Kolchak's Gold (22 page)

The first hour was desultory; the conversation was the ordinary thing—he asked me about myself and my work, he gave a shorthand sort of self-summation (lifelong bachelor, son of a tailor, not much of a reader but a great lover of music—he had a Gramophone and a surprising collection of recordings and his radio looked first-rate and expensive) and he asked me how I was enjoying my visit to the Crimea. The only remarkable thing I noticed was that he did not ask me very many questions about America.

I eased him toward the war and General Tyulenev and he followed my lead without resistance. Speaking slowly, selecting the dry phrases with care, he discussed the Caucasian, Ukrainian and Crimean campaigns from a semi-scholarly viewpoint more characteristic of a strategist than of an orderly. He spoke excellent Russian with a neutral Moscow accent; his vocabulary was formal. He said he came originally from Smolensk. I have said his reminiscences were on a grand strategic scale but they were enriched by many dramatic, if impersonal, details.

Thus, in the late summer of 1942 the Germans had been massed for an armored attack toward Grozny, and Tyulenev had learned through his intelligence branch that the German assault was to be determined and massive: the Wehrmacht had orders to break all the way through the Caucasus, on into the Middle East and on down all the way to Egypt to link up with Rommel. Tyulenev's job was to halt that blitz in its tracks, and to accomplish that purpose he mobilized nearly one hundred thousand civilians onto twenty-four-hour-a-day shifts to build antitank ditches and fortifications across the line of German advance ahead of Grozny.

Because he didn't use his own troops for these construction jobs, Tyulenev was able to muster a big enough fighting army to stop the Germans cold at their Mozdok bridgehead. They never went farther; winter came, and after that the Germans were on the defensive.

I had known all this before but Bukov gave me a number of details I hadn't seen. For instance the tank traps were devised by Tyulenev himself and were far more effective than the ones prescribed by regulations that dated back to the First War. They consisted of trenches dug across the roads and then covered with plywood or thin sheet metal and a thin layer of gravel. The bottoms of the trenches were mined. The Germans found it much harder to avoid a concealed trench than to maneuver through an ordinary field of pit-type tank traps; they lost hundreds of tanks in Tyulenev's mined trenches.

Bukov had quite a bit of that sort of thing. It was interesting but it didn't provide the personal glances I preferred. Nevertheless I did my best to pump him and we were still at it three hours after my arrival.

In the meantime Bukov had been a good host. He had been an officer's gentleman; he kept a neat home and served us little tea snacks cut into exact squares—bread and caviar and cheese—and he kept our glasses filled with beer. He kept the fire roaring and smoked a strong pipe of Russian tobacco; I thought it was the heat and smoke and the beer that put poor Timoshenko to sleep. He spent a while politely trying to smile and pay attention but he kept nodding and presently he dropped off, sliding to one side in his chair. He hung there with his head lolling, supported on the arm of the chair, the fingertips of his right hand trailing the floor. Bukov smiled briefly in his direction and went right ahead with whatever he had been saying.

It had begun to drizzle in the middle of the afternoon but that didn't deter Bukov from rising to his feet and suggesting we go outside for a stroll and a breath of air. I needed a reprieve from the smoky stale heat of the room and I got up to go with him but I do recall making some remark about the rain; Bukov said it didn't matter. He had an umbrella and we walked through the town square under it, and along the pavement beside the railway track. Bukov kept talking steadily, a stream of wartime reminiscence; I stopped to make an occasional note and he waited patiently, his umbrella shielding my notebook from the rain.

Then we were past the edge of the village with the last house behind us and Bukov said abruptly, “Are you. carrying a listening device?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? Do you mind if we look?”

I stiffened but he waggled his free hand impatiently. “I have some things to say to you that shouldn't be overheard. Shall we make sure?”

“Do you mean to search me?”

His cool eyes appraised me. I wasn't afraid; it was more indignation.

Then he said, “Suppose I mention the name Nikki.”

“How did you …?”

