Kolchak's gold

PART II
4

My conversations with Haim Tippelskirch were nearly six weeks in duration. He had the rambling tendencies of age, and sometimes the querulousness. But perhaps he was aware of the hungry cells that were consuming his life; he kept repeating to me his desire to get it all said. If he had been a Catholic it would have been his final confession before asking for last rites, I think.

There were several evenings when he hardly touched on the subject of the Civil War-evenings when he talked of pre-war life in the Ukraine, of his village and his family; or of events between the wars, or his fifty years in Palestine, or the Second World War. His mind was remarkably retentive and he had a gifted analytical memory.

Clearly he had resolved to be candid with me from the outset-largely because he trusted Nikki and he saw that she trusted me-but for the first ten days his habits were stronger than his resolve. He had decided he would tell me only what it was good for me to know, and so he censored himself and spoke with an air of rueful formality.

He began at the end, with his memoir of the gold-how, why and where Kolchak had hidden it. The first time he told me the story it was related in impersonal terms, as if he and his brother had been observers there. Yet the subject of the gold was a constant source of excitement to him.

At that time I felt occasional impatience with him; I had less interest in the gold than he had. I’m a historian, not a treasure-hunter. The disposition of the Czar’s treasury was a matter of academic interest; I was more concerned with the human truth of the events. Nearly a hundred million people have died in the conflicts of the Russian twentieth century* and I had become obsessed with seeking the causes of that serial armageddon. Perhaps it was hazy reasoning to study cruelty in terms of numbers-the Russians had been involved in more bloodshed than any other people on earth but they hadn’t systematized it the way the Nazis did, nor did they put to use the technology for destruction which the United States employed on Dresden and Hiroshima and the Indochina villages. But more than any other modern nation, Russia had indulged in an unparalleled and nearly unbroken succession of mass human obliterations-sometimes aggressive but often as purely self-destructive as a rabid animal which, finding nothing else to attack, turns upon itself in a foaming fury and tears itself to bloody pieces.

I wanted to find the roots of that. I had reached a point where I was compelled to go beyond the idea of history-as-source material; history-the human record-was beginning to look like a substance with shape and motive and direction. I never took a Leninist view of History as an Entity to be worshiped and lied for; but as I probed the Russian century I began to take a Freudian view of it: I began to think it might be possible, by analyzing the causes of Russian behavior and gaining an insight into the contemporary Russian psyche, to predict the direction of future events.

This wasn’t an intellectual game. It was an earnest pursuit. I arrived at it slowly and in retrospect I’m sure Nikki had a lot to do with it. We talked incessantly: most of it was light and frivolous but there were times when we sat together in the room or the cafes of Tel Aviv and discussed ideas. Ideas had more reality in that setting; you had a sense of living in the center of things, there was none of that blase insulation against hard truths which you get in the States. Israel lives always under the poised threat of a suspended axe and it heightens the reality of pleasures, the savor of simple things, the intensity of everything. In that atmosphere it is still possible to discuss the ultimate questions of good and evil without feeling ludicrous.

And so we talked. Sometimes the two of us, sometimes the three; sometimes whole groups-friends and associates of my two companions. We thought it might be possible by puzzling out the Russian destiny to know whether the Russian urge toward self-destruction could determine the odds for, or against, the Kremlin’s willingness to risk war. We asserted that it was no good studying the political and rational counterpressures in the Middle East without taking into account the character of Russian leadership and its relationship to the Arab neurosis. Reason was seldom a guiding principle in international affairs and never was it less so than when you were dealing with peoples as volatile as the Jews, the Arabs, the Russians, the Americans. How much was behavior predictable on the basis of biological urges toward domination and aggression? How much was peculiar to the nations individually? Was it possible the Russians were no more aggressive or self-destructive than anybody else-that they’d simply had more provocations and opportunities than, say, the Brazilians or Canadians? Was it possible, by the same reasoning, that the French or the British, given their Versailles and their Hitler, would have been as murderous as the Germans had been? How much different would the Soviet Union have been without Stalin?

They were questions for cocktails and cigarettes and charades; but for the first time in my life I was sincerely looking for the answers.

