The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  “But what of you, Poxl?” she said.

  “What of me?” I said. “What of your mother?”

  Heidi took a minute to answer. Her affect was not that of a seventeen-year-old girl—there was nothing petulant, instead only a slow air of resignation. For the second time since she’d come up to me, I now recognized something familiar in Heidi, only it wasn’t her resemblance to her mother this time. It was a moment of looking at her and seeing, reflected back at me, myself. Hers was a resignation I myself had carried upon embarking on my new life alone.

  “Only the future holds the answer to that question, Mr. Weisberg,” Heidi said. A strange ambiguous look came across her face. “My mother has been living with my stepfather in London for almost as along as you.”

  Françoise, Heidi explained, had anticipated the fate that might befall a woman like herself, having seen firsthand the destruction wrought by the Luftwaffe. She’d walked the streets in terror in the days after the bombing. Not two months after Nazi bombs destroyed half of Rotterdam, some Brit had paid her way to London. She had stowed away on a freighter. I told Heidi this departure mirrored precisely my departure from Rotterdam.

  “Your disappearance,” Heidi said. “No one knew where you’d gone.” Now I watched as the skin on her lips bunched together. I recognized this action as I’d seen it in her mother that day I failed to grasp her explanation of how muscle memory worked in her hands. That muscle memory was now working on her daughter’s mouth: disappointment drawn on her very lips.

  “You must understand,” I said. “My father had gotten me passage to London, and I was so confused in those days about what I was to your— I had seen that— I just.”

  “Do you need something more to drink?” Heidi said. I started to say something more and then stopped, not knowing what I would even say. We sat in silence until Heidi spoke again.

  She told me more about her time in Rotterdam after the war. For the rest of that afternoon I found some way, as I had with Fräulein Van Leben, to avoid divulging any of the details of my life since leaving Rotterdam. When I got Heidi talking again I recognized that embedded within Françoise’s resurrection, like a fissure in a rock which is over time eroded to sand, was the fact that she was now married. Heidi had kept up with her mother by post, but in the chaos of the last years of the war, she had kept in touch poorly. I took down Heidi’s information, and on that same paper she included the most important information I would ever receive—Françoise’s London address:

  William and Françoise Rutherford

  128 Park Sheen

  Richmond TW 9

  England

  Heidi gave me a look whose meaning I couldn’t discern. She said, “There’s more to my mother’s state than I’ve told you. There is a more pressing reason I’ve only been in intermittent contact with her in the past few years. In her first year in London, my mother was trapped in a building that was hit by a Luftwaffe bomb. She was blinded.”

  “So how does she care for herself?”

  “This is why I have ceased writing her, Poxl. She can read only when William Rutherford reads to her. The things I would like to tell her—about having met you, any material private in the least—I cannot write.”

  “I could take a letter back to her for you,” I said. “I’ll leave for London soon enough and seek her out.”

  Heidi looked down into the cup in front of her. “I’d rather not,” she said. I did not ask further after her meaning. There were some mirrors in which I wasn’t yet ready to gaze upon myself.

  For the following days Heidi and I walked around Rotterdam, witnessing the beginning of its attempt to regain itself after a long period of destruction. Piles of rubble, pushed back over their original foundations, lay between buildings with cracked façades. Along the Nieuwe Maas the heads of massive brick windmills lay cracked. We walked blocks, seeing only rubble. Only in Delfshaven had most of the old brick town houses remained intact. By the end of that week, Heidi and I gravitated there each afternoon.

  The mind desires order. Perhaps it is that which defines the limits of vengeance: The teleology of the mind is a movement toward order. Where no order can be found there is no retribution. Even justified destruction must trail behind itself resurrection; the only question being how long the lag. Buildings destroyed would be rebuilt or they would become empty space—it was a binary, nothing more. A yes-or-no question. The restoration of a city was uncomplicated in that way. In the years after the war, when cities like Dresden and Berlin would rebuild their wrecked buildings brick by brick, Rotterdam would opt for the opposite—each building erected to replace those lost would be more modern than the next, bearing less and less resemblance to the buildings that had been there before, until they barely even resembled buildings. This city did not attempt to recapitulate herself, but to build something anew, no matter how ugly or jarring.

  By our third day together, Heidi and I spent our afternoon sitting on a bench, staring off at an unbroken line of town houses that had stood in Rotterdam since the thirteenth century, the very houses from which those religious pilgrims who would first settle the United States set out in their ships to cross the Atlantic. We rarely talked of the war. I didn’t want to know what Heidi had seen. At a quiet moment on our third afternoon together, Heidi said, “What did you do in the Air Force? You were a medic?”

  “I wasn’t,” I told her. “I trained as a pilot on a Lancaster, Perdita,” I said. “A bomber.” I explained it was the most frequently used bomber of the Royal Air Force. Along with me were six other men. The job of these planes was to bomb Germany. Heidi sat back and again stared at the marbled sky. I looked back up, too. Where when I’d looked up when I was in Rotterdam last, I saw the sky overhead, now my brain deciphered tactical meaning: cumulous, probably twelve to eighteen thousand feet. Nimbus likely to follow, and with them rain.

