The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  Sometimes the tremolo and woof of a mandolin would arise from Françoise’s window. Her muscles had not forgotten how to make chords, how to pick that instrument. I would sit very still, and in not moving, I could hear her voice. It was much quieter now, but it still carried that warble I remembered from her days performing with the Tennessee Sisters. I listened as she sang Bill Monroe’s “What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?” If it occurred to me then that I might be cuckolding this William Rutherford as my mother’s painter had once done my father, it had not stopped me.

  One day while I was in the midst of my deadheading in Françoise’s garden, an old man approached and inquired after my interest in those flowers.

  “I have a certain fascination with making things grow,” I told him. He suggested that he could provide a small fee for my looking after those plants.

  Soon, on the Fridays when British European Airways wasn’t in need, I would go to Park Sheen and, in khaki pants and knee pads, with a spade and a shovel, some fish emulsion procured from the receptacles out back of the local seafood market, and some gloves, I would look after those flowers. At lunch it was the bench and Mrs. Goldring’s old copy of Shakespeare, and awaiting Françoise’s drawing back her curtains so I might listen to her singing; after she’d let them fall again, I would read a single act of one of the plays, or half a dozen sonnets, and then return to gardening. Some days, William Rutherford even waddled past in his Falstaffian way, but he never acknowledged me.

  The gardener is an unseen force. The better he is at his job—the better he is at making things grow and making it appear as if they’ve grown on their own—the less he is seen. He is wholly unlike the bomber, whose nacelles cried out for miles across the German countryside, and in whose wake lay only irrevocable destruction.

  2.

  I’d like to pause for a moment before this life history draws to its natural conclusion, to say a thing or two about my life after returning to find Françoise in London, which needn’t be mysterious any longer. She and I did not reconcile. We did not marry. She stayed with William Rutherford, and I had no choice but to leave.

  I believe to this day that Françoise and I were very much in love, that I never stopped loving her even after I was forced to abandon any dream of a life with her again, maybe even after I married, even after I left London for good for a life in the United States. But there are some events in our lives that do change irrevocably who we can be, what we can be. The damage I’d done in leaving Françoise, the years we’d had apart sitting on those indiscretions, had caused too great a chasm. It took some time for me to comprehend that, but in time I did. I don’t know to this day if Françoise loved William Rutherford. I do know now that it was her life and she would live it. It was not mine.

  Once or twice in the years since that initial postwar period, I’ve gotten my horns locked with older survivors of that war and its attendant atrocities, survivors with whom I’ve joined groups in the interest of solidarity, those middle-aged men like myself who in the forties experienced things they can’t really bring themselves to speak of. They, like me, might have a manuscript locked away in a closet somewhere, reams running through a typewriter, pages they’re likely to show only to their family—or pages they have no interest in showing anyone, which they’ll then share only with the utmost reticence. Those memories are far from mind most days, and yet the scratch of their talon leaves its unalterable mark on the skin of daily life.

  We are sometimes willing to talk about those times. Generally we simply play bridge or discuss some history we’re reading, but at times someone will begin to tell a story and find himself unable to stop until he’s finished. Once or twice, on a bad year, I’ll provide a truncated version of my loss in exchange. They’ll hear some expurgated version of my story, hear that I flew a Lancaster bomber. Usually they’ll say, “What I’ve heard described—firebombing over Germany—you say it was a total destruction by fire. How do you handle it? Thinking of it? Speaking of it?”

  I understand their implication. We all live with what we live with. What you know, you know.

  There were decades ahead for me after I returned to London. Freed from trying to find Françoise, I traveled to Leitmeritz to see the remains of Brüder Weisberg. It had fallen badly into disrepair. Seeing it so made me somehow happy. I traveled to Vienna. In the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, I saw a portrait of my mother as a young girl hanging alongside the most famous Schieles and Klimts. Some people fought to get paintings like this one back. I liked that it hung where anyone could see it.

