The Last Flight of Poxl West Read online

  “I won’t ask it again,” Françoise said. “It’s been a very long time since I asked it of someone, but with you I feel I can.”

  The room filled with the smell of tea. Until she stood and walked over to the lamp by her bed to turn it out I didn’t understand what she was asking, but then I saw: she wanted the quiet privacy of darkness. In the slick, dim room she moved beneath my fingers until she was done.

  When I woke the next morning Françoise had already left. There was no note, no sign of her. I gathered my things and returned to my flat. That night I worked my shift, and the next two, and did not see her again until the next time her band played. When they finished, she told me to meet her at her flat in an hour.

  She was in just a robe when I arrived. She had her mandolin out. She began to pick some American folk song she’d learned from her records. While she played, I had a chance to take in her flat with the lamp lit. Clothes lay upon its floor in squalor. But I soon came to learn that if we needed to leave, she always knew just where to find a blouse, a sweater. She kept a fresh tulip on her windowsill each afternoon. Years later, when the war was over, an old Dutch woman would tell me of friends who ate the tulips from their gardens when they were the only thing left to eat. But there in the serenity before the war broke out in earnest, the splash of violet or carmine or vermilion on Françoise’s windowsill lent order to her room. She may have been born cross-eyed, but Françoise as I knew her could see and see and see.

  6.

  One night Françoise invited me to the home of a couple she knew well, and whose complicated role in her life would grow clearer to me in the weeks after I met them. The Brauns lived in Delfshaven, a quiet neighborhood fifteen blocks from Françoise’s flat—236 Heemraadssingel. Their block followed a canal up from the Nieuwe Maas. Over the glassy, still surface of their canal, languid willows dipped their arms down to the water as if searching for something just below its surface.

  Inside we encountered Herr Braun, a dentist, and Frau Braun, his wife, who had been Françoise’s teacher. By the time she was sixteen, Françoise had already been at work in the brothel for a number of years. Frau Braun had been attractive then—now she was obese, but the clear blue of her eyes allowed me to imagine her in her youth. One afternoon as Frau Braun sat alongside her before an old piano, Françoise had put her hand on her teacher’s arm. Frau Braun had pulled it away. Three years later, when Françoise was no longer attending school, Frau Braun had seen her performing with Greta at Café le Monde. They returned together that night to her house, and Françoise visited the Brauns’ home regularly in the years to follow.

  That night the four of us ate sauerkraut and bratwurst. We looked out on their garden. The Brauns were attentive to Françoise’s needs, which they seemed to anticipate even before she asked for things. There was a familiarity between them that felt almost paternal. They were cold to me, and at first I didn’t know if it was because they were protective like parents—or if they felt some other kind of propriety with Françoise.

  “What of your work?” Herr Braun said.

  “I’ve just found something permanent,” I said. “Working in the cranes. In Veerhaven.” I’d been walking down Schiedamsedijk when I heard the familiar sound of a man speaking Czech. Along the canal were dozens of cranes, which served to take the cargo from ships entering the harbor. This Dutch shipping company had bought cranes from Czechoslovakia, but all the men who ran them except him had been called to the army because of the fear of German invasion. In the weeks and months to come, I used these cranes to unload shipments. The money Johann Schmidt had given me was beginning to run out, and it was providential for me to find this work.

  “Poxl has done quite well since he arrived,” Françoise said. The Brauns nodded and dragged their knives across their bratwurst. “I’ve even taught him to play some guitar.”

  We’d settled into some after-dinner port when the Brauns’ daughter joined us. Heidi was eleven. She had wiry black hair and skin tawny as if she’d been too long in the sun. She seemed a bit shy with me, but she immediately walked over to Françoise. It was clear they knew each other well.

  “Heidi,” Herr Braun said, “would you like to sing a song for our guests? Why not one of those American folk songs your mother has taught you?”

  Françoise and Frau Braun were suddenly quiet. Now even Herr Braun grew red at the collar. Heidi walked over closer to Françoise. She blanched white as if a cloud had passed between her and the rest of us.

  “You want to sing and you won’t, so off with you, then!” Herr Braun said.

  “Poxl can play guitar for us,” Françoise said. “Heidi, we could do that new Rice Brothers Gang song.”

  Heidi’s soft skin regained its color. She looked Françoise in the eyes. At the back of the Brauns’ house I picked up a guitar and began to hack at the only three chords I’d learned since arriving in Rotterdam—G, C, D. It took me a second to change between each chord, setting each finger slowly on its fret, but I could essentially manage it now when given the time. Françoise had been playing that Rice Brothers Gang record incessantly, and in particular a song that was new at the time but has grown quite familiar to listeners in the years since, “You Are My Sunshine.” It was the only song I knew. Françoise sang the end of the verse: “If you leave me to love another, you’ll regret it all one day.”

  When she came to the chorus, Heidi sang a perfect tenor, three notes above. Her voice was naturally a few steps higher than Françoise’s, but it was as if the same voice was singing the two parts together.

  * * *

  One night the following week, when we’d just arrived home from one of her performances and had had a lot to drink, Françoise said we needed to talk. I was full of wine and ready for bed, but clearly something was eating at her. Hazy as I was, I sat and listened.

