Kolchak's Gold Read Online Free PDF

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