The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  Something must have crossed my face. Glynnis said, “Poxl, what is it? I’ve never seen you look so sad. Or happy. I don’t know which.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. I’d never spoken to her of Françoise before, and I wasn’t going to start. “But let’s forget it.” Presently the song changed, and it was past, and we went back to dancing slowly. I’m sure my behavior seemed odd, but neither of us made mention of it again. The cave was so broad and wide most of the sound was lost in the room anyway, or it echoed so that it was as if you were hearing both what was being played and what had been played seconds before, the two lines crossing until it was no longer clear which was which: past or present.

  Glynnis’s hands were in mine. We were dancing slowly. I had to say something, even as the melancholy of my thoughts sat as a residue on my mind.

  “I’m glad you brought me to this place,” I told Glynnis.

  “My mother’s taken to you.”

  “It’s a wise child who knows her mother,” I said, and she held me close.

  13.

  All this life east of the city, amid the protective womb of the cave, might have kept me wholly in its thrall had it not been for the fact that no matter how I’d taken to Glynnis—and I was, I truly was in love with her—roiling under my conscious thoughts I still longed for nothing but to effect change myself. In battle. That nagging didn’t ever leave me. With each passing day, in fact, it grew. While Mrs. Goldring and I read of Macduff headed off for Dunsinane, or found Hamlet taking up arms to avenge the death of his father, I still thought subconsciously of those RAF pilots who were at that very moment dropping bombs on the Reich. While we were away in the east, dancing the fox-trot in the relative dark of a cave ballroom, I was able to push out of my conscious thoughts that London was being bombed, potentially to her ruin.

  But as I said, those were just days between the long weeks when Clive and I still scoured the streets for bombed buildings. When I went to visit her, Niny was beginning to bear signs of fatigue. I would find her in her room for entire evenings, just reading and unwilling to talk. Johana’s grief at the loss of Scott Prichard had negated even the existence of her husband, Vaclav, whom Niny told me had now not written in a year himself; we were beginning quietly to feel certain he hadn’t survived his stint on the eastern front. And Johana’s grief at the loss of the man she’d seen more recently seemed only to grow with time.

  In addition to the effect of those bombs falling upon us, word came of deportations of Jews all across Eastern Europe. On one long hiatus from both work and the cave, a letter arrived from the longtime foreman of Brüder Weisberg, whom Niny had written. He’d been kept on after the factory was wrested from my father. The letter was addressed to the three of us.

  I do not see reason to reproduce verbatim this morbid letter here. I’d never heard back from anyone in Rotterdam. Now I was hearing from Leitmeritz instead. The foreman at our fathers’ factory stated quite directly that my mother had been sent to Terezin. She was sent on from there to her death, as we later learned, in the slow brown fields somewhere in western Poland. My father had been taken along with his brother Rudy—father to Johana and Niny—to Terezin, as well. The camp was just three miles south of my hometown of Leitmeritz. It was all too easy for the SS officers to liquidate the population of that small city.

  I will not attempt to reproduce the conversation between my cousins and me in the hours and days after the arrival of that letter. Each of us read it and left it on the dining room table as evidence for the others that it had been read.

  I walked out to the park across from our flat and sat on a bench. I watched the sparrows fly up into their eaves. I didn’t know I was crying until I saw on the faces of those who passed a mixture of concern and distaste—everyone in London during that period was suffering losses.

  The thing was to press on.

  Knowing my mother was gone came, in the days to follow, to feel like the loss of the very need for love. Like never wanting intimacy again. Like those Londoners I’d been observing amid falling bombs, it was my desire to withdraw. What was I doing reading books with some other Mother when my Mother had ended? My parents were the firmament in which the sun sat, and I could see now that was true whether they glowed as one or in separate vectors. I’d been angry upon finding her with my father’s cuckold, sure—but some part of me assumed I’d see her again. That there would be time for reckoning, time for the airing of emotions and grievances. I didn’t know until this moment I’d felt that way. Now it was clear. There was something petulant in my flight from Leitmeritz. I could now see that there was something more than petulant in my flight from Rotterdam, from Françoise. I’d learned to run when problems arose, rather than meeting them head-on. Now there would be no reckoning—not in Leitmeritz, nor anywhere else. Knowing my mother had met her end was like imagining every star in the sky blotted out by some small boy with a pin whose touch extinguishes each light.

  She now existed only in memory.

  So picture me later that week as I received the foreman’s letter—instead of on a train east with Glynnis, whose calls I refused, riding aboard a bus bound for Piccadilly Circus, riding amid the burgeoning rubble of central London, inching up to an old woman and peering at her head: Would I suffer the disappointment of seeing her ear not pierced, bearing no amber earrings, wrinkled and foreign? Or might I have the glory of seeing that after seventy years of life, forty of them during which her ear bore the weight of heavy jewelry, she might have that same slit I’d once fondled in my mother’s lobe? He who chanced upon me staring at his large work-stained hands and seeking my father in them—what do you think he thought of me? He scowled and looked away, that father with a thousand Polonius faces. He did not know that like the Bard himself seeking his damaged father in every glove maker in the London to which he’d just arrived, I sought my Czechoslovak father and evidence of his leather work.

