The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  Over the previous six months, Niny explained as we walked past the open façades of buildings and scarred plane trees, she had been seeing a Spitfire pilot she met at an NAAFI function in a country house near Wiltshire, where she and her fellow WAAFs were billeted. This man was named Thomas Paxton. He was twenty-five, raised in West London.

  “On our first weekend pass in common, we drove all the way to Dover,” Niny said, “where he walked me along the edge of those cliffs and asked after our home.” She explained she had never before had the odd feeling she had for this Thomas Paxton. He was an avid and well-versed student of European history. Inquiring after her accent, he discovered she had been raised in Leitmeritz. He had traveled to Prague on several occasions, had traveled across Bohemia. On their first outing together, he described in detail the oxbow that bent around Czesky Krumlov, the medieval castle that rose majestic above its river; trips he’d made down to the spas at Karlovy Vary; the gray stone of the Charles Bridge passing over the Vltava. He had gone swimming in the Elbe, and appeared to understand those feelings we’d experienced as children.

  “It has been six years since I’ve set foot in my house in Leitmeritz,” Niny said. “It has been six years since I’ve seen Prazsky Hrad, since I’ve even thought of a weekend trip to Krumlov, heading down to the Elbe. But here now is a well-traveled Briton who can talk me back to that place.”

  A quiet breeze touched us as Niny spoke. This was the first time in as long as I could remember that I had listened to someone else talk. It was as if, for the first time since S-Sugar had entered that cloud above Lübeck, I’d returned to myself. I’d spent all that time alone in my bed near Grimsby. Now I could see the dark moles on Niny’s face, and it was as if I’d found a home again in the visible world.

  “When I’m with him,” Niny continued, “even as the mist blows off the North Sea, moistening my face along those cliffs, I feel as if I’m not with him at all, but in Prague. We’ll lie together in the grass, and with eyes closed, we will be in Prague together.”

  Niny and I reached the park near our flat, where I walked when I’d first arrived. The wrought-iron fence around the commons had long since been stripped and melted down for matériel. Someone had made a slapdash bench of some rubble and boards. Niny and I sat on it.

  In the clear late-afternoon air, we stared up at the rooks in their plane trees, and past them to the eaves of buildings along the park. In beds lining that space where once there had been a neatly kept privet hedge, lilac bushes, and boxwood, now spills of earth overturned by bombs lay in piles. Flowers withered brown in the thin light. As we sat there, Niny described Thom’s home, where she’d met his parents and his spaniels. He’d been raised in one of those immense four-story town houses in Bloomsbury we coveted. This home at once reminded her of our grandmother Traute’s house in Zizkov. It began to feel, my cousin confessed, as if every aspect of this Thomas Paxton drove her into the past.

  “I find myself dreaming of our classmates from the gymnasium. During the day I’m forced to record dozens of missing bombers and fighters. I interact with officers at social events, and the most interesting women I’ve ever met among my fellow WAAFs. At night my dreams are populated only by the children we once knew. Last week I dreamed I was in the R/T tower, taking a distress call from a Spitfire, and it became clear the pilot on the line was Frantisek Pessl from fourth-form math.”

  Niny didn’t seem to know where to look. The confessional denuding of memory kept her eyes from mine. This was something different from muscle memory—it acted longer and more carefully. For a moment we were left to observe the clouds. Sparrows batted up against the sky. Birds were abundant in the months since the Blitz, having found new nesting places in eviscerated buildings. I picked a single bird to study as I waited for Niny to continue. This pale sparrow flapped her wings once and found a current from the square. She glided. All around us, the air smelled of the stale carbonite exhaust of spent bombs.

  “This past weekend, I called on Thom to tell him I couldn’t see him anymore,” Niny said.

  “A rash decision,” I said. “What could have driven you from a man who knows such happiness?” Right in front of her, my cousin had love! A love she could taste and touch, exactly what I was missing. “You should go to him and profess your love,” I said. “Not leave him.”

