The revolutionist, p.4
The Revolutionist, page 4
Zander cleared his throat. "As a matter of fact, I was going to ask you if you could see your way clear to lending me money for passage." He lowered his voice. "I need to go back, Maud."
The skin on her face appeared to tighten over her bones. "It always ends the same way, doesn't it.^ The biggest thing a woman has going for her is mystery. When you sleep with a man you lose your mystery. He knows how you put yourself together. And knowing, he will leave for a new mystery—another woman, a revolution." She shook her head in disgust. "You have a hell of a nerve. It's one thing to come and go as you like. It's another to ask me to pay for the trip. I have my pride, you know."
A long stone's throw down from the ferry slip, a dozen Chinese laborers wearing baggy pants and skullcaps were passing heavy timbers
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up from the rocky beach and loading them on an enormous open wagon drawn by six shaggy work horses. A wooden whaler had broken up the week before in heavy winds, and parts of it had washed up at South Ferry in Manhattan. The Chinese, employed for $3.50 a week by a coal and firewood company in the Bronx, were retrieving the wood to cut up and sell to homeowners the following winter.
Oblivious to the frantic lapping of the tide against the pilings and the maniacal screams of the gulls circling overhead. Zander watched several Chinese stagger up the incline with part of the whaler's mainmast on their shoulders.
"What are you smiling at.'"' asked Maud. She and Kermit were waiting with Zander for the ferry to arrive.
"I'm not smiling. I'm grimacing in empathy."
"Here it comes," Kermit cried, pointing excitedly at the ferry slipping in between the wooden pilings draped with used automobile tires, ricocheting gently from one side to the other until its bow kissed the jetty. A small bell rang and the seventy or so people who had been waiting for the late morning ferry to the Statue of Liberty began lining up in front of the ticket seller's wooden booth. "Let's go," Kermit begged, tugging at Zander's sleeve with his good hand.
"Wait a minute more," Zander said. "I don't like crowds."
Leaning casually against the whitewashed wall of the equipment shed. Zander studied the two men in soft-brimmed Lansdowne hats and Ennyweather Shine-or-Sprinkle belted topcoats who stood on either side of the booth surveying the people as they passed. One of them seemed familiar—or was his imagination working overtime.^ If they were federal agents, as Zander suspected, were they merely watching to see who would turn up to hear Trotsky speak at the Socialist gathering.^ Or were they looking for him.^ He had never mentioned Bedloe's Island to Ortona, as far as he remembered. He hadn't even told Maud until after breakfast that morning, and he had been with her and Kermit since. And then Zander remembered the hectographed leaflet he had tacked to the back of the door. What an idiot! The agents searching his room on Hester Street had spotted the leaflet. They were here for him. But would they recognize him with his freshly shaven pink face, without eyeglasses, a straw boater belonging to Maud's ex-husband planted at a rakish angle on his head, Kermit's woolen scarf wrapped around his neck, the costume completed by an old pair of white flannel trousers and a thick knitted green sweater that Maud had found in an attic trunk.
"Please, Zander, there won't be any places left if we don't get in line," Kermit pleaded.
"Pull up your socks," Maud called after the boy as he dragged Zander off.
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Waiting their turn, drawing nearer to the ticket window, Zander held the picnic hamper with one hand and kept his other arm tightly linked through Maud's—the perfect family man on a Sunday outing. Behind them a four-cylinder Mercer taxi pulled up and Trotsky, along with his nine-year-old son Seryozha and three other men, got out. Two of the men kept their right hands buried in their overcoat pockets. Zander was not surprised to see that one of them was Tuohy; he had heard that he took on occasional stints as a bodyguard.
"How many.^" the ticket seller demanded from behind his grille.
Zander glanced at the prices printed on a wooden board. "Two adults, one child," he said, putting a dime and two pennies on the counter.
On the ferry Kermit scampered off to the upper deck. Maud and Zander settled onto a wooden bench on the port side. Nearby, a heavy woman complained to a nun sitting next to her, "I want to tell her 'don't,' but the truth of the matter is I don't know what she shouldn't!"
