Contents
For Shan, with love
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The editors gratefully acknowledge the important assistance, in preparing this manuscript, of Shan Willson, James O’Shea Wade, and Justin B. Scott.
EDITOR’S NOTE
The various narratives which go to make up the body of this volume are all the product of one hand: that of the distinguished and popular historian Harris Bristow, author of nine successful books since 1962, including The Aeneas Scheme (1965), The Nazi Spies (1967), The War in the Aleutians (1969), and the bestselling The Master Spies (1971). It should also be noted that his first book, recently brought back into print in a new hardcover edition, was The Civil War in Russia: 1918–1921 (1962), and that for many years Harry Bristow has been regarded as one of our outstanding authorities on modern Russian military history. (His long article on Marshal Zhukov in the American Historical Review, March 1964, is regarded as a classic.)
The unique circumstances underlying the publication of the present volume—which we sincerely hope will not be Harry Bristow’s “last book”—have left no doubt in the publishers’ minds that the book must be published essentially as Harry Bristow wrote it: that there be a minimum of editorial tampering. We believe this to be one of the most alarming publications the United States has seen since the revelation of the Pentagon Papers by The New York Times, and it has been our feeling that any efforts to “smooth it out” or “polish it up” would merely run the risk of destroying potentially important material. Further, it has always been our policy to make no substantial changes in an author’s work without the express consent of the author.
The obligatory copy-editing has been done, of course, under close supervision of the editors; and we have added explanatory footnotes where it was felt they were needed. We have attempted to follow as closely as possible the instructions in Harry Bristow’s letter to his agent. Beyond that we have taken no liberties with the book. If its organization appears haphazard or arbitrary, that is more the editors’ fault than Harry Bristow’s.
Avast gloomy building stands along the Potomac waterfront in Alexandria. Originally a torpedo factory, it now houses many of the military records belonging to the National Archives. I’ve been familiar with it for a dozen years; masses of research for all my books have come out of those miles of microfilm and documents.
The National Archives is supposed to be a civilian department—our government’s historical librarian—but access to its military records is controlled and limited by the Pentagon. I had my first clash there in the 1960s when I began to compile material for a history of the Aleutian campaigns in World War II. Those campaigns ended in 1943 and the records I sought were twenty-five years old; yet they were locked inside “Classified” cabinets and it took nearly a year before I was able to wheedle the Pentagon into declassifying them so that I could use them for publication. The opposition was not based on argument, merely on bureaucratic inertia; but that made the obstacles all the more maddening, because they were unreasoning.
There was nothing sensitive in those files. It was only that no one had asked to see them before I came along. They’d remained under lock and key. When you took them out you had to blow the dust off them.
In the course of researching that book and others in the long warehouse, I developed a fair working knowledge of the scope and coverage of the NARS collections. I came to know the pale people who worked there, and the ways in which I could trace the erratic paths of reference in their muddled index of dusty possessions. In the end I followed those paths too far, I suppose: being a writer made me a scholar of sorts; being a scholar forced me to be a detective; being a detective made me a fugitive.
My mother was Ukrainian, perhaps I should explain that. She lived in Sebastopol until 1935, when freak circumstances permitted her to leave the Soviet Union. She immigrated to England. My father in those days had a minor post with the American Embassy in London.
They met one evening at the Haymarket Theatre; they were married in 1936. I was born in 1938 on board an ocean liner at a spot south of Iceland on a voyage from Southampton to New York; since my parents were of separate citizenships and I had been born on the high seas, I was allowed my choice of nationality when I reached my majority in 1959. I have carried an American passport ever since then but a good part of my childhood was spent outside the United States: Ottowa during the war, then London again—my father then Second Secretary to the Ambassador to the Court of St. James—then Bonn for two years, and a further two years in Switzerland. I went to a variety of schools and acquired four languages including my mother’s native Ukrainian dialect, as well as German, English and St. Petersburg Russian.
