The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  I told Navigator Smith I would talk to this boy.

  A day passed, then another. Smith’s man didn’t arrive.

  I was hardly able to get my men to complete their work for the distraction it caused me. A week after Navigator Smith came to see me in the mess, a man named Rheinholt, whom I’d come to know by his face but not until now by his name, dropped by my office. I offered him a Woodbine. He lit it.

  A small detail of my men had just begun building a wooden frame for a radio tower. I suggested we walk to a nearby Nissen hut so that we might oversee their work. Where had I come from? Rheinholt wondered. My Czechoslovak accent, though it had grown diffuse over the years since my emigration, had given me away. I told him of a year I’d spent in Rotterdam and then about my time in London.

  “I was stationed in Rotterdam in ’40 and ’41,” Rheinholt said to me. “When I tell him this, Officer Smith tells me to come and see you.”

  The area where my neck met my shirt was febrile. I told him before the war I’d lived in Rotterdam. I mentioned there might still be some residents there who mattered to me. Had he known any of the undesirables in that city?

  “Undesirables?” Rheinholt said.

  We reached the hut where my men were working. The high-pitched buzz of saws and the hum of a generator rose. We took a step inside the hut.

  “Yes, yes, undesirables,” I said. “Those who worked in certain professions that might be considered unacceptable by polite society.”

  Rheinholt took a moment to decipher my meaning. Then his shoulders relaxed and the skin around his eyes pulled taut with a smile.

  “Oh, of course,” Rheinholt said. “We frequented all the better whorehouses”—the term raised the temperature of my blood another degree—“while we were in Amsterdam, so we did the same in Rotterdam.”

  My palms sweated. The scar atop my head throbbed. I rubbed it with my fingertips and found it hot to the touch. Did he remember the names or looks of any of those women?

  “Oh, I took up with a rather large one,” Rheinholt said. “Big-hipped … I could hardly keep her away. Very large breasts.”

  “Greta?” I asked.

  “Greta!” Rheinholt said.

  He seemed almost as elated as I was by the coincidence. I asked him if she played guitar and he said yes, yes, if he remembered correctly, he had seen one in the corner of the room. At that moment a waft of the spruce my men were sawing came across the Nissen hut to where we were standing, bringing back the wood smells of my father’s office in Leitmeritz—bright, clean, citrusy wood shot light through my head. An image of my father’s officious pose in his room above the Elbe in the Brüder Weisberg factory stuck in mind. My nose was filled with wood smell.

  “Did you know any of her friends?” I asked. “Rosemary? Was there a half-Asian girl named Rosemary?”

  “There were all kinds,” Rheinholt said. “I’d lie if I said I could remember any other than Greta. Though that does sound familiar … sure,” he said. “There might have been a Rosemary.”

  It was too much. Françoise’s face appeared less and less in my mind, yet again she became a reality in our conversation as the wood smell overtook it.

  “Françoise?” I asked him. “Was there a Françoise, tall and freckled? Played mandolin in a band, a sisters’ band?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Rheinholt said. I was so full of memory and rage, my fists and teeth were clenched. “I just don’t remember this one.”

  “Well, then, what of Greta?” I said. “What of her as the war went on?”

  “Oh,” Rheinholt said. “Some of her kind we had to move out of the Netherlands once things got bad.” His face displayed no emotion concomitant with the joy he had only moments before displayed. Some of these men were real men and became friends; others were as hateful as the cardboard version of those Nazi villains that has stuck in the world’s memory in the days since. This man belonged to the latter.

  I watched as Rheinholt crushed out his cigarette. I did not move or look up as he walked away. There was no evidence of Françoise, but there was no evidence of her demise, either. I clung to the fact. That afternoon I took to the half-paved runway and found a draconian new strategy for getting the men in my charge to work.

