The Last Flight of Poxl West (6 page)

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.

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.

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 it 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…”