Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

“It has been six years since I’ve set foot in my house in Leitmeritz,” Niny said. “It has been six years since I’ve seen Prazsky Hrad, since I’ve even thought of a weekend trip to Krumlov, heading down to the Elbe. But here now is a well-traveled Briton who can talk me back to that place.”

A quiet breeze touched us as Niny spoke. This was the first time in as long as I could remember that I had listened to someone else talk. It was as if, for the first time since S-Sugar had entered that cloud above Lübeck, I’d returned to myself. I’d spent all that time alone in my bed near Grimsby. Now I could see the dark moles on Niny’s face, and it was as if I’d found a home again in the visible world.

“When I’m with him,” Niny continued, “even as the mist blows off the North Sea, moistening my face along those cliffs, I feel as if I’m not with him at all, but in Prague. We’ll lie together in the grass, and with eyes closed, we will be in Prague together.”

Niny and I reached the park near our flat, where I walked when I’d first arrived. The wrought-iron fence around the commons had long since been stripped and melted down for matériel. Someone had made a slapdash bench of some rubble and boards. Niny and I sat on it.

In the clear late-afternoon air, we stared up at the rooks in their plane trees, and past them to the eaves of buildings along the park. In beds lining that space where once there had been a neatly kept privet hedge, lilac bushes, and boxwood, now spills of earth overturned by bombs lay in piles. Flowers withered brown in the thin light. As we sat there, Niny described Thom’s home, where she’d met his parents and his spaniels. He’d been raised in one of those immense four-story town houses in Bloomsbury we coveted. This home at once reminded her of our grandmother Traute’s house in Zizkov. It began to feel, my cousin confessed, as if every aspect of this Thomas Paxton drove her into the past.

“I find myself dreaming of our classmates from the gymnasium. During the day I’m forced to record dozens of missing bombers and fighters. I interact with officers at social events, and the most interesting women I’ve ever met among my fellow WAAFs. At night my dreams are populated only by the children we once knew. Last week I dreamed I was in the R/T tower, taking a distress call from a Spitfire, and it became clear the pilot on the line was Frantisek Pessl from fourth-form math.”

Niny didn’t seem to know where to look. The confessional denuding of memory kept her eyes from mine. This was something different from muscle memory — it acted longer and more carefully. For a moment we were left to observe the clouds. Sparrows batted up against the sky. Birds were abundant in the months since the Blitz, having found new nesting places in eviscerated buildings. I picked a single bird to study as I waited for Niny to continue. This pale sparrow flapped her wings once and found a current from the square. She glided. All around us, the air smelled of the stale carbonite exhaust of spent bombs.

“This past weekend, I called on Thom to tell him I couldn’t see him anymore,” Niny said.

“A rash decision,” I said. “What could have driven you from a man who knows such happiness?” Right in front of her, my cousin had love! A love she could taste and touch, exactly what I was missing. “You should go to him and profess your love,” I said. “Not leave him.”

“Maybe that’s it, Poxl. For weeks I watched you in hospital, murmuring about your mother with some painter, and your father, and Radobyl, and over and over about Françoise.” I had no memory of such murmurings. “I know you didn’t know you’d been speaking, Poxl. I kept Johana away so she wouldn’t hear you. I told the doctors to let you alone. But I need to tell you now.”

The sparrow I’d been following dipped and then arose again. Another caught its path midair. One flew off to my right, the other to the left. For a moment I could follow them both, but then they were too far apart.

“If you love this Thomas Paxton,” I told Niny, “you should take up with him in earnest.” Niny’s eyes caught mine for the first time since we’d sat down on the bench. There was something in them I’d never before seen. A young couple walked by. Both Niny and I looked down. Our eyes sought ground, boards, broken macadam. When the couple had passed, Niny looked back up at me. She looked directly into my eyes.

“This isn’t where I want to live, Poxl. Life in an elaborate memory? What kind of love is there to find with a man whose main asset to me is his ability to evoke the past? This is living one’s life in a history classroom.”

A crease had developed in the space between Niny’s eyebrows. Where her brown eyes had once been open wide, I could see at their sides they were down-turned. While I could see all over Niny’s face the kind of writhing uncertainty Thomas had left her in, I could no longer parse its meaning. The crease between Niny’s eyes drew even deeper. For the first time since I’d returned from 100 Squadron, I felt myself removed from my memories, if only for a second — separated from those events like a man who has lived a life and told a tale, only to find the two have diverged in some confusing fashion, lost their cohesion. I was listening to Niny. I thought to comfort her, to remind her I was her confidant.

Instead Niny took my hand in hers.

“Johana wants you to find your own flat,” she said.

By now I didn’t care. I tried to change the subject, but we’d lost the earlier thread.

“I don’t want you to go, Poxl,” Niny said. “But maybe the time has come for you to start thinking about what’s next.” I pulled my hand away, and Niny turned her eyes back to the sky.

14.

One afternoon the second week in May, I went to talk to a superior officer at RAF headquarters in central London. I pushed for an updated physical evaluation. Soldiers and airmen wanted above all to return home, but I had no home to return to — not my real home, anyway. I was declared fit to serve. I was more than willing to take on the work of establishing order after the fighting had ended. I was assigned to the administration of a refugee internment camp and airfield in the Rhine Valley, a camp for Germans and Nazi collaborators who had been captured at the end of the war.

A move south.

A move toward Rotterdam.

I was the RAF’s ideal postwar tool — raised with Czech and German and with five years’ travel across Europe, I spoke Dutch, French, and English. Within weeks I was to head southeast over the North Sea again.

Niny accompanied me to the transit station. A bus would take me to the aerodrome. On our ride into the city, Niny tried to talk to me a bit about what was ahead. Even if Françoise was still alive, there was good reason to suspect she might no longer be in Rotterdam. She was right. But I had to find out.

“You should return to Thomas Paxton,” I told Niny. “When you do, ask him not to speak of Prague again. You cannot live your life with this man talking only of the past.” Niny searched my face. “My experience is not your experience. There may come a time when Thomas can indulge in the memory of your life in Leitmeritz. It’s up to you to forge a relationship with the present.”

The bus’s wheels cried out against their brakes.

“And one day when we see each other again, Poxl, maybe we’ll speak of our parents,” Niny said.

The bus driver was closing his doors. I called out to him not to leave, and then I held Niny as hard and long as a cousin might properly hold on to his cousin, without any desire to let go.

15.

My assignment was at a camp in Wunstorf, just west of Hannover. I’ll note briefly that I use the German spellings of these cities’ names to demonstrate the seriousness with which I took the diplomatic demands of my new commission, no matter where my allegiances and vituperation might lie in regard to the past years’ events. This camp was populated by captured Luftwaffe pilots and airmen, along with an RAF wing that was to oversee their work. In the year after my arrival, the POWs’ number would swell to more than ten thousand. It was our charge over the coming months to enlist these POWs in enhancing the aerodrome there. It would serve as a principal supply station for Berlin in the days after the armistice.