Gerald Seymour: Kingfisher

There was the opportunity to think: just what they wanted him to do. He had to put it together in his mind, sort out where it had started, and why, and what were their aims and intentions.

Quicker for them that way – they'd get their answers faster. And be easier for him, too – he'd suffer less. Have it all ready when they come for you, then they won't need to hurt you so much. The awful fear of waiting – but this would be only the start of it. First the waiting for the time when they were ready to take the confession. Then the waiting for the trial. And after that more waiting.

Waiting for sentence, waiting for execution. Be from a cell like this that they'd take you out. Still dark before the creep of dawn, and floodlights playing on the high walls, and somewhere in the yard they'll trip you over, Moses, then jerk you down to your knees, and there'll be a hand to hold your head steady and then the grip will loosen from the hair and there will be the noise of the pistol being cocked. That's what you're going to wait for, Moses, that's the future, that's eternity.

They'd grown up together, the four of them. The war was long over when they were born, and the fighting finished, but nothing changed in the lot of the Ukrainian Jew. Second- class people, on the outside, without benefit or recognition. They didn't live in a ghetto – that was not the way the housing was allocated – but they'd learned to fall in together because that was survival in an alien world. Taught to be quiet, taught not to answer back, taught not to risk provocation, to ride a jibe or an insult, and to be better and fitter and stronger and more able, because those were the necessities of equality.

As children David had been their leader, the one who knew the answers and understood the struggle. It had been David who told them of Babi Yar, and none of them past eleven years of age. It was not a place their parents spoke of, not talked about by the rabbi, but David had led them to the ravine on the edge of the city's suburbs and told them what had happened there, of the machine-gunning of the Jews, told them there was no monument to commemorate the place because those who had died there had been Jewish. David had pointed to where the Germans had set up their machine-gun tripods, marked the spot for them, explained how the columns of the condemned came without thought of flight or resistance, spoken of the meek and pallid acceptance of the orders to wait patiently, to file forward, to kneel down, not to move, not to obstruct the soldiers' aim. Then he had shown them the refuse of the suburb that had been thrown into this place, and walked with them to the broken jars in which the brave placed flowers at night, when they were safe from view, and which were destroyed in the morning by the boots of those on their way to the trams and the buses. The trio listened as David explained their position in life, their heritage. For a boy of his years he knew so much, had the patience to tell them, when they wanted to play the games of children, the matters with which they should concern themselves.

The group had become inseparable. At school they had sat together, at home they had worked together – because David said they must be cleverer, with better grades, better diplomas than those they sought to emulate. But they were being prepared for a life of conformity and inaction, inevitable in its way, until the day that David had come to Rebecca's house with the radio set.

They were teenagers now, but isolated from the outside world until the radio flitted into their lives. The Voice of America, the World Service of the BBC, Radio Liberty broadcast by an emigre staff in Munich and beamed from a massive transmitter across Central Europe. The curtain was pulled back, a shaft of sunlight brought in. There was contact with the forbidden, excitement and stimulation at the illegality of it all. David said he'd purchased the radio, and smiled. They knew it was beyond his means, and he'd also said they had no need to learn more of its acquisition, only to listen and to understand.

It became a secret thing, special and precious with its expanded short wave band, and a door through which they followed the June War of 1967, and the War of Atonement of 1973. They heard of the tribulations endured by those of their faith who sought to emigrate from Russia to the State of Israel, were told of the trials of those not permitted to leave the Motherland that they wanted to forsake. They knew of international protest at the lot of Soviet Jewry, they suckled themselves on what they believed to be the strength of world opinion. Heady and intoxicating drink for the four teenagers…

And David was their leader.

Nothing had ever been formally decided. It had never been talked over, but the time came when he made all the decisions for the group. At first there had been discussions, followed always by inevitable agreement to David's point of view, till within the last two years the pros and cons were no longer argued. David announced what they would do, and there was immediate concurrence. And as he assumed command so David's personality seemed to grow, and he took on a mantle in the minds of the other three of new strength, new influence. Yet when Moses submitted to the men in khaki, with their instruments and their drugs, when he gave the names, then David would follow to an identical cell, a fashioned and geometric imitation of the one that Moses lay in now, and his future would be as strongly etched as was that of Moses. The torture would be the same as he would have endured, and the culmination too – perhaps the same dawn, perhaps the same prison yard. All of this would be David's if Moses talked when his interrogators came for him, all of this and an equation of betrayal. Was he any more fitted, better equipped, to confront them in the interrogation basements? David with his smiling face, who could conjure up passion into his words, communicate the life in his eyes. Did he possess a threshold that would protect him from the fear and terror of pain? And Moses realized that he had never known David to experience helpless and uncontrollable stress, had never seen anguish screw up his cheeks, or known him exchange his confidence for confusion and hurt. It hastened a chilling shudder through him; what if David were no better, no stronger, no more resolute than he, Moses, the follower? He clasped his arms across his chest, digging his uncut fingernails through the fabric of his shirt. What if the leader were no better able to withstand the pigs, had no defiance, no arrogant obscenities? That would be betrayal too: to expose him to them, to leave him weak and vulnerable and screaming.

How many months ago it had been that David had found the woodman's hut amongst the birch forest near the 'dachas' north of the city Moses could not remember. Time had travelled fast since then, much had been compressed into the days till they had seemed to run together without shape or pattern because of the new stimulus of what they called the 'programme'. Moses had allowed his work at the new chemical factory near his home to become subordinate to the meetings that the group held inside the darkened and damp shack, which they reached separately, making their own way at David's behest. Bare walls, only the rough-cut timbers to shield them from the spring rain that followed the snow and that preceded the summer heat and the flies. It was here that David had talked and the others had listened. The irony was – and it was not lost on them – that the doctrine he preached was available for all in the Ukraine to find; there were histories, tomes of them, of the partisan warfare against the Germans who had occupied the area, and treatises of the tactics of Guevera, and for those who had stored them and who had not thrown them away when they were suppressed there were the works of Mao, and there were the thoughts of Giap who had conquered the invincible Americans. That was what David talked to them of. On one fundamental only did he depart from the text and bible of the guerrilla fighter. There would be no