  Not a good day for a bombing run.

  I suggested to Heidi we should get inside. At some point in the near future, rain was likely. On our way back to my hotel, we stopped for a gelato. The combination of time and the sweets rescued Heidi from her mood.

  The rain I’d predicted didn’t come. For the rest of that afternoon and the afternoons that followed we walked those Rotterdam streets, not raising the subject of her mother or of my military service. At week’s end, by those same turbid canals of Delfshaven, a week since I’d arrived, I told Heidi I would return to London. She looked out across the way from the bench where we sat.

  “Perdita, I’d like you to come with me to find your mother,” I said. Heidi only continued to look out across the way. This was her home. Perhaps she would visit in due time. I’d gain no truck in attempting to change so confident a person as Heidi of anything, let alone moving to a city where she knew no one but her blind mother and her blind mother’s estranged former lover.

  “When you find my mother, be gentle. Be patient. You don’t know how she’ll respond. So much has changed for her since you saw her last, and she does have William.”

  I said nothing. From nothing comes nothing. I was to leave Rotterdam. Heidi walked me back to my hotel and I bid her farewell.

  “One last question, Poxl,” Heidi said. “Why do you keep calling me Perdita?”

  I explained that Perdita was the daughter of Hermione, a Shakespearean queen believed dead sixteen years before a statue sculpted in her likeness was returned to life. She later would marry the prince of Bohemia. I stopped short of telling her that I’d read of Perdita in a cave in the countryside east of London with the mother of another woman I’d almost married. That would be too much to explain.

  Something had changed in me, something I might even be able to articulate now looking back on that afternoon: For the first time in my life, I had my own secrets. When I’d met Françoise years before, the text of my life read on just one level. I could tell Françoise the story of my mother’s cheating on my father, for that was all there was to tell. It was left to me to interpret, but it bore no further story. Now I c
ould not narrate all of what had befallen me since leaving Rotterdam those years before.

  3.

  I set myself up in a room in the Regent London. Niny, who had taken a job with British European Airways, where she and Johana both had parlayed their good standing as WAAFs into work at RAF Northolt, greeted me at her old flat as a returning Odysseus. She laid kisses all across my face. She was wearing the earrings I’d found for her in the midst of the heaviest days of the Blitz.

  “I assumed you would stay in Rotterdam with Françoise, that we might never see you in London again.”

  I explained what Heidi had told me: Françoise was alive. She was now married, had been blinded, and was living in a flat in Richmond. As Niny took in the implications of all I had told her, she said she would get us some tea. We could talk about what I might do now. When she returned I told her there was essentially nothing for us to discuss—after finding a permanent residence, I would go seek out Françoise.

  “Six years have passed,” Niny said. “A woman you fell in love and left with so long ago is now married. You need to prepare yourself for any possibility.”

  “I know it,” I said.

  “And Poxl. You need to figure out how you’re going to ask for forgiveness.”

  “I will take it one step at a time,” I said. Then I told Niny it made sense for me to find a bedsit rather than burden her again. I had Johana in mind. Before I left, Niny suggested there was little trouble for a former RAF pilot to find work flying commercial airlines. She would do what she could to find someone for me to talk to there.

  * * *

  My first week I found a room not in central London, as I’d planned, but not far from Niny’s, either, where it was cheaper, where it would please Niny herself to have me nearby. A job came open for a flight instructor at British European Airways. Before long I was hired. It would be a number of months before the position was to begin.

  Two weeks after my return I rode the Underground out to Richmond. It was forty-five minutes out, almost all the way to RAF Northolt. Soon I found myself in a small neighborhood of three-story houses and wide streets. For ten blocks up Church Street, I looked on as men and women went about their daily activities. All of them might well have seen Françoise every day since she’d been there. Up a side street, maybe a quarter mile on the left, was the little neighborhood Heidi had mentioned: Park Sheen.

  At the center of the square where Françoise purportedly now lived was a small courtyard with a garden surrounded by benches, one of which I sat on while I looked up at the windows of her building, guessing which was her bedroom. Quiet secrecy was best for now, to wait here until there was some sense of Françoise and her new husband.

  For three hours nothing happened. No one came in or out of 128 Park Sheen. I sat on the bench reading a play that has no ghosts but does have a woman long thought dead who turns up years later alive, The Winter’s Tale—I’d already begun toying with the idea of returning to school. My mother might have longed for me to follow those painters she so loved; my father might have liked it if I had ventured about to restore myself to the leather-selling business. But in the depths, what I cared for most were the plays I’d read in a cave in the Kent countryside. I lugged Mrs. Goldring’s old Shakespeare with me everywhere I went.

  I returned home that first day without so much as walking to Françoise’s door. I repeated this trip on four successive days, sitting in the courtyard of Park Sheen until it seemed impossible to stay without raising suspicion.

  On the fifth day, the door to the address Heidi provided opened.