“Let's be sure of our privacy first, shall we?” He nodded toward my clothing and now curiosity had replaced my indignation and I turned my pockets out for him. He didn't rifle anything, he just glanced at my possessions and then he moved up close to me and asked me to hold the umbrella while he had a look at the buttons on my various garments. “Sometimes they sew a button on your coat when you don't know about it.”

“I doubt they'd bother in my case. I'm not a spy.”

“They
don't know that.” He did a thorough job before he was satisfied. Then he indicated we should resume our stroll.

It occurred to me that Timoshenko's falling asleep had been very convenient to Bukov's purposes. I asked him if he had drugged Timoshenko and he admitted he had. “A sleeping powder in his beer. But he won't be aware of it. It will keep him out for a few hours. By the time he wakes up he'll find us just as we were when he dropped off.” He tipped the umbrella back slightly to squint at the sky. “I apologize for this. But we needed to be out of earshot of whatever transmitters may be hidden on your friend.”

“You mentioned a name just now.”

“Nicole Eisen. Yes.” He held up a hand to postpone my questions. “You had written her that you were coming here. She asked me to make contact with you.”

“Why?”

“To introduce myself. It's possible you may have—let's call it inconvenience. With the authorities here.”

“Why should I? Everything's gone quite smoothly. I've done nothing to annoy them.”

“Sometimes it takes very little to annoy them,” he said, very drily. “You know who I am and where you can find me. If you need my assistance at any time, I'm at your service.”

“What sort of assistance?”

“Any kind. I hope the need won't come up. But if it does …”

“I think you've got something in mind. Something specific.”

He said, “Naturally they're watching you very closely.”

I knew that but I wasn't sure how much to trust him; it was even possible he was not at all what he pretended to be. I had written too many books about spies and double agents; for all I knew he was a Soviet agent putting on this little charade to find out if I had indulged in any clandestine activities which would cause me to be nervous enough to ask him for the assistance he so glibly offered. It could have been a trap; so I said nothing about having discovered for myself that I was under constant surveillance. I only said, “If they are they're wasting their time. I've got nothing to hide.”

“This regime is infected by an epidemic of suspicion and distrust. You're a very sensitive issue. There were people high-up who didn't want to give you your clearances to come here. They were overruled in the supreme councils but they're men who don't like to be overruled—they're watching you closely for a single misstep. That's all it will take.”

“By ‘they' I take it you mean the KGB?”
*

“Yes. Specifically Andrei Bizenkev, the man who heads it now. He's an old-fashioned conservative Bolshevik. He wanted no part of this ‘cultural exchange' you represent. He'd very much like to see you make a mistake. And it's possible if you don't do it for him he'll manufacture a mistake for you.”

A frame-up. It sounded far-fetched to me. They hadn't harassed me at all up to now.

“I won't belabor it,” Bukov went on. “Bear it in mind—act cautiously at all times and remember my offer of assistance if you require it. As I said, I hope you won't. My work has risks enough.”

I assumed I knew the nature of his “work”; I further assumed he was fairly high in the fifth-column organization—partly because of his manner and partly because he could not otherwise be expected to know what the personal views and intentions of the chief of the KGB were.

I said, “Are you a Jew, Bukov?”

“No, I'm not.”

“Then I'm not sure I understand your position.”

“One does not need to be a Jew to be a man of conscience.”

We went up the wooden steps onto the platform of the railway station; we had made a brief circuit along the road beyond town and had returned. The waiting room was empty—evidently no more trains were scheduled that day. Bukov collapsed his umbrella and we sat on a bench. The room was dim and unheated and we kept our coats on. He took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. “We must return to the flat within an hour or so. Do you find it uncomfortable here?”

“No.” It was a lie. I minded the chill; I was a soft American accustomed to central heating. But Bukov wanted to talk and I was curious to hear it; I was curious about him as well. “Conscience” was too broad and too vague a term to explain why a man of obvious ability and taste should take the deliberate and mortal risk of acting as a subversive agent in his own homeland. I'd seen the way he lived and he wasn't doing it for money (he had a legitimate office in the town, roughly equivalent to that of postmaster, and the salary for that would be more than enough to pay for his rent and his phonograph records). Possibly he did it out of impulses toward idealism and adventure—but these again were emotional abstractions that explained very little.

