Blind Date Read Online Free PDF

the side of a cliff, rolling over and over all the way down to the valley. With arms tightly linked, small knots of these unwilling vacationers would be seen stumbling forward, trying to keep their bodies upright, always looking down at their feet, never up at the mountains. Many of them actually believed the mountains were man-made, like the massive government buildings they had seen on their obligatory visits to the capital, and they wondered why the government had built them so high.
    The ski instructors were mainly sons of local artisans whose families had lived in the region for centuries. They had all been onskis from the moment they could stand, and many of them were regional and even national champions. But skiing was all they knew. Their only other interests were drinking, playing cards, and seducing vacationing females. As children, they had gone to the local parish school to learn how to pray, write, and read, but most soon forgot what little they had managed to learn. None of the instructors had any notion of what “ideology” meant; few had ever heard of Marx or Engels; and all they knew about Lenin was that after his death Stalin began to take care of the world’s working people.
    This lack of knowledge made local Party authorities apprehensive. Since ski instructors had contact with the workers and these vacationers might return home with embarrassing stories about ignorant mountain men, the political consciousness of the ski instructors had to be raised. The authorities decided they needed a university-educated certified ski instructor at each resort to indoctrinate the local ski teachers. Since Levanter was qualified, the university released him for four months each winter to teach skiing to peasants and to conduct a biweekly class in ideology for his fellow instructors. He was also required to test their progress at the end of each one-month course; those who failed the simple finals twice in a row had their skiing instructorships suspended, and those who failed three times were fired. Levanter was to be the only judge of his students’ ability.
    During his first lesson, Levanter made a reference to the end of the nineteenth century. Someone asked how a person could tell when one century ended and another began, and no one in the class had an answer. In a class about Trotsky, they wondered how the same man who had founded the workers’ state had so quickly turned into its dangerous enemy.
    To keep their athletic standards as high as their newly imposed ideological ones, all the instructors had to compete every December and March. The widely publicized Ski Instructors’ Championship combined downhill and slalom with jumping and cross-country races. The first time Levanter participated, he was the only skier not born in the region and his entry received a great deal ofattention. He felt he was in good shape and had ample reserves of strength. Confident of his stamina and form, he assumed he would place among the first ten or fifteen skiers in the meet.
    At the start of the cross-country race he was determined not to tire himself in the first few miles. The forty-five participants soon stretched out along the course, and Levanter found himself skiing alone. Toward dusk he arrived at the finish line. The area was deserted: there were no judges, no press and no radio commentators, no other skiers, and no crowds. Levanter realized that he had come in last, but not a soul was waiting for him. He assumed he had lost his way somewhere during the race, and everyone must have thought he had dropped out. That night he talked with some of the others and learned to his dismay that he had not been lost — he was simply that much slower than all the other instructors.
    In his class the next morning, Levanter began with a question. “What, according to Comrade Stalin, are the five factors that determine victory in war?” The instructors, intimidated as usual, sat in gloomy silence. “No