The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  “Do you know why Shakespeare left Stratford for London, where he gained his fame?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “It is a tale among scholars of the Bard that he was caught repeatedly poaching deer from a landowner near his father’s home. He would go onto this man’s land not because he needed to, but for the thrill of it—kill his deer, slip past his guards undetected. Samuel Johnson always claimed this was where Shakespeare learned his trade later: poaching. Almost every one of the thirty-nine plays was a story from history, a story someone else had told and the Bard retold. Some were even just versions of other stories other playwrights of the time were telling and he retold.

  “Only Shakespeare, he learned to tell it better. This is the very crux of telling a story: to tell it better.”

  “But,” I said, “you were writing in the first person. You were writing a memoir. You were—”

  “And they attacked Shakespeare just as they did me! The leading playwright of his day. The greatest writer in the history of the English language. They called him an upstart crow, said he was beautified by their words. William Shakespeare himself! Torn down for what he did. But what matters, my boy, is the words on the page! Did I tell the story the best I could?

  “I told the story the way it needed to be told! All of this book was true, Eli. I was a Czech Jewish teenager who left his home at the moment of the Anschluss, whose parents were killed by the Nazi aggression, who went to London by way of Rotterdam and who followed love and guilt’s demands back to try to find Françoise. This was my book, and I refused to go on television and be berated for it. If I wrote the book I needed to write, I’ll not apologize for it. Not now! Not then!”

  I was about to speak again. I was about to tell Poxl West that I thought I believed him but I needed to know more. He wasn’t right; of course I get that now. The very conviction with which he made his argument raised in me both a rage and an understanding I can’t explain. It strikes me now that this was what came to allow me to see Poxl in front of me for the first time right then, a man in all his sharp-elbowed contradictions. Sometimes it’s only undistilled anger that accompanies comprehension. The two cannot be extricated from each other.

  But he believed what he was saying. He truly did. His red face was so full of life even now in its wasted state, I still would have listened to him tell any story he wanted, consequences be damned. And the world should have, too, I guess. Or maybe not. I still don’t know. But I do know that I wanted to let him know everything I’d felt and thought from the moment he came to our house during the Super Bowl until now.

  But just then, I saw Mrs. Hornicker coming across the way. Her face was as red and sweaty as my uncle Poxl’s face had been minutes earlier. I didn’t even hear the next sentences Uncle Poxl spoke.

  “Eli Goldstein, where on earth have you been?” she said.

  I can tell you now what trouble I got in for having walked away, what a berating I got for having made her think she’d lost me in New York City on a field trip. Who can even imagine the fear I must have put into Mrs. Hornicker, her thinking she’d failed so miserably at her job. Just imagine if I’d accepted my uncle Poxl’s invitation and left the museum with him. By the time we got back to Needham, I was in about as much trouble as I ever got in. I received a suspension. My parents were livid, concerned it might hurt my chances at getting into the right college, and when I returned, they didn’t give me a chance to tell them I’d seen Poxl—and so I resolved not to. I might not have known I’d teach at a college someday, but I knew I’d get into one. Knowing what I knew about Poxl West now, and denied a chance to tell it as soon as I returned, with each day it got harder to imagine even trying to tell my parents about it. The further you get from a story whose moral you don’t know, the harder it grows to tell it. Who knew if they would even believe me, or if it would simply sound like a fantastical story told to deflect the trouble I was in. And isn’t that the very problem with even the simplest lie, let alone a lie the size of Poxl’s? It breeds suspicion, incredulity without bounds.

  But that’s not what I remember of that moment.

