Mrs. Goldring had passed a couple months earlier.
“Her daughter succumbed to the Blitz, you know,” he said. He looked at me. “But yes, of course you knew.” He told me Mrs. Goldring had taken it hard when she lost Glynnis. Living in those damp caves can’t have helped. It seemed once again there would be no ceremony to accompany a loss. But as I turned to depart, the old man said, “Are you the Czech boy she used to speak of? Floxin or something.”
I told him that I was, in fact. Poxl. Poxl West. Weisberg. West.
He asked me to wait there a moment. He absconded somewhere deep within the cave. Minutes later he returned. In his hand was Mrs. Goldring’s Copy of Shakespeare. It was still covered in that oilcloth that protected it from the cave’s damp. It was more worn than when I’d last read from it, but I recognized the book as I would have her daughter’s face.
For the first time during that period, some remnant of loss had been left behind.
“She wanted you to have it,” he said. I thanked Mr. Lovelace’s brother and departed.
When I returned to the light outside that cave I sat down. Mrs. Goldring had not inscribed the book as I’d hoped she might have I thumbed through the thin, crinkling pages, and saw she’d taken notes in her last days. I opened to King Lear. There I saw where she’d penned in our parts:
Next to each Lear speech, she’d written in “Pocksall,” and next to each of Cordelia’s, “Me.”
I cannot describe the hope seeing these inscriptions instilled in me. For the first time since I’d left Rotterdam, some evidence remained of someone I’d lost. She’d been thinking of me, recording my name in the margins. This edition of the plays would come to supplant the one Niny had gifted me when I was in hospital. It was the edition I would read for the rest of my days.
13.
At the end of the first week in May, on what has come to be known as V-E Day, the streets filled with people. The youth in our neighborhood took to the streets, hung out their windows and threw ripped paper onto one another.
I stayed inside and drew the blackout curtains. Only one of those people I’d come to love in those years since I first left my father’s house in Leitmeritz might still be alive. I had to find out.
The war in Europe was over.
My war was far from over.
One day not long after that, I overheard Johana ask Niny when she thought I would find my own living arrangement. After the intimacy of our Hanukkahs and the Elbe-swimming days of our youth, I had come to expect Niny to support me no matter the circumstances, and at first I took her lack of immediate response as an affront. After listening further I came to see that Niny did have my best interests in mind. She suggested she would speak with me. When she knocked on my door late the following afternoon and suggested we take a walk, I found our conversation was not primarily to concern the state of my affairs.
Over the previous six months, Niny explained as we walked past the open façades of buildings and scarred plane trees, she had been seeing a Spitfire pilot she met at an NAAFI function in a country house near Wiltshire, where she and her fellow WAAFs were billeted. This man was named Thomas Paxton. He was twenty-five, raised in West London.
“On our first weekend pass in common, we drove all the way to Dover,” Niny said, “where he walked me along the edge of those cliffs and asked after our home.” She explained she had never before had the odd feeling she had for this Thomas Paxton. He was an avid and well-versed student of European history. Inquiring after her accent, he discovered she had been raised in Leitmeritz. He had traveled to Prague on several occasions, had traveled across Bohemia. On their first outing together, he described in detail the oxbow that bent around Czesky Krumlov, the medieval castle that rose majestic above its river; trips he’d made down to the spas at Karlovy Vary; the gray stone of the Charles Bridge passing over the Vlatava. He had gone swimming in the Elbe, and appeared to understand those feelings we’d experienced as children.
“It has been six years since I’ve set foot in my house in Leitmeritz,” Niny said. “It has been six years since I’ve seen Prazsky Hrad, since I’ve even thought of a weekend trip to Krumlov, heading down to the Elbe. But here now is a well-traveled Briton who can talk me back to that place.”
A quiet breeze touched us as Niny spoke. This was the first time in as long as I could remember that I had listened to someone else talk. It was as if, for the first time since S-Sugar had entered that cloud above Lübeck, I’d returned to myself. I’d spent all that time alone in my bed near Grimsby. Now I could see the dark moles on Niny’s face, and it was as if I’d found a home again in the visible world.
“When I’m with him,” Niny continued, “even as the mist blows off the North Sea, moistening my face along those cliffs, I feel as if I’m not with him at all, but in Prague. We’ll lie together in the grass, and with eyes closed, we will be in Prague together.”
Niny and I reached the park near our flat, where I walked when I’d first arrived. The wrought-iron fence around the commons had long since been stripped and melted down for matériel. Someone had made a slapdash bench of some rubble and boards. Niny and I sat on it.
In the clear late-afternoon air, we stared up at the rooks in their plane trees, and past them to the eaves of buildings along the park. In beds lining that space where once there had been a neatly kept privet hedge, lilac bushes, and boxwood, now spills of earth overturned by bombs lay in piles. Flowers withered brown in the thin light. As we sat there, Niny described Thom’s home, where she’d met his parents and his spaniels. He’d been raised in one of those immense four-story town houses in Bloomsbury we coveted. This home at once reminded her of our grandmother Traute’s house in Zizkov. It began to feel, my cousin confessed, as if every aspect of this Thomas Paxton drove her into the past.
“I find myself dreaming of our classmates from the gymnasium. During the day I’m forced to record dozens of missing bombers and fighters. I interact with officers at social events, and the most interesting women I’ve ever met among my fellow WAAFs. At night my dreams are populated only by the children we once knew. Last week I dreamed I was in the R/T tower, taking a distress call from a Spitfire, and it became clear the pilot on the line was Frantisek Pessl from fourth-form math.”
Niny didn’t seem to know where to look. The confessional denuding of memory kept her eyes from mine. This was something different from muscle memory — it acted longer and more carefully. For a moment we were left to observe the clouds. Sparrows batted up against the sky. Birds were abundant in the months since the Blitz, having found new nesting places in eviscerated buildings. I picked a single bird to study as I waited for Niny to continue. This pale sparrow flapped her wings once and found a current from the square. She glided. All around us, the air smelled of the stale carbonite exhaust of spent bombs.
“This past weekend, I called on Thom to tell him I couldn’t see him anymore,” Niny said.
“A rash decision,” I said. “What could have driven you from a man who knows such happiness?” Right in front of her, my cousin had love! A love she could taste and touch, exactly what I was missing. “You should go to him and profess your love,” I said. “Not leave him.”
“Maybe that’s it, Poxl. For weeks I watched you in hospital, murmuring about your mother with some painter, and your father, and Radobyl, and over and over about Françoise.” I had no memory of such murmurings. “I know you didn’t know you’d been speaking, Poxl. I kept Johana away so she wouldn’t hear you. I told the doctors to let you alone. But I need to tell you now.”