Cockpit (15 page)

I am protective of my solitude in the mountains. I have shared it only once, with a dog, a huge animal, so strong that he could drag me uphill. When I was tired or upset he would stay close, his eyes fixed on my face, his muscles ready to respond to my slightest command. We took walks and he would run ahead of me or lag behind, scouting for unseen enemies. If I was sick, he lost his appetite. If I locked him in another room, he paced restlessly, listening for my every sound.

But I did not want his whole being to be centered on me. I felt that I had perverted his essence, taming his original animal cunning and making him a dependent creature.

When he once failed to catch an alley cat, I called him. He slunk toward me, afraid, knowing I was angry. I began whipping him with my heaviest belt, swinging my arm high. As he whined, I silenced him by kicking his head until his eyes rolled in pain and terror. He flattened like a swollen rug, his fur soaked with sweat, saliva dripping from his mouth. I stood over him, continuing to beat him, trying to force him to get up and attack me. But he would not. He cringed in the corner, bereft of any instinct for self-preservation.

One night, as he padded up the stairs, I noticed that his
flanks seemed too heavy for his back legs. The next morning, his hind quarters were swaying sideways. I felt his back, and he whimpered in pain but licked my hand, his eyes searching my face, his great head pressing against my thighs. I took him to a veterinarian, who told me an incurable disease was eating through the dog’s spine.

Although walking was painful for him, he insisted on following me. He stayed even closer now, his nose nudging my calves. If I stretched out on my back in the grass, he sat erect behind me despite the pain, watching for anything that moved. If I opened my eyes, I would see his head towering over my face ready to lick my forehead. Sometimes he would stretch out next to me with one of his paws gently resting on my shoulder. Every week, his flanks grew heavier, until his legs eventually gave in under him when he tried to follow me.

In the evenings, we often sat together on my balcony, looking into the valley and the mountains beyond it. As the wind brought us a child’s cry or the barking of a village dog, his ears would stand up, but his eyes were foggy and his breathing was labored. Finally, I mixed a powerful drug into his food. He ate his meal reluctantly, sensing the presence of the poison. When he had finished, I spread a blanket and lay down, pretending to sleep. He listened to my breathing and sniffed the spring wind. He lay down slowly, his paws and head heavy on my legs. The breeze brought sounds of faraway life, but soon he did not hear them.

Years later, in the Service, I trained a tough little hound. I had him run about in a belt loaded with heavy metal, from which a long thin rod protruded like an antenna. When he grew accustomed to running with the added weight, I attached food to the underside of a car, a foot or two forward from the back bumper, and sent him to fetch it. Next, my partner would slowly drive the car by, and at my command the dog, who hadn’t been fed for a day or two, would chase the car and crawl under its rear fender to get to his dinner.
The rod protruding from the belt would bang against the undercarriage as he snatched the food from beneath the still-moving car.

During the next stage of training, my partner drove a car of a different type every day. With each test, he increased the speed and I placed the food closer and closer to the gas tank. The dog never failed. Even when the food was under the gas tank, he retrieved it successfully. He was ready.

On the day of our assignment, the three of us were up early. Expecting to be fed, the animal grew excited as my partner strapped the dog’s belly with the belt, which now also contained packets of gelatinous explosive.

Through my binoculars, I sighted a large limousine parked in front of a town house at the end of the block. I could tell from its slight tremor that the engine was idling. The car’s bulletproof glass was almost opaque, and now and then the driver stuck his head out to look around. Two guards lounged nearby.

The door of the house opened and two more guards briskly accompanied a gray-haired man down the stairs. The guards on the sidewalk became alert, looking up and down the street. Four of the men climbed inside the rear of the limousine and the fifth took his seat beside the chauffeur. The car pulled away from the curb in our direction, slowly picking up speed. I opened the door of our car, pointed at the passing limousine and gave the command. The hound, its tail between its legs, the rod rising from its back, slipped away and sped toward its dinner.

We drove away just as the explosion lifted the limousine and enveloped it in flames. A wave of hot air pounded our car, warming my face. The shattered glass from nearby windows rained onto the sidewalks and struck the cars parked along the street; everywhere, pedestrians ran for cover. Soon we heard police sirens.

Although I had expected to be upset by witnessing the explosion, I was surprised by my own lack of emotional
response to the scene. Yet since I was a child I have done many inexplicable things. Perhaps the explanations for my behavior, if there are any, are rooted in an area of my past to which I have no access.

I learned from my father that before I was two years old my mother came into my room one morning and found me sleeping in my nanny’s bed. Knowing that I could not climb out of my crib by myself, she called the woman and asked her why she had taken me to her bed. Nanny denied that she was responsible and claimed that almost every night for several weeks she had awakened to find me in bed with her. She had tried to get me back to the crib, but my crying was so pitiful that she let me stay with her till morning. My father did not believe her and decided to conduct his own investigation.

On the following night, my father crept into our room when nanny and I were sleeping, and crouched in the corner. After a few hours, he saw me stand up in my crib, sound asleep, climb out of it, go straight to the nanny’s bed and cuddle up at her feet. My father apologized to the woman and decided to seek medical help. Several doctors examined me, but none could discover the cause of my sleepwalking. The most sensible of them advised my father to drape wet towels over the sides of my crib, so that when I climbed up against them their chilly dampness would send me back to the warmth of my blankets. I never walked in my sleep again.

I have only one memory of another nanny, a Swiss girl who began working for my parents when I was three. One evening after she had been with us about a year, I stole a pair of scissors from her work box. Later, when she sat me on her lap and hugged me close, I plunged the scissors into her right breast. Her face became contorted, and she screamed, watching her white blouse turn red. When my mother rushed into the room, my fist was covered with blood, making her think it was I who had been wounded.