  “Maybe that’s it, Poxl. For weeks I watched you in hospital, murmuring about your mother with some painter, and your father, and Radobyl, and over and over about Françoise.” I had no memory of such murmurings. “I know you didn’t know you’d been speaking, Poxl. I kept Johana away so she wouldn’t hear you. I told the doctors to let you alone. But I need to tell you now.”

  The sparrow I’d been following dipped and then arose again. Another caught its path midair. One flew off to my right, the other to the left. For a moment I could follow them both, but then they were too far apart.

  “If you love this Thomas Paxton,” I told Niny, “you should take up with him in earnest.” Niny’s eyes caught mine for the first time since we’d sat down on the bench. There was something in them I’d never before seen. A young couple walked by. Both Niny and I looked down. Our eyes sought ground, boards, broken macadam. When the couple had passed, Niny looked back up at me. She looked directly into my eyes.

  “This isn’t where I want to live, Poxl. Life in an elaborate memory? What kind of love is there to find with a man whose main asset to me is his ability to evoke the past? This is living one’s life in a history classroom.”

  A crease had developed in the space between Niny’s eyebrows. Where her brown eyes had once been open wide, I could see at their sides they were down-turned. While I could see all over Niny’s face the kind of writhing uncertainty Thomas had left her in, I could no longer parse its meaning. The crease between Niny’s eyes drew even deeper. For the first time since I’d returned from 100 Squadron, I felt myself removed from my memories, if only for a second—separated from those events like a man who has lived a life and told a tale, only to find the two have diverged in some confusing fashion, lost their cohesion. I was listening to Niny. I thought to comfort her, to remind her I was her confidant.

  Instead Niny took my hand in hers.

  “Johana wants you to find your own flat,” she said.

  By now I didn’t care. I tried to change the subject, but we’d lost the earlier thread.

  “I don’t want you to go, Poxl,” Niny said. “But maybe the time has come for you to start thinking about what’s next.” I pulled my hand away, and Niny turned her eyes back to the sky.

  14.

  One afternoon the second week in May, I went to talk to a superior officer at RAF headquarters in central London. I pushed for an updated physical evaluation. Soldiers and airmen wanted above all to return home, but I had no home to return to—not my real home, anyway. I was declared fit to serve. I was more than willing to take on the work of establishing order after the fighting had ended. I was assigned to the administration of a refugee internment camp and airfield in the Rhine Valley, a camp for Germans and Nazi collaborators who had been captured at the end of the war.

  A move south.

  A move toward Rotterdam.

  I was the RAF’s ideal postwar tool—raised with Czech and German and with five years’ travel across Europe, I spoke Dutch, French, and English. Within weeks I was to head southeast over the North Sea again.

  Niny accompanied me to the transit station. A bus would take me to the aerodrome. On our ride into the city, Niny tried to talk to me a bit about what was ahead. Even if Françoise was still alive, there was good reason to suspect she might no longer be in Rotterdam. She was right. But I had to find out.

  “You should return to Thomas Paxton,” I told Niny. “When you do, ask him not to speak of Prague again. You cannot live your life with this man talking only of the past.” Niny searched my face. “My experience is not your experience. There may come a time when Thomas can indulge in the memory of your life in Leitmeritz. It’s up
to you to forge a relationship with the present.”

  The bus’s wheels cried out against their brakes.

  “And one day when we see each other again, Poxl, maybe we’ll speak of our parents,” Niny said.

  The bus driver was closing his doors. I called out to him not to leave, and then I held Niny as hard and long as a cousin might properly hold on to his cousin, without any desire to let go.

  15.

  My assignment was at a camp in Wunstorf, just west of Hannover. I’ll note briefly that I use the German spellings of these cities’ names to demonstrate the seriousness with which I took the diplomatic demands of my new commission, no matter where my allegiances and vituperation might lie in regard to the past years’ events. This camp was populated by captured Luftwaffe pilots and airmen, along with an RAF wing that was to oversee their work. In the year after my arrival, the POWs’ number would swell to more than ten thousand. It was our charge over the coming months to enlist these POWs in enhancing the aerodrome there. It would serve as a principal supply station for Berlin in the days after the armistice.

