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

by David Quammen

  Now that he has gotten where he wanted to get, Kessler senses more vividly the stupidity of this whole idea. Cigarette pack or no. It just cannot be so crucial to know Max Rosen’s brand of tobacco, or Max Rosen’s true identity, or for that matter even Max Rosen’s innermost secrets and motives, whatever the devil those might be. Not nearly so crucial as to be worth risking a broken neck. Screw it. Kessler is not concerned about Max Rosen right now. Nor even about Mel Pokorny. He is concerned about young Michael Kessler.

  He raises himself to his feet: carefully. He steps across from the scaffold into the building. There is scarcely any light and the floor here is as cluttered as the one above, a confusion of dim irregular shadows, so he scuffs along with small strides, wary of tripping over a pallet or a stray block or a two-by-four toothed with gleaming nails. He steadies himself with hands fanned out, palms down. Methodical. Don’t hurry now. Every precaution. Kessler takes another two steps and part of a third and then is hit on his right hip by a shocking thick low animal force that drives him right off his feet, sideways, into darkness and air.

  He paddles his arms hopelessly.

  15

  DEXTER LOVESONG CAN hear Buddyboy coming from halfway down the block. Trotting, for Christ sake, then skidding and changing course, flapping his shoe leather like castanets. The blood rises in Lovesong’s neck and at once his shirt collar is as tight as a tourniquet. But he does not shift position, does not raise his eyes above the car seat; there is no need to look up, since Lovesong can so clearly imagine it. More noisy footfalls, coming closer, then abruptly crossing back to the far side of N Street. He’s hunting for the right car, Lovesong knows. He has already forgotten the make and color. Hunting for me. All urgent and earnest and breathless—as Lovesong pictures him—running wildly up the pavement, dodging from one parked car to another, with some very hot fat message that demands announcing his presence and Lovesong’s also to anyone who might care enough to open an ear or an eye. Lovesong may just as well sit up now, because his painstakingly devised invisibleness has been squandered, his cover is a joke. But he does not sit up. Instead, for his own satisfaction, he imagines Buddyboy taking a round of .270 magnum in the forehead. Right there in the middle of N Street, picked off his feet and laid flat, nothing but daylight and bone stubble left from the eyebrows up. Now that is precisely what would happen, Lovesong imagines, if God were just, and a sniper.

  The right rear door of the Audi is jerked open. Lovesong, supine on the floor of the back seat, rolls over disgustedly onto one elbow. Near his knees is the door panel from the left rear door, which he pried off with the same screwdriver that he then used to punch three holes through the Audi’s thin sheet metal. The holes are in a tight cluster, low on the door, just beneath the spot where Lovesong’s head now rests at a crimped angle. His shoulders are twisted. His suit is filthy. The three holes have given him an excellent if uncomfortable view of the front door and upper windows of the Tabard Inn. Buddyboy gapes from the curb, his shiny young face gone suddenly slack. Buddyboy seems to have forgotten, for an instant, whatever hot fat message he came running to deliver.

  “Does Motor Pool know you did that?”

  “Shut up,” says Dexter Lovesong. “What? What is it?”

  “I heard a noise.”

  “You heard a noise.” Lovesong closes his eyelids and begins counting slowly to twenty, with measured breathing, as his idiot of a doctor has recommended. He imagines himself poking holes in Buddyboy with a screwdriver.

  “Loud. Back in the alley.”

  Seven, eight, nine, he opens them early, as usual. “A loud noise. Okay. A shot?”

  “No,” says Buddyboy. “No. I don’t know. More like a swivel chair thrown through a plate-glass window.”

  16

  KESSLER HAS A TERROR of not finishing. It is a recurrent fear, quiet and corrosive each time it visits, arriving at some awful moment in the course of every long difficult investigative article and every book he has ever written or tried to write: the mutter of doubt, the loss of single-mindedness, the loss of focus, the loss of momentum; the almost audible creak and groan of an edifice on the verge of collapse. The loss of authorial nerve. The loss of energy. Nothing is worse. No other sort of trauma has the power to leave Kessler more depressed, more fuddled and terrified, than that moment of failing faith when he senses that whatever this thing is he has been trying to write is not, after all, going to get written. He panics, wanders the neighborhood, sometimes for days. Hides out in afternoon bar-and-grill places. Feels his identity leaking away like the oxygen pressure in a submarine. And this is not an illusory phobia; he has in fact lost whole months, whole years of work, entire two-inch piles of half-complete, unsalvageable manuscript. Gone: patient turned cold on the operating table. All right, no point in any more suturing, wrap it up and take it away. Mark it for the morgue.

  Kessler glances again at this young emergency-room doctor, with his crooked glasses and his shaggy curly hair, and thinks: No, it’s much more traumatic than that. For them, there is always another patient.

