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.