The Last Flight of Poxl West Read online

  You ask after our lives here—the Bauers’ sugar factory outside of Prague has been taken. I have gone to the Central Jewish Office and registered. I have papers and no one else has the expertise to run Brüder Weisberg. At the office in Prague they say they will send up a Devisenschutz Sönderkommando to look over our records. A troop of German soldiers has come through our neighborhoods in Leitmeritz, asking, and we are sure to see them again. One came up the Muehlengasse a few weeks ago and asked after our business and I asked was he the Devisenschutz Sönderkommando and he asked after my papers, but I told him I didn’t have them and he said he would be back. He was the man who came through to find out. I would see others soon enough, he said.

  Here there was a break in my father’s letter. After the caesura my father had written the new date, September 22, in a hand substantially less neat than the one that proceeded it.

  I write again without amendment or revision. The Devisenschutz Sönderkommando has come to the house. We will not control Brüder Weisberg and I would not tell you Leo that I put up a fight. But what could I do? There was nothing to do. What will become of it anyway? No one could tell you, least of all me.

  Leo I am looking to London, from where we might be able to reach Palestine now and you must do the same and come from Holland this minute if you have not already. You must go to the British consulate in Rotterdam where I have arranged for a visa in London.

  Your father

  I did not note at the time the absence of any mention of my mother at all in the second part of my father’s letter: the cease of majesty dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw what’s near to it. Wise as my father’s advice might have sounded, and wise as it clearly was in retrospect, leaving Rotterdam meant leaving Françoise.

  I reread the letter.

  I thought of Heidi, and it made me think of Françoise with the Brauns, but that was not enough to rend me from her. I sat down at my desk and wrote a long reply. I told my father I wished him and my mother well in their travels to London and hoped they would arrive safely. He should write me at the address I gave to tell me he’d arrived. I’d met a woman now, and while I didn’t tell him it was love that was keeping me—who can say in the moment what makes him do anything?—I told them that I was happy to be there with her. My home now was in Holland, with Françoise.

  8.

  War broke out across Europe. My father did not write again. The Tennessee Sisters played their gigs at the Café le Monde. Greta lent a high close harmony a third above Françoise’s leads as they sang “What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?” Their English was still a little rough, a little full of umlauts I now understand one does not generally find in a bluegrass song. Their clients had provided them with rawhide boots embroidered with colored leather, and shirts with studs and peaked shoulders. They looked the part. If he wears the uniform long enough, even the most peaceable man may grow to be a soldier.

  I tried not to think about where Françoise had gotten those clothes each time I saw her play, but on the Saturday-night gig after my father’s letter, for the first time it began to eat at me. My father’s letter had begun to place some new thought in my mind: I imagined him at work the day I found my mother with her painter, going about his business while my mother went about hers. Was I so different now here in Rotterdam? Well, I knew about Françoise’s profession in a way my father didn’t know of my mother’s surreptitious actions. But was that only rationalization? There was a visa to London. I was staying here with a woman who received all these things in exchange for—what?

  Françoise’s and Greta’s voices blended beautifully. There was something to the act of harmonizing itself that smacked of precision: two voices doing two different things, diverging so they might come together as one, greater than either alone.

  Françoise looked as happy as she ever had that night. Fifty Dutchmen were in the crowd. Who had come to listen, to see them, knowing them in the many ways a man can know a woman? Who’d simply stopped on the street upon hearing two Dutchwomen singing American gospel songs? I will never know. Françoise’s fingers traveled deftly up her instrument, pulling out double stops and picking loose melodies over Greta’s guitar playing. When they finished, Françoise showed me her mandolin case, which was piled full with guilders she’d received as tips, and she was too happy then for me even to think of starting a serious conversation about the future.

