When I’d got a fresh drink I looked again and MacIver was still there with her. He waved at me and I dodged through to the corner.
MacIver made some sort of blurred introduction and hurried away while the young woman stared at me out of cool agate eyes.
I glanced back through the room. MacIver reached the door, turned and smiled with conspiratorial viciousness, and left; as if to say, I really stuck you with one this time, old buddy.
“Well then,” I said.
The girl’s femininity, MacIver to the contrary, was not sufficiently atrophied to enable her to resist what I thought of as my fetching smile; she gave me a deep and luminous smile, albeit brief, in reply.
“MacIver tells me you’re steeped in Russian Civil War lore,” I said. I smiled again to show I was ribbing her and she smiled to show she understood that.
Then her face changed. “Oh of course. You’re that Bristow.”
“You’ve heard of me. That’s too bad—I was hoping we could be friends.”
“It’s a hell of an obstacle,” she said, “but maybe we can overcome it.” She moved subtly into the corner of the chair—she was quite tiny—making room on the overstuffed arm so that I could sit down there.
She had a soft and slightly breathless voice; I had expected something with more bite to it. The accent was minimal: without MacIver’s briefing I’d have known that English wasn’t her native tongue but I’d have been at a complete loss to identify the accent.
She looked amused but not impatient. She was under no compulsion to hurry into conversation; silence was not awkward to her, she was too self-assured.
I said, “MacIver warned me against you.”
“I’m an iceberg and a bore, yes?”
We both laughed; she took off her glasses and squinted her big nearsighted eyes at me. “I’m afraid I disliked him instantly. I took him for FBI—I assumed they’d sent him to keep tabs on me.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, six weeks ago I suppose. Two months. It was soon after I came over. I’m afraid I must have taken a blowtorch to the poor man. He was trying so desperately to be a man of the world. At one point he started to talk about some Czechoslovakian Communist friend of his. It might as well have been a Jew, or a black man—you know? Some of my best friends.… I’m afraid I slapped him in the face with a cold fish—I reminded him of the half-million Soviet troops that invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of sixty-eight and I reeled off a few statistics on the women and children they murdered in Wenceslas Square. The gang that contrived the so-called suicide of Jan Masaryk. Then I spent ten minutes telling him how the Russians exposed Dubček to a massive dose of radiation to give him leukemia. I’m afraid he wasn’t amused. But he seemed so—banal, so gullible. He infuriated me, his small unconvincing arrogance. It was only the conceit of a petty man, trying to believe he deserves better than life has granted him. But I was new here, I’m sure I was on the defensive. I treated him badly. Why am I telling you this?”
“Maybe I look harmless enough.”
“Anyway you’re a good listener. Do you live in Washington?”
“No. I have an old farmhouse on the Delaware River in New Jersey—more or less across the river from New Hope, if you know the area.”
“Bucks County. Someone took me to the playhouse there once. It’s lovely.”
I waited for a burst of party laughter to subside. “Have you lived in Czechoslovakia?” It sounded lame.
“No. I have an annoying memory for facts, that’s all. Particularly facts that show the Soviets in a bad light.”
“That’s candid enough.”
“I do hate them. But I don’t limit my being to that alone. I’m afraid I let MacIver think I did, and I’d prefer to have him go on believing that.”
“My lips are sealed.”
“Do you know him well?”
“We roomed together in university for a few months. But I didn’t remember him when he introduced himself to me tonight.”
She changed the subject abruptly. “Are you writing another book on the Civil War in Russia?”
“On Kolchak. He was the Czarist admiral who——”
“I know who he was.” She didn’t snap; it was a kindly rebuff: Don’t waste time explaining things that don’t need explaining. “Do you think you can add much to what’s already been written about him?”
“We have quite a bit now that wasn’t available before. I’ve gone through Deniken’s papers, for example—the family only turned them loose a few years ago.”
“Ah, but he was only another general. You really should talk to the survivors who really knew.”
“They’re a bit hard to find. It was more than fifty years ago.”
“I know a man in Israel,” she said.
Her name, it turned out, was Nicole Eisen, née Desrosiers; it was her father, not her mother, who had been French. (Her mother had been a Ukrainian Jew.) She did in fact have a seven-year-old daughter, a severely retarded child, in a Swiss institution; but there was no husband. Ben Eisen had been dead for nearly two years. When I observed that MacIver was a rotten spy she agreed with amusement; MacIver had accepted everything she’d told him. It left me wondering how much of it I should accept: did she tailor her fictions to fit each audience?
She was doing some sort of work for a refugee group, an Israeli-sponsored mission in Washington which lobbied for the relaxation of Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration. She was a bit vague when it came to what precisely she did there, or how long she expected to stay.
At five the next day I picked her up at her organization’s rented office down C street from the State Department; I drove her home so that she could change for dinner and give me the name and address of the old man in Tel Aviv who she said had survived the White Russians’ Siberian disaster in 1920.
She had a small flat a few blocks from the water in Georgetown. In the next weeks I came to know it well.
We had dinner that night and the next; we were at ease with each other from the very beginning. I liked talking with Nikki; she was a stimulant: when I talked with her my voice became quicker, my perceptions brighter, my mind bright and analytical.
