Well, it seemed that their train had not reached Tiflis yet. It had been delayed somewhere along the line, and since they had been promised permission to go on our plane, the commandant did not think that he could very well leave the Turkish delegation stranded here, and would we mind waiting perhaps another half hour.

The level of the tea in our bodies had reached the thorax. And we went back to the restaurant, and drank another glass, and it bubbled out of our mouths. Chmarsky put his head down in his hands, and I reminded him of our definition of gremlins, and of his answer that in the Soviet Union they do not believe in ghosts.

I said, “Mr. Chmarsky, do you believe in ghosts now?”

And he raised weary eyes, and then banged his fists on the table, and ran out to the commandant, shouting.

Our hosts from Tiflis were now squatting on the ground under a tree in the garden of the airport, sound asleep. But we couldn’t go to sleep, because our plane was to leave in thirty-five minutes.

Two and a half hours later the Turks’ baggage arrived—twenty fat suitcases in a truck—but no Turks. And it developed that after an all-night trip on the train the Turks had felt a little sandy, a little grainy, and they had gone to a hotel to take a bath, and have some breakfast, and rest up a little bit. The commandant was very sorry, it was an international matter, and if we wouldn’t mind letting the Turks on our plane, we would make him the happiest man in the world, and incidentally probably save his job and his reputation.

Again we were magnanimous. And we had discovered one scientific truth: we knew exactly how much the human system can hold, and we had reached that point.

At twelve-thirty the Turks arrived. They were fat Turks—four men and two women. We didn’t know what they were going to do with twenty great suitcases for a stay of at the most two weeks. We thought perhaps they had brought folding harems with them. They swaggered through the airport, and got in the plane, and the door was about to close when we besieged the plane ourselves. There was a little altercation at the door, but the Turks finally let us in. It turned out that it was not our plane at all, it was the Turks’ plane. And we were not letting them ride with us, they were letting us ride with them, and they didn’t like it a bit. We didn’t want to remind them that we, as American taxpayers, were providing dollars to preserve the democracy of their great state. All we wanted to do was to get on that plane and get the hell out of Tiflis. Mr. Chmarsky was crying a little bit by now, and shaking his fist at everything that moved. He had a plan to write letters to all of the Moscow papers concerning the incident.