The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  “Flak ahead,” Navigator Smith called out. “Or … something.”

  Gallsworthy came on the interphone next:

  “Not flak,” he said. “Lightning.”

  Before us was the largest cloud ever amassed in the air above Nazi Germany. As we passed over the German coast south of Cuxhaven, the great mass undulated. All through the cloud, branches of white fire spread and retreated like the passing of axons to synapses in the great black brain of the Reich.

  Gallsworthy came over the interphone again:

  “Perhaps we might consider turning back, Captain West.”

  No sooner had the words escaped his mouth than Navigator Smith followed: “I’m not going out with an LMF”—lacking in moral fiber, the worst kind of discharge from the service. “You’re certain to get one, too, Captain West. How will that look for a citizen of a Nazi protectorate?”

  We stayed in formation.

  The bombers ahead pushed headlong into the cloud. Silence saturated our bomber. The only sound was the low, anxious rumble of nearby thunder. For once something wrought by the Lord had quieted Navigator Smith’s constant chatter. At last the sky grew as angry as I was at the loss of my parents, of Françoise, of Glynnis. Like a tumid-eyed pup seeking his mother’s teat, we edged around the crevasses comprising the outer realm of that great black cur, which lit up so frequently it was difficult to know just what we were seeing.

  We would fly directly into the cloud.

  First came the winds. A current of cold air swept S-Sugar’s wings, rocking us until we banked right and then left. Soon we were alone amid dense cloud. No other bombers from our wing were visible.

  Nothing was visible.

  We pushed on, and then a flash—for a second I was blind. When I regained my sight, a deep blue glow enshrouded the cockpit. The de-icing tube on the other side of the perspex bore a halo of blue flame. Blue tendrils shot back and forth between Browning guns of the front turret Gallsworthy manned. All around the propellers to our left and right, blue auras outlined the blur of blades.

  “I can see a kind of blue light between my guns,” Gallsworthy said over the interphone.

  Navigator Smith said, “All over the instruments back here as well.”

  Five seconds passed. The world again flashed so bright I was blind. This time when I regained my sight, the world was wholly suffused with corporeal blue. It was so cold I could not tell if I was experiencing electricity or air. Again the dark world flashed white so bright my sight was gone as if for good. A kind of mania gripped us in those moments as we looked in the eye of the lightning from a cloud in which we were sitting.

  A pounding began on the fuselage. Gallsworthy came again over the interphone:

  “We’re hit! We’re hit!”

  Then Navigator Smith: “I don’t see Jerry—does anyone see Jerry?—where’s Jerry?” No sooner had they spoken than we all saw it. The propellers were throwing off ice in chunks the size of shingles. Navigator Smith said he could see the ailerons icing over. In a matter of seconds we would freeze into a block and plummet like a bomb into the sea. I had my hand on the throttle, which pushed hard back against me. My grip slipped, then slipped again.

  I took off my right glove.

  I was in need of traction.

  Now I pushed the column in hard. We dropped a couple hundred feet. The ailerons were icing worse. I knew if I were to try to fly higher, we’d never make it. I pulled back horizontal and desynchronized the engines. We shook like we were inside a paint mixer until I synchronized the engines again. No sound came over the interphone.

  We were free of the ice. In the brief moment we seemed free I began to feel spider legs of trepidation slide over my hands. Then another flash stole my sight, then a third. When I regained sight we were bathed in blue flame so thin I could see where on my hand minute blue effluvia sank canines into skin. I could feel it all around my molars, blue maws of flame stabbing their fangs into enamel. I tried to put my hand to my lap for my glove but my muscles all tensed. They wouldn’t untense. My jaw clenched tight and a jolt stole through me and atop my head I felt a burst of hot pain.

  A great blue flash.

  Eyes failed.

  Then: nothing.

  10.

  The world returned in electric blue flames. No sooner had I regained consciousness than my brain made me believe I heard the voice of my cousin Niny saying in her native Czech, “Oh, I think he might be waking,” and “Keep your eyes closed, Poxl.”

