Free The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday Page A

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 where 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