The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  “Only now, on the ride back to the scene, I’d hear a new bump. In my mind it was a man again. Do you know the guilt, believing you’ve killed a man? Even if it wasn’t intentional. Even if you didn’t witness the carnage with your own two eyes. Who wouldn’t it drive mad? The circle grew tighter until, just before you arrived and came after a job with the Home Guard, I almost didn’t make it to my house one night. Six in the morning before I arrived home. Eight hours to drive fifteen miles.”

  A smell rose from the bar as a patron lit a cigar. We could hear each tinkle of each glass touching the next in the cabinet behind the publican. The silence in the absence of an air raid siren was blaring.

  “It happened in the canteen car, too,” Clive continued. “They were shorter drives. I returned to the station on the same routes we’d taken. I would sweat the whole time, convince myself on the way back to the station I would be able to see what I’d hit. Only on my way home, I couldn’t get there. I kept getting into tighter loops.”

  “This all sounds scary, Clive,” I said. “Surely you don’t sound as if you’ve cracked. Your nerves are simply frayed.”

  “I’ve got a theory,” Clive said. “I believe I’ve come to understand the cause of it all, what my mind’s up to. What the world’s up to. Zeno’s paradox. I read philosophy at Oxford. Zeno was a Greek philosopher who held that if you looked at it using math, no physical mass could ever move. He used the example of a bow and arrow. In order for an arrow to hit its target, it’s got to move through space—let’s say ten feet. To get halfway to its target, it must go five feet. Each time the arrow moves across this smaller space, it must get halfway there. It’s mathematically impossible for the arrow ever to get there. It’ll divide in half infinite times without ever crossing the final infinitesimal divide.

  “No one has ever been able to disprove the theory.

  “Maybe I was testing the paradox. Get halfway there, turn around. Here we are now. Siren, all clear. It’s been a year and no bomb has dropped on us. No smoke. No bang. No ash. No rubble.” The men across the way erupted in laughter. My shoulders rose toward my ears. Obsessive Clive Pillsbury just sat there in the wash of his recitation of Zeno’s paradox.

  “I’ll go refill our beer,” I said.

  Air had returned to the room. The publican pulled me a Watney’s. Clive and I clacked beer glass and mug. Some coffee dumped out onto the table. We touched glasses. Those, at least, did meet.

  5.

  During the first weeks of autumn the bombs began to land on East Enders, but not yet on us. Explosions had left thousands homeless and streaming into the city—and left our neighbors with a false sense of stability. Shelters filled. Morrison ordered the tube stations in central London billeted. Communities arose in stations all over the Underground. Londoners were beginning an exodus into their homes, under the streets, which would later find them moving north and east until they were clear of mortal threat.

  At night I walked to the park across from our flat; iron railings of the park’s fence had been stripped during the salvage drive. In the middle of all that verdure, the call of rooks up in their plane trees, past dark, all the people were packed away in their air raid shelters in town or in their Anderson shelters out back. It was as if I had that city to myself. Where my outings to Prague had been comprised of the joy of thousands of people forever rushing at me—I learned that to live life is to lay oneself down to a wave, to feel as best one could the direction the current was flowing and then allow one’s body to go slack and have the wisdom not to fight it lest one drown—London at night during that anxious period of the war was tensile as the thin frozen sheet atop a moving river.

  The air was thick with the dust of debris. Nightly bombings kicked up soot. Where behind closed eyes I once saw each of the faces I’d known in the stones of Prague, now my eyes were abraded by astringent dust. The air was filled with frantic resolve, so that even on a night like this, all thoughts were suffused with mortality. What we were seeing as we drove through those streets was only the beginning of thirty thousand civilian casualties. I came to feel almost ashamed of the fact that still holding sway over my mind was the image of my mother, naked, with her suitor in my father’s immense home. That when I woke at three in the morning with my mind churning, it was churning over that moment when I’d followed my instinct to leave Holland, not having thought of what it would mean to Françoise. What did such things mean now amid falling bombs in London and Rotterdam?

