“Who is they? This they who threatened you about leaks.”
“Claude Sparrow, naturally.”
We designated one of our rooms as the Vault, Gondelman says. Then he stops himself. Do you know about the Vault? he asks Kessler.
“Yes.”
“Tell me, then.”
“A concrete cell where Tronko was kept. Somewhere outside the Washington area. Three years of solitary confinement. Sensory deprivation and hard conditions, but no active physical torture, and no drugs. I have all that from Pokorny and Sparrow.”
“All right,” says Gondelman, easily assuaged. He seems to want to believe that it is within the bounds of discretion, sharing his recollections now with Kessler. He seems, after all these years, to relish the chance. “So we had this one room, and we called that the Vault. Got rid of all the furniture to make it sufficiently grim. Even tore up the carpet. Nothing was left but three folding chairs.”
Gondelman himself took one of those chairs and sat inconspicuously in a far corner—at least, he amends, it was as inconspicuous as he could be. I had a note pad but no script, he says. I kept quiet, each day, until they were done. Leo and Al had center stage. They worked through the transcript. Al tried to be as tough and as cunning and as pitiless as Pokorny seemed to be. Leo argued back from Tronko’s side. Tronko’s own exact words now, you understand. He did it with conviction, Leo did. Tried to. That was crucial to this whole exercise. As much conviction as possible. Assume the role, walk a mile in the man’s moccasins; see where his footsteps might lead you, and what you might notice along the way. And when conviction was utterly impossible, says Gondelman, then Leo would say so, afterward, and we would talk about that. That itself would be a datum. This was our procedure beginning in, what, late fall of that year. It must have been I suppose about 1965, says Gondelman. Ancient history. I don’t remember exactly, but whenever Pokorny began on Tronko.
“November of ’64,” says Kessler.
“Sixty-four? Are you sure?”
“Yes. The assassination, and then Tronko appeared three months later. Lentzer did the first debriefing, but it was short. Mel got him at the end of that same year.”
“Of course. You’re right.”
November of 1964, then, Gondelman and his colleagues began. But they had gone on for barely a week in their original arrangement before it became clear that something was wrong.
“Me,” Gondelman says. “I was an intrusive presence. Little Sidney in his corner. Ambience was very important, we thought, so we moved my chair out.”
“Out of that one room.”
“Yes. Then Leo and Al had the space to themselves. I took up a position behind the door to the room adjoining. It had a plastic window, and we got some holes drilled in that so I could hear. Like watching everything through a one-way mirror. This improved the ambience greatly. No distractions. It helped Leo in imagining Tronko’s sense of total, hopeless isolation. The lousy part was that, for most of three years, I had to stand.”
By the time we began working, says Gondelman, Tronko had already taken and failed two polygraph tests, and we had those also. The transcripts as well as the cross-referenced charts. We could match each statement against the variance in physiological parameters. Compare what he said with his mouth against what he said with his heartbeat and with his skin. Then we could generalize, sorting the statements according to subject matter and trying to find trends or patterns in the man’s cognitive dissonance. This was part of my role, says Gondelman. I worked up the analysis of all the polygraph data, put it into charts, and identified a number of subject areas where there seemed to be particular strain. Then those categories could serve us as search-images while we went over the material that Pokorny was—
“Sparrow told me he lied about everything,” Kessler interrupts. “Uniformly.”
“No. Oh, that’s far too simplistic,” says Gondelman. “You have lies and then you have anxiety and you have doubt. Shame. Regret. All very difficult to distinguish, using just these tricky machines. You have about ten grades of ambivalence. No, Sparrow had no call to say that.”
“Sometimes he told the truth? Tronko, I mean.”
“Of course. Apparently so, anyway. But you can’t X-ray a man’s soul. Not even with polygraph technology.”
“Did Tronko feel all ten grades of ambivalence?”
“His test results showed a whole rainbow of variations, yes. From maximal dissonance all the way to a flat normal reading. On many points he seemed to be speaking the purest gospel. Or at least he thought that he was. Clear conscience and true belief.”
“Name one.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“One of those points. With a flat normal reading.”
