Cockpit (7 page)

“I have no other choice,” he apologized in a toneless voice. “I am going to cut your head off. Now. Please don’t try to run away.” As he moved toward me, I withdrew behind the heavy mahogany dining table in the center of the room. I was paralyzed by the unreality of it all and could not make myself believe he wanted to kill me.

“Please put the knife down, Robert. Let’s talk,” I reasoned. He stared at me, then lunged, barely missing my head with the knife.

It was real. I had no time to take off my jacket to ward off the blows with it. Robert stalked me around the table while I maneuvered desperately to stay on the opposite side. When he leaped onto the table, I grabbed a heavy vase and hurled it at him. It hit with enough force to knock him to the floor. As he was struggling to his feet, I grabbed a chair and swung it at him, trying to knock the knife out of his grip, but he wrested the chair from me with his free hand and threw it against the wall, where it splintered.

Suddenly, he was above me, wrestling me to the floor
with the knife at my chest. As he raised the blade, I rolled over on my stomach, crawled backward, grabbed a broken chair leg and struck his shoulder. He did not drop the knife, but the blow slowed him down. Before he could recover his strength, I grabbed another chair and hurled it at the window to get attention. The glass shattered and I could hear the chair smash as it hit the ground. I counted on someone noticing the commotion and calling the police.

Just then, Robert attacked again. He had me cornered and he thrust like a duelist ready to deliver the coup de grâce. I yelled, ducked and grasped his leg with my hands, trying to pull him off balance. He slipped but got back on his feet. Before I could run out of the room, he blocked my path to the corridor, standing with both arms extended, his knife slicing the air. I was breathless but he showed no sign of fatigue.

For an instant, we faced each other without moving. Then, with his free hand, he cleared a path between us by throwing the three remaining chairs out the window one after another. “I have to cut off your head. Now,” he repeated. “I have no other choice.”

“We’re friends, Robert,” I shouted at him. “Why do you want to kill me?”

“You know why,” he said, jumping onto the table to bridge the distance between us. He waited for me to move, then threw himself at me, but I leaped sideways and he missed. We began running around the table like two boys playing tag. I was tempted to make a dash for the corridor but knew he was too fast for me.

Suddenly, he halted at the old-fashioned bookcase that stood against the wall, and pulled it over. It hit the floor like thunder, strewing books over the floor. Now there was another obstacle, and Robert had resumed the chase. Because he was a trained jumper, his chances of catching me increased each time I hurdled the bookcase. Twice I fell over it and bruised myself, getting up only seconds before
his knife reached me. I was saved not by my speed but by his choosing to aim only at my throat.

An hour had passed since I entered the apartment. My strength was ebbing, but the deadly game of tag continued. Suddenly, we heard hammering and shouts of, “Open up. Police,” at the front door. Robert paused, distracted by the sounds, and I took advantage of the interruption to pick up a thick dictionary from the floor and throw it into the corridor to further distract him.

The hammering and shouting increased. Determined to finish me off, Robert attacked again. I tried to run away but tripped over the bookcase, and the distance between us shortened. The police still pounded on the door. I took a desperate chance and bent down to pick up another book; just then Robert lunged again. He missed my neck but nicked my jacket collar. Again, I managed to break away and hurled the book into the corridor over his head.

At that moment, the police shot open the lock and entered with guns drawn. I shouted to them not to fire because Robert was sick. They raced down the corridor. Reaching the dining room, their guns still cocked, they ordered him to drop the knife and raise his arms above his head.

Robert’s face suddenly regained its alertness and he turned from me, charging at the two men with a speed and ferocity far beyond what he had shown in chasing me. It was then I realized he could have caught and killed me at almost any point, but that he had intentionally slowed himself down.

Against the policemen, he became a natural killer. Within seconds, he had cut one officer’s uniform twice. The policeman was about to shoot but I pleaded with him not to. For the first time since the police entered, Robert became aware of my presence. He turned his head in my direction and, as he did, the other policeman slugged him. Robert’s body went limp and he fell at our feet.