  What I remember is that Mrs. Hornicker wasn’t looking at me. She was staring straight at Poxl, who was sitting there across from me in the café at MoMA in midtown Manhattan. As scared as I was of her at that moment, as much as I wanted to continue talking with Poxl West, for just one moment all we could do was look at him—Mrs. Hornicker trying to figure out what I was doing talking to this man before she pulled me from him, and I seeing him as if for the first time:

  He was an old man who’d run from his parents’ house without saying good-bye, who’d run from Rotterdam without saying good-bye to his first love. Only he knew what pushed him. Did Isaac sit around his father’s home for years, wondering what he might ask Abraham of their trip to the top of Mount Moriah, wondering what incomprehensible flash he’d seen in his father’s eyes? Once their descent was made and they were home, was it simply too complicated ever to raise the question? Or maybe he was just what he’d always been: Isaac’s father. Here I am now, a father myself, remembering again for the thousandth time the moment when I could have said the right thing. Anything. I’ll never know what went through his head when Poxl flew from Leitmeritz, when he flew from Rotterdam. This was the closest I would ever come. Couldn’t I have said one final true thing to a man who’d been a grandfather to me, if only I’d known then what it was I should say? But I didn’t. And I don’t. Mrs. Hornicker whisked me away, after I’d seen him one last time. And I guess if nothing else, I know what he looked like to her.

  He was just a pile of bones in a blue wool suit.

  ACT FOUR

  1.

  The morning after my talk with Percy I went to the office of my superior officer and once and for all tendered my resignation from the Royal Air Force. I wrote Niny, asking her to send the money I’d saved, and which I’d left in our flat for safekeeping. I would arrange for a flight to Rotterdam as soon as the money arrived.

  My wait lasted more than a month. Finally I found myself on an RAF air transport to Rotterdam. Even having lived in Holland for a year, I’d never seen the Nieuwe Maas from the wide view provided by thousands of feet of altitude. As beautiful as it was to see that huge port from an aeroplane, something of the image didn’t comport with the trek I’d embarked upon. I’d spent so much of the years since I left Holland aloft, in an aeroplane, or thinking of flying, or remembering time aloft. The harbor appeared somehow too placid from my perch as we made our swooping arrival from the east.

  A new set of cranes had replaced the ones where I’d once spent my days at work. A row of new buildings had been erected by those towers whose operation had once required the linguistic skills of a young Czechoslovak immigrant. This is little to tell compared with the new building that had accompanied the regrowth of that city after its near decimation by the Luftwaffe.

  In Delfshaven, I walked every block I’d once known, knocking on doors, ringing doorbells. I found no one home at the flat where Françoise had once lived in Veerhaven. No one at Greta’s and Rosemary’s. Along the stagnant canals of the city, it struck me that perhaps the best place to ask after her was the Brauns’. With an adopted daughter and a dental practice to look after, they were most likely not to have been displaced in the years of the occupation. I arrived at the house of that old schoolteacher and her dentist husband. A hulking blond golem of a man opened the door. His shoulders were as broad as the doorway. “Is this the home of”—I realized at that moment I didn’t even recall their Christian names—“the Brauns, the dentist and schoolmarm?”

  “No one by that name lives here,” the man said in his gruff Dutch.

  Though I’d resigned my post in Wunstorf, I hadn’t yet acquired any civilian clothing. I was still clad in my RAF blues. This fact afforded me a certain courtesy of the emancipator—and burdened me with the formality paid one in a position of authority. In this situation, it kept the Brauns’ door from being closed in my face. This gol
em suggested I go to the end of his street, where an elderly woman called Van Leben knew much of the changes to the businesses and residences in the neighborhood.

  I made my way to the doorway that might bring me one step closer to discovering Françoise’s fate. I knocked.

  The door opened.

  Fräulein Van Leben was hunched and crooked, and on her chest sat an apron below the stoic blankness of her wrinkled white face. When she opened her door, she asked, aloof but polite, that I step in over the threshold.

  I asked whether she knew the couple who before the war lived in the house I’d just come from down her block, a couple called Braun?

  “Ah, yes,” she said. “The dentist.”

  She appeared reluctant to say anything more while standing at the doorway. An old woman like this had clearly experienced a fatigue of men in uniform during the war years. I explained that I knew the family acquaintances in the days before the war broke out. In those days we had shared friends—a woman named Françoise, her friends Greta and Rosemary. Did she know what had become of them?

