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

by David Quammen

  Nor was the man a doctor. He wore a charcoal suit of fine twill that must have come at least from East Germany. He held his hands clasped patiently at his belt. He was unexceptional physically, neither tall nor short, a middling fellow of middling age and possessing the gift of stillness, with inexpressive gray eyes and thinning hair combed back. His eyeglasses were unmistakably Soviet, and didn’t flatter him so well as the suit: ungainly frames, with a thick silver bar across the brow and only thin rims looping under the lenses, like some apparatus a jeweler might wear. He spoke with a mild, intermittent stammer that sometimes left him unmolested for whole sentences. Viktor Semyonovich had no idea who he was.

  “Welcome back, Viktor Semyonovich,” the man said. “I’m glad to see you looking so much b-b-b—” The man stopped himself at once and glanced at the floor. Then he glanced up again and said crisply: “Better.”

  Viktor Semyonovich said nothing.

  The man smiled. Not a menacing smile at all. His mouth was a small line curled gently. He came up alongside the bed, pushing this friendly new smile before him. He picked a bright Jaffa orange off Viktor Semyonovich’s tray and began peeling it with fast sure fingers. He rolled the entire peel off in only two pieces and set the pieces back on the tray. Then he split the orange down into sections, setting those on the tray. He dipped his head toward them. Obediently, Viktor Semyonovich put an orange section into his own mouth. The man wiped his hands on a white handkerchief.

  “We’ll wait until you are completely healthy. That comes first,” the man said.

  “Before what?”

  The man nodded indulgently. “Everything will be all right now, Viktor Semyonovich,” he said in lieu of answering. He opened his mouth again and then closed it, having decided, evidently, that further elaboration was not called for at the moment. His purpose this afternoon seemed to be limited: peel oranges and smile and take his own firsthand look at Viktor Semyonovich Tronko.

  “I want to see my family,” said Viktor Semyonovich, feeling reckless.

  The man stared back. Again not a menacing expression, though neither did it seem meant to reassure. “Yes. Naturally you do. Still, for a while you will need to be p-p-p—” His eyes went to the floor, lingered an instant, and came up. “Patient.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You will know me as Trofim Filippovich Rybakov,” the man said precisely.

  Viktor Semyonovich was allowed nine days of this luxurious and idle recuperation, throughout which he felt like a goose being fattened for Christmas. The nine days were a great concession of precious time, he understood later, grudgingly allotted not only to restore his strength for coping with the hard work ahead, but also to rid his body as completely as possible of the visible effects of Lefortovo and Kolyma; likewise the intravenous supplements had been discontinued early, he guessed, because of concern about lingering needle marks. They wanted him healthy and whole, and yet they were in a hurry. After nine days he was judged fit to begin. That morning the two lockjawed angels brought him a suit of civilian clothes. They told him to dress and they waited there in the room while he did. Viktor Semyonovich had the suit halfway on before he recognized it: one of his own, left behind in the apartment sixteen months earlier because it had been much too heavy for Rome in August.

  “Where did you get this?”

  The lockjawed angels didn’t answer. He hadn’t expected they would.

  They took him across the city in a ZIL limousine with smoked windows and armor plating and a driver screened off from them by glass partition. The car was also equipped with a telephone, first such that Viktor Semyonovich had ever seen, but nobody made any calls. He gaped out through the smoked windows at the familiar street corners of Moscow. He saw pedestrians, hobbling over the frozen slush, who couldn’t see him. There seemed a wild chance he might catch sight of Tanya. He didn’t. At the Lubyanka they drove through a gate that opened magically before them and closed behind. It was a different courtyard from the one he had seen sixteen months earlier, on his march from the cell to the champagne van. This courtyard was smaller and cleaner; all the snow had been cleared off the cobbles. They walked to an elevator and rode, this time, up.

  The third floor was also new territory. During his working years in the Eleventh Department, Viktor Semyonovich had never had occasion to visit these holy corridors, spanning the junction of the old building and the annex, so near to the Chairman’s office. Along the floor stretched a pink and green runner. He and his escorts followed the rug around three corners and for what seemed like hundreds of meters. Finally a door. It was held for him. He was ushered across a large antechamber, past a male secretary in blue uniform, through a swinging gate in a low wooden railing and into an inner office. The light here was softer. The furniture was elegant: an oak desk, leather armchairs, brass lamps with shades of green glass, and an Armenian carpet. On a table were a half dozen telephones. The man of the silver eyeglasses looked up as Viktor Semyonovich entered. He smiled his benign smile. He motioned Viktor Semyonovich to a straight chair pulled up beside the desk, and then he waved the two lockjaws out.

  On the edge of the desk was a thread-bound file.

  “Open it, Viktor Semyonovich,” said the man.

  Viktor Semyonovich obeyed. He ran his eyes over the first page, recognized his own handwriting, turned on to the second page and then the third while the man waited patiently. Viktor Semyonovich had sewn in each of the pages himself. It was the file from a visa investigation concerning a poor fellow in Leningrad, a professor of philology, who had called himself Lavrushko for years but was actually the son of a Jewish laborer named Giterman. Giterman the son had been a genuine war hero and was a genuine philologist, though a genuine Lavrushko he was not. Viktor Semyonovich had uncovered that little deceit five years earlier. Giterman had been denied his visa for the foreign trip and then lost his job at the university. But it had not been a case possessing any special importance, so far as Viktor Semyonovich knew.

  “We begin here,” said the man of the silver eyeglasses. He tapped two fingers on the open file. “With Lavrushko. With your brilliant and zealous investigation in the Lavrushko affair.”

  Viktor Semyonovich looked at him vacantly.

  “Congratulations on your p-p-p—” The man glanced at the floor and then up again. “Promotion to captain.”

  Viktor Semyonovich wagged his head, still not comprehending.

  “I have a chore for you, Viktor Semyonovich,” the man said in a tone that was more stern and direct. “Pay the closest attention to what I say, and everything will work out well.”

  For the seven weeks of his briefing, Viktor Semyonovich did not once leave the Lubyanka. But he wasn’t kept in a cell. He spent his nights in a princely two-room apartment on the fifth floor, with one or the other of the lockjawed angels always on watch at his door. His breakfasts and his suppers were brought to him there. The food was excellent and abundant, though not so extraordinary as what he had gotten at the bigwigs’ hospital. Lunches he ate off a tray in the office downstairs, while the man of the silver eyeglasses left him alone for an hour. With the noon meal he was also served a small paper cup of pills, of which he was terrified at first, but which turned out to be only vitamins. They wanted him healthy, fast. And he was given a thick pile of Izvestia and Soviet magazines, dating back into November, by which to acquaint himself with what had gone on in the world recently. In the early mornings and in the evenings he was allowed to take exercise on the roof, so long as no prisoners were up there at the time. Viktor Semyonovich had heard the man of the silver eyeglasses use that very phrase, in giving the instructions to a lockjaw: “—so long as no prisoners are up there at the time.” Evidently Viktor Semyonovich himself wasn’t considered a prisoner. Then again, he certainly wasn’t free. During the long days he listened intently and answered the questions thrown at him, while the man of the silver eyeglasses rewrote the script of the last five y
ears of Viktor Semyonovich’s life. It was only the two of them in the office, working over files or notes at the oak desk or, in the later weeks, seated more comfortably in the leather armchairs. There was a large body of information to master and the repetitions demanded were seemingly infinite. The precision of memory demanded was seemingly impossible. In the evenings Viktor Semyonovich drilled himself further. Marching up and back on the roof in his sheepskin coat, with a lockjaw guarding the elevator, he repeated aloud the various intricate details of his revised biography, conditioning himself to hear these new facts spoken confidently in his own voice. The man of the silver eyeglasses had suggested this sort of practice. The man had also suggested that he add some knee bends and toe touches to his exercise regimen, in the interest of restoring his atrophied buttocks. Viktor Semyonovich obeyed. He was eager to satisfy the man. He still feared what would happen if he didn’t. He performed the knee bends and the toe touches, he chuffed back and forth on the roof with his arms swinging high, his breath puffing out white in the frozen night air of December and then of January, his voice rehearsing the lies. He learned to know himself, by rote, as a somewhat different person from the Viktor Semyonovich Tronko who had boarded a plane for Rome. He made a dogged pupil.

  He learned to know that the Lavrushko case had been a turning point in his career. He learned to know that, in early summer of 1959, following a commendation for his work against Lavrushko, he had been promoted still again, from captain to major, and transferred to the Tourist Department of the Second CD, where he took up service as deputy to the departmental chief. He learned to know that the departmental chief was a man named Trofim Filippovich Rybakov, and that this Comrade Rybakov had been Viktor Semyonovich’s own patron and protector for some years, since even before his recruitment to the Organs. He learned to know the basis for that paternal relationship. He learned to know the routines and functions of the Tourist Department, the layout of the offices, the size and decor of his own personal office, the view from his window, the route to the elevator. He learned to know the size and decor of Comrade Rybakov’s office. None of these offices was Viktor Semyonovich ever permitted to see; they were merely described to him, until he could describe them back. His new living quarters were also described to him: a larger apartment for Tanya and him and the boy, in a desirable building on Maksim Gorky Embankment—and not even sharing a kitchen, but theirs alone. Having memorized the apartment, he found he could delude himself with hopeful fantasies that perhaps, by some miracle of folded reality that passed his understanding, his wife and son were actually living in such a place, unmolested. He learned to know about hidden microphones at the U.S. Embassy. He learned of his later and final promotion, to lieutenant colonel. And he learned to address the man of the silver eyeglasses as “Trofim Filippovich,” just as if this man himself were Comrade Rybakov of the Tourist Department, though Viktor Semyonovich felt certain he wasn’t. The familiar form of address had its place in an atmosphere of gentle but firm tutelage that had been set between them; in each case when Viktor Semyonovich reverted to calling the man “Citizen Colonel,” as he had at first and as any camp inmate would address a commandant, he was corrected to say: “Trofim Filippovich.” Gradually the name came to feel natural on his tongue. Maybe it belonged to a real living man, maybe not. But Viktor Semyonovich never believed it belonged to the man of the silver eyeglasses, no more than he believed in himself as a deputy departmental chief who lived on Maksim Gorky.

  In the seventh week he sensed a culmination of some sort. His story was being polished like a lens, and a new passport photo had been taken. So he said again: “I want to see my family.”

  The man of the silver eyeglasses shook his head.

  “I insist,” Viktor Semyonovich said daringly.

  The man had a steady and ever measuring disposition. After a moment of stillness he left the room. The day’s session had ended, early. Viktor Semyonovich was taken upstairs. Next day there was a full session and the subject of his family was not mentioned. Viktor Semyonovich judged that the prudent thing, now, might be a little patience. That night after his exercise and his shower and his solitary supper he was brought back downstairs, an exception to the normal routine. The man of the silver eyeglasses was waiting in his office, that room being now totally darkened. They sat in the armchairs. There were no questions, no drills, no repetitions. They just sat. Within a few minutes Viktor Semyonovich’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, and then the other man summoned him to the bank of windows. The man pressed an electric control that opened the steel shutters of one window. Together they stared out at the night. Finally two figures appeared, walking along the pavement of Dzerzhinsky Square: Viktor Semyonovich’s wife, guided at the elbow by one of the lockjawed angels. These two walked the length of the block, turned, walked back. The Lubyanka building loomed over them, and Tanya was painting it with her gaze, sweeping her eyes imploringly along the rows and tiers of windows. She gave no special attention to the window at which Viktor Semyonovich stood. One circuit down and back, and she disappeared beyond view.

  “Where’s the boy?”

  “A defective child cannot be out at night. He needs special attention,” said the man of the silver eyeglasses.

  Viktor Semyonovich looked at him in the dark. Only the silver frames caught any light from the street.

  “Neighbors,” the man said.

  They were finished polishing him. Evidently he had learned his rote lessons sufficiently well. A suitcase full of his own clothes had appeared, and a tailor was brought in (though healthy now, Viktor Semyonovich was still twenty-five pounds lighter than at Rome) to do alterations. He knew his lines. Without a superfluous word spoken by the man of the silver eyeglasses, he knew what was implied by parading his wife, alone, up and down Dzerzhinsky Square. He knew that Article 64 of the criminal code was applicable not just to defectors and traitors but also to their families. He knew the kind of facility his son would end in, if his wife were taken away to a camp. He understood exactly what was expected of him, he thought. He had no inkling of the reason or the logic behind it, if indeed there was any reason or logic.

  Then another night session, the second and final one of those. Viktor Semyonovich was told to dress in his (newly retailored) work uniform and then brought downstairs. The man of the silver eyeglasses was standing over his oak desk. Turning the pages of a thick file. For a moment Viktor Semyonovich thought again of Lavrushko. But this was different. On a corner of the desk sat three other file volumes bound identically. The man looked up as Viktor Semyonovich entered.

  “You have just come from Vnukovo Airport,” he said.

  He described the night in November when Viktor Semyonovich had flown back from his mission to Minsk. He described the weather in Moscow that day and evening, the unseasonable warmth, the slush in the streets, the fog. He described the phone call from himself that had been necessary to cow the traffic controller into allowing Viktor Semyonovich’s plane to land. He described the trip’s larger context, the midnight call twenty hours earlier by which he had waked Viktor Semyonovich at home, the tense conversation that had passed between them, the thoughts they had together been almost too frightened to think. This is the surveillance file on the American lunatic Oswald, he said.

  “Good lord, Viktor Semyonovich,” he said. “We must see how much, if at all, we have gotten ourselves implicated. Do you p-p-p—” He glanced down at the file and up again into Viktor Semyonovich’s face. “Pray?”

  The following afternoon Viktor Semyonovich was put on a flight to Vienna.

  This time, in place of the gun, Roger Nye carries only a folding chair. Possibly that means he feels secure in here with Kessler because of accomplices outside the door of the Vault. Possibly it means no such thing. Maybe he knows kung fu. He opens the chair and sits, directly in front of Kessler, who is on the floor again with a cold aching ass and his back braced in the corner of two walls. Nye pushes his hands into his p
ockets. With the snowy hair and the lean genteel features and the flannel jacket and the boots, he could be a professor emeritus of forestry at some New England college, or perhaps E. B. White. He says: “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Let’s talk about what you know, Mr. Kessler. And what you think you know.”

  “All right. Let’s.”

  Kessler has given this moment a great deal of advance meditation. He has concluded, with the lucidity of the angry and scared, that he has two options. He can tell the complete truth and then hope for the best, or he can spin out some elaborate total lie, trying to conceal the extent of his own knowledge with a muddle of distortions and ignorant mistakes and bad guesses all designed to persuade Nye that Michael Kessler needn’t be taken as a threat—and then hope for the best. The second option seems safer, which is not to say safe. Unfortunately, no such elaborate total lie has occurred to him. His brain feels as if it’s full of cold bacon grease. He has no idea what he will say until he hears himself saying it.