Cockpit (17 page)

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.

When I was in high school, I discovered that, by squeezing my member, I could force it back into my body. I practiced keeping it retracted, and later discovered that I could keep it hidden with a plastic-edged metal clamp, which made it look as if I were recovering from an amputation.

A few days after my discovery, I invited a girl I was interested in to my family home. After the preliminary kissing and fondling, I turned off the lights, undressed her and continued to caress her until she asked me to undress as well. I pretended to hesitate but at last removed my shirt, slowly unbuckled my belt and finally took off my pants.

The girl was not aggressive enough to reach for me, so I guided her fingers to the clamp. She pulled away in horror. Calmly, I explained that when I was a child, during the war, a grenade had exploded near me and metal shards had torn into my organ. A surgeon had fitted a clamp to protect the chronic wound from irritation. I told her that I was barred for life from what was considered normal intercourse, and could find fulfillment only through unusual associations. I assured the girl I would respect her right to
reject me as a cripple. Ashamed of her initial withdrawal, she attempted to convince me that the absence of one part of my body did not distress her. In fact, she remarked, my deficiency was really an advantage because it freed her from the danger of pregnancy, and for once she could let herself go without fear of the consequences.

In turn, I urged her to demand anything that excited her: I was an invalid, I said, who searched for sources of release others might consider abnormal, and nothing was perverted or repellent to me. She said she was willing to try, and almost immediately began to take the initiative.

I had to avoid erection during love-making because the clamp could be sprung by the growing pressure within my organ. As long as the clamp remained in place, I felt a bit of pain, but the sense of harnessed power made orgasm crude by comparison.

Later, when the girl was too aroused to be aware of what I was doing, I surreptitiously removed the clamp and shot into her without warning. When she felt me climax inside her, she screamed. First she grew angry, although I tried to convince her that withholding part of myself was not a game but an attempt to revive sexual sensitivity. I explained that, in avoiding what we had experienced so often with so many others, she and I had made the act of sex fresh and pure.

She finally admitted that being aggressive with me had released her in a pleasurable way, and had let her feel more sensual than ever before. Her manipulation of me was more exciting than her passive surrender to her previous lovers; she said that any anger or anxiety she had suffered because of my deception was a small price to pay for her new-found freedom, her new sexual identity.

I have needed to change my identity so often in recent years, I’ve come to look upon disguise as more than a means of personal liberation: it’s a necessity. My life depends on my being able to instantly create a new persona
and slip out of the past. As for the others I come in contact with, my disguise is never simply a deception or a hoax. It is an attempt to expand the range of another’s perception. Confronted with my camouflage, it is the witness who deceives himself, allowing his eyes to give my new character credibility and authenticity. I do not fool him; he either accepts or rejects my altered truth.