  Now she stared at me with mild contempt.

  “All those types are gone now,” she said. “Germans took them away very early on.”

  She paused. The grimace on her face relaxed. She continued, aware of the cold comfort she had offered. The day was frigid and damp. I removed my boots. She wandered back toward a sitting room at the rear of her house. I followed her and waited while she repaired to her kitchen to brew a pot of tea. This home was so similar in every way to the flats I’d entered in the period I lived there in Rotterdam. Up the center of the place was a narrow staircase identical to the one I’d ascended at that first party with Greta and Rosemary; to the back was a large picture window. It looked out upon an overgrown garden. Old Van Leben returned from the kitchen with a pot of black tea. We observed the peculiarities of the day’s weather. She inquired after my uniform. My accent wasn’t British. I said I’d moved from north of Prague to a place here in Rotterdam before the war at my father’s behest. So what had become of me in those days after I left the city where we now sat?

  As would occur for many years after that day, I found a bottlenecking of the story I might have told her. I thought to say something about Françoise, about the details of my time in Rotterdam. But here we were in Rotterdam! Instead I thought to inform her of my escape from that city where we now sat, about my time with Niny—as a squaddie—discovering news of my parents—my injuries in training for the RAF—the great thundercloud that struck the Lancaster S-Sugar.

  Each time I opened my mouth, I didn’t know what story I would be telling. The story of a Jew who had left his home to do—what? To fall in love? To save Londoners? To scour Western Europe in search of a woman who might be dead? To take to the skies and exact revenge? I asked Fräulein Van Leben if she had been in Rotterdam when the Luftwaffe bombed.

  “I have been in this house since 1893,” she said. “That year I was orphaned by typhus.”

  From the decrepit look of the place I suppose I should have made some such conjecture. The upheaval of the past years had caused me to expect change, where now I was faced with a measure of permanence—or at the minimum, serious longevity.

  “What I am getting at,” I said, “is not so much the full span of your tenure in this house as your specific experience during the period of the bombing itself.”

  Now it was Van Leben’s turn to grow taciturn. She sat back and sipped her tea. We both looked off at the tulips growing in their beds outside her window.

  “I stayed in my basement three days,” she said. “Lived there. When the noise stopped, I came up. I sat by my window, but always near to the entrance to my basement.”

  Van Leben stood and walked to the front of her house. I followed in my stocking feet. Two picture windows looked out on her block. They stood uncovered. Across the street was a gap in the block maybe four or five town houses wide. It had been cleared of rubble. No reconstruction had yet begun.

  “The Hoffstetlers lived there since before my parents bought this house.” She was pointing to some space amid the emptiness at the middle of the block opposite her home. “They had four dogs. Four beautiful German shepherds. Gustav, Gerta, Gideon, and Hilda. They walked the four dogs every day—every morning, every night.

  “After the bombing I watched them carry the bodies out. Huge dogs. Heavy as men. The Hoffstetlers had a piano and many paintings. I did not see them carry out any piano or paintings. Only dogs.

  “Machines came and cleared the stones and the lumber. I watched them carry away stones. Wood. Long after they carried out the dogs.”

  Fräulein Van Leben looked out the window to that space where the dogs’ bodies and rubble had once been. She walked me to her back room again. For a long time we didn’t talk, for it became apparent that what we both tacitly needed for a moment was to be around another human, while not talking. We both drank our tea and looked out again at her flowers.

  “That was long before they began to take anyone away,” Fräulein Van Leben said. There was something in her eyes then, a way they were moving back and forth, searching my face, that made me believe in the moment perhaps she had more to tell.

  I took a cigarette from my packet and smoked it at an acceptable pace, then stubbed it out in the ashtray on her table. I thanked Fräulein Van Leben for her hospitality. If she was to remember something further about the Brauns or if she were to learn more of their fate, or the fates of my friends, I told her I would appreciate it if she’d let me know. I provided her with the address of the hotel where I would be staying, and of the café on Scheepstimmermanslaan where I could be found during the days.

