The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  In retrospect, it could be seen as a failure of imagination. Viktor Semyonovich was a straightforward man of moderate intelligence and, notwithstanding his profession, never a talented liar. He could have given Morozov some real names and some faked-up conspiratorial details, certainly, and thus destroyed a few innocent lives, but his dimmed brain couldn’t come even close to providing him with a rationalization for that. So he stuck with the truth because it was simple and sure and, over another ten months, he suffered miserably for it.

  His daily food ration throughout all this time consisted of four hundred grams of sour black bread in the morning, along with two cubes of sugar and a cup of very weak tea; a bowl of fatless gruel at noon; and a cup of hot water at night. He lost weight quickly and his hair, as it grew back from the shaving, fell out in tufts, probably from lack of vitamins. His gums bled. His teeth loosened in their sockets. His fingernails broke like flatbread. On an average night he got no more than an hour of sleep, spending the other seven hours seated upright in the chair in Morozov’s interrogation room, subjected forever to the same repetitious questions and the same fits of screaming abuse, and trying desperately not to nod off. Sometimes he did nod off and fell backward out of the chair, waking on the floor to the roar of Morozov’s voice and the spray of Morozov’s spittle on his face, and to the burst of excruciating pain when Morozov’s boot toe came slamming into his kidneys. On these occasions the five or six seconds of sleep that had been snatched between when his lids closed and when Morozov’s boot struck seemed almost (but not quite) worth the punishment. During an average day in his cell he stole a total of another twelve or fifteen minutes of sleep, sitting up, between the guard’s glances in through the wolf’s eye. He shrank down to about one hundred pounds, then his weight stabilized there. He had no flesh left to his buttocks. His knees and elbows stood out like knots in a rope. He and Morozov had sunk into a stalemate of repetitions and it began to seem possible that Viktor Semyonovich might die or lose all mental competence before Major Morozov succeeded in extracting anything new. Viktor Semyonovich was by now utterly docile, a walking invalid in the last stages of generalized physical decay and a model prisoner, with no stubbornness left in him except the somatic stubbornness that kept his heart thumping, barely. He would have confessed to anything and implicated anyone, at this point, if he had just had the requisite focus and energy to create a lie. But he didn’t. He was ready to die, and vaguely aware that it shouldn’t be long now. Morozov on the other hand was not ready for that. Viktor Semyonovich’s death from interrogation might not have hurt the major’s career but neither would it have helped. Presumably Morozov could not abide having eleven months of effort end inconclusively. So as Viktor Semyonovich slipped closer to death, Morozov’s rage and frustration increased. He swung the Tokarev more frequently, sometimes knocking Viktor Semyonovich unconscious and then summoning a guard to revive him with a bucket of cold water. Viktor Semyonovich grew puzzled and annoyed, in his faraway sense of the whole matter, that Major Morozov would not simply use the pistol to shoot him. Then at some point in those final weeks Viktor Semyonovich was conscious, hazily, of being examined by another doctor. He couldn’t recall later whether this one had been a woman or a man. He remembered no face, only strong cold fingers tapping and pinching him, and a stethoscope. Next thing he knew he was in a bed with real sheets, at the Serbsky Institute.

  They were feeding him intravenously with a nutrient solution. After a few days of that they switched him to solid food—wholesome food, food that had taste, and given to him in modest but progressively larger quantities. There was a bowl of cabbage soup with bits of meat, for instance, which he would never afterward forget. They were nursing him back, at this place. He didn’t understand why and for the moment he didn’t care. A miracle had occurred, and he was saved—he set himself to believing that, difficult though it was.