Gondelman shrugs. He tilts his head back to gaze at the ceiling. “Well, Rybakov’s daughter.”
It was too pathetic to be invented, says Gondelman. Also it tended to reflect badly on the Soviet regime. Tronko might conceivably have cooked up the whole story from his own imagination, just to make himself look like some sort of sensitive, openhearted guy, but I don’t think so, says Gondelman. I don’t think he had that much imagination, for one thing. And for another, what did he care if we believed he was sensitive? What was that going to buy him? Nothing at all. Not from Claude Sparrow and company. So I think it was mortally real, this part. And the point is, both polygraph examiners agreed. They gave him high marks on the matter of Rybakov’s daughter. It happened while he was doing his student internship with the diplomatic service.
“In Prague,” says Kessler.
“You’ve heard this, then.”
“No,” says Kessler. “No, please go on.”
Prague it was, says Gondelman. Tronko was in his last year at the Institute of International Relations and therefore eligible for a six-month posting at one of the embassies. His first chance to get beyond Soviet borders. He spoke a little Czech. So the powers that controlled his destiny sent him down there, to Prague, to get his feet wet and his ears dry, in the role of a very very junior attaché. Roughly twenty-three years old, says Gondelman. He wasn’t yet married. Though he did have a nubile young friend waiting back in Moscow, we’re told—the same one who later became Mrs. Tronko. This would have been in autumn of 1952, that he took up the assignment in Czechoslovakia.
The purge trials down there were just hitting full stride in ’52, by the way, says Gondelman. They were about fifteen years behind Moscow. The numbers weren’t large, but some Czecho heads had begun falling into the basket.
Tronko’s winter in Prague seems to have been mainly uneventful, says Gondelman. Young Viktor did just what he had been sent there to do—generally, very little. He attended a few receptions and shook a few hands but spoke only when spoken to; he ran a few innocent messages back and forth between the embassy and the Czech Foreign Ministry; he got to try his hand at translating a few boilerplate proclamations from the Gottwald government into Russian for cabling home; he might even have done the original translations of those same proclamations from Russian to Czech; and he kept out of trouble. When the ambassador said jump, he pole-vaulted. He was just a small widget in the Soviet occupation machine that was discreetly but firmly running the country. He knew almost no one outside the lower ranks of the diplomatic community, and very few diplomats outside the Soviet and Czech services. He stayed away from the cafés and saloons of Old Town Prague because Russian voices were so unwelcome there. He drank imported vodka in privacy with a code clerk who had befriended him, watched Czech girls pass on the street but didn’t speak with them, and waited for his tour to end. He adjusted himself complacently to the pinstripe ghetto life. In other words, says Gondelman, his internship fared well toward being a total success. He had made only the most cursory acquaintance with Rybakov’s daughter.
That encounter had happened back in late autumn. They met at an embassy function and exchanged a couple poli
te sentences. There had been no reason to say more, since Tronko at that point didn’t yet know her father, and he and the daughter had nothing evidently in common. She was ten years older than Viktor, after all, and a married woman. Truth be known, she seems to have made no particular impression on him. At the same gathering Tronko had also been introduced to her husband, a pleasant man named Yuli Landau. Him Tronko remembered vividly.
Landau was a doctor, a surgeon trained at the best schools and hospitals in Moscow, and he was considered to be quite brilliant. A rising star in his profession, Gondelman says. He had been sent down to do pediatric surgery at the St. Ignatius Hospital in Prague, where his very presence was meant as a sort of personified aid and public-relations program to help shine up the Soviet image. He was that good. Landau himself had no quarrel with the assignment, since the children of Prague were afflicted with more than enough punctured eardrums and cleft palates to keep him feverishly busy. His wife, Zina Trofimovna Landau, was herself an obstetrician, also attached to St. Ignatius; but she wasn’t such an icon as her husband. Viktor Tronko remembered meeting Yuli Landau because (despite the fact that Landau was much celebrated and fawned upon in Prague while Tronko was just another swatch of the diplomatic wallpaper) the doctor had looked straight into Tronko’s face as they talked. He spoke with Tronko for five minutes, at that embassy party, and seemed to care about the answer to every question he asked. Tronko didn’t recall afterward what they had discussed. But he remembered that Dr. Landau had black curly hair with flecks of premature gray, and brown eyes that burned like phosphorus fires, full of intelligence and compassion.
