Cockpit (16 page)

I was tempted to relent, because a year before my father had been stricken with a heart attack. Casually, I asked if
he enjoyed living in the new territories. After all, I said, it was possible for him to emigrate to Palestine, and I was curious to know why he had chosen to remain in a country where millions of his people had been slaughtered. He faltered and then told me that destiny had decreed that Jews were to live in the homes of others, even if they were enemies. I hesitated no longer. I told him that destiny belonged to men, not men to destiny, and the law I represented made no exceptions for heart-attack convalescents. A man who was strong enough to live alone among his enemies was strong enough to keep a government appointment in his nation’s Capital. He reacted at once. All he wanted from life, he said, was peace and security, which the certificate would bring him. He read the instructions back to me and promised to follow them to the letter. I called his number the next day and for several days following that. No one answered.

A month after I began my calls, a knock on the door interrupted my family’s breakfast. A harsh voice announced that the police were outside. My father’s hands shook so badly that he was unable to knot the sash of his robe, and my mother turned white. She and my father hurried to the front door. When she opened it, six plainclothesmen pushed by her and said my father was under arrest. They hauled him downstairs to an unmarked car and drove off. Later that morning, my tutor’s wife called to say her husband, too, had been arrested.

The following day, a policeman came to our door with orders for my mother and me to accompany him to police headquarters without delay.

As soon as we arrived at the station house, an inspector ushered us into a room and announced that treasonous calls had been made from our telephone. He demanded statements about my father’s activities from both my mother and me. My mother was so distraught that she could hardly speak, but did manage to say that no one had access to our
telephone except the three of us. She could not understand the charges.

The inspector said scores of innocent people were being victimized by a vicious saboteur who was using our telephone as his weapon. The inspector described the crime and told us that, a few weeks before my father’s arrest, a call had been made to a citizen who already had a residence certificate. The man had reported the incident to the police, who then checked with the Capital and learned that numerous persons were being sent to nonexistent residence certification bureaus. Public notices were placed in the papers urging anyone receiving a potentially fraudulent call to get in touch with the police. Some of the victims had replied, and the police were able to trace subsequent calls to our phone.

The inspector flipped on a tape recorder and I heard myself speaking as the official. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how perfect my imitations were. The voice on the tape sounded like a middle-aged man’s. My mother listened intently and shook her head, unable to recognize the voice.

I stood up and announced that I was the impostor. The inspector laughed. I insisted that I could prove it. If he would turn off the recorder, I told him, I would recite word for word the rest of the recorded message. He stopped laughing and turned off the machine.

I continued the monologue, modulating my voice as I had done so many times. The inspector called a second man into the room and ordered me to repeat the speech, which by now they were recording. When I finished, they conferred for a moment. The inspector told me that, in spite of my youth, I was under arrest. My mother was free to go. She reached for me, but they forced her away. That evening, I was transferred to a darkened room with padded walls. It contained a long table with four chairs along one wall, a single bench against another.

After I had been alone in the room for several hours, four men entered and sat down at the table. Buckets of water and several spotlights were brought into the room. One of the men ordered me over to the bench. I was blinded by the lights and could not tell which of the four men kept insisting that my father and my tutor were the real saboteurs. He claimed they had written the text of my message, trained me to imitate the official’s voice and selected the numbers I had called. Now, he ranted, those traitors were letting me take the blame for them and possibly for other conspirators.

I leaned forward, squinting in the direction of his voice. My parents and tutor did not know about my calls, I shouted. I had made them while alone in the apartment. The man roared the accusation at me again. I repeated the denial. A second voice announced that unless I told the truth I would rot in prison. Since I was young, he said, I could look forward to many years of solitary confinement. I screamed out my denial. One of my interrogators rose and positioned himself between me and the spotlights. His dark bulk bent over me and he yelled into my face that I must confess. Gripping the edge of the bench, I leaned backward to avoid smelling his breath.

He grabbed me by the hair, dragged me off the bench and threw me against the table. The other three interrogators stood up and moved toward me. As I struggled to get away, one of them slammed me in the mouth and I spat blood and two teeth onto the table. Another man threw a bucket of cold water into my face and all four began to shout at once.

It occurred to me that the police were not aware of my father’s heart condition. They could easily kill him by beating him or even by keeping him in confinement. I thought about my tutor, a gentle, quiet man who spoke Latin as if it were the local dialect. I myself had already been too lucky; I had survived the war. Moreover, my life involved no one
but myself, unlike my father and my tutor who had to support families.

I began to mimic the speech patterns of one of my interrogators. Though the missing teeth interfered with my speech, I imitated his voice perfectly, including his vocabulary and his mannerisms. The other inspectors burst into laughter. Then, catching themselves, they grew silent. The man I had mocked made a grab for me, but I jumped up and ran around the room, never stopping my impersonation. I paused once or twice to ask mockingly if they thought my father and my tutor had coached me for this performance.

The four interrogators stormed out of the room and I was locked up once more. The next day, the man I had imitated tried to bribe me with some fruit and an imported chocolate bar. He watched me eat, then asked me why I had tortured scores of innocent strangers who were already sad victims of the war. Ignoring his question, I asked him what would happen to my father and my tutor. Both of them would remain in prison, he said, until I had satisfactorily answered his questions. I told him that if I gave him the information he wanted they would never be released. If they were to be hurt or held in prison, I suggested he kill me, because if he didn’t I would someday punish his wife and children so terribly that he would regret he had ever met me. I reminded him how adept I was at affecting the lives of people I did not even know. He kicked the leg of my chair and stormed out of the cell.

Soon after, I was released from the prison and driven home in a military jeep. My father lay in bed, his swollen face covered with cuts and bruises. My mother sat next to him, applying compresses to his shoulder and abdomen. When she saw me, she began to cry.

