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

by David Quammen

  “Something like dentistry?”

  “No. There is no dentistry in camp. Something like sewing. Or dealing tobacco, somehow. Or poetry.”

  The dentist was cheerful, confident, popular. He seemed to have the game beat. Each night across Siberia he would give a performance. Sometimes it was Lermontov, sometimes Nikolai Nekrasov, sometimes the frazzled verses of Mayakovsky, which the dentist would animate with wild hammy arm gestures and crazy faces; most often it was Pushkin. Always it was poetry that could only be judged politically safe, because there were informers in a Stolypin car just as anywhere. That was another bit of counsel that the dentist offered Viktor Semyonovich: there were informers everywhere, even in camp, and a man could always have an additional sentence tacked on. Landau the dentist was serving his second, and he intended that it would be his last. He knew two hours’ worth of Eugene Onegin by heart.

  The early stanzas about Eugene’s decadent life, with its costume balls and its duels and seductions and other nineteenth-century pleasures, were by acclamation the favorites. The dentist repeated these stanzas so often, on demand, that half the prisoners in the car eventually had them by memory too. The thugs would make everyone hush. The dentist would begin, and recite for twenty minutes, raising his voice alone over the clack of the rails, before he came to:

  The ball’s wild gaiety was wearing,

  So turning morning into night,

  To darkness’ kind abode repairing,

  Now sleeps the scion of delight.

  By afternoon he will be waking,

  He’ll then resume till day is breaking

  The merry and monotonous round,

  And then once more till noon sleep sound.

  But was true joy to Eugene granted

  Then, in the flower of his youth?

  Was pleasure happiness in sooth

  ’Mid all the conquests that he vaunted?

  When in the banquet-hall he beamed

  Was he the carefree soul he seemed?

  This was the point where dozens more voices would chorus in, chanting in full throat as the train rattled along through Siberian darkness:

  No, soon the world began to bore him,

  The senses soon grew blunt and dull,

  In vain the belles might clamor for him,

  He found the fairest faces null;

  Seduction ceased to be amusing!

  And friendship’s claims he was refusing,

  Because he could make no bon mot,

  Could not wash down with Veuve Clicquot

  The beefsteak and the Strasbourg patty!!

  When his poor head began to ache;

  And though he was an ardent rake!

  An exquisite both bold and natty,

  The time came when he quite abhorred

  Even the pistol and the sword!

  And then the guards would pound on the wall.

  The man who calls himself Max Rosen cannot help smiling at this recollection. He remembers those two stanzas of Pushkin indelibly, and quite a few others. He even used them to amuse himself, later, over here, in the concrete room. Probably he will never forget them. He hopes he will not. He sets his feet up on Kessler’s bed, making himself more comfortable.

  They reached Vanino in mid-October. This was the terminus of the rail line, and of the continent, on the Tatar Strait just a spit from Japan. By now it was unmistakable where they were being taken. But first they were marched overland six kilometers to the Vanino transit camp. They spent a few days there in a huge compound with thousands of other prisoners, under no work regimen yet, merely standing around and growing colder and more hungry, waiting for the ship. The ship arrived. They were marched back to the harbor and put onboard. It was a huge rusty old steamer, called the Felix Dzerzhinsky now though Viktor Semyonovich heard from another prisoner that this was a second name for what had long earlier, under a different set of winds, carried registry as the Nikolai Yezhov. The ship lived up to both its names. The open hold was divided into a number of very large cells, simple cages of heavy iron grate, each cage holding several hundred prisoners; the cells were set in tiers, with no solid floors, so that refuse from an upper cell rained down on the men below. Viktor Semyonovich and the dentist were both so fortunate as to be shoved into an upper cell. Nevertheless the dentist was ill during the voyage—not badly ill but afflicted with some sort of seasickness or flu or a recurrence of dysentery. He gave no poetry recitations. Their passage up the coast to Nagayevo, gateway to the Kolyma basin, took eleven days. Across the last few kilometers and into Nagayevo Harbor, the Felix Dzerzhinsky was breaking ice.