Partly it was Nikki’s influence; partly it was the fact that I was well into my thirties and it was no longer possible for me to subsist on the kind of critical notices that inevitably began by saying, “For a writer so young, Harris Bristow has produced a remarkably impressive output. The latest of his many books is …” After more than ten years writing professionally I could no longer use my youth and prolificity as accomplishments of importance; I needed to do something solid-and churning out more and more summaries of historical events had become too easy because I knew how to do it, I knew which levers to press and which narrative gimmicks to employ.

I wanted more from the old man than dry facts about the burial of Kolchak’s gold. He and his brother had spent those times in the company of officers of the old Russia and I wanted to know about those men-their sensibilities, their behavior, their attitudes. Russia and its leadership were still in the hands of men like those: their sons and brothers. The Soviet generals who fought the Wehrmacht in 1941 were former Czarist officers, most of them; the Kremlin leaders of 1970 were men who had grown up in a Russia that was still feudal or near to it. Especially among the leaders, old traditions of thought and attitude slip away only slowly. The psychologies of the men in the Kremlin today could be measured according to the prejudices of their fathers, I believed; I wanted to know about those men with whom the old Jew had lived and fought and survived.

But he didn’t give me much satisfaction during the first few weeks of our interviews. He withheld judgments even when I asked for them. He kept coming back to the gold:

“You must understand this. The gold is of the utmost importance today-more than at any time ever before. As I have told you, I have made a study of this thing. As recently as July of nineteen seventy the price of gold on the free market was not far out of line with the official monetary price of thirty-five dollars U.S. But today suddenly there is inflation throughout the world, there are devaluations everywhere you look, the currency exchanges are madhouses of profiteers. No one trusts the currencies anymore, you see. And loss of confidence in national currencies is the entire basis for the gold market. Currencies today are in a state of collapse, and the farther they fall the farther gold rises. The price of gold has already gone up to something like forty-two dollars, which is an increase of some twenty percent in one year. You understand what I am saying?”

I suppose I understood well enough; I understand it more vigorously today than I did in June of 1971, when these interviews took place; in the interim the free-market price of gold has shot up to seventy dollars a troy ounce, and on the clandestine exchanges of Beirut and Macao it is selling at nearly a hundred dollars an ounce.* This means the Kolchak treasure today is worth at least twice what it would have been worth in 1971, in dollar-exchange terms; the five hundred tons of bullion would command somewhere near five billion dollars today, depending on who sold it to whom.† There is more than one nation whose entire national treasury is only a fraction of that.

“You must understand what this means.” His hand made a loose fist. We were at a small table in a dairy restaurant, the three of us, eating blintzes. “What it must mean to any government which still has the pretense of a gold basis for its currency-even unofficially.”

“Like the United States, you mean.”

“The United States, or the Soviet Union. Yes.” Ja. Explosive, emphatic. We were still speaking German. Nikki’s attention flickered from my face to his; her smile was fond.

“A large sum in gold has a way of pyramiding its power,” he went on. “You can’t merely think of it as two billions or two and a half billions. It is not paper currency, subject to inflation. In Beirut where the world black market has headquarters and the trading is for opium and heavy weapons, gold is the only accepted medium of exchange-they have been stamping out new gold sovereigns for years, and the transactions are in millions and hundreds of millions of dollars. This is true in all the smuggling capitals of the Near East and the Orient-only gold is used. No currencies at all. Can you imagine the effect of billions in gold on those markets? It would be far, far beyond anything you can measure in dollar equivalents.”

I said I could hardly picture a private gang of smugglers and thieves trying to heist five hundred tons of gold bullion for criminal purposes. The logistics alone were prohibitive; it would require the manpower and transportation facilities of a national government.

“Or a big corporate enterprise,” he countered.

“On Russian soil?”

“I have not said the gold is still on Russian soil, Harry.”

“Oh? Then where is it?”

He drew back. “I have not said it is not on Russian soil, either.”

Nikki said, “You shouldn’t play games with us, Haim.”

“The truth is I do not know where the gold is. I have an approximate idea. Very approximate-you must measure it in thousands of kilometers. But that is not the point. I only mentioned the smugglers’ black market as an illustration of the power that can be exercised with this much gold. An even more telling illustration is the use to which a government might put it.”

I was dubious. “There are departments of the American government that spend that much money in a matter of days.”

“In gold?”

“Gold or not, it’s still purchasing power.”

