The Last Flight of Poxl West (24 page)

This visit from a wraith left me in a stupor for the rest of that day.

Smith was alive. Of Mrs. Goldring, I'd found only a relic: her annotated Shakespeare. But here, now, was a man I'd long thought dead, walking about a refugee camp in Germany.

16.

For weeks routine bore down upon the camp. Every day for more than a month we approached a piece of field that needed to be flattened by a backhoe, razed, and leveled, upon which we then put down a tarmac. We focused on work.

I passed Navigator Smith in the mess. We grew to have a friendship so real I might even call it warm. I joined the bridge game he played in. With each hand—with each comment I ventured—I awaited his derision, but the obstreperousness I knew from him in RAF Grimsby was gone. Each time I referred to him as Smith, he implored me to call him Percy. We treated each other as equals.

“Why wouldn't you want to just go back home?” he said. “I hear the girls in Prague are beautiful.” That was no longer my home, I told him. My parents had been taken. He just looked down at his hands when I said it, but even softened, Smith wasn't one to let the melancholic in me take over for long.

“So why didn't you just stay in London?”

I looked at him long and hard.

“I'll tell you,” I said. “But you have to listen. Can you?”

Navigator Smith came to show me that men are capable of change. Percival Smith changed. As I narrated my early days in Rotterdam, now a lifetime ago, about my love for Françoise, who was a prostitute but who I could now see was the first woman I ever truly loved, whom I was coming to believe I loved still, Smith listened. In the beginning of my narration, I saw him narrow his eyes at times as if to speak, perhaps to register some disagreement. Then he would just settle into listening again. He listened as I told him of my brief, nebulous engagement to Glynnis Goldring, and of my revelation that it was Françoise I thought of most in those days after we bombed Hamburg. And part of my story became a story of regret, a story of the wrongs I'd perpetrated—not on the battlefield, but in my personal life. I was beginning to see, I said, the villainy in my having left Rotterdam as I had. His face bore no judgment. He didn't even attempt a joke. When I'd finished telling him of my goals, I said, “Now, do you have anything you'd like to say?”

“I threw a dart at you once and hit you in the back,” he said.

“I still have the scar.” I pulled down my cotton shirt to reveal the gnarl of skin it had left behind, shiny and tight.

“I was an angry young man in those days,” he said. “I'd just lost my best friend. I drank myself to sleep every night. Every morning I was raw, hungover, and grieving.” He looked down at his hands. I was about to tell him I knew what it felt like to lose control of one's emotions at loss, but he spoke again. “And I was—well, there's no excuse. It was a terrible thing to do.”

“It was.”

“It was,” he said.

I pulled out my pack of Woodbines and we smoked one together. We talked about nothing for a period. Then he went on his way. In those moments after he left me, after I had narrated the story of Françoise, and had received the first real apology I'd had from anyone for any of the misfortunes that had befallen me since I left Leitmeritz years earlier, I felt a kind of peace.

During this same period, the length of just one summer, something strange happened that came to confuse me far more than having become so close to my former enemy. The image of Françoise, while still present in its residue, began to muddy. The stones of Prague and the flashes of flak returned at night. Sometimes they carried the face of my love. Sometimes not. Now, even when these images came, they arrived with the ineffability of dreams. Sometimes instead I now saw Glynnis; at times Clive's face even returned to me, or John Gallsworthy's, or my mother's.

Then they disappeared.

In their place I had images of those verdant fields of central Britain, the same green as on my first flights south of Prague with my father. Images took no discernible form—memories dispersed to the margins of my mind. My palms sweated. My skin prickled. The top of my head grew hot to the touch, and somehow its heat seemed to radiate—rather than the memories of the events that had caused it—only memories of my mother sitting in her home at the top of a hill in Leitmeritz. I stopped sleeping and instead stared at the ceiling, took long walks to smoke and clear my mind.

Around this same time we came also to hear stories that cast a pallor over all of our thoughts. An officer in the mess told of an afternoon he had taken a group of Luftwaffe pilots on a trip to see a camp called Bergen-Belsen. It was only a couple dozen miles west of us there at Wunstorf. There at the camp, by his account, emaciated Jews had been discovered. They had avoided the crematoria. Many of the pilots he took that day wept when they saw what they'd been protecting, flying for the Luftwaffe. This officer talked incessantly about what he'd seen—he didn't know enough about me to know his audience. I'll provide no further detail, only to say that in the image of those soldiers of the Wehrmacht weeping when they saw the effect of the machine in which they'd been moving parts, I retained a certain truth that would later be of use to me.

17.

One warm day in mid-July, around the time my men were close to having laid their runway, Percy Smith came to see me. Normally he would have taken this as an opportunity to sit and offer a postmortem of the previous night's card game, but that day he spoke with a certain seriousness.

“Poxl,” Smith said. “Didn't you tell me you met Françoise in Rotterdam?” I told him I had. “I've a chap on my detail says he was stationed in Rotterdam during the occupation. I'll send him over if you like.”

Smith's eyes were flat, the corners of his lips not upturned as they once had been during his meddling and needling. In his face was a new kind of need: I was the last of his deceased crew. He who had been my enemy was now my friend. This was a lesson I would recognize often in the days to come. While in the pages of
Othello
we may feel we understand a character like Iago, when we meet him in life, he retains the capacity for change. He's not cut off from the obviation of his sins. If Othello had spared Desdemona and himself, surely he and Iago could have met in some new circumstance in their later years. There would have been memories to hash out, confessions to be made—the great dissembler would have had to try not to dissemble for once, to speak and be heard after his great sins had been unveiled. But couldn't they have been as Navigator Smith and I now were?

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.”