A few months later, I dropped a large earthenware flowerpot from the window of our fifth-floor apartment onto a five-year-old boy who had broken one of my favorite toys. It missed him, but a shard from the pot flew up into his face and badly lacerated an eye. Everyone supposed the pot had dropped by accident.

When I was twelve, the new government uprooted hundreds of thousands of families, my own included, and resettled them in recently annexed territories along the new border. None of the resettled families was allowed to take anything except minimal personal belongings; they had to leave behind homes full of furniture and objects collected over the years, and move across the country into households furnished with objects that others had been forced to abandon. Their insecurity was increased by the fact that the government at any time might make them surrender even these lodgings.

Since both my parents worked, I was alone every day until shortly after lunch, when my tutor arrived. One morning, the telephone rang and a long-distance operator in the Capital announced that a government official wished to speak to my father. I explained he was at work and offered to accept the call. The official came on the line and, assuming I was not a child, ordered me to write down what he was about to tell me.

In two days, he said, my father was to appear at the offices of the department in charge of the new territories. After signing a disclaimer of ownership of his former property, he would be issued a certificate authorizing him to reside permanently in our present apartment. The official informed me of the heavy penalty for noncompliance with the orders but added that the government would reimburse my father for traveling expenses. He gave me a list of train times, the department’s address, the name of the official my father was to see and the time of his appointment. When the man finished, he had me read back the instructions to
make certain I had made no mistakes. He warned that only a serious accident could justify my father’s failure to appear.

I gave my father the message after he returned from work. I expected him to be unhappy. The government was forcing him to abandon all hope of going back to the place where he had lived all his life. But he was delighted we would not have to resettle again. He no longer seemed to mind living among unfamiliar paintings, ugly, heavy furniture, and some stranger’s bric-a-brac, using silverware with strange monograms. Only a few months earlier, he had labeled the leader of the new government a Party puppet, accusing him of condoning the deaths of countless people, including my aunts and uncles. Now, he spoke impassively of the dead as victims of impersonal Party bureaucracy. My mother remarked that the most important thing was once again having a home where she and my father could raise me as a civilized human being.

My father followed the instructions I had carefully written down. It was a trip of a few hundred miles with several changes of trains, and he was gone for two days. When he returned, he brought the government certificate, a bouquet of flowers for my mother and a box of chocolates for me.

After my parents left for work the next day, I opened the telephone directory, selected a number at random and dialed it. A woman answered. Imitating the high-pitched voice of a long-distance operator, I announced a call from the Capital. Then I lowered my voice to sound as much as possible like the official who had phoned my father. I told the woman I wished to talk to the current legal tenant of her apartment. She replied that her husband was at work and could not be reached by phone, but that she would take the message for him.

I then warned her it was imperative to write down the following instructions correctly. Her husband was required to appear in the Capital in two days’ time, where, in exchange
for formally relinquishing all rights to his previous property, he would receive government authorization to reside permanently in the apartment he now occupied. As I dictated, I invented an address of the department, as well as the name of the official he was to see and the time of the appointment. I read off the train times I had copied down for my father and added that the government would reimburse her husband’s travel expenses upon presentation of the receipts.

I had her read the message back to me to guarantee accuracy. Assuring me that her husband would keep the appointment, she hung up. The next day I called her again, pretending to be one of her husband’s business acquaintances who had been unable to reach him at his office. She replied that he had left early that morning for an appointment in the Capital and would be back at work the next day.

From then on, I waited impatiently for my parents to leave every morning. As soon as they were gone, I rushed to the telephone directory and chose people in the resettled districts. If, like my father, they had abjectly surrendered their rights, they deserved to be punished.

Alternating between bureaucratic impersonality and restrained friendliness, I recited the directions, always stressing that official proof of identity was required for the issuance certificate. The dictation process was tedious, but I remained patient. Each time, I invented a new address of the department, and when circumstances required it I improvised other details.

Some of my older victims were almost illiterate, many speaking in crude, peasant dialects. Others were hard of hearing, some unused to speaking on a telephone and many so terrified of yet another governmental intervention in their lives that they could hardly speak at all. Occasionally, I was given personal information: an apprehensive wife feared her crippled husband might not survive the trip; an
aged aunt assured me her nephew would obey the summons, although on the day of the appointment his fiancee was coming a great distance for a two-day visit. A young woman speculated that, since she was about to give birth, her husband would be reluctant to leave her; a teen-aged son told me he would go on his father’s behalf since the man had been traumatized into immobility by internment in a labor camp; a widowed mother spoke of her tubercular baby daughter’s long-awaited appointment in the town’s only clinic.

I listened to their pleas without interrupting, then gently replied that full compliance was mandatory. To disobey, I said, introducing a note of shrillness into my voice, would be to aid political saboteurs and foreigners who conspired to regain the land they had lost. Thus, no excuses were valid, and no postponements were allowed.

I kept a complete record of all my calls, noting what I had said and how the news had been received. Every day, I tried at least half a dozen new numbers and made continual checks on the ones I had called the preceding day. Of all the people with whom I had made contact, only five were still home when I checked back the following day.

If, in my calls, I came across a household that had already received a resident certification, I penalized myself by making several additional calls. No one whose number came up was allowed to escape his fate, and if the phone wasn’t answered the first time, I persisted in calling the number until finally someone responded.

I called one such number twice daily for at least three weeks before a man answered. He identified himself as the sole member of the household. After I had given him the usual details, he pleaded in a tremulous, heavily accented voice for a postponement. He was a Jew, he said, and was just recovering from a massive heart attack.