  I didn’t understand what Niny was doing in the cockpit of a Lancaster over Lübeck. Some large part of me felt as if from the time I’d first entered that cockpit I had been living some other, borrowed, life. One I knew well enough, but one that wasn’t mine. Soon enough my hand came to my face to feel the soft cloth covering my eyes.

  Niny said again, “It’s all right, Poxl. You’ve survived and they’ve just got you here in Grimsby at the hospital and you’re all right.”

  A doctor admonished her to speak to me in English so he and his nurses could understand her, and for her to tell me by some miracle I’d survived a lightning strike on S-Sugar. My only thought then was to tell her how I’d wanted her to meet John Gallsworthy, the best chap I’d yet come to know in my squadron.

  But I wasn’t able to say anything at all.

  Following the moment I was struck by lightning, Rowlandson had Gallsworthy drop his bombload, turned S-Sugar around, and brought her back to base. Somehow amid the orange spiraling bullets of Me110’s they encountered on their return, the men of the Lancaster S-Sugar survived yet another run, only to lose the commission of their pilot to an electrical storm.

  There were losses and there were losses, and my loss was of a particular variety: the loss of my commission to many months’ more rehabilitation in hospital. I’d suffered a rupture of my tympanic membrane as blue fires surged through my body. I could just make out the words Niny spoke at my bedside. My doctors came through and observed spreading ferns of Lichtenberg figures across my left arm. These red patterns across my skin were evidence of the lightning that had entered my body, bursting veins and capillaries along its path.

  Only when I’d just regained my sight was I able to witness the ferns’ remnants. The eruption at the top of my head, where the electricity had singed my scalp, burrowed its path and exited back into the cloud over Lübeck, had mostly healed by the time I’d regained my hearing and had been weaned off the morphine that got me through those initial weeks, almost exactly as it had after my bout of pleurisy. I was left with a small patch of scalp atop my head where no hair would ever grow again.

  But I was alive.

  It would be a month before I was able to see. In those words of Goethe’s, “Alles Nähe werde fern”: “Everything near becomes distant.” Even when my hearing returned, the physical world stayed far from me until I could again see. I lay in bed for days, relegated to a chamber in a cave. The world around me grew to the likeness of those caverns where Mrs. Wilma Goldring, who felt me a suitable partner for her daughter Glynnis, who sparked in me a lifelong love of Shakespeare, had lived out the Blitz so as not to succumb to the bombs that took her daughter. Only in my cave, there were no other humans to join in my isolation. Around the shadows and in the corners of those visions I had in the weeks I lay alone convalescing I would see faces: at times Glynnis’s or Suse’s or my cousins’ or my mother’s, but as time progressed, only one face came to me: Françoise’s.

  Now an idée fixe that had long been developing gained purchase: How did I know Françoise might not still be alive? So many others had died and I knew it. What if Françoise hadn’t been killed in the bombing of Rotterdam? This thought gained its toehold, and then more images: a carmine hollyhock blossom on the sill of a window to the east of London; purple tamarisks by the side of the Elbe in Leitmeritz; a bloom of purple tulip on the sill of a window in Delfshaven. I began to imagine Françoise alive and with a kind of electric shock I truly began to wonder what she would be thinking of me, what thought
s would pass her mind should the name Poxl appear there. The man, the boy really, who had come and fallen in love with her and then left without a word. Without a word. I let my mind drift back to the purple tulip, much easier. All these images again intertwined and I returned to fever dreams like when I was a child, an odd negative and positive switch: black and white, white then black, growing ever more menacing.

  As I grew more and more calm, as the world began to return to my eyes and sound to my ears, things practical returned to mind. I saw the Leathersellers College, where I longed to return to work. I saw cousin Johana’s little ceramic spitz—I longed to see that little dog, and the flat I’d now absented for so long.

  11.

  Niny visited on the weekends when she was granted a pass to come see me in hospital. On one of her visits, just as I was beginning to regain the use of my eyes, I asked after my good friend Clive Pillsbury, whom I’d not seen in the brief period during which I was able to fly just five runs in a Lancaster bomber—I would never now come close to approaching the thirty-two necessary to complete my tour—and whom I was surprised to find had not yet come to visit.