He was taken to the hospital and I to the police station. The officer in charge referred to Robert as my “schizo friend” and told me that Robert had a record of violent attacks and was supposed to have been under psychiatric care. I made a deposition and went to visit Robert, but the attending doctor told me Robert was under heavy sedation and was not allowed any visitors. The doctor’s only comment was that I was lucky to be alive.

I called Robert’s parents. When his father answered, I told him what had happened, and he said he would fly in immediately to see Robert and me. He stopped by the apartment the following afternoon, having spent the morning at the hospital. He was in excellent shape for a man his age, with a handsome, impassive face. He surveyed the wreckage in the dining room and looked at my bruised head. “Robert has been under medical supervision ever since he returned from the army,” he said. “He has been hospitalized many times before.”

“Why didn’t you warn me when I talked to you the first time?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “Why did he stop seeing his doctor?” I demanded.

He looked at me blandly. “You should know. You lived with him.” We both stopped talking, strangers with only one hideous interest in common.

“When did Robert become ill?” I finally asked.

“When he was in the army,” he said. “When they realized how sick he was, they discharged him.”

“Was there any indication of disturbance before he enlisted?” I asked.

Robert’s father rose and picked up his hat from the table. “When Robert was a small boy, I gave him a dog,” he said. “A big, strong animal. The kid loved it more than anything else in the world. Two years later he cut off the dog’s head.”

Shortly after Robert was committed I went back to Europe. Even now, whenever I become involved with
others enough to expect certain patterns of behavior or to rely on them, the memory of my experience with Robert returns to alert me. In a sense, Robert continues to be a close friend, reminding me from time to time of the estrangement that may lie beneath apparent mutual understanding.

I settled in Switzerland and began working in a small chemical laboratory. To earn money for ski weekends, I worked overtime in the lab and did free-lance translations. I boarded with a family in their small house to make my money last. The couple worked on weekends during the tourist season and asked me if I would mind taking their ten-year-old daughter to the ski slopes with me. The little girl loved to ski, but her parents wouldn’t let her try the higher slopes by herself and were pleased that I accompanied her.

Shy and withdrawn, she became friendly only after I offered to teach her some stunts performed by the better skiers. Soon, she wouldn’t leave me alone. When we ate lunch, she angrily told any waiter who addressed her as my daughter that I was not her father but her best friend.

We agreed that I despised my work as much as she hated school and that one day the two of us would visit places where together we would do only what we liked. We would wear beautiful clothes and ski the highest mountains. We would fly south to swim in warm, turquoise oceans. She hung on every word as I described the strange animals we would see in the jungles and the parties we would attend on the roof-top terraces of skyscrapers. As we talked, she would pull at my parka, demanding that we escape right away. When her parents complained about her grades or reprimanded her for sleeping too late on school days, she gave me a conspiratorial glance.

We went skiing on the last Saturday of the season, though the slopes were already bare in many spots. When I hit places where the snow or ice was too thin, I removed my
skis and walked the trails, but the girl insisted on skiing even the baldest patches, laughing and making fun of me.

At dinner that night, I mentioned that I would be leaving early on Monday. The girl’s mother proposed a toast to my return the following year, but I told her that I might not even be in the country then. The girl said nothing.

During Sunday supper, the girl ate little and sat quietly at the table. She surprised her parents by volunteering to go to bed early and, as she went upstairs, I embraced her and she kissed my cheek.

The next morning, I awoke while it was still dark, dressed and finished packing. I was attempting to leave the house without waking anyone when I saw the girl standing in the hall. She was wearing her best coat and clutching a small suitcase in her hand. She whispered that she was ready to go. I tried to explain that our trip had been make-believe and that she was too young to be allowed to travel alone with me. She replied that she was planning to escape secretly.

