The Last Flight of Poxl West Read online

  My decision was made. My body was in motion. I would not vacillate further. So I traveled along the same path as during the previous day’s trek, and only an hour later a large ship run by William Muller and Company had a space for me, and I boarded.

  We embarked.

  10.

  The open sea was cold. I spent the long passage out the Nieuwe Maas up on deck, looking north and gazing at the waters trying to imagine I could see the U-boats circling us, seeking our demise. While up there I experienced a feeling of the loss of love I’d only experienced something close to one time before. When I was twelve, most of my summer was spent by the oxbow in the river below my father’s factory. Evening would arrive as we relaxed upstream from those waters, which served as the waste bin for whatever refuse was sloughed off by the workmen at Brüder Weisberg. Each afternoon before dark the children of Leitmeritz would walk down to the Elbe to the same bend in the river where my cousins and I had spied my mother and father in their broken flirtation when we were too young to know what we’d seen. There we swam. Fifty feet out into the middle of this stretch of water our father’s fathers had built a birch-wood dock. Across from this dock dangled a rickety ladder.

  One day I walked amid the din of afternoon cicadas crying in treetops. We children of the little city of Leitmeritz worshiped at the brown river’s ankles. My cousins lived between my family’s house and the river, and I picked them up for the walk. I could think that day only of a little girl named Suse. My pursuit of her had become an idée fixe. She was in Niny’s class at the gymnasium, the daughter of one of my father’s workmen. I’d known her father, Vladek, since I was a child. He was a dedicated worker who did not speak much. His disdain for his station and for my father was never obvious, but I’d always surmised it must be present.

  Suse was a mediocre student. She wasn’t dim, but she never seemed to hold an opinion of her own. Even at that young age she was a person who is not living her own life, but waiting for someone to live it for her. There was something not wholly unpleasant in this manner—a certainty to her acceptance of life and its hardships that smacked of a kind of counterintuitive confidence—and it was, for a boy coming from a home like mine, immediately attractive. I told Niny, my sole conspirator, about my design.

  “You’ll help me speak to Suse today,” I said.

  “Do what you will,” Niny said. “I won’t help, but I won’t get in your way.” Even then Niny knew how to handle me.

  She returned to conversation with her sister. I spotted Suse. She was the only girl in our class who’d grown breasts. In the hamstrung light of the evening my eyes settled upon her shape. Niny and Johana and I swam our bodies content while all along I tracked my whereabouts on the banks of the Elbe, always knowing where in the water Suse was. I found myself at day’s end resting on that birch-wood dock, next to Suse and Niny.

  Niny had always been my favorite. We’d taken long train rides to visit the other Weisberg cousins outside of Debrecen, Hungary, when we were little. We would play games, seeing who could count all the yellow sunflowers outside the train window. By the oxbow behind Brüder Weisberg it was always Niny who would walk upstream from the mill wheel to explore the dark woods that sat a couple hundred feet above our land. Niny’s presence provided me confidence in speaking with Suse each time she returned to shore. I said, “You’re cold—let’s put a towel around you.” She only greeted me and then returned to conversation with Niny. I listened. They were talking about their Czech history class.

  “Bratislava was once the capital of Hungary,” I said.

  Suse just looked at Niny, not knowing how to respond, not knowing really what I was talking about. Niny laughed at me. She knew if she was too much in my corner, it might tip Suse to my desires. Suse followed her lead and laughed, too. She was not snobbish or curt about it, which gave her a new power over me.

  Soon we were all dressed. An early-evening moon stood sentinel over us, lucid in the receding sky. The banks of the Elbe were suddenly new to me, the fields of some distant planet we’d been transported to. Flies lifted out of the low grass in ululating swarms as if shaken off the earth’s floor by the vibrating strength of my desire. A low waft of fragrant pollen rose in the night air. Johana joined Niny at a game of cards. I stared up at the purpling sky. The sun was too far behind the western bank of the river and the trees for us to see it set.

