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.
Vladimir Uspensky hated Berlin. It was such an ugly city, with a soul as cold and sterile as the Prussian soil upon which it squats. It was a city where men shouted and women whined, where the purple apoplexy of the struggle against defeat had displaced the grace of living. Uspensky knew all the capitals. For him New York had movement, Paris beauty, London age. But there was only one city that he loved, and that was Moscow. Loverlike, he credited to that blood-stained snow-mound the movement of New York, the beauty of Paris, the age and dignity of London.
It had been a sudden pang of homesickness, and had come upon him unawares. Vladimir had never before let homesickness interfere with the business of flying. But this time—it had caught him like the springtime desire of a young girl to be loved....
A park bench by a still, dirt-screened pond greeted the unhappy man icily. He had no sooner fallen onto it when overhead a metal bird hummed in flight. He looked up—a Fokker monoplane, blue and brown. He knew it. He knew the pilot. He had often saluted him in the air when their paths crossed between Amsterdam and Berlin.