The Last Flight of Poxl West (11 page)

That first day we went out together on the streets of London I was forced to depend upon him for directions. I studied the city maps, marking the main avenues, but I was hopeless. “This right here on Oxford Street—no, right, make a right,” Clive would yell. “A left here. Poxl, a left, my boy. Oh, we've missed it again, then. Mightn't we consider trying to find another driver?”

I looked at him.

“I know, I know, my license and all. But it will be something if we're able to get there. And now—there—no, you've missed it again.”

“Why don't you have the wheel yourself?” I asked.

He didn't respond, only turned a bright red at the skin above his collar.

“Drive on, then,” he said.

I had been told by our dispatcher that Clive had lost his license after driving the better part of the previous year, all throughout the Phoney War, until an unfortunate drunken incident left him unable to drive. I hadn't learned what kept Clive from driving, but I assumed I was better off not pushing it. The subject of driving was a sore one for irascible Clive.

While I became inured to our paths across London, we found ourselves circling neighborhoods. British planes were fighting the Luftwaffe on the coast, and our charge gained urgency. Where wounded soldiers had been spotted returning through Waterloo Station after Dunkirk end of May, now homeless suburbanites trickled into the city for respite.

“We shall get used to it in time,” people would say. “Business as usual.”

At night a pink glow rose from the southeast. Bombs hadn't yet fallen on London proper. In the evenings, Clive and I would drink. Clive's self-control in the public houses made the story I'd heard about him losing his license even more suspect. He was completely self-possessed. His secret to holding his liquor: Every three pints of bitter, he would drink a cup of coffee—ersatz coffee, amid rationing, but it was a drink he preferred to the tea his fellow Brits commonly drank. I took to having a cup myself amid all the drinking, coming to like the rectitude implied by such routine.

4.

When we heard the sound of the air raid siren at home—the sound of a couple hundred banshees all letting their voices cry upward and downward to signal that bombers were soon to be overhead—we dropped what we were doing and huddled in the Anderson shelter out back. It brought me and my cousins a new closeness, an ease like we'd had back in Leitmeritz. And something new. We would sit together, imagining this could be our last moment on earth. And something changed in us. Johana would let her fingers grip mine while her other hand gripped Niny's. We weren't children, cramped together in a tiny metal shelter, awaiting Luftwaffe bombs. We weren't adults, either. We were three cousins pressed together, not knowing what would come next, unable to predict what the next second held for us.

Those self-same banshee cries came to define much of that autumn for us—for all of us in London at the time. One night the first week of September, Clive and I sat in a pub near Bermondsey. Another air raid siren went off. I tipped my beer back before turning for the exit. But this was not the proper comportment. As they did each time the sirens went off, as I'd soon realized the previous spring, the bar's patrons remained seated. This might seem the kind of apocryphal story those who've been through war tell once it's long over, misremembering or embellishing somehow. I can attest to the fact it was this very attitude that allowed the war to continue until Luftwaffe attacks could be subdued.

Here at Smithwick's Pub with Clive Pillsbury, I found myself sitting in a bar whose windows might implode with lethal shards, whose stone walls might fall and crush us. But we weren't going anywhere. Conversation in the bar continued as if we were a group of thanes all pretending not to notice the king in heated argument with an invisible ghost. Whole notes of the air raid siren rose and dipped. No one changed his demeanor. The barkeep pulled me a Whitbread. I returned to our table. Clive sat with his coffee. He went about trying to create the admixture of milk and coffee, while all the time the sound of the siren rose and fell. Three times Clive filled his mug to the point of overflowing, then sent it back. Though he made a mess of his place at the table, Clive was repelled by disorder. Coffee drew ever more toward the top, the liquid topped off at the lip of the mug, and his hands would work—first milk, then spoon in after. His eyes never left the mug. He was at this business, the two of us ignoring the sirens, when suddenly he stood.