Maud squeezed Zander's arm conspiratorially. Above their heads a thread of black smoke corkscrewed up from the ferry's thin stack. Under their feet the deck vibrated. Slowly the ferry pulled away from the slip and angled out into the choppy waters of the bay. Behind, on the jetty, the two men Zander had taken for federal agents were staring after the departing ferry in bewilderment, almost as if they had heard a joke but did not quite understand the punch line.
As soon as the wind picked up, Maud announced she was going inside. Zander climbed the ladder to the top deck. Kermit, Trotsky's son Seryozha, and two other boys were at the railing gazing back wordlessly at the Manhattan skyline. Off to the right Zander could see the Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn docks; a once-graceful clipper ship was rotting away at a dilapidated pier. The ferry passed Governor's Island and came abreast of Ellis Island. Its long, low red brick registry hall with paned windows, the four Turkish-looking minarets, the manicured lawns, were all familiar sights to Zander, though he had set eyes on them only once before in his life.
He had a sudden vision of himself and his father and his brother waiting on the Ellis Island dock for the ferry that would take them to the Battery. He remembered hearing someone weeping hysterically behind him. At the door of the registry hall, a child was being pried free of his mother's legs, to which he clung like a tangled vine. Zander never discovered whether it was the mother or the child who had been refused entry into America and was being sent back to Europe, but he knew from personal experience that it didn't really matter. For both the pain was the same.
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To this day Zander bitterly regretted that he hadn't clung like a vine to his own mother on the pier in Rotterdam.
He watched Ellis Island glide past before shifting his gaze to Trotsky, who was sitting on a bench built around the base of the ferry's smokestack. Splinters of silver light flashed from his pince-nez when it caught the sun. He was scribbling notes in the margin of a manuscript and carrying on a conversation with the man next to him at the same time. Zander headed in their direction.
Tuohy drifted over from his post at the after ladder to shake hands.
"Come to hear our friend convert the dentists' wives," he commented. "You saw the feds at the ticket booth, I take it.'^"
"I had to find out sooner or later if they'd recognize me without a beard," explained Zander. He nodded toward Tuohy's left hand, which was in his overcoat pocket. "You really have a pistol in there.^" "You have got to be making a joke, don't you.? Where would I get the money to buy a pistol.? All I have in my pocket is myself to play with. Even erect it's not lethal." Tuohy obviously enjoyed his little joke. "Mind, I wouldn't turn down Ortona's Nagant if out of the kindness of his black anarchist's heart he suddenly offered it to me." "Ortona's poison. He fingered me for the feds—they were waiting in my room the other day."
"it figures. Out of the blue he came sucking up to Trotsky yesterday. Trotsky's got a nose for informers—he wouldn't give him the time of day. Someone ought to take care of Ortona."
"You think so.?" Zander squinted at Tuohy. "Are you volunteering to put the matter right.?"
"I'd be willing. Unless, of course, you have your heart set on it." "What does Trotsky think.?" Zander asked. "I haven't taken the matter up with the man. But I will." "Do that." Zander walked over to where Trotsky sat and said in Russian, "Comrade Trotsky, do you remember me.? I'm Alexander Til."
Trotsky stared at Zander through his pince-nez. His eyes widened in recognition. "Of course, of course," he said jovially. "Come meet Nikolai Bukharin. Nikolai, here is Alexander Til, the grandson of Til."
'T/ieTiir Bukharin asked. 'T/ie Til," Trotsky confirmed.
Zander and Bukharin shook hands. Trotsky motioned Zander to sit on the bench next to him. "Here we are, sandwiched between the so-called Statue of Liberty and the famous Wall Street, concocting a second revolution in Russia. Delicious, no.? What do you think, Alexander"—Trotsky pointed to a passage in the typed text—"I am
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for saying, straight out, that the provisional government of Prince Lvov is doomed to disappoint the working classes that ousted the tsar in the first revolution. Nikolai here thinks it will make us out to be opportunists, that we should play along with the provisional government until its shortcomings become self-evident, and then join with the other Socialist parties—"
"Even with the Mensheviks," Bukharin cried exuberantly. He was almost thirrv' years old, but he could still muster a boyish enthusiasm for any idea that appealed to him.
