: Exiles of the sky by Spewack Samuel Tomaso Rico Illustrator - Short stories; Air pilots Fiction; Russians Germany Fiction

@FreeBooksTue 07 Nov, 2023

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The man who writes this vivid tale of a pilot in the commercial air service of Europe today knows the scenes of which he writes and the spirit of the people who inhabit them, for, since the war, he has been one of the most active of all the American correspondents in Germany and Russia.

He walked unseeing into the Tiergarten. It was winter--the sunless winter of Berlin, when trees sway like despairing skeletons praying to the wind for snow to cover their bones.

The man pressed the collar of his sheepskin coat closer to his throat, shivering not with cold but with an aching sense of the world's injustice to man--to himself. He was dazed with constant rehearsing of the scene that had taken place in the director's office only half an hour ago. The scene itself had taken but a few minutes. Directors of passenger airplane services have very little time to waste, their secretaries will tell you.

"We have no use for pilots who crash," the director had shouted, but those words had not hurt.

True, he had crashed. But he had never crashed before. Why couldn't the director give him a second chance? Bookkeepers, captains of industry, doctors, editors and statesmen err, and are forgiven. And other pilots had crashed. Why, that Westphalian pilot had had two crashes and had not been dismissed. If only that little cowardly merchant had not complained! But who would have thought that he would? Instead of commending him for his skill and quick wit in preventing their all being crushed to dust, that damned little merchant had testified, unsolicited, that the pilot had had two glasses of vodka in quick succession in the flying-field waiting-room at Reval.

The wretched man began mumbling to himself as he plunged deeper into the park.

Yes, he had had two drinks. But a man could not get drunk on two glasses of vodka, particularly a Russian. He had crashed because the cooler had sprung a leak. The motor had stopped. But he had glided to earth. Was this not proof enough that he was sober? And the plane was not even damaged. Not even a scratch on her wings. And he had never had a crash before. He'd asked the director that, but the director had been too busy finding the red pencil to answer. Well, had he?

No. Never. Never! Nobody could say that Vladimir Uspensky had ever had a crash before.

Consumed by his misery, the man looked neither to right nor left. Yes, he had had two drinks.

"And after four years of service with us, are you still unacquainted with our regulations?" the director had asked sarcastically.

"And dumb beast that I am, I couldn't even answer him," Vladimir remembered bitterly.

Yes, he had taken two drinks. He'd taken them, too, because he was coming back to Berlin, when he longed with all his being for Moscow.

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