“I’m afraid of myself,” Vladimir cried. That confession wrested from him by the impersonal sympathy of the girl’s voice now made him long to pour forth words of explanation, of supposition, of self-justification. But he found he could not, for his cracked and trembling voice hinted at a renewed outburst of self-pity.
“Did you ever crash before?” The girl’s voice was still gently impersonal.
The man winced.
“Yes,” he replied. “But only once before.”
And in a voice as shrill as a girl’s he told her of the little merchant, the director, the dismissal—everything!
“I stole the plane to prove to them that I could fly her at her record speed and bring her back safely,” Vladimir concluded bitterly. “And what did I do? I crashed again. I am a wreck—a ruin. I have no right to live.”
There was no murmur of pity, no cry of scorn from the girl beside him. She stood there silent, almost lost in the darkness.
“You see you turn away from me,” Vladimir was moved to cry out.
There was a long silence; then the girl spoke. “You have suffered,” she said. “You say you are wrecked, you are ruined. Do you think you know what it is to be wrecked? To be ruined? You say you can no longer fly again—the sky is barred to cowards.... Do you know that I too once flew? Not in a plane, but in dreams. I flew so high I never touched earth—until the revolution came. My father died. My mother followed him. My brother was killed. And I ran away.
“I should never have run away. Hunger, death—what does it matter? A Russian should never desert Russia. I ran away. I told you before that instead of fleeing to Paris, I made my way here. That was a lie. I wanted to get to Paris, but my money gave out when I reached Berlin. You’ve walked in the Tiergarten on a muggy November day. So have I. Not just one day. One night, I slept on a bench there. The next morning when a man spoke to me on Friedrich Strasse, I went with him. He fed me. He maintained me for a month, and then he brought me to a friend of his, the proprietor of a night club on Kurfürstendamm. The first evening I took my place at the table assigned me was also a birthday for me—my nineteenth. That is how I celebrated.”