During the war my mother’s relatives managed occasionally to get letters out to her. She saved these carefully in a leather case and in later years she would let me read them. As far as any of us knew, all her relatives in the Crimea and the Ukraine had perished in the war. I’m sure it was those letters, and my mother’s childhood memories, which inspired me to write my first book on the Russian Civil War and to lay elaborate plans to write the definitive history of the Nazi seige of Sebastopol—the project which took me into the Soviet Union in February 1973 and culminated in those alarming events with which this account is concerned.
When I was researching my book on the Nazi spies I first encountered German documents that referred to the Sebastopol siege. I had thought that such documents would be in Russian hands today, but that isn’t altogether the case.
The Germans were compulsive paperwork addicts; our own Pentagon can hardly match the Nazi mania for record-keeping, which helped doom many of the war-crimes defendants: their bestiality was attested by document after damning document, many of them sealed with their own signatures.
When the Wehrmacht advanced it sent back its records to the Fatherland. When it retreated it took its records along. Nothing was left behind. Amazingly few records were destroyed, until right at the end of the war a belated effort was made to erase the evidence they had so carefully amassed against themselves. But at that point everything was collapsing around them and the ranking officers fled to preserve their skins while their subordinates found more pressing engagements than record-burning; so that a vast body of Nazi history fell intact into Allied hands at the end of the war in Germany.
Among these records were voluminous files from the Crimea. Even in rout; even under siege; even in the panic of desperate flight from the Red armies, the Germans threw their own wounded off trains and ships in order to make space for the transhipment to Germany of their paper records.
These trainloads fell into American hands, mainly in Austria, in 1945. Most of them were taken to Berlin (the American sector) for examination. Harried men, assigned to the Strategic Bombing Survey and the Allied Military Government in postwar Germany, had the jobs of sorting these endless millions of documents; collating them, indexing them, finding places to store them. (For a while many of them were kept in the bombed and burnt-out remains of the old Reichstag.)
Many were not indexed with any care. The principal target of the hunt was documents to incriminate those accused of war crimes; anything that didn’t seem to have a direct bearing on that objective was discarded and consigned to the oblivion of “miscellany.” Later, when the military occupation ended, the American forces brought the captured material back with them. Most of it was stored intact and unopened; in the intervening years it has been examined piecemeal but there has never been any systematic attempt to get it sorted out. There is still enough unopened material to keep historians busy for a century.
When I came across the first clues I was tempted to shelve the book on Nazi spies and plunge straight into the Sebastopol material. I did abandon the spy book for several weeks until it became obvious that I was not going to get enough material from those files to justify doing that particular book. The key material was Russian; and of course it remains in the Soviet Union.
Clearly I had to have access to the Russian archives. I began to make approaches to the Soviet government, by mail and through their embassy in Washington, while at the same time I returned my immediate attention to the Abwehr and Gestapo records and proceeded to complete that project.
Predictably the Soviet authorities were obstructionist; I knew it would take years to break down the barriers, if it could be done at all. At that time no Western historian had been allowed into any Soviet archive.
I hoped my dual nationality would help. Also there was the fact that I had treated the Russians fairly in all my books, particularly my history of the Russian Civil War—my first book. I hoped that would count for something. (Since then some things have changed. Even then I was dabbling with material for a book on Aleksandr Kolchak and the White armies. But the Soviets weren’t to know that.)
I completed the manuscript of the Nazi spy book in the autumn of 1965. After that there were the usual revisions, the work of obtaining photographs to illustrate the book, the preparation of the bibliography and index, all the other irritating post-partum chores that go into the publication of a book which from the author’s point of view is already completed. It was well into 1966 before I had breathing space in which to begin the next project.
The Soviets still hadn’t budged. I was making pleas through intermediaries by then—old friends of my father’s, people in the diplomatic corps—but none of it had worked; the Russian archives were still closed to me. It was going to take years, if it was to happen at all. To the Soviets history is not a source, not a tool, but a god. Like all gods its interpretation is subject to revision—periodic expedient changes to fit the requirements of the present. No crime, regardless how heinous, can be condemned if it is performed in the service of Red history—a system of rationalization which is reminiscent of the Inquisition and the Crusades. But as long as history is the Red religion it is small wonder that the Soviets resist incursions by outside students, and I had few illusions about my chances.
