The Last Flight of Poxl West (4 page)

Not only did he charge over to pick up the contents of my trunk but he
still
had done nothing to cover himself. His paint-splattered canvas pants still sat in the corner opposite. In charging over in so disrobed a state, and rapidly going flaccid, he also pronounced quite explicitly that he was not a Jew himself—as evinced by a rather ugly piece of pachyderm skin, which proved that, unlike Abram five thousand years earlier, he'd not made the essential covenant with the Lord that my people had made with every male birth since.

I had to put up a hand to stop him from taking another step.

He stopped.

All this time my mother continued to stand in a corner. I latched the trunk and collected my rucksack and was out of the house and down the hill to the Leitmeritz station without having said a proper good-bye to my mother or my father. The smell of the river lodged in my nose and piggybacked along with it was the image of that cuckolding suitor of my mother's, and a heat rose up into my cheeks I couldn't cool.

I got on the next train south.

As I left the house that day I expected anger—but marrow-deep anger follows action after a lag of days, not hours. The sulfurous river smell returned to my nose as I descended the hill toward its source from our house, and before me was the memory that longed to gain purchase:

I was too young even to know how young I was, before my father ever took me up in his plane. My cousins and I had just returned from an afternoon sunning along the Elbe, one town over, in Schalholstice. This is where our fathers' leather was tanned, where the current was strongest and could lend the most power to the mill wheel. My father would select the hides of cows in Prague, in Brno, in Budapest, or travel to the port in Rotterdam, and the raw hides would then be dipped into these huge oak barrels dug into the ground and covered over with straw. From there they would be taken to the factory for finishing, packaging, and shipping.

We reached those huge circular vats dug deep into the muddy soil alongside the river, where the mill wheel of Brüder Weisberg turned day and night. And there between sunken vats my mother was holding my father's hand. They were only bodies against the backdrop of leather tanning vats, looming above holes in the brown ground. My father stood stiff. His shoulders were held perfectly parallel to the ground. None of the ease I'd witnessed in watching my father full of life before flying his plane was evident. He looked stiff—and uncomfortable. My mother tugged his sleeve toward her, French cuffs I knew so well pinned together with links adorned with Czech amber, the liquid solidified millions of years long since passed. My father did not move. My mother pulled herself by his sleeve, pushing her chest against his arm. She was flirting, but he was not flirting back. Even as young as we were then we could see it. They were standing only a few feet in front of the nearest vat to one side, closer even on the other.

Still my father did not move.

Only now, as my mother went around him, she lost her footing. Her foot dunked straight through the straw into one of the vats. She and my father both looked down at it. My cousins and I were too far to smell it, but we saw the way my father's shoulders dipped perpendicular to the horizon as he lifted my mother from the ground, expertly held her in his arms, and ran her to the river to soak her in its waters. I recognize now the opportunity that had passed—that my father never had a chance to loosen up, to give my mother the love she wanted. But I suppose it's too hopeful to imagine he would have changed. Who could say how many more times this scene had played out, or one like it, my mother needing something my father couldn't, or wouldn't, give. But I didn't see all that then. What I saw was my father acting when action was needed, carrying my mother riverward. The last thing any of us saw—was I the only one to see it? Did Niny and Johana see it as well? Or was it so dark none of us could see it, and I've only invented it in my memory over the years?—was the look on my mother's face: the relaxed eyes, the taut, smiling lips of a woman who has achieved happiness so momentary it is a flash more fleeting than the look captured in a painting.

My cousins and I did not say a word to one another. We walked back down to another part of the river to swim.

4.

In Prague I was forced to wait for the evening train. When night came, we rode out of Hlavni Nadrazi. Lights scattered across the Zizkov hills like trails of a thousand small fires burning. Holland lay before me, five hundred miles west. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the Vltava flowed dark alongside my window. In the distance, the peaks of St. Vitus Cathedral pronounced themselves against the night sky. The church was lit from below as if to say good-bye to her departing Semitic son. A flock of waterbirds lifted off the dark water in unison. The moon lit the river not yet signifying a bombing, but only Czechoslovakian night.

