The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  “Your eyes adjust as much as they can,” Niny said. “In the end you can’t see a thing. Just a dim blue bulb when you reach your station.”

  She unwrapped the tissue from her foot to reveal a half inch of flesh lifted off her big toe. The bleeding had stopped, but it was still a mess. I took her into the kitchen and washed it.

  “I’m happy to have you here,” she said.

  The hand on my shoulder gripped tight. Then, with her toe freshly wrapped, Niny was off to the kitchen, where she prepared Wiener schnitzel as we ate it back home, enough for Johana, too, as well as some cucumber sandwiches with cream cheese on soft white bread. Amid rationing for the war, these were luxuries. I was telling her of my trip from Rotterdam when the jingling of keys signaled Johana’s arrival.

  “Well, out with it, then,” she said as soon as she’d settled into her seat at the table. “Let’s hear all about the fun you had in your protected Netherlands while we were here, awaiting the next trauma.”

  Johana was a small, ruddy-cheeked woman in her mid-twenties whose husband, Vaclav, had sent her to London with her sister while he stayed in Prague to see to his work at Brüder Weisberg, all with the empty promise that he’d travel to London when he could. Johana and I never got on when we were children. Now here she was in London, an adult. She wiped her hands on her napkin.

  “I said out with it, Poxl,” she repeated.

  “There are many stories to tell of Holland,” I said. But I didn’t tell any. My cheeks burned with a longing to be alone with Niny. Ugly embroidered pillows covered the threadbare sofas in the flat. In the corner, Johana’s ceramic spitz was looking on at us.

  “You are in London now, and you must speak English,” Johana said. “Speak German here and they’ll think you’re a Fifth Columner. Send you off to be interned.”

  I hadn’t even noticed I was speaking German. Niny seemed to agree there was some sense in this. So in what English I had I told them of my passage across the North Sea. Then silence ensued. I broke it to inquire after what they knew of my parents and theirs. Niny told me they knew nothing of them.

  They hadn’t heard a word in weeks.

  2.

  The early spring of 1940 found me using every method I could at the Leathersellers College to tan hundreds of pieces of leather. Away from my father I was at once home again—and the farthest I’d ever been from it. In the glowing eggshell light of the model tannery, I stood alone with hide that bore the old Brüder Weisberg death smell. My nose had learned to know death long before my eyes ever did. Bristles poked at my hands as they had back at the factory. Shivers at once pleasant and dour rippled over my skin.

  One afternoon in those first days I came upon a newsstand where the front page of the Evening Standard read LOWLANDS TAKEN; ROTTERDAM BOMBED; NETHERLANDS HITLER’S. German troops, the story below it told, had descended on Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. Dutch warplanes engaged in dogfights with Luftwaffe planes, which were dropping bombs all over Rotterdam.

  I’d missed the invasion by only a matter of weeks.

  Now that city lay in ruins, an untold number of its citizens killed.

  German troops were parachuting into the streets.

  I rushed home, but what was I rushing for? The flat was empty. Nothing I could do at that moment would allow me to undo the decisions I’d made. My first thought was of course that Françoise might be dead—she and all her friends. My second was a flash of Françoise alone in those tulip fields we’d gone to together, playing her mandolin. Where did she think I’d gone? Then my anger at watching her at her work returned. Probably I thought then it was best I’d left. That I’d not been there during the bombings. But if Françoise was dead—some part of me felt that even in leaving Holland, even leaving in such a huff, one day I might be with her again. What had I done? I’d never lost someone so close. Janos Heider committed suicide when we were in sixth form, but my parents hadn’t taken me to the funeral. I’d been to my grandfather’s funeral, but I was too small to remember it.

  Neither of them was to me what Françoise was. What had become of the Café le Monde? The Brauns down on Heemraadssingel? The only thing I could do was write a letter. I sat down to draft one—not to Françoise, but to Herr Braun. I asked if they were okay, let them know they were in my thoughts. If Françoise was okay and she wanted to contact me, she would surely learn of this letter and get in touch.

