Kolchak's gold

10

Timoshenko had very kindly offered to make regular visits to the offices of the two Sebastopol newspapers to see if my notices in them had brought in any responses. After my first ten days in the city I had accumulated a little stack of letters-seven or eight, of which about half had come from addresses in the city and the others from outlying villages.

On Friday evening* Timoshenko drove me to my first meeting and we talked for several hours with a sixty-eight-year-old retired Red Army major who had participated in the final weeks of the decisive Russian counteroffensive that had driven the Germans out of the Crimea. His anecdotes were useful, he had a good wry sense of humor, and he gave me the names and addresses of three fellow veterans in the Sebastopol area. I counted it a well spent evening.

Saturday we went quickly from one interview to a second to a third; and a telephone call at lunchtime established a fourth meeting for me, after dinner, with one of the retired captains whose name I had obtained only the previous day.

It was a full day and I gained a good deal of information, particularly from one factory foreman who had driven a tank in the war. He was one of those people who had a fascinating memory for the kind of detail a writer is avid to have.

I had arranged by telegraph two Sunday meetings with correspondents from nearby towns. Timoshenko collected me very early in the chill morning and we drove out of the city at an hour when it was still necessary to use headlights.

Timoshenko participated in all those interviews-mostly as a silent observer; now and then he would offer a question and sometimes it was a question that made sense. I’m sure he had orders not to let me out of his sight. But he was a genial companion. So far as I know, he wasn’t armed; and I’m quite certain his masters had not told him to eavesdrop on my interviews for purposes of censoring them. He didn’t have the sensitivity for that-although I suppose it is possible he had some sort of miniature transmitting device or recorder hidden away somewhere in his bulky clothing.

In any case I wasn’t inhibited by his presence. In those interviews I had no secrets; I’d resolved to play the game by the host country’s rules.

Anyhow I expected no information on the subject of the gold to come out of these interviews. These people were all Russians; presumably the Russians had known nothing at all about the gold episode or the German attempt to spirit the treasure out of the country.

My first Sunday interview was something of a washout. He was an old man who ran a dairy farm about fifteen miles from the edge of the city. He had served seven years in the army-most of them as a cook in a regimental field mess. He was proud to be a veteran and, although he didn’t seem overly indoctrinated with Communist notions, he was nevertheless a flag-waver at heart and his rambling reminiscences were all designed to laud the heroism of Russian soldiers and the glory of the motherland. He lacked the anecdotal spirit and a sense of detail; he told me far more than I wanted to know about the operation of a field kitchen; his recounting of his only real battle experiences-emergencies when every warm body available had been pressed into rifle service against German attacks-was so subjective it was useless, and had the unmistakable flavor of habitual repetition and embellishment.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been disappointed. You expect bad interviews and bad interview subjects. You listen to them, you thank them kindly and you go home. Maybe you use one or two lines of the material they gave you. It’s all part of the job and I’d been prepared for a much poorer average than I’d obtained thus far; one dud out of six is much better than usual. But I couldn’t help chafing because my time was so limited and I couldn’t afford to waste it on fruitless trips and courtesies.

We left as soon as possible but not before the old farmer had insisted on feeding us a hearty lunch heavily lubricated with dark ale. Timoshenko must have consumed at least half a gallon of it and his driving was noticeably less precise when we started down the road toward our second rendezvous. Once he almost ran into a farm cart that was wobbling down the road on enormous solid wooden wheels.

We only had twenty miles to go but Timoshenko interrupted the journey twice to get out and relieve himself by the side of the road.

He was in boisterous high spirits but I clung to the handholds inside the car and winced in terror at his misjudgment of curves and his lead-footed recklessness.

By the mercy of his Slavic gods he delivered us intact into the village of Bykovskiy, not too many miles above Yalta. My appointment was with a man called Vassily Bukov whose letter to me in care of Gazeta Sebastopol identified him as a postal official who had served in wartime as batman and orderly to General Tyulenev, who had commanded the Trans-Caucasus front against the Germans in 1942–1943. I had high hopes for the interview; a general’s batman is as good as a prime minister’s butler for providing the kind of human glimpses of key leaders that can make the difference between a dull story and an exciting one.

I had made the appointment by telegram and it had been confirmed the same way; I had suggested the time and Bukov’s reply had named the place-his flat in a communal boardinghouse on the square opposite the railway station in Bykovskiy.

We had no trouble finding the place although when he attempted to park the car Timoshenko bumped right up onto the curb and threw a scare into two small boys who were playing there.

