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He looked at her fondly. For a moment, there might have been no airport runway, no guard, only that moment over the kitchen table in Leningrad. “I am a bad man for wanting to leave, but I am not so bad that I want you to suffer. If I run, then you must act like you don’t know me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” she relented. Again the irony. In that moment that she was supposed to be denying his existence, she discovered that she knew him only too well, better than ever before. “I’m convinced they’re not looking for you,” she told him. “Stay in line. Don’t run. Please.”
The line had ground to a halt and she could see the twins and Ted sitting on their flight bags as if they were in for a long wait. “What’s happening, Ted?” she called out.
He joined them. “The guy in the uniform says that we might as well make ourselves comfortable. Our suitcases are not on this flight—they’re on another one that’s arriving soon—make that ‘soon’ in Soviet time, so who knows when? Then we’re supposed to grab our own bags and go through a security check.”
“What are they looking for?” David and Maria crowded around, encircling Volodya protectively. They want him to be safe, Jennifer thought. It’s touching. “Weren’t we just checked pretty well when we left Moscow?”
“Who knows what they’re looking for? I can tell you one thing, both Hank and Lona are pretty upset. It seems Hank is carrying some of Lona’s things in his luggage and he’s not too happy about them poking through his bags again.”
“Did the uniform tell you where we were?” She asked the question that she knew was on Volodya’s mind.
“He wouldn’t answer,” Ted replied. The last of the colour drained from Volodya’s face, and his eyes cast about wildly sizing up the airport fence and the chain link gate.
“But surely we’re in Sweden or Finland?” David went on, putting one hand on Volodya’s arm, sensing his fear. “They’re entirely too casual here for the Soviet Union. Look—no armed guards or slogans on the wall.”
“Hang in there, Vlad…uh, Paul.” Maria said.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Ted replied. “Probably because it’s a military airport, he’s not supposed to tell us much about it.”
“Hey, here comes a plane. Can you beat that? It arrived ‘soon’—just like they said.”
Manolis Aligizakis 