He also remembered mentioning Dr. Landau, shortly thereafter, to one of the more senior consular officers. Yes, absolutely, said this older man, Yuli Landau is a very deft surgeon. No one could deny him that, said the man. And the children seem to like him well. Prague is a good place for Landau, said the man; it was a stroke of great wit to ship him down here. All this sounded a little odd to Tronko. And intelligent? he asked. Isn’t Dr. Landau supposed to be brilliant? The other man’s face altered slightly. “Yes, I suspect he’s quite clever, for a Jew.”
Landau was arrested the following February. First there were no explanations at all. He simply disappeared from the hospital one day, in the custody of officers from the Interior Ministry and two of their Soviet advisers.
He was being questioned, it was said. For two weeks not a rumor of more, and even his wife didn’t know whether he was still in Prague or had been taken back to Moscow. When the rumors did come they spoke of profiteering, conspiracy to commit sabotage, treason, and other formulaic slanders. Zionism wasn’t even mentioned. But the “Doctors’ Plot” had just been uncovered at home and—putatively uncovered, Gondelman corrects himself—and, though Yuli Landau had no connection with any of those men, it was an especially bad time for Jewish doctors. In Prague itself, Rudolf Slánský and a half dozen other Party officials, all Jews, had just been executed. For a month Landau’s wife could only wait and worry. No one at the embassy would see her. The Czech Interior Ministry ignored her demands for information. Eventually there was another rumor: that Yuli Landau had been found guilty of a lesser crime, unspecified, and in accordance with Czechoslovak justice was being sent for a term of forced labor to the Jachymov uranium mines. By this point, his wife might have taken that news as cause for relief. But how long a term? Then almost immediately she received a dry official notification that the convict Yuli Landau had been executed, mistakenly, at Hlinko Crossing, with a group of other prisoners.
The subsequent events seem to suggest that Landau was indeed the very exceptional man that Tronko had taken him for, says Gondelman. If you can judge anything at all from the grief of the wife. Caesar is always least honored by his own spouse, or however that saying goes, says Gondelman—but not in this case, evidently. Evidently Landau and Zina Trofimovna had had a fierce and total marriage.
She was wild with anger, she was inconsolable, hysterical, beyond control. She went to the Interior Ministry day after day and pounded at closed doors with the flat of her hands until her fingers and palms were swollen like sausages. She screamed at some powerful men. Twice she was removed from the embassy grounds by militia. No one from the Soviet colony would talk to her. No one would even give the illusion of help or sympathy. They couldn’t afford to. Didn’t dare. She was a pariah. She was the widow of a traitorous Jew doctor. Get away, disappear, was what people were thinking. But she wouldn’t and she didn’t. Not yet. She wanted her husband’s body, at least give her that, his cold body, was what she screamed at the stolid men and then at the closed doors and eventually at the rooftops and the pigeons in the gutters. She wanted his body. She demanded her right as a Soviet citizen to bury the body of her murdered husband. She was unraveling horribly, the madwoman of Prague. She had loved that man—how she had, says Gondelman. But she got nothing. No body. No explanations. Two or three weeks went by like that and then suddenly she fell silent.
She didn’t appear anymore at the ministry offices. Didn’t make scenes. She began to wash and eat again, reportedly. No more weeping. That’s it, the squall has passed, she’s come back to her senses, people thought. She even showed up at St. Ignatius and resumed her rounds. A couple more days, everyone breathed out, and then they found her late one afternoon on a cobbled courtyard at the hospital. She had thrown herself out of a window. But it was only three stories, unfortunately. She lived for another week.
