after the af- fair . . . Frida sits in Diego's lap laughing and curled up like a kitten. She blows at the red feather in Diego's felt hat and looks over at Lev Davidovich with her chin upturned and her eyes half closed. He feels the feather vibrate and looks away from the memory of the full red mouth and the red feather, falling momentarily into his own sadness.
He draws himself back. He does not want to think about the Mexican elections, about the break with Diego, about the refusal of Life magazine to accept his article.
Instead his mind turns to his last visit to the market with Frida.
It was the Day of the Dead. Frida had parted the crowds before them. They had approached Senora Rosita's stall. Mountains of sugar skulls rose up. A child lay on a rough blanket next to the stall; she held tiny sugar skulls up to her eyes like looking-glasses, elbows rightangled.
Senora Rosita welcomes them warmly, remembers him from the time when she had read his palms. She searches through a large bag of metal objects at the back of the stall. She draws a small rectangle from the bag, which he recognises as a milagro, a small square of tin, a devotional object. Frida and Diego have hundreds of such objects hammered to their walls. Senora Rosita presents him with a small square of tin embossed in the shape of a heart. For your protection. Frida smiles. Two bodyguards flank them. Trotsky laughs and remonstrates with Rosita. "Thank you, thank you," he says and then points at the bodyguards, "but you can see, I have enough protection." But he keeps the milagro in his hand, undecided. He is suddenly reminded of Andre Breton's visit - Breton prising old retablos and milagros from the walls of village churches around Mexico, pocketing them. How this had outraged Trotsky, the disrespect of it. At the point of declining the gift from Senora Rosita and therefore declining superstition, Trotsky accepts the gift, on impulse, moved by Rosita's concern. He accepts her gift because it affirms something about his stay in Mexico, the warmth, the hospitality; Frida. It is his way of repaying something, a cultural debt. He accepts the milagro that day, and Senor Rosita smiles hugely, halfway around her face, the gold teeth that Frida had paid for gleaming in the sunlight.
With the milagro in his hand he is reminded of a heavy gilt cross that once lay in the vestibule to his Kremlin office. It was 1922. He had chaired the commission to requisition valuables from the Church. They had eventually sold off the cross to a German banker. It had been a necessary act, to obtain money for the Treasury; to sell off, melt down, destroy Church artefacts, to put pressure on the reactionary clergy.
At that time, and later, there had been excesses. Overzealous comrades. Of course. In a revolutionary period, there would always be excesses.
Sixteen years later, he holds the tiny milagro in his hand as firmly as he had once flung the ornate crucifix on to a pile in the Kremlin.
As he remembers this trip to the market with Frida, he rehearses, still, over and over what he would say if ever they met again by chance. Although his world is less and less governed by chance these days, every moment accounted for, everything organised, no random happenings.
Such thoughts about the recent past preoccupy him. He gets out of bed, tries not to disturb Natalia and goes through into the study. On these sleepless nights, he turns once again to the biography of Stalin. But he has no passion for it. His heart is split, like a tree hit by lightning. In these last days, he is as preoccupied with questions of love and friendship as he is with questions of the coming war. More and more he turns back to such questions and their meaning. He remembers a chance remark at a meeting of the Politburo, when Lenin was still alive, and someone - Rakovsky? Could it be? - someone had declared Engels to be superior to Marx.
Trotsky, intrigued, had demanded: "As a thinker?"
"No," came the reply, "as a human being."
The remark stayed with him. Engels and Marx. The two of them together greater than the sum of their parts produced one of the most resonant first lines in political history:
"A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism . . ."
How that line still thrilled him. And it was a line born out of shared experience, out of friendship. There was now no one alive who shared his memories of the revolution. Of the civil war. No one alive from the time of his most intense friendships and collaborations. Rakovsky, once his dear friend, had denounced him. Trotsky remembered a beloved photograph of his friend. It showed Rakovsky relaxed, looking straight at the camera, arms folded, face open and intelligent. It was a photograph that had accompanied Trotsky everywhere in his exile, but after the news of Rakovsky's trial, he shredded it and handed it to one of his secretaries to dispose of.
And if it was Christian Rakovsky who had made that statement about Engels, Trotsky wonders, perhaps it had been intended as a veiled attack on himself? Was Rakovsky saying all those years ago that Trotsky, like Marx, neglected those closest to him? Made intolerable demands upon them? Maybe it was a fair comparison. Maybe he had no talent for love or intimacy. Maybe Rakovsky was telling him this, thereby laying the grounds for betrayal years later? Such thoughts tormented him in the early hours. It was preposterous, Trotsky knew. But insomnia made his thoughts turn, unexpectedly, down paths of fear and confusion and hurt.