  The dentist, with his usual morbid good humor, said something casually during the ocean passage that Viktor Semyonovich did not forget. “Think of the irony, Viktor Semyonovich,” he said. “Here I am, sentenced for owning gold. And now soon I’ll be standing on top of the biggest lode in the Soviet Union.” As it turned out, the dentist was wrong. At Nagayevo they were put ashore onto a pier and then mustered immediately for another overland hike to the transit camp, this time about ten kilometers. It was early morning, no promise of daylight yet, and quite cold. Before they left the harbor a guards lieutenant had warned them that rest breaks would not be allowed, no stopping and no stragglers would be tolerated, on this march to camp. After a couple kilometers Landau the dentist was having another crisis of the bowels so he scampered off quickly to the edge of the gravel and dropped his pants. A guard shot him.

  Viktor Semyonovich stopped walking. He stared at the dentist’s body, small and crumpled on the edge of the road. Its pants down. Then the same guard who had fired the shot said a word to Viktor Semyonovich, and Viktor Semyonovich marched on.

  Of the final three or four weeks what he mainly remembers is being cold. He had never been so cold for such a long stretch of days. Of course he realizes that three or four weeks was really nothing, just a wink of time, a relative moment—relative not just to his twenty-five-year sentence but even to the actual period most prisoners in Kolyma served before dying or, in the rarer case, being released. Still it was enough time for Viktor Semyonovich to grasp that he himself would not have survived long. Not twenty-five years, which was laughable, nor five years nor probably even two. It was enough time to make him understand, later, how lucky he had been. Most likely even a single full winter would have killed him.

  He spent less than a day at the transit camp. He was added to a truck convoy that was leaving at once, before the road became impassable, for labor camps within a few days’ hard driving along the nearer headwaters of the Kolyma River; the more northerly camps were already snowed in. He was deposited several days later inside the gate of a compound, a zone of dirty snow surrounded by high fences with guard towers. The compound contained only a handful of log buildings and maybe a hundred tents. It was one of the gold camps, devoted to dredge operations there on a small tributary of the main river. It had a proper name, this camp, but it was more familiarly known to its inmates as “Kilometer 299.” Two of the log buildings were occupied by guards, one belonged to the commandant, the rest were for machinery. Viktor Semyonovich was assigned randomly to a tent. Each tent was furnished with wooden bunks but no bedding, and a stove but no stove wood. Prisoners were allowed to scrounge what stove wood they needed from the taiga during their free time, which was also nonexistent. Another option was to burn the bunks in the stove and lie down on the snow. The real intention, Viktor Semyonovich saw clearly, was that he and these other men should die here, mining a little gold in the meantime. Viktor Semyonovich was fortunate in that his assigned tent already housed some sturdy stubborn veterans, men who had piled snow and moss against the tent walls outside and over the roof, for insulation. These men also knew the illicit ways to get stove wood.

  And by still greater luck, on his first morning of work he was given a steam hose. The steam hose helped save his life. The dentist, with hi
s bright-eyed optimism, should have had half so much luck.

  Another man had been running the steam hose for months. The day before Viktor Semyonovich arrived, that man had died—simply sat down in the snow and coughed a pint of blood into his lap and that was all. Viktor Semyonovich by good timing inherited the man’s job. On the first morning his work-brigade leader took him out to the placer site, showed him how to light and stoke a large wood-fired boiler, how to regulate pressure, how to control the nozzle. Each day thereafter it was Viktor Semyonovich’s task to use this steam hose for melting the frozen stream gravel long enough so that it could be dug up and sifted. He himself never had to dig. He just wielded the hose like a wand. His lungs stayed damp but unfrozen and the rest of his body had a source of heat while everyone else got frostbite. He was warm but wet as he worked, and only suffered badly during the hike back to camp and the half hour of waiting outside the gate for evening head count. Each night he could warm himself briefly again by the tent stove, then he slept in his soggy clothes. He was one of few prisoners eager, each morning, to get to the work site. Eventually the steam hose would have killed him as surely as anything, and he knew that. Pneumonia, probably. But for three or four weeks at Kilometer 299 it saved him from the quicker physical wreckage of pure brutal cold. As events unfolded, that much was sufficient.

  One afternoon they came out and found him at the placer site: a guards lieutenant from camp, and two strangers.