  He regained some of his weight and his brain began to clear. He spent the first week in his bed but after that he could stand and walk again, and it was permissible for him to leave his room, even to take a stroll down the length of the ward. There were guards here too, but these guards dressed in white jackets and functioned also as orderlies, and none of them shouted at Viktor Semyonovich, not even when he stayed in his bed by daylight and slept. The windows were shielded from inside with heavy wire grates. Viktor Semyonovich did not know where he was. Obviously, though, it was some sort of prison hospital. Only later, on the train that took him to Kolyma, did he learn the name of this facility where he had been treated, and its reputation. The stairways were off limits. He was instructed to confine his explorations to the corridor that ran past his own room, and he obeyed. The doors of the other rooms were usually closed. He saw few other prisoners—few other patients, or inmates, or whatever they were called here—except the four men who shared his room, and those four didn’t communicate. Three of them acted feral and shy, keeping their distance from Viktor Semyonovich when they could, avoiding his glance, ignoring his direct questions, and the fourth seemed to be in a coma. The doctor now attending Viktor Semyonovich was a man, a young fellow about his own age, handsome, with swept-back hair and an unctuous manner. This doctor visited daily. He himself never examined Viktor Semyonovich, merely read the chart that was kept current by a nurse. One morning he set the chart back on its hook and said:

  “So. How do you feel, Viktor Semyonovich?”

  “Very much better.”

  “Exactly. So. I will be sending you some medication now. You will take it obediently.”

  “I feel good. It’s the food,” said Viktor Semyonovich. “What medication?”

  The doctor’s smile stiffened like cold fat and he walked away.

  They started on him with pills. Viktor Semyonovich was given two different kinds, and the dosage each morning amounted to a cupped palmful of capsules. These were counted out into his hand by a nurse, who also provided the water and stood by to watch, then demanded he open his mouth and raise his tongue so that she could be sure they were all gone. Viktor Semyonovich did not know at the time what it was he was taking. He only knew, after the second morning, that the stuff made his mouth and his throat go dry and burned in his stomach like some sort of corrosive bile. Nevertheless he swallowed the capsules as he was told. That seemed far preferable to the prospect of being sent back to Lefortovo. And maybe these side effects would disappear, he hoped, when his body adjusted to the medication. But he began to feel sicker again. Continuous headaches, dizziness, faintness when he stood up out of bed. Although he was still drowsy much of the time, his body wouldn’t let him sleep; the nerves in his legs tingled maddeningly, his calf and thigh muscles twitched and spasmed. He couldn’t lie still. During daytime he walked endlessly up and down the corridor. But at night such pacing was forbidden and his legs tortured him. He waited desperately for each dawn, when he could get up again and walk. The nerves of his face were soon tingling also, and his jaw muscles grew sore from a constant involuntary clenching and yawning. After ten days Viktor Semyonovich grasped that he was being poisoned.

  When he told the nurse that he would swallow no more of those capsules, she replied in a firm cold professional tone that, yes, he would indeed. Anyway he would get the medication one way or another, she said. To Viktor Semyonovich’s own surprise, this flat statement by her brought him to tears. He sobbed uncontrollably for a quarter of an hour.

  But he refused to swallow more capsules. So the injections began. Each day he was held belly down on a metal table by three guards in white, while the nurse raped him repeatedly with hypodermics. The stuff was shot into what remained of his buttocks. It required several syringes to deliver the full dosage. During these brief moments Viktor Semyonovich would thrash piteously against the guards’ strong grip and moan like a tortured cat. For the rest of the day, then, he would be well behaved. Sometimes he didn’t find his way back to his bed at night and a guard would come out to retrieve him. When that happened, Viktor
Semyonovich wept childishly from fear of punishment, but evidently there was no punishment for getting lost in the corridor. More and more often, he was incontinent with his urine. He would dry his legs with the hospital gown. No one gave him a fresh gown, and the guards scolded him for his puddles. The scoldings put him in tears. His eyesight seemed to be going foggy. Finally one morning there was a man’s face at the foot of his bed. Viktor Semyonovich had trouble focusing, but this face seemed too round for the unctuous doctor. When he saw that it was Major Morozov, he wept with the joy of recognition.

  Twenty-six days had passed since Viktor Semyonovich left Lefortovo.

  He still had enough of his wits, barely, to give Morozov some names. He denounced two of his colleagues back in the Eleventh Department, two men he knew only slightly, each of whom had been in competition with Viktor Semyonovich for favor and promotion, and each of whom had in some petty way treated him badly. These two, he told Morozov, had been his accomplices. One of the two, the elder, had been influential in forming Viktor Semyonovich’s own anti-Soviet attitudes. The other man had alerted him about the American economic attaché at Rome. Complete lies. Viktor Semyonovich despised himself as he said these things to Morozov and even more so afterward, but he didn’t hesitate. For a margin of safety he also told Morozov about his own closest friend from his years at the Institute of International Relations, the son of the Politburo member.