  Within a month of my posting, I was placed in charge of a fifty-man detail. These men were demoralized, eyes forever down-turned, not even knowing where in their enormous country they were. I gathered them and spoke frankly. They would work to get this airfield in shape. Some complained the Geneva Convention said they couldn’t be forced to work. What would they rather do? I asked. Sit in prison? I said it in German. I said it in Czech. I said it in Dutch. I said it in English.

  In the weeks to come I took up with the fraternity of men who had been my dread enemies. In addition to overseeing my crew, I reregistered dozens of men a day as they were directed from their bases across northern Germany. While many of the men at this camp had flown Messerschmitts or Junkers or had even served among the brownshirts, a good number were not soldiers at all, but railroad workers, janitors, ticket takers—anyone in uniform had been picked up by Allied troops.

  One afternoon while we had begun leveling a large swath of earth that was to become one of Wunstorf’s new runways, we were besieged by the kind of wet cold that fights through to your marrow and forever evokes in me those days at thirty thousand feet in a Lancaster, when my very bones themselves felt as vulnerable to Luftwaffe attack as John Milton’s, or Yorick’s. During the lunch hour I was part of a game of contract bridge. The men under my command were out with shovels and mattocks. When I returned from making water beyond the confines of the tent, the door to my office was open. Another officer was sitting at my desk.

  “I heard there was some Polack working this camp,” the officer said. “I had to see for myself.”

  Here before me was none other than Navigator Smith—Percy Smith, as returned from the dead as Banquo’s ghost or Hermione’s statue, with apparently no charge but to torment me. I put my hand to my shoulder, which still bore a small scar from his dart.

  “But you went down with our crew,” I said.

  “I took shrapnel from a flak burst in the leg on the last run before our kite went down,” Navigator Smith said. For a microsecond the snarl on his face gave way to something less sinister. “You were a pilot of S-Sugar, West,” Navigator Smith said. “Word reached me you were here in Wunstorf. I had to come see it for myself.”

  He rose to leave. While I awaited some further commentary, there was only his exit.

  This visit from a wraith left me in a stupor for the rest of that day.

  Smith was alive. Of Mrs. Goldring, I’d found only a relic: her annotated Shakespeare. But here, now, was a man I’d long thought dead, walking about a refugee camp in Germany.

  16.

  For weeks routine bore down upon the camp. Every day for more than a month we approached a piece of field that needed to be flattened by a backhoe, razed, and leveled, upon which we then put down a tarmac. We focused on work.

  I passed Navigator Smith in the mess. We grew to have a friendship so real I might even call it warm. I joined the bridge game he played in. With each hand—with each comment I ventured—I awaited his derision, but the obstreperousness I knew from him in RAF Grimsby was gone. Each time I referred to him as Smith, he implored me to call him Percy. We treated each other as equals.

  “Why wouldn’t you want to just go back home?” he said. “I hear the girls in Prague are beautiful.” That was no longer my home, I told him. My parents had been taken. He just looked down at his hands when I said it, but even softened, Smith wasn’t one to let the melancholic in me take over for long.

  “So why didn’t you just stay in London?”

  I looked at him long and hard.

  “I’ll tell you,” I said. “But you have to listen. Can you?”

  Navigator Smith came to show me that men are capable of change. Percival Smith changed. As I narrated my early days in Rotterdam, now a lifetime ago, about my love for Françoise, who was a prostitute but who I could now see was the first woman I ever truly loved, whom I was coming to believe I loved still, Smith listened. In the beginning of my narration, I saw him narrow his eyes at times as if to speak, perhaps to register some disagreement. Then he would just settle into listening again. He listened as I told him of my brief, nebulous engagement to Glynnis Goldring, and of my revelation that it was Françoise I thought of most in those days after we bombed Hamburg. And part of my story became a story of regret, a story of the wrongs I’d perpetrated—not on the battlefield, but in my personal life. I was beginning to see, I said, the villainy in my having left Rotterdam as I had. His face bore no judgment. He didn’t even attempt a joke. When I’d finished telling him of my goals, I said, “Now, do you have anything you’d like to say?”