  The strangers wore unsoiled fur parkas with fur hoods, good felt boots that seemed to be new, uniform trousers unsuitable for serious cold. They looked miserable, these men. Viktor Semyonovich was reluctant to surrender his steam hose. But he was ordered by the lieutenant to accompany these strangers back to camp. Accompany, the lieutenant said. Viktor Semyonovich left Kilometer 299 that same afternoon, seated between the two strangers, in a truck equipped with tire chains and a heater and a plow. One of the two strangers had presented him with a sheepskin coat; Viktor Semyonovich wasn’t sure, but he believed that the coat had belonged to the camp commandant. He was mystified. They had food, which they shared with him. Sausage, smoked fish, a thermos of strong hot tea. He was astounded but didn’t dare to ask questions. If he was being taken back to Nagayevo to be shot, for some meaningless reason, let him at least enjoy the last meal in ignorance. They didn’t look as though they would answer his questions anyway.

  At Nagayevo a ski plane was waiting. Also a fresh supply of food; the food evidently came from the Nagayevo commandant’s kitchen and was already boxed for air travel when the truck arrived. They flew down the coast to Vanino, just the three of them and a pilot. Viktor Semyonovich was growing guardedly more optimistic. He could imagine not even the most farfetched reason why he should be taken to Vanino or Vladivostok, in luxury, to be executed. Something else was happening.

  Someone had died, he guessed.

  He remembered all the turmoil and crazy caution after Stalin’s death. Khrushchev has died, he thought. The old peasant has choked on a turnip. Viktor Semyonovich couldn’t dream how it might have come to involve him, by even the silliest misunderstanding, but that had to be what was what. Nothing happened so swiftly unless someone had died. At Vanino this time there was no forced march between the camp and the harbor; they didn’t go to the harbor at all. Another plane was ready, a big one, there on the airstrip.

  It was an Ilyushin-28 transport. It took off immediately and flew west. Aside from his two escorts, Viktor Semyonovich was the sole passenger. He was given a double armload of fur rugs on which to sleep. He was given more food. The plane stopped only once for refueling. It landed finally at Vnukovo Airport late on a clear cold afternoon, the last day of November 1963.

  Kessler’s neck is sore. His buttocks are sore. He is hugging himself at the rib cage and shivering steadily now. His shoulders are sore from the unconscious effort of hunching them up, trying to use them as earmuffs. His head is throbbing like a chime doorbell. Probably he is running a fever, he suspects, thanks to the infected arm. He is tired of pacing the room in a half-assed attempt to stay warm and very damn tired of being cold. Very damn tired of waiting. The arm is throbbing also, of course—sort of a syncopation of throbs. His attitude is negative. He has resolved to buy a watch.

  Then again, Nye would probably have taken the watch also. But maybe not. How long has it been now? Kessler estimates five hours since the last visit, when Nye deprived him of his coat. Possibly longer. The time by now must be close to dawn. It could even be bright winter sunshine outside, a new day, and in here he wouldn’t know it. Five hours of frigid misery in just a khaki shirt, five hours to ponder the loss of his dear heavy frayed wool overcoat, with the notebook in its inside pocket.

  Kessler had a few seconds of terror when he first remembered the notebook. But then he relaxed, aware of what may be the week’s only merciful happenstance—that this particular notebook is a fresh one, nearly empty. He snatched it from the drawer just before leaving New Haven again. Nye will have found it in the pocket, yes, and it will have told him nothing at all except the phone number of one Roger Nye, and directions from Washington to a certain stonework trestle outside of Strasburg, Virginia. For this narrow escape Kessler can claim no credit of foresight. The notes that he made after talking with Gondelman—and the few terse crucial phrases that he put down after seeing Rosalind Alpert—had simply filled out the previous notebook, so he left that one behind in New Haven, with the two others. In fact he tucked all three notebooks away securely, in the spot to which Kessler by habit consigns irreplaceable papers when he is leaving town in a hurry: the freezer compartment of his refrigerator. So there is a God after all, even if He does seem more often inclined toward sick humor. Nye is welcome to the empty notebook.

  Thoughts of the freezer only amplify Kessler’s shivering. And thoughts of the other notebooks only amplify his anxiety.