Bukov had been watching for our arrival. He greeted us at the main entrance-introduced himself, shook hands and led us upstairs to his bed-sitting room. He looked about forty-five but he must have been at least fifty to have served in the army beginning in 1941, as he said he had. A spare man, ascetic features, short grey hair shaped into a widow’s peak. He wore a high-neck sweater and a pair of slacks that seemed much better tailored than most Russian clothes. He would not have been out of place in the same costume on the Riviera: he had the appearance of self-confidence and self-assuredness that you would expect of a tycoon or an aristocrat. My expectations began to drop the moment I set eyes on him. He looked the type who would stick to formal history and refuse to reveal any personal touches about the general whom he had served.

Bukov waved us to chairs. His room was archaically spacious, a Czarist anachronism of heavy carved moldings and a stone hearth on which a wood fire blazed. The furniture was old, steady, simple; with its row of windows and its high ceiling the room seemed underfurnished. He had no carpet and there was only one table which evidently he used for dining; it was near the back corner where there was a small stove and sink. An old desk with many scars squatted beside the corner window opposite. The panes allowed a good view of the rolling farm country that began immediately behind the boardinghouse.

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.”

I said, “It’s true, isn’t it, that it’s actually easier for a Jew to emigrate than for some of the other minorities-the Lithuanians, for example, or the Volga Germans?”

“These minorities aren’t persecuted, are they?” he murmured dispiritedly. “I agree they should be allowed to go where they wish-everyone should. But the propaganda is wrong. The truth is that the Kremlin has tightened its internal security, not loosened it. It has done this to offset the internal effects of its policy of relaxing tensions with the West. The KGB has been cracking down very hard on what it thinks are dissident groups-especially Jews. Let me tell you about a recent case. I’m very familiar with the details-I was involved in it.”

I waited while he drew breath and composed his thoughts.

“The man’s name is Levit. He’s a chemist, not an important one. He was working in a plastics factory near the city here.* Now in order to leave Russia, a Jew must first have a relative abroad. You understand?”

“A vicious circle,” I said.

“Exactly. So we have this function in our organization-we manufacture ‘relatives’ in Israel.”

“I see.”

“Levit was sent to me by someone who knows me. I took care of this for him. I told him what he had to do, I gave him a little pamphlet which outlines the steps you must take. He wrote a letter to Post Office Box Ninety-two in Jerusalem-the Jewish Agency-asking them to locate his ‘relative’ in Israel, a first cousin whom we had manufactured for him. A real person, of course, but not actually related to Levit.

“Now in a few weeks Levit received a note from the Jewish Agency giving him the address of this cousin. Then Levit had to write to the cousin, asking him to send Levit a vyzov, which is an affidavit of the relationship, and an invitation to join him, and a promise to support him. This document has to be notarized, after which the Israeli cousin has to take it to the Finnish Embassy in Tel Aviv. The Finns handle these arrangements because of course the Soviet Union has no embassy in Israel.

“The vyzov has already been notarized but now it must be certified again at the Finnish Embassy, after which the cousin mails it to Levit. If Levit had been lucky he would have received it, but he did not, and we had to make the request again. In point of fact we had to go through this four times, much to the inconvenience of the ‘cousin’ in Israel who did not live anywhere near Tel Aviv.”

“You mean the Soviet censors were confiscating Levit’s incoming mail?”

“Of course. It is standard, this sort of harassment. All right, finally Levit received his vyzov. That much had taken nearly three months’ time.

“He took the document to the local OVIR and they gave him a form to fill out. For this form one must provide a stack of authenticating documents: a karakterstika from his place of employment, signed not only by his director but also by the Communist Party representative there and also by his trade union representative.

“No law forces these functionaries to sign such documents. They may call you a traitor, they may demote you, they may even dismiss you.

“In the meantime you are questioned by KGB agents. Your home is searched, your parents and relations and friends are interrogated. They are pressured by the KGB and if any of them weakens he will probably end up by testifying to your anti-Soviet activities so that the State can send you to prison on charges of treason or spreading Zionist racist propaganda or belonging to an imperialist Zionist ideological front.”

He was speaking in a monotone now, repressing all emotion. “Levit was also required to get a paper from his landlord, and one from his children’s teachers, and one from his wife’s employer-she had to go through the same idiocy he went through.

“In the meantime we had sent our own people to talk with his friends and relations before the KGB could reach them, so that they’d know what to say when they were questioned. We had also exercised a little quiet pressure from various sources against both the Levits’ factory supervisors. If we hadn’t done so, the chances are the supervisors wouldn’t have signed their karakterstiki. The supervisors weren’t Jews, you see.