So I turned to the Aleutian campaigns and spent two years on them (1966–1968), after which I assembled the vignettes that went into The Master Spies.
Those were years when my daughter died in a stupid accident and my marriage broke up. I mention those things only to explain why I did not devote more wholehearted efforts to opening Russian doors a crack. I had too many problems. For a while my work took a back seat; in fact for more than a year I was drinking too much to do decent work. But I don’t mean this to be a confession or an apologia; my personal life has only a limited bearing on the facts that must be divulged here.
For one reason and another it was near the end of 1970 before I returned to Washington to begin work on what I intended to be the definitive popular history of the Siberian Civil War in 1918–20—Kolchak’s War. It was shortly thereafter that all this began. I remember the date quite clearly: January 26, 1971.
George Fitzpatrick, who has a Boston Irish sense of humor and a practical joker’s temperament, was throwing one of his bacchanals. He detested the hoary Washington practice of throwing every party “in honor of” someone. This one, I recall vividly, was thrown in commemoration of the date of Oscar Wilde’s death.
I had been weeks sorting the boring files of Graves’ Expeditionary Force in Siberia and I welcomed Fitzpatrick’s invitation in the hope the party would pull me out of my dulled mood.
Fitzpatrick is a Boston lawyer, a registered lobbyist; he keeps a suite of rooms year-round at the Hay-Adams. In the lobby that evening, conventioneers with name-tags on their pockets swarmed like prisoners of war and it was with great difficulty that I made my way to the bank of elevators.
A man arrived there just ahead of me; he put his finger on the depressed plastic square and it lit up. He turned and we looked at each other with the tentative smiles of people who think they recognize each other but aren’t quite sure.
Then he said, “Harry Bristow.” He pumped my arm in a politician’s handshake, left hand on my elbow. “Been a hell of a long time.”
I still didn’t remember him well enough to put a name with the face.
“I didn’t realize I’d put on that much weight. I’m Evan MacIver. Remember?”
I had to do the self-deprecating laugh and disbelieving head-shake; he was right, I should have remembered him—we’d roomed together one semester at Columbia.
MacIver brightened; we asked each other how we were, after which he said something complimentary about my books.
I remembered him as a self-possessed jaunty youth; a magpie with a raffish way. Now he had the somewhat defeated air of a worn-out roué: a big rumpled man with the jowls of a bulldog, the rheumy eyes of a bloodhound and a hard round belly on him. In profile his nose was an exact right triangle with a bit of a point on it. He was only two years older than I but he looked badly used at thirty-five. He wore a beet-hued tie and a gray flannel business suit as if he had been born in them; there’d been a day when he wouldn’t have been caught dead in conventional attire. And his manner somehow suggested that the good education he’d once absorbed had gone stale through shiftless indifference.
At Fitzpatrick’s floor the elevator doors slid open with a soft scrape. The hallway was wide and carpeted, intersected at intervals by painted doors. MacIver said, “You going to the Fitzpatrick bash? You know the way?”
“I’ve been here before,” I admitted and led him along the corridor. I made conversation: “What have you been up to?”
“Oh hell, you know how it is. A little of this, a little of that. I did time at grad school after you left. Few years overseas—Kyoto and Darmstadt, mainly. Married a German girl while I was stationed over there, got my inactive papers, came back here.”
“Any kids?”
“I got my wife and she’s got me.” It was wry because, evidently, there was truth in it. “Other than that no, no children. How about you?”
“No ties at the moment.” I saw no point in going into detail. I rang the bell and a laughing girl let us in.
Among those who know, an invitation to a Fitzpatrick party is a privilege. There is always a White House crisis or a Capitol Hill scandal to fuel conversations and the guest list insures that a good number of animated and heated disputes will break out in the course of the bibulous evening.
