The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (26 page)

Late in 2008, he wrote on his blog about Polunsky going into lockdown mode: “We ‘Death Row’ are being punished for the few that have been caught with cell phones and other contraband. And that is not right,” he wrote. Then, a few days later, the guards happened to discover in Stroman’s own cell a cell phone, a charger, a chunk of metal sharpened into a crude arrowhead, and a substance resembling marijuana.

It was in 2009, by various accounts, that Stroman’s letters and blog posts showed signs of a turning. He had been told long ago, as a boy, that he so lacked self-awareness that even therapy couldn’t save
him. Now, for the first time, flecks of such awareness were becoming evident—and went beyond the flickers of good cheer that he had been able to perform throughout his life.

“I’m no angel by far and I’ve done some things after September 11, 2001 that still haunts me and by no means am I proud of the pain my own actions have caused,” he wrote in April 2009.

He found himself growing more introverted, more eager to dwell in his own mind. A new vocabulary, inflected with the jargon of positive psychology, surfaced: “I’ve been unraveling, unsure and undetermined but this morning I’m just a man who feels as if he’s on top of the world and from where I sit and write this, that’s saying a mouthful! How about that folks! Can you honestly say that’s how you felt this morning when you woke up? In the land of freedom? I have a lot to be grateful for and that’s why I am feeling it this new day.”

Stroman’s newfound religiosity could be especially striking: “Thank ya Jesus for allowing this ole’ Texas Rebel Redneck one more day of life, for no matter where it is I awake or lay my head, I know for a fact that this nightmare is only but a path to a true blessing and I will continue to ‘walk it proud’ and ‘talk it loud’ the American way and when I do get to that final destination that cross’s me over into the next phase of existence, the learning process of life would have been completed with each day I absorb more knowledge and that shallow minded fool I once was is slowly fading away. Who would have thought that the trail of blood and tears would have opened my eyes so wide?”

This language from Stroman could feel almost put-on, too new. Was it genuine? Perhaps he really was changing with the vanishing of his old influences and their replacement by new influences: a blossoming relationship with Ilan Ziv, the filmmaker; contact with commenters who read his blog; other correspondence with people who wrote to Death Row prisoners out of charity. Or perhaps it was his shrewd understanding of what such people liked to hear to make themselves feel helpful.

Stroman constantly told his correspondents and readers how he appreciated all their letters and greetings and wishes. He felt the strength they were beaming his way. He sent them his blessings in turn and imparted little life lessons: “Never take life for granted and never pass up the chance to smile at someone.”

From time to time, he took on projects, like making an album for each of his four children. He told Ziv it would be a kind of “legacy.” It would contain pictures, written reflections, and other trifles: his thoughts when he first saw them, stories from their childhoods, answers to questions they might have in his absence, an account of his likes and dislikes and convictions. Sometimes assembling the albums made Stroman cry.

He gave the impression of working on himself and through his past. On darker days, he had learned what to do to calm himself: sit back and probe for a few memories. He had to dig deep. He knew what a mess he had made, but it was what it was. “Into each life some rain must fall,” he once wrote.

There were still bad days aplenty, when it felt like he’d breathed in hell itself and those silent demons would awaken as if to remind him that they had been nestled in his organs all along. “I’m unraveling,” he wrote in January 2010.

Then the brightening Mark Stroman would resurface. “I was born free, you can knock me down and keep chains on me and try to break and silence me and you can even execute me but I can assure you I’ll die with my head held high and I’ll still be a true American.” He could even play the cosmopolitan: he wished his readers a wonderful Thanksgiving—and then added, “Even if you don’t celebrate this in your country or lands, give thanks on November 25th for what you do have, for I can assure you, things could be a lot worse!”

Some weeks later, he wrote, “A person can have all the money in the world, several nice homes, cottages, villas, and a different car to drive every day of the week and still not know what true happiness is. Here it is, I have nothing, but I have everything for at the end of
each day, before I go to sleep I know I have lots and lots of people who love and care about me.”

“M
ARK CHANGED,” SAID
Ilan Ziv, “not because we did anything, but because of who we were. His old world betrayed him, and a new group of people who was more loyal to him than his own family introduced him to our world.”

The filmmaker was the pioneer and unofficial steward of this group of supporters and friends of Mark. By 2011, its ranks had swelled to include a network of European and American pen pals, a priest turned journalist, an elderly pastor who ministered to prisoners, a diffuse community of blog readers and commenters, and of course Ziv, who had arrived to conduct one simple interview, only to discover in his subject answers to questions that had haunted him almost since birth. Members of the group corresponded with Stroman, took an interest in his life, cheered him on in his appeals, vowed to be there with him at the execution.

The first time Ziv entered the Polunsky Unit, he walked into Visitation and sat in one of the cubicles. Walls to his left and right sides cut him off from other visitors, and a piece of glass stood between him and this bald, painted hulk of a man. In those earliest moments, Ziv felt something strange coming over him.

“You’re sitting at a very uncomfortable proximity,” he said. “Suddenly your physical space is invaded. The physical distance where we feel comfortable is invaded by this glass and the need to lean and this artificial focus.” He went on, “In that cubicle with the seats, I just see you. There’s almost no visual distraction. So you have this very bizarre semiuncomfortable thing that now I am focused only on you, and I’m sitting uncomfortably close to you. We don’t have walls between us. And what it does is, I have this very uncanny focus on you, where I feel like I know you and I see a lot of things in you.”

