People in this town know the man with the stooped, halting walk and the burning eyes. They point out his house, and they talk about “what he did” and about how they admire “what he did” and wonder if they too would have the strength to do “what he did.”

This is what Vitaly Kaloyev did: After his wife and children were killed in a plane crash in 2002, he stalked the air traffic controller who was on duty all the way to Switzerland, knocked on the man’s front door and stabbed him to death with a pocketknife.

“I don’t really take offense at people who call me a murderer. People who say that would betray their own children, their own motherland,” Kaloyev said. “I protected the honor of my children and the memory of my children.”

By the time Kaloyev walked out of a Swiss prison and made an emotional return to this city spread in the icy shadows of the Caucasus Mountains late last year, his crime had been eclipsed by his fame and a social split over his significance. Some Russians cheer Kaloyev as a national hero, a “real man.” Others are appalled by his celebrity status, which they believe highlights the worst tendencies of Russian nationalism.


Kaloyev’s story is a postmodern tragedy, a tale of loss and vengeance, but also of clashing cultures -- of the deeply humanistic, man-to-man world of the Caucasus crashing confusedly into the sterilized, legalistic culture of big Western companies facing expensive lawsuits.

Although he says he blacked out and can’t remember attacking 36-year-old Peter Nielsen, Kaloyev doesn’t deny killing him, nor is he sorry for the man’s death. Even in the earliest days of his grief, Kaloyev admits, he fixated on Nielsen, the only controller on duty when the plane carrying Kaloyev’s family crashed into another plane in midair. Within two days of the crash, he had tracked down the air traffic controller’s name and neighborhood. He knew that Nielsen had two children, and that his wife was pregnant with a third child.

In 2004, after a sensationalistic trial in Switzerland visited by luminaries from his home republic of North Ossetia, Kaloyev was sentenced to eight years in prison. But after high-level lobbying from the Russian government, he was set free three years later on the order of Switzerland’s highest court.

When he arrived in Moscow, youths from Kremlin-orchestrated groups lined the roads for a hero’s welcome. Back home in Vladikavkaz, sympathetic shop clerks wouldn’t take his money. He was named “Man of 2007" by local journalists. And last month, the government of North Ossetia gave the former construction designer a cushy perch as deputy minister of construction.


“When you see him in public, you can see that a real man is walking,” said Taimuraz Khutiyev, deputy head of the elders association of North Ossetia. “What he did was very prestigious for the country. . . . It was an act of heroism.”

Hundreds of handwritten letters have poured in from all corners of Russia and from the Russian diaspora as far away as Australia.

“You are an ideal for me,” wrote Svetlana from Moscow. “If it were up to me, I’d put the entire world at your feet. If more people were like you, the world would be a better place.”

Other Russians are aghast. “Murderer named deputy construction minister,” ran a headline last month on Yandex.ru, a popular Russian news website.


“We live in a very sick society,” said Dmitry Oreshkin, lead researcher at Moscow’s Institute of Geography.

“This is the clan mentality which Stalin successfully instilled in the minds of our ancestors and our people,” he said. “And now the current authorities are appealing deliberately again to this primitive and barbarian psychology.”

Kaloyev reads every piece of fan mail, keeps the letters carefully bundled and gratefully receives his many visitors. He still lives in the house he designed for his family, an elaborate brick three-story with pear, cherry and plum trees in the walled garden. This winter the rooms are cold and empty; portraits of the dead stare down from the walls. The children’s beds and crib stand forlornly in drafty upstairs rooms, still scattered with dolls and stuffed animals.

After Kaloyev’s homecoming, his older sister moved into the house to keep him company. His friends and family conspire to smother him with companionship at all hours; they stay up smoking and drinking with him, drive to the graveyard with him, as if they are afraid he could not stand the thoughts he might think if left on his own. He shuns psychotherapy, and religion, he says, is “not for me.”


In the summer of 2002, Kaloyev was working in Spain, building a house for a wealthy Russian. His family set out to join him for a vacation: his 44-year-old wife, Svetlana; his 10-year-old son, Konstantin; and his 4-year-old daughter, Diana.

Their flight was almost entirely full of schoolchildren headed off on an organized trip to Spain. In the skies over Germany, the passenger plane collided with a cargo plane. All 71 people aboard both aircraft were killed.

