Cockpit

  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.

  Around New Year’s day, a tall, dark-haired Austrian appeared in the village. From listening to the gossip in the square, I learned he was a famous ski-jumping coach, hired by several of the richest families in the village to train the potter’s son for the Olympic qualifying competition.

  Every morning, I followed the coach and the potter’s son to the jump and watched them. Often, I was the only spectator at the practice sessions because the village children were in school, and soon both the Austrian and the jumper began to greet me with smiles.

  As the jumper went through his paces, the Austrian took dozens of photographs of his run, his leap, his flight and his landing. The potter’s son did not seem to pay much attention to his coach’s advice and I wondered if he even understood what instructions the Austrian screamed at him through a megaphone.

  About a week after the Austrian arrived, a friend of his appeared in the village. She was as tall as he but much younger. Her hair was red
and she wore tight-fitting sweaters and a long fur coat, which always hung open over skirts that showed her knees. None of the villagers spoke to her. But because she had been brought to town by the coach, they all tried their best to restrain their scorn. One of them claimed that the “Red Whore” had been imported from the big city as a special reward for the jumper, who apparently had never had a woman.

  I devoted all my time to spying on the woman, the Austrian and the potter’s son. Many evenings, I watched the three of them drinking on the balcony of the house where the Austrian and the woman were living. When the jumper got too drunk to sit up straight, the couple would drag him into the house.

  One afternoon, pretending to watch the jumper practice, I dared to move closer to the woman, who now accompanied the two men to their jump sessions. While the jumper was climbing the distant run, the Austrian said to her that the “Flying Gnome” had to be gotten out of the village to practice jumping from higher and better-constructed ski-jumps. She shook her head, replying that the Gnome had persistently refused to leave the village. With a laugh, he answered that, after all, she had been brought to change the jumper’s mind, and asked if she didn’t think the Flying Gnome was in love with her. The woman said he would follow her to the ends of the earth. They both laughed uproariously, and at that moment the jumper fell. The Austrian immediately ran to him.

  The woman turned toward me. She asked me my name and why I was at the jump. I blushed and replied that one day I was going to be as great a man as the potter’s son was a jumper.

  She sat down next to me and put her arm around my shoulder. Her eyes were pale green. I stared at her white teeth as she spoke and felt her breath on my face. She whispered that the potter’s son jumped only to demonstrate his love for her. The more he loved her, she said, the farther he jumped. I protested that the potter’s son had jumped well long before she had come to the village. She brought her face and body so close to me that her fur coat brushed my chin and I could feel her breasts press against me. She agreed that he had jumped well, but before her time, she said, the potter’s son had been a stuttering, dumb peasant who knew nothing about life. Since he had fallen in love with her, she continued, he had become a man. If I, too, wanted to become a man, she said, I must first learn how to love.

  She got up and walked over to the Austrian, who was shouting angrily at the jumper. The Flying Gnome stood silently, his head bowed.

  In February, my parents found a tutor in the city and I went home. I studied the sports pages every day to find out whether the Flying Gnome would again confront the national champion. Finally, a date was announced and the papers began carrying large photographs of both the champion and the Gnome. I continually nagged my parents to let me attend the competition, and at last they agreed.

  I spent twelve hours on the train and arrived, a few hours before the jumps were to begin, in the fashionable ski resort that was sponsoring the meet. When the guards were not looking, I slipped through the rows of spectators and found a spot next to the takeoff point. I scanned the jumpers with binoculars until I saw the Flying Gnome, dressed in a blue ski suit with a tight red cap pulled down to his eyebrows. The Austrian was gesturing emphatically to him but the jumper kept his head turned away.

  When I checked the area reserved for rich spectators and the jumpers’ families, I saw the Red Whore. Her hair was even redder than I remembered and her make-up thicker. She was accompanied by another woman and by a man with a large movie camera. As I spotted her, she was changing seats with the other woman and leaning against the man’s shoulder, her face as close to his as it had once been to mine.

  I turned back to the competition in time to see the national champion establish a new record. Then I watched the Red Whore through the binoculars. She removed her coat and stood up in the loge, thrusting her chest forward, applauding and cheering wildly. She was the most noticeable of all the women, and many men in the stands were ogling her. When the crowd quieted down, the challenger for the national championship was announced over the loudspeakers.

  I turned my binoculars to the Flying Gnome. He lurched forward, and I saw the blue tips of his skis sticking out of the snow. Hunched at the top of the run, he looked even smaller than he was. When he started down, he accelerated so fast that I had trouble keeping the glasses trained on him. But almost as soon as his skis left the run and he was propelled into the air, I sensed something was wrong. His body appeared to have given up, to refuse to complete the jump at all. His hands would not line up with his thighs, and his skis seemed out of control. The crowd gasped.

