A smell rose from the bar as a patron lit a cigar. We could hear each tinkle of each glass touching the next in the cabinet behind the publican. The silence in the absence of an air raid siren was blaring.
“It happened in the canteen car, too,” Clive continued. “They were shorter drives. I returned to the station on the same routes we’d taken. I would sweat the whole time, convince myself on the way back to the station I would be able to see what I’d hit. Only on my way home, I couldn’t get there. I kept getting into tighter loops.”
“This all sounds scary, Clive,” I said. “Surely you don’t sound as if you’ve cracked. Your nerves are simply frayed.”
“I’ve got a theory,” Clive said. “I believe I’ve come to understand the cause of it all, what my mind’s up to. What the world’s up to. Zeno’s paradox. I read philosophy at Oxford. Zeno was a Greek philosopher who held that if you looked at it using math, no physical mass could ever move. He used the example of a bow and arrow. In order for an arrow to hit its target, it’s got to move through space — let’s say ten feet. To get halfway to its target, it must go five feet. Each time the arrow moves across this smaller space, it must get halfway there. It’s mathematically impossible for the arrow ever to get there. It’ll divide in half infinite times without ever crossing the final infinitesimal divide.
“No one has ever been able to disprove the theory.
“Maybe I was testing the paradox. Get halfway there, turn around. Here we are now. Siren, all clear. It’s been a year and no bomb has dropped on us. No smoke. No bang. No ash. No rubble.” The men across the way erupted in laughter. My shoulders rose toward my ears. Obsessive Clive Pillsbury just sat there in the wash of his recitation of Zeno’s paradox.
“I’ll go refill our beer,” I said.
Air had returned to the room. The publican pulled me a Watney’s. Clive and I clacked beer glass and mug. Some coffee dumped out onto the table. We touched glasses. Those, at least, did meet.
5.
During the first weeks of autumn the bombs began to land on East Enders, but not yet on us. Explosions had left thousands homeless and streaming into the city — and left our neighbors with a false sense of stability. Shelters filled. Morrison ordered the tube stations in central London billeted. Communities arose in stations all over the Underground. Londoners were beginning an exodus into their homes, under the streets, which would later find them moving north and east until they were clear of mortal threat.
At night I walked to the park across from our flat; iron railings of the park’s fence had been stripped during the salvage drive. In the middle of all that verdure, the call of rooks up in their plane trees, past dark, all the people were packed away in their air raid shelters in town or in their Anderson shelters out back. It was as if I had that city to myself. Where my outings to Prague had been comprised of the joy of thousands of people forever rushing at me — I learned that to live life is to lay oneself down to a wave, to feel as best one could the direction the current was flowing and then allow one’s body to go slack and have the wisdom not to fight it lest one drown — London at night during that anxious period of the war was tensile as the thin frozen sheet atop a moving river.
The air was thick with the dust of debris. Nightly bombings kicked up soot. Where behind closed eyes I once saw each of the faces I’d known in the stones of Prague, now my eyes were abraded by astringent dust. The air was filled with frantic resolve, so that even on a night like this, all thoughts were suffused with mortality. What we were seeing as we drove through those streets was only the beginning of thirty thousand civilian casualties. I came to feel almost ashamed of the fact that still holding sway over my mind was the image of my mother, naked, with her suitor in my father’s immense home. That when I woke at three in the morning with my mind churning; it was churning over that moment when I’d followed my instinct to leave Holland, not having thought of what it would mean to Françoise. What did such things mean now amid falling bombs in London and Rotterdam?
Well, everything. And nothing. And amid this, marked each day in the papers was not the notation of someone dying in a bombing, but of their having died “very suddenly”: “Thomas Brown of Lancashire died very suddenly Tuesday night”; “Sally Fargo died very suddenly earlier this week. She is survived by…”
There was no one to bury. How hard it is to believe a life has ended until one sees the body interred. Or the damage done.
It wasn’t long before Clive Pillsbury and I saw our first bombings firsthand. While people were arriving from the East End, having hitched rides, the two of us took long rides about greater London, surveying the damage and feeding squaddies. In Aldersgate one afternoon, a week after the evening of Clive’s confession, we passed a sandwich shop, its façade open like a cleft palate. A sign affixed to the door, left standing, while the rest of the front had been blown away, read MORE OPEN THAN USUAL.
“Let’s not stare too long,” Clive said.
It’d already been cleared of survivors.
Clive crossed arms over chest.
As I pulled away Clive turned to look at the building. Something more had been keeping my partner from looking. There was a mannered quality embedded deep in Clive which might have accounted both for his initial refusal to look at that building and the kind of obsessiveness that had led to his Zeno’s paradox madness. It might not be polite to stare at a birth defect, but when I first saw a man with a port-wine stain on his jaw while on a trip to Prague, walking the streets of the city, I had to be taught by my mother to look away. Such tact didn’t come innately. It had to be learned, and it struck me at times that men like Clive had learned the lesson perhaps too well.
Once we’d gone all the way past, Clive turned forward again. I was surprised to find that there seemed to be a new calm in him. Rather than ramping up his anxiety, seeing the damage firsthand had somehow eased the burden of expectation — as if the anticipation of fear was worse than danger itself.
“Be much work for a canteen truck now,” he said. “We’d better get some sleep.”
I watched to see if Clive futzed with his coffee less in the days to follow. Though I can’t be certain — we were now so busy we rarely had a moment to sit for a drink — it seemed to me that he did.
6.
Nighttime was a mad dash through black streets. Every night we were out until sunup, plying squaddies with drink and food as they dealt with bombed-out buildings. We skirted brick and broken glass, or some hoary old man in the street who had resolved not to be kept inside by something so trivial as a falling bomb, lucky not to have been hit, either.
“The fire’s over near London Wall, Poxl,” Clive would say, relaying word from our dispatcher, and then, “Didn’t we just pass our left?” and finally say, “I’m just certain that was the left-hand turn you wanted, Poxl,” and I would proceed as best I could. Bombs were dropping by the dozen. All across London the men of the rescue squads and fire brigades were rushing about, awaiting word from their dispatchers. We had come to wish we were on those teams who arrived first at the bombings. Our work was plagued by a distinct lack of heroism, a distinct lack of action. We followed the squaddies and the firemen, always five or ten minutes behind, ready to provide tea and coffee.