Although it was German airspace, the traffic was being monitored from Switzerland, where Nielsen was manning two workstations at the same time. The airplanes were less than a minute away from crashing by the time he realized they were on a collision course.

Kaloyev was waiting in the Barcelona airport when, suddenly, the arrival lounge was flooded with reporters.


“I got the news from journalists,” he recalled, picking at fried mutton steaks and swallowing down shots of vodka at his kitchen table. “I couldn’t believe it.”

He paused and poured a little vodka onto his plate in memory of his children.

For the next two years, Kaloyev hounded officials from Skyguide, a Swiss airspace control company. He insists that he was after only something simple: an apology. He wanted somebody to sit with him, look him in the eyes and take responsibility for the loss of his family. In his culture, this is the minimum courtesy a man would expect.

But the apology was not forthcoming. Skyguide had a government investigation pending and court cases on the way. The company was haggling behind closed doors over compensation payouts; legal wrangling over the crash continues to this day.


When Kaloyev was told to be patient, he felt rebuffed. When he was reminded of the money he would be paid, he was insulted. He was convinced too that he was being treated shabbily because he is Russian.

“It matters if you’re Russian. All the people in Western Europe or the United States, they feel some suspicion, some enmity, because you’re Russian,” he said. “I understood that Russia was incapable of protecting its citizens at that time, and that hurt me a lot.”

Rage grew inside him, and he kept thinking about Nielsen. One day, he went to the bus stop near Nielsen’s house but turned back. Then one afternoon, he couldn’t stand it anymore.

He went to Nielsen’s house and knocked on the door. He carried an envelope stuffed with graphic pictures of his dead children -- bruised, disfigured, sewn together and lain out in their coffins.


When Nielsen opened the door, Kaloyev remembers saying in German, “I am from Russia.” He made a gesture with his hand, he says, indicating that he wanted to be invited inside.

But Nielsen stepped outside, slammed the front door shut behind him and motioned for Kaloyev to go away, he says. Kaloyev tried to press the envelope on Nielsen, but, he says, the air traffic controller knocked them impatiently away. To Kaloyev, the sight of the pictures fluttering to the ground was unbearable.

“My last thought was that he threw my dead children out of their caskets,” Kaloyev said.

After that, he said, “everything went black in my eyes.”


Kaloyev says he doesn’t remember anything until he was back at the hotel. His first memory, he says, is of taking out the envelope of his children’s pictures and realizing that it was splattered with blood. He looked down and saw that he too was covered with blood.

The next day, police arrived at his hotel.

Kaloyev went first to a psychiatric institution and later to a Swiss prison with a pond and gardens. He compares it to a resort and loftily dismisses the other prisoners as drug dealers and murderers.

Kaloyev remains wholly remorseless about the murder he committed.


“He’s nobody to me. He’s nobody to me,” he said in a voice hard as granite. “He was an idiot and that’s why he paid for it with his life. If he’d been smarter, it wouldn’t have been like this. If he’d invited me into the house, the conversation would have happened in softer tones and the tragedy might not have happened.”

“I think about his children,” he said the following day, smoking one Marlboro after another as morning sunlight flooded his kitchen. “They’re growing up healthy, full of life. His wife is happy with her children. The grandparents are happy with the grandchildren. Who am I happy with?”

Nielsen’s family has moved back to their native Denmark and “started a new life,” a Skyguide spokesman said. Asked about the enthusiastic welcome that greeted Kaloyev in Russia, the spokesman, Patrick Herr, said tersely, “We’ve watched that too.

“So many people were hurt in the aftermath of this accident and this killing. So many things were said,” Herr said. “Now is the moment to bring calm.”


Here in Vladikavkaz, Kaloyev celebrated his 52nd birthday last month. The phone jangled with one well-wisher after the next, officials and dignitaries calling in their respects. Meat fried on the stove, and his family gathered around the kitchen table to drink shots of vodka and glasses of champagne, taking turns rising to their feet to toast Kaloyev.

They toasted him in the name of St. George. They toasted his homecoming, his individualism and the years ahead.

“To your health, Vitaly,” the voices rang in the warm kitchen. “To your health.”

--


megan.stack@latimes.com