My father gestured for me to come to him. I kissed his unshaven cheek. He held me at arm’s length and said that he did not want to know what reason I had to hurt so many families. My mother hugged me and told me that even
though my tutor had been released from prison, he refused to teach me anymore.

My winter vacations were spent in a small mountain village in the north of the country. When I arrived the first year, in November, I expected to find deep snow. Instead the Ruh, the wet wind from the warm lakes, swept through the region, keeping the snow and the skiers away. Yet, nature was ready for the winter. Autumn had boiled to death all the grass and weeds. The black willow branches, stripped of their foliage, curved to the ground. The potato plants decayed and the fields became bogs. The dull glow of morning hovered over the spreading gray hills, and the raindrops, the children of the Ruh, shook themselves loose from the sky, scuttling fast. The Ruh punished them as they fled, forcing them aslant and hurling them against the ground.

At daybreak, the villagers wrapped themselves in warm clothes and made their way from their homes to the market. They were all anxiously awaiting the Thule, a dry wind from the tundras.

A solitary pond fed by underground springs slowly diffused into swamps. Thickets of reeds, slender rushes and clusters of low dwarf willows grew in clumps on its banks. Every day, I joined the village boys and girls when they went to examine the lowering water level of the pond.

As the first breath of the Thule blew across the hills, dozens of us rushed to the pond to begin the game of Thule. Each child brought a canvas bag or a box containing a live animal—a rat, a dog, a cat, a duck, a goose or a muskrat—that he had captured or bought during the last days of gentle Ruh.

Attaching stones or iron bars to each animal’s underbelly to slow it down in the water, we released the creatures, throwing them into the pond. Blinded by the sudden light after days of darkness, the animals hit the water, sank, then emerged breathless, instinctively swimming or thrashing their way to shore. As they struggled to keep afloat, their
owners frightened them away from the banks, screaming and shouting and swinging long twig brooms with iron hooks hidden inside them. If an animal escaped or drowned, its owner was disqualified and had to pay a penalty to those whose animals were still panicking and colliding in the chilled water.

The Thule grew colder by the minute, and we pulled our woolen cloaks tighter about ourselves. Suddenly, the air seemed to contract. The pond thickened, then crackled ominously. In an instant, it turned into a platter of thin ice, its glaze broken only by the trapped animals.

We watched them struggling to crawl out of the water, but they could not grip the glassy sheet. The Thule blew around them. It slowed the blood in their veins, thinned the air in their lungs and made them sluggish. Stunned, they stared at the sky, at each other and at us, standing along the distant shore. One after another, they died, their heads cocked to one side as though listening, their eyes frozen open.

When the first snow swirled down, it stuck to the animals. Throughout the winter, they sat in the frozen pond like frosted glass sculptures from the church fair. On our way to the slopes, we often stopped to stare but never touched them. The animals belonged to the Thule, which had transformed them into creatures from another world.

When I returned the following winter, the village had completed a new ski jump, one of the largest in the country. Increasing numbers of visitors lengthened the lines at the lifts. Ski-jumping had become popular among the young villagers, and local skiers were beginning to compete against the best jumpers in the country.

One of them, the potter’s son, was unquestionably the top village jumper. Speeding down the run, hunched over his skis, he would reach the takeoff and arch forward into the air, arms flat against his sides, his nose almost touching the tips of his skis as he hurtled through space.

We all stood breathless, expecting him to fall, but, stretching
out his arms and bending his knees to soften the impact, he always touched the ground easily and skied to a graceful halt. In silent amazement, we’d surround him before he could remove his skis or shake the snow from his parka. This attention made him uncomfortable and he would immediately walk back to the top of the hill to begin a new jump.

He was short, with one shoulder a bit lower than the other. His head was too big, his yellow teeth were crooked and his eyes were set in a perpetual squint under a low forehead. I recalled my mother saying that a low forehead was a sign of mental inferiority. Only two inches separated my hairline from my eyebrows, but the jumper’s scalp and brows almost grew together. He could never complete a sentence without stuttering, and I speculated that it was because he was slow-witted.

Some of his jumps had exceeded the national record and the villagers predicted that, once he won the Olympic Gold Medal, foreign skiers would begin flocking to the village. Several of the wealthier townspeople had already been in contact with city architects about designing new restaurants, and the more adventurous ones even considered opening a gas station.

My parents had been unable to find me a new tutor and while looking for one, they felt I was better off in the mountains than in the city. They allowed me to remain in the village until the end of January. After the holidays, though, all the other tourist children went home and the village boys and girls went back to school. As I found myself more and more alone, my fascination with the jumper intensified. I would have given anything to be able to jump as he did. But whenever I gathered enough speed to dare a hop from a mound of snow, I was tossed about like a baby bird clumsily trying to fly for the first time. While some invisible physical force launched the potter’s son into the air, an opposite force drove me directly back down to earth with a humiliating thump.

I was desperate to learn all I could about my idol. I
mingled among the villagers when they gathered to drink at night, pretending I was looking for someone. All they talked about was the jumper, endlessly pondering his future achievements but rarely discussing the man himself. I did learn that because of his terrible stutter he had never gone to school. He could neither read nor write, and even the priest who was forced to listen to his confessions had given up all attempts to correct the stammer.

All this made the skier seem even more extraordinary. Here was a man who had achieved fame without ever having gone to school. Even his one skill, jumping, he had developed without training, relying only on what his instinct commanded.

During the Christmas competition, which he had lost only by inches to the national champion, the potter’s son became a nationwide celebrity. Radio, television and camera crews, as well as reporters, photographers and autograph hunters, came to the village in search of him. Always shy, the jumper grew even more withdrawn as the reporters pressed microphones into his face and cameras zeroed in on his every move.