  “I threw a dart at you once and hit you in the back,” he said.

  “I still have the scar.” I pulled down my cotton shirt to reveal the gnarl of skin it had left behind, shiny and tight.

  “I was an angry young man in those days,” he said. “I’d just lost my best friend. I drank myself to sleep every night. Every morning I was raw, hungover, and grieving.” He looked down at his hands. I was about to tell him I knew what it felt like to lose control of one’s emotions at loss, but he spoke again. “And I was—well, there’s no excuse. It was a terrible thing to do.”

  “It was.”

  “It was,” he said.

  I pulled out my pack of Woodbines and we smoked one together. We talked about nothing for a period. Then he went on his way. In those moments after he left me, after I had narrated the story of Françoise, and had received the first real apology I’d had from anyone for any of the misfortunes that had befallen me since I left Leitmeritz years earlier, I felt a kind of peace.

  During this same period, the length of just one summer, something strange happened that came to confuse me far more than having become so close to my former enemy. The image of Françoise, while still present in its residue, began to muddy. The stones of Prague and the flashes of flak returned at night. Sometimes they carried the face of my love. Sometimes not. Now, even when these images came, they arrived with the ineffability of dreams. Sometimes instead I now saw Glynnis; at times Clive’s face even returned to me, or John Gallsworthy’s, or my mother’s.

  Then they disappeared.

  In their place I had images of those verdant fields of central Britain, the same green as on my first flights south of Prague with my father. Images took no discernible form—memories dispersed to the margins of my mind. My palms sweated. My skin prickled. The top of my head grew hot to the touch, and somehow its heat seemed to radiate—rather than the memories of the events that had caused it—only memories of my mother sitting in her home at the top of a hill in Leitmeritz. I stopped sleeping and instead stared at the ceiling, took long walks to smoke and clear my mind.

  Around this same time we came also to hear stories that cast a pallor over all of our thoughts. An officer in the mess told of an afternoon he had taken a group of Luftwaffe pilots on a trip to see a camp called Bergen-Belsen. It was only a couple dozen
miles west of us there at Wunstorf. There at the camp, by his account, emaciated Jews had been discovered. They had avoided the crematoria. Many of the pilots he took that day wept when they saw what they’d been protecting, flying for the Luftwaffe. This officer talked incessantly about what he’d seen—he didn’t know enough about me to know his audience. I’ll provide no further detail, only to say that in the image of those soldiers of the Wehrmacht weeping when they saw the effect of the machine in which they’d been moving parts, I retained a certain truth that would later be of use to me.

  17.

  One warm day in mid-July, around the time my men were close to having laid their runway, Percy Smith came to see me. Normally he would have taken this as an opportunity to sit and offer a postmortem of the previous night’s card game, but that day he spoke with a certain seriousness.

  “Poxl,” Smith said. “Didn’t you tell me you met Françoise in Rotterdam?” I told him I had. “I’ve a chap on my detail says he was stationed in Rotterdam during the occupation. I’ll send him over if you like.”

  Smith’s eyes were flat, the corners of his lips not upturned as they once had been during his meddling and needling. In his face was a new kind of need: I was the last of his deceased crew. He who had been my enemy was now my friend. This was a lesson I would recognize often in the days to come. While in the pages of Othello we may feel we understand a character like Iago, when we meet him in life, he retains the capacity for change. He’s not cut off from the obviation of his sins. If Othello had spared Desdemona and himself, surely he and Iago could have met in some new circumstance in their later years. There would have been memories to hash out, confessions to be made—the great dissembler would have had to try not to dissemble for once, to speak and be heard after his great sins had been unveiled. But couldn’t they have been as Navigator Smith and I now were?