  Well, everything. And nothing. And amid this, marked each day in the papers was not the notation of someone dying in a bombing, but of their having died “very suddenly”: “Thomas Brown of Lancashire died very suddenly Tuesday night”; “Sally Fargo died very suddenly earlier this week. She is survived by…”

  There was no one to bury. How hard it is to believe a life has ended until one sees the body interred. Or the damage done.

  It wasn’t long before Clive Pillsbury and I saw our first bombings firsthand. While people were arriving from the East End, having hitched rides, the two of us took long rides about greater London, surveying the damage and feeding squaddies. In Aldersgate one afternoon, a week after the evening of Clive’s confession, we passed a sandwich shop, its façade open like a cleft palate. A sign affixed to the door, left standing, while the rest of the front had been blown away, read MORE OPEN THAN USUAL.

  “Let’s not stare too long,” Clive said.

  It’d already been cleared of survivors.

  Clive crossed arms over chest.

  As I pulled away Clive turned to look at the building. Something more had been keeping my partner from looking. There was a mannered quality embedded deep in Clive which might have accounted both for his initial refusal to look at that building and the kind of obsessiveness that had led to his Zeno’s paradox madness. It might not be polite to stare at a birth defect, but when I first saw a man with a port-wine stain on his jaw while on a trip to Prague, walking the streets of the city, I had to be taught by my mother to look away. Such tact didn’t come innately. It had to be learned, and it struck me at times that men like Clive had learned the lesson perhaps too well.

  Once we’d gone all the way past, Clive turned forward again. I was surprised to find that there seemed to be a new calm in him. Rather than ramping up his anxiety, seeing the damage firsthand had somehow eased the burden of expectation—as if the anticipation of fear was worse than danger itself.

  “Be much work for a canteen truck now,” he said. “We’d better get some sleep.”

  I watched to see if Clive futzed with his coffee less in the days to follow. Though I can’t be certain—we were now so busy we rarely had a moment to sit for a drink—it seemed to me that he did.

  6.

  Nighttime was a mad dash through black streets. Every night we were out until sunup, plying squaddies with drink and food as they dealt with bombed-out buildings. We skirted brick and broken glass, or some hoary old man in the street who had resolved not to be kept inside by something so trivial as a falling bomb, lucky not to have been hit, either.

  “The fire’s over near London Wall, Poxl,” Clive would say, relaying word from our dispatcher, and then, “Didn’t we just pass our left?” and finally say, “I’m just certain that was the left-hand turn you wanted, Poxl,” and I would proceed as best I could. Bombs were dropping by the dozen. All across London the men of the rescue squads and fire brigades were rushing about, awaiting word from their dispatchers. We had come to wish we were on those teams who arrived first at the bombings. Our work was plagued by a distinct lack of heroism, a distinct lack of action. We followed the squaddies and the firemen, always five or ten minutes behind, ready to provide tea and coffee.

  At home the bombings brought great strain to my cousins. Johana no longer made schnitzel or smazeny syr. She didn’t cook for us, and hardly seemed to eat at all. She hadn’t heard word from her husband in so long, we all assumed he was gone, though we didn’t say it aloud. Hers had been a marriage of conve
nience, and Johana had never valued fidelity, but even as she met other men in London, she grew more and more distant to Niny and me. To this day I don’t understand what emotions drove her then. What distance had been closed in those nights of our holding hands out back in our Anderson shelter began to grow again between us. I came home in late September to find her sitting on the sofa, staring out the window. Something was wrong in the flat. It took a moment to discern: Streetlight shone on her little ceramic spitz.

  “You must keep the curtains closed!” I said. Only months before it had been she who implored me to act in just such a way. I rushed over to close the blackout curtains. “It is imperative we provide no targets for their bombers.”