  Across the way Suse was out of sight. She had trekked off to the stand of trees away from the river. I walked to the cusp of the wood, on the other edge of the purple tamarisk blossoms, where she’d gone to pack her swimsuit. She heard me coming. I said, “I believe I’m in love with you.” Something in my honesty held her there long enough for me to speak again. “But I can see you’re not interested in me.”

  A sudden wave of shyness overtook me. I turned away. Behind us the setting sun threw its light onto our little mountain Radobyl. The breeze was slow at my back. It was so close to dark now, I thought there might not be time to await Suse’s answer. Then, a couple of steps away, I heard the crunching of footsteps on early-spring wood fall.

  Suse’s hand was at my back.

  I closed my eyes and pushed my lips hard against hers. Suse kept her mouth open while stroking my neck with just the tips of her fingers. Her tongue felt huge against mine, covered in bumps at its side, which presented in my mind the image of a large squid. She pulled me toward her as if she were the man, something I could imagine her father, Vladek, doing to her mother, something I knew in my bones already would have been wholly out of character for my father.

  When the sound of crackling branches came again I was so caught in our dark vertigo that I didn’t react. Suse was not so intoxicated. She broke away and we turned to see that twenty feet from us a boy from one of the older classes at the gymnasium, whom I’d seen many times but whose name I did not know, was looking at us. My hand had been snaking up under Suse’s shirt and had almost found its way to its goal.

  He pointed at us and in his loudest voice said, “Little Suse is kissing the Yid from the leather factory! Suse and the Yid, kissing in the trees!”

  She pushed me away. My hand sprang toward her again, snarled in her shirt. The boy ran off, yelling to his friends to come see, come see. But before anyone could arrive, Suse ran away home.

  When I saw Suse in the future, she did not speak to me. Ours was not a Jewish town, but we Jews lived in relative peace at that period with our Czech neighbors. My insecurities kept me from seeking her again. It was not clear if I had jilted her or had been jilted, only that I no longer had what I wanted. Soon other boys were with her. By the time Suse and I were sixteen, the particular blankness of her character had begun to develop into a hollowness in her eyes. She was tiring from the variety of relationships she had with so many of the boys from Leitmeritz. She became everything to the men who needed her, even men who would point at me and call me malign names.

  In turn she became invisible to everyone but the men who had lost her. She lingered in my mind like the wisps of cloud I moved through—or which moved through me—when I was aloft in my father’s plane. Some men would embarrass her. Their hungry hands would be all over her in public, hands that seemed guided by lascivious spirits uncontrolled even by their owners. Others were gentlemen. None elicited an observable response, but they weren’t thrown off until their own insecurities or boredom drove them away.

  Many years later, Niny would tell me that she had learned Suse took up with an SA officer who came to love her during the occupation. When the Russians liberated Leitmeritz in May 1945 on their push through to the German border, she was dragged into the street. Townspeople, all of them men, tore her clothes. They pushed her to the ground. Many were the same men who had made love to her before the war, groped at her, and then left or were left by her.

  It was their vicarious shame, Suse’s consorting with the Nazis.

  She became the living declaration of their own helplessness in the days after the occupation. We lived in a time wher
e such things were possible—when the abstractions of our day could be encapsulated in the body of a living woman. What idea I was leaving behind me then, in the body of Françoise, I could not yet comprehend. It hadn’t even fully hit me yet what I’d done in leaving her to begin with—only that I’d lost something, and it was too late to return.

  Acknowledgment: First Interlude

  The next time I saw my uncle Poxl, it was two weeks after his book was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, at his Boston reading. There was a monsoon outside. Rain sheeted down the windows of a large bookstore just off the corner of Harvard Yard. The carpeted room was packed to the walls with academics and book-club readers, Poxl’s former prep school students and his colleagues. We found a seat near the middle of the space, behind a graduate student in a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. The kid wore horn-rimmed glasses, his shoulders covered in a downy layer of flaked scalp skin. I recognize only now that he was everything I tried not to be when I began grad school myself more than a decade later.

