Gerald Seymour - Kingfisher

' Isaac and I will have these,' said David, handling the submachine-guns. 'We understand them.

You can have the policeman's pistol. It is enough for you.'

'Where did you get them?' Rebecca asked, wonder in her voice, built from the uncertainty she had felt through the evening and the night that even if Yevsei agreed to handle the package there might be nothing to give him.

There is a man who is known to me. In his own way he fought the pigs, but many years ago, and he is now old, and has no need of these things. He would wish them to be used for the purpose that he once had them. He gave them to us.'

'And I have the tickets,' said Isaac, pride on his face, ignoring that he had told her his triumph the previous evening. 'I thought there would be difficulties, but there were none, and the seats are confirmed. We are going tonight to the West, Rebecca. Tonight we sleep in peace.'

And they stood together in the centre of the small room, holding each other close, kissing each other's faces, and there were tears on their cheeks, and they clung hard to each other's bodies, willing the strength they needed.

'But we were four, we must not forget that,' Rebecca said finally. 'We must not forget Moses.

Wherever he is, whatever they have done to him. If we weaken now we betray him.'

She had changed their mood, bringing a sombreness to them all. Like abandoning the wounded in battle, thought Isaac, to leave their friend. But what alternative was there? They were turning their backs, though, however they disguised it. David said, 'Rebecca, you must sleep now. If you don't you will be useless to us, half awake. You have time – three hours, four hours – before we go to the airport.'

On the floor she tossed and turned the minutes away, striving for comfort on the uneven boards, and her dreams were of the guns, and the bullets and the blood they might spill. She was alone while she slept, unaware that the others had gone, surreptitiously and with care to their homes and to hers, and that they had collected the personal identity cards that David decreed should not be carried on their persons, but which they would need at the airport. Work and school and the morning shopping rounds had emptied the houses, and they came and went unobserved by their families.

It was Isaac who had remembered that they must produce the cards at the barriers at the airport Luigi Franconi had lost his suitcase. Or rather the porter's desk at the Hotel Kiev had lost it. All the cases of the delegation had been put outside the room doors, as requested, and had been taken downstairs by the service lifts; all had appeared again beside the main swing doors to be loaded on to the airport bus – all, that is, except the case of Luigi Franconi.

Outside on the street the bus revved its engine and the driver sounded his horn with impatience. The Party representative who acted as the delegation's guide, interpreter and way-smoother attempted to assure the unfortunate Franconi that if he travelled to Tashkent without his bag it would be sure to be found and would be sent on to him on the next flight. A totally unsuccessful effort, as the Partito Communista Italiana's Assistant to the Foreign Policy Committee was not to be budged with mere promises. Not till the other eight members of the PCI delegation touring the Soviet Union had joined in the angry chorus was there a sudden and exultant shout from the far side of the cavernous lobby area: the errant piece of luggage had been discovered nestling among the cases of the Rumanian football team that had just arrived.

There were more delays for a last re-checking of the baggage, and by the time the laden bus was on its way to the airport it was running late. The delegation were in poor humour, and Luigi Franconi, sitting alone at a window seat, was not one to show gratitude that his problem had been solved.

Edward R. Jones Jr and his wife, Felicity Ann, had been more circumspect in their travel arrangements and had left the Hotel Kiev on schedule a full twenty minutes before the Italians.

But then when you were on a free trip – and they always travelled on free trips – you went when the car came to collect you. His Russian hosts at the Cultural Section of the city's Party Administration had been puzzled by the use of the word 'Junior' in his name, and found it strange that a man represented to them as a distinguished American poet with more than forty years of writing behind him should bother with such an appendage. That Edward R. Jones Sr had died in 1937 was known to them because the visa applications that the couple had filled in had told them so, but why this ageing son should insist on using what they regarded as a child's title was confusing and baffling.

Edward and Felicity Ann had realized many years before that the best way to travel the world and enjoy their summer holidays was to spend the winter firing off letters that begged in their reply an invitation, and they had found their ploy remarkably successful. Leningrad, Kiev and Tashkent this year. Budapest at the invitation of the Hungarian Socialist International Writers Conference the year before. Two years ago an expenses-paid summons to a poetry seminar in Warsaw. Not that the hotels were that good, and the restaurants were slothful and lifeless, but it was at least a plane ticket across the Atlantic, and a month away from the suffocation of New York in high summer.

As the taxi made its way through the outer suburbs of the city Felicity Ann mopped her forehead with a scented square of cotton. I hope the plane's on time, my dear,'

'If it is, it'll be the first one we've had.'

He did not seek the conversation of his wife. Talk was only a distraction from the task in hand, jotting the iambic pentameters of an ode on the back of a postcard. When it was completed he would type it out with the portable Olivetti he always carried with him, and post it to Valery Guizov who headed the Department of Cultural Studies in the Ukraine. He'd found on earlier journeys that his hosts were quite touched by such a gesture, and sometimes printed the work in a Party periodical.

On the last stretch to the airport now. The fifth-year school children that packed the coach had had the noise and argument bounced and melted out of them by the 225-mile drive from Lvov on the Polish border. Silent and slumped in their seats, for which their teachers were grateful. Six hours, with thirty-eight children, they'd endured through all the usual gamut of threats and cajolery, and at last the little ones had succumbed to the jerking motion of the coach and the sun that pierced the curtain] ess windows. In front of them an hour and a half of fractious hanging around at the terminal and then the tedium of the flight to Tashkent. More delays there, inevitable, before there was another coach to take them into the Kazakhstan city.

' If any of them have the strength to appreciate ballet it will be a miracle,' muttered the head teacher, balding, sweating in his dark suit, bright tie knotted high, to his neighbour from the Art Department.

'Well, if they sleep right through it at least the little so-andso's won't be fidgeting in the seats from halfway through the first act. Remember the ones last year?… But you wait and see, they'll sleep on the plane and be as awful as ever by tomorrow morning.'

The head teacher grimaced, then settled once again into his Pravda.

Other passengers for the 16.00 Aeroflot departure to Tashkent were already at the check-in counters, toeing their baggage forward, inching an advance with cloth-wrapped bundles, string bags and rope-fastened cases through a confusion of noise and objection and rancour.

David and Isaac were among them.

Nervous, both of them, and sweaty. Nothing strange in that, nobody in the queue able to keep calm and avoid the perspiration that the minimal air-conditioning system did little to counter.