  “What does it matter?” Johana said. Her bangs stitched her forehead like straw over the vats in our fathers’ leather yard. “Bombs will fall or they won’t.” She made no move to open the curtains again. She made no move to clear her face of her hair. Had Françoise reacted so blithely in the moments before bombs began to fall on Rotterdam? Even having to think of it tightened the muscles in my neck. I pushed the thought out of mind. I had nothing to say to her.

  I found Niny in her room. She had a low light on, reading Dickens.

  “You’ve heard her talk about Scott Pritchard,” Niny said. I had no idea what she was talking about. Whatever closeness we’d come to feel out in that Anderson shelter, Johana didn’t share with me details of her love life. “Johana has fallen in love with an East Ender.” Niny took the novel she was reading and placed it on her bedside table. “His house took a direct hit yesterday. Killed instantly.”

  I walked from Niny’s room to the small bedroom my cousins kept set up for me, and kept clear of Johana in the coming days.

  Steering clear of Johana wasn’t hard, as soon word came of a massive fire in Knightsbridge. Clive’s face evinced a rare agitation. “Let us follow my directions, if just this once, then, Poxl,” he said.

  Up one alleyway and back down the wide avenue, we raced north through the city, when suddenly I was jarred forward. My head smacked windshield, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if the darkness before my eyes was the backs of eyelids, or if it was night.

  “Are you all right, Clive?” I said. I reached to turn on the overhead light. I struck a match and saw that Clive was fine. The refractory glint of glass particles floated in the air between us. Petrol vapors rose from the cab of the truck. The match burned down to my fingers. We were at rest.

  “You’ve a trickle of blood on your forehead,” Clive said. He swabbed at it. A flash of white heat jumped above my left eye.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  We had driven into a bomb crater. That was the end of our Chevy. Its nose was accordioned, and the vehicle tipped at a forty-five-degree angle to the street. Clive had a look of bewilderment. It was the last time I saw him influenced by the weight of outward events.

  When we returned across the river by foot—we had been dispatched from Corbett’s Passage, at the end of London Bridge—there wasn’t much to be said except that the canteen truck had met its demise. Someone would have to clean it up. There was little time for reprimand, for the necessary bodies had to be put to work in the required capacities.

  With our truck permanently removed from service and new needs facing London, Clive and I were shifted to a rescue squad. We spent our first week getting outfitted and then trained. Our squaddie uniforms bespoke pragmatism and officialdom. We wore black tin helmets with a bright white R on front. In the mid-autumn sun they would grow hot to the touch. Mine was heavy on my head, held on by a thin leather strap. We were provided with large blue coveralls, which we wore over our street clothes. In a matter of days we were provided full blue battle dress. I was no longer a disheveled Czechoslovak, alien to the land he’d set foot upon; instead I was a patriotic Briton. We were not on the offensive as were the boys of the Home Guard—but it was a step forward.

  Each rescue squad truck had four rescuers, a driver, and a team leader. I was driver. Clive was team leader. Along with us was a rotating cast of four more men. There were three trucks like mine at Corbett’s Passage—tin-lined mortuary vans fitted with stretchers on their roof racks, with ample room inside for the six of us, equipped with shovels, pickaxes, ropes. Shifts started at eight in the morning. At a newsstand on our first day we watched as a small man Clive and I had often noted for his good humor was out chalking up a new message:

  GERMANS CLAIM 1,000 TONS OF BOMBS ON LONDON. SO WHAT?

  In the following days we were given the end of our first-aid training. By November I passed my exam. We worked twenty-four-hour shifts, riding about the city, waiting for the control center to call out an address. Fire wardens on rooftops all over the city spied blazes, then set off air raid sirens. A call would go to the control center, where they would send an incident officer out to coordinate the efforts of the fire brigade, whose job it was to tend to those who were trapped in the upper floors of the damaged buildings and then to put out the fires. Then we squaddies came to find any people trapped there.

  As the autumn grew cold the Luftwaffe began a new campaign, dropping incendiary bombs, making it ever more important for us to reach bomb sites quickly, before the burning phosphorus gained purchase and set buildings—and bodies—ablaze.

  7.