  This young man, now a desk officer at the Foreign Ministry, had played a role in encouraging his treason, Viktor Semyonovich said. He and this young man had often exchanged counter revolutionary ideas. The young man was a secret admirer of the West, Viktor Semyonovich said, who kept his real views concealed from everyone but his closest confidants. He listened to recordings of Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. He received smuggled goods that came in from America, especially books and magazines, and was under the spell of what he read in them. During private conversations, he expressed his contempt for the leadership of the Soviet state and of the Party. All of this was at least half true. His friend at the Foreign Ministry might not be destroyed, Viktor Semyonovich consoled himself, thanks to the position of his father. Or he might be destroyed anyway. Probably it depended upon how the father currently stood with respect to the Politburo’s majority faction. If he were in good smell, the son was invulnerable; if not, the father himself might be ruined by these statements too. Viktor Semyonovich wished them the best. The other two men, however, from the Eleventh Department, were definitely finished. Major Morozov wrote all three names greedily into a little blue notebook. He also wrote the names of Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker.

  Then again Morozov disappeared. This final degradation had taken less than an hour. Viktor Semyonovich went back to sleep and allowed himself to dream it hadn’t happened.

  Next day he was transferred back to a cell at Lefortovo, not the same one as before but identical. The ration of bread that arrived for him now was slightly larger. He was allowed to sleep. It took him a full twenty-four hours to realize that the sleep rules had been canceled, for him, and so through that first day he slept sitting up. No one shouted through the food slot. Evidently no one cared. The following day he tried it lying down. Not a squeak of reprimand. They weren’t even peeking in on him anymore. They had ceased to care. Viktor Semyonovich went through another phase of stark despairing self-hatred and thought seriously about how he might kill himself. But there were no means available to him in this little cell that were likely to be better than gruesomely inefficient. He wasn’t interested in bashing his head open against the iron corner of the cot, only to live on as a helpless drooler—and when this thought was given words in his mind, he remembered the boy. His son. At least Viktor Semyonovich had not named his wife as an accomplice in anti-Soviet attitudinizing; at least he had not done anything, so far, he hoped, that would leave the boy unprotected. Instead of suicide, Viktor Semyonovich slept.

  He retreated from consciousness that way, sleeping as much as his body would accept, he didn’t know how much, probably sixteen hours a day. He no longer scratched off a calendar on the wall. The day count didn’t matter. And he didn’t see Morozov again. After another ten days or perhaps two weeks or a bit more, an officer in a uniform just like Morozov’s (but this man was a stranger) came to Viktor Semyonovich’s cell and informed him of his sentence.

  He had been given “twenty-five, five, and five”: twenty-five years of corrective labor, five more of exile, another five after that before his full rights of citizenship were restored. My full what of what? he thought.

  It didn’t surprise Viktor Semyonovich. It was a standard sentence, for its time. This was during the thaw. If Stalin were alive, Viktor Semyonovich knew, he would certainly be shot. He was glad now to be unburdened of the pressure and the suspense. He was glad to have those arduous preliminaries with Morozov all out of the way. And the sentence did not seem especially shocking, given his offenses. After all, Viktor Semyonovich would have expected to get twenty-five, five, and five merely for confessing to treason and espionage; and he had not only confessed to those things, he had actually done them. Fine, let the rest begin, he thought.

  Two days later his wish was granted. He was taken by champagne van to the Yaroslavsky Station and mustered into a prisoner convoy bound for the East.