“You mistake it, Harry. The leverage of bullion wealth is many times its value. For how many years did your government support a three-hundred-billion-dollar economy on the official basis of thirty or forty billions in gold reserves? The political and economic power of large sums of gold is a factor of eight or ten times the actual value of the gold. A small country with two or three billions in gold reserves is in a position to wield the same economic pressures as a substantial but gold-poor country with an economy of twenty or thirty billions a year. Do you understand the reasons for this?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s a question of credit, more than anything else. A nation with piles of gold in its vaults gives the appearance of being a solid credit risk. When the world money market is uncertain, when currencies can’t be depended on to hold their values for any length of time at all, a reserve of gold becomes magnified out of all proportion to its real value-simply because it is there. It isn’t going to wear out, it can never be inflated to the valuelessness of a Weimar Deutschmark. It is always gold, always measurable by the troy ounce, always valuable.”

Nikki caught my eye and made her private signals of love. The waiter’s arm flashed in past our shoulders; he took away the plates and replaced them with espresso cups. Haim Tippelskirch was drawing tracks in the tablecloth with his fork.

He said, “A country with that much uncommitted gold in its vaults could go a long way toward destroying the economies of neighboring states. It might behave very boldly because it would know that no internationally sanctioned blockade could succeed against it when every greedy trader in the world was eager for gold credits. Or it could buy munitions-enough to build the most powerful and modern small army on the face of the earth. Do you begin to see what I’m driving at?”

I said, “You’re talking about Israel now, aren’t you.”

He made no reply; he only watched me until Nikki broke the silence: “If the shoe fits.”

His intensity made me uneasy. He was driving at something, as he admitted; I was not yet certain what it was, and I didn’t altogether want to know. I steered the talk away from the subject of the gold and, for a while, he was content not to return to it.

During the next week or two he began to open up with me, far more than before. Later I realized he was doing this partly in an effort to gain my confidence; at the time I felt he was warming to me, loosening up with familiarity.

He told me about his wife, Hannah Stein. I recognized the name at once but thought it might have been a coincidental duplication-it was not an uncommon name for a German Jew-but very quickly I realized he had been married to the Hannah Stein, the forthright woman who had worked so closely with Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir in the thirties and forties to bring about the nation-state of Israel.

When I realized this, the old man changed in my eyes; he was more than the quaint relic I had taken him for. In fact it turned out that for several years-the years that counted-he himself had been an agent for the Mossad. I felt terribly foolish; I took to casting back through our discussions in an attempt to recall whether I had appeared patronizing at any point. Now he was no longer a garrulous old man still living in a forgotten war of fifty years ago; he was a veteran Israeli security agent who had helped forge a nation in what must have been one of the great adventures of the mid-twentieth century. For the first time I realized that the importance of his life had not drifted away after the fall of Kolchak: that in terms of his own accomplishments the Russian Civil War had been a minor youthful training ground for the hard important events in which he had figured in his maturity.

He showed me a photograph of himself and Hannah Stein that had been taken in 1949; I knew her face from all the old newspaper photographs but I found Haim Tippelskirch barely recognizable. For the first time now I understood why Nikki had been so alarmed when we had paid him our first visit together. In the photograph he was a strapping giant in his prime: a man of fifty or thereabouts, towering over his sturdy wife, the big chest and shoulders filling the poplin of his new Israeli uniform. Today he was nothing more than a bookmark left in place of that man. His color was faded, a kind of powdered yellow; the skin hung in brittle folds from his skull and the spidery hands were always atremble, mottled with small brownish-blue spots of illness and age. He was still tall but the shoulders seemed to have curled inward, the chest collapsed; he was gaunt and tired and only the pale eyes reminded you of life, like bright coals in the ashes of a dead fire.

Hannah Stein had been a physician in Hamburg until the Nazi rumblings had alerted her. She had been a Zionist even before that; in 1934 she had immigrated to Palestine and Haim Tippelskirch had met her in Jerusalem. They had been married in 1936 and the marriage lasted thirty years until her death. They had three children, all of whom were alive: one was a minor functionary with the Israeli mission to the United Nations, and the other two, both girls, were married and living in Israel. I met his younger daughter when she came to visit him on a Sunday afternoon. She was a handsome woman, large-boned, in her sixth or seventh month of pregnancy, radiant with the flush of impending motherhood but deeply troubled by her father’s visible deterioration. I gathered that both daughters had asked him to come and live with them but the old man was having none of that.