“All right, Levit got all these papers filled out and signed. I went over them with him to make sure there had been no mistakes in them. Then he took it all back to OVIR in Sebastopol and paid a forty-ruble filing fee. After that he had to wait five months.

“At the end of the five months he was informed by OVIR that his job was sensitive and important. Therefore his exit passport and visa were being denied.

“I had expected as much, and warned him, but you can imagine the man’s desperation. We convinced him to stick to it. He filed the necessary appeal. Three months later his appeal was denied. It was only then that I was allowed, by the regulations of our own organization, to act. Even so, in many of these cases we do nothing further. The applicant after another year’s waiting is allowed to apply again.”

“For an exit visa?”

“For a new vyzov from Israel,” he said, utterly without inflection. “You must start at the beginning and go through the entire utter nonsense over again. I’ve known some patient Jews who were at it eight years before they got their visas.”

“I gather it didn’t take Levit eight years.”

“The man hadn’t the patience. He was beginning to drink a great deal, which was not like him-ordinarily drunkenness is a Slavic trait which the Jews despise. He and his wife were despondent. Their children were being subjected to cruel harassment in school. Both husband and wife had been dismissed from their jobs.”

“If he’d been dismissed they couldn’t deny him his visa again on the grounds of the sensitivity of his work.”

Bukov nodded-that was true. “He might have been successful if he’d tried it again. But he’d have had to wait twelve months to start, and it would have been at least six months-more likely another year-before it ended. Two years, with no income. They were despondent enough to be talking about suicide. Both of them. They told me they had considered it. I was not prepared to take the risk they would do it.”

“So you smuggled them out of the Soviet Union?”

“In some cases we merely arrange false papers-the razrewenia and the rest. In this case, for various reasons, that sort of forgery was impractical.”

“What reasons?”

“Principally the psychological state of the Levits. They were nervous wrecks, both of them. Very likely they’d have broken under the strain of interrogations and checkpoints, regardless of how serviceable their documents had been. If they’d exposed themselves they’d have exposed many of us too. We preferred to avoid that risk. So we smuggled them out, yes.”

“How?”

“I’m not at liberty to explain the details. You understand.”

“All right,” I said. “Why have you told me all this?”

“To gain your sympathy. Do I have it?”

“Up to a point.”

“Up to what point, Mr. Bristow? The point of willingness to help us?”

MacIver had been right. I felt as if Nikki had kicked me in the pit of the stomach.

I straightened up on the bench. “I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”

He didn’t fight. “I understand. I had hoped …”

“Under other circumstances I might have.” That was a shabby attempt and I regretted it the instant I had spoken. But I didn’t retract it; it was too late for that.

I don’t know if he understood what I meant. If Nikki hadn’t chosen to take advantage of our relationship in such a way I might have been far more open to his suggestion. But I wasn’t sure of that; I’m still not sure what I might have done under other circumstances. Anyone who is exposed to the product of the modern world’s massive news-gathering machinery learns very quickly that he cannot possibly concern himself with even a small fraction of the injustice and misery that infects his planet. And since he cannot help everyone he soon becomes indifferent to anyone. I think this is really why witnesses to muggings watch but do nothing-it is why none of us wants to “get involved.” We are assailed by too many appeals, all of them worthy; we are threatened by an avalanche of “problems” which cry out for “solutions”; finally in defense of our sanity we close our ears and isolate ourselves.

The moral rectitude of such a course is dubious but the pragmatic necessity is clear. In such a mood of defensive isolation I might well have reasoned that the Jews now had a strong and capable ally-the people and government of Israel-and that I, who was neither a smuggler nor a Jew, had no obligation to assist them. I might have; I might not. I can’t say. The issue was clouded by Nikki’s involvement in it; this was what I reacted to-it was my personal sense of betrayal that dictated my decision.

Bukov got to his feet, carrying the umbrella. “I apologize for taking so much of your time.”

“It’s quite all right.”

“We’d better get back. Your friend will be waking up soon.”

We walked through the dim empty station. As we passed through the door and he unfurled the umbrella he said, “Please remember my offer of assistance. If the need arises, I’m at your service.”

“I shouldn’t think you owe me anything.”

“It wasn’t intended as a bargaining point, Mr. Bristow. The two questions are separate. The one never depended on the other.”

“Well since I’m not joining your fifth column I don’t see how the need should arise.”

“I hope it won’t,” he said with resonant sincerity, and we picked our way across the square, around the puddles.

* 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.