Exiles of the Sky
9781465680174
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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. It hadn’t hurt so much until the director, big-jowled and thin-lipped, had taken up the red pencil and drawn a brutal line through the name: Vladimir Uspensky. “We have no use for pilots who crash,” the director had shouted, but those words had not hurt. That ruthless scrape of the red pencil through his name had hurt. If it had been a blade tearing through his flesh, the pain could not have been more intense. Why hadn’t the director put him up against the wall and shot him? That’s what they did to soldiers who faltered. But shooting was an act of mercy compared to that red line. 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.