  Rather than Françoise, the figure of a dwarfish, aging British man appeared. He was far older than Françoise, nearly into his dotage. In a long mac that easily covered the length of his stunted body, which opened, revealing heavy rubber galoshes that rose above his knees, he bumbled through his entranceway. No sooner had Rutherford exited his house than he was walking toward the garden, his short, childlike steps coming rapidly, and just as he was upon the bench where I sat, I thought to open my mouth before realizing he was simply attempting to pass on his way out of the courtyard.

  Then he was gone. Françoise must have been alone in her flat. With William off and my heart still pounding, I set myself up opposite his door. Is it okay to knock? I wondered. Might Françoise depart this very same home and I could speak to her then? She hadn’t done so once all week. I knocked on the door as if my hand were something I’d stolen, some other man’s hand. On the second floor of that building, a curtain drew back. A minute passed.

  The door opened.

  “Yes?” Françoise said. Another moment passed. “Well, who is it, then?” Françoise had maintained her Dutch accent, the guttural Dutch rasp in her tone. “What is it you’re selling?”

  “Nothing for sale,” I said. “It’s Poxl.”

  Françoise closed the door.

  My toe might have done some good had I thought to lodge it in the opening. I might have put up my hand to block her.

  But I didn’t.

  After a moment the door reopened, revealing Françoise’s tan face again. It was much the same, and yet in some way it was wholly changed. Thick brown-pink tissue around her eyes drew back into an indecipherable flatness. Her eyes were now blanched cataracts. Their gaze remained directed off to the left and never came near my own.

  “If Poxl Weisberg does still exist, I suppose it would be rude not to admit him,” Françoise said. “Take off your boots on the way in. I’ll not have even Lazarus tracking all of Richmond’s mud across our new rugs.”

  She made her way into the dark hallway of the flat she shared with her dwarfish Briton. Persian rugs in a variety of browns and rich burgundies lined the linoleum floors of the place. I found their texture coarse against the soles of my feet. I put my book down under my boots so as not to forget it there. Much as I had done with Fräulein Van Leben, who had told me of the dogs she’d seen hauled out of her neighbors’ house in Delfshaven, I kept quiet.

  “If in fact this is truly Poxl Weisberg, I suppose he expects me to come over and feel his face with my hands to confirm his being the same Poxl Weisberg I once knew,” Françoise said.

  Her back was toward the stove opposite. She made no move to approach me. Instead she used her hands to navigate around her small kitchen. Françoise used the flat of her palm to push her way along the cabinets she opened to find two porcelain teacups. She held her hands, palms out, against her counter as she made her way to her stovetop. Just as she had the first time I ever entered her flat back in Veerhaven, she brought the teacups down to the towel by the sink and wiped them once, then twice. This time she was making sure to do away with any dust that might have settled in them since they were last used.

  She reached behind the stove for a box of kitchen matches, turned the gas on the stove, and went to strike one.

  “Why don’t you let me,” I said.

  Françoise had already lit the match with an expert deftness and put it to the gas. A tiny woof filled the air and then was gone—the smallest perceivable explosion.

  “You’ll take sugar, I suppose,” she said, though she did nothing to accommodate an answer. I gave none. She passed her hand over the burner to locate the center of the flame without a flinch as the borderless yellow bulb licked her palm. The minute explosion touched Françoise’s flesh. An image arose in my mind and then fled.

  Now Françoise reached for the teakettle and placed it on the burner. She took a measured step to her right, then another, and passed her hand beneath the water from her faucet. Then she came and with a coarseness wholly new even to her, having not even dried her hands, she used her damp fingertips and the flat of her palm to feel my face. She pushed and prodded at my nose like an infant studying its mother. She let her hands linger for a moment on the patch of scalp where now instead of hair there was only shiny tissue. Then she promptly moved back to the stove, got us each a cup of tea, and settled back into her seat. She lifted her teacup very slowly to her mouth.

&n
bsp; “I suppose you watched Rutherford on his way out, before having the gall to come see me.”

  “Heidi gave me your address,” I said. “We met in Rotterdam after my discharge from the RAF. She told me about your accident.”

  “Yes, well,” Françoise said.

  For the following minutes, we drank our tea. Of course she couldn’t see the tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. As she neared done she picked the dregs from her tongue and placed them on a cloth to her left, her finger coming to her mouth and then down with a certain expertise. And though I’d told Niny I’d take it one step at a time, I spoke quickly.

  “Françoise, there is so much for us to tell each other, but I am, first and before other words, sorry,” I said. She did not respond. I watched her lips pull tight just as Heidi’s had. “I’m sure you can’t forgive me now, I’m sure you will need time, but I am sorry.”

  “Stop,” she said.

  “Stop?”

  Now she said nothing. A few more times she refused to hear of my life since I’d left Rotterdam. I’d hoped at least to explain my departure, to tell her of those moments of watching her on that boat in the Nieuwe Maas and seeing her at her business with that young man, stories that would lay fallow in me for decades. But each time she heard me start, she turned her blank gaze past me to the window over the sink in her kitchen, where some light source must have found its way to the remnants of what she had once been able to see. And I had no choice but to stop talking, as well. We sat that way for what felt so long I can’t say how much time passed before she spoke.