  “I’d hoped to put it off,” Niny said. “I don’t know how to say it, save for just saying it. Clive’s Spitfire went down over North Africa. He’s missing.”

  It was almost a verbatim recurrence of that moment when I learned of Glynnis’s fate. Even without the proper use of my eyes to take in what I’m sure was the harrowed look on my cousin’s face, I knew in what way Clive Pillsbury had gone “missing.” Niny was a WAAF working the radio north of London. In taking communications from pilots for a year now, she had developed into an accurate detector for those kites that went down with a chance of their crews surviving, and those whose crews would stay missing until the Messiah again visited the Mount of Olives.

  I would soon learn of the fate of my crewmates from S-Sugar, as well, which would come only a month after I was struck by lightning: John Gallsworthy went down along with all the crewmen on that Lancaster, S-Sugar, over Essen, on yet another of Bomber Harris’s raids of the Ruhr Valley.

  Some might suggest there was capital P Providence in my having been taken out of my bomber on the last night of the Battle of Hamburg. But mine is not so benevolent a God. Mine is the Elohim of the Pentateuch, whose ways are the ways of punishment, not reprieve. God of Sodom’s destruction, not Lazarus’s resurrection. God of Job’s misery. No other cheek turned, no sin granted absolution. Were I to have stayed on my commission, I would most certainly have found myself missing along with those men. But my fate had long been discrete from the fates of my fellow travelers.

  I learned long after the war that well more than half of the men who’d joined the RAF during the war died in service. It’s become a commonplace, the millions of Jews who died along with my parents back in Czechoslovakia. Those destinies were distinct from mine—the numbers of those lost trying simply to survive, the numbers of those lost in the reckless action of attempting to fight back from the air. Instead, I lay in hospital until I was able to leave under my own recognizance. With my mind increasingly focused on a return to Rotterdam, I boarded a train south to London along with those few belongings shipped to me from my bunk up north of Grimsby.

  I was going home.

  12.

  Soon after my return to the little flat near Bermondsey I found that while I’d not fully recovered from the effects of the tempest, and didn’t have energy enough yet to travel far from the flat, neither was I constitutionally suited to spending my time in idle convalescence. The period after my stint in the Royal Air Force I longed for Mother, Elbe, Father, Radobyl, youth. I didn’t talk to many people: What life I’d created for myself in London before I left for the RAF was almost entirely gone. Glynnis, Clive, even John Gallsworthy—nothing of it was left.

  Only Françoise might possibly have survived.

  The Nazis had started a harrowing ground and air war on London, indiscriminately firing V-2 rockets at Allied targets. Although the Luftwaffe didn’t send their planes overhead to bomb in those days as they had in the Blitz, for a period there was an even greater fear of annihilation. People had ceased going out to pubs, even to their work.

  Then, as suddenly as they’d started, the Luftwaffe attacks stopped. We didn’t hear V-2’s tearing across London. Quiet blanketed the city. Throughout April, we heard radio reports that the Reich would give up. One day people even began hasty celebrations, only to learn from the Beeb that it was a false hope. The continuation of the war after that felt somehow even worse for the brief reprieve.

  One afternoon during that period, when I found my energy returned in the afternoons and I was up to traveling greater distances, I purchased a train ticket and rode east out of the city toward Kent. Outside my window I saw the same water in the fields. The ground was torn up to a far greater extent than even the last time I’d gone past. V-2’s had flown indiscriminately from Holland, and while many of the rockets had found their way to London, many had bored their way into the ground here. I did my best to focus on those patches where the grass was still green, saved from arbitrary destruction.

  When I arrived I walked deep into the woods. It was a drier season than the last time I’d been to visit Mrs. Goldring. Midges were scarcer. The walk felt longer than it had those days with Glynnis. Soon enough I was at the mouth of the cave. I did not hear the murmur of voices until I was upon them. In the big chamber at the front of the cave, there were maybe two dozen people milling about. I didn’t want to talk to any of them and so proceeded deep into the cave, hoping only to achieve the room I sought.