Hannah Stein had kept her maiden name and he told me it had amused her to refuse to answer to the appellation “Frau Tippelskirch.” Until the war of 1948 she had kept up a medical practice and had served on hospital staff in addition to her work as a nationalist; after the 1948 war she had been forced to give up her practice by the pressures of membership in the Cabinet and leadership of the new nation’s fund-raising apparatus abroad. It was Hannah who had recruited Nikki into that movement, shortly before her death in 1967.

I was unfamiliar with Jewish ritual and tradition and was uncertain of my forks, particularly when it came to Sabbath practices and dietary laws; fortunately the old man was more nationalist than religious and he did not keep a kosher house. He regarded the Orthodox beliefs with a worldly, kindly cynicism; to him they were useful but quaint, he didn’t quarrel with them but he had no personal use for them. His god was the Jewish people; he told me that, insofar as his sins allowed it, he regarded himself as a humanist first, a Jew second and a Zionist third.

You had to credit him with the compassion and goodness he aspired to. Yet there was always a shadow over him and it was more than the long-ago memory of the crimes he blamed himself for during the Siberian terror. I began to feel he must have done things as a Mossad agent that he was not proud of; but for a long time he steered away from that subject, always reminding me that I was a historian trying to do a work on the Russian Civil War and that was our proper field of discussion. The same argument seldom kept him from returning to the subject of the gold, however; he was always coming back to that-the importance the Czar’s hoard could have in the modern economy. I began to have the strange feeling that he was trying to persuade me to do something about that. What it was, I had no idea at the time.

By the end of the third week of our interviews he had fallen into the pattern of beginning the discussion with a lecture on gold, and then good-humoredly allowing me to steer him back to Siberia; he would talk-ever more freely-about his brother Maxim and the months with Kolchak. Then after an hour or two he would tire of that. Sometimes we would have tea together; sometimes Nikki would come at the end of her day in the office and the three of us would take tea in his flat or go out to a cafe. He wasn’t talked-out yet; he would dominate the conversations, even when others joined us, and the rich variety of his interests was constantly surprising. Once he launched into a half-hour monologue on the effect the Beatles had had on modern popular music; another time he participated energetically and knowledgeably in an argument with a visiting American museum curator on the relative merits of half a dozen post-Impressionist painters, half of whom I had never heard of. And there were several evenings with friends when there would be long heated post-mortems of the Napoleonic wars or the North African campaigns of the Second World War or the repercussions of the Marshall Plan.

Finally after we had been at it for weeks he started to broaden the topics in our private interviews: he carried the story forward past the Civil War into the Stalin years and began to talk of his brother Maxim, whom he had never seen again; but he had received a few letters and had heard of his brother’s doings indirectly through friends and fellow agents, during the war.*

Toward the end of June 1971 the old man’s health began to fail more rapidly and obviously than before. Nikki insisted on calling in a doctor even when Haim Tippelskirch objected. He was still investing great enthusiasm into our interviews but finally on July seventh he was taken away to hospital.

We continued our talks there for more than a week but he was fading quickly and I could not bring myself to press him; after a while I went to see him every day only in company with Nikki or others of his friends, so that he was forestalled from launching into long talks which only left him limp and in pain. They had him on drugs-tranquilizers and painkillers for the most part; the cancer was everywhere in his system and there was no point attempting surgery, although he was being subjected to cobalt treatments.

I had far outstayed my plans. But there were no pressing engagements at home, Nikki had still been unable to finish the work for which she had been summoned back to Tel Aviv, and I felt a responsibility to the old man now; I could not leave until the end. None of us pretended there was any hope for his recovery; not even the old man himself. The doctor was a close friend, an old colleague of Hannah’s, and he knew the old man far too well to lie to him.

Haim Tippelskirch did not take it easily or cheerfully; it depressed him and made him angry but I saw no evidence of self-pity and he did not become maudlin. He did not take the attitude that he had been betrayed; he behaved as if cancer were a straightforward enemy, worthy of his rage and hatred but not his fear. Sometimes he would roar at the nurse to take the medications away: he didn’t mind losing the fight but he wanted to go down with a clear head, using his brain to the end. And he did so as long as he could.

His body wasted away horribly. He was covered with spots of a cyanotic blue; the flesh melted from his skeleton. His hands no longer trembled but he had no strength to lift them from the sheets. He lay propped up on pillows fighting for breath, very angry that he was too debilitated even to read. Conversation was the only stimulus left; he detested the television they had offered him and had refused to have the set placed in the room. There was a small radio by the bed and he listened to the news with active interest; the rest of the time he left it tuned to a rock-music station from Luxembourg which came in by way of a relay broadcast antenna somewhere in Greece, I believe.