  “For a long time I’ve wanted to tell you the story of my childhood,” she said. “Now that you’ve met the Brauns, and will surely see them again before long, I’ll tell you. But before I tell you, before I do, first I must know something from you, something I’ve been needing to know: What do you think of my work? Of what I do for money?”

  She turned on a lamp, stood and lit the burner on the stove, brewed some tea. This wasn’t going to be a quick conversation, and I steeled myself for it. Unlike our first time together, now when Françoise made tea for me, we would go through the ritual of allowing it to steep, and then actually drink it. I’d learned to wait patiently while she finished this ritual before we could talk again. It gave me time to consider an answer. I was not displeased with her. I did not long to leave her. I’d never known a different version of her—this was simply Françoise, the same Françoise I’d first met. I’d tried in the past, against my better judgment, to think of her with her clients, but all I could think of was my mother and her cuckolding painter. I grew angry, but not at Françoise. I did not know where to put the anger. In our time together I’d learned not to ask. I did not know then what I even thought love was—I only knew that in the moments when I was with Françoise I did not want to be anywhere else in the world.

  But I could not say any of that now. When Françoise returned with our tea I said, “You do what you do. It’s the only way I’ve ever known you. What can I say? When I’m with you, I’m happy.”

  Françoise handed me my tea. She did not look me in the eyes, but sipped at her tea while I sipped at mine.

  “I think I knew that,” she said. She sighed, and we were both quiet.

  And then she started in on her story.

  Françoise explained that her father was a colonialist who had gone to the Congo, a Dutch protectorate at the time, to oversee an investment, and had returned with her mother, who was herself the daughter of a colonialist. Her mother, Françoise’s grandmother, was Congolese, though from my time growing up in Leitmeritz, I’d never encountered anyone with such a background, and I did not know until she told me that Françoise was one-quarter African. She was taupe. Freckled. There was a
touch of albinism in her tan skin, which to the eye of one who knows such things might have been a distinguishing feature of her background. To a young Czechoslovak who for the first time was seeing a Dutch woman in Rotterdam, she was simply bronzed.

  As Françoise told me this I sat up on a sofa in her apartment, giving her full attention, attempting not to slouch. Françoise was sitting across from me, her legs tucked under her on a straight-backed chair. When I think of her now I think of the way she was that night: The lightness of her freckles was very light then, the brownness of her cocoa nipples very deep. Her eyes were wide, trained on me as she spoke. She was so young and so unblemished in those days, days when she seemed the most worldly woman I’d ever met.

  When Françoise’s parents returned to Rotterdam they found the house her father had grown up in destroyed by fire. Her father’s investments in the Congo had come to nothing. He sank into a deep depression. Her mother was unable to find a respectable job. The fire and penury led Françoise’s mother to work in a brothel near their home. She sometimes brought home more money in a night than Françoise’s father earned in a week, if he was seeking work at all.

  “By fourteen, I began to work the ships in the harbor myself,” Françoise said, “where sailors had comfortable accommodations belowdecks.

  “I was good at my work. Being good meant many things. Different things. Some men liked to have me simply for how young I was. Some liked to give me things—mandolins, records, bottles of French and Spanish wine. But I had one immediate need myself in my endeavor, and that was that I not get pregnant. And somehow I was lucky even in that realm: I never had even a scare. It appeared I was barren.”

  Françoise put her head down again on her pillow. She turned to me and expressed a truth I was coming to learn: Sometimes even the most steadfast facts of our lives can be undone by time and chance.

  “Then when I was sixteen,” she said, “I noticed one day my menstruation had stopped. Years of work each day the same, each day a different challenge but the same results. Here I was now. Suddenly pregnant.” Her mother told her she must not keep the baby. Her father had recovered himself during that period, and had made plans to return to the Congo, where he would be embroiled in a business transaction that could keep them from returning to Rotterdam even to visit for years. Her father was lucky to have found work again. Françoise would not be able to join them if she was with child.

  At that moment in her telling me all of this, a new tear appeared in the outside corner of Françoise’s eye like the tear that comes upon first waking. It rolled down her cheek and into her ear. Now her face was all hot and wet. It was the first show of defeated sadness I’d ever observed in her. Being full of wine herself, her energy started to flag. She came over to the sofa where I sat and buried her nose in my neck. We lay down together on the long sofa.

  “Isn’t it silly?” she said. I had my arms wrapped around her now. “The choices we make.”

  And then, before finishing her story, she closed her eyes. “It’s hard even to think of it now,” Françoise said. She stopped speaking. Her breathing grew slow and heavy. Minutes passed with us lying that way. I did not have the heart to wake her. While I waited, too lit by the story to sleep myself, I was plunged into the memory of my last moments with my own parents: The week before my father told me I was to leave for Rotterdam, the three of us had traveled to Prague together. My father had just made a major upgrade to his Tiger Moth biplane, and he wanted to take us each up in it. But when we arrived, my mother refused to join us, no matter how my father implored her. She was afraid of flying, she said, though she’d been up before, and she didn’t want to go.