  “You, over there, Klemperer!” I shouted at a former Dornier pilot least in my favor. “Off the ground. Get to work!” Klemperer looked at me. I lifted this man by his grubby collar in the warm July evening and set him down to work next to his fellow men. “There will be no further laxity on this detail!” That night in the mess, I found my tongue loosed as if it had been given similar orders. Françoise! I only wanted to see her again, for her to see me—for the one person left whom I’d loved to help acknowledge my existence. She was my Mnemosyne. If she was alive, she bore memories of me, just like I had mine of her. If she bore memories of me, those memories were the wrong memories. Perhaps the past can be undone. At the least it can be unearthed, long-buried bones torn from the ground by aerial assault. I would find her again, no matter what state I found her in.

  18.

  News of V-J Day came from our superiors around the time we were nearing completion of the airstrip. The last of the Axis powers had given up.

  The war was over.

  A cheer arose across camp, a great electricity flowing through the men who’d seen more than their share of destruction. Even the POWs under our supervision were brighter that day, despite their nominal loss—not much of one, given how long it had been since Germany itself had capitulated. I managed to enjoy myself among my fellow Brits. I drank a glass of champagne with Percy Smith, who, upon news of the Japanese surrender, sought me out in the mess.

  “Who would have thought of all those men in S-Sugar,” he said, “it would be me and the injured Polack celebrating together?” He saw the old fierce look on my face. “Okay, yes, yes. I know, I know. The Czechoslovakian. The Czechoslovakian Jew, Poxl West—the man who flew me over Hamburg.”

  Smith put his arm around me. Over the coming weeks, as we proceeded apace in our work, he and I came to develop what would end up the most lasting of all my relationships of that period. Françoise wasn’t the only friend I’d made who might still be alive; Smith himself was here. While we came to befriend a number of the others we’d now been at work with for close to a year here in Germany, it was mainly the two of us in each others’ confidence.

  My prevailing memory of that period, that stretch after the glee of our victory began to mature into a more nuanced emotion, came one day soon after. It was during another of our long card-playing evenings. Percy and I were big winners at whist. One of our fellow men, an officer called Berend, with whom Smith had had a close friendship, and who knew our history in S-Sugar, joked, “It’s nice to see two former enemies fighting alongside each other.”

  Percy put his arm around me and said, “Former enemies is a little too harsh, don’t you suspect, Poxl?”

  I breasted my cards.

  “You two were in the same squadron, isn’t that right?” Berend said.

  “We were stationed together north of Grimsby,” I said. “We flew together in the Battle of Hamburg.”

  “Proper war heroes, at that!” Berend said.

  Another officer with whom Percy had a long history and who knew about the bombings our wing undertook, Landsman, said, “Or something like that.”

  Berend inquired after his meaning.

  “We heard all about it,” Landsman said.

  “All about what?” Percy said.

  “The tens of thousands of German civilians killed in those bombings,” Landsman said.

  “There were people killed in all the bombings!” Percy said. “They were bloody bombings! What were you, some radio operator down on the ground, you bloody moralizer, sitting back in your armchair with the WAAFs on your lap, sitting in judgment of those who saved you!”

  Percy lunged at Landsman. Had I not been nearby to grab him, he might have done some damage. I didn’t know quite what had set him off. Pe
rhaps Percy was unable to deal with the calm settling in after the final armistice. He was a career officer, one who seemed uncomfortable in the skin of civvy street, a prospect now arising for all of us. Regardless, with the help of this man Berend, I pulled him out of the Nissen hut. We took to a field nearby to smoke. Out among the fields, cicadas chirruped in the late-summer evening. Nightdew lifted off the Rhineland grass. Far above, the stars of Orion’s belt blinked. We walked long enough to smoke two cigarettes before Percy spoke.

  “Bloody Landsman,” he said. He proceeded to explain that this officer had always been an antagonizer, always taking up the counterargument. The more silence fell in around us, the more the noise of cicadas filled the air. We kept walking. What in Landsman’s attitude had pushed Smith so far? I knew his stance on the need for a “press-on” attitude during our tour. He had little tolerance for the kind of self-doubt that could develop among pilots who weren’t inculcated into the military thinking he deemed acceptable. But the war was over. We were standing on occupied German soil. What losses we’d suffered, we’d endured, and now we had to try to move forward. As the cicadas chirruped in the dark I awaited his attack on my moralizing.