  On the walls around us were musty used books. Out front were piles of new ones. Chief among them, on a wood-laminate table with folding metal legs, were a couple dozen copies of Poxl’s memoir. Since our copies had never arrived, it was the first I’d seen the book in person. On the front was a brown painting of a Lancaster cutting through high cirrus, chased by an Me-109, bullets pinging its side. It was almost cartoonish, the edges of the planes somehow too bulbous, the colors too bright. Had the book landed with a bigger publisher, perhaps it would have had a better cover. Still—it was my uncle Poxl’s book, in the flesh. Finally. I looked closely, but no matter how hard I looked, I could not make out the face of a pilot inside the cockpit of the Lancaster bomber. It was as if it wasn’t being piloted at all.

  But on the back was a full-page grainy black-and-white photograph of my uncle with his arms crossed, feet spread to the width of his shoulders. He stood in front of a tall oak. It was the kind of photograph you’d find on the back of a Stephen King or a John Irving novel at that time—in the days when a writer could become as famous as an actor or an athlete and ascend to the most visible ranks of American public life, could hope to meet Norman Mailer at a party, be reviewed in the Village Voice Literary Supplement. A kind of literary fame that’s hard even to fathom, let alone remember, now.

  Uncle Poxl was everything a sententious musical at the Wang Center could never be.

  “Can we get one?” I said.

  “Poxl said he’d send us each a copy,” my father said. “He said he signed one for you already. Have some faith. It’ll come.” I didn’t argue. But whatever Poxl West did for me, in all the years after the publication of his book, he never did send me that copy. Some part of me will always be awaiting it.

  I sat between my parents, who were still in their work clothes. My father was a tax lawyer at a corporate firm downtown, and my mother worked as an administrator at Mass General. They were more markedly not my uncle Poxl than almost anyone in my life—he was a writer and an artist and a war hero. He was about to stand up in front of an audience while they sat watching. My father’s father had come from Latvia after the war and worked all the way from janitor to dean at the prestigious school where Poxl taught, before his untimely death. My mother’s parents had left Romania after World War I and opened a bakery on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. We saw my mother’s parents in New York only a couple times a year. My parents did their duty, making the best of their parents’ hard work, their modest but tangible successes. I did not want modest successes. I did not want to be a professional. At that point, I don’t know what I wanted, other than a hero. I wanted to listen to my uncle Poxl.

  When Poxl caught my father’s eye on his way to the podium, we felt we’d been some part of that life he’d led, a life so Odyssean and outsized we couldn’t help but listen. Some young hip professor from the Brandeis English Department in a pair of paint-splattered Guess jeans and a salmon sports coat rolled to his elbows talked for five overstated minutes about Poxl West’s nearly instantaneous place in the canon of Jewish chroniclers of World War II. His speech was full of humorless references to Eastern European writers I’d never heard of, writers who’d not even been translated into English yet.

  Then Uncle Poxl stood.

  Without shaking the professor’s hand, he put his mouth very close to the mike.

  “Before the night is through I would like to read to you from the climax of my memoir, a memoir that is ultimately about love and love’s limits, but which contains certain inevitable passages describing as yet unspoken vengeance against the German horror,” he said.

  Speakers popped. He moved back from the microphone a few inches, found his place behind the podium.

  “To begin, I’d like to show you a little of how the Lancaster bomber S-Sugar came to drop bombs on Nazi soil.”

  Rain ticked against the windows as if to dispel the validity of the pathetic fallacy. Uncle Poxl read from a chapter describing how he and his cousins felt when they first learned of their parents’ fate during the war. Heads bowed toward chests all through the audience of maybe a hundred listeners packed into that small space when Poxl described what he knew of his mother’s deportation to Terezin. Poxl himself never looked up from his text, which was enormous and imposing as the Pentateuch in his narrow red fingers. Thin red spindles rippled out across his face as he turned to a passage describing his trip from Rotterdam to London by freighter, the fear of U-boat attacks present at every moment. And when he finally gave us what we wanted—and that audience wanted so much from Poxl West, the first Jew so many of us had heard of who had not only survived the Nazi threat but had combated it, literally—and narrated what happened the night he crawled into the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber, when he piloted a plane so that his bomb aimer could drop blockbuster bombs that created a firestorm that destroyed almost every building in Hamburg, it was as if every villain in God’s unholy world had been burned in the cauldron of fire my uncle Poxl had lit.