Her face was animated, full of vitalities and subtleties that inhabited the swift constant changes of responsive expressions: wisdom, sophistication, alert shrewdness, avaricious impatience. To a painter’s eye I suppose she would not have been beautiful but I found her extravagantly bewitching. Her rayonnement was irresistible. Her enormous amused agate eyes; her soft and always slightly breathless voice; her good-humored pride in her quick little body—she was willing to give frankly when it pleased her, when the touch of my hand pleased her. She was the kind of girl who enjoyed being with a man but did not define herself only in terms of men; you had to meet her as an equal. That was one reason she had turned MacIver off. He was too much of a scorekeeping womanizer.
She knew she was generous; she expected to get hurt sometimes. If you wanted to avoid being hurt, she said, you never took emotional risks but then you might as well be comatose.
Like her accent, her taste in things was hard to pin down in terms of place. She enjoyed haute cuisine and took a bawdy delight in wolfing hamburgers; she wore floor-length dresses and Levi’s with equal aplomb. She was not an expatriate in America; she simply lived there for the moment. She was at home anywhere.
I brought her to Lambertville on the weekends. She loved the woods; she went barefoot into Alexauken Creek. But she said she felt guilty about being there because she had not brought a few of her own pots and pans; somehow that would make it all right. The old-world proper side of her character, which came out strongly when we were in company with other friends, was amusing to me: I knew how utterly wanton she was in bed.
When we had made love she liked to lie warmly against me and talk of idle things until she felt stirred to make love again. At first we sought each other’s bodies with the insatiable appetites of adolescents; we drowned in each other but it was always
rescued by laughter.
It is important to the rest, how this dark-haired chayelet Sabra and I felt about each other; otherwise it gives me no pleasure to expose these personal things—this is not a memoir. If I hurry past these intimacies it’s because of two things: first that I’m a private person not given to public soul-baring, second that I’m a prosaic historian without practice in detailing the lyrical facets of sexual relationships. Whatever I write will take on the appearance of a banal Technicolor love affair no different from millions; yet it is important that to us there was nothing commonplace about it. We were in each other’s thoughts at all times. We couldn’t wait for the working day to end. I had not been so single-mindedly infatuated since college days; everything—utterly everything—was colored by my love for Nikki.
Her image intruded upon the screen of my vision at all times, yet this didn’t make my work more difficult; only more pleasant. Work, to me, has never been an ethical virtue; it has been the great pleasure of my life, my raison d’être. But with Nikki there was additional reward: the promise of happiness at the end of each day. The quiet talk, the candle-lit dinners and always the laughter. We regarded anything, no matter what, as a challenge to our sense of humor.
But from the beginning we both knew that was a defensive barrier. Laughter is an expression of existential feelings: it is of the present. Rely on it too much and you preclude a view of the future. It was because both of us, for our own reasons, wanted to ignore consequences: we didn’t want to think of tomorrow.
Tomorrow held no specific threat for me; whether it did for Nikki I had no way of knowing then. For me it was only the fear of repetition. I had helped ruin my marriage to Eileen and I was afraid of it happening again. There were vast differences between Eileen and Nikki but it was myself I feared.
My marriage had been poor almost from the beginning; I had several tormented years with Eileen’s jealous hysterics but it was hard to forget her because I couldn’t help remembering the good times as well as the horrors. But it had always had a tentative quality. Eileen offered an American woman’s brand of love, which was about half the whole thing; she was presentable, she was sexually agreeable, she made a dutiful mother and hausfrau; and she was singularly unexciting. Wherever we lived she always put me in mind of a neat gadgety little house, a neat lawn blooming with roses, gravel driveways, Early American mailboxes. That was her background and she never escaped it. I kept an image of her laying the baby down wet in the bassinet, her mouth cooing, her hair done up in ugly curlers, the tails of one of my old shirts flapping around her hips.
Our daughter was killed in a school bus that went over the edge into the Delaware River. She was eight years old. I suppose it was afterward that everything flew apart but the seeds had been germinating for years and there was nothing left to hold us together: the more bored we became with each other, the more jealousy ruled Eileen’s imagination. She became fixated on a wholly false idea that I had turned into a satyr; she asked constant idiotic questions in a demanding voice and finally it drove me in defiance into the very kind of meaningless affairs she dreaded. I made no great secret of them. There were three or four histrionic scenes and finally, having justified her near-paranoia, she filed for divorce. I did not contest it.
It’s distasteful to write these things but it seems necessary. When I met Nikki I had convinced myself of my own unreliability; I did not regard myself as being capable of sustaining anything more demanding than a brief affair.
Nikki had lost her husband two years ago and I assumed she too was not yet ready for anything like a serious relationship. We never mentioned marriage. It was as if the word had been erased from our lexicon. We made no plans more than a few days ahead. We delighted in each other in a broken instant of suspended time and gave no thought to what might come after. Yet it seems important to try and convey an understanding that we had no sense that it was temporary. That would have implied an anticipated ending, and we had none; we reserved nothing, withheld nothing—nothing intimate. There were things we did not discuss very much (our own backgrounds for example) but that was because those topics didn’t fit into the style we had adopted with each other, or so it seemed at the time; I had no feeling she was keeping deliberate secrets and I know I kept none.
