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

by David Quammen

  The book in Kessler’s hands was assembled from those Huisgenoot articles, which had been originally published during the six years in advance of Maeterlinck’s act of piracy. Anyone who read the earlier versions, the Marais versions, could not hesitate to grant Marais the credit that justice and Maurice Maeterlinck owed him—at least, so said the translator. Then the preface ended: Eugène Marais intended writing a fuller and more scientific volume, but this intention was frustrated by his untimely death a few months ago.

  The translator’s preface had been written in 1936. The Soul of the White Ant was first published in London the following year. That much Kessler gleaned from the copyright information at the front of his Penguin. He recovered from the intestinal bug, he escaped Malindi as gratefully as he had escaped Washington, and the Serengeti lion gave him no story. For five weeks Kessler thought intermittently about Eugène Marais. Then he flew back to the United States and began a casual search in used bookstores. For another half year all he knew about the man was what came from that preface, and from the thin book it introduced: “untimely death,” plagiarism, and a fevered vision of termites. Kessler was curious. But nothing happened quickly.

  Throughout the next two years, some part of his brain always told Kessler to stay away, to think again and better—to recognize that this Marais fancy of his was a very bad and impracticable idea. A nonsensical waste of time, at best. At worst, a cold blind alley. He was wary of ever really starting. He recalls vividly how wary he was. At 4 A.M., when the nurse comes in to wake him and compare the size of his pupils, Kessler is already wide awake, thinking.

  If he leaves in the morning, as soon as the hospital will release him, and stops at the Tabard for just long enough to check out, he can be back in New Haven by early evening. He can have the Marais typescript in his hands, and a cup of decent coffee at his elbow. He can write just two or three sentences, half a page maybe, reestablishing contact and just the tiniest bit of momentum, then begin again earnestly on Monday morning. He can call Nora and tell her. The Washington thing was a bad idea, he can say. A false start. I’m back with the termite man.

  Kessler knows that he is not going to do any of this and only suspects that he should.

  He doesn’t want to bleed to death. Not the quiet way, alone in a hotel room and leaking blood into his cranium until the pressure squashes away consciousness—and not Mel Pokorny’s way either. But he has a greater terror of not finishing. It’s confusing now because Viktor Tronko, like Eugène Marais, is something that he has begun.

  17

  LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON he drives out to Rockville and finds Barry Koontz, the congenital pack rat, living without furniture.

  The house is an empty shell. Nothing left from the way it was when Kessler last saw it except the rich cream carpeting, now badly in need of a professional shampoo. Kessler can still make out marks in the pile from where the piano sat. Naked picture hooks poke forth from the walls. There are no lamps. No curtains. Even the ladybug magnets that crawled up and down the refrigerator door are gone, and through the kitchen window Kessler notices two scuffed patches of bare dirt paired together in the middle of the lawn, but the swing set itself has disappeared. To take curtains and swing set, Kessler thinks, is the act of a vehement person. Barry has carried a few file boxes of government paper up from the basement to function as chairs and ottomans. He has brought a card table home from Montgomery Ward. He serves Kessler’s gin and his own scotch in fine crystal lowball glasses, which seem to be almost all she has left him. The odd thing is that Barry looks not much worse than ever. He always wore wrinkled suits, he was always half bald (since adolescence, for all Kessler knows), and the gray crescents under his eyes have always come and gone routinely in conjunction with cycles of compulsive overwork. He raises his glass at Kessler with a grin that is genuine, though perhaps a little pinched.

  Kessler feels sad and embarrassed. “When did she go?” he says.

  “Four or five months ago. I think about four months, yeah.”

  “You think?”

  “I was teaching two new courses, plus trying to finish an article. And then I got stuck on this committee to redesign the curriculum. It was a crazy time. Just brutal.”

  “Christ, Barry.”

  “She had a professional mover pack it all up. Took them less than a day, you know? Very fast, very efficient. Not that expensive. I spent a night on the floor at my office, because it was already hard enough on her.”

  “On her.”

  “Yeah, that seemed best. I stayed away. No scenes, no screaming. You could see, it was taking its toll on Patsy, inside. Not an easy thing for her to do. I suppose I’ve got to admit it was brave. Four months at least, yeah, because that was before Halloween. Otherwise I would have had Matthew out around the neighborhood, in his Garfield costume.”