  After he finished reading, after the thunder of applause that matched the tempest outside had subsided, the impertinent dandruffed graduate student we’d seen on our way in raised his hand. His was the only head that I hadn’t seen dropped in solemn sympathy during the reading. He’d watched, but there was something defiant in his demeanor.

  “Mr. West, with all due respect, isn’t it possible we’ve reached a point of saturation with all the first-person accounts of this particular war?”

  A hush fell. When I became a professor, or even just when I was a university student myself, I would have recognized this as the overzealous application of a graduate student’s desire to question everything he receives. Frankly, it wasn’t wholly unlike my attitude toward the stories of survivors I’d heard in Hebrew school. But I didn’t see the connection then. I wasn’t a professor yet, or an undergraduate. I was a kid at a reading, there to bask in my uncle Poxl’s glory, and here was some kid stepping all over it. I expected to see the nostrils on Poxl’s sharp nose draw in as they had the few times I’d seen him challenged. But we were close enough to see that no cloud passed his face.

  “I haven’t ever considered such a question,” Poxl said. “This is my life as I lived it. I simply sat down and reported the heroism in which those around me on those harrowing days partook. I don’t think of things like ‘saturation,’ or other stories previously told about it.”

  The audience had drawn just inches forward in their seats like grass pushed by wind when the question came; now that my uncle had handled it with aplomb, backs touched seats again. Clearly everyone expected that would be the end of it. But the graduate student continued.

  “You haven’t,” the kid said. “Huh.”

  An older man next to the kid stared at the side of his head like he might do something. Someone said, “The nerve,” with a bluster and propriety that sounded as if he had been the one in that Lancaster bomber and not my uncle.

  Uncle Poxl’s demeanor still hadn’t changed. He stood in his chocol
ate brown Armani suit, with his shoulders drawn back, his hands along the wooden sides of the podium.

  “I’d just say there’s a certain saturation point with a certain kind of story,” the graduate student said. “You know, in the way that Propp posited that there are a finite number of stories to be told at all, there are surely a small number of these. I just wonder what you can say that Primo Levi or Jerzy Kosinski or Elie Wiesel hasn’t already.” We’d been assigned Survival in Auschwitz, The Painted Bird, and Night at Hebrew school. I’d read Kosinski closest, and my uncle was no painted bird. He was a Jew who had killed Germans, who had sought the fight when others fled. He was the master of his own narrative. No one had handed me any Borowski, and Kertész hadn’t yet been translated into English, I don’t think. Not that it would have made much difference to me. I understand now of course that they had all fought their own battles, but I was a teenager, and wholly without patience.

  Poxl West was the only hero I needed.

  Now my uncle Poxl’s face spidered with red lines. He began to respond, but he stopped. A gray old man made a move toward the kid. My uncle’s face grew ever redder. The hipster Brandeis professor who had introduced him bumped the microphone with his rolled-sleeved arm on his way up to the podium. Speakers popped as they had when Uncle Poxl’s lips first hit it.

  “That will be all,” the professor said. “Mr. West will be in the back to sign books. Please, just one to a customer.”

  My uncle Poxl shuffled to the back. The professor whispered something in his ear as they walked to the signing table. The graduate student strolled leisurely out toward the back. He came close enough I might have reached out and ripped the earring from his smug punk ear, but as soon as violence rose in me—I was too young really to have done anything, and I don’t know even now what I could have done—he was already past. My parents and I didn’t need books signed; Uncle Poxl had promised copies. We stood to the side of the room as he signed. The line was so long ten minutes passed, then a half hour, and still readers and students stood with books. I was standing before the B’s in the Used Fiction section. Right at eye-level was a green old dust jacket that read “Bellow—Herzog.” A smell like dead cumin arose from the thing as its pages flapped freely in my hand. My father looked at me. I hadn’t even realized until after I’d done it that I was half-expecting a hundred-dollar bill to fall from it.