  * * *

  I suppose there are men who when they are in love know to call it love, who know its shape, its demands. Who are able to tell when its wings have begun to rust. You will not find my name anywhere on that manifest. My understanding of my concerns was somehow more immediate in those days. Since the afternoon I’d fled my mother’s house I had only one direction and that direction was forward. To stop and survey, to stop and understand how I was feeling, would have been fatal. Perhaps it was this myopia that caused the most catastrophic decisions during that period of my life. Perhaps that’s too easy.

  When I think of it now, I can say that I do know what happiness looked like then. On Saturdays when we did not need to work, afternoons before she was to play gigs with Greta, Françoise and I would borrow bicycles from my boss and ride east out of Rotterdam, the direction opposite from the harbor. Not ten miles out of the city was an area where upon the horizon the green and brown of flat grasses gave way to brilliant swatches of color: tulip fields. Françoise would strap her mandolin in its case to her back, and I would strap a guitar to mine, and after ditching our bikes we would secret ourselves back amid acre upon acre of those definitively Dutch flowers. No farmer would disturb us on those weekend mornings, and after we made love, Françoise would teach me to make new chords on the guitar. She was a mandolin player primarily, but now I saw she knew how to play guitar as well as Greta. She would hold the instrument in her intelligent hands and show me three new voicings of G chords that sounded more open and fuller than the basic version I’d first learned. One morning in early spring, the first of a spate of warm days after winter’s chill, I asked her to show me another new voicing of a G7, with the diminished seventh in the bass of the chord. But for some reason, she began to fumble with it.

  “It’s odd,” Françoise said, giving up on it for a moment and cradling the guitar between her crossed legs. “I can make that chord easily if I don’t think about it. But thinking about it now, trying to think where to fret it, I can’t make my fingers do it. It’s just muscle memory, making these chords. You wouldn’t be able to think about it fast enough when playing in time if you tried. So you make your hand make the chord over and over until you don’t have to think it, exactly. You just go to make the chord, and there it is.”

  She looked up at me, and in her face I could see she felt she’d expressed herself perfectly. But I didn’t have that muscle memory, and I didn’t fully comprehend. I told her I didn’t know quite what she was talking about. Now the skin on her lips bunched together, and I watched the skin around her eyes tighten.

  “Perhaps you need to listen better,” Françoise said. She was no longer looking me in the eyes.

  “I mean, you know the chords, right?” I said. “Of course you’re thinking about it.”

  “Well, I know them, yes,” she said. Her eyes were still narrowed and diverted from mine. “But I don’t think, C, and then a C chord arrives. I just know I’m about to play a C chord and my hand is gripping the neck. I don’t think it. I just do it. Maybe if you learned how to give yourself over to it, you’d learn how to play quicker yourself.”

  I looked down at my hands. I wished so much then that I understood what she meant—how to give myself over to it, to develop the muscle memory. But I could make chords well enough, I thought.

  “You really don’t see what I mean, do you?” Françoise said.

  “Not really.”

  To my surprise, after I admitted again that I didn’t understand, something eased in the tension that had gripped Françoise’s face. It pleased her I’d confessed, at least, what i
t was that confused me.

  “To act,” Françoise said. “I just act with you now, Poxl, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For so many years I’ve learned how to perform for men. I read what they need from me, and I give it to them. That’s the transaction: for me to fulfill their needs. And that’s the right word: performance. But with you, Poxl…”

  She stopped speaking. I do not know if a conversation like this is what it is to be in love—to disagree but to stay around and find out why, so it is no longer a disagreement. To do something so simple as to talk honestly, and then to listen. But I do know it’s what it means to begin to know someone: confession, revelation, reconciliation.

  “What is it?” I said. “I want you to tell me. Honestly.”

  “It’s like undoing the notes of a chord and then making a whole new chord. Then practicing long enough to make a new muscle memory. For years being with men was like the same basic chord. But since we’ve been together it’s like I’ve begun to unlearn how I’ve voiced things in the past. And it grows more complicated. I tried something like this once before—”

  “Before?”

