“I suppose I’d better.”
She went with me as far as she was allowed to the customs departure gate. “I’ll come soon, darling.”
“Promise me that.”
“Yes-it’s a promise I’m making to myself too.”
“Wangle it, Nikki. You’re good at that-twisting men around your finger.”
We both laughed but it was brief laughter. We understood, both of us, that it might be a long while.
Abruptly I kissed her very hard. “That’s to make sure you don’t forget me.”
“I have a very poor memory,” she said. “You’d better do that again.”
I obeyed but when I kissed her I felt the warm tears on her cheek and then she was wheeling away from me: “Ciao, Harry …” and she was running away through the airport. They were calling the flight; I couldn’t follow her. I had the impulse to throw the ticket on the floor and go back with her but in the end I went through the customs and emigration line and boarded the flight with stinging eyes and an empty weight in my throat that wouldn’t go up and wouldn’t go down.
I knew it was foolish, immature. But that didn’t ease it. I think I was sad because it made me realize we were not complete romantics at heart, either of us. If this love had been paramount we each should have been willing to make nearly any sacrifice for it but we hadn’t been willing to do that. We both understood we’d have no happiness together if it meant sacrificing our individual raisons d’etre.
She’d seen it faster than I had; she’d known the day when I would no longer reject the airplane ticket. Another month and we might have been bickering, at each other’s throats. Nikki had been wise enough to make the decision for us and I should have been grateful.
Love is meaningless without dignity and it is self-destroying wherever one’s success means the other’s failure. Nikki and I were too well aware of that. I think we both regretted it. It seemed unfair and at times I grew angry with both of us, I felt we had made a selfish and petty decision; I felt we must be small people crippled by unheroic realism-it wasn’t that this was the wrong age for the grand passion; it was that we were the wrong people. We were too ordinary, too hidebound in our commitments to ephemeral occupations, too egocentric in our smaller-than-life way.
In that manner I alternated between extremes, sometimes maudlin and sometimes confident that we had made the best decision. But underneath it always I felt we would find our way together again. I trusted that; I believed it with all my heart.
6
I spent a good part of that sweating August at home in New Jersey avoiding getting splendidly drunk. I had a secretary in to transcribe the tape recordings from my talks with Haim Tippelskirch and the others to whom he’d introduced me in Israel; I went over that material as it came from her typewriter and I spent two or three weeks going back over the material on Sebastopol and the Kolchak retreat. I had been away from it all long enough to discover some new things in it; I made some notes to take with me to the archives and late in the month went down to Washington.
My first act there was to visit the Soviet Embassy. There was some encouragement: they had not shut the door on the possibility of my visiting the Crimea for the purpose of looking at their archives and interviewing survivors. Neither had they opened it wide, however. There was a bureaucratic wall of rules behind which the embassy and OVIR (the office of visa registration) took refuge. There were more applications for me to fill out, more questions to answer. The Soviet hacks had thwarted my efforts for years but I was determined to outlast them.
At the same time I had more procedural battles to fight in the Pentagon in my attempts to get access to several cartons of Wehrmacht and SS records, particularly the stenographic minutes of daily staff meetings-records that were essential to my Sebastopol book. These initially had gone into the West German central archives but some clerical mistake had moved them into the Political Archives of the Foreign Ministry in Bonn and a supervisory clerk had discovered them, decided they didn’t belong there and shipped them out to the Americans shortly before the end of the Occupation. So far as I knew they had never been examined in any detail. Nor would they ever be unless I could find some lever with which to pry them open.
The machinery was in motion but there was no rushing it. I needed the records of British Intelligence and Expeditionary Force operations in the Russian Civil War for the Kolchak book; I flew to London in the fall and spent weeks in the Imperial War Museum and the archives of the Ministry of Defence in the Old Admiralty Building. I had it half in mind to swing down to Israel before going home; I put through an international trunk call and finally, in spite of everything the telephone service could do, I reached Nikki.
It was a poor connection but it was wonderful to hear her voice. “They must have routed this call through Johannesburg.”
“Oh, Harry, I can hardly hear you.”
“I’m thinking of coming to Tel Aviv next week,” I shouted.
“Oh dear-I won’t be here. They’re sending me to the Far East for several weeks. Oh crap.”
“It’s a conspiracy against us. Christ.”
“I’m so sorry. I’ll see if I can get it changed-can I call you back tomorrow?”
We arranged that she would; and she did so but she hadn’t been able to change the schedule of her mission to Tokyo and Peking. There’s no purpose in recounting the details of our conversation; we said our disheartened farewells and I returned to my work with somnambulistic determination.
She had never given me a clear picture of her position or function in the refugee organization. I knew she had to do with fund-raising but obviously there was more to the job than that. I took it for granted she was engaged in clandestine dealings to some extent-the efforts to get Jews out of Russia had always been tinged with the coloration of espionage and intrigue but the business of espionage was far more humdrum than the moviemakers would have us believe. Whatever her job, it didn’t put her in any evident physical danger. But what began to concern me now was the realization that her position in the organization must be a good deal higher than I’d taken it to be. Perhaps because of her youth and vivacity I’d taken it for granted she had an ordinary minor post of some sort; but you didn’t send your minor clerks off globetrotting to Washington and Tokyo and Peking. Nikki was nobody’s secretary.
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.