Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

I agreed with him and though I thought of mentioning the Schiele paintings, asking him about my mother’s life before I was born, before they met, I quickly thought better. I recognize now that of course my father knew more about my mother and her business than I possibly could have gleaned, but I was her son and a teenager, so what really could he have told me? Here we were together. It was precious time, this time alone with my father, and I had none of the petulance of a teenager that morning. I had a goal and that goal was to get into my father’s new monoplane and see our world from above.

And so we flew.

My father sat in the cockpit and I sat in the passenger berth behind him, both of which were open, and he called out to ask me if I was ready, and when I said I was, we began taxiing ahead. As the nose of the plane began to lift I could feel the middle of my stomach dip toward the balls of my feet, and then the ground was lifting away from us. The field drew in at its edges below us and the Be-50 made a mighty racket, a whirring I could feel shaking deep inside my ears, but here it was! The gray of overcast skies pushed cloud masses against my eyes, and with the wind stiff and bracing against our faces in those open seats, the smell of petrol blew away. Instead, there was now the smell of droplets of water in my nose, the fresh morning smell of clouds. My father veered west, and soon we were passing in the sky above the old city of Prague. From thousands of feet above we could see every block — down below was my grandmother’s house in Zizkov among the many terra-cotta roofs, I knew, and to the west the castle mount, and what I remember most then was how I longed to talk to my father about it. I wanted to tell him what it looked like to see that city from above, how close it all seemed and how absurd that a walk from the Charles Bridge up to Grandmother Traute’s should feel significant, now seeing that one was but a thumb’s length from the other.

But even a shout was lost in the racket of the air in those open areas, and my joy at that flight came in my simply sitting back and taking it in, knowing that my father was taking me skyward. While he had a certain genius at business, in all other venues in life I could remember him only as passive — it was as if he was saving up all his energy and mastery for the two things he cared for most: selling his leather and flying his planes. I do not blame him for it; I know he didn’t see that it could make my mother feel he did not give her the attention she deserved, or that it might make me want and need more than he could give.

As we flew southward all the way down to Czesky Krumlov, where we could see the great oxbow in the river, my father’s right hand shot out to the leeside, pointing at the massive medieval castle at the village’s center. The cloud cover began to burn off, and while wisps of cloud might appear far ahead, that’s not what I could see, and it’s not what I remember. What I saw for that whole long flight each time my neck grew too stiff to continue craning, to look out at the land below, was the same thing I would see every time I flew with him in the years ahead, the same thing I would see when my father bought a Tiger Moth biplane the following year, that same invisible guide that would be emblazoned on my eyes whenever I flew: I saw before my eyes the back of my father’s helmeted head.

3.

March 21, 1938.

Hitler marched on Austria.

The Anschluss was under way. I was eighteen. Much to my surprise, my father came to me that afternoon not to keep me close, but to present me with an unexpected wish: I was to leave for Rotterdam as soon as arrangements could be made. There was business to be done there with his Dutch counterpart in leather sales. But that was not the immediate reason for my flight. My father felt it wasn’t safe for me to stay in Czechoslovakia. I was a young Jew with a future to protect. He himself refused to leave. He would take care of Brüder Weisberg, and see to his planes down at the aero club, but I was to leave. He and my mother had had an arranged marriage. I was to have an arranged emigration.

Until that moment my life had had a single trajectory: I was to take over the tannery. I’d had an education that might allow me to cultivate interests like my father’s in his aeroplanes or my mother’s in her painting, or the life of books that held my interest more, but my central concern was the factory. And so in my mind it was equally settled: I would stay, no matter what my father’s arrangements.

On a Tuesday two weeks later I had lunch at my uncle Rudolf’s. His daughters, my cousins Niny and Johana, had departed for a new life in London the year before. My father’s demands ran through me like current through a wire. I excused myself as soon as I could. I would plead with my mother to convince my father I should stay. And I would have succeeded, had it not been that that afternoon I discovered more about my mother than I’d ever hoped to know.

The first thing I saw on my return from my uncle’s was a large, hard suitcase our maid Josefina had packed for me days earlier in advance of my planned departure. I walked into the hallway, where it had sat since it was first packed. A pair of wool pants was folded on top of a sweater on the luggage. Then I saw a pair of canvass pants hastily left crumpled on the floor, covered in variously colored splotches of oil paint. My father did not own such a pair of pants, and his only hobby was flying. If a pair of his pants were to be soiled it would surely not be by oil paint.

I saw my mother next.

She was on her knees. This is not a position to which I was accustomed to seeing my mother, who knelt for no one. The only time she’d ever acted against her will was in accepting her arranged marriage to my father. My view of my mother was obstructed by the most unpleasant sight. When her eyes opened and she saw me, she stopped the business at which she was engaged. She stood bolt upright. This action only doubled the discomfort I was already feeling.

I’d never before seen my mother naked — I’d seen that young version of her in the Schiele portrait years earlier, I suppose, but surely I had not seen her so in person, and not at such lascivious business. None of the involved parties had the wherewithal to alleviate the awkwardness of the moment. My mother did not cover up, but simply said, “Oh — Poxl. Oh.”

The hairy thing in front of me was not my father. What he revealed to me presented a proper exclamation point to their act, evidence that was now rapidly becoming detumescent without achieving its ends. My mother stood and turned her back to me, which, again, did very little to alleviate the awkwardness of the situation.

My failure to speak or depart from the doorway in which I stood also did little to help. I know I’m not without blame for not simply fleeing right then, but what would you ask of an eighteen-year-old upon finding his mother in such a state? My luggage sat in the hallway opposite from where I now stood. Until that very moment I’d not allowed myself a real thought of leaving Leitmeritz.

Now it was the only option.

I would not be able to keep this event from my father. What this, coupled with what was now clarifying itself about that Schiele afternoon with my mother years earlier, was coming to show me was that a different kind of trauma was accruing in my parents’ home. I looked up and before my eyes was a flash of memory of an afternoon along the Elbe, but as quickly as it arose, it disappeared. The eggy smell of river water entered my nose and evaporated.

My bag was already packed.

A visa to Holland had already been arranged.

A rucksack with my books was sitting on our porch.

I walked across the room and lifted the trunk, but its lid was not latched. I’d not thought to latch it — the main intent of my actions was overwhelmed by my trying not to look at this unclothed man — and its contents tumbled to the floor. Now here they were, all the clothes I was about to take to Rotterdam with me, crumpled on the hallway floor. While I assumed the beast before me could do no worse than receive oral pleasure from my mother in my father’s house, effectively exiling me from my childhood home, the hairy golem proved me wrong.