  Death from cerebral hemorrhage or spleen rupture as result of a fall is one way of not finishing, Kessler thinks. But there are others, too, which may be just as painful and just as certain. Loss of momentum. Loss of nerve. He thinks of Mel Pokorny and of Viktor Tronko, and then of the late Afrikaner naturalist Eugène Marais, subject of a certain two-inch pile on the desk back in Kessler’s New Haven apartment. Who is the patient on the table? Kessler can’t at the moment see the face very clearly. He can’t even tell whether the body is cold or warm. He is very confused. Maybe that’s a symptom of concussion. He says nothing about it to the young doctor, who is still amusing himself with a rubber hammer and the bottoms of Kessler’s feet.

  “Who called the ambulance?” This is the doctor’s forty-ninth question, roughly, in fifteen minutes.

  “Friends of mine,” Kessler lies. He remembers listening to Lovesong and Buddyboy discuss the security and medical considerations, in that order, bearing upon whether they should move him themselves or just find a telephone. They chose the telephone, but it was better than deserting him entirely. Kessler still thought at that point that his back might be broken, and he was also a little concerned lest the Volkswagen’s owner come along before he could get himself up. There was ragged fiberglass everywhere.

  “Where are they, these friends?” says the doctor.

  “They went home. When they saw I was okay.”

  “You’re not okay. No one knows whether you’re okay. I don’t want to alarm you, but it’s perfectly possible you could still die from this fall, Mr. Kessler.”

  “Thanks for not alarming me.”

  “If you aren’t properly cared for. Observed. Can you stay with those friends tonight?”

  “No. I’m at a hotel.”

  “Can you stay with them? You need to be waked up and checked on every two hours.”

  “No. They’re just acquaintances actually. No.”

  “Then you aren’t leaving this hospital.”

  “Sure I am.”

  “Not tonight, no. We’ll get you admitted to a ward. Right after the spinal X ray.”

  “I feel okay. I was lucky.” For instance, it could have been the bare cobbles of the alley that he landed on. Or, worse still, the heirloom Vespa. “Of course I’m leaving.”

  “No. No, you’re staying.”

  “Wrong.”

  “Observation. This is standard in any head-trauma situation. Just for tonight.”

  “No.”

  “Listen carefully: yes.”

  “Screw you, Doc.”

  “Fine. ‘Screw you, Doc,’ is fine. All right. But before you leave this building tonight, if you do, you’ll have to sign yourself out ‘against medical advice.’ That’s a category we reserve for stupid people who may also be sick.” No more bedside manner. The doctor’s voice has gone hard, and he now begi
ns swatting his own palm with the hammer, snapping his fist closed on the rubber head with each stroke. His reflexes seem to be good. “After that, you can die in a taxi or at a hotel or in an all-night laundromat, if you insist on it.”

  “Don’t be so touchy,” says Kessler. “You’re not the only one who’s had a hard night. How would you like to fall four stories and go through the roof of a Volkswagen camper?”

  The doctor flattens his lips together, saying nothing. Then: “I apologize.” He looks down at his penny loafers.

  “All right. So. Okay, I’ll stay.”

  Kessler doesn’t care much for the idea of being stupid and sick at the same time, it’s bad enough to endure them consecutively. He allows himself to be booked into a room upstairs, on the far side of a white curtain from a man who is either snoring ecstatically or dying of emphysema, where it is promised that a nurse will come in every two hours to wake Kessler up, gaze into his pupils, ask him a few questions, and ascertain whether he has a brain cavity full of blood or spinal fluid dripping out of his ears. Kessler has decided to be a good patient. He doesn’t even ask what it’s all going to cost him. But if they were truly concerned for my health, he thinks, they would wake me every two hours just to say this: “Forget about Viktor Tronko. Get out of Washington.”

  Which is precisely what Nora would be saying also, for her own reasons, if he gave her the chance.

  Nora’s reasons happen to derive from concern for his literary soul, not his physical welfare (though if she knew about unseen strangers throwing him off high buildings that too would certainly find a place in her arguments). She would tell him, he knows, that he should go home and get back to work on the book. Nora retains a fierce hatred for the city of Washington. She despises what she calls the adolescent fascination with power and secrecy. Her own bad experience only exacerbated this feeling—she has told Kessler that she despised the very same things about the city even back when she thought she was happily married. She considers espionage a game for small boys. She seems to have forgiven Kessler, grudgingly, for having once lived in this place and devoted himself to the spy beat. On the other hand, from the first moment she heard about the Marais project, she professed to believe—bless her heart, one in a thousand—that writing a book about this holy lunatic could be extremely goddamn worthwhile.

  In fact she did not even use the word “worthwhile”; she used the word “important.” The very thing that makes Nora’s set of attitudes so troublesome, so unanswerable, is that they coincide closely with some of Kessler’s own.