  “Barry, it’s me, Kessler. Stop this bullshit.”

  “Adam’s too old now. So he says. Eleven in July and he’s too old for Halloween, can you imagine? My God. How old were you when you got too old for Halloween, Michael? I was about twenty-three, still going out at least to steal pumpkins and throw cherry bombs at cars.”

  “Barry. Are you all right?”

  Barry Koontz stares at his ice cubes, fused, circling in the glass like a cam.

  “Agh. Yeah, I am, Michael. Yes.”

  “She took them back to Colorado?”

  “Right.”

  “Is this permanent?”

  “Oh, I suppose. I think so, yeah.”

  “Were you screwing around?” Kessler knows the answer to that one already, if he knows anything at all about human nature: not Barry. Why he nevertheless felt the need to ask, he isn’t sure. Generalized crisis of confidence, maybe.

  “No, of course not,” says Barry. “Nothing like that. It was just a thing between us. Patsy and me. Just a thing she felt she needed to do, apparently. You know?”

  It was just a thing. No, Kessler doesn’t know. He has never been married, and he has never been Barry Koontz. He is silent. He has no more questions, for once.

  “Damn, though.” Barry sips his scotch, and then faces Kessler directly with a flinty smile. “I mean damn.”

  They eat their steaks and drink their bottle of red, seated upon file boxes with the surface of the card table not far below their chins. Kessler does not mention Colorado again, or raise the subject of Viktor Tronko. He is in no particular hurry; in fact he is enjoying himself for the first time all week. Most of what they talk about involves people and events from their shared past, relatively harmless memories, ranging backward through the heyday of Senator Frank Church and Kessler’s last gambits in political journalism all the way to their loathsome first term at Chicago Law School. You were right to get out when you did, Barry says, and at first Kessler, with some help from the gin and the wine, misunderstands him to mean: out of Washington. No, no, out of law school, of course. I’ve never doubted that for a minute, Kessler says. He adds, then, that Barry seems to have no reason for regretting he stayed. Barry shrugs. The subject passes, leaving Kessler with the impression that perhaps it is another tender area that shouldn’t be probed further tonight. Barry asks him about his “personal life,” by which prim formulation Barry means women, and Kessler describes the situation with Nora in two or three reticent sentences, trying not to seem coy but also hoping not to jinx himself. Barry knows him well enough to recognize that those couple sentences are sounding, for Kessler, a fundamentally new tone. So, Nora Walsh, Barry repeats. A music teacher with a young daughter. He is pronouncing the words out loud as though to test their feel on his own tongue, to grant his approval, to commit the important facts to memory. Well well, Barry says.

  Oh shut up, Kessler says, but can’t suppress a grin.

  They carry dishes out to the kitchen and dump them. They each carry back a scotch. Barry recounts an old story that they both know by heart and both consider hilar
ious, about the distempered man who taught them torts and later died in a tram accident at Knott’s Berry Farm. By now this particular tale is almost a ritualistic recitation, like Homer, and they cackle together on cue in boozy falsettos. Kessler tells a funny story about being chased by a rhino, in a forest in the Nepalese lowlands, while he was doing the early research for what became his tiger book: how he ended up stuck to his hips in the mud of a small oxbow pond, into which the rhino was too smart to follow, and his Nepalese hosts pulled him out with a long rope because they themselves were more wary of crocodiles than of rhino. Mud over every inch of me, says Kessler, I had to be dragged across twenty feet of it on my belly, and those khakis still smell like a sulfur swamp. The particular species of crocodile in question, says Kessler, is called a marsh mugger, though they didn’t tell me that part of it until we were back at the lodge. Barry tilts his chin up and laughs, deeply, silently. Then he says a few flattering things to Kessler about the tiger book. And then he goes back to the kitchen for the scotch bottle.