  While I was drafting this morbid letter Niny arrived home. She instantly recognized my distress. She put her hand on my shoulder and let me write my letter. Later that evening she came to my room, and I told her of my history with Françoise.

  “So easy to fall in love,” Niny said. “You always were. I’m sorry, Poxl.” She seemed to understand the pain I was in. She looked off out the window. It wasn’t yet dark. The blackout curtains were still open. Light slanted in and lifted my mood. “But when you left, you must really have been hurting.”

  “I was,” I said.

  “You weren’t even thinking of what she must have thought when she found you gone.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  We both sat back in our chairs and looked at each other. Niny took up the newspaper I’d brought home. I could see that she wanted to continue, to bring home to me what I’d done, but that she could tell how distraught I was already.

  “Half the city’s buildings destroyed in one day,” she said. “That’s not half the people, Poxl. It’s buildings. Two wholly different things.” As she spoke I watched the motes in the slanting light. “You’ll wait to see if you get a letter back. Meantime, you’ll have no choice but to continue on.”

  There was a sound at the door. Johana had returned. She looked in on us but didn’t say anything. Niny left me alone, too, after kissing me on the forehead. I heard Johana in the kitchen opening cabinets and closing them. Not long after she’d started banging around in there I caught a whiff of a smell so familiar that it carried with it memories: my mother’s face; amber earrings clacking against each other; the thin fog of cloud as it surrounded my head in my father’s small propeller plane; the dark purple outline of Radobyl in the near distance. Johana came into the room with a plate of fried cheese. She put it down in front of me.

  Smazeny syr.

  During the weeks that followed I heard on the radio that Holland had capitulated before the Luftwaffe had begun bombing—the queen had, like me, fled to London. The last few Dutch pilots turned west and kept right on flying across the North Sea until they, too, landed on British soil. It was as if everyone in Rotterdam was absconding for the UK. Still no word came from the Brauns, and no word from Françoise, either. Perhaps now she didn’t even want to hear from me. It had felt powerful, the regaining of some propriety, leaving for London when I had. Now I was entirely powerless even to know what Françoise was thinking—if she was even alive.

  My mind was given over to thoughts of flying. Each BBC report of the overwhelming power of the Luftwaffe made me think of the planes I’d flown with my father outside of Prague.

  A new idea set in for me.

  I could fly.

  It was a matter of figuring out how to enlist.

  There in London, Churchill took over. The next week, 300,000 British soldiers evacuated Dunkirk. Londoners settled into routines. Those with means sent their children out of the city for fear of bombings. I rode my bicycle up to Downing Street and watched as buildings on Whitehall were plied with sandbags. Soldiers put up Browning machine guns. We were lucky to have the freedom to observe it: Many of the Jews who had arrived from points east were now being detained in refugee camps on the Isle of Wight. But since Johana and Niny had established themselves, we were lucky to be spared that burden.

  3.

  One morning in early June a pamphlet came to our door. It was entitled What Can You Do If the Invasion Comes? I arrived at a section entitled “How to Protect Oneself While Walking About,” then this pair of sentences:

  “In Holland, Dutch soldiers were gunned down in the streets b
y German soldiers. Be certain to have your wits about you, and if you see your own soldiers engaged in battle, do steer clear of them.”

  And so I took to the streets of central London to seek out an enlistment office. If it wasn’t hard enough for me to get around this new city already, street signs had been removed now, so if a German attack accompanied an invasion, the soldiers would have a hard time navigating London. Pillboxes went up all around the city disguised as huts or petrol stations. They disoriented me, obfuscating the few landmarks I’d come to recognize. I rode my bicycle across London Bridge and applied for work with the Civil Defense Department. There was a limited amount I could do in the active war effort as a refugee.

  By mid-August, when I stopped, as I did every day, to check in with the Civil Defense Department, I was offered a job driving a mobile canteen. This was not yet joining the RAF. Driving a truckful of potables was not countering Luftwaffe planes. But it was a first step.