  “It’s where I got these instruments. There was an American, I’ve mentioned him before. He gave me all these records, gave me my first mandolin, my first guitar. He seemed not only to want things from me but to want to give. He told me he would take me back with him to the American city of Nashville. I believed him. Then I never saw him again.”

  We were both silent. If love shows itself at times by giving us a sense of propriety, I suppose I came close to understanding it in that moment: I didn’t want to hear about her American. I’d kept tucked away any jealousy that might accompany our relationship, her work, but for the first time now I felt it. Blood came to my cheeks. Off in the distance the wind swayed the flowers, a huge patch of yellow tulips dipping away from us and then back in our direction. A cloud passed over the sun, dimming the world around us and honing sharp teeth in the cold air. I almost spoke, almost said that I didn’t want to hear about her American. Perhaps if I had then, if I’d admitted that feeling, things might have gone differently in the days ahead. But the smallest thing can change us if we let it, and I did not speak. The cloud blew past, left the sun, and our world again warmed.

  “I’ve never told you why I left Leitmeritz when I did,” I said. Françoise looked up from her guitar, where her left hand had begun to form chords again while she listened, though she did not strike the strings with her pick. The skin around her eyes drew slack, bearing relief at having told me about her American, and gratitude for my not pursuing it when she’d finished. “That afternoon,” I said, “I came upon my mother in the drawing room of our house with, well, with a painter. Some man. Some man who wasn’t my father.”

  “And you didn’t know of your mother’s infidelities.”

  “No, I didn’t know! Of course I didn’t.”

  “How did you know he was a painter, then?”

  I told her that I’d seen his paint-splattered pants in the corner.

  “I’m sorry, Poxl,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I do hope you’ll think about what must have pushed your mother there. I hope you’ll consider how complicated a marriage must be, years down the road.”

  Now I stopped talking as well. No cloud came to darken those fields, but I drew inward. What did I want in those moments? To argue with Françoise, to defend my father or defend my mother? To parse that old memory of seeing them in the leather yard when I was a kid, to understand what had passed between them? What I found was not what I expected: I simply felt as if my burden had eased, having spoken it aloud. The bright sun lit the tulip field beside us like a sail filling with wind.

  Françoise’s left hand gripped the guitar again. She struck the chord.

  “That’s the G7,” she said, and she handed me the guitar.

  I suppose there are men who know to call it love when they’ve fallen. Though it’s pained and even ruined me over the years, I know only that if I’m happy in a moment I don’t want it to end—only to move on the next day, to the next desire, then the next. I have much reason to long for forgiveness, but for that I’ll never apologize. I took the guitar back and played the new chord myself. I moved slowly, putting down my ring finger on the high E string, my index finger on the first fret of the low E string, fumbling only to grasp it later. My hand didn’t yet have the muscle memory to get it at once. Only time and practice could make that happen.

  9.

  One evening a month later, as spring was just fully upon us, my gaze fell to the harbor, whose waters were choppy in the wind blowing out to the great open water along the longest port in Europe. Thirty feet below my perch, Françoise, Greta, and Rosemary were standing next to a small dinghy that bobbed along the choppy surface. I saw Greta stick out one of her legs toward the boat and nearly fall forward until Françoise grabbed her arm. Rosemary followed. Then Françoise got in.

  I called out to her, this woman I’d stayed in Rotterdam to be with at great personal risk. “Françoise! Up here!” But with the sound of the wind she did not hear me. I tried to return to my work. Ten minutes later three men passed in their sailors’ woolens. These men were around my age, perhaps more properly boys than men, as I now understand I was at that moment. They, too, entered a dinghy to return to their boat out in the harbor—the same boat Françoise had just paddled out to. I could swear to this day that one of those boys was the same boy I’d seen talking so gruffly to Françoise just after she and I met. These boys must have been en route between some far shore and the great expansive continent. Perhaps they were Americans, even. Perhaps one of them was the very American who’d given Françoise her mandolin and her records. It was unlikely, I know that now and I’m certain I must have known it then. But it could have been the case. It wasn’t, but I might have believed it. This boy I recognized wasn’t the painter of my mother’s cuckolding, either. But he might as well have been.

