Kolchak's gold

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.