The Last Flight of Poxl West (2 page)

“My squadron flew into a thundercloud over Lübeck,” he said. “That's when the S-Sugar began to fly into the thundercloud, too. Crack, boom, blue lightning! You've never seen anything like it.” I asked him to read it to me instead of telling me about it—he'd written it down, after all, and I wanted to hear—and so he put his face to the loose pages before him and read. The world around us dropped away as I listened to my uncle Poxl read from his book. His hands spun dense nimbus clouds in the air between us as he narrated the bomber's bravery. This was an entirely different kind of war story than the ones we read at Hebrew school—a story not of survival, but of action. It was as if he was crafting his great account before my very eyes, and I don't know that I've been so close to history since. My uncle Poxl was born in a small city north of Prague but he had a diplomat's accent—his cars had
r
's, his parks, too, and unlike the living survivors we met or whose books we read in Hebrew school, his tongue wasn't thick and muddy with Slavic consonants. As he described in the middle chapters of his book—I'd heard each of them as we talked over fudge and whipped cream—he had been sent to London by way of a year in Rotterdam. By the time the Luftwaffe began bombing the East End, he was enlisted as a squaddie. Poxl was a Jew who had flown for the Royal Air Force during the war and lived to write about it. Though he carried in his broad shoulders the complicated burden of his own actions in those days, he had wrested his fate from the inevitable bearing down of history upon his fellow Ashkenazi Jews. And not only that but he'd lived to write about it, too.

And write about it he did. Each time he finished a new chapter he would take me somewhere new and recount to me his finest similes, the clearest arisen memory, the complicated feeling that arose as he remembered things he'd obviously spent most of his adulthood trying to forget—all for the sake of literature. For the sake of those who came after him. We talked about the fact that this is why men wrote: to leave behind their stories for those who would come years later.

“The pages are flowing from me faster than ever before,” Poxl said one afternoon. We'd just gone to stare at the Renoirs at the Museum of Fine Arts. He had an innate knack for spotting celebrity, and that afternoon, like two little kids spying on the neighbor's wife, we watched Katharine Hepburn as she studied the great painter's brushstrokes. But now we were again at Cabot's, and he had promised to read to me from the middle of the book, pages he'd only recently completed. I asked him what the new scenes were about.

“Well, until I started writing, I'd entirely forgotten about the day I enlisted. The officer called me into his office,” Poxl said. “‘Weisberg,' the officer said, ‘we need to talk. If you're shot down over Jerry soil, a man with a Jew name like yours will be torn to pieces.' So that's how they came to call me Poxl West—the kind of name men remember.” He looked at me, and I looked back. I implored him just to read to me, and as he always did, he shuffled the pages in front of him and settled back into his tale.

I sat and stared at my uncle as if he were the only hero we'd seen that day. Who needed some prune-faced old actress I'd never even seen in a movie when my uncle Poxl was there to recite his stories? Even when he stopped midsentence and stared at the shimmering window behind me, an odd blankness coming over his face, as if he might stop, I felt I could read the story he was telling in the ageless lines of his sharp red face.

By the time I was a sophomore in high school he had finished the book. As I've said, this one quickly found a publisher. A small but prestigious press bought it, offering a respectable advance. A book tour was arranged, he completed his copyedits, the first edition was printed, and before he even had a chance to give that first reading in Boston—not three short months since that moment when he'd come to my parents' house and interrupted the Super Bowl—the book began to get real notice. Before we saw him again we read the review on page twenty-three of
The New York Times Book Review.
The reviewer was laudatory and honest: “
Skylock
is not a perfect book. There are some odd formalities in its language at times, and its second half is stronger than its first. But the story Poxl West has to tell is truly unique, a history we need, and there's something undeniable about the quality of its details, the precision of its observation. Having finished it, I don't think I've been so moved by a book in recent memory.” Without even talking with him I could imagine my uncle Poxl's response: “There are some criticisms in there, Eli, sure. Even
The Great Gatsby
isn't a perfect book. But my book! Reviewed in
The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times
!”