  I tried to return to my work. A seabird landed on its perch, returning from wherever it is seabirds are always going to and returning from. It looked at me with its black beady eye. Was I my father in his evasive way eluding my mother’s grasp alongside the Labe, a river he veritably owned? Or was I my own man, newly aloft in a new city I’d now lived in long enough to call home?

  I crawled down from my perch. I found an idle dinghy. The oar left knocking against it was rotted. As I traveled into the harbor gloaming, the boat tossed in the waters of the Nieuwe Maas. Mists rose. Drops sprinkled my face, sending my memory back to the days of my youth by the Elbe, when the mist of the river was lifted to our faces in Schalholstice by the big turning wheel of my father’s factory.

  I pushed on.

  Though for some time I saw nothing but waves, I finally spied the destination Françoise and her friends had reached. For more than a year I’d been unaffected by my knowledge of her profession. Here, faced with the tangibility of this ship, I found a crack I’d known was there splitting into a deep fissure. I found Françoise’s dinghy tied to the ship’s prow. I managed to square mine alongside it. The deck was slick with harbor mist. I stood by the bow. The only sound was the harsh break of waves lapping at the ship’s starboard side. Twenty-five feet ahead of me a portal glowed against the evening’s half-light. Looking down through the window, I saw three women pleasuring three young sailors. Strewn over the arms of a pea green ship bed and two desk chairs were wool sweaters with roll necks bunched up like chastised house pets. On the floor, a white cotton undershirt like spilled milk.

  Françoise was the most active of the three women. She was sitting up atop the insubstantial, hairless body of that same young deckhand I’d observed paddling out to the ship, moving all about with an energy I’d never seen her take on with me. She had on no shirt. She was utterly undressed, naked in a way different from that she’d ever been with me. I saw a guitar leaning up against the wall in the corner of the berth. I allowed myself to be sure now I’d seen this boy speaking
to Françoise that first night I met up with her. As I knelt on the deck of that ship watching Françoise on top of this boy, the guitar in the corner, I tried to convince myself it was nothing. Was it nothing? Then Bohemia and all that’s in it is nothing. Seasickness gripped my stomach. Though it went against the most difficult decision I’d made in those months, I resolved at that moment no longer to leave myself subject to the feeling I had then, the same embarrassment my father had so clearly left himself subject to. The facts began to matter less and less. It was what I was feeling that mattered, and I had only one instinct—to flee.

  I turned from the window. Just as had been the case that last day I was in Leitmeritz, there was no decision left to be made. It had been made for me, before my eyes. My body did have muscle memory after all, and it wasn’t the memory of making chords. It was the memory of leaving Leitmeritz that afternoon I saw my mother with her painter. One foot before the other, all the way to the train station. My body knew just how to leave.

  That night I packed. Next morning I left my flat for the British consulate to get the visa my father had arranged. With U-boat attacks on ships in the Atlantic and the North Sea all winter long, travel was dangerous, but my body was determined to reach London. In a room at the back of the consulate I was provided a secondhand longshoreman’s sweater and a ticket for passage to Britain. I would enter the country at the port of Grimsby, from which I could travel by land to London.

  On my way to the harbor I stopped to see if Françoise was at her position at the café. I was about to risk death to put the North Sea between us, but my mind was like melody and harmony in counterpoint—there was a second kind of memory in my muscles and it longed to see Françoise once more.

  But she was not there.

  When I think of it now, do I recognize what I was doing, the mistake I was making by leaving Françoise without saying good-bye? If you have had such wisdom in the moments when you were driven by emotion, by jealousy and confusion—well, nostrovia, as the Russians say. Had I taken a day more to think about it, had I taken Françoise back on a bicycle to the tulip fields, where we could have talked about it, could she have alleviated the anger I was feeling? Would it have changed what I was feeling? I’ll never know. What’s done can’t be undone.