On the assumption that my possessions (and especially my notes) were subject to constant search, I was keeping all gold-related jottings on my person; after I began to find more significant clues to the gold story I actually took to slipping them inside the pillowcase at night.
The gold episode was a completely new discovery, never even hinted at in anything that had ever been published. When a writer comes across such a discovery he lives in professional dread from the moment of discovery to the moment of publication, lest by plagiarism or by pure coincidence someone else should happen to publish it first. I didn’t want the Soviets to know about my investigations into the story of the gold because I didn’t want Pravda or the Soviet Historical Association to publish it ahead of me. Admittedly this was a far-fetched anxiety. I can’t really excuse it except by reasoning that I must have had a subconscious awareness that there was a remote chance I might actually stumble across clues that would reveal the whereabouts of the gold; that such knowledge could be very dangerous to me if the Russians learned I had it; that therefore it was best to drop no hints at all. Whether I actually felt that way I don’t really know; it makes sense retrospectively but that doesn’t prove much. I don’t pretend to understand why I did all the things I did; in the end all I can do is report them as they happened.
Timoshenko took me to a tourist restaurant for dinner; we were entertained by a troupe of folk dancers. I joined him for a chilled glass of vodka but I demurred when he made it clear enough that he had a drinking contest in mind. I let him get mildly potted by himself. We were surrounded by visitors—mostly vacationing Muscovites, drawn south by the mild winter climate of the Black Sea. I found myself seeking a familiar face in the crowd—Gorokov’s—but I didn’t spot it; I had to assume if I was still under surveillance they must have brought in a new man. (In fact I never saw Gorokov again.)
I retired to the hotel as early as I could and prepared my notes for the next day’s assault on the Military Archives. My plan was to work solidly for three weeks or so in the museum-library and then devote the rest of my visit to interviews with veterans of the siege. I had posted notices to the city’s two newspapers, through State channels; I hoped the responses would begin to come in before my three weeks’ paperwork was completed. On a job like this you need only make contact with a few veterans—a dozen or so—and they in turn will give you more names and references; it can easily pyramid like a chain letter and once the door has been opened the job is much easier than one might expect. People are delighted to talk about their experiences.
Timoshenko lived in a flat not far away. He collected me at seven forty-five in the morning and we were on the museum doorstep precisely on the dot of eight. It was a cool sunny morning and I spent it near a window in the reading room with two young women delivering cartons of dusty documents to my table. By half-past eight I had the company of four or five other patrons—sometimes there were students; quite a few old men used the place and after the first couple of days it was obvious the number of readers in the library was a direct function of the weather outside. When it rained the place got crowded.
Timoshenko did not watch over my shoulder. He would drop me at eight and arrange to pick me up at four when the museum closed; I was on my own for lunch. Although there were cafés in the neighborhood I soon took to bringing a cold lunch and a flask of coffee with me so that I didn’t have to interrupt the precious hours of work.
From a researcher’s point of view the Military Archives were a treasure of dreams. The Russians had carefully preserved every scrap of paper relating to the siege. Candid snapshots, railway timetables, propaganda leaflets, even restaurant menus with penciled dates on them to show the progression of the siege—with more and more items being scratched off as time went by until there were no more menus. The Germans at the last had taken out an incredible volume of material in the evacuations—that was the material I had already seen in Washington and London—but a great mass of it had been left behind nevertheless. Some of it had been abandoned by fleeing Germans, and other bodies of documents had been captured by the Russians along with the Germans who had them in their possession at the time when the Red onslaught overran and swallowed whole rear-guard regiments.
I had taken the better part of eighteen months to go through a similar volume of material in the West; I had three weeks to do it here. There were the usual bureaucratic delays—it was a middle-aged woman at the desk, an employee of the museum, who now had a spiral-bound list of document numbers from Moscow in which she had to look up the classification of each request of mine before she could release it to my table or deny me access to it.
It goes without saying I became very shortly a victim of backaches, headaches and blurred vision. The concentration of work unnerved me and I came to dread that hard wooden chair each morning. With dinner I took three or four straight chilled vodkas. The first few nights Timoshenko took me out on the town after dinner but soon I was too exhausted for that; at any rate I was trying to keep ahead of my notes and sometimes the work in my hotel room kept me up well into the small hours. Once, at three in the morning, I emerged from my room and limped toward the front door to go outside for a breath of air but the stern woman at the desk shook her head mutely at me and I returned chastened to the room; from then on I had to satisfy myself with five minutes’ pacing back and forth around the bed at irregular intervals to keep my bones and muscles from cramping into irrevocable knots.
Toward the end of the first week I learned I was under surveillance. It took that long because they worked it in relays and I didn’t see the same faces all the time. There were at least three of them, possibly others as well. I can’t say exactly what put me onto them. Perhaps it was the fact that they made a point of not looking at me. Most Russians tended to stare at me out of curiosity. By my clothes and hair, perhaps by my face and carriage, I was obviously a foreigner; they didn’t get many Westerners in Sebastopol and I was studied with great interest by most people. These fellows only shot covert glances at me when they thought I wasn’t looking at them. By the beginning of the second week I knew who they were and I knew at least one of them would always be in the reading room while I was working there.
After that it took two or three more days before I realized they were not there so much to keep an eye on me—although I’m sure they did keep watch, to make sure I didn’t purloin any records; their main purpose was to find out what I was looking at, or looking for. It was a slipup on the part of one of the girls on the desk which gave that part of it away. I turned in a batch of documents, picked up the new batch and returned to my table; and as I sat down I happened to glance back toward the desk and the girl was handing a man the sheaf of papers I’d just turned in to her. He took them back to his table and went through them quickly, occasionally jotting something in a pocket note pad by his elbow.
Usually they were more circumspect than that. At no other time did I see the documents turned over to a new reader but on occasion I would glance around the room and see a folder I’d read the same day on the table in front of one of the men whose faces I’d come to recognize.