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Part 1: Mobilisation.
Ernesto:
Moscow, November 7, 1967.
Trotsky is dead. To me, these words would always be synonymous with cold, the biting, bitter, penetrating cold, as I stand, shivering in the throng, the cortege slowly passing between us, the people, and them, the inheritors, arms stiff in salute on the podium of the renamed Lenin-Trotsky Mausoleum. The shoulders of eight tough Kronstadt Marines bear the red draped coffin's weight. The funeral dirge echoing across Red Square, the kremlin spires obscured by the snow swirling to cap the silent thousands with a white patina.
What will these people think, when they finally confront the embalmed, shrunken carcase on the displayed bier? Filing past, will they marvel at the dichotomy of power and mortality: Is this he? this mummied wisp, with skin like pharaonic parchment, almost disappeared into his own crumbling bones, was this our ruler for forty-four years?
I remember clearly the last of our only three meetings: The Neva side dacha, May, '64. I had just come from the Argentine fiasco, no brave success there to report. The gentle giant Sklyansky, his Deputy-cum-heir, ushered me into the Presence. It was not, alas, the flashing fire of our earlier forums. At eighty-five his limbs had finally betrayed him, condemning him to the wheelchair. His hands, taloned and bent by arthritis. The famous head, however, still as leonine as ever, the shock of white hair, the snow white goatee and moustaches, the eagle eyes, unnaturally enlarged by his immensely thick eyeglasses, retaining their full power. They pinned one down like a butterfly, boring into your own as you wriggled on the stake, the undimmed mind boring into yours, extracting the most critical data, discarding the mere lumber. He had lost none of his harsh directness, neither, addressing me in Spanish - how the man loved to demonstrate his polyglot fluency!-
"A right balls up in Argentina and no mistake." His voice, too, alas, was fading, rasping like a rusty file. "You are still marred by Latin sentimentalism. True, old Peron is an immaculate arsehole, a corporal with delusions of grandeur. But the petite-bourgeois phase is still valid for that country. Peron is still a tool to be used to prise the way for workers' power. But you are like a love sick child, ever the incurable romantic. Personal distaste leads you into leftist adventurism. Subjective quibbles take over even when history's iron is still heating up in the fire. So, the proletariat splits, Peron falls, and the Junta returns to power. Fundamental errors lead to a crushing defeat. If we can't learn from history, who can? Illyich and I would have been jackal bait if we had gone the same way." He caught himself. "Pardon an old man's ravings." The great head lolled a little, as if the body could not bear its burden, then snapped up again, the hand raised: "Africa, comrade! That is the agenda now. The Gold Coast, Kenya, Abyssinia! The Colonial Empires are on their last legs. If the true revolutionaries don't seize the time now we all deserve to be on the scrap heap of history. I can tell you," the head dipped towards me, "I have people around me who wouldn't move if Marx himself, or Christ, or Moses, thrust a stick up their arse! Abyssinia! I yell at them till I'm blue in the face - the Italian link is the most rotten in the colonial chain! Mussolini is tired, half dead, bedridden, all around him corruption seethes like the Borgias... Abyssinia, God damn it! But does anyone listen? No, they just nod and cheer sycophantically and whisper in corners as if we too were the Medicis, tut tut tut, the Boss is going senile, the old yid has gone off his head..."
The grand rabble rouser is dead now, the endlessly haranguing voice stilled. Grimly the Soviet Guard of Honour march past in funereal step. I raise my eyes, reluctantly, to the dumpy greatcoated men standing like tiny chunky dolls behind the snow, on the reviewing stand. Those dour, humourless men with their cadaver souls and punctillious obsession with empty ritual, a world removed from their dead leader's fire and brimstone. Trotsky straddled the world, the twentieth century's Bonaparte (despite his own distaste for the comparison). For better or worse, there would be none like him. The jowly bureacrats on the ramparts may have come to praise Caesar but none the less to bury him very, very deep. I am suddenly struck with a deep sense of personal loss, which Trotsky himself would have scoffed at (more Latin sentimentalism!)... And something else, an insight difficult to define... That there are crux moments in history, which blend with the sense of a turning point of one's own mission... An inheritance? An individual burden? A heresy, untouched by the collective will? Are you, Ernesto Che Guevara, fit to carry this load? Old friend, I'll do what I have to, to press on with that life long struggle... The self dies, the body may be embalmed or rot - the necessity continues. Goodbye, old comrade, wherever you are now, I'm sure you will, like myself, be stirring up trouble for the powers that be...
