I passed Navigator Smith in the mess. We grew to have a friendship so real I might even call it warm. I joined the bridge game he played in. With each hand — with each comment I ventured — I awaited his derision, but the obstreperousness I knew from him in RAF Grimsby was gone. Each time I referred to him as Smith, he implored me to call him Percy. We treated each other as equals.
“Why wouldn’t you want to just go back home?” he said. “I hear the girls in Prague are beautiful.” That was no longer my home, I told him. My parents had been taken. He just looked down at his hands when I said it, but even softened, Smith wasn’t one to let the melancholic in me take over for long.
“So why didn’t you just stay in London?”
I looked at him long and hard.
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “But you have to listen. Can you?”
Navigator Smith came to show me that men are capable of change. Percival Smith changed. As I narrated my early days in Rotterdam, now a lifetime ago, about my love for Françoise, who was a prostitute but who I could now see was the first woman I ever truly loved, whom I was coming to believe I loved still, Smith listened. In the beginning of my narration, I saw him narrow his eyes at times as if to speak, perhaps to register some disagreement. Then he would just settle into listening again. He listened as I told him of my brief, nebulous engagement to Glynnis Goldring, and of my revelation that it was Françoise I thought of most in those days after we bombed Hamburg. And part of my story became a story of regret, a story of the wrongs I’d perpetrated — not on the battlefield, but in my personal life. I was beginning to see, I said, the villainy in my having left Rotterdam as I had. His face bore no judgment. He didn’t even attempt a joke. When I’d finished telling him of my goals, I said, “Now, do you have anything you’d like to say?”
“I threw a dart at you once and hit you in the back,” he said.
“I still have the scar.” I pulled down my cotton shirt to reveal the gnarl of skin it had left behind, shiny and tight.
“I was an angry young man in those days,” he said. “I’d just lost my best friend. I drank myself to sleep every night. Every morning I was raw, hungover, and grieving.” He looked down at his hands. I was about to tell him I knew what it felt like to lose control of one’s emotions at loss, but he spoke again. “And I was — well, there’s no excuse. It was a terrible thing to do.”
“It was.”
“It was,” he said.
I pulled out my pack of Woodbines and we smoked one together. We talked about nothing for a period. Then he went on his way. In those moments after he left me, after I had narrated the story of Françoise, and had received the first real apology I’d had from anyone for any of the misfortunes that had befallen me since I left Leitmeritz years earlier, I felt a kind of peace.
During this same period, the length of just one summer, something strange happened that came to confuse me far more than having become so close to my former enemy. The image of Françoise, while still present in its residue, began to muddy. The stones of Prague and the flashes of flak returned at night. Sometimes they carried the face of my love. Sometimes not. Now, even when these images came, they arrived with the ineffability of dreams. Sometimes instead I now saw Glynnis; at times Clive’s face even returned to me, or John Gallsworthy’s, or my mother’s.
Then they disappeared.
In their place I had images of those verdant fields of central Britain, the same green as on my first flights south of Prague with my father. Images took no discernible form — memories dispersed to the margins of my mind. My palms sweated. My skin prickled. The top of my head grew hot to the touch, and somehow its heat seemed to radiate — rather than the memories of the events that had caused it — only memories of my mother sitting in her home at the top of a hill in Leitmeritz. I stopped sleeping and instead stared at the ceiling, took long walks to smoke and clear my mind.
Around this same time we came also to hear stories that cast a pallor over all of our thoughts. An officer in the mess told of an afternoon he had taken a group of Luftwaffe pilots on a trip to see a camp called Bergen-Belsen. It was only a couple dozen miles west of us there at Wunstorf. There at the camp, by his account, emaciated Jews had been discovered. They had avoided the crematoria. Many of the pilots he took that day wept when they saw what they’d been protecting, flying for the Luftwaffe. This officer talked incessantly about what he’d seen — he didn’t know enough about me to know his audience. I’ll provide no further detail, only to say that in the image of those soldiers of the Wermacht weeping when they saw the effect of the machine in which they’d been moving parts, I retained a certain truth that would later be of use to me.
17.
One warm day in mid-July, around the time my men were close to having laid their runway, Percy Smith came to see me. Normally he would have taken this as an opportunity to sit and offer a postmortem of the previous night’s card game, but that day he spoke with a certain seriousness.
“Poxl,” Smith said. “Didn’t you tell me you met Françoise in Rotterdam?” I told him I had. “I’ve a chap on my detail says he was stationed in Rotterdam during the occupation. I’ll send him over if you like.”
Smith’s eyes were flat, the corners of his lips not upturned as they once had been during his meddling and needling. In his face was a new kind of need: I was the last of his deceased crew. He who had been my enemy was now my friend. This was a lesson I would recognize often in the days to come. While in the pages of Othello we may feel we understand a character like Iago, when we meet him in life, he retains the capacity for change. He’s not cut off from the obviation of his sins. If Othello had spared Desdemona and himself, surely he and Iago could have met in some new circumstance in their later years. There would have been memories to hash out, confessions to be made — the great dissembler would have had to try not to dissemble for once, to speak and be heard after his great sins had been unveiled. But couldn’t they have been as Navigator Smith and I now were?
I told Navigator Smith I would talk to this boy.
A day passed, then another. Smith’s man didn’t arrive.
I was hardly able to get my men to complete their work for the distraction it caused me. A week after Navigator Smith came to see me in the mess, a man named Rheinholt, whom I’d come to know by his face but not until now by his name, dropped by my office. I offered him a Woodbine. He lit it.
A small detail of my men had just begun building a wooden frame for a radio tower. I suggested we walk to a nearby Nissen hut so that we might oversee their work. Where had I come from? Rheinholt wondered. My Czechoslovak accent, though it had grown diffuse over the years since my emigration, had given me away. I told him of a year I’d spent in Rotterdam and then about my time in London.
“I was stationed in Rotterdam in ’40 and ’41,” Rheinholt said to me. “When I tell him this, Officer Smith tells me to come and see you.”
The area where my neck met my shirt was febrile. I told him before the war I’d lived in Rotterdam. I mentioned there might still be some residents there who mattered to me. Had he known any of the undesirables in that city?
“Undesirables?” Rheinholt said.
We reached the hut where my men were working. The high-pitched buzz of saws and the hum of a generator rose. We took a step inside the hut.
“Yes, yes, undesirables,” I said. “Those who worked in certain professions that might be considered unacceptable by polite society.”
Rheinholt took a moment to decipher my meaning. Then his shoulders relaxed and the skin around his eyes pulled taut with a smile.