  My Czechoslovak passport declared me Class C, “friendly alien,” and though back at the end of May, Churchill had had all the Austrian and German refugees interned, I was hired. My canteen was a Chevrolet truck donated to Bermondsey by the people of the American city of Chicago. In the bed of this truck was a small superstructure we would load up with food and drive out to the Home Guardsmen and the ack-ack operators, who had yet to fire their flak at Luftwaffe planes.

  My first week at the job, I was partnered with Clive Pillsbury, a lank Brit in his mid-twenties. His face was blanched save for scattered freckles across his nose and the upper parts of his cheeks. He had the face of a teenager, the manner of a much older man, and he was possessed of a gravity and wit that made him a welcome companion.

  That first day we went out together on the streets of London I was forced to depend upon him for directions. I studied the city maps, marking the main avenues, but I was hopeless. “This right here on Oxford Street—no, right, make a right,” Clive would yell. “A left here. Poxl, a left, my boy. Oh, we’ve missed it again, then. Mightn’t we consider trying to find another driver?”

  I looked at him.

  “I know, I know, my license and all. But it will be something if we’re able to get there. And now—there—no, you’ve missed it again.”

  “Why don’t you have the wheel yourself?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond, only turned a bright red at the skin above his collar.

  “Drive on, then,” he said.

  I had been told by our dispatcher that Clive had lost his license after driving the better part of the previous year, all throughout the Phoney War, until an unfortunate drunken incident left him unable to drive. I hadn’t learned what kept Clive from driving, but I assumed I was better off not pushing it. The subject of driving was a sore one for irascible Clive.

  While I became inured to our paths across London, we found ourselves circling neighborhoods. British planes were fighting the Luftwaffe on the coast, and our charge gained urgency. Where wounded soldiers had been spotted returning through Waterloo Station after Dunkirk end of May, now homeless suburbanites trickled into the city for respite.

  “We shall get used to it in time,” people would say. “Business as usual.”

  At night a pink glow rose from the southeast. Bombs hadn’t yet fallen on London proper. In the evenings, Clive and I would drink. Clive’s self-control in the public houses made the story I’d heard about him losing his license even more suspect. He was completely self-possessed. His secret to holding his liquor: Every three pints of bitter, he would drink a cup of coffee—ersatz coffee, amid rationing, but it was a drink he preferred to the tea his fellow Brits commonly drank. I took to having a cup myself amid all the drinking, coming to like the rectitude implied by such routine.

  4.

  When we heard the sound of the air raid siren at home—the sound of a couple hundred banshees all letting their voices cry upward and downward to signal that bombers were soon to be overhead—we dropped what we were doing and huddled in the Anderson shelter out back. It brought me and my cousins a new closeness, an ease like we’d had back in Leitmeritz. And something new. We would sit together, imagining this could be our last moment on earth. And something changed in us. Johana would let her fingers grip mine while her other hand gripped Niny’s. We weren’t children, cramped together in a tiny metal shelter, awaiting Luftwaffe bombs. We weren’t adults, either. We were three cousins pressed together, not knowing what would come next, unable to predict what the next second held for us.

  Those self-same banshee cries came to define much of that autumn for us—for all of us in London at the time. One night the first week of September, Clive and I sat in a pub near Bermondsey. Another air raid siren went off. I tipped my beer back before turning for the exit. But this was not the proper comportment. As they did each time the sirens went off, as I’d soon realized the previous spring, the bar’s patrons remained seated. This might seem the kind of apocryphal story those who’ve been through war tell once it’s long over, misremembering or embellishing somehow. I can attest to the fact it was this very attitude that allowed the war to continue until Luftwaffe attacks could be subdued.