"With all respect," Zander offered, "Lenin will never agree to a coalition with the Mensheviks."
"Just so," agreed Trotsky with a wry smile; he himself had identified with the Mensheviks for many years and had been on the receiving end of Lenin's acid tonguelashings more than once. "Lenin should take up a clearly defined position to the left of the Mensheviks, so that when the working classes eventually turn from the provisional government he will be the only possible alternative."
Seryozha came over and pulled at Trotsky's hand. "Papa, I say that Petrograd is bigger than New York and a boy there says it isn't, that New York is bigger. So which is it.'"'
"He is right and you are wrong," Trotsky told his son. "But there are other things to see in New York beside its bigness."
"Like.?"
"Yesterday I saw an old man fish out a crust of bread from a garbage can." Trotsky told the story intently, carefully observing the boy to see what his reaction would be. "He tried the crust with his hands, and then he touched the thing with his teeth, and finally he struck it against the can. But the bread did not yield. In the end he thrust his find under his faded coat and shambled off down St. Mark's Place. This little episode did not in any way interfere with the plans of the ruling class."
The boy nodded solemnly. "The only thing that will interfere with the plans of the ruling class is you."
"Nicely put," Bukharin commented. Trotsky beamed with pleasure.
Tuohy called over, "We're almost there."
Ahead, the tarnished green Statue of Liberty was clearly visible astride its eleven-point base that had once been part of the old Fort Wood. "There are two things of significance to remember about this statue," Trotsky instructed his son. He winked at Zander. "First, she is standing with her back to America. This is an important symbol." Bukharin chuckled. "Secondly, you can clearly see that she has a torch in her right hand. But what is that in her left hand.''"
"A book," the boy said brightly.
"Just so. A book. But what book.'"'
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The boy pulled a face and turned up his palms.
"The book," Trotsky announced dramatically, "is Marx's Das Kapital^y
"Ahh," said Seryozha, impressed once again with the fact that his father seemed to know everything.
As the ferry maneuvered alongside the wooden pier, Trotsky, leaning over the railing next to Zander, commented that it was nice of him to come all this way to hear him speak.
"I didn't come to hear you speak," Zander confessed.
Trotsky removed his pince-nez and began polishing the lenses with the tip of his tie. "What is it you think I can do for you.-"' he asked directly.
Zander said simply, "I want to go back."
Trotsky fitted his pince-nez onto his nose and studied Zander. "How long have you been in this country, Alexander.'"'
"Ten years."
"You are an American then. Stay and make a revolution here."
"If I stick around much longer," Zander retorted, "the feds are going to catch up with me. They're going to lock me in a penitentiary and lose the key."
"Why come to me.'"' Trotsky asked. "I will have enough trouble getting myself back."
"I need money to buy my passage. I need false papers. I need a letter of introduction to the comrades in Petrograd."
On the main deck people were already filing off the ferry onto the pier. Maud looked up and saw Zander and waved to him. Clinging to the ladder with his good hand, Kermit called, "Come on, Zander."
Trotsky was clearly annoyed. "What am I, a capitalist, that everyone comes to me with a hand out for money.'"' Shaking his head in frustration, he stalked off to join Bukharin and his two bodyguards.
The municipal authorities had recently started posting signs in public parks around the city ordering people to keep off the grass, but they hadn't gotten around to Bedloe's Island yet. So Maud, normally a stickler for written injunctions, had no compunction about depositing her hamper and spreading her chintz tablecloth on the grass near the base of the statue. Trotsky, surrounded by four dozen or so ardent Socialists, most of them ladies, held court on the shady side. Waving a chicken bone like a baton, breaking into German or Russian when he couldn't come up with the word he wanted in English, he gave a short course on the events that had led to the overthrow of the tsar. He described the soaring inflation, the severe rationing, the harsh food and fuel shortages, the bread queues forming in the icy hours before dawn, with some of the women hugging babies to their breasts to keep them from freezing to death. The average factory worker put in ten
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and a half hours a day and took home thirty-five rubles a month; an ordinary pair of leather shoes, Trotsky said, bending to slap the side of his own, cost more than one hundred rubles.