Beriya, Molotov, Khrushchev . . . Sometimes he intones the names of the members of Stalin's Politburo, over and over, in an effort to lull himself to sleep. But in his head this night is her voice lowly calling those names, calling her xolotl dogs, seven of them named after Politburo members. He shakes his head at the memory of those dogs, the way they always growled at his approach and how he would turn helplessly towards Frida, as the dogs circled him: It's as if, with those names, they know . . .
"Yes," Frida said, "dogs know everything."
Lately, all his thoughts begin and end with Frida. His internal compass is awry. He can no longer distinguish between true north and magnetic north. Natalia and Frida. The red arrow of desire pointing in Frida's direction. The pull of her too great for him.
He had once said to her, his mind full of his rival, Diego: "I could take you away from him."
Only if I want to be taken away. She had looked at him then with a mixture of pity and challenge in her eyes, head thrown back, arms folded. Maybe it was his statement that had sent her away, had the opposite effect from the intention?
In the weeks with Frida, time had slowed down as it slows down when you travel very fast or sit in the presence of a strong gravitational field. The gravitational pull of the young woman bent time out of all known shape, and there were no longer days and weeks but only moments between one kiss and the next. In Einstein's physics, he knew, the future was out there waiting to be stepped into. The splash of a stone on water already ordained, the reflection of yourself in the water already contained in spacetime. All times co-existed. His time with Frida was out there still. And memory could touch it.
It was a mystery to him, how Frida could prefer her philandering frog of a husband to someone like himself. The mystery of attraction. The mystery of friendship. And sometimes he felt the cold shadow of the future touch him, prepare him for a time when there were no more mysteries.
Of all the emotions he had ever allowed himself, this longing was one of the most difficult. It confused him. He woke at night when the Nembutal wore off, his body held taut around his wife like a picture frame. And yet it was Frida who preoccupied him, not even in a sexual way, as he lay there, his arms enfolding Natalia. He was preoccupied beyond sex, beyond love, beyond the life he had built with his wife over half a century. Maybe he would never enjoy again that feeling of losing himself in the eyes of another, of seeing himself reflected larger than he was in a look that contained the appreciative roar of a crowd. A look that contained the steel hum of a train on its tracks, he in a blue carriage at the height of the civi war. A hero to himself. It was a half-century of appreciation that his wife carried within and was, if he looked closely, reflected in her actions every day. It was expressed in her concern for him, the way she poured his tea, the extension of her arm opening a window, her caress on the back of his neck. It was there in gestures so familiar. But it was not new to him; it was not fresh; his life sometimes felt as if it had shrunk to an audience of one - Natalia - and he was not always enamoured of this audience with its predictable responses, its singular clap.
In truth, he hankered for that larger audience, the unpredictability of the first night, emotion undulating and uncertain. In Frida he had sensed such an audience, an audience he had to work hard to convince, but not so hard as to find it tedious. Yes, in his private life sometimes he longed for an audience beyond Natalia, and in his brief time with Frida he had glimpsed it. He had seen himself new, had felt as if all the accumulations of his past had been rolled back in the body of a person much younger than himself who knew only the grandeur of him and none of its fading.
For Natalia knew the lustre. She knew, also, the efforts to maintain it, to polish. The effort, sometimes, to keep going.
The younger woman saw none of this, and this cheered him. Made him forget how much effort it took to rise again in the morning, preparing for battle, wondering if that day would be his last and, if that were the case, how best to live it.
He had seen himself reflected in Frida's eyes: handsome, virile, strong. With a great capacity for living. Not old.
Sometimes he saw himself in his wife's eyes. It was not always flattering. The man who stumbled in the half-light without his glasses, the man who required bottles of pills to sleep, the man irritable when things did not go his way.
He had never allowed Frida to see him without his glasses. When he had felt her gaze upon him, he had basked in it, like a seal in sunlight, sleek and glistening. Natalia had once looked at him like that. And he had responded.
Maybe that was the sum of private life? A reflex to a look from a beautiful woman. Was he so different from other men that he could resist such a look?
Guiltily he lifts his wife's nightdress. He strokes himself as he merges the images of the two women, loses himself in what he imagines is their double gaze of adoration.