  Like every one of the things I’d lost in that period, I couldn’t have it back.

  At times, always unexpected, the flames of the past will come and burn a hole in my day. I read a lot of poetry in my summers when I’ve got some free space in my head and I return to the poetry written during that time when I first met Françoise. I knew then that T. S. Eliot had been a fire watcher in one of those central London stations near where Clive Pillsbury and I worked as squaddies. Perhaps I saw him once. Perhaps I passed him on the street that night in December when I first met Glynnis Goldring. Perhaps I saw Françoise in those last months before she lost her sight, simply passing her on the street somewhere, seeking out fires and not seeing her because I wasn’t looking. Running around all of London in those last days before I decided to fly sorties to kill tens of thousands. Perhaps if I’d found her then, before her life settled in Richmond, I could have won her back, could have had her as my wife.

  I came through those years of war wanting only one thing. But I understand now that it wasn’t Françoise. It was the Françoise I knew before I left her, before I’d made the worst decision I’d ever made in my life, one that I regret today more than anything I’ve ever done. The Françoise I’d met in Rotterdam before I left for London, as she was then. I could not return to Leitmeritz and take over Brüder Weisberg; I could not go back and choose to attempt to help my mother and father reconcile. I could not go back and sit out the bombing of Rotterdam by Françoise’s side, allowing her whatever she needed to be allowed. But I had found her, and now she was in fact William Rutherford’s wife and she was going to stay, bodily, William Rutherford’s wife.

  3.

  I have written a book through the scrim of memory, seeking a freedom that can be attained only through acknowledgment. I do not know if I’ve succeeded. But allow me to back up just once more and recount to you one last memory, to return to one moment before things were settled with Françoise, in want of liberation.

  One Wednesday in 1947, in the winter months, during which British European Airways and the weather kept me from Françoise’s garden and before it was settled that she’d continue on in her life with William Rutherford, I arrived at 128 Park Sheen, only to find no answer at the door.

  A week later I returned. Again I found the flat vacant. Mail lay piled at the door, letters Françoise couldn’t have read if she’d wanted to. I wondered if one even arrived from Heidi. But I would never know. I was alone for so much of those years after I left my home in Leitmeritz, but never in all that time was I as alone as I was during those weeks. They began to accrete: I’d lost forever the sedentary love of my parents. I was certain at that time I’d been all but disabused of the hope for romantic love.

  Still I returned each week to Park Sheen with the hope Françoise might admit me again for tea. On the fifth Wednesday after Françoise had ceased to answer, I knocked, and she answered. She saw me in. She took me to her kitchen as if no time had passed. In the span of our relationship, I suppose it hadn’t.

  She took out the teacups, lit the flame, cooled her palm in the sink, and served our tea. Sweat began to collect on my brow. I was about to say something when I looked at Françoise and recognized she was about to speak. This fact was signaled by a tightening around her eyes.

  “My ophthalmologist is in Vienna,” she said. “I was being checked out. William set it up. He knows a man there. There’s scar tissue behind my left eye. My ri
ght eye is gone. Just glass. But the scar tissue behind the left must be cleared from time to time. While we were there we stayed to see Don Giovanni and to see a psychotherapist I’ve come to trust.

  “Well, not see, after all. But.

  “I had reason to talk with him this past month. There appeared to be some chance of restoring sight to my left eye. There was response from the optic nerve after the scar tissue was cleared this time.”

  “You might have mentioned you’d be going,” I said.

  I didn’t say it particularly kindly.

  “I might have said a lot of things. I might have told you how confused I was in the days after you left Rotterdam, when Veerhaven was bombed to dust. When many died. When I was left alone to deal with it, wondering where on earth you’d gone. Do you know what it feels like to be abandoned again? I can no longer see, but I haven’t forgotten what color looks like. How often do I think of that afternoon when we biked to the tulips fields, when I told you of the American who bought me my mandolin, who left me without explanation. And then there I was, again, left alone. Without a word. Even after you knew it was my greatest fear to be abandoned. Some actions you can’t take back, Poxl. Most of them, in fact. Mostly we do things in our lives and they affect the people around us. You. What you did. To me. You ask for forgiveness? You offer apology? As if that could undo what’s been done.

