* March 9, 1973.-Ed.
* The Soviet Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Besopast-nosti)-the Russian Secret Police, the world’s largest and most elaborate intelligence organization, founded and headed until 1953 by Lavrenti P. Beria, one of Stalin’s closest and most vicious associates. It is a sort of cross between the CIA-FBI and the Gestapo.-Ed.
* Respectively, “Hebrew” and “Jew.”-Ed.
† Respectively, “yids” and “Abies.”-Ed.
* The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, although it ramified from Berlin starting in 1919, was an invention of a Russian fanatic organization called the Black Hundred. The Protocols purported to be the minutes of several meetings of the heads of a worldwide, sinister Jewish conspiracy in which the Elders outlined their plans to overthrow all existing regimes and build a Jewish world empire. Obviously the Protocols were a forgery, and a crude one at that, but as ridiculous as they may have been, they were convincing to a great many people-including such Americans as Henry Ford and Father Coughlin. (From Bristow’s notes.)
* Presumably Bukov was referring to Sebastopol.-Ed.
11
There were questions I should have asked Bukov but they didn’t occur to me until we were driving back to Sebastopol that night with rain oiling across the windshield and Timoshenko hunching over the steering wheel, peering out, trying to keep the car on the road. I should have asked Bukov exactly what Nikki had told him about me-exactly what instructions she had given him, and what kind of help he wanted from me. Wasn’t it possible that I was reading too much into it? Perhaps they only wanted inconsequential assistance from me-the sort of thing you would ask any friend who happened to be traveling in an area from which you required something.
I tried to believe that but it didn’t work. Any trivial favor in the area could have been done by Bukov himself or members of his group. If they wanted my help it meant they wanted to use my mobility-the fact that I was soon leaving the Soviet Union. It could only mean smuggling, whether of documents or something else: information perhaps, the sort of thing you could carry in your head-verbal messages.
No, it wasn’t that either. They already had lines of communication-otherwise how could Nikki have got the message about me to Bukov? It came back to espionage. The documents sewn between the layers of shoe soles; the microdot pasted onto your carnet; the spool of film imbedded in your bar of soap-all the tiresome rigamarole I had studied and written about.
I tried to find excuses but it was no good. She had tried to use me and it made me angry because it destroyed something precious.
Timoshenko was unaware that he’d been duped. He dropped me off at my hotel and from the shelter of the portico I watched the car take off in splashing shards, sweeping through rainy puddles and flinging up arched sheets of water like a destroyer’s wake.
On the opposite side of the street a dark car moved slowly, its tires hissing on the wet paving. It almost stopped opposite me. In the end it accelerated slowly and I watched it go out of sight. The rain made a black shine on the surface of the empty street and I felt anxiety: I realized it was probably the atmosphere but there had been something sinister about the slow passage of that second car and suddenly I was alarmed-wondering if it had been following us; if so, had Bukov and I been watched?
I retreated into the hotel. The woman at the desk nodded to me. I collected my key from her and went into the room. The chambermaid had turned down the bed and set the electric fire; it was warm and close and I was unpleasantly aware of the rank smell of my wet clothes. I opened the window a crack before I made ready to retire.
It had been a long and emotionally exhausting day but I was too keyed up to sleep. There was nothing to drink in the room. I lay staring at the darkness above me and listened to the rain trickle down the air shaft outside my window. There was fear in the room-I hadn’t found it an oppressive room before but I did now. Fantasies ran away with me: what if the KGB had a make on Bukov and knew him to be subversive? What if I was now tied in to him by today’s meeting? They would need no more evidence than that; I knew their methods. I wouldn’t be the first American visitor they’d charged with improper activities. I recalled One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and I pictured myself among Solzhenitsyn’s starving convicts.…
I raged against Nikki. She had not only betrayed an intimacy; she had filled me with fear. It didn’t matter that I had rejected Bukov’s request; it mattered only that the request had been made at all. Cleverly Bukov had told me too much: by telling me these things in confidence he had made me part of his conspiracy whether I worked for him or not. I had an obligation to him now-an obligation to silence and secrecy-which I shouldn’t have had if he hadn’t taken me into his confidence. Yet he’d told me nothing that could do important damage to his group. I knew the methods and the generic facts but not the details, not the names. He’d told me nothing the KGB didn’t already know, except perhaps his own identity-if they didn’t have him on file in the Arbat; and could I credit their total ignorance of his activities?
Bukov’s revelations had served only one purpose: to bind me to him in secrecy. Because of Nikki he knew I would not voluntarily betray him; to betray him would be to betray Nikki. They had counted on that.
It was contemptible. They risked very little in asking me to risk everything; they were using a means-my relationship with Nikki-to further an end which they thought vital. It didn’t matter whether they were correct about the morality and importance of the ends. It remained a cheap device and I was bitter. She had chosen this thoughtless way to bring us to a shabby ending. I felt hollow, emptied by a heartbreaking loss. There was no one, after all; in the dark room I heard the rain and my fear became terrifyingly lonely.
The work became a frenzy. It was all I had left. I sat hunched for uninterrupted hours at the long table in the archives with an endless rain beating at the high plate-glass windows. My tired eyes raced across the pages and I clawed each paper aside to get at the next. My knuckles ached from jotting; my eyes burned, everything throbbed. I ignored the relays of watchers who kept surveillance from their shadowed corners and quietly sifted my leavings.
I had interviews in the city both Monday and Tuesday evenings. There were no further communications from veterans outside the metropolitan area of Sebastopol and virtually all the referral contacts from my interviewees were either close at hand or impossible distances away in other parts of the Soviet Union. As a result I decided to revise my schedule and spend at least one additional week in the archives while conducting as many interviews as I could on the weekends and during the evening hours when I was barred from the documents.
By that Wednesday I was too exhausted to keep my evening interview appointment; I canceled it and rolled into bed shortly after dinner but once again I couldn’t fall asleep. Typewritten words-records, cipher decodes, dry matter-of-fact accounts of unspeakable atrocities-flashed against the insides of my eyelids like slides projected on a screen, painfully brilliant, confusingly rapid. I had worked myself very near a punch-drunk state of collapse. Reality had faded into vaguery and I had the strange sensation you sometimes have when you’ve gone too long without sleep or had a few drinks too many, that ordinary objects are just a bit too far away to be touched and that the voice which speaks to you from a nearby mouth is heard as if it issues from a distance away. When the chambermaid asked me a question I had to have her repeat it three times and still it came to me as if in a dream; finally I perceived she was asking if I would care for a flask of coffee and I nodded eagerly. But the coffee did not bring actuality any closer; it only kept me half awake during most of the night.