The Last Flight of Poxl West (29 page)

“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 golem 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 of 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.

“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.”