Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

Within a month of my posting, I was placed in charge of a fifty-man detail. These men were demoralized, eyes forever down-turned, not even knowing where in their enormous country they were. I gathered them and spoke frankly. They would work to get this airfield in shape. Some complained the Geneva Convention said they couldn’t be forced to work. What would they rather do? I asked. Sit in prison? I said it in German. I said it in Czech. I said it in Dutch. I said it in English.

In the weeks to come I took up with the fraternity of men who had been my dread enemies. In addition to overseeing my crew, I reregistered dozens of men a day as they were directed from their bases across northern Germany. While many of the men at this camp had flown Messerschmitts or Junkers or had even served among the brownshirts, a good number were not soldiers at all, but railroad workers, janitors, ticket takers — anyone in uniform had been picked up by Allied troops.

One afternoon while we had begun leveling a large swath of earth that was to become one of Wunstorf’s new runways, we were besieged by the kind of wet cold that fights through to your marrow and forever evokes in me those days at thirty thousand feet in a Lancaster, when my very bones themselves felt as vulnerable to Luftwaffe attack as John Milton’s, or Yorick’s. During the lunch hour I was part of a game of contract bridge. The men under my command were out with shovels and mattocks. When I returned from making water beyond the confines of the tent, the door to my office was open. Another officer was sitting at my desk.

“I heard there was some Polack working this camp,” the officer said. “I had to see for myself.”

Here before me was none other than Navigator Smith — Percy Smith, as returned from the dead as Banquo’s ghost or Hermione’s statue, with apparently no charge but to torment me. I put my hand to my shoulder, which still bore a small scar from his dart.

“But you went down with our crew,” I said.

“I took shrapnel from a flak burst in the leg on the last run before our kite went down,” Navigator Smith said. For a microsecond the snarl on his face gave way to something less sinister. “You were a pilot of S-Sugar, West,” Navigator Smith said. “Word reached me you were here in Wunstorf. I had to come see it for myself.”

He rose to leave. While I awaited some further commentary, there was only his exit.

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 Wermacht 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.