  Here at Smithwick’s Pub with Clive Pillsbury, I found myself sitting in a bar whose windows might implode with lethal shards, whose stone walls might fall and crush us. But we weren’t going anywhere. Conversation in the bar continued as if we were a group of thanes all pretending not to notice the king in heated argument with an invisible ghost. Whole notes of the air raid siren rose and dipped. No one changed his demeanor. The barkeep pulled me a Whitbread. I returned to our table. Clive sat with his coffee. He went about trying to create the admixture of milk and coffee, while all the time the sound of the siren rose and fell. Three times Clive filled his mug to the point of overflowing, then sent it back. Though he made a mess of his place at the table, Clive was repelled by disorder. Coffee drew ever more toward the top, the liquid topped off at the lip of the mug, and his hands would work—first milk, then spoon in after. His eyes never left the mug. He was at this business, the two of us ignoring the sirens, when suddenly he stood.

  “I’m off to the lav,” he said. The sirens continued. I know now that bar was never hit by a bomb. But I still sat waiting for the roof to crush me. What would happen when glass shattered? When the world ended for me with no one even by my side to witness it? Clive returned. The siren stopped and we sat through minutes of silence. Later in the war we would hear dogfights overhead. But this had not occurred yet. We heard nothing but Glenn Miller playing on the radio. Then a higher-pitched cry, all one high C note: the all clear.

  We were quiet again for a moment before Clive’s confession came. It came all at once. He said, “No one ever thinks that he’s anything but the best behind the wheel. They all think they’re the best driver in London.

  “Bollocks.”

  Around us people returned to speaking at normal volume.

  “Everyone gets a tad crazy behind the wheel,” Clive continued. He still had not lifted his eyes from the lip of the mug. “Me, I get angry while driving, sure, but I never see red. I see black. I get blind. I come to lose myself.”

  This was the talk of a man who speaks more the more nervous he becomes. I noted this strange progression: He’d been in perfect command of himself during the threat of a raid, but now that that was past, something changed. Rills of coffee the color of river silt were spilling all over the sides of his mug. I looked around for a waiter but he was with the barkeep sipping a Watney’s.

  “It wasn’t seeing black kept me from driving,” Clive said. He continued to look down into his coffee. “Do they tell the story around the station, then?”

  “What story?”

  “‘What story?’” Clive mocked. “What do you think? I can see it all over your face. The story of how Clive Pillsbury isn’t driving the canteen truck because he cracked.”

  “People say you were drunk.”

  “Too much drink has kept me from driving?” he said. “If only.
A few too many whiskies, a man recovers in a day.” At a corner table a squat man with a gleaming head told a joke that kept his two companions laughing. A crescendo had been building in the minutes since the all clear. Clive was sopping away at his mug, into which now he continued to pour milk from the small pitcher at its side.

  “Might be good to take a sip if you don’t want to spill over any more,” I said.

  Clive’s cheeks flushed.

  “‘Might be good to,’” he said.

  For the second time in five minutes he’d mocked me—and the second time he’d ever done so.

  “It might do to take a sip, Poxl. But I can’t. Same reason I can’t drive the truck.” He fell silent again. “You see, I get in this way so I can’t do a thing.”

  “Can’t do a thing?” I said.

  “Like with this cup of coffee here.” Clive looked down at his mug and then put a finger to its rim. “For a long time I knew how I liked my coffee. I knew it more and more, until I could drink it only if it was the right combination.” I told him that everyone has a way he likes his coffee. “Not like this,” Clive said. “I can see the color without tasting it: caramel, only not. September clouds, only not gray. And this”—Clive was pointing down at his coffee—“is not right.”

  “One time I’d gotten into my car at the end of a long day,” Clive said after a pause. “As I was driving I thought I’d hit something. Could have been a dog. I drove back. There was nothing. The next week it happened again. This time I was sure I’d hit something. Still, I got half a mile from it before turning back.

  “Nothing.

  “A couple of days later I thought I’d hit something again. This time I decided I must not have. I got ten miles away before I turned back and found nothing there.

  “It began to happen more and more. The bump would stick in mind until, when I got back to the location of the first incident, my mind had made it into a human-size bump. Even when it was a man I’d thought I’d hit, I’d convinced myself I’d hit nothing. I would almost get home. Then, a hundred yards from my door, I’d go back.