  Winter descended on London like someone had flipped a switch. One cannot remember until the bone chill of winter has come how frigid air feels—how fifteen degrees Fahrenheit feels when it radiates past your top coat, your skin, into your bones.

  That one must feel to remember.

  We’d been granted moments of autumnal respite: false quiet in the first week of November, days of autumn rain when cloud cover was too dense for Luftwaffe sorties, the quiet of each afternoon before the blackout would go into effect and people retreated into their flats or shelters. I was reminded every day how absent love was in my life on those evenings. Something like that same muscle memory Françoise had told me about overtook the parts of my mind that could love: My hand longed to make a chord on the neck of the guitar, but there was no guitar. And I was the one who’d pawned it, my actions having left me without instrument. Time spent thinking about it was time spent alone, turning over in my mind the moment I’d boarded that ship. But always within a few days the bombs would come at night and drive time for such thoughts from my mind, put off until the years that followed allowed all the time I needed to dwell on such things.

  December brought the heaviest damage to the city yet. Buildings burned for nights on end. We worked following up the fire brigades everywhere we went. Days we assisted with the massive cleanup following each air raid. We were bombed every day for three months by five-hundred-pound explosives, which dropped more frequently than footfalls.

  Christmas week brought a lull. There were few children for people to shop for; they’d been sent north. Shops on Oxford Street made a good show of it anyway. I’d never experienced Christmas in London. Mostly I kept quiet about my Judaism amid the goyim I worked alongside. Given the distinct loneliness and isolation that fact could elicit, in December I went to Johana and Niny’s to celebrate Hanukkah. I’d been spending most nights—after the bombing started in earnest—sleeping at Corbett’s Passage. Once a week I would return to the flat, hoping to see Niny, but even when she was home, she and I were exhausted from our work for the war effort. Our skin prickled from lack of sleep and yearning for Leitmeritz. We seldom talked. When we did, it was formalities on the way to our beds on the few nights I slept there, too exhausted to return to Corbett’s Passage. I would sit before the radio, listening to news of home or Holland, news that could never satisfy the building remorse I felt at having left Françoise behind.

  The first night of Hanukkah, Johana was absent, off sitting her private shiva for Scott Prichard, allowing Niny and me to spend some time alone. Though it was the Festival of Lights, the room in the flat where we celebrated our holiday was dark. Winter was here. Day ended early. With blackout curtains drawn w
e were cast in darkness. Niny lit the shamas. She covered her eyes while she touched match to candle and chanted three baruchas. I hummed along, unafraid of looking straight at the cool, soothing light. Hannukah fire still put me at ease. When the candles were lit, Niny uncovered her eyes. We sat together and played dreidel. It was the first I’d played since my childhood in Leitmeritz.

  “This was in a pile down in the city,” I said. I handed Niny a small box. She unwrapped it to find a pair of silver earrings inlaid with amethyst. I’d found them at the edge of a pile of rubble near Fleet Street. On rescue missions I would sometimes pick up an unclaimed trinket to take home. I’d given her some singed magazines—never anything anyone would miss, only something I’d caught glinting in the morning sun. I would leave those things in Niny’s bedroom. The earrings I’d found a couple of weeks prior were the first thing someone might have missed, but—but Niny deserved them.

  “Oh, thank you, Poxl, thank you,” Niny said. She put her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. It was the first time I’d been touched in a long time, and something jumped in my bones, then settled. I helped her thread them into the delicate holes in her earlobes. The skin of her lobes drew taut. Four small creases appeared at top when the metal pulled down on them. My mind was given over to flashes of home, early memories of my mother, of a ride back north to Leitmeritz from Prague not a decade earlier, the rush of the Elbe calling up into my ears. And of course of Françoise. Had her American, who had promised to be with her and then left her, as I was beginning to see I, too, had, gifted her a necklace, spent quiet time with her? Thinking of her that way returned me to the very jealousy that had driven me from her. Every thought of Françoise was just that complicated: regret and Iago’s green-eyed monster, in lockstep.