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
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