I imagined the glint in his eye over a sundae we would share later that year. I knew even if I chided him, nothing would sway Uncle Poxl's new, implacable optimism in the wake of its publication. He'd received an advance against future royalties, and notice in the paper of record.

Now my uncle Poxl was a writer.

Before the ink had dried on the newsprint in the
Times,
Poxl had moved out of his tiny apartment in Somerville and rented an apartment in Manhattan—the place was in Spanish Harlem, but it was a place in New York. Though he held no Ph.D., having been ABD for longer than I'd been conscious, he was offered an adjunct class at Columbia in the fall. He planned to take a leave from his job teaching ninth-grade English. He had syllabi to write and readings to conduct. He'd called my father one afternoon when I was at a basketball game, and I can still feel how my skin prickled with jealousy that I hadn't been the one to answer. I could only hope and imagine he'd honed those very passages of his book on those Cabot's trips of ours. Somehow I'd been a part of the writing of this book—I'd touched history, fame, and heroism all in one small passive reach, and though it later nudged me down my path, it gave me no solace at the time. Uncle Poxl was to be a known writer, but as a result our Brahmin cultural outings were to take a hiatus.

I wrote him a letter congratulating him and briefly bemoaning not seeing him or the Rodins at the museum for a while. He wrote back with the promise of complimentary copies of his book—which we wouldn't receive until we saw him for his reading in Boston. Those books hadn't arrived. I allowed myself to assume he was simply too busy to send them along, or his publisher had forgotten to fulfill his request, but my parents could see the disappointment on my face each time mail arrived without copies of his book. I tried to remember what Poxl had written, but there were so many gaps to be filled, and what is the memory of words compared with reading the pages of a book? I longed to hold the object. I wanted to see Poxl West's name on the cover.

But what I did get was that letter. I hadn't flown his mind entirely. It was written on stationery, at the top of which was embossed
The Algonquin Hotel
in red letters, the color of which matched his face.

“As soon as my tour is over,” Uncle Poxl said at the end of his handwritten note, which I still keep in a desk drawer today, “I'll take you down to the island of Manhattn. We'll go to the Galerie St. Etienne and I'll show you the Schieles there—oh, the Schieles there! What a treat you're in for, Elijah. You'll come down to New York. Then you'll really see something for once.”

 

Skylock

The Memoir of a Jewish RAF Bomber

 

ACT ONE

1.

I grew up in Leitmeritz, a small Czechoslovak city forty miles north of Prague. My father owned a large leather factory called Brüder Weisberg. It was a business he ran for his family, out of filial duty and love, and if this story is to be about something, it is love, not war. And if we are to understand romantic love, we must first understand the languid, sedentary love of family.

My father was among the most well-to-do Jews in Czechoslovakia. We lived in a large house on a hill above the streets of Leitmeritz. Its long stone façades overlooked the city all the way down to the Elbe, over the tufted green hills where I played as a child and endured the bullying of instructors at a strict gymnasium. When I was young I worked at my father's factory. I learned the trade, and on holiday accompanied him to the aerodromes, where the fortune he'd accrued allowed him the luxury of flying private aeroplanes. One day, I was to take over the factory.

Every Sunday, while my father flew his planes, my mother took me into Prague to see her mother, my grandmother. We arrived at the main train station and she walked me through Wenceslas Var, across the Charles Bridge and up to the castle mount to buy some
smazeny syr
before crossing the city to my grandmother's town house. Black bulbs at the top of the cathedral stood out, imposing against the marbled sky. Walking up the cobblestone streets we passed cafés and bars where men stared at my mother's beauty as we passed. From the top of the mount we witnessed the drone of the Vltava pushing in its absolute grayness, bisecting Prague like some great creature finding it easier to keep watch over a city divided.