  They sink deeper into the squashed-down tops of their file boxes. Barry tells a story about Senator Howard Baker, not from the Church Committee period but from Watergate, a story told to him by another staff counsel and illustrative of the subtle truth, says Barry, that you can’t believe everything you see on TV. He tells another in roughly the same vein, from his own experience, about the day Frank Church held up the poison-dart gun for a photographer and appeared thusly posed in newspapers all over the world. He tells one about the elaborate negotiations that preceded Jed McAtee’s consent to testify; among the critical issues, says Barry, was the question of where the network news cameramen would be allowed to place their lights. McAtee was all in favor of good lighting, as long as the floods would not be so positioned as to make him appear old or sinister. In that order, says Barry. He tells of calling on McAtee at Langley during the course of those negotiations, getting to ride the Director’s private elevator and see (but not eat in) the Director’s private dining room, and of then forgetting to turn in his visitor’s badge when he left the building. Six months passed, one night there came a panicked phone call, and they sent a man out here to the house, says Barry, at ten o’clock the same evening to pick the silly thing up. Six months, ten in the evening, you figure that one. Fortunately the badge was still in my side jacket pocket, says Barry. Thank God I hadn’t had the suit Martinized. Kessler laughs. Barry begins telling then of a bizarre trip he made to New Orleans in early 1976, and before the story has gone five sentences Kessler realizes that this is not going to be one of the funny ones.

  Barry had gone down there to interview a man named Alex Djevdjevich, who as it turned out died suddenly.

  Nobody had ever heard of Alex Djevdjevich until the late sixties, Barry says, long after the Warren Commission had completed and published its report. Practically nobody, he corrects himself. Djevdjevich had never gotten into the headlines. If you had sat down and actually read the Warren Report, you would have known a little about him, only a little, most of it not very interesting. Anyway, how many people ever did that? But he was there, he was in the record, Djevdjevich, having testified for two solid days before an assistant staff counsel to the Commission and one stenographer, in a hearing room somewhere in Washington. Also the FBI was well aware of him; they had been carrying a dossier on the guy since at least 1942. Almost three hundred pages by the time I saw it, says Barry. Otherwise, though, he was obscure. A tertiary figure. Until 1967, when everyone suddenly got so interested in the famous photograph of Oswald with the rifle. Until then, Djevdjevich had kept a very low profile.

  He had been off in Japan and Indonesia for most of that time, since even a half year before the assassination—or at least so he told me, says Barry. Came back especially to testify for the Commission, in early ’64, then left again quickly. He had business interests out there, evidently. Hotels or something, or travel services, some sort of government contracts involving tourism. It was vague. Like so much of the rest, with Djevdjevich. The FBI found one source claiming that Djevdjevich had never set foot in Indonesia, for instance. Korea. Korea, that’s where he really had been. North or South? asked Barry. Nobody knew. The Bureau had never thought to inquire, and that source was no longer in contact. Very typical. With Alex Djevdjevich, says Barry, reality always seemed to be just an arcade of shimmering epistemological possibilities.

  But he was not slimy, says Barry. He was a rather likable man. He had a good wit, and he had charm. Almost every source who talked about Djevdjevich, in fact, mentioned that one point: charm. He was one of those guys the word was invented for. Charming Alex. He listened well, and he enjoyed talking. An old-style conversationalist. Very fluent and gracious, even in English, which was his fifth or sixth language, I think, says Barry. It was no wonder that Lee Oswald should have been infatuated. If that’s what it was. On a form he filled out for the Texas Employment Commission, Oswald had listed Djevdjevich as a reference and then described the relationship as closest friend, that’s a quote, says Barry. This was in August or September of ’63. Closest friend, despite the fact that Djevdjevich had disappeared from his life five months earlier. Supposedly gone off to do business in Jakarta.

  And there was one other factor besides charm, says Barry. Oswald was glad to have someone he could talk to in Russian. He was hungry to practice the language, didn’t want to lose it. His fluency in Russian was one of the few things, so very few, that made him special. That’s why he wouldn’t let Marina learn English, and that’s why he glommed onto Alex Djevdjevich. Or at least so we are told, in the official understanding, says Barry.

  Kessler says nothing. He sits on his box, back to the wall, legs out, and sips scotch.

  “I read everything we had on Djevdjevich before I went down there, of course,” says Barry. “Two or three times. Studied it.”

  “What did you have on him?”