  “Greta and I were lucky to live. You weren’t there. It was only through William’s generosity that I was able to come to London. One man, one person who finally did what he said he would do. There was always a promise of a different life. Only William took action. Was it what I most wanted? Was this the version of my life I’d have chosen? I’d even fallen in love, really in love, with a Jewish boy from Czechoslovakia at one point, but he flew from me without a word. After the bombing that spring, I would have done anything to leave. Do you know what it is to wait out nights in a basement, waiting to be burned as if you were in a kiln? There’s nothing I wouldn’t have done to get away. Nothing.

  “William had a flat in Knightsbridge. We made it all the way through the heaviest nights of the Blitz without being hit. I was finally away from Rotterdam. I was finally safe. We were lucky. Neighbors were left homeless. Plenty of scares. Our town house remained intact. Months passed. Soon there were no longer scares even—there was no more real fear. We let ourselves believe it. What we can let ourselves believe if only we want to believe it badly enough. The rumbling of buildings being hit, the hiss of incendiaries, those became the natural sounds of life.

  “One night in February we were to go into London to see some friends. William hired a car to pick us up. At the last minute he decided he would shower. Would I mind looking after the car? I said I wouldn’t.

  “Now, you might wonder—didn’t I know better than to stand by a window? My life had grown so circumscribed. Sometimes I allowed myself indiscretions. I didn’t even want to acknowledge the war was going on outside. For just one evening I would stay in our flat without the blackout curtains pulled, the lights out in the room but the curtain open that I might look on the park across from our building, which reminded me so of those parks I’d loved in Delfshaven. A late-night walk in that park, even, if William was at hospital.

  “That night, I allowed myself to stand by a window without the blackout curtain drawn.

  “The first thing I thought was that the wall had somehow fallen and hit me in the face. A rush like a conch shell up to each ear. My eyes were closed. I couldn’t press my face off the wall. Then I realized it wasn’t a wall; it was the floor. I couldn’t get up. I could hear William calling me. All I could think was to henpeck at him for his tardiness, to say, ‘Finish your damn shower; the cab’s coming.’ Even when I came around in hospital the following morning, even when my body knew I wouldn’t be able to see any longer, in my mind I felt anger at William, wishing he’d finish that bloody shower.”

  She made a little sound, not a sigh really, but a kind of harrumph I’d not ever heard her make before. Then she stopped. She fingered her teacup, and it appeared she wouldn’t say anything further.

  “I was a squaddie in those days,” I said. “I drove around looking to save people like you.” Françoise didn’t say anything. “Later I flew a bomber. I trained on planes that bombed Germany. Bombers that flew deadly runs on Hamburg. That destroyed entire German cities.”

  It was meant as a complement to the story Françoise had just told. An exchange of information. A chance at retribution. One of us was in her flat in Knightsbridge when a Luftwaffe bomb stole the visible world from her. The other trained on a bomber a couple of years later that either exacted revenge, or perpetrated the same evil upon Germany. Whichever it was—vengeance or villainy, quid pro quo or quid quid quid—I know only that in that moment I honestly thought she wanted me to tell her my story in exchange for hers.

  Behind the skein of scar tissue that surrounded Françoise’s eyes the muscles in her face twitched. They’d gained their own new memory. Her eyes stayed fixed in their sockets, both the eye she’d been born with and the glass eye, identical in every way. Her eyes were open, but their senses were shut. Their rheumy stare was still directed over to the window above her sink.

  “I might ask how that was for you, but to be honest, I don’t want to know,” Françoise said. “We all did what we needed these past years. I’m not here to conduct a postmortem.”