Water dripped from his umbrella and made a little pool on the wooden floor. Bukov said, “Perhaps you're acquainted with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.”

It was more or less a question but he didn't wait for an answer. “Article Thirteen, Paragraph Two. ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.' Do you know what it's like to be a Jew who wants to leave the Soviet Union, Mr. Bristow?”

“There's been a lot in our press. I have an idea, yes.” I stirred; I was remembering what Evan MacIver had said.

Bukov went on. “Persecuting Jews is nothing new in the world. It's been going on in Russia for centuries. The pogrom massacres of eighteen eighty-one and the Civil War here, the purge of Jews in the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty-eight, after the pogroms, all the Jewish schools and institutions were closed in the Soviet Union. Not one has reopened. There are only some fifty synagogues left in the entire country—our Jewish population is around three million, you know—and I doubt there are ten ordained rabbis allowed to function in Russia today. Have you any idea what it must be like to be a Jew in this country, trying to accept the idea that your children will never read a Jewish book, see a Jewish play, attend a Jewish school to learn Jewish history and speak his own tongue?”

His cadaverous cheeks were sucked in. He was watching me sternly. “Jews have always been treated as foreigners here. Worse than immigrants. On a Jew's identity card it says
Yevreika
and on his internal passport under ‘nationality' it says
Ivrei.
*
You meet people everywhere who voice their regret that Hitler did not finish off the
zhidi
and
Abrashki.
†
Today all organized Jewish activity is considered Zionist plotting or anti-Soviet treason. If a Jew is too outspoken he is accused of deviationist crimes and he is shipped to Siberia for ‘re-education,' or he is forcibly confined in a mental hospital. Just last month in Sebastopol a young Jewish girl—I think she was nineteen—went on trial for sedition and anti-Soviet agitation. It was a summary half-day trial and they sentenced her to seven years in prison and five in exile. Now she was not particularly guilty of slandering the Soviet Union. She was guilty only of wanting to emigrate to Israel.”

Bukov sat staring at a fixed point on the wall. His words were as formal as ever but passion had crept into his voice. “You know the name Maxim Tippelskirch, I think.”

I stiffened. Haim's brother. I said, “He died in the war.”

“Yes. One of his children survived. He was an infant. His name is Izrail.”

“He's still alive?”

“I think so. He was taken into the home of a farmer who lived near the
shtetl
where Maxim Tippelskirch had his farm. This farmer was not a Jew. In point of fact he was an uncle of mine. Last year in the Ukraine they arrested Izrail Tippelskirch. He is twenty-one years old. They charged him under the Ukrainian Criminal Article One Eighty-seven with promulgating seditious slanders against the State. He was tried in Kiev on October the fifth.”

Bukov stirred; he sat with his elbows on his knees, face hunching toward his hands; he began to rub his forehead fiercely as if to expunge the thought of the injustices he described.

“They sentenced him to twelve years in a forced labor camp.”

I winced at his bitterness. He sat up then and reached for the handle of his umbrella; his hand grasped it as though it were a bludgeon. “Technically there is no single Soviet law which applies solely to Jews—anti-Semitism is more clever, more subtle than that in our People's Republics. But there's no end to their old tribal barbarities. The lip service changes but the hate is still there. People need to look for a hidden hand behind their own failures—and they always seem to find the Jews there. Thus, you know, the
Protocols.
*
And do not believe the
Protocols
are dead. If you read the official press you will see that the Zionist cartel is an imperialist tool—Zionism is the new Nazism, it is a Hitlerite global threat. They believe this. It is incredible but they believe this,” he said at the weakening end of a breath.

Then he put away the umbrella and clasped his hands and said dispiritedly, “In your country I think you are getting tired of hearing about it. Perhaps you believe the propaganda that the Kremlin is so sensitive to your charges that Jews find it much easier to emigrate than they did before.”