  He was silent. Night birds called out from a stand of pines beyond the fields.

  “There’s a lad on my detail,” Percy said. “Twenty-year-old called Schlict. Always yammering. Never made pilot, never got on a Luftwaffe bomber, stuck with a job as a firefighter at home.” Percy drew on his fourth cigarette since we’d left his altercation with Landsman. Only its red ember showed in the dark. “This boy talks. No matter how many times I’ve put him on the most menial duties, he cannot keep his Jerry mouth shut.”

  Percy stomped out his cigarette and lit another.

  “Early this week, he started in on how the war is over but that he doesn’t have a home. Started again about how he had been a firefighter. In Hamburg, he said. When it started the first night, he said, he took to a bomb shelter. Once the blockbusters finished falling, he went out into the firestorm.”

  A steady breeze picked up out in the field. It forced a cloud across the moon. Percy took a drag off his cigarette. With one fag already lit in his mouth, he took another from the packet and played it over, end over end, in his hand.

  “The main waterline in the city was broken by one of our bombs early that night. Schlict and the other firefighters had to go to the river to begin pumping from the source itself. There they saw hundreds of people diving into the water. Directly before his crew were four women. They’d been hit by incendiaries. Phosphorous was burning their arms and backs.

  “One of those women kept running into the water to douse her arms. When she emerged, the phosphorous was so hot—burning to the bone—it would light itself again. She kept jumping into the water. Each time she got out, her arms would set themselves afire again. The way this Schlict described it: these women running into the water, screaming, coming out, igniting again. Over and over, until he and the other firefighters were able to get ahold of them, wrap them in fire blankets, and take them back to the station.”

  Percy stopped. He took a long pull off his cigarette. The red ember at its end was dancing with the shaking of his hand.

  “Phosphorous in those incendiaries could do that if it hit you,” Percy said. A hitch crept into his voice. “I told this Schlict kid to get back to work. To stop with his propaganda. Normally he would have started at me again, yammering until he’d had everyone convinced. For the first time since the lad had started talking, he stopped. I saw his pale face. He hardly even believed himself, the horror of this story he’d witnessed with his own seeing, remembering eyes. I could see him thinking, Maybe it hadn’t happened that way. So awful his mind allowed his memories to be undone.”

  Percy stopped talking. A taste of bile was rising in my throat. I would like to think now maybe it was all the cigarettes we’d smoked. But maybe it was that up until that moment, no matter what we’d done, we’d assumed we were like the vast majority of men—like Lear himself—self-judged to be more sinned against than sinning. Now something was changing in both of us the more Smith talked. As I say, if you met him in life, years later, even Iago might have turned from his role. But it could work the other way, as well, couldn’t it? That line from The Merchant of Venice had crossed my mind many times in the years since Glynnis’s mother and I first read it: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Somehow, I’d not thought quite clearly that this line had been uttered by one of Shakespeare’s great villains, not one of his great heroes.

  We looked at the dancing of that red ember at the end of Percy’s cigarette.

  “What I haven’t told you about the days back when we were in S-Sugar,” I said, “was why I signed up for the RAF.”

  Percy didn’t say anything. I did. I talked to him about Glynnis Goldring and her mother. I told him about Johana and Scott Prichard. I told him about my parents and my long-since-passed desire to run Brüder Weisberg, and that I’d fled from Leitmeritz without ever saying good-bye to either of my parents, not knowing I would never again see them. If I had it in me in those days to cry, I might have cried, but I only said that now—now—I wanted to find Françoise as much as anything. I needed to know if she was still alive.

  “None of it changes much for us, does it?” Percy said.

  “How so?”

  “We dropped those incendiaries ourselves, Poxl.”

  I said I supposed we had. “But like you said in those moments before we went on our run,” I said. “We signed up to fight Nazis who had bombed us in London. We continued with ‘pressing on,’ as you put it. That’s never changed. Has it?”