Her father, Rybakov, was on assignment in East Berlin and even under normal conditions he would have had slim chance of getting down there to her bedside—but the current conditions were far from normal. It happened to be a moment of dire confusion within every branch and twig of the Soviet bureaucracy throughout the entire bloc. Everything stood still in a frozen instant of chaos. Everyone was paralyzed with caution and dread. Because her timing had been so very inopportune, you see, says Gondelman: she had managed to die the same week as Joseph Stalin.
Probably that fact would have given small consolation to Zina Trofimovna Landau, says Gondelman.
Up in Berlin, the father heard only that his daughter had been stricken with “serious illness.” By the time even that skewed bit of information reached him, she was already dead. And he heard no more. There was nothing he could do. He may have tried to leave Berlin for Prague, on a transport flight or some such, and been denied permission. She was his youngest of three daughters, so we’re told, says Gondelman, and the mother was dead. She was, we are led to believe, his heart’s little treasure. But there was nothing he could do. Possibly. Or possibly his own nerve faltered during that dangerous moment and he didn’t ask to leave. “Serious illness” might not have been anything so immediate, after all. We don’t know. This part of the tale remains in ellipsis, says Gondelman. All we know is that everyone was petrified. Motion had stopped. Business had stopped. They were all frozen to their footprints with fearful uncertainty. Possibly even Trofim Filippovich Rybakov. Meanwhile his much-adored daughter Zina, by now, was a lump of cold clay down in Prague. The unclaimed carcass of the widow of a traitorous Jew doctor.
Her body spent two days on a shelf in a large meat locker at the Soviet Embassy compound. No one dared dispose of it, and no one dared take the initiative of shipping it back to Moscow. Everyone was vaguely aware that her father had been an important man in the security apparatus but no one knew how he stood with the new regime—if there was a new regime yet. He might be out or he might be up. No way to know. Any action with regard to his daughter’s remains was therefore a rash one. Most of all, right now, no one wished to guess wrong. So they just left the body on ice. Two days. It might have stayed there for two months, until explicit instructions could be received from above or the embassy chef demanded the shelf space. But it didn’t, says Gondelman.
Two days were long enough. Her skin had already turned a pale suety gray, we are told, says Gondelman. Young Viktor Tronko barely recognized the body when he saw
it. But then again, he had barely known her.
According to his own testimony, Tronko acted on impulse, says Gondelman. And the polygraphs tended to confirm him here too. Twenty-three years old, remember, says Gondelman. Stars in his eyes over Yuli Landau yet this woman, the wife, had made no special impression upon him. He hadn’t been in love with her. He wouldn’t even claim he had liked her. She was a stranger. What he did, it might easily have wrecked his career, or worse—but when does a twenty-three-year-old ever stop to consider that? It was an impulse, Tronko said, and he never would say more. Maybe he was just modest, says Gondelman. Don’t ask me. Sometimes the most potent human acts are the ones that transcend rational motive. The most potent and, I should add, the most credible, says Gondelman. Anyway. So he sold his watch. The kind of melodramatic thing a young man does. He possessed no money otherwise, we are told. He sold his watch. With the proceeds he bought a black dress and a coffin.
“And he had her buried,” says Gondelman. “That’s all. Simply saw her into the ground.”
“What, he took the body away himself? He dug a hole?”
“Yes. Almost like that. He pushed open a few doors. Hired some men. Yes. He put her in a Jewish cemetery near the river.”
“And he wasn’t punished?”
“Neither punished nor rewarded. Not immediately, anyway. No repercussions whatsoever. Just more of the same embarrassed silence. There was still that raging epidemic of caution.”
“You believe that this really happened,” says Kessler.
“I do. The flutter technicians did too. Tronko himself believed it, evidently.”
“No wonder the old man loved him.”
“Yes,” says Sidney Gondelman. “No wonder at all.”
Gondelman has interrupted himself to lumber off down the spiral staircase, taking the steps like a gorilla, and returns after several minutes armed with two bottles, which he carries pinched by their necks among three of his fat fingers. He is wheezing happily. He sets an old and no doubt highly distinguished brandy on the table before Kessler; beside it, a fresh bottle of soda water. From the deep fold of his other palm appear a pair of crystal glasses.
The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 38