You never see quite the same crowd there twice; you’re kept on your toes by the presence of strangers who throw lethal darts into your best set-piece opinion speeches. A bore never gets a second invitation. There’s a slight artificiality to it—Fitzpatrick’s principal aim is to recreate the Algonquin round table—but nobody minds. The best sarcasms are honed here. Tomorrow’s political-humor newspaper columns often have their geneses around George’s bar. I believe it was at one of his early parties that the phrase was coined, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Or at least legend would have it so.
Evan MacIver and I were separated almost instantly on entry; I found myself marched into the center of the main room with George Fitzpatrick’s thick arm thrown across my shoulders. Around me vied the fumes of his Black Label Cologne and Cutty Sark whiskey. George stopped to introduce me to a trio of allegedly beautiful people and left me there to find my own way to the bar; I don’t recall speaking to him again at all that night.
I was in the wrong mood for it; I knew that right away. I’d been immersed in dry research too long; wit, like love, is something you have to keep working at—otherwise it withers. I constructed some sort of drink and found a neutral corner in which to swizzle it reflectively. Across the room I saw a glamorous woman, the wife of a young Senator who wasn’t here with her, take offense at something someone said to her; she took a reef in her floor-length dress and swept straight out the door. When it closed behind her the entire room burst into raucous laughter: there was no such thing as an embarrassed silence at one of these bashes. Manners were suspended; anything went; she had broken the house rules and nobody had sympathy for her: the room echoed with ridicule when she returned for her forgotten coat.
A columnist buttonholed me and tried out a funny idea he was thinking of using. Evidently he was speaking to me but he seemed to be aiming somewhere over the top of my head. I laughed in the right places.
Another drink, too fast. I saw MacIver drifting through the crowd, looking curiously like an eavesdropper: he was out of place here, the company was too fast for him. I wondered where Fitzpatrick could have come across him. What did MacIver do nowadays? He hadn’t said. I had thought he was taller than he seemed now; perhaps events had shrunk him. He was burning his cigarettes away in long drags.
I found a chair in the lee of conversations; someone had just vacated it to charge into the midst of a spirited argument nearby. Laughter hung in the room in waves that bounced from one end to the other; the various knots of joke-tellers seemed to have found synchronization. I settled into the chair and went through the time-consuming ritual of getting my pipe going.
For a little while I let things drift by me. Then my attention drifted toward a young woman who sat in the corner opposite me, beside the window. Her head was bowed so that her dark hair shielded her face; people went by and there was an undrunk glass of something in her hand but she paid nothing any notice.
“She’s Israeli. Separated from her husband, not divorced. Twenty-eight, I think.”
It was Evan MacIver, suddenly at my side, sitting down hipshot on the arm of my chair. “She’s got a son in some Swiss boarding school. She’s staying in a consulate apartment out in Georgetown.”
“Why tell me all that?”
“Because you wanted to know.” His smile was cynical: he had a salesman’s knowledge of human weaknesses. “She speaks five or six languages but as far as I know she doesn’t know how to say ‘yes’ in any of them.”
“I gather you don’t like her much.”
“I can’t stand argumentative women,” MacIver said. “Her name’s Nikki something, I forget exactly. Weinstein, Eisenstein, something like that.”
“Nikki?”
“She’s only half Jewish. French mother, I think. Probably short for Nicole. She’s over here with some kind of fund-raising group, trying to get shekels out of the New York Jews to help spring Jewish emigrants out of Russia.”
I drained my drink down to the ice cubes and set the glass down.
MacIver said, “You really ought to talk to her about that Russian stuff you’re always writing about.”
I could tell by the way the girl squinted at her newspaper that she was nearsighted. I looked at MacIver. “Why?”
“She’s hipped on it. Talk your ear off. You don’t know what depressed is until you’ve listened to her number on pogroms and atrocities. You’ve never met such a relentless memory for dismal facts and figures.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“On business. I should have left it there.”
