1 Death and the Lighthouses (1 January 2001)

. It’s a shame he did it to the exclusion of my political
activism. Stuck me in a ludicrous tripartite plot involving Sigmund Freud
and a spaceship fleeing a destroyed earth. Worst of all, had me sent to New
York in 1917 to open a political folly, the Manhattan — Manhattan! —
branch of the Bolshevik party, absenting me entirely from the October
Revolution in Petrograd! Even Stalin didn’t go to those extremes! Pah! These
English novelists! No grasp of dialectics. As if one can’t have a revolutionary
and a romantic life at one and the same time! As if these seeming opposites
are not always and everywhere bound up in a dynamic unity! Witness
Orwell: acknowledged my political work. But how did he choose to depict
this most human side of me He portrayed me, literally, !”
“There was Cabrera Infante, too, I believe. Didn’t he have a section on you
in ”
“You mean ‘The Death of Trotsky as Described by Various Cuban Writers,
Several Years After the Event — or Before’ That was a typically shabby
surfictional enterprise. Simply used me as an excuse to parody his rivals.
Didn’t even leave the Cuban Embassy in Brussels to consult me about it.
Ditto Saul Windbag Bellow. Sends his Augie March character down from
Chicago to meet me, without checking the facts out for himself. Some of the
ones who come are no more bearable, mind you. Alan Brien wanted my
life story
. I ask you!”
Hesitantly you say, “Isn’t that understandable”
“Understandable”
“Given, I mean, that Lenin himself is dead”
“Lenin dead” Trotsky cackles drily at the back of his throat. “Vladimir
Ilyich is alive and living in Africa, fattened on a diet of Solzhenitsyn,
Alexandra Kollontai, Mikhail Shatrov and Ellis Sharp! We still swap the odd
e-mail.”
There is silence while Trotsky taps keys and shuffles mouse, calling into
his local America Online server and opening its Web browser. He
like Trotsky. The notion that the man is an actor, the product of a newfangled
trend in museum management, a virtual substitute, a player who
refuses ever to drop his mask, has been bothering you for some time. But
his air of erudition is too keen to be contrived. After all, the opportunity —
this opportunity — needs to be grasped.
“Lev Davidovich, what would you say is the role of revolutionary socialists
in a post-industrial, post-Fordist, post-Marxist, postmodernist age”
“Pah!” says Trotsky, twiddling and fiddling. “Talk about slow dialups! I’ve
put a 166MHz Cyrix processor in this fucker, there’s the mother of all
motherboards in there, a Tyan S1562S, the kind of animal the HX chipset
was invented for! And what happens I have to call into an AOL point of
presence run through an impotent 14,400 b.p.s. modem! Jeez!” He rattles
the desk impatiently with his fingernails. “At last!” He flags triumphantly at
1 (1 January 2001) 32