Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

13.

All this life east of the city, amid the protective womb of the cave, might have kept me wholly in its thrall had it not been for the fact that no matter how I’d taken to Glynnis — and I was, I truly was in love with her — roiling under my conscious thoughts I still longed for nothing but to effect change myself. In battle. That nagging didn’t ever leave me. With each passing day, in fact, it grew. While Mrs. Goldring and I read of Macduff headed off for Dunsinane, or found Hamlet taking up arms to avenge the death of his father, I still thought subconsciously of those RAF pilots who were at that very moment dropping bombs on the Reich. While we were away in the east, dancing the fox-trot in the relative dark of a cave ballroom, I was able to push out of my conscious thoughts that London was being bombed, potentially to her ruin.

But as I said, those were just days between the long weeks when Clive and I still scoured the streets for bombed buildings. When I went to visit her, Niny was beginning to bear signs of fatigue. I would find her in her room for entire evenings, just reading and unwilling to talk. Johana’s grief at the loss of Scott Prichard had negated even the existence of her husband, Vaclav, whom Niny told me had now not written in a year himself; we were beginning quietly to feel certain he hadn’t survived his stint on the eastern front. And Johana’s grief at the loss of the man she’d seen more recently seemed only to grow with time.

In addition to the effect of those bombs falling upon us, word came of deportations of Jews all across Eastern Europe. On one long hiatus from both work and the cave, a letter arrived from the longtime foreman of Brüder Weisberg, whom Niny had written. He’d been kept on after the factory was wrested from my father. The letter was addressed to the three of us.

I do not see reason to reproduce verbatim this morbid letter here. I’d never heard back from anyone in Rotterdam. Now I was hearing from Leitmeritz instead. The foreman at our fathers’ factory stated quite directly that my mother had been sent to Terezin. She was sent on from there to her death, as we later learned, in the slow brown fields somewhere in western Poland. My father had been taken along with his brother Rudy — father to Johana and Niny — to Terezin, as well. The camp was just three miles south of my hometown of Leitmeritz. It was all too easy for the SS officers to liquidate the population of that small city.

I will not attempt to reproduce the conversation between my cousins and me in the hours and days after the arrival of that letter. Each of us read it and left it on the dining room table as evidence for the others that it had been read.

I walked out to the park across from our flat and sat on a bench. I watched the sparrows fly up into their eaves. I didn’t know I was crying until I saw on the faces of those who passed a mixture of concern and distaste — everyone in London during that period was suffering losses.

The thing was to press on.

Knowing my mother was gone came, in the days to follow, to feel like the loss of the very need for love. Like never wanting intimacy again. Like those Londoners I’d been observing amid falling bombs, it was my desire to withdraw. What was I doing reading books with some other Mother when my Mother had ended? My parents were the firmament in which the sun sat, and I could see now that was true whether they glowed as one or in separate vectors. I’d been angry upon finding her with my father’s cuckold, sure — but some part of me assumed I’d see her again. That there would be time for reckoning, time for the airing of emotions and grievances. I didn’t know until this moment I’d felt that way. Now it was clear. There was something petulant in my flight from Leitmeritz. I could now see that there was something more than petulant in my flight from Rotterdam, from Françoise. I’d learned to run when problems arose, rather than meeting them head-on. Now there would be no reckoning — not in Leitmeritz, nor anywhere else. Knowing my mother had met her end was like imagining every star in the sky blotted out by some small boy with a pin whose touch extinguishes each light.

She now existed only in memory.

So picture me later that week I received the foreman’s letter — instead of on a train east with Glynnis, whose calls I refused, riding aboard a bus bound for Piccadilly Circus, riding amid the burgeoning rubble of central London, inching up to an old woman and peering at her head: Would I suffer the disappointment of seeing her ear not pierced, bearing no amber earrings, wrinkled and foreign? Or might I have the glory of seeing that after seventy years of life, forty of them during which her ear bore the weight of heavy jewelry, she might have that same slit I’d once fondled in my mother’s lobe? He who chanced upon me staring at his large work-stained hands and seeking my father in them — what do you think he thought of me? He scowled and looked away, that father with a thousand Polonius faces. He did not know that like the Bard himself seeking his damaged father in every glove maker in the London to which he’d just arrived, I sought my Czechoslovak father and evidence of his leather work.

Soon something began to change in me.

I called on Glynnis again. When I saw her I did not mention news of my mother. She and I made love in the same quiet way we always had, but now some small part of me was held in abeyance. There was an odd comfort in being with Glynnis now, perhaps a greater comfort than I’d ever felt with a woman, for where once I found need in being with her, now I felt only the physical pleasure that passes like top waters over the current drawing down in the depths. Now I did not feel the desire to read plays in caves in rural areas. I did not seek a weekend pass to return to the caves. I can see looking back on it that digging my heels in, meeting my problems head-on, might have led me to stay in London, remain by Glynnis’s side. But in those days after that letter, it meant something different to me. It meant meeting the German advance head-on. It meant no longer rescuing those who’d been wronged — but acting to stop from their needing rescue to begin with.

I returned again and again to the RAF recruitment office in Southwark.

So, maybe I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps the loss of my parents was like living in a city for many long years and never leaving. You have lived a rural life as a child, and walked off into the woods to stare up at the sky. It wouldn’t make sense to say you loved or didn’t love the stars, only that you knew nothing would change them.

They were stars.

Now you live in the city. War has driven you there, war and your own capriciousness. Every night you go about your business: drink, succeed, fail; take in live music — save lives volunteering in a war effort. You do everything that might fulfill one with even the noblest ambitions. But you never again leave the city. Overhead is an eternal pink glow, light that never dims past a point, a phenomenon some might call light pollution but which is the only thing that sustains you. At four in the morning, you have left a pub. You are, quite frankly, drunk. Have been for days. To placate you, above: pink sky, never not pink.

Then one day, rather than taking some leisure in the woods to the east, rather than the ease of a woman’s bed, you take to the sky in an aeroplane. You are airborne, it is night, below you the glowing white clouds — and above, where once there were stars all across the firmament, now there is only blackness. That void carries a memory of stars, of the way you once felt them guide you … perhaps you even remember, before it has happened, a time when, lost in the night’s sky on a training run, you feared you would not survive your flight, and only upon finding the Dipper, its pointing you to the North Star, were you able to make it back to base. Only now the night is black, and all along, that pink urban shelter you were confined to kept you from knowing that for all those years, the stars were fading from the sky. And you remember a time when you dropped bombs on cities, destroying them beyond resurrection, and all you could see below you were clouds. While you might have known but not understood that you were destroying what lay below you, now there aren’t even stars above.