Counting

All three days of the coup I sat in my third floor apartment overlooking Lenin Prospekt and gazed out the window.

I was looking out the window not because I had given in to the holiday blues. I was watching.

Immediately below my window a whole theatre of military action was unfolding. Military vehicles everywhere: light tanks, heavy tanks, armoured personnel carriers, etcetera. At the request of the one of the city's news agency I was carefully counting them and phoning in their numbers to the Defence Committee inside the White House.

When I was young, I remember reading a book about kids my age working as spies during the Second World War. They had code words for all the different types of military equipment: seeds, sticks, nuts. Five seeds were five tanks, six sticks - six grenade launchers, four nuts - four lorries. And if the enemy heard these kids talking amongst one another, they never suspected what it was they were talking about.

From the anonymity of my city apartment I simply wrote everything down on a piece of paper - seeds, nuts... Later they told me that my information on August the 21st had been the most important. When I phoned the Defence Committee early on Wednesday morning and told them that a long column of tanks was moving out of the centre of the city towards the outskirts, they said that this was the first clear signal they had received that the conspirators were backing down.

Alexander Furman