  As I was leaving, Fräulein Van Leben stopped me. She said that while she didn’t know what she could tell me now, she did have an idea of how she might unearth something, and that I should leave her information regarding my lodgings.

  From Fräulein Van Leben’s I returned to my hotel room. The gaping hole in the block across from her house kept arising in mind, and alongside it an image of those brown gashes Glynnis and I had observed in the countryside outside of London. Maybe I had been wrong about the image that appears in the mirror. Walking around those old streets by the harbor, all my brain could do was imagine Françoise walking those same streets amid mortal fear of Luftwaffe bombs. I’d left Rotterdam without saying a proper good-bye. I’d left London for training and never seen Glynnis again. I’d left Leitmeritz without bidding a proper good-bye to my mother. My last letter from my parents had come years earlier. I had not attended a funeral since I’d left Leitmeritz. I had only acted and acted and acted and acted, some delusional anti-Hamlet acting instead of thinking. And now every one of my thoughts was retrospective, as if I’d set out on a new life with my gaze cast ever backward.

  2.

  I rose early each morning the next week and sat at the old café. There were new owners. Now they called it Das Amsterdam. My former employers had relocated to the countryside along the Austrian border. They’d left the place to some relations, who promised to pass along my regards, and news of my having outlasted the Nazi aggression. I sat and smoked, and during those moments, I thought perhaps love’s loss would be my soul’s demise. For so long I’d proceeded through that period feeling as if I’d been acted upon: The Anschluss had led me away from my home; Luftwaffe attacks had led me to the seat of a bomber. But I’d acted, too, hadn’t I? It had been my decision to leave Rotterdam. I’d wronged Françoise, and now this was the closest I would come to finding her again: sitting in the city where she and I had met. Living as close as I could to that memory, buffeted only by the evidence of Luftwaffe bombs.

  My third day in Rotterdam, just as I was finishing my morning coffee, a tall girl with dark hair stopped before my table. Standing before me was a beautiful woman, maybe seventeen. She looked at least five years older; girls at that age are truly already women. Her black hair fell to the middle of her back, curled into loose ringlets, and her skin was tawny, like that o
f one who has spent time in the sun.

  “You are Poxl Weisberg,” she said. “You knew my mother.”

  And so Heidi Braun sat down at the café with me. This apparition, who only years earlier I’d known as a preadolescent, was Françoise’s daughter. She’d found me. Fräuleïn Van Leben clearly hadn’t told me she knew of Heidi but then had contacted her. I could see myself through that old woman’s eyes in a flash—and in Françoise’s. Villain. Poxl West, the villain in what he felt was his own tragedy. But here Heidi was, and here was the beginning of my chance for redemption, however meager. As she sat before me, speaking, I was struck most by the way she represented how much time had passed. I’d grown older, I suppose, but I was still the same height, same build, same size. Heidi had been a girl when last I saw her. Now she carried herself like a woman.

  As I marveled at the change in her, Heidi explained that by the time she was fifteen she found her own way to utilize the calling of both her mother and her grandmother. The allure of her youth and of her exoticism would never not be desirable. For her whole life she’d been granted a greater ease of living through her adoptive parents, but when Nazi pressure arrived at their doorstep, even the Brauns couldn’t keep Heidi’s impure blood from Nazi scrutiny. It was in her papers.

  Many like her were sent to Poland.

  But Heidi was able to use her feminine power to her advantage. She found a Nazi soldier to look after her—an ineffectual soldier who ensured her safety, kept her in Rotterdam, but whom she always kept at arm’s length, the relationship so clandestine that even her friends could only whisper of the mechanism of her survival, leaving her safe from the stigma and repercussions of being deemed a collaborator like little Suse back in Leitmeritz. By the time the Wehrmacht was expelled from their city, she’d been working three years in a store that sold fine paper. The occupying officers had come to depend upon that paper when they needed to send word back to their women at home. She had learned to print, and while such fripperies were hardly useful to the civilian population now, she claimed she could keep at this for some time ahead.