  “Take Poxl,” she said, her hand distractedly playing with the amber of her earring. “He likes to fly with you. I’ll take the car to town for the afternoon.”

  There was some loose skin around my father’s eyes that twitched when he was most agitated. It twitched then without abandon. It wasn’t until this moment, lying alongside Françoise, that it struck me this might have been a sign my father knew of my mother’s indiscretions.

  We took to the sky that afternoon while my mother was in town. A second throttle sat in my rear seat. After flying me faster and more recklessly than my fastidious father ever had before, he shouted back to me, “Take over, Poxl.”

  For the first time after all those flights watching the back of my father’s helmeted head, first in his Be-50 and then in this Tiger Moth, I took that plane upward. The slightest nudge of the throttle sent us down at an angle that seemed to me to cause mortal danger. I straightened us and then my stomach made quickly for my feet. But soon I had us horizontal. A kind of ease overcame me in my seat. Thin fog passed through us like the skin of vacated bodies, and when I looked far enough across our leeward side, I saw that these were the wisps of clouds we were inside of. Wind forced us up and I pushed in, sent us down. I’d been flying I don’t know how long before, for the very last time, my father’s invisible hand retook control of the throttle from me, and he again maintained control of us in the sky.

  “Ace flying, my boy,” my father said. By the time we returned to the hangar, my mother was again with us. A new pair of larger amber earrings were in her ears.

  “Do you like them?” she said. She did not look at my father. I told her I did, sure. “I met up with Grandma Traute,” she said. “We shopped down in Wenceslas Var.”

  She and my father didn’t speak again until we arrived in Leitmeritz. I nodded off on the ride and in my head I was back up in the clouds—my body had maintained that altitude, and the clouds that passed through us or we through them were all around us again, and I was untethered. When I came back from my reverie, Radobyl was to our northeast up in the distance, and we were driving past the fortress walls of Terezin, which then held none of the meaning it later would, just the remnants of another, more belligerent time in the town to our south, walls I’d seen a thousand times before.

  Presently Françoise woke again and broke me from my memory. She sat up, so that we were next to each other on the sofa.

  “There is one more part of this story I’ve been telling you,” Françoise said. “Where was I? Right. Of course I did not go with my parents on their new junket in the Congo. I was going to keep the baby. My mother was furious at my decision, and she and my father left me.

  “I might have been in real trouble had it not been that around that time I had just begun seeing the Brauns. At first I worked for only Frau Braun, but she began to take me home to her husband as well. They were paying for it, but they were gentle and generous with me, nonetheless, and I came to trust them both. I don’t think I sought them out for the sake of the baby at first—honestly, I didn’t know what I’d do. But Frau Braun had wanted me, and here was this wealthy couple who had no children of their own. I began to see that it was providence, their having come back into my life.

  “When the dentist noticed my swollen belly, he erupted at first, thinking I was claiming it was his, that I wanted money from him. Strange as it might sound, when he came to understand that the baby wasn’t his and that was not what I was asking, he calmed. And at that same time, a preternatural peace seemed to come over Frau Braun.

  “I have learned from my work how to read people. I saw something in Frau Braun’s face—something I’d come there looking for. So I stopped pleading. I made my proposal overtly.” And so I came to understand that this was what had taken her back to the Brauns that night. There was some safety in her knowing her baby would have a comfortable home with them, and that she could go to see her if she wished.

  She stopped talking and looked at me.

  “So, you see,” she said. “Heidi Braun, the Brauns’ little girl—she’s mine.”

  And with her story complete, Françoise said she was tired. There was nothing more to say. It occurred to me, among other things, that Françoise was a good bit older than I’d assumed her to be. But surely I wouldn’t remark on such a fact—now, or ever. We crawled off to her bed and
went to sleep.

  7.

  Inside my door one afternoon weeks later I found a travel-worn envelope. My father’s rendering of my address there on Scheepstimmermanslaan was barely legible. The first part was dated August 8. It had long been delayed in its arrival.

  “Dear Leopold,” the letter began.

  Thank you for your letter no matter how brief or belated. Your mother is fine and I am fine and little Pitzky the dog is fine. We have all been wondering about you. We are each fine. In spring Hitler slept the night in Hradcany to spit in our faces. The German soldiers took over Prague with tanks and guns, but not Leitmeritz. I have written the national bank in Prague and I have heard nothing back but we can no longer maintain our funds and we can no longer make purchases and we can no longer liquidate our assets.

  I have not heard from Johann Schmidt and I learned only the other day he has left for New York and could not have provided you with leather work so you cannot have work from him. What are you doing to keep aloft, my son? Please write to tell us. It pains me that we did not say good-bye to each other before your departure, but your mother explained you’d had a fight over money and so you left. I’m sorry that I was not there to see you off and know that I worry about you. Please understand I will do for you what I can from afar. And that I already have. Poxl you should go to the Leathersellers College in London. It will be possible for you to obtain a student visa to attend the school there. Johana and Niny can provide you a place to live and an introduction to the city. I have made arrangements with an associate in the consulate for you to have an exit visa from the Netherlands and a visa into England. You should leave immediately.