And then he turns away in sadness at the realisation that perhaps the best of him is now past. He has lost the facility to stay in the present. He clutches at the blankets as Natalia stirs in her sleep, worried that all that is left of him is a past: of life, of love, of revolution.
And it was not so much desire that bothered him, plagued him, guilted through him. It was rather the memory of desire, the illicit deliciousness of it, and the loss of it.
The time with Frida had been the last time he had felt alive to his fingertips. Outside the blankets he stretched out his hands - felt the stiffening in the fingers, extended them until he felt what it meant to say life span, turned over the palms in the dawn light, felt what it meant to hold your life in your hands.
Was a life span really written in the hands, as Senora Rosita had once said? The breadth and the length? The veins weaving through?
He remembers Senora Rosita. The small intense woman with the broad high cheek-bones and the green cloth wound through her hair. He remembers her passion for her work. He remembers the conditions of her life: the dirt floor, the hammocks in the corners, the icons of Stalin and the Madonna in tin frames. The obsidian mirror. How such conditions, such a life, always convinced him of the necessity of struggle. How there was no other way.
He remembers desire at his fingertips. He would not feel such desire again, he was certain of it.
One day, there would be bullets and his body would be punctured through. Then he would know the meaning of life and desire. What was durable. What was transient. What his life had been worth.
Natalia lies sleeping. He watches her uneven breathing in the light coming through the curtains, the pallor of her skin grey. He notices the lines forming at the back of her neck. She has become an old woman and he does not know how this has happened. And he gets slowly out of bed and looks at himself in the mirror as a stranger might look at him and he sees himself as if for the first time, an ageing man slightly paunched, his white hair awry, faintly ridiculous in his pyjamas. He slumps back down on to the edge of the bed. He looks over at Natalia and feels confusion and love, her grey hair curling across her head like rain-clouds curling across a sky.
He leans over to touch her hair, still soft although the colour has leached from it. He loved a woman's hair most of all. It was the first thing he noticed. The weight and fall of it, the fragrance and texture of it.
Frida's hair had been heavy and straight and strong as twine. He had loved its glossy weight, piled up on her head or curtaining heavily down her back, ribboned, plaited, pleated, braids looped and looped again, like rope on a quayside. Every day her hair was different, and he came to expect this difference, to note the alterations from one day to the next. He had believed that she made a special effort for him. But he soon realised that it was for herself that Frida made such an effort: Every day I dress for paradise, she once said.
You are a different woman every day! He had marvelled at her self-invention, the time she took. So many different women! He felt that it would take him a lifetime to possess all the different women she contained. The challenge of it.
He thought of his wife's hair. The chestnut curls that had so captivated him in Paris all those years ago. His wife's hair was always the same. Bobbed and curling around her face, making her eyes seem large and vulnerable. His wife's appearance altered little from one day to the next, one period of exile to the next. It was that steadfast predictability that he so valued, that she would not alarm him with difference or caprice, would be there for him, smoothing his way before him.
How then, at this stage of his life, had he come to appreciate difference, ornamentation, and novelty?
A thousand times a day he enumerated and analysed these differences between his wife and Frida. But the conclusions defied rational thinking. There were no logical explanations. He felt lost. For as enamoured as he was by variety and difference he did not want to go back to a time in which he could not think clearly, had no will to write and felt tormented by a desire to see whether the object of his affection had braided her hair with ribbons that day or flowers.
It was absurd.
All his children had been taken from him. All his friends. He had no one left except Natalia. It did not feel enough. He felt numb. There was nothing except remembrance of desire.
He turned back to Natalia and wound one of her soft grey curls around his index finger. He wondered whether Natalia had ever experienced such guilt and torment, and felt jealousy and shame tear through him at the thought.
Natalia Ivanovna Sedova Coyoacan, September 1940
After his death, I think about everything between us. I think about the time of our separation, the anger crackling down the phone lines across the desert. How I felt as if I might never recover. How, after a lifetime in the service of Lev Davidovich, I knew nothing else.
I once had another life. In the early years of the revolution, I worked at the ministry for cultural enlightenment. I fought hard to preserve the art of the past - bourgeois art; many comrades opposed me. I once saved a Rembrandt from destruction. I believed we could not progress as a people without knowing the past. I had my triumphs, independent of Lev Davidovich.