I can’t pretend he didn’t become cranky and childish; he didn’t die a hero’s death. But I was in awe of his courage and this only made the inevitable end more heartbreaking. By then I was as fond of him as if he were my own uncle and I felt that he loved me a bit as well; he was always pleased when I appeared at his bedside.

The Mediterranean summer was viciously hot; we went through the streets, Nikki and I, in wilted flimsy clothing, trying to avoid the crush of swarming tourists. There was an air conditioner in her flat but it did not work very well; we hardly spent a moment in the place except to sleep. The old man had put me in touch with three other survivors-a Polish Jew and two old women from South Russia who had watched the Red and White armies chase one another across the farm fields-and although none of them had been in Siberia I interviewed all three for as much background detail as they could provide.

Nikki and I were tourists now and then; we visited Jerusalem and Haifa and we drove out into the frontiers as far as one was allowed to go before being turned back by the military roadblocks. We swam off the beaches as often as we could; we enjoyed it all, and enjoyed each other, as much as we could under the shadow of the old man’s dying. We took in concerts and movies and I appeared three or four times on radio and television panel programs at the behest of my Israeli publisher. Nikki spent the weekdays in her office, obviously working very hard but not burdening me with the tiresome details of whatever she was doing there. She had an ability which I envied, to compartmentalize her life; but then I didn’t need to compartmentalize mine. My work couldn’t be separated from my life by time-clock hours. Nikki understood this because she too was immersed spiritually in her work, mainly organizing refugee efforts; it was more than a job for her and she knew how it was to carry one’s profession around as a built-in component of life rather than a separate entity, a mere source of economic sustenance.

On an afternoon in early August we went to visit Haim and found both his daughters at his side. They informed us that their brother, Haim’s eldest, was flying home from New York. It could only mean the doctor had passed final sentence.

He was in strong spirits, although hardly cheerful ones. He complained of the brevity of one daughter’s skirt (the unpregnant one) and made pointed remarks about his younger son-in-law, the father-to-be. Evidently Haim didn’t think much of that one. I think he was employed in a curio factory in some shirtsleeve capacity. The other son-in-law managed a kibbutz and the old man was happy enough with him, one gathered. There was awkward affection in the room but neither the old man nor his daughters were expansive types by comparison with the stereotypes of Fiddler on the Roof; they were not clutching one another’s hands or weeping loudly. It was a quiet sadness in the room, mature and deep, broken only by Haim’s growling complaints and the fierce rock music of his radio.

After a short while he said he had to speak privately with Nikki. He waved the rest of us from the room.

We waited in the outer hall. It was not a time for getting acquainted and none of us had any small talk then. The two women were in their thirties and not very attractive. There were a few strained remarks; one of them said her father was very fond of me-she said it almost sharply as if she meant to impose on me an obligation to prove deserving of his fondness. I said something vague by way of thanks. Nearly a quarter hour went by before Nikki appeared in the door and we returned into his presence.

Afterward Nikki wouldn’t tell me what he had said to her. She said it was something of no importance to anyone but the two of them. If I make issue of it now it is only because of hindsight; at the time it passed from my mind very quickly but I recall noticing that it was the first time she had withheld anything from me deliberately, as far as I knew.

Two days later he died.

* Bristow’s figures are not exaggerated. Nearly thirty millions died in Russia in 1914–1921 (Russians, their enemies, and their allies). A like number, or something very close to it, perished in the Second World War on the Axis fronts with the Central Powers and with Japan. And the Stalinist purges between the wars destroyed tens of millions of lives. Taking into account a number of “little wars” (like the Russo-Finnish War of 1940 and the Russo-Japanese war of 1905), the total war-associated deaths of the Russian twentieth century number very close to one hundred millions.-Ed.

* At press time the free market price of gold on the European exchanges was fluctuating around one hundred and thirty dollars.-Ed.

† At press time it would appear to be as high as eight billion dollars.-Ed.

* There follows a series of interviews on the subject of Maxim Tippelskirch and World War II in the Ukraine and the Crimea. To eliminate unnecessary duplication of material, we have transplanted this material to a point farther along in the book where it fits more logically into place.-Ed.