So it now appeared that I was in love with a person of some importance in the political scheme of things.
I found this discouraging, not because it created any sense of competition but because it made me realize how seriously committed she must be. This was no mere youthful enthusiasm for a cause. She had to be fairly high up in her organization; it stood to reason she must have had decision-making authority. At any rate if I had used my head earlier I should have known she was no fuzzy-headed do-gooder. She was not merely serious; she was dedicated to whatever she was doing and it was no passing fancy. It was becoming very unlikely she would ever decide to throw it over and come rushing into my arms to stay.
There was the alternative of continuing an intermittent affair but that held very few attractions for me. I’d had some success but my income wasn’t unlimited and I couldn’t afford to keep up a zany schedule of globetrotting, particularly since I had to conserve money for my possible trip to Sebastopol; and it looked as if Nikki had no idea when—or if—she would be able to come to the States.
For nearly a year we kept in touch—long letters and the occasional extravagant phone call. We were neither of us at ease with gushy sexual prose; often it was a strain to write because I was too verbally inhibited to put my feelings on paper adequately, and writing long paragraphs to her about the progress of my work was no decent substitute. Nevertheless we looked forward to each other’s letters and I sometimes got angry when more than a week went by without a few pages from her. She kept me appraised of the unexciting doings of the handful of people I’d met in Israel; she wrote nice chatty letters about some of the eccentric characters who shared her suite of offices; at intervals she went off to Stockholm or Vienna or Belgrade and I would get incisively witty travelogues from her with those postmarks on them. She never talked about her work in any detail; only the occasional reference to a conference of Jewish organizations in Brussels or the rather proud statement that three hundred Jews had been able to emigrate from the USSR in a month’s time.
After several months I began to fill with hopelessness. Gradually I started to suspect that there was no good end to this, that our long-distance affair was only a form of self-flagellation. The odds against us were high and I began to defend myself against ultimate heartbreak by thrusting Nikki away from the center of my emotions.
I began making the rounds of the Washington parties again; in time it became a series of casual beddings that lasted a night or a fortnight. It didn’t work. I found no distraction strong enough to threaten Nikki’s place in my soul.
I became talkative and argumentative and found myself slinging opinionated remarks into the smallest cocktail-party opening. I must have become a pill. I discovered that I had opinions on everything and anyone who didn’t share them was a fool.
I offered pat simplistic solutions to the problems of crime and drugs and race relations. I insulted bureaucrats and diplomats with equal obliviousness. Curiously, I became something of a lion that season—very much in demand—and I suppose it was partly because I had a successful spy book on the market and partly because my outspoken brashness was taken to be forthright and refreshing at those gatherings of pious discreet woolgatherers. The only parties at which I ceased to be welcome were George Fitzpatrick’s; wit was too highly prized at those bacchanals and it appeared I had traded in my rapier on a broadsword—suddenly, literary celebrity or not, I was too gauche for Fitzpatrick and the invitations stopped. It was at this same time—the late spring and early summer of 1972—that my publishers booked, me onto several network television talk-shows and my forceful assertions about the Russians brought a ton of mail into the Dick Cavett offices while several officials—one of Cabinet rank—hinted to me that it would be wise if I tempered my pronouncements in view of the current Nixon rapprochement with Moscow.
I hadn’t been making political remarks at all, but they were taken that way and with some justification: you can’t divorce nations from politics. But I wasn’t a political person. I’d grown up in the post-McCarthy era; it was no longer commonplace to be vocally anti-Communist and although I thought communism to be a system that was (if anything, and if possible) even worse than capitalism, I was not riding an ideological hobbyhorse. My outpourings were more like racist prejudices than political ones; at this time I was writing portions of the rough draft of my book on Kolchak and my feelings toward Russia were hardening. I was unable to find any consistent history of immorality in the West that matched the habitual behavior of the Siberian Cossacks, the Red Army and the Stalinists. I don’t cling to those views now. But my feelings at that time had an important bearing on the decisions I soon had to make. I think it’s important that in those days when I hadn’t yet begun to penetrate this nightmare I had got myself into the habit of making righteous distinctions between Us and Them. I was able to believe, somehow, that the longevity and numerical hugeness of Russian atrocities made them wholly different in kind from the American atrocities in Vietnam or the absolute and thorough corruption of the entire police department of New York.
In retrospect I find it pathetic that I even made any pretense at objectivity in the things I wrote at that time. My bias was as clear-cut as the bias you find in the output of Soviet historians. It wasn’t long before I was deliberately seeking out evidences of Russian perfidy. That sort of selectivity can’t lead to a balanced report but when you’re in the grip of bigotry you don’t make those distinctions.
The cause of it must have been my frustration with the way things were going between Nikki and me. I couldn’t bring myself to take out my anger on her; therefore I took it out on everything and everyone else. Yet perversely I chose as the main target of my hatred the very people whom Nikki herself regarded as The Enemy. Perhaps I was unconsciously trying to reassure her that I was on her side.
A writer’s professional decisions often are the result of happenstance. Probably my mother’s nationality prefigured my interest in Russian history; but I didn’t hate my mother—the bias came from somewhere else. The shape of both projects—the Kolchak book and the Sebastopol book—had been changed considerably by several coincidences, mainly my chancing to meet Nikki and then, through her, my meeting Haim Tippelskirch.
Because of these accidents my mind was attuned to things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise: specifically the gold, in which I should have had a very limited interest had it not been for Haim’s obsession with it.
Whenever I came across the remotest reference to Kolchak’s gold in my researches, my attention would rivet itself onto the reference. I ended up with a surprisingly thick file of notes on the subject.
During the Second World War the German war machine made its deepest penetrations into southern Russia in the summer and fall of 1942. In the far south the Nazis had swallowed up the Black Sea and the Panzers were within striking distance of the shores of the Caspian. These penetrations took the Germans to a point nearly four hundred miles east of the longitudinal parallel of Moscow: the Wehrmacht pushed a great bulge into the lower belly of Russia.