“I'm off to the lav,” he said. The sirens continued. I know now that bar was never hit by a bomb. But I still sat waiting for the roof to crush me. What would happen when glass shattered? When the world ended for me with no one even by my side to witness it? Clive returned. The siren stopped and we sat through minutes of silence. Later in the war we would hear dogfights overhead. But this had not occurred yet. We heard nothing but Glenn Miller playing on the radio. Then a higher-pitched cry, all one high C note: the all clear.

We were quiet again for a moment before Clive's confession came. It came all at once. He said, “No one ever thinks that he's anything but the best behind the wheel. They all think they're the best driver in London.

“Bollocks.”

Around us people returned to speaking at normal volume.

“Everyone gets a tad crazy behind the wheel,” Clive continued. He still had not lifted his eyes from the lip of the mug. “Me, I get angry while driving, sure, but I never see red. I see black. I get blind. I come to lose myself.”

This was the talk of a man who speaks more the more nervous he becomes. I noted this strange progression: He'd been in perfect command of himself during the threat of a raid, but now that that was past, something changed. Rills of coffee the color of river silt were spilling all over the sides of his mug. I looked around for a waiter but he was with the barkeep sipping a Watney's.

“It wasn't seeing black kept me from driving,” Clive said. He continued to look down into his coffee. “Do they tell the story around the station, then?”

“What story?”

“‘What story?'” Clive mocked. “What do you think? I can see it all over your face. The story of how Clive Pillsbury isn't driving the canteen truck because he cracked.”

“People say you were drunk.”

“Too much drink has kept me from driving?” he said. “If only. A few too many whiskies, a man recovers in a day.” At a corner table a squat man with a gleaming head told a joke that kept his two companions laughing. A crescendo had been building in the minutes since the all clear. Clive was sopping away at his mug, into which now he continued to pour milk from the small pitcher at its side.

“Might be good to take a sip if you don't want to spill over any more,” I said.

Clive's cheeks flushed.

“‘Might be good to,'” he said.

For the second time in five minutes he'd mocked me—and the second time he'd ever done so.

“It might do to take a sip, Poxl. But I can't. Same reason I can't drive the truck.” He fell silent again. “You see, I get in this way so I can't do a thing.”

“Can't do a thing?” I said.

“Like with this cup of coffee here.” Clive looked down at his mug and then put a finger to its rim. “For a long time I knew how I liked my coffee. I knew it more and more, until I could drink it only if it was the right combination.” I told him that everyone has a way he likes his coffee. “Not like this,” Clive said. “I can see the color without tasting it: caramel, only not. September clouds, only not gray. And this”—Clive was pointing down at his coffee—“is not right.”

“One time I'd gotten into my car at the end of a long day,” Clive said after a pause. “As I was driving I thought I'd hit something. Could have been a dog. I drove back. There was nothing. The next week it happened again. This time I was sure I'd hit something. Still, I got half a mile from it before turning back.

“Nothing.

“A couple of days later I thought I'd hit something again. This time I decided I must not have. I got ten miles away before I turned back and found nothing there.

“It began to happen more and more. The bump would stick in mind until, when I got back to the location of the first incident, my mind had made it into a human-size bump. Even when it was a man I'd thought I'd hit, I'd convinced myself I'd hit nothing. I would almost get home. Then, a hundred yards from my door, I'd go back.

“Only now, on the ride back to the scene, I'd hear a new bump. In my mind it was a man again. Do you know the guilt, believing you've killed a man? Even if it wasn't intentional. Even if you didn't witness the carnage with your own two eyes. Who
wouldn't
it drive mad? The circle grew tighter until, just before you arrived and came after a job with the Home Guard, I almost didn't make it to my house one night. Six in the morning before I arrived home. Eight hours to drive fifteen miles.”

A smell rose from the bar as a patron lit a cigar. We could hear each tinkle of each glass touching the next in the cabinet behind the publican. The silence in the absence of an air raid siren was blaring.