  Soon something began to change in me.

  I called on Glynnis again. When I saw her I did not mention news of my mother. She and I made love in the same quiet way we always had, but now some small part of me was held in abeyance. There was an odd comfort in being with Glynnis now, perhaps a greater comfort than I’d ever felt with a woman, for where once I found need in being with her, now I felt only the physical pleasure that passes like top waters over the current drawing down in the depths. Now I did not feel the desire to read plays in caves in rural areas. I did not seek a weekend pass to return to the caves. I can see looking back on it that digging my heels in, meeting my problems head-on, might have led me to stay in London, remain by Glynnis’s side. But in those days after that letter, it meant something different to me. It meant meeting the German advance head-on. It meant no longer rescuing those who’d been wronged—but acting to stop from their needing rescue to begin with.

  I returned again and again to the RAF recruitment office in Southwark.

  So, maybe I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps the loss of my parents was like living in a city for many long years and never leaving. You have lived a rural life as a child, and walked off into the woods to stare up at the sky. It wouldn’t make sense to say you loved or didn’t love the stars, only that you knew nothing would change them.

  They were stars.

  Now you live in the city. War has driven you there, war and your own capriciousness. Every night you go about your business: drink, succeed, fail; take in live music—save lives volunteering in a war effort. You do everything that might fulfill one with even the noblest ambitions. But you never again leave the city. Overhead is an eternal pink glow, light that never dims past a point, a phenomenon some might call light pollution but which is the only thing that sustains you. At four in the morning, you have left a pub. You are, quite frankly, drunk. Have been for days. To placate you, above: pink sky, never not pink.

  Then one day, rather than taking some leisure in the woods to the east, rather than the ease of a woman’s bed, you take to the sky in an aeroplane. You are airbor
ne, it is night, below you the glowing white clouds—and above, where once there were stars all across the firmament, now there is only blackness. That void carries a memory of stars, of the way you once felt them guide you … perhaps you even remember, before it has happened, a time when, lost in the night’s sky on a training run, you feared you would not survive your flight, and only upon finding the Dipper, its pointing you to the North Star, were you able to make it back to base. Only now the night is black, and all along, that pink urban shelter you were confined to kept you from knowing that for all those years, the stars were fading from the sky. And you remember a time when you dropped bombs on cities, destroying them beyond resurrection, and all you could see below you were clouds. While you might have known but not understood that you were destroying what lay below you, now there aren’t even stars above.

  14.

  Here’s one thing I learned from reading with Mrs. Goldring before I took my leave of her daughter: When Hamlet asks Yorick how long a body lies in the ground before it rots, the first clown replies, “… eight year or nine year. A tanner will last you nine year.” When Hamlet asks, “Why he more than another?” the response comes this way: “Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade that it will keep out water a great while, and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.”

  Was my father a difficult Jew to kill, to bury, to cremate? Had his skin so toughened that even once the life was snuffed from him, he wouldn’t cede his toehold on this craggy wall, his thick, tanned hide failing to succumb to the flames of the crematorium where he was kilned? Was his death different if he proved a tough Jew to burn?

  After the war I read many of the books that were written during those times. I was later to gain mastery over the Shakespeare plays I had only begun to read with Mrs. Goldring in those days before I left for flight training, enough to teach those plays to interested students. Before that I read the histories of our times, the modernist literature produced during my youth. T. S. Eliot, as I say, had himself been a fire watcher during those days of the Blitz, and I read every word of his “Little Gidding,” which will always evoke those days for me.

  After the war ended—long after I’d decided to drop bombs of my own on Germany, to fight a war thrust upon me that the side I was on was now winning—I learned that John Milton’s bones were vaporized on the last major Luftwaffe offensive of 1940, the night Clive Pillsbury and I met Glynnis Goldring. We never saw those bones, just as I never saw my parents’ remains or the obsequies for them. I didn’t even know what had become of Françoise. But that very same night Milton’s bones were done away with, before that final pub where Clive and I went with Glynnis, we had just passed a cemetery when I felt compelled to return to it. I wanted to make sure I’d seen what I thought I’d seen. I got down on one knee and picked it up. Shaken loose of its rest, and lying upon the grass, was a dirt-encrusted bone. A femur. A human femur.

  If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

  The Germans were going to kill even our dead unless we were to do something about it.

  15.

  Those late days of the Blitz, my hunger to engage German soldiers gained full purchase over my mind. Glynnis and I would meet in the evenings and engage in a particular kind of intimacy—and even for the pleasure she brought me, even knowing I was in love with her, it was as if that love appeared to me through a newfound scrim. I longed to join up more than before.

  “What is it, Poxl?” Glynnis would say as we lay in the half-light of her kerosene lamp.

  “What is it?”

  “Yes! Yes. You aren’t looking at me. You don’t look at me.”

