VICTOR ZASLAVSKY
29
surname of Carrasco. "But that's Cervantes," I said , surprised . "Re–
member, he had a character named Carrasco?" "A pseudonym,
maybe," Natasha guessed . Her curiosity was also aroused.
Several days later Natasha called me and said that she would
come around in half an hour. I knew from her voice that something
had happened. "I cracked it!" she blurted out in the doorway and
then whispered: "It's Ramon Mercader." "Who?" I did not under–
stand. "Ramon Mercader!" And she added in my ear, "The guy who
killed Trotsky. But, for God's sake , don't tell anyone. We'll both be
jailed. And in different cells, at that."
I asked around a bit and scraped some "facts" together,
although they were all based on rumors. They said Mercader spent
twenty years in a Mexican prison. They said that for "exemplary
success in an important governmental mission," Stalin made Mer–
cader a Hero of the Soviet Union and that all those years the Gold
Star awaited Mercader in a safe deposit box . He did not get much
out of it. Mercader returned during the Khrushchev years, not a
good time for him. Although the victims of the 1930s show trials had
not been rehabilitated, the condemnations of Trotsky as a Gestapo
agent and Bukharin as a Nazi spy were also out offashion . The word
of the day was to "forget and never mention!" Thus, Mercader was
sent to Prague . They said that he later came to sympathize with
Dubcek and the Prague Spring and had to be shipped back to the
Soviet Union . Now he shuttled back and forth between Moscow and
Leningrad - more accurately, between two
spetskhrans,
supposedly
writing memoirs .
From that day on, I could not work in the spets . I bombarded
my neighbor with questions: "Is it true that you're the very same
Mercader? Why did you take the name Carrasco? Do you mean
Trotsky was insane, a new Don Quixote? Do your children know
who you are? And how do you feel now, thirty years after the
murder of Leon Davidovich?" Of course , all these questions re–
sounded only in my mind. A direct question could end badly for me
and for Natasha. But I could no longer sit quietly in my seat nor
read nor concentrate . I exchanged books needlessly, I stepped out
into the smoking room - although I did not smoke. All the while I
kept up an imaginary dialogue with Mercader. It was a sort of curse.
Mercader took no notice of my agitation or, indeed, my pres–
ence. But he had a hard time reading as well. He obviously con–
ducted his own, endless dialogue with Trotsky or, perhaps, with the