The girl had opened her handbag. She took out a pair of large dark-rimmed glasses to read the news more closely. She was quite oblivious to her surroundings. She looked bright and quick; MacIver’s droll attempt to characterize her didn’t quite jibe with her appearance. Her eyes, magnified behind the glasses, seemed slanted with a somewhat rancorous irony—wary, suspicious, but the sort of face that would hide sooner behind clever mockery than behind heavy literal fact-mongering.
MacIver’s lip-hung cigarette bobbed up and down when he spoke. “What are you working on right now? Another spy book?”
“No. I’m doing a book on the Russian Civil War.”
“You already did one. Didn’t you?”
“This one’s on Kolchak. I passed him over lightly in the first one.”
“The admiral, I remember.” He beamed as if proud of his memory. “You do pick the grim ones, don’t you?”
I let it lie. “What kind of line are you in these days?”
“Cloaks.” He dragged avariciously on his cigarette and poured thick slow rivers of smoke from his nostrils, and gave me the familiar grin for the first time. “Cloak-and-dagger business. I’m in the cloak end of it. Civil service, you know. Years ago I decided I was the sort of bureaucratic hack the civilian world would eat alive, so I stayed with the government when I got out of the army. Now I’m just another fool exercising my petty authority around Langley.”
His candor surprised me. It was not de rigueur for people in that line to advertise their calling. This was long before the celebrity of E. Howard Hunt.
He seemed to feel he’d gone far enough. He changed the direction of the conversation: “Some of us at The Firm were reading your last book. We got a few yocks here and there, but you didn’t find half the jokes in that Haitian business. Not half.”
I grunted to encourage him and after he found a place to stub his cigarette he went on: “It was Lansky, you missed that part.”
“Meyer Lansky?”
“Let’s say people associated with him. Miami types.” He lit up and blew smoke at his match. “Come on, Harry, you should’ve figured out that Papa Doc knew what our mental retards were up to. Lansky had a little meet with the Duvalier people to talk about those Mickey Mouse exiles we had flying B–Twenty-fours over Port au Prince.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Why should I? Look, the mob was looking for beach resorts for their casinos, and Papa Doc offered to trade beach-front property for antiaircraft guns. Where’d you think he got his artillery on the roof of the palace?”
“The Mafia?”
“Shot down two Liberators, too. Those clowns trying to fly airplanes—eighteen tons of bombs and they never hit the palace once.” His chuckle grew into a bray of laughter.
“Why tell me all this?”
“Ancient history. It’s what you write about, isn’t it?”
But it was something else, I knew. I had a feeling he was doing it to establish his bonafides but I couldn’t fathom what reason he had for doing that.
The girl in the corner was quite indifferent to the party swirling around her; it wasn’t an act.
MacIver said, “Remember old Gilfillan, the time he mimeographed that fake sociology exam and hooked half the class on it?” And then he was off on a rambling discourse of nostalgic reminiscence which I endeavored to curtail by making a gesture with my empty glass and carrying it away toward the bar.
He came along unshakably. “You had dinner yet?”
“Yes,” I lied.
It made him pause. “Too bad. There’s a place down the block, the steaks aren’t too bad. Christ, I don’t know about you but I can only take so much of this ruckus. I think I’ll take off. Listen, we ought to have dinner soon—have a few yocks over the old times.”
“I’d like to,” I said politely.
He gave me a card after scrawling a ballpoint number on the back of it. “That’s the home phone. I’ve got a little house just the other side of Arlington. Come out and visit sometime. The little lady makes a hell of a sauerkraut.”
I looked at the card as if I really intended to call him sometime.
MacIver drifted away through the smoke; I was still waiting my turn at the bar. He stopped by the young woman’s chair in the corner and I saw her stiffen and nod with recognition but not pleasure. MacIver spoke briefly and the Israeli woman’s eyes turned toward me. I had no choice but to smile and wave my glass in their direction.
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.