  Back in the living area where I’d once sat with Glynnis Goldring’s mother I found the one thing I would hope not to find, again and again, in the coming months and years:

  Nothing.

  The room had been vacated. No pallets on the floor. No white bedding for Mrs. Goldring to lie upon. There was no one there even to ask. I realized that perhaps I’d find no evidence of Glynnis’s mother, either.

  For the next hour I walked around that huge cave. In some rooms I would find groups talking in a low hush. At each I inquired after Mrs. Wilma Goldring, the old woman who suffered dementia, whom I’d come to visit those months before.

  No one seemed to know of her. Soon enough I found myself quite lost. After maybe half an hour, I heard voices again—I’d come upon that same group I’d first encountered before finding Mrs. Goldring’s room empty. I was leaving when I saw someone new had joined their group, an old man who looked familiar, though it was very hard to say—there had been thousands of denizens of that cave in the days when I last visited it. Each face as it passed me then was obscured by shadow. I asked this old man if he knew of Mrs. Goldring.

  “Wilma Goldring,” he said. In the cold, damp dark, all that was visible of his face were just the wisps of a white beard poking from his cheeks. “I’ve known that name since I was a much younger man than you.” This was the elder brother of old Mr. Lovelace, whom Mrs. Goldring had spoken of when I first met her, fearing that he might “take liberties” with her deep in that cave. The coincidence of meeting him here felt providential. But he followed with the news:

  Mrs. Goldring had passed a couple months earlier.

  “Her daughter succumbed to the Blitz, you know,” he said. He looked at me. “But yes, of course you knew.” He told me Mrs. Goldring had taken it hard when she lost Glynnis. Living in those damp caves can’t have helped. It seemed once again there would be no ceremony to accompany a loss. But as I turned to depart, the old man said, “Are you the Czech boy she used to speak of? Floxin or something.”

  I told him that I was, in fact. Poxl. Poxl West. Weisberg. West.

  He asked me to wait there a moment. He absconded somewhere deep within the cave. Minutes later he returned. In his hand was Mrs. Goldring’s copy of Shakespeare. It was still covered in that oilcloth that protected it from the cave’s damp. It was more worn than when I’d last read from it, but I recognized the book as I would have h
er daughter’s face.

  For the first time during that period, some remnant of loss had been left behind.

  “She wanted you to have it,” he said. I thanked Mr. Lovelace’s brother and departed.

  When I returned to the light outside that cave I sat down. Mrs. Goldring had not inscribed the book as I’d hoped she might have. I thumbed through the thin, crinkling pages and saw she’d taken notes in her last days. I opened to King Lear. There I saw where she’d penned in our parts:

  Next to each Lear speech, she’d written in “Pocksall,” and next to each of Cordelia’s, “Me.”

  I cannot describe the hope seeing these inscriptions instilled in me. For the first time since I’d left Rotterdam, some evidence remained of someone I’d lost. She’d been thinking of me, recording my name in the margins. This edition of the plays would come to supplant the one Niny had gifted me when I was in hospital. It was the edition I would read for the rest of my days.

  13.

  At the end of the first week in May, on what has come to be known as V-E Day, the streets filled with people. The youth in our neighborhood took to the streets, hung out their windows and threw ripped paper onto one another.

  I stayed inside and drew the blackout curtains. Only one of those people I’d come to love in those years since I first left my father’s house in Leitmeritz might still be alive. I had to find out.

  The war in Europe was over.

  My war was far from over.

  One day not long after that, I overheard Johana ask Niny when she thought I would find my own living arrangement. After the intimacy of our Hanukkahs and the Elbe-swimming days of our youth, I had come to expect Niny to support me no matter the circumstances, and at first I took her lack of immediate response as an affront. After listening further I came to see that Niny did have my best interests in mind. She suggested she would speak with me. When she knocked on my door late the following afternoon and suggested we take a walk, I found our conversation was not primarily to concern the state of my affairs.