The idyll extended into the cherry-blossom spring; we took our exercise on horseback in Rock Creek Park, we drifted down the canals, we picnicked on the Blue Ridge with my outrageous friends: uproarious games of Botticelli, insane evenings of puns and character assassination, quiet nights in bed when we only lay warm together and listened to each other’s breathing.
Early in May she told me she had to return to Tel Aviv for two weeks; something to do with the organization she worked for.
I immediately said, “I’ll go with you.”
I had written to the old man in Israel—his name was Haim Tippelskirch—and he had replied by air-letter that he would be happy to grant an interview if I should happen to visit his country. The invitation hadn’t excited me; he said he had been a subaltern in Siberia and I’d had enough experience with old men’s recollections to put very small stock in their veracity. It hardly seemed worth a long expensive trip merely to interview one man whose function in those historic events had been one of low-ranking unimportance. That his revelations would draw me into a terrible trap was something I had no way of suspecting until much later.
Nikki’s trip changed my mind about Haim Tippelskirch’s unimportance. I rationalized that there might be useful records in the Palestinian archives; I had never seen Israel; it might be worthwhile to talk to the old man after all; it was still a cool spring in Washington, cloudy all the time it seemed, and I looked forward to a blaze of desert sunshine; I had not been away in months; and so on. The truth was I wouldn’t have gone without Nikki.
The old man lived in a modern block of flats in Tel Aviv. I hadn’t expected such Scandinavian architecture or such crowds along the commercial thoroughfares; somehow I’d created a picture of Israeli austerity and was amazed by the hell-bent rush for consumer goods I saw on all sides. Certainly on the streets of the city there was no sense of fear; you didn’t feel an Arab air force lurking beyond the horizon, you didn’t suspect every alley of harboring an Al Fatah fanatic. It was almost as if all that must have been a fiction of the Western press. At the time of course I was unaware of what went on behind closed doors, except insofar as the government-censored newspapers covered it. The Jewish Defense League, which had terrorized New York so recently, was regarded as a pathetic joke; the press was filled with political cartoons ridiculing not only pompous Arab windbags but also the American Zionists and to some extent Israel’s own politicians.
It was quite hot and the proximity of the Mediterranean only made it seem even drier than it was—like the parched feeling you get when you come in sight of a man-made lake in the middle of the Arizona desert.
Haim Tippelskirch had a tiny apartment on the fourth floor overlooking the playground of a modern school. He and Nikki were very glad to see each other; they embraced and their laughter mingled.
She had told me he had a great deal of vigor for a man in his seventies but to me he appeared alarmingly frail at that first meeting. He was very tall but thin as a sapling, with oversized grey slacks cinched up around his middle chest; he leaned on a polished cane. His wispy hair was in pewter-grey tufts and his cadaverous face appeared to have few teeth.
Yet there was dignified authority in the poise of his head, the angle of his physical attitude when he greeted me. With Nikki he had spoken Hebrew; we now had a brief go-round of tongues—he had no English—and we settled on German, with which we were both comfortable. He spoke with a good High German accent and did not need to hesitate in search of the right word.
Later after that first meeting Nikki told me how hard it had been for her to conceal her alarm: he had wasted badly since she had last seen him six months earlier. We had no way of knowing it but he was already quite ill with the cancer that would s
oon take his life. I don’t know if he had the diagnosis yet; he knew he was ill.
She was remarkably good. She gave no sign. She teased him girlishly and the old man gave as good as he took. He was her surrogate uncle, they told me; he had known her mother well. They were not related but they might as well have been.
He didn’t seem a religious man; there were no artifacts in the apartment. The furnishings were inexpensive and Scandinavian in style but hardly spartan; he had arranged the small flat pleasantly and the sun streamed in with clean strong light. One entire long wall of the sitting room was given over to bookcases and the volumes on the shelves were in several languages; I saw none in English but apparently he read French, German, Italian and two or three others besides Hebrew and Russian. There were the classics of Russian and Continental literature and philosophy; there was also a substantial library of history and military studies (including three of mine in translation); he had Clausewitz and an extensive shelf of Nietzsche and Goethe.
The two of them made tea and Nikki brought it into the sitting room on a silver tray. It looked quite valuable. I remember the old man catching my eye and smiling. “This is one reason I am no longer in Russia. I fear I lack proletarian sympathies. I enjoy as much comfort and luxury as I can afford—and I’ve never had anything against privilege.”
Nikki had to leave. We both saw her to the door. “Take good care of him,” she said to the old man; we kissed and she went.
He waved me to a chair and went to the bookcase where he took down a book. It was my first, the one on the Civil War in Russia. He laid it on top of the case; stopped to glance out the window at the sky and then pivoted on his cane to face me. “Of course I have read this.”
“A very youthful effort,” I said.
“It’s quite well done. But it’s seen from a great distance. You must have done it all from libraries.”
Kolchak's Gold Page 3