Since then it seems his triumphs have been mine. His setbacks, his defeats also. As if we had become one organism with one heart, one lung - inhaling the world, attacking, defending and retreating. A shared life. In recent times, we felt no need for new people. We were both tired - of struggle, of the endless steps of visitors, of danger. Now the struggle is over, the tiredness is there, like a blanket around me, and I could sleep for a lifetime. L.D. always had trouble sleeping. At night I would measure out the tablets, enough to lull him under. My life was in the measuring.
I lie on our bed, weeping. Crying hard. The indentation of his head still on the pillow. I should be issuing statements, wielding the pen like a weapon. But I lie here, wondering whether it is all over now.
For we always assumed that I would survive him, outlive him; assist him if necessary in outwitting his pain. And I always went before him, easing his way. And now I am left behind - the survivor of the wreckage of our family. To have your children and your husband go before you . . . after a life of measuring and smoothing the path . . . I now want to put down this burden of survival - this terrible thing.
I could now sleep for a lifetime. But that is not what he would have wished. Last night, I took handfuls of Nembutal and fell into a sleep in which the past was more real than the present. I dreamt back to my time at the ministry. The incident Lev Davidovich threw back at me in our separation.
Was it a betrayal? In the dream, I was in the arms of a tall fair young man, 10 years my junior. We had been colleagues some 20 years before and, at the time, he had desired me. The young man had flattered me; had professed love for me. And yes, I remember one night working late. I remember the young man leaning to kiss me and I confessed that I, too, felt an attraction, but that my future was with Lev Davidovich.
Those were the facts. But in the dream last night, there was more than a kiss. Indeed, the young man was pushing inside me as we lay on the floor in a darkened room. And then I woke, wondering if it had ever happened like that, if it was something I had desired at the time, and why I should be dreaming of a young man infatuated with me from the past, only weeks after my husband's death? Why should I wake now, over 20 years later, flushed and pleased with the attentions of a boy? My life merged so gradually with that of my husband. A shared life. The expression of these things does not come easily. I write now with difficulty. For myself.
In times of stress Lev Davidovich would often reproach me with the affair. And in the past I always fought back: There was no affair. Of course, I knew of his infatuations. He was an attractive man; he became animated in the company of women. I knew this; accepted it. I did not believe him to be unfaithful. But in Mexico, things changed. The painter came between us. I sat and waited for him. I staked my territory. After all we had been through together, I believed he must come back. After he retreated to the sparse Taxco hills to collect himself, to wonder who and what he wanted, I felt as desolate as the landscape. He said: We must separate. And who was I to argue?
The phone calls. He reproached me - in my grief at the thought of losing him - he reproached me once again with this imagined infidelity. And instead of denying it, I collapsed under the weight of his accusation, convinced that I was to blame, ready to confess to something that had never happened if it would bring him back to me. He had gone to the hills to be alone.
I remember Frida visited the Casa Azul to collect some things, her face tight towards me. I believed she was going to see him. Some days later, there was a change. His communication with me softened. Something had broken. I never asked him directly. But his desire for me returned. He wrote passionate letters as in the first days of our courtship. How inflamed for me he felt. And I tried to summon up a level of desire for him, but there was only grief and fear at how close I had come to losing him, and it was many months before I felt, deep inside, a passion for him like before.
But the feeling returned. Slowly, slowly. Things were never the same between us. But we found something greater, deeper, calmer. For myself, older, no longer desirable, I felt I had won in the contest of youth and allure and beauty. I had won. And my victory gave me strength.
After this dream of the young man, I now understand things more fully. Frida, at the same age as I had been when I was at the height of my powers all those years ago, had seduced my husband, simply because she could. It was as simple and as difficult as that.
Biography
Meaghan Delahunt was born in Melbourne and lives in Edinburgh. House (Bloomsbury, £16.99 in UK), her first novel, published last month, has just been long-listed for this year's Orange Prize for Fiction. Its protagonist, the Communist, theorist and agitator Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a leader of Russia's October Revolution of 1917. Largely responsible for the Red victory in the Russian civil war, Trotsky was later commissar for foreign affairs and for war. In the power struggle following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin emerged as victor, and in 1929 Trotsky was exiled. He remained leader of the Fourth [R O] International, an anti-Stalin opposition abroad. He moved to Mexico in 1937, where he was assassinated in 1940 by Ramon Mercader, a Spanish communist and Stalinist agent who had won the trust of the Trotsky household.
Meaghan Delahunt, who won the 1997 HQ/Flamingo Australian national short-story competition