Chapter 21
Holiday in Berlin
During the summer we went with my family to visit our German friends in Berlin. On the day when we prepared to go to the airport – it was the first flight for both my wife and my son – our red hibiscus, whose small sprout we had got from my mother years before, brought its first beautiful flower. The plant has a habit to lose flowers in a few hours. That morning my son found a beautiful beetle, the size of a potato beetle, but it looked like metallic green paint, and he put it inside the flower.
Just as we checked everything before a week of absence, he spotted the flower fallen and his beetle still inside. He took it and brought it in his hand. It remained there, the flower a little drooped, until we arrived to the apartment of our hosts.
Our holiday was a fine experience, and we again invited them to come to us, that time with their daughters. The pleasantest day has been that we spent on their rented recreation site. There was a small summer house on the site and there were fruits. In the cool climate the currants were of cherry size and of fine flavour. They had great plans to buy another hut on a better site, but it would not come true as they would divorce in some years.
Shortly after our return from the GDR all my attention turned to an international event, the common flight of the Apollo and Soyuz spaceships.
I have always had a great interest for space-flights. In my childhood my father gave me a book from a German sci-fi writer Kurt Lasswitz. His novel "Two Planets” was built around connections between Earth on a technical level of the turn of the century and a more developed Mars. I liked American and Soviet authors, and my favourite have long been two novels of Lem, a Polish sci-fi writer. These novels were "Planet of the Dead” and "The Magellan Cloud”.
When I went to work at the repair shipyard, space exploration was on a great scale with a lot of Soviet and American craft. So ahead were these nations, that when the first Chinese satellite, boosted by a solid-fuel rocket, was launched, two jokes went around. One sounded so:
"What is solid fuel in the Chinese rocket?”
"Black coal from Xinjiang.”
The other:
"Did you hear about the Chinese satellite?”
"Oh, yes. 40 million people were drawing the slingshot.”
In the repair yard three of my colleagues, S.S, L.S. and G.K., all of my generation, had formed an astronaut club. They were emptying a glass of gin every time a space-craft has been launched. Besides, it goes without saying, they were interested also technically. I joined them in the latter respect. When the Apollo 11 reached the Moon and shortly after "Time” published some of their pictures, I reproduced those pictures on slides.
That time I recorded the connection of Apollo and Soyuz on film from the TV-screen.
My 3rd semester of the 4 started at the University of Economics. It gave me a hard time, but it has not been all. I began to feel the need of Russian language. Much of it I understood, but answering was hard. And daily I needed it, as in our shipyard the representatives of both the customer and the Soviet Register of Shipping had their offices, and with the new object there were a lot of details to consult with them. Taking a translator girl from the documentation department would not do, as they had their own urgent work and Otto, with no respect of our generally good relationship, would say four-letter words.