Joseph Gable
Carpentersville, Illinois, November 8:
Visited Adolf for the Saturday bridge game, not without a lingering reluctance, I must say. After more than forty years, Adolf's company does wear a little thin. A jumped-up man in a crumpled suit, I recall my first impression. Then, the second look, the reflection... Was I wrong, all those years ago, to cast Adolf as the receptacle for all our hopes and longings? Would I not have been better suited myself to lead our tiny exile group through all these traumatic years? Saturday frustrations again, the regular tics and twinges of old age's might-have-begns. If... if... if... if the fatherland had not fallen to the communist vermin four decades ago... if we had remained behind, to fight it through ... if my grandmother had had wheels, she would be an automobile.
Shown through the new electronic gates. Frieda, the maid, takes my hat and coat at the door. Respectability and routine. From the hallway I can already hear Adolf haranguing Hermann, holding forth, as I knew he would, on Trotsky's death in Moscow. Frieda announces me, as always, by my old-world name and title: `Doctor Goebbels, meine herren.' Adolf, seated as usual in his fine morocco armchair, his suit as ill-fitting as ever, acknowledges my entrance with the usual half-insolent flick of the eyes, without faltering in his tirade. At seventy-eight, he has not lost the knack of talking his audience into the ground.
`That Jew,' he expatiates, underlining the obvious, `should have demonstrated to all that the Talmudic plan has long entered its decisive phase. The apparent withdrawal of Yiddish cadres from the German Communist leadership did not fool me for one minute. Mark my words, the Kremlin will now similarly pass into so called non-Jewish hands. There may even be a pathetic purge. It is this act precisely that signals the true danger. While functioning in the public eye the Bronstein-Luxemburg clique had to work perspicaciously and in stealth but I have no doubt that now, behind the scenes, the world-conspiracy shifts gears and prepares for the kill. Germany, Germany should have been the engine of the destruction of the Talmudic menace. Failing that we must not waver in our faith in the arousal of America's Aryan elements. Youth must be forged and purified in the fire to face the sacrifices to come. Under no circumstances must we pause in the work for one moment. . .'
Hermann has fallen asleep again. Who can blame him? Of course, he has been slipping for some time. His obesity is by now an affront to mankind, as he waddles from bottle to bottle like a giant red doughball. On drugs again, too, by the look of him, experimenting with his loathsome chemical compounds. Look at him slobbering on the divan. How he has lasted to the age of seventy-four is a complete mystery. Only four years older than myself and already a foot and a half in the grave. A truly pathetic example of the lack of fresh air, physical and mental exercise and natural sexuality.
Adolf's Annchen glides softly into the room with coffee and cakes on a trolley. Ignoring the storm clouds, passing round the cups and saucers, sailing as ever on her calm seas, as if unbuffeted by the typhoons that have raged in her man's life. Force of circumstance (and my cajoling) may have led him to take refuge in her father's adopted land, so long ago, but, as the decades passed, and she bore him his two sons, watching his passions incinerate one and alienate the other, one wonders, which of them is living in the other's world? True, she tamed his old bohemian mannerisms, or at least damped them down, bringing her shrewd knowledge of America and the Americans to the service of our cause, but has she really Americanised Adolp I think rather, she has been subsumed in his world. A believer, yes, Adolf attracted such types in droves. It was watching her almost slavelike devotion that confirmed my belief that even here, in this alien country, it was Adolf who should be the one groomed… Yes, Annchen epitomises the mass that must be reached, inspired, made pregnant and set on the path...
The bridge game begins badly, as usual, Adolf in his worst ranting mood. `The two faced rottenness of the Jew-York Times ... They mutter meekly of the tyrant Trotsky but bemoan his passing, terrified of the weak men following the strong… Sulzbergerism cannot hide its Bolshevik horns, the circumcised hammer and sickle! So-called President Rockefeller sends a message of condolence to the Soviet Government! The mask of Rothchild-feller too is slipping. Hermann, you know you cannot lead from your own hand since the last trick was from the dummy...'
Verbal drivel, the same old cracks I wrote for him long ago. Do we have to go through this every week? More and more I am becoming convinced Adolf's relevance to the current phase of the Plan must be held at the absolute minimum. His oratoric talent has turned in on itself. He is becoming the worst sort of windbag. Luckily he soon grows too hoarse to carry on and the last half of the game is conducted peacefully, with nothing but a sporadic `bid three diamonds', `two no trumps', or `pass', to break the soothing weekend ambience...
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