I arrived in Rotterdam two days later and was let off at the station not far from the harbor. My mouth was full of a long night's cigarette smoke, my head not a fit for my brain. Already I'd fared poorly—the bag our housekeeper had packed was lost on the train. I only had money enough for a couple nights' sleep in a hotel until I could find work. Once I was settled I would seek out whatever business connections my father had set up for me there. First thing, I found a room above a small restaurant called Café le Monde on Schiedamsedijk, and at the café a job busing tables.

The first night there was a Saturday, and as the dinner crowd thinned, a group of musicians filed in with their large black cardboard instrument cases. They set up outside, and inside the café I could feel only the thud of the double bass. Toward the end of their set I went out front. They were a quartet, a pair called the Tennessee Sisters, backed by two men, and they played a kind of music I'd never heard before. That bass and a banjo backed up two young women, who sang high harmonies.

The lead singer was called Maybelle Tennessee. Her face was the color of untreated pine, dusted with ground cardamom. Her dark hair wasn't quite black and was kinky as if even the ends of her hair longed to stay as close as they could to her head. There was a gap between her two front teeth wide enough to slip in a chapbook of love songs, and in this slight imperfection she was only more alluring. Next to her ear, a brown-pink scar drew bright against her earthen skin before she sang. I stood there and watched. Here I was, alone in the world, listening to two Dutch girls sing American folk songs.

After their set, I cleaned the tables out front, where people had sat to listen to them.

“Do you have a deep, enduring love for the American folksinger Bill Monroe?” Maybelle said to me. She said it in English, of which I knew only a little.

“Am not a waiter,” I said, using the tiny bit of English I had learned from my grandmother's American cousin. “I find one.”

“I do not want a waiter,” she said. She spoke to me in German now, having picked up on my accent. “I saw you listening to us. From looking at you I thought you were an American and perhaps a fan of brother-duo singing music. But you are not.”

“I am not,” I said.

“You should know!” she said. “He is the greatest American folksinger of all American folksingers. Bill Monroe, one of the brothers in the Monroe Brothers, along with his brother Charlie Monroe. They are the finest of all brother-duet singers in America, the Monroe Brothers.”

“I don't know their music,” I said. And with a boldness I would never have had back in Leitmeritz, a young man on his own in a new life, prepared not to repeat the mistakes he'd witnessed in his father's reticence, I said, “But I'd like to hear more of it.”

“We're here every Saturday night,” she said.

Although I'd begun working at the café I did go to see Johann Schmidt, my father's business associate, who might have provided me some lucrative work but who told me he would be leaving for the United States in only a matter of weeks. He was sorry he could not be of more help, and he handed me a wad of guilders to absolve himself of whatever guilt he felt. It was enough money to give me some freedom for a month or two, and I did my best to convince him I was simply grateful for his generosity.

The following Saturday, the Tennessee Sisters were to play again, and again I listened. With every song she sang it seemed that the lead singer was looking right in my eyes. I'm sure, looking back on it, that every man there felt that way, but I only knew then that I did. I was leaving for a walk along the Nieuwe Maas when I saw some boy about my age attempting to talk to her. Accosting her, more like. He was speaking loudly when I approached, and when he saw me, his voice dropped to a guttural growl.

“Finally, he has arrived,” Maybelle said. She and this dark boy both turned to look at me. “Are we to go listen to some of the music of Bill Monroe and his brother Charlie now, as you promised? The new LP from Decca Records just arrived from America.”

The boy thrust his hands low in his pockets. His shoulders moved forward and there was a bulge down where he held his hand. We had not talked again since that first meeting. I did not want trouble with this boy.

“You were going to meet me at the front of the café,” I said, picking up her meaning. The pink scar beside her cheek drew brighter as she smiled, took me by the arm, and took a couple steps away from the guttural boy.

“Next time we will decide to speak in either Dutch or German,” she said.

We walked quickly away before the boy could speak again. We walked all the way to the Nieuwe Maas, gas lamps lighting the path to the harbor.