On one particular visit when I was thirteen, the city was overwhelmed by a gray, damp chill. It was late October and cold enough to erase most odor from the air. Only the pungent smells of meat held the power to waft by on our walk to my grandmother's immense town house in the Zizkov district. Cobblestones made a trail from the river, and beneath my feet I saw 2 … 4 … 16 … 132 … 17, 424 and on into infinity millions of cobblestones smudged to a variegated mix. The sky throbbed with fast-passing clouds. I walked with my arm in my mother's until she stopped. I looked up and saw pasted to a stone wall posters drawn by the Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha.

My mother stood staring.

She was an amateur painter, a habit my father supported with a complicated reluctance I could not understand. On our trips to Prague she would always divert us when my father was absent, eager to see what art she could. While she stopped, two men paused alongside us to look at these posters, as well. Green vines enwrapped the bodies and breasts of stark naked women, in their hands bunches of grapes. One of the men next to us said to the other in a shallow, informal Czech:

“Wouldn't you like to have one just like her?”

“Flat up against a wall like that,” the other replied.

They both laughed and looked at my mother, expecting to have offended her.

She smiled at them.

She was not embarrassed by the nude women before us. The men's lecherous leers and ugly comments did not faze her.

They looked at me, and my skin prickled.

They walked away.

I watched a change pass over my mother's face: The skin about her eyes drew back and I saw there a kind of giddiness my father at all times looked upon with impertinent disdain.

We walked to my grandmother's. She lived at 30 Borivojova, in a town house painted canary yellow. The components of its face were those chisel-cut rectangular stones one might find all across the city. On the front steps leading to the door sat a pair of angry lions. Inside the entranceway the air was close. Grandmother Gertrude, whom we called “Traute,” held my head to her bosom. She kissed me on my cheek and rubbed the invisible stubble over her upper lip against my nose. I longed to get away and departed for the lav, and when I reached it, I tended to myself. In the cobblestones that rose out of my memory came Mucha's women—only overlaid by that scrim of stones, they grew even more angular. This new image seared itself across the backs of my eyelids. I felt the warmth of their painted bodies come to life under my skin.

While I was cleaning up, I heard footsteps.

I froze.

They veered off into a room nearby. As I moved toward the sitting room where I'd left my mother and grandmother, I noticed the door to a little-used room off the main dining room was open. Inside, I found my mother standing before half a dozen paintings propped along the far wall. A burlap tarpaulin that must have been used to cover them was strewn across the floor. The angular girl in the painting before my mother sat with her legs spread, her hands below her small breasts and a mossy tuft just covering her exposed pink sex.

The two paintings next to it contained more of the same.

My mother took note of my presence. She blanched. Her shoulders drew back. A look crossed her face.

“I suppose I'm glad to see you like them,” my mother said. “They're the work of a great painter, an Austrian called Schiele.”

I looked away from the first painting and to one of an emaciated, naked older woman who appeared to be writhing in pain. My mother pushed it off to the side to reveal a portrait of a similarly angular woman with her legs spread as if to form a wishbone, between them heavy brushstrokes of dark gnarly brown. My mother explained that she had posed for Schiele when she was young, during summers she spent in Neulenbach, outside Vienna. There she would go to his atelier to see him with his woman, Wallie. She took my mother to buy beautiful hats until Schiele was sent to prison.

But I could not listen to her words—for on the face of the second Schiele girl, I saw something fantastic, something I hadn't noticed in the midst of my preoccupation with the fact that certain deep brushstrokes had been used to create the deep pink roundness of the areolae on that girl.

The face in that second painting was very young. But it was clearly my mother's.

If that realization wasn't enough, these paintings were the exact images overlaid by cobblestones that I'd seen when I'd closed my eyes in the bathroom minutes earlier.

I blinked hard.

It was as if I had crafted Schiele's style in my mind just minutes before. While I marveled at this coincidence, my mother said that before her marriage to my father was arranged she had sat for “her Egon” when Wallie was away. She had been the subject of a number of his paintings. Grandmother Traute had tracked down the others some time later, wishing them to be kept private.