  When he reached the peak of the ascent, his trunk turned sideways, his head bent beneath his skis, his hands flapped frantically in the air. Instead of witnessing the miraculous jump we had all expected, we saw a puppet severed from its strings. In an instant, he crashed down on the run. As his skis fell off, he bounced against the packed snow and we heard a loud crack. His body rolled down the incline and came to a stop, leaving red and brown splotches in his trail.

  The screaming crowd broke through the barriers, and I shoved through the throng past the guards and the police. By the time I reached the jumper, he was being carried to the ambulance. His eyes were open and unblinking. Someone shouted that he was dead.

  I looked everywhere for the Red Whore and finally found her leaving the grounds with the other woman. I grabbed her coat sleeve and she turned to look at me. I screamed at her that she had said her love would make him jump farther and farther until he became the national champion. I wanted to know why he had failed.

  She whispered something to her companion and the woman left us. The Red Whore walked to a bench and sat down. I stood weeping in front of her. She embraced me, pressing me against her chest, and kissed my cheeks. If I would stop crying, she said, she would tell me why the potter’s son had killed himself.

  She then took my hand and guided it under her skirt, along her thighs, under the garters and the soft underwear. When I hesitated, she insisted, leading my hand where she wanted it to go. As my fingers went inside her, her expression softened. She asked if I could feel how hot she was. She said the jumper had never liked her heat and had never wanted to be where my hand now was. The jumper had grown up surrounded by rock and ice, she said, and he could live only when his bones and his body were frozen like stored meat. He saw rot in everything hot and wet and would touch her warmth only when he was drunk. And there she had been, hot and wet, inviting his touch all the time. She said he felt soiled by her love.

  The air felt cold against my warm hand as the Red Whore withdrew it from under her skirt. Before my fingers could dry, she gently pressed them to my mouth and I licked them. For an instant, I felt the moisture on my tongue before it dried in the cold. Then she took my hand and kissed it, her tongue pink against her bright red lipstick. The Red Whore embraced me, got up and moved off with the crowd.

  Years later, in the Service, I was waiting in a restaurant on the massif of Switzerland’s Plaine Morte for a telephone call from my contact. I noticed an old man on the terrace who seemed familiar, although I couldn’t quite place him. He was bald and the bright sun gleamed on his scalp. He supported his sharp chin on one hand, and his elbow rested rigidly on the arm of the deck chair, a blanket covering his legs and other hand. When he turned to the waitress, I recognized him as the Flying Gnome’s jumping coach.

  Apologizing for the intrusion, I asked whether he remembered a ski jumper from a small mountain village who had been killed in a national championship many years before. I prompted him by reminding him that he had called the jumper the “Flying Gnome.” As he removed his sunglasses to see me better, the Austrian exclaimed that, indeed, he did remember such a monster. He reached up to pat my shoulder, repeating the nickname with obvious delight, without asking how I came to know it. The conversation seemed to have stopped, and again I prompted his wandering mind by suggesting that the jumper had been in love with a woman with dyed red hair who had arrived in the village not long after he himself had
come there.

  The Austrian leaned closer to me, his expression altered as if he were about to tell a dirty joke. On the day of the Gnome’s death, he related, he had accompanied him to the top of the ski-jump tower. About five minutes before his jump, the Gnome wanted to go to the men’s room. The Austrian insisted that the jumper was experiencing an attack of nerves rather than a real physical need and reminded him that he had been to the toilet twice in the past hour. The jumper persisted. Reluctantly, the Austrian said, he had escorted the Gnome to the men’s room, but, when they got there, both toilets were occupied. The Flying Gnome had begun screaming that he could not wait any longer, and the Austrian was about to check if the ladies’ room was free, when it became apparent that it was too late. The jumper propped himself against a wall and pointed at his freshly pressed blue ski pants, now covered with brown stains. Just as the Austrian was about to ask for a postponement of the jump, it was announced that the Flying Gnome was next.

  The Austrian said that he had almost dragged the jumper to the starting position. Some of the judges, press people, photographers and waiting contestants noticed the splotches on the jumper’s pants and the stench emanating from him. Many people walked away; others laughed. The Flying Gnome, the Austrian recalled, turned to him and stuttered that he would rather die than have the people below laugh at him because he had soiled himself like a child. He stepped into the trail and began his flight, leaving a faint odor behind him. Seconds later, he was dead.

  I asked what had happened to the red-haired woman. The Austrian’s hand emerged from under the blanket in a gesture of nonchalance. She was nobody, he said, just a hooker who had been paid to keep that ape of a man happy. Instead, he chuckled, that stupid woman had fallen in love with the Gnome.