  Françoise’s words suggested liberation, but in hearing her talk, I understood that what she needed to be liberated from was her past. Françoise was not a ghost; she did not do any haunting. She was haunted by a ghost of her own. Her ghost was a capricious young Czech kid who came into her life and flew just as he came, without explanation. What Françoise needed was the very liberation I thought I’d come to gain from her. From the pain of events long past.

  From me.

  In those moments, I began to understand something that wouldn’t grow in my conscious mind for months: I would have to stop. I had found Françoise and one day I would have to leave her. But that did not keep us from talking now. I could attempt to apologize once more, but now I understood something new about the nature of apology: It is the request for a gift. Forgiveness. It was not a gift I deserved.

  “In the time before I found Heidi in Rotterdam,” I found myself saying, “I worked at an internment camp in Wunstorf. There I encountered a German youth who told me of his life in Hamburg while RAF bombers were dropping those very bombs on his city. It was awful.”

  Françoise seemed to be looking at me. I know she could not see, but some atavistic instinct had placed her gaze upon me. Her whole face, for the first time since I had found her here in Park Sheen, was directed at me.

  “And how was he?” Françoise said. Her meaning wasn’t clear. “Was his skin sloughed off from the flames? Had he lost his sight, a limb?”

  I told her I hadn’t thought of it.

  “No, no,” I said. “He didn’t bear any physical mark from the bombing.”

  “Well, tell me, then, Poxl. Which of these things has made you understand? What do you make of seeing me here?”

  “What really have I seen of you?” I said. “Not what I’ve wanted.”

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “More,” I said.

  And so I did what I’d yearned to do for so long then it might express the underlying momentum behind every emotion that had coursed through me since that day I found Heidi in Rotterdam: I stood. I walked across the room. I took Françoise by the shoulders and made her stand. Then I took each button of her blouse between my thumb and forefinger.

  I removed it.

  I removed her bra and then her skirt. I stepped back. All across her chest, above her breasts and on them, too, was that tan-pink watery flesh of the burn victim, that flesh that grows anew to replace what’s been stolen by fire. What the war had stolen was not replaced as it had been, but was replaced by slick, tight, shiny flesh. The nipple of her left breast was obscured by just such scar
tissue. That is where I began. I began to kiss, just as I had previously kissed, what shrapnel had stolen. I kissed her and kissed her and kissed her: new Françoise. Some other man’s Françoise. A Françoise I’d wronged so badly, she would never be able to forgive me.

  More Françoise.

  She did not stop me, knowing as well as I did that this would be the last time. She did not express fear that William Rutherford might return and find us there, as I’d found my mother in her anteroom a decade earlier. She took her arms so that the crook of each elbow was against the very center of my neck. She flexed so I couldn’t breathe and it did not matter that I felt pain, that I was getting what I deserved, that the brittle cartilage of my throat made audible sounds against the sharp bone of her elbows. Neither of us even acknowledged it was happening. She placed kisses atop my head, where new tissue had come to replace the eruption where lightning had passed from my head into the electric cloud above Lübeck.

  I moved to the nipple that was untouched by new tissue, but Françoise moved me back again. I pushed her down against the cold tile of that Park Sheen floor. Her arms released my neck. I opened my eyes and saw she was wearing no earrings. I thought for the first time since I’d again found Françoise that now maybe I had supplanted my mother’s suitors, all of them. I’d not been up this close to Françoise since I’d returned to London and I never would again, but I could see that, where when I saw her last her lobe was taut, now the hole had drawn long, and there were four little creases like I’d first seen those years before in Prague but I had only a moment before I had to close my eyes again, as both of her hands were rubbing me, then clutching me, one moving up and down and one moving in circles and for far too short a time—it had, after all, been so long since I’d made love erotic and romantic, love as brief as lightning and sedentary as family—we moved against each other, I moved inside her and she within me, and we moved and moved and moved until we were, until the end but never again, lovers.