  Kessler can remember his own first response to the stark outline of the Marais story—though for Kessler that was more than five years ago now. He was in Kenya, over Christmas of 1975. He was alone, and with no premeditated itinerary. The Church Committee had just issued its interim report, the newspapers and magazines were full of stories about CIA assassination planning—Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, Allende—but Kessler himself was already withdrawn from all that. He felt distant and cynical. He had written his last CIA story a year before. He had run into Pokorny at the Capitol, and made excuses to slip away quickly, which was itself quite a departure from old patterns. Now he was on a vacation, a suitably drastic escape from Washington and his recent life and work there; at the same time, Kessler thought he might drop down for a tour of the Serengeti while he was in the neighborhood, hoping maybe to find something to write about. Big animals, or something. Lions interested him mildly. Possibly there was a situation about poaching, tourism, and the politics of uhuru. He would see. The notion of finding a story was really for the sake of the IRS as much as anything. Mainly he had come to bake his sinuses dry, and walk some dirt roads, and surround himself with the sound of a language he didn’t speak. He could have chosen better for that last, since there was already a Colonel Sanders franchise in downtown Nairobi and plenty of white English faces, some newly arrived, some having never left. But he stayed away from the patio café at the New Stanley Hotel and got on out of Nairobi as fast as possible. When his bus stopped in Mombasa, down on the sweaty coast, he went into a drugstore and bought four or five paperback books from the small but eclectic selection on a metal rack. One was a Penguin that caught his eye with its cover: a garish painting in oranges and creams of a grotesquely gravid queen termite. She was swollen like a fatty sausage, attended by workers and soldiers just a tiny fraction of her size. Kessler stared briefly, then added this paperback to his pile. He had never heard of the author. The book cost him less than a pound Kenyan. Its title was The Soul of the White Ant.

  It was the masterwork of Eugène Marais, published posthumously under weird circumstances. At that time, of course, Kessler knew nothing about the circumstances. It was just something to read in English, a book with a gaudy cover and a nice title.

  He took the book with him up the coast to Malindi, a bizarre little settlement that seemed to fancy itself the Palm Springs of post-independence Kenya, where Kessler got an intestinal bug and spent a comically miserable Christmas confined to his own luxurious beach hut, surrounded at not great enough distance by German and Irish skin divers and their loud bad music. Fortunately the hut had plumbing. All day on the twenty-fifth Kessler did not walk any farther than thirty yards to the main lodge, and even that he did only to carry back more mineral water. Mostly he lay on the bed, beneath a mosquito net, while a half dozen geckos belayed from the various walls and watched him for vital signs. He drank his water. He read about termites, and about a man who had studied them.

  The name Eugène N. Marais is known to all Afrikaans-speaking South Africans as a writer of short stories and verse, according to a short preface at the front of the paperback, contributed to the original edition by the book’s translator. He himself, however, would wish to be remembered for his lifelong study of termites and apes.

  The preface was less than two pages long. When he had finished reading it, Kessler read it again. Having finished the whole book, five hours later, he read the preface once more. It gave just a bare outline of Marais’s early adult life, from the time he came out of college and began work as a journalist in Pretoria, through the years he spent in London during the Boer War, studying medicine until he was nearly a doctor and then switching suddenly into law, up to his return to South Africa as a practicing lawyer. Evidently Eugène Marais loathed or was bored by the legal profession; Kessler liked him already. Losing patience quickly, Marais had abandoned his law practice and gone north into the Transvaal. A scholar and a man of culture, said the translator’s preface, he chose nevertheless to live for a period extending over many years in a “rondhavel” or hut in the lonely Waterberg mountains, learning to know and make friends with a troop of wild baboons, whose behavior he wished to study. He tamed them to such a degree that he could move among them and handle them with impunity. At the same time he busied himself with the other end of the chain and studied termite life, a study which often meant tremendous drudgery and needed endless patience.

  During those years of lonely drudgery, Kessler read, Marais made no attempt to publish his observations on animal behavior—neither those from the baboon study nor from what his translator termed the other end of the chain. But finally a friend talked him into writing one article, for an Afrikaans periodical called Die Huisgenoot. That article was well received, and so over the next several years he was persuaded to write more, entertaining the readers of Die Huisgenoot with a series of odd facts and even odder ideas derived from his termite investigations.

  His years of unceasing work on the veld, said the translator’s preface, led Eugène Marais to formulate his theory that the individual nest of the termites is similar in every respect to the organism of an animal, workers and soldiers resembling red and white blood corpuscles, the fungus gardens the digestive organs, the queen functioning as the brain, and the sexual flight being in every aspect analogous to the escape of spermatozoa and ova. Well.

  Not long after those articles appeared in Die Huisge
noot, Kessler read, they were plagiarized in a book published by Maurice Maeterlinck.

  Kessler knew of Maeterlinck as a playwright, a Belgian who had won the Nobel and scored great European successes with his verse dramas, but evidently he had dabbled in natural-history writing also. An earlier book by Maeterlinck, about the life of the honey bee, had been a bestseller all over the Continent. Then in 1926 he gave forth with The Life of the White Ant, in which Maeterlinck described how a termitary with its elaborate organic integration was an uncanny analogue to the human body. This theory aroused great interest at the time, according to Eugène Marais’s translator, and was generally accepted as an original one formulated by Maeterlinck. The fact that an unknown South African observer had developed the theory after many years of indefatigable labour was not generally known in Europe. Excerpts from Marais’s articles had, however, appeared in both the Belgian and the French press at the time of their publication in South Africa. Indeed, the original Afrikaans articles would have been intelligible to any Fleming, for Afrikaans and Flemish are very similar.