I returned again and again to the RAF recruitment office in Southwark.
So, maybe I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps the loss of my parents was like living in a city for many long years and never leaving. You have lived a rural life as a child, and walked off into the woods to stare up at the sky. It wouldn’t make sense to say you loved or didn’t love the stars, only that you knew nothing would change them.
They were stars.
Now you live in the city. War has driven you there, war and your own capriciousness. Every night you go about your business: drink, succeed, fail; take in live music — save lives volunteering in a war effort. You do everything that might fulfill one with even the noblest ambitions. But you never again leave the city. Overhead is an eternal pink glow, light that never dims past a point, a phenomenon some might call light pollution but which is the only thing that sustains you. At four in the morning, you have left a pub. You are, quite frankly, drunk. Have been for days. To placate you, above: pink sky, never not pink.
Then one day, rather than taking some leisure in the woods to the east, rather than the ease of a woman’s bed, you take to the sky in an aeroplane. You are airborne, it is night, below you the glowing white clouds — and above, where once there were stars all across the firmament, now there is only blackness. That void carries a memory of stars, of the way you once felt them guide you … perhaps you even remember, before it has happened, a time when, lost in the night’s sky on a training run, you feared you would not survive your flight, and only upon finding the Dipper, its pointing you to the North Star, were you able to make it back to base. Only now the night is black, and all along, that pink urban shelter you were confined to kept you from knowing that for all those years, the stars were fading from the sky. And you remember a time when you dropped bombs on cities, destroying them beyond resurrection, and all you could see below you were clouds. While you might have known but not understood that you were destroying what lay below you, now there aren’t even stars above.
14.
Here’s one thing I learned from reading with Mrs. Goldring before I took my leave of her daughter: When Hamlet asks Yorick how long a body lies in the ground before it rots, the first clown replies, “… eight year or nine year. A tanner will last you nine year.” When Hamlet asks, “Why he more than another?” the response comes this way: Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade that it will keep out water a great while, and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.
Was my father a difficult Jew to kill, to bury, to cremate? Had his skin so toughened that even once the life was snuffed from him, he wouldn’t cede his toehold on this craggy wall, his thick, tanned hide failing to succumb to the flames of the crematorium where he was kilned? Was his death different if he proved a tough Jew to burn?
After the war I read many of the books that were written during those times. I was later to gain mastery over the Shakespeare plays I had only begun to read with Mrs. Goldring in those days before I left for flight training, enough to teach those plays to interested students. Before that I read the histories of our times, the modernist literature produced during my youth. T. S. Eliot, as I say, had himself been a fire watcher during those days of the Blitz, and I read every word of his “Little Gidding,” which will always evoke those days for me.
After the war ended — long after I’d decided to drop bombs of my own on Germany, to fight a war thrust upon me that the side I was on was now winning — I learned that John Milton’s bones were vaporized on the last major Luftwaffe offensive of 1940, the night Clive Pillsbury and I met Glynnis Goldring. We never saw those bones, just as I never saw my parents’ remains or the obsequies for them. I didn’t even know what had become of Françoise. But that very same night Milton’s bones were done away with, before that final pub where Clive and I went with Glynnis, we had just passed a cemetery when I felt compelled to return to it. I wanted to make sure I’d seen what I thought I’d seen. I got down on one knee and picked it up. Shaken loose of its rest, and lying upon the grass, was a dirt-encrusted bone. A femur. A human femur.
If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
The Germans were going to kill even our dead unless we were to do something about it.
15.
Those late days of the Blitz, my hunger to engage German soldiers gained full purchase over my mind. Glynnis and I would meet in the evenings and engage in a particular kind of intimacy — and even for the pleasure she brought me, even knowing I was in love with her, it was as if that love appeared to me through a newfound scrim. I longed to join up more than before.
“What is it, Poxl?” Glynnis would say as we lay in the half-light of her kerosene lamp.
“What is it?”
“Yes! Yes. You aren’t looking at me. You don’t look at me.”
I stared at the ceiling. Then I did look at her.
“It’s what I’ve said before,” I said. “It’s fine being a squaddie. But they need to put me to use. If I could just get in a plane, I could be of use.”
Glynnis lay back and she did not say aloud that my joining up, should it happen, would mean we would see each other less — and who knew the consequence beyond that. If ever there was a moment to tell her about Françoise, about my parents, this was it, and looking back now I can see it might have changed things, might at least have given her a sense of what was on my mind. I cannot say exactly why I did not tell her. I can only say that I didn’t. No matter what had changed in me, when I looked at her, in that moment, I couldn’t deny she was wonderful to look at. The way her plump cheeks pressed up against mine was almost enough to draw from me a confession of my letter from that Czech foreman. An explanation of my keeping from taking trips to the cave. A confession of nights out alone drinking. A divulgence of my time in Rotterdam that could have helped me see what I’d done in leaving.
Almost.
Regardless, when Glynnis asked me to go to the cave with her I now refused — for reasons that actually had nothing to do with her and everything to do with her mother, I did not make another trip east with her. I did not talk to her about my parents, and I would not. At Corbett’s Passage, my bunk was too hard. Back in Bermondsey the ceiling was too low, too close to us. The tiptoe of shadow touched and lifted up there.
“It’s nothing,” I said when she asked, over and over again, what was wrong, and I made her believe me.
16.
Every day I went to Southwark to attempt to enlist in the RAF.
Luftwaffe bomb on Rotterdam; I was gone.
Luftwaffe bomb in the East End; cousin Johana’s Briton had been done in.
What was there to do?
What there was for me to do was to fly a plane and take out the Luftwaffe myself.