  I stared at the ceiling. Then I did look at her.

  “It’s what I’ve said before,” I said. “It’s fine being a squaddie. But they need to put me to use. If I could just get in a plane, I could be of use.”

  Glynnis lay back and she did not say aloud that my joining up, should it happen, would mean we would see each other less—and who knew the consequence beyond that. If ever there was a moment to tell her about Françoise, about my parents, this was it, and looking back now I can see it might have changed things, might at least have given her a sense of what was on my mind. I cannot say exactly why I did not tell her. I can only say that I didn’t. No matter what had changed in me, when I looked at her, in that moment, I couldn’t deny she was wonderful to look at. The way her plump cheeks pressed up against mine was almost enough to draw from me a confession of my letter from that Czech foreman. An explanation of my keeping from taking trips to the cave. A confession of nights out alone drinking. A divulgence of my time in Rotterdam that could have helped me see what I’d done in leaving.

  Almost.

  Regardless, when Glynnis asked me to go to the cave with her I now refused—for reasons that actually had nothing to do with her and everything to do with her mother, I did not make another trip east with her. I did not talk to her about my parents, and I would not. At Corbett’s Passage, my bunk was too hard. Back in Bermondsey the ceiling was too low, too close to us. The tiptoe of shadow touched and lifted up there.

  “It’s nothing,” I said when she asked, over and over again, what was wrong, and I made her believe me.

  16.

  Every day I went to Southwark to attempt to enlist in the RAF.

  Luftwaffe bomb on Rotterdam; I was gone.

  Luftwaffe bomb in the East End; cousin Johana’s Briton had been done in.

  What was there to do?

  What there was for me to do was to fly a plane and take out the Luftwaffe myself.

  I tried to impress upon the recruiters at RAF reception that even given the faults they perceived in my English, I had experience flying planes with my father at his aero club outside of Prague. I was twenty-one and desperate; I was a Jew looking to kill Nazis. I would be most effective killing Nazis in an aeroplane fitted with Browning guns and blockbuster bombs. Early on, I received only a strong endorsement of my work in the rescue squad (more pat on the head than pat on the back) and a nebulous invitation to try back sometime later.

  Then Clive was inducted into the RAF. It was early fall, fully a year since the Blitz had begun. By this time he was seeing my cousin Niny only once every couple weeks. Although Clive wasn’t deemed fit to have joined early on in the war, we began to hear on the radio that Bomber Harris was ramping up a full-scale retaliation for the Blitz, that Bomber Command was building bombers and fighters faster than they could sign up young men to crash them. Clive arrived at Niny’s flat to say he was to enter pilot training the following day. He and Niny hadn’t consummated their relationship, hadn’t brought it past a flirtation, the early stages of courtship.

  Now it was a courtship ended.

  He didn’t even look at her as he left the flat—his obsessive personality was focused on his new path. This was how relationships might begin and end at that point in our lives: One kind of man might, in the moment before he was to leave for assignment, motor around the countryside with his woman, and though they’d only known each other for a matter of months, ask her to marry him.

  Clive was very much not that kind of man.

  Two months later, a change at 10 Downing in the laws pertaining to the employment of nonnaturalized citizens flying for the Royal Air Force made it so I was accepted as well. Should I be shot down over the Reich, I wouldn’t be long for the world. I wouldn’t be protected by any POW laws, a Czechoslovak Jew flying for the RAF.

  “So, young chap, keeping this name Leopold Weisberg on your passport won’t do,” the inception officer told me. What name should I take instead? “Peter West is more appropriately a British name for a pilot in the RAF, don’t you guess?”

  So though I would never in my life have anyone call me Peter, I took West as my new surname. If they had to call me Poxl West—if this would allow me to pilot Spitfires and engage in battle with Luftwaffe Junkers and Messerschmitts—then this is what they would call me.

  With a new name and my knowledge of plane
s from my time with my father in an airstrip outside of Prague, I enlisted. I went down to Guy’s Hospital to tell Glynnis of the news. I found her at her bed checks.

  “What is it, Poxl?” Glynnis said.

  “I’ve finally gotten it,” I said.

  She tapped at a saline drip attached to a man’s arm. On the windowsill behind that bed was a single hollyhock stalk, with three carmine blossoms pointing in three different directions. Hollyhocks do not give off an aroma. Glynnis did not hold my eyes with hers. The only smell in the room was the smell of iodine.

  I was so elated in that moment of being accepted to flight training I’d not given real thought to how Glynnis would take it. She looked up from the serum dripping through the line she was fixing and I saw that tears wet her face. A black ant was crawling around the green stalk behind that hollyhock bloom.

  “Careful to fly well up there,” Glynnis said. The ant crawled around that hollyhock stalk. I couldn’t bear to look at it. I raised my eyes to the red blossom. “What will become of me down here? You in the air. Me underground with Mother.”

  “You’ll go about your nursing,” I said. “London is safer now. Perhaps Mrs. Goldring will even come home.”