The sparrow I’d been following dipped and then arose again. Another caught its path midair. One flew off to my right, the other to the left. For a moment I could follow them both, but then they were too far apart.
“If you love this Thomas Paxton,” I told Niny, “you should take up with him in earnest.” Niny’s eyes caught mine for the first time since we’d sat down on the bench. There was something in them I’d never before seen. A young couple walked by. Both Niny and I looked down. Our eyes sought ground, boards, broken macadam. When the couple had passed, Niny looked back up at me. She looked directly into my eyes.
“This isn’t where I want to live, Poxl. Life in an elaborate memory? What kind of love is there to find with a man whose main asset to me is his ability to evoke the past? This is living one’s life in a history classroom.”
A crease had developed in the space between Niny’s eyebrows. Where her brown eyes had once been open wide, I could see at their sides they were down-turned. While I could see all over Niny’s face the kind of writhing uncertainty Thomas had left her in, I could no longer parse its meaning. The crease between Niny’s eyes drew even deeper. For the first time since I’d returned from 100 Squadron, I felt myself removed from my memories, if only for a second — separated from those events like a man who has lived a life and told a tale, only to find the two have diverged in some confusing fashion, lost their cohesion. I was listening to Niny. I thought to comfort her, to remind her I was her confidant.
Instead Niny took my hand in hers.
“Johana wants you to find your own flat,” she said.
By now I didn’t care. I tried to change the subject, but we’d lost the earlier thread.
“I don’t want you to go, Poxl,” Niny said. “But maybe the time has come for you to start thinking about what’s next.” I pulled my hand away, and Niny turned her eyes back to the sky.
14.
One afternoon the second week in May, I went to talk to a superior officer at RAF headquarters in central London. I pushed for an updated physical evaluation. Soldiers and airmen wanted above all to return home, but I had no home to return to — not my real home, anyway. I was declared fit to serve. I was more than willing to take on the work of establishing order after the fighting had ended. I was assigned to the administration of a refugee internment camp and airfield in the Rhine Valley, a camp for Germans and Nazi collaborators who had been captured at the end of the war.
A move south.
A move toward Rotterdam.
I was the RAF’s ideal postwar tool — raised with Czech and German and with five years’ travel across Europe, I spoke Dutch, French, and English. Within weeks I was to head southeast over the North Sea again.
Niny accompanied me to the transit station. A bus would take me to the aerodrome. On our ride into the city, Niny tried to talk to me a bit about what was ahead. Even if Françoise was still alive, there was good reason to suspect she might no longer be in Rotterdam. She was right. But I had to find out.
“You should return to Thomas Paxton,” I told Niny. “When you do, ask him not to speak of Prague again. You cannot live your life with this man talking only of the past.” Niny searched my face. “My experience is not your experience. There may come a time when Thomas can indulge in the memory of your life in Leitmeritz. It’s up to you to forge a relationship with the present.”
The bus’s wheels cried out against their brakes.
“And one day when we see each other again, Poxl, maybe we’ll speak of our parents,” Niny said.
The bus driver was closing his doors. I called out to him not to leave, and then I held Niny as hard and long as a cousin might properly hold on to his cousin, without any desire to let go.
15.
My assignment was at a camp in Wunstorf, just west of Hannover. I’ll note briefly that I use the German spellings of these cities’ names to demonstrate the seriousness with which I took the diplomatic demands of my new commission, no matter where my allegiances and vituperation might lie in regard to the past years’ events. This camp was populated by captured Luftwaffe pilots and airmen, along with an RAF wing that was to oversee their work. In the year after my arrival, the POWs’ number would swell to more than ten thousand. It was our charge over the coming months to enlist these POWs in enhancing the aerodrome there. It would serve as a principal supply station for Berlin in the days after the armistice.
Within a month of my posting, I was placed in charge of a fifty-man detail. These men were demoralized, eyes forever down-turned, not even knowing where in their enormous country they were. I gathered them and spoke frankly. They would work to get this airfield in shape. Some complained the Geneva Convention said they couldn’t be forced to work. What would they rather do? I asked. Sit in prison? I said it in German. I said it in Czech. I said it in Dutch. I said it in English.
In the weeks to come I took up with the fraternity of men who had been my dread enemies. In addition to overseeing my crew, I reregistered dozens of men a day as they were directed from their bases across northern Germany. While many of the men at this camp had flown Messerschmitts or Junkers or had even served among the brownshirts, a good number were not soldiers at all, but railroad workers, janitors, ticket takers — anyone in uniform had been picked up by Allied troops.
One afternoon while we had begun leveling a large swath of earth that was to become one of Wunstorf’s new runways, we were besieged by the kind of wet cold that fights through to your marrow and forever evokes in me those days at thirty thousand feet in a Lancaster, when my very bones themselves felt as vulnerable to Luftwaffe attack as John Milton’s, or Yorick’s. During the lunch hour I was part of a game of contract bridge. The men under my command were out with shovels and mattocks. When I returned from making water beyond the confines of the tent, the door to my office was open. Another officer was sitting at my desk.
“I heard there was some Polack working this camp,” the officer said. “I had to see for myself.”
Here before me was none other than Navigator Smith — Percy Smith, as returned from the dead as Banquo’s ghost or Hermione’s statue, with apparently no charge but to torment me. I put my hand to my shoulder, which still bore a small scar from his dart.
“But you went down with our crew,” I said.
“I took shrapnel from a flak burst in the leg on the last run before our kite went down,” Navigator Smith said. For a microsecond the snarl on his face gave way to something less sinister. “You were a pilot of S-Sugar, West,” Navigator Smith said. “Word reached me you were here in Wunstorf. I had to come see it for myself.”
He rose to leave. While I awaited some further commentary, there was only his exit.
This visit from a wraith left me in a stupor for the rest of that day.
Smith was alive. Of Mrs. Goldring, I’d found only a relic: her annotated Shakespeare. But here, now, was a man I’d long thought dead, walking about a refugee camp in Germany.
16.
For weeks routine bore down upon the camp. Every day for more than a month we approached a piece of field that needed to be flattened by a backhoe, razed, and leveled, upon which we then put down a tarmac. We focused on work.