  “Not that much. The FBI file, which was fat but very rough. Confusing. Transcripts of previous interrogations of Djevdjevich himself, plus a lot of unchecked and uncheckable hearsay from other sources. And then we had the transcript of his Warren Commission testimony. And a bit more—a few scraps that had been gathered by our own staff investigators. Not so much, altogether, that I couldn’t memorize practically every fact.”

  “You always do that?”

  “No. But with Djevdjevich it seemed like a good idea.”

  Barry flew to New Orleans in February of 1976 and got a day and a half with Djevdjevich before the interviews were abruptly terminated.

  Djevdjevich showed no apparent reluctance about talking into Barry’s recorder. They held their sessions in Barry’s room at the Marriott, and on the second day Djevdjevich announced quite cheerfully that he would like to adjourn long enough for lunch and a couple of errands, but that he would meet Barry again in two hours. Fine, Barry said. At that point, Barry tells Kessler, they had covered much of Djevdjevich’s adult life, up to and including his early acquaintance with Lee Oswald. But they had only just begun discussing the photograph.

  “Did Djevdjevich take that photograph?” Kessler asks idly.

  “No. Marina. According to the official understanding. The less official understanding, as you well know, makes it a clumsy composite.”

  “Oswald’s head on the body of John Wilkes Booth. Amelia Earhart’s arm. Jimmy Hoffa’s chin.”

  “Exactly.”

  “A sundial in the background reading thirteen o’clock.”

  “Yes. All of that.”

  “What’s your understanding?”

  “That it was a genuine photo,” says Barry. “I saw Djevdjevich’s personally inscribed print.”

  “Before he died?”

  “After,” says Barry. “That was supposed to have been one of the errands.”

  “Was it your interest in the photo that upset him?”

  “If he was upset. Maybe,” says Barry. “Possibly. We’ll nev
er know.”

  What Barry had heard from Djevdjevich during their day and a half of talk jibed roughly with what he had read in the FBI file and the Warren Commission testimony—roughly, but not perfectly. It jibed only as well, Barry says, as the two other versions jibed with each other. The problem was not simply that third-party informants contradicted Djevdjevich’s stories; Djevdjevich also contradicted himself. According to Barry, the autobiography of Alex Djevdjevich seemed to change slightly, to evolve slightly, with each repetition.

  Like the song of the humpback whale, Kessler thinks, but he does not interrupt. By now he is half drunk.

  Djevdjevich was born in 1913, or possibly 1916, in a town called Kishinev on the western fringe of Soviet Moldavia, not far from the Dniester River. The lunatic Balkans, says Barry. Moldavia itself was one of those rich and contested borderland zones, like Alsace-Lorraine, that had been wrenched back and forth over the centuries between two suzerainties, depending on whose empire was in ascendancy. Evidently Peter the Great fought over it, says Barry, then for a hundred years or so it belonged to Romania, then the tsars got it back for a while, then Romania again, then the Soviets. The international border had been yo-yoing to and fro, charted on one side of the town of Kishinev and then on the other, for as long as history could remember. The hills around Kishinev were fertile and the climate was mild, a region of orchards and vineyards, which was apparently what caused the place to be fought over. Wine and brandy. Djevdjevich’s father was a thriving middle-class vintner, not a producer but a wholesaler, who bought by the barrel and exported through Odessa, according to one version. According to another, he was a fallen-away Orthodox priest who worked as a day laborer and proselytized socialist revolution. Take your pick, says Barry. Alex had half a dozen older siblings of whom one, a brother, may or may not have preceded him to the United States. If so, the brother changed his name and the family lost touch with him. Alex never knew for sure whether the brother had really made it to America. Or so he said. Anyway, for Alex himself that journey came much later. At the time he was born—whether you took 1913 as the date or 1916—Moldavia was definitely part of the Russian Empire, and Alex learned Russian as his first language. But as the Revolution began in Moscow and everything got crazy, Moldavia declared itself independent, with a call for land reform and the reestablishment of the Romanian language. The Bolsheviks invaded in early winter of 1918 and held Kishinev for precisely eight days—until a division of the Romanian Regular Army booted them out. Why am I telling you all this? asks Barry. Good question. Because it’s the perfect analogue to everything else you’ll hear about Alex Djevdjevich, is why. Was he a Russian or a Romanian? Was he a wave or was he a particle? The answer is yes.