Back in 2004, when he first looked at Stroman with that focus, he saw none of the callousness and cruelty he had been expecting: “Everything broke down from the first meeting, because he’s a complete mess. He’s a completely helpless mess—crying, like, ‘Oh my God, I prepared for this interview,’ and now he’s collapsing.” Stroman just talked and talked, telling Ziv as much as he could think to ask: “I mean, the guy is not lying; he’s just dangerously honest. Which is very kind of amazing. So he proceeds to tell me how he was going to go to Dallas malls. I mean he tells me stuff that he shouldn’t have told me. And he tells me he was very confused. But he’s also very charismatic, he’s very engaging, and the eyes are very twinkling.”

Ziv was not the first person to be charmed blind by Stroman. You could ask Tena or Tom Boston or any of his kids. But Ziv was also a seasoned, worldly documentary filmmaker who knew what he was doing and wasn’t easy to dazzle. There was just something in this man that defied his expectations. Throughout the interview, Stroman cried and fretted that he’d messed everything up. Ziv offered him a mulligan: “I said, ‘You know what, I promise you I’ll come back.’ ” Did Ziv make that offer because he needed more tape? “No,” he said flatly. It was because something strange and ineffable happened between them that day: “I wanted to come back forever.”

ILAN ZIV LIKED
to think of himself as a man not easily enchanted—certainly not by a murderer. What happened with Mark was different. It perhaps had to do with his discovery that the line separating him from Stroman wasn’t as thick as he would have liked to believe.

The history that primed Ziv for their encounter preceded his birth. Ziv’s father had grown up outside Warsaw in the 1920s and ’30s, an assimilated Jew in a mixed apartment building in a religiously diverse neighborhood. When Hitler invaded Poland, the father realized with shock and bitterness that no one regarded him as the Pole he had always known himself to be. Neighbors were betraying Jewish neighbors, ratting out Jewish friends, watching as
Jews were sent off to the ghettoes. “It’s this personal betrayal and an identity betrayal,” Ziv said, “because he was a Pole.”

His father, then sixteen, disguised himself as a Polish gentile, assumed a false identity, and escaped to Romania. He ended up, by a trail of disguises and deceptions he remains loath to detail, in Israel, and eventually in the Tel Aviv suburb of Afeka, where Ziv grew up. Most of his father’s relatives weren’t so lucky. “Eliminated,” Ziv said simply.

This particular level of proximity to and distance from the Holocaust shaped the young Ziv’s worldview. It left him consumed by the question of why his father’s neighbors had betrayed him. It also, he figures, left him less ardently nationalistic than he might otherwise have been.

“I never grew up with Auschwitz stories, with the horror of the death camps,” he said. “I never grew up with that. I grew up with a surreal escape story.” The names to be mourned were names he had never known in the flesh. The losses fed endlessly repeated gossip: “I grew up with who fucks who, who was a closeted homosexual, who stole from who. But nobody exists.”

The Holocaust suffused the atmosphere of Ziv’s schooldays. He still remembers the school pausing instruction to broadcast reports of the Eichmann trial over the loudspeakers; Ziv was eleven. “Everything was Holocaust,” he said. “It was a degree of obsession at that time in my childhood.” And he understood that many of his neighbors and classmates had lost much more than he.

As he came of age, he sensed that there were two ideological roads available to an Israeli seeking to make sense of, and transcend, recent history. There were, of course, many trails in between, but to him it was a real fork. One road was hard-core Zionism and nationalism. It was the more particularized interpretation of the history of their people: a systematic attack on Jewishness that had to be answered by a systematic assertion of Jewishness. The other road was built on a more universal reading of what had occurred: the Jews, like so
many other peoples in history, were victims of “chauvinism,” as Ziv put it, and of the abuse of power; they must now stand with anyone anywhere threatened by chauvinists, caught under power’s jackboot. “You can come out to Jewish nationalism and I shall fight and never again,” he said. “Or you can come out so sensitive to human-rights violations.”

Perhaps it was the abstraction to him of his family’s loss, but from the time of high school Ziv found himself among the universalists—a position, as he put it, of “refusing to trust chauvinism and nationalism.” An assumption of that worldview was that Nazism wasn’t wholly exceptional, that it was the extreme expression of a potentiality that lay within all people. It was something that could hijack you or me, a German or, yes, even a Jew. This belief was the seed of Ziv’s career, though he didn’t realize it at the time. If we all harbor the germs of evil, why do they infect some of us and spare others? Is evil always a choice, or can it at times be explained by context and circumstance?

As a student at Ironi Yud Daled High School in Tel Aviv, Ziv applied these still-forming ideas to his editorship of the student newspaper. When the 1967 war broke out, he figured he should dedicate the paper to the conflict and publish Palestinian voices, so readers would hear both sides of the story. “Over my dead body” was the headmaster’s response. Ziv considered raising money and publishing the newspaper anyway, for the students of other high schools, as a public service.

Then, at seventeen and a half, he graduated and was drafted into the military of a country, his country, whose growing nationalism made him wary. Israel was turning in that direction after the Six Day War, in which it had more than tripled the territory it controlled. Ziv, feeling lonely in his convictions, was mobilized to an elite reconnaissance unit under the Central Command called Sayeret Haruv. In 1968, he finished basic training and deployed with his men with a mission to prevent the Palestine Liberation Organization from
infiltrating the West Bank. Ziv suppressed his opinions as best he could in that time. It could really mess you up to keep thinking about how you were against the mission. And he found in the physical challenge of combat an outlet for his competitiveness.

At times, he felt himself flirting with that invisible line, at risk of becoming what he had once assailed. One night a commander offered a deal to Ziv’s unit: for a certain number of Palestinian infiltrators killed (Ziv couldn’t recall the precise bargain), the responsible team would get a week off. “We were lying on these bunk beds in the barracks—it was a desert down in the valley—thinking, ‘Who’s going to get the chance to do it?’ ” Ziv said. “ ‘Will tonight be the night that we get it?’ Because a week off was a big deal, a really big deal—Tel Aviv, your girlfriend, cafés, life.”