“It happened in the canteen car, too,” Clive continued. “They were shorter drives. I returned to the station on the same routes we'd taken. I would sweat the whole time, convince myself on the way back to the station I would be able to see what I'd hit. Only on my way home, I couldn't get there. I kept getting into tighter loops.”

“This all sounds scary, Clive,” I said. “Surely you don't sound as if you've cracked. Your nerves are simply frayed.”

“I've got a theory,” Clive said. “I believe I've come to understand the cause of it all, what my mind's up to. What the world's up to. Zeno's paradox. I read philosophy at Oxford. Zeno was a Greek philosopher who held that if you looked at it using math, no physical mass could ever move. He used the example of a bow and arrow. In order for an arrow to hit its target, it's got to move through space—let's say ten feet. To get halfway to its target, it must go five feet. Each time the arrow moves across this smaller space, it must get halfway there. It's mathematically impossible for the arrow ever to get there. It'll divide in half infinite times without ever crossing the final infinitesimal divide.

“No one has ever been able to disprove the theory.

“Maybe I was testing the paradox. Get halfway there, turn around. Here we are now. Siren, all clear. It's been a year and no bomb has dropped on us. No smoke. No bang. No ash. No rubble.” The men across the way erupted in laughter. My shoulders rose toward my ears. Obsessive Clive Pillsbury just sat there in the wash of his recitation of Zeno's paradox.

“I'll go refill our beer,” I said.

Air had returned to the room. The publican pulled me a Watney's. Clive and I clacked beer glass and mug. Some coffee dumped out onto the table. We touched glasses. Those, at least, did meet.

5.

During the first weeks of autumn the bombs began to land on East Enders, but not yet on us. Explosions had left thousands homeless and streaming into the city—and left our neighbors with a false sense of stability. Shelters filled. Morrison ordered the tube stations in central London billeted. Communities arose in stations all over the Underground. Londoners were beginning an exodus into their homes, under the streets, which would later find them moving north and east until they were clear of mortal threat.

At night I walked to the park across from our flat; iron railings of the park's fence had been stripped during the salvage drive. In the middle of all that verdure, the call of rooks up in their plane trees, past dark, all the people were packed away in their air raid shelters in town or in their Anderson shelters out back. It was as if I had that city to myself. Where my outings to Prague had been comprised of the joy of thousands of people forever rushing at me—I learned that to live life is to lay oneself down to a wave, to feel as best one could the direction the current was flowing and then allow one's body to go slack and have the wisdom not to fight it lest one drown—London at night during that anxious period of the war was tensile as the thin frozen sheet atop a moving river.

The air was thick with the dust of debris. Nightly bombings kicked up soot. Where behind closed eyes I once saw each of the faces I'd known in the stones of Prague, now my eyes were abraded by astringent dust. The air was filled with frantic resolve, so that even on a night like this, all thoughts were suffused with mortality. What we were seeing as we drove through those streets was only the beginning of thirty thousand civilian casualties. I came to feel almost ashamed of the fact that still holding sway over my mind was the image of my mother, naked, with her suitor in my father's immense home. That when I woke at three in the morning with my mind churning, it was churning over that moment when I'd followed my instinct to leave Holland, not having thought of what it would mean to Françoise. What did such things mean now amid falling bombs in London and Rotterdam?

Well, everything. And nothing. And amid this, marked each day in the papers was not the notation of someone dying in a
bombing,
but of their having died “
very suddenly
”: “Thomas Brown of Lancashire died very suddenly Tuesday night”; “Sally Fargo died very suddenly earlier this week. She is survived by…”

There was no one to bury. How hard it is to believe a life has ended until one sees the body interred. Or the damage done.

It wasn't long before Clive Pillsbury and I saw our first bombings firsthand. While people were arriving from the East End, having hitched rides, the two of us took long rides about greater London, surveying the damage and feeding squaddies. In Aldersgate one afternoon, a week after the evening of Clive's confession, we passed a sandwich shop, its façade open like a cleft palate. A sign affixed to the door, left standing, while the rest of the front had been blown away, read
MORE OPEN THAN USUAL.