The Last Flight of Poxl West (15 page)

“Don't know the greatest achievement of Western culture, Mr. Weisberg!” she said. “Only one way to remedy such a grave offense.”

She opened the volume to
King Lear.
Before I knew it, we were taking turns, she as Cordelia and I as Lear, she as Goneril and I as Edmund. There we were in a cave in the countryside east of London, dividing up ancient England over the mistaken response of a daughter who loved her father. We felt as if France and Albany were standing in the nooks of our cave, listening in as we unwisely divided the kingdom; our anger at Goneril and Regan was as great in those moments as it was for the Messerschmitt pilots over London. The pages of that edition were all very clean, not a mark on any one of them.

Near the end of Act 2, Glynnis returned to us. She told her mother we would be back, that we'd come see her when we had a leave.

“We,” she said.

“Poxl and me,” Glynnis said.

“Upon your return, we will find our way into Act 3, my boy,” Mrs. Goldring said.

Kerosene light danced on the ceiling ten yards above our heads, about the deep-lined face of Glynnis's mother. She looked right at me for the first time.

“I could do with that,” Mrs. Goldring said.

On our long walk back to the train, Glynnis asked what had allowed her mother to seem so lucid at some moments after weeks and months of decrepitude. I told her I didn't know. I'd only just met this woman and wouldn't purport to know.

“But we read
King Lear
together the whole time you were gone,” I said.

I suspected there might eventually be more to say on the matter, but I left it at that.

12.

In the months ahead, when we were granted weekend leave, Glynnis and I went to see her mother. While Glynnis went off to procure whatever her mother needed, I stayed and read. First we read
Lear,
and then the rest, from
Timon of Athens
to
Titus Andronicus,
from
All's Well That Ends Well
all the way to
The Merchant of Venice
, where we paused as Shylock asks, so pained, If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

When Glynnis grew tired and returned, I would survey the cave myself, while Glynnis and her mother talked, or read from the plays as well, though having grown up with them, Glynnis surely didn't have the same patience for her mother's proclivities that I did. I wouldn't say I came to know its every recess, but the cave itself came to be a kind of holiday home for us.

And without our quite knowing when it had happened so fully, Glynnis and I had taken to each other. We made love quietly on weeknights when we could. While her face bore that constellation of freckles, when her shirt came off, I found that every inch of her skin not touched by the sun was wholly white. I liked to turn on a lamp in the corner of her small room near the hospital when we undressed. In the quiet after we'd disentangled I heard about her childhood. She'd grown up on a dairy farm, her family one of modest means. After watching her parents' husbandry of their cattle—“I'd seen more pink bleating calves pulled from their mothers by the age of ten than one should see in a lifetime,” Glynnis said—she came to decide that medicine attracted her. Not just medicine but also the birthing process. She began her training as a midwife soon after leaving her parents' home. But then the war threatened, and now she was a handful of years into working as a nurse.

“It's a funny transition, innit?” Glynnis said. I told her I didn't follow her meaning. “I wanted to be in a hospital helping to bring new life into the world. Here were are in London watching it taken.”

“You're doing exactly what you should be doing now,” I said. “The war will end one day, and you'll go back to it.”

“I suppose. And you, Poxl West? What will you do when the war you're so certain will end does end?”

I didn't want to tell her that I didn't know, so I gave her an answer somewhere in between.

“
Before
this war is over, Glynnis Goldring, I will fly for the RAF.” It wasn't the first she'd heard of this desire, but I suppose it was the most clearly she'd heard it.

“And what will become of me while you're off flying?” she said.

“The same thing that becomes of you now. Or you'll come with me, come work for the Women's Auxiliary.”

“I don't want to leave here,” Glynnis said. And for a time we left it at that. We stopped speaking and held each other tight. After hours on Mrs. Goldring's pallet there was something almost too ordered about Glynnis's bed—there was no sense of being thrown off by the gravity of the shifting world, no feeling of the disruption that a dim cave can bring.

So more often than not we found ourselves back in that cave on every weekend pass we could procure. I liked to carry a lamp with us on those weekends when we went to see Mrs. Goldring and observe every cave room there was. I learned after the war that as many as eight thousand Britons had set up camp there, and by springtime they'd moved beyond a dining room and sleeping areas. Deep in the paths water had borne through the rock over many thousands of years, through a passageway so tight one felt one might be stuck until one starved to death, a ballroom had been constructed. Some boy small enough to pass through the crevice along with a small chandelier had brought tools as well, and near the top of the cave ceiling, he had installed that glimmering glass. An old Victrola was powered by a hand crank in a far corner of the room.

It took some convincing to get Glynnis in there with me. She wasn't much of a dancer and neither was I, but when Glenn Miller came on I took her hand and we did the best we could.

One night for a fast dance someone put on one of those old Decca Records recordings of Bill and Charlie Monroe doing “You Won't Be Satisfied That Way.” For just a second I hesitated when Glynnis came to me, my mind thrust away from that place, but I did my best to regain myself. Glynnis took my hands, and she and I danced hard to it. I had her hands gripped in mine, and I didn't let go. The low-slung rock of the cave's ceiling seemed to push down toward my head, and as if against my desire, constructed images of Françoise stuck under the beams of a bomb-imploded house entered my mind. I didn't picture Rotterdam: I pictured that building in Gough Square where Glynnis and I had first met, only now Françoise was there. I can only guess that as I held her there, Glynnis thought I was simply a young man in love—with her. And that wasn't inaccurate. But there was more on my mind. My palms grew sweaty as I considered that this empathy for Glynnis, considering her thoughts, was more move to empathy than I'd given Françoise even after I left her, even after I arrived in London.

Something must have crossed my face. Glynnis said, “Poxl, what is it? I've never seen you look so sad. Or happy. I don't know which.”

“I don't either,” I said. I'd never spoken to her of Françoise before, and I wasn't going to start. “But let's forget it.” Presently the song changed, and it was past, and we went back to dancing slowly. I'm sure my behavior seemed odd, but neither of us made mention of it again. The cave was so broad and wide most of the sound was lost in the room anyway, or it echoed so that it was as if you were hearing both what was being played and what had been played seconds before, the two lines crossing until it was no longer clear which was which: past or present.

Glynnis's hands were in mine. We were dancing slowly. I had to say something, even as the melancholy of my thoughts sat as a residue on my mind.

“I'm glad you brought me to this place,” I told Glynnis.

“My mother's taken to you.”

“It's a wise child who knows her mother,” I said, and she held me close.

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 as 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.