Once I realized that she was determined to go, I went upstairs to wake her parents. When we returned to the hall, we found that she had disappeared. We assumed she was upset about my leaving, that she had decided not to see me off. As her parents walked me to my car we spotted her poised on the roof of the chalet. Her mother pleaded with her to come down, but the girl insisted that if I left without her she would kill herself. She swore she would jump if I abandoned her. Her father urged me to leave at once so that his child could see I had no intention of taking her with me. I fastened my skis onto the car, stowed my luggage in the trunk and started the engine. When the girl saw me going, she stood up, swaying very near the roof’s edge. I wanted to get out and talk to her, but her father slammed the car door and ordered me to go. I backed the car out of the driveway, but, just as I began to move forward, I heard
her mother scream. The girl had fallen off the roof, and was rolling down the slope.

She was unconscious by the time we reached her and we were afraid to move her. While her mother and I sat with her, her father called an ambulance. At the hospital, waiting for the doctor’s report, her father kept trying to explain to me how much he had loved his daughter, as though I had blamed him for her accident. The doctor appeared with the x-rays and told us that the girl had broken her spine and fractured several ribs; she might never walk again. I have never seen her or her parents since.

When the French scientist whose works I had been translating came to see me, I asked him to help me find a better job. He took me to a cocktail party given for him by a prominent Swiss industrialist and his wife who, he felt, might provide good job connections.

Our hostess was tall, olive-skinned and very glamorous. I learned from the scientist that she was of Lebanese descent and had been an actress in second-rate French and German films.

Since she was constantly surrounded by admirers, I had no chance to talk to her alone. She was too busy to bother with me until she overheard me speaking English with one of the guests. In the middle of a conversation, she abruptly turned to me and complimented me on my fluency and then returned to her conversation. A few days later, she called to say she would like to refresh the English she had learned as a child. I agreed to give her lessons, which began the following day.

The lessons were held in her study while her husband was at his office. I saw him infrequently, only when she invited me to one of their parties. During our lessons she read English prose and poetry aloud, and I criticized her pronunciation. She always remained cool and distant.

One morning, I was awakened by a phone call. She said she had to see me and would be over at once to pick me up.
As we drove, she insisted that what made her call was not boredom and restlessness. She told me that her need to see me was too desperate to wait the twenty-four hours until our lesson, that what she wanted to say was too important for the time we had alone. Rather than reveal only part of what she felt, she had said nothing, but now she had to speak. That afternoon we became lovers.

Our physical intimacy only increased the ambiguity of our relationship. She said that she wanted to be more than an afterthought tacked onto the main part of my existence. She wanted to be the center of my life and would not settle for less. Since she knew this need made unreasonable demands upon me, to spare me, she suggested we consider our relationship unsalvageable and part.

After several days, we began to meet again. Still she blamed me for holding back. She claimed that each time she had tried to get a response from me, I had moved away; she was always the one to suggest we make love.

She also told me she assumed our every meeting would be the last, and that she would do anything to keep me. She grew more anxious every time we were together, our encounters became more and more tense, and she again demanded that we part. We did, for about three weeks, then she wrote that she could no longer suppress the tenderness she felt for me. We began to meet again.

Since she claimed to want to build her life around me, I was puzzled by her frequent trips abroad. She always went alone and her husband did not seem to mind, but I suspected she was meeting a lover and she finally admitted it.

A year later, her husband was about to move his base of operations to Washington, D.C. During the last few weeks in Switzerland she insisted on seeing me more often. The evening before they were to leave, she came to ask if I would consider returning to the United States. I said I could not afford to go back.

Then she took an envelope from her purse and handed it
to me. The package, she said, contained coded documents of considerable value. She gave me the names of foreign intelligence agents who would all be eager to buy these secrets at a high price. The originals, she assured me, were abroad, in the private safe of her lover, who was a prominent member of a powerful government. She had photographed the documents and developed and printed the copies herself; no one but she and I knew she had done it. I could become wealthy by selling the documents, she said, and if I wanted to could even begin a new career. But she warned me not to betray her.