Cockpit

by Jerzy Kosiński

  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 do
wn 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.

  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.