And then there was the Great War against Germany. The tsar had plunged his country into it on the side of the Allies. Fifteen million men had been mobilized, including hundreds of thousands of children; when they didn't obey orders, their officers either spanked them or shot them, depending on their moods. "Do you understand.'"' Trotsky cried. "Are my words penetrating your brain.^ Spanked i\e.m or shot them!" Millions of soldiers had been dispatched to the trenches without winter clothing or boots, and some without rifles; they were expected to scavenge for them on the battlefield. The Russian dead, estimated in the millions, were never properly counted. The Germans often had to bulldoze mounds of Russian corpses piled up before their trenches to clear a field of fire for the next attack. While back in Petrograd (the name of the Russian capital had been changed from St. Petersburg at the start of the war), the bourgeoisie took tea with one another in the afternoons, plucking sugar from little silver boxes in their purses, wagging their heads at the deterioration of the social order and the inconveniences caused by the war.
Nicholas II, tsar of all the Russias by the Grace of God and force of habit, was, Trotsky plunged on, a total incompetent, ignorant of elementary economics and indifferent to the seething social problems that threatened his empire. His wife, the German-born Empress Alexandra, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England, was even less intelligent and more narrow-minded than he was.
"On the eighth of March," intoned Trotsky, his head tilted to the sky, his goatee parallel to the ground, "twenty thousand women chanting 'khle-e-eba . . . khle-e-eba . . . bread . . . bread' marched through Petrograd to celebrate Women's Day. The next day two hundred thousand workers joined the women in the streets. The army, which has always stood between the ruling class and the workers, ignored their officers and swarmed into the streets. Massing in the great boulevards of Petrograd, the soldiers raided an arsenal on Liteiny Prospekt and distributed rifles and machine guns to the workers.
"The mutinies spread like wildfire. Nicholas, away at the front, had no choice but to abdicate. And now, gentlemen and ladies, begins the struggle to see what institutions, what political philosophies, will take the place of the Romanov dynasty."
"This is what you came for," Maud told Zander.
"Russia," continued Trotsky, "has opened a new epoch of blood and iron. The powerful avalanche of the revolution is in full swing and no human force will stem it. All those who have been oppressed, disinherited, deceived, will rise up. All efforts to put an end to class
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warfare will lead to nothing. The philistine thinks that it is the revolutionist who makes a revolution, and can call it off at any point he wishes." Trotsky talked as if his audience had ceased to exist; he seemed to be flinging a challenge at the horizon. ''Not so! The people make a revolution."
There was a commotion in the back of the group. Heads turned. Two young ladies were trying to calm a young man. He leapt to his feet. "He's full of shit," he exploded. "For years he's been criticizing Lenin and siding with the Mensheviks. Now suddenly he sees the light and reverses himself. Which Trotsky are we to believe.'^" The young man spun toward Trotsky. "You talk a great deal—"
"Revolutions," Trotsky observed laconically, "are verbose."
"But you don't really understand the dialectic. Everyone knows that before you can make a Socialist revolution, you have to have an industrial base and proletariat. Russia has neither."
"What do you propose.'"' Trotsky demanded with a passion so controlled his jaw trembled. "That the workers get rid of the tsar and then calmly hand over the reins of power to the bankers and professors, who will set up parliaments and other edifices of rotten liberalism.'' I say no! Why come this far and stop.^ This is not the time to lose one's nerve."
The young man advanced on Trotsky. Tuohy and the other bodyguard rose to their feet. Trotsky fingered the pistol in his pocket. "Russia is a land of peasants," cried the young man, "not proletarians. So there is a revolution in Petrograd. What about the rest of the country.'' What about the dark masses out there in the villages who never heard of Marx, of socialism, or Leon Trotsky.'"'
