Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

Suse was a mediocre student. She wasn’t dim, but she never seemed to hold an opinion of her own. Even at that young age she was a person who is not living her own life, but waiting for someone to live it for her. There was something not wholly unpleasant in this manner — a certainty to her acceptance of life and its hardships that smacked of a kind of counterintuitive confidence — and it was, for a boy coming from a home like mine, immediately attractive. I told Niny, my sole conspirator, about my design.

“You’ll help me speak to Suse today,” I said.

“Do what you will,” Niny said. “I won’t help, but I won’t get in your way.” Even then Niny knew how to handle me.

She returned to conversation with her sister. I spotted Suse. She was the only girl in our class who’d grown breasts. In the hamstrung light of the evening my eyes settled upon her shape. Niny and Johana and I swam, our bodies content, while all along I tracked my whereabouts on the banks of the Elbe, always knowing where in the water Suse was. I found myself at day’s end resting on that birch-wood dock, next to Suse and Niny.

Niny had always been my favorite. We’d taken long train rides to visit the other Weisberg cousins outside of Debrecen, Hungary, when we were little. We would play games, seeing who could count all the yellow sunflowers outside the train window. By the oxbow behind Brüder Weisberg it was always Niny who would walk upstream from the mill wheel to explore the dark woods that sat a couple hundred feet above our land. Niny’s presence provided me confidence in speaking with Suse each time she returned to shore. I said, “You’re cold — let’s put a towel around you.” She only greeted me and then returned to conversation with Niny. I listened. They were talking about their Czech history class.

“Bratislava was once the capital of Hungary,” I said.

Suse just looked at Niny, not knowing how to respond, not knowing really what I was talking about. Niny laughed at me. She knew if she was too much in my corner, it might tip Suse to my desires. Suse followed her lead and laughed, too. She was not snobbish or curt about it, which gave her a new power over me.

Soon we were all dressed. An early-evening moon stood sentinel over us, lucid in the receding sky. The banks of the Elbe were suddenly new to me, the fields of some distant planet we’d been transported to. Flies lifted out of the low grass in ululating swarms as if shaken off the earth’s floor by the vibrating strength of my desire. A low waft of fragrant pollen rose in the night air. Johana joined Niny at a game of cards. I stared up at the purpling sky. The sun was too far behind the western bank of the river and the trees for us to see it set.

Across the way Suse was out of sight. She had trekked off to the stand of trees away from the river. I walked to the cusp of the wood, on the other edge of the purple tamarisk blossoms, where she’d gone to pack her swimsuit. She heard me coming. I said, “I believe I’m in love with you.” Something in my honesty held her there long enough for me to speak again. “But I can see you’re not interested in me.”

A sudden wave of shyness overtook me. I turned away. Behind us the setting sun threw its light onto our little mountain Radobyl. The breeze was slow at my back. It was so close to dark now, I thought there might not be time to await Suse’s answer. Then, a couple of steps away, I heard the crunching of footsteps on early-spring wood fall.

Suse’s hand was at my back.

I closed my eyes and pushed my lips hard against hers. Suse kept her mouth open while stroking my neck with just the tips of her fingers. Her tongue felt huge against mine, covered in bumps at its side, which presented in my mind the image of a large squid. She pulled me toward her as if she were the man, something I could imagine her father, Vladek, doing to her mother, something I knew in my bones already would have been wholly out of character for my father.

When the sound of crackling branches came again I was so caught in our dark vertigo that I didn’t react. Suse was not so intoxicated. She broke away and we turned to see that twenty feet from us a boy from one of the older classes at the gymnasium, whom I’d seen many times but whose name I did not know was looking at us. My hand had been snaking up under Suse’s shirt and had almost found its way to its goal.

He pointed at us and in his loudest voice said, “Little Suse is kissing the Yid from the leather factory! Suse and the Yid, kissing in the trees!”

She pushed me away. My hand sprang toward her again, snarled in her shirt. The boy ran off, yelling to his friends to come see, come see. But before anyone could arrive, Suse ran away home.

When I saw Suse in the future, she did not speak to me. Ours was not a Jewish town, but we Jews lived in relative peace at that period with our Czech neighbors. My insecurities kept me from seeking her again. It was not clear if I had jilted her or had been jilted, only that I no longer had what I wanted. Soon other boys were with her. By the time Suse and I were sixteen, the particular blankness of her character had begun to develop into a hollowness in her eyes. She was tiring from the variety of relationships she had with so many of the boys from Leitmeritz. She became everything to the men who needed her, even men who would point at me and call me malign names.

In turn she became invisible to everyone but the men who had lost her. She lingered in my mind like the wisps of cloud I moved through — or which moved through me — when I was aloft in my father’s plane. Some men would embarrass her. Their hungry hands would be all over her in public, hands that seemed guided by lascivious spirits uncontrolled even by their owners. Others were gentlemen. None elicited an observable response, but they weren’t thrown off until their own insecurities or boredom drove them away.

Many years later, Niny would tell me that she had learned Suse took up with an SA officer who came to love her during the occupation. When the Russians liberated Leitmeritz in May 1945 on their push through to the German border, she was dragged into the street. Townspeople, all of them men, tore her clothes. They pushed her to the ground. Many were the same men who had made love to her before the war, groped at her and then left or were left by her.

It was their vicarious shame, Suse’s consorting with the Nazis.

She became the living declaration of their own helplessness in the days after the occupation. We lived in a time where such things were possible — when the abstractions of our day could be encapsulated in the body of a living woman. What idea I was leaving behind me then, in the body of Françoise, I could not yet comprehend. It hadn’t even fully hit me yet what I’d done in leaving her to begin with — only that I’d lost something, and it was too late to return.

The next time I saw my uncle Poxl, it was two weeks after his book was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, at his Boston reading. There was a monsoon outside. Rain sheeted down the windows of a large bookstore just off the corner of Harvard Yard. The carpeted room was packed to the walls with academics and book-club readers, Poxl’s former prep school students and his colleagues. We found a seat near the middle of the space, behind a graduate student in a Guns N ’Roses T-shirt. The kid wore horn-rimmed glasses, his shoulders covered in a downy layer of flaked scalp skin. I recognize only now that he was everything I tried not to be when I began grad school myself more than a decade later.

On the walls around us were musty used books. Out front were piles of new ones. Chief among them, on a wood-laminate table with folding metal legs, were a couple dozen copies of Poxl’s memoir. Since our copies had never arrived, it was the first I’d seen the book in person. On the front was a brown painting of a Lancaster cutting through high cirrus, chased by an Me-109, bullets pinging its side. It was almost cartoonish, the edges of the planes somehow too bulbous, the colors too bright. Had the book landed with a bigger publisher, perhaps it would have had a better cover. Still — it was my uncle Poxl’s book, in the flesh. Finally. I looked closely, but no matter how hard I looked, I could not make out the face of a pilot inside the cockpit of the Lancaster bomber. It was as if it wasn’t being piloted at all.