“Will you tell me your name, then?” she said. “I am Françoise.”

“I thought it was Maybelle Tennessee.”

“That's my stage name. I'm Maybelle, and my partner Greta is Lilly. These names work better with Tennessee than our own.”

“I'm Poxl,” I said. She looked at me. “Leopold Weisberg. Leopold, Leopoldy, Leopox, Leopoxl, Poxl.”

We walked together up the Nieuwe Maas. I told her about Leitmeritz and about my passage on the train from Prague just the week before. We walked near each other as we passed under the lights along the harbor's edge. Uneven cobblestones lined the embankment.

“What was that boy after?” I said.

“Something he could not afford,” she said. She was looking at her hands when she said it. Now she looked up at me. “But,” she said. “Thank you.”

Now she grew quiet, as if in showing her gratitude she'd ceded some ground to me she wished she hadn't. In our silence she walked upright and reserved for the first time. In the quiet of the haze lifting off the river, the air lightened between us. I noted something I'd not seen on that evening of our first meeting: In Françoise's ears were earrings similar to those my mother wore—pellucid amber, shaped like playing marbles, casting tawny shadows on her cheek. Mist grew thick around the yellow glowing gaslights, comingled with Françoise's earrings. I found myself telling her that my mother had earrings just like the ones she wore.

“It's not a good idea,” she said, “to tell a girl you've just met that she reminds you of your mother.”

I spent some of the wad Johann Schmidt had gifted me on dinner and she talked to me about music I'd never heard of.

“Bill Monroe is not only the greatest American folksinger,” she said. “When he was a young boy, he was cross-eyed. He could not see. This is why he learned to play the mandolin the way he did.” She paused and took a breath. “When I was a child, I was cross-eyed, too. My mother saved all her earnings for many years. We had my eyes fixed. I believe it is why I can hear the music of Bill Monroe so clearly. But you can't tell they were ever crossed, can you.”

“No,” I said. Over the smell of meat I could detect the heavy scent of patchouli oil on her skin. “No, I would not ever have known.”

5.

One night two Saturdays later, after her set ended, Françoise asked me if I would like to accompany her to a party. She led me ten blocks into the thick of the city and over to Rochussen. Two girls Françoise's age awaited us. They were her bandmate Greta and their friend Rosemary. The party would be just the four of us, Françoise explained on our walk over. When for the first time I asked her what her friends did, how she knew them, she simply looked at me.

“We work in the brothel,” she said. “We play with our band there at times. And.”

I put my hands into my coat pockets and pushed my fingers against my palms. In Greta's flat, Bill Monroe was on the phonograph. We drank wine thin as vinegar. Greta arose to dance and pulled me up alongside her. I protested with the little Dutch I had—I told her I was not a dancer, that I would prefer to watch. While my facility with Dutch wasn't enough to let me argue with them, I could comprehend their conversation.

“So he is that kind, is he?” Greta said.

“I haven't yet discovered what kind he is,” Françoise said.

“You'll have to find out yourselves,” I said.

I stood up and took Greta's hand. Did I imagine I was my tepid father in those moments of action, slipping along the Elbe away from my mother's flirtations? I didn't. I pictured myself a painter unafraid to stand in another man's home without a stitch of clothing, my paint-splattered trousers on his floor, attempting to speak reason to his son. Greta was a substantial girl, her brown hair twisted up like a bundle of kindling. She changed the record to some big-band music and danced up close to me while Rosemary moved against Françoise on the velvet-upholstered sofa on the opposite side of the room.

Rosemary stood and began to dance behind Greta. Then her hands were up under Greta's shirt. Greta began to kiss Rosemary. I had never seen women kiss each other. They grew more sensual. Rosemary lay Greta down and undressed her, then put her face down into Greta's lap and pleasured her until she let out a little shriek. This was the first time I had ever seen female genitalia, let alone tended to so. Françoise was watching along with me, and without giving me time to anticipate it, she kissed me. She'd had a lot of wine. I'd had a lot of wine.