Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

At the center of the square where Françoise purportedly now lived was a small courtyard with a garden surrounded by benches, one of which I sat on while I looked up at the windows of her building, guessing which was her bedroom. Quiet secrecy was best for now, to wait here until there was some sense of Françoise and her new husband.

For three hours nothing happened. No one came in or out of 128 Park Sheen. I sat on the bench reading a play that has no ghosts but does have a woman long thought dead who turns up years later alive, The Winter’s Tale —I’d already begun toying with the idea of returning to school. My mother might have longed for me to follow those painters she so loved; my father might have liked it if I had ventured about to restore myself to the leather-selling business. But in the depths, what I cared for most were the plays I’d read in a cave in the Kent countryside. I lugged Mrs. Goldring’s old Shakespeare with me everywhere I went.

I returned home that first day without so much as walking to Françoise’s door. I repeated this trip on four successive days, sitting in the courtyard of Park Sheen until it seemed impossible to stay without raising suspicion.

On the fifth day, the door to the address Heidi provided opened.

Rather than Françoise, the figure of a dwarfish, aging British man appeared. He was far older than Françoise, nearly into his dotage. In a long mac that easily covered the length of his stunted body, which opened, revealing heavy rubber galoshes that rose above his knees, he bumbled through his entranceway. No sooner had Rutherford exited his house than he was walking toward the garden, his short, childlike steps coming rapidly, and just as he was upon the bench where I sat, I thought to open my mouth before realizing he was simply attempting to pass on his way out of the courtyard.

Then he was gone. Françoise must have been alone in her flat. With William off and my heart still pounding, I set myself up opposite his door. Is it okay to knock? I wondered. Might Françoise depart this very same home and I could speak to her then? She hadn’t done so once all week. I knocked on the door as if my hand were something I’d stolen, some other man’s hand. On the second floor of that building, a curtain drew back. A minute passed.

The door opened.

“Yes?” Françoise said. Another moment passed. “Well, who is it, then?” Françoise had maintained her Dutch accent, the guttural Dutch rasp in her tone. “What is it you’re selling?”

“Nothing for sale,” I said. “It’s Poxl.”

Françoise closed the door.

My toe might have done some good had I thought to lodge it in the opening. I might have put up my hand to block her.

But I didn’t.

After a moment the door reopened, revealing Françoise’s tan face again. It was much the same, and yet in some way it was wholly changed. Thick brown-pink tissue around her eyes drew back into an indecipherable flatness. Her eyes were now blanched cataracts. Their gaze remained directed off to the left and never came near my own.

“If Poxl Weisberg does still exist, I suppose it would be rude not to admit him,” Françoise said. “Take off your boots on the way in. I’ll not have even Lazarus tracking all of Richmond’s mud across our new rugs.”

She made her way into the dark hallway of the flat she shared with her dwarfish Briton. Persian rugs in a variety of browns and rich burgundies lined the linoleum floors of the place. I found their texture coarse against the soles of my feet. I put my book down under my boots so as not to forget it there. Much as I had done with Fräulein Van Leben, who had told me of the dogs she’d seen hauled out of her neighbors’ house in Delfshaven, I kept quiet.

“If in fact this is truly Poxl Weisberg, I suppose he expects me to come over and feel his face with my hands to confirm his being the same Poxl Weisberg I once knew,” Françoise said.

Her back was toward the stove opposite. She made no move to approach me. Instead she used her hands to navigate around her small kitchen. Françoise used the flat of her palm to push her way along the cabinets she opened to find two porcelain teacups. She held her hands, palms out, against her counter as she made her way to her stovetop. Just as she had the first time I ever entered her flat back in Veerhaven, she brought the teacups down to the towel by the sink and wiped them once, then twice. This time she was making sure to do away with any dust that might have settled in them since they were last used.

She reached behind the stove for a box of kitchen matches, turned the gas on the stove and went to strike one.

“Why don’t you let me,” I said.

Françoise had already lit the match with an expert deftness and put it to the gas. A tiny woof filled the air and then was gone — the smallest perceivable explosion.

“You’ll take sugar, I suppose,” she said, though she did nothing to accommodate an answer. I gave none. She passed her hand over the burner to locate the center of the flame without a flinch as the borderless yellow bulb licked her palm. The minute explosion touched Françoise’s flesh. An image arose in my mind and then fled.

Now Françoise reached for the teakettle and placed it on the burner. She took a measured step to her right, then another, and passed her hand beneath the water from her faucet. Then she came and with a coarseness wholly new even to her, having not even dried her hands, she used her damp fingertips and the flat of her palm to feel my face. She pushed and prodded at my nose like an infant studying its mother. She let her hands linger for a moment on the patch of scalp where now instead of hair there was only shiny tissue. Then she promptly moved back to the stove, got us each a cup of tea, and settled back into her seat. She lifted her teacup very slowly to her mouth.

“I suppose you watched Rutherford on his way out, before having the gall to come see me.”

“Heidi gave me your address,” I said. “We met in Rotterdam after my discharge from the RAF. She told me about your accident.”

“Yes, well,” Françoise said.

For the following minutes, we drank our tea. Of course she couldn’t see the tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. As she neared done she picked the dregs from her tongue and placed them on a cloth to her left, her finger coming to her mouth and then down with a certain expertise. And though I’d told Niny I’d take it one step at a time, I spoke quickly.

“Françoise, there is so much for us to tell each other, but I am, first and before other words, sorry,” I said. She did not respond. I watched her lips pull tight just as Heidi’s had. “I’m sure you can’t forgive me now, I’m sure you will need time, but I am sorry.”

“Stop,” she said.

“Stop?”

Now she said nothing. A few more times she refused to hear of my life since I’d left Rotterdam. I’d hoped at least to explain my departure, to tell her of those moments of watching her on that boat in the Nieuwe Maas and seeing her at her business with that young man, stories that would lay fallow in me for decades. But each time she heard me start, she turned her blank gaze past me to the window over the sink in her kitchen, where some light source must have found its way to the remnants of what she had once been able to see. And I had no choice but to stop talking, as well. We sat that way for what felt so long I can’t say how much time passed before she spoke.

“If you’d like to stay here and have this tea with me,” she said, and would say repeatedly in the days to come, “I have no qualms with it. But that is all it will be.” “Us, having a cup.” She drank her tea and I drank mine, and it was not clear if this was an end or a beginning.