  It was September when he left Moscow on this train. He traveled for thirty-seven days in a Stolypin railway car under conditions of unimaginable crowding. Some prisoners were off-loaded at transit prisons along the way, others were picked up at siding stops and packed into the car even when it seemed there could not possibly be space for another human body. Generally the head count in that car hovered between five and six dozen, not including the guards, who had their own compartment on the far side of a partition. Viktor Semyonovich got no chance to be lonely. As they crossed the high Siberian plain during early October, the cold weather came on them like doom. It began so abruptly—with crosswinds that rocked the car and fine driven snow sweeping across land that was still autumn brown and the breath of sixty men coating the iron meshwork of their cage with frost—it began so abruptly that they seemed to have traveled into it, as though riding an ore car down into a mine. And they had traveled into it, of course, but through both time and geography: the season had broken. The actual mines would come later. Viktor Semyonovich still didn’t know that he was destined for Kolyma. He had heard of the goldfield camps there, vaguely, but like everyone else he had been led to believe that they went out with Stalin. A temporary aberration, which had resulted from certain abuses of power during the period of the cult of personality.

  There was no stove in this Stolypin car except a small one on the guards’ side of the partition. While the train rolled eastward, toward that temporary aberration, the days grew colder and shorter.

  Sometimes the train went on for a week without making more than the briefest stops; then sometimes it pulled onto a siding and stood for an hour, or two, or forty-eight. No prisoner was permitted to leave the car, during such stops, except those who were taken off permanently. And then on one occasion the rest of the train pulled away again while this particular Stolypin, with Viktor Semyonovich and his cohabitants, was left behind on the siding, eventually to be coupled onto a different train. Naturally no explanations were made, ever, to prisoners.

  After he had been robbed of his good boots and his decent trousers, then left otherwise unmolested by the common criminals (who had enough other political prisoners even weaker than Viktor Semyonovich to focus their menace upon), his life in the moving boxcar became almost tolerable. He clung to his patch of space on a high bunk—a desirable bunk near the ceiling, and shared with only three other men. The rations were meager and no one got enough water, true. Toilet privileges were restricted at the whim of the lazy guards, true, and some men fouled the bunks. But at least there was no labor, yet, and no interrogation, anymore. Viktor Semyonovich himself had recovered control of his bladder. All day and a
ll night, he and the rest of the prisoners simply slept or talked. He made two friends among the other politicals. One was a former general from the Army, and one was a dentist. Each of them tried to tell him things that would be helpful for surviving in camp.

  The general was a tall man with a large frame and it appeared as though he had once been burly as a bull walrus; now his skin hung slack at the jowls and his wrists were delicate. He coughed. His eyes were constantly moist as a beagle’s. The general was educated. He spoke Ukrainian, though he was not himself Ukrainian, and he had been trained as an engineer. In his proudest moment of youth he had commanded an artillery battery at Stalingrad. He advised Viktor Semyonovich that in camp it would be necessary, whatever the risk, whenever possible, to steal extra bits of food. Otherwise a man would weaken and be unable to work, the general said, which would get him cut back to invalid’s ration and then he would die for sure. The general was debarked at Irkutsk. Viktor Semyonovich never saw him again. The dentist, on the other hand, was left in the car all the way to Vanino. So they had thirty-seven days to share company.

  The dentist knew poetry. He carried in his magical memory long sections of Pushkin, among others, which he would recite to an avid audience of prisoners in exchange for small privileges like bunk position and freedom from general molestation. The dentist was a frail little man who would have been helpless, but even the common criminals were gentle with him because they as much as anyone enjoyed the recitations. This was their only entertainment, besides stealing and fighting. So the dentist was favored, in the car, as a sort of pet. His hair grew back out into a woolly tangle of black ringlets, during the course of the trip, and his eyes were a deep ruby brown. He smiled more than most. To Viktor Semyonovich, he seemed in some ways like a clever child, this dentist. He had been arrested for ownership of gold—an occupational hazard for a dentist, the dentist would say, his eyes dark and shiny with wit. The real reason for his arrest was still a mystery to him. He came from Leningrad, of a half-Jewish father who taught chemistry at a technical institute and gave slavish obeisance to the Party, and a Latvian mother. His name was Yuli Landau. He counseled Viktor Semyonovich to find some skill or trade, in camp, by which he could make himself useful and earn a trickle of personal income. That was the only way one could hope to survive, the dentist said. And this trade had better be found quickly, the dentist said, before Viktor Semyonovich got weak and they put him on invalid’s ration.