  Percy’s cigarette was bobbing. I reached out to steady his hand. He almost didn’t notice I’d touched him. In the darkness, we couldn’t see each other’s faces. We were out among night-wet grasses. Hardly a sound save for the swishing of our boots and all those chest-plated bugs we couldn’t see up in the treetops, vibrating their internal coils. We walked for another fifteen minutes over the landing strips we’d built, over dusty fields unpaved and past half-constructed radio towers and unused nacelles and Merlin engines of decommissioned planes left piecemeal at the base. Night smells of gathering dew and stoked fires carried across the grasses. We kept as far as we could from the lights and laughter in the Nissen huts without entering the forest on the other side. We were again approaching the distant glow.

  “You should go as soon as you can,” Percy said. I looked at him in the dark, but I couldn’t quite make out his face. “Listen to me, Poxl,” he said. “You should go to Rotterdam.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  “The war’s over. I’ll talk to the major. I’ll get it set up. You can take enough time there to see if you can’t find Françoise, see if she’s still there. Still—well, still there’s enough.”

  “And what if there’s nothing to find?” I said.

  “I’m sure there is,” Percy Smith said. My eyes had adjusted enough to the faint light cast from the Nissen huts across the field that I could now see Percy’s face. There was so much certainty in his eyes when he said it, like it was the surest he’d ever been of anything he’d ever said.

  He needed it to be true.

  So did I.

  And then Percy Smith said something else that I’d needed for so long I didn’t even know I needed it.

  “And Poxl,” he said. “If you do find her—when you do find her, see if she’ll forgive you for leaving.”

  I would have to press on until I was able to find Françoise, and if I did find her, I would have to tell her everything.

  “But just go find her,” Percy said. “Get a transfer, go AWOL. Return to civvy street and catch a flight from free London.

  “Go.”

  19.

  The night Percy Smith told me Schlict’s Hamburg story was filled with the reality of Françoise. Yet again I had no image of her face. I had only the pervasive sense of her absence. Her memory was more present than ever, but her face hadn�
��t arrived to accompany it.

  That void couldn’t remain. I stopped trying. In the moments that followed, in my lightest sleep, a new image came to me in my dreams. Three women were doing something strange a couple hundred yards off. These women were submerging themselves in the Elbe, walking out of the water and then running back in. It wasn’t the German Elbe of Hamburg I’d seen from thirty thousand feet, but the Elbe of my childhood, running through Leitmeritz. Radobyl stood off in the near distance. I kept walking closer, lugubrious, as if my feet were plunged ankle-deep in wet sand. I was stuck to the ground. I had to pick my whole self up with the lassitude of each step. As I walked, those women ran into the water and out, stopped on the banks of the river and then went in again. When I got close, the three women acquired familiar faces.

  The nearest was my mother. Each time she got out of the water, she looked down at her hands, looked back up, and then turned back into the water. The other two women were Glynnis and Françoise. Their faces were cachectic, wasted, ashen. Each time they emerged from the water, a blue halo encircled their wrists. They were saying something together I could not make out at first. It kept on, a concatenation, until I could hear. “You can go, but she won’t see you,” they said. “You can go, but she won’t see you.”

  Once I understood what they were saying they stopped.

  Françoise held her wrists skyward. When she comprehended the blue flames wrapped around them, she turned and ran back into the Elbe. Two contrails of smoke lifted higher and higher in the summer air. None of them saw me. None of them saw one another. They just ran into the Elbe and back out—cachectic, ashen, catching blue fire each time they came up for air.

  When I read Hamlet in my thirties, studying it in earnest and reading it for the first time since I’d encountered it in the cave with Mrs. Goldring, I came to find that there is a disagreement among Shakespeare scholars over the nature of the ghost of his father, King Hamlet, who visits him throughout the play. Some believe it is meant to be staged as a physical manifestation: The supernatural has occurred. A ghost has set foot onstage. The Tragedy of Hamlet, in this staging, is the original ghost story. But other scholars believe that it is simply the manifestation of Hamlet’s guilt, the most famous indecision in all of literature: the question of whether Hamlet will act. There is no such thing as a ghost; there is only such thing as Hamlet’s hallucination. To tell a tale, Hamlet famously says, is to “hold a mirror up to nature,” and in the mirror we will never see the face of the dead. It is only our own image we see.