  Maybe that’s the reason for all this delay—maybe Nye has sent someone up to New Haven, to ransack Kessler’s apartment. Will they find his notes, so cleverly hidden among the potpies and the bottle of Beefeater and the frozen lasagna? Only if they have at least the intelligence of a raccoon. On the other hand, maybe Nye doesn’t need the notes if he has Kessler himself, held hostage without hope of rescue. Ve haff vays of mecking you tok, Mr. Kessler. Better still, we have ways of keeping you evermore silent. How in the dancing devil, Kessler wonders, am I going to lie my way out of here?

  How do I hide the notes that are on ice in my brain?

  Pokorny, he wrote on the page below Rosalind Alpert’s underscored name. Just that single word. He was not likely to forget what question it answered. Kessler was sitting in his car, back at the overpriced motor lodge, after his hour with her. He had not taken any notes while Rosalind Alpert talked—not because he was worried about spooking her, but because it just wasn’t necessary. Highly unlikely that he would forget anything she had said. Now in the car he scratched down a few phrases hurriedly. Even these phrases were not for memory but to reassure himself, later, that he hadn’t hallucinated. Rosalind’s epiphany, he wrote. Having met this imposing woman, he no longer could think of her by the lampooning nickname. A slash after the previous entry, and he added: Mel’s mistake.

  Kessler’s bag was stowed in the back seat and he had already checked out of the motel. But he didn’t yet start the engine. He thought of that day in the Vault, halfway through the third year, when Pokorny was badgering Tronko with special insistence about the imputed connection to General Avvakian. He thought of Rosalind Alpert reenacting that session with Leo the Dubious, under the eyes of Sidney Gondwana, and he thought of what she had described to him as her own very private instant of dire recognition. Pokorny had finally slipped. He had gone a step too far. And he knew he had. Viktor Tronko seemed to know too. Probably Leo the Dubious had grasped the import of the moment, in replay, and Rosalind Alpert certainly had. Everyone noticed but Gondelman, outside his plastic window, and the rest of the Central Intellig
ence Agency. Then the moment passed. It was interred within thousands of pages of transcript. Rosalind Alpert had taken her suspicion—her knowledge—with her up to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and never again spoken of that moment until someone came asking.

  Kessler wrote the stammer man in his notebook, and drew a fat line across the page.

  He sits up awake, suddenly, in the chair. But despite drowsy confusion and a mild sense of alarm, pulse drumming in his ears, he doesn’t move. He waits for his brain to clear. He listens for sounds outside the room, on the landing and stairs, meanwhile breathing silently through his mouth. He listens for a long time and hears nothing. He thought it might be Kessler, returning at last. Evidently not. Seems to be no one out there. Probably it was just his own drooping head that startled him back awake.

  The man who calls himself Max Rosen can still doze comfortably while sitting upright but, even asleep, his body remembers when a drooping head was enough to earn a beating.

  From Vnukovo Airport they took him straight to a hospital in the center of Moscow. It was a special facility of some sort though not, mercifully, of the same special sort as the Serbsky Institute. He was wary again by now. He was guessing that perhaps they had brought him back for a confrontational interview, to use him as a stooge in some other poor man’s interrogation; maybe to use him against his former friend, the son of the Politburo member. But in this hospital there were no iron grates over the windows. The nurses and even the doctors were cheerful and servile. He had a room all to himself with a door that was kept closed, guarded constantly by one or the other of the two lockjawed men who had fetched him back from Kolyma. He slept long hours. He was given books to read. After a few days of intravenous supplements he was shifted entirely to a solid diet, and the food was shockingly good. Roast birds, sturgeon, beefsteak, priceless tender tomatoes from God knows where. When he finished one dinner tray, the nurse would ask him if he wanted more, and since of course he did, she would immediately deliver additional delicacies, steaming and tasty, the best food he had ever eaten. It was the quality of these meals by which Viktor Semyonovich deduced that he was in a hospital normally reserved for the Party bosses. He still didn’t know why. At the end of a week of such pampering he woke in the afternoon to find a man standing at the foot of his bed. This time it wasn’t Morozov.