Now an idée fixe that had long been developing gained purchase: How did I know Françoise might not still be alive? So many others had died and I knew it. What if Françoise hadn’t been killed in the bombing of Rotterdam? This thought gained its toehold, and then more images: a carmine hollyhock blossom on the sill of a window to the east of London; purple tamarisks by the side of the Elbe in Leitmeritz; a bloom of purple tulip on the sill of a window in Delfshaven. I began to imagine Françoise alive and with a kind of electric shock I truly began to wonder what she would be thinking of me, what thoughts would pass her mind should the name Poxl appear there. The man, the boy really, who had come and fallen in love with her and then left without a word. Without a word. I let my mind drift back to the purple tulip, much easier. All these images again intertwined and I returned to fever dreams like when I was a child, an odd negative and positive switch: black and white, white then black, growing ever more menacing.
As I grew more and more calm, as the world began to return to my eyes and sound to my ears, things practical returned to mind. I saw the Leathersellers College, where I longed to return to work. I saw cousin Johana’s little ceramic spitz — I longed to see that little dog, and the flat I’d now absented for so long.
11.
Niny visited on the weekends when she was granted a pass to come see me in hospital. On one of her visits, just as I was beginning to regain the use of my eyes, I asked after my good friend Clive Pillsbury, whom I’d not seen in the brief period during which I was able to fly just five runs in a Lancaster bomber — I would never now come close to approaching the thirty-two necessary to complete my tour — and whom I was surprised to find had not yet come to visit.
“I’d hoped to put it off,” Niny said. “I don’t know how to say it, save for just saying it. Clive’s Spitfire went down over North Africa. He’s missing.”
It was almost a verbatim recurrence of that moment when I learned of Glynnis’s fate. Even without the proper use of my eyes to take in what I’m sure was the harrowed look on my cousin’s face, I knew in what way Clive Pillsbury had gone “missing.” Niny was a WAAF working the radio north of London. In taking communications from pilots for a year now, she had developed into an accurate detector for those kites that went down with a chance of their crews surviving, and those whose crews would stay missing until the Messiah again visited the Mount of Olives.
I would soon learn of the fate my crewmates from S-Sugar, as well, which would come only a month after I was struck by lightning: John Gallsworthy went down along with all the crewmen on that Lancaster, S-Sugar, over Essen, on yet another of Bomber Harris’s raids of the Ruhr Valley.
Some might suggest there was capital P Providence in my having been taken out of my bomber on the last night of the Battle of Hamburg. But mine is not so benevolent a God. Mine is the Elohim of the Pentateuch, whose ways are the ways of punishment, not reprieve. God of Sodom’s destruction, not Lazarus’s resurrection. God of Job’s misery. No other cheek turned, no sin granted absolution. Were I to have stayed on my commission, I would most certainly have found myself missing along with those men. But my fate had long been discrete from the fates of my fellow travelers.
I learned long after the war that well more than half of the men who’d joined the RAF during the war died in service. It’s become a commonplace, the millions of Jews who died along with my parents back in Czechoslovakia. Those destinies were distinct from mine — the numbers of those lost trying simply to survive, the numbers of those lost in the reckless action of attempting to fight back from the air. Instead, I lay in hospital until I was able to leave under my own recognizance. With my mind increasingly focused on a return to Rotterdam, I boarded a train south to London along with those few belongings shipped to me from my bunk up north of Grimsby.
I was going home.
12.
Soon after my return to the little flat near Bermondsey I found that while I’d not fully recovered from the effects of the tempest, and didn’t have energy enough yet to travel far from the flat, neither was I constitutionally suited to spending my time in idle convalescence. The period after my stint in the Royal Air Force I longed for Mother, Elbe, Father, Radobyl, youth. I didn’t talk to many people: What life I’d created for myself in London before I left for the RAF was almost entirely gone. Glynnis, Clive, even John Gallsworthy — nothing of it was left.
Only Françoise might possibly have survived.
The Nazis had started a harrowing ground and air war on London, indiscriminately firing V-2 rockets at Allied targets. Although the Luftwaffe didn’t send their aeroplanes overhead to bomb in those days as they had in the Blitz, for a period there was an even greater fear of annihilation. People had ceased going out to pubs, even to their work.
Then, as suddenly as they’d started, the Luftwaffe attacks stopped. We didn’t hear V-2’s tearing across London. Quiet blanketed the city. Throughout April, we heard radio reports that the Reich would give up. One day people even began hasty celebrations, only to learn from the Beeb that it was a false hope. The continuation of the war after that felt somehow even worse for the brief reprieve.
One afternoon during that period, when I found my energy returned in the afternoons and I was up to traveling greater distances, I purchased a train ticket and rode east out of the city toward Kent. Outside my window I saw the same water in the fields. The ground was torn up to a far greater extent than even the last time I’d gone past. V-2’s had flown indiscriminately from Holland, and while many of the rockets had found their way to London, many had bored their way into the ground here. I did my best to focus on those patches where the grass was still green, saved from arbitrary destruction.
When I arrived I walked deep into the woods. It was a drier season than the last time I’d been to visit Mrs. Goldring. Midges were scarcer. The walk felt longer than it had those days with Glynnis. Soon enough I was at the mouth of the cave. I did not hear the murmur of voices until I was upon them. In the big chamber at front of the cave, there were maybe two dozen people milling about. I didn’t want to talk to any of them and so proceeded deep into the cave, hoping only to achieve the room I sought.
Back in the living area where I’d once sat with Glynnis Goldring’s mother I found the one thing I would hope not to find, again and again, in the coming months and years:
Nothing.
The room had been vacated. No pallets on the floor. No white bedding for Mrs. Goldring to lie upon. There was no one there even to ask. I realized that Perhaps I’d find no evidence of Glynnis’s mother, either.
For the next hour I walked around that huge cave. In some rooms I would find groups talking in a low hush. At each I inquired after Mrs. Wilma Goldring, the old woman who suffered dementia, whom I’d come to visit those months before.
No one seemed to know of her. Soon enough I found myself quite lost. After maybe half an hour, I heard voices again — I’d come upon that same group I’d first encountered before finding Mrs. Goldring’s room empty. I was leaving when I saw someone new had joined their group, an old man who looked familiar, though it was very hard to say — there had been thousands of denizens of that cave in the days when I last visited it. Each face as it passed me then was obscured by shadow. I asked this old man if he knew of Mrs. Goldring.
“Wilma Goldring,” he said. In the cold, damp dark, all that was visible of his face were just the wisps of a white beard poking from his cheeks. “I’ve known that name since I was a much younger man than you.” This was the elder brother of old Mr. Lovelace, whom Mrs. Goldring had spoken of when I first met her, fearing that he might “take liberties” with her deep in that cave. The coincidence of meeting him here felt providential. But he followed with the news: