“Oh, of course,” Rheinholt said. “We frequented all the better whorehouses”—the term raised the temperature of my blood another degree—“while we were in Amsterdam, so we did the same in Rotterdam.”
My palms sweated. The scar atop my head throbbed. I rubbed it with my fingertips and found it hot to the touch. Did he remember the names or looks of any of those women?
“Oh, I took up with a rather large one,” Rheinholt said. “Big-hipped … I could hardly keep her away. Very large breasts.”
“Greta?” I asked.
“Greta!” Rheinholt said.
He seemed almost as elated as I was by the coincidence. I asked him if she played guitar and he said yes, yes, if he remembered correctly, he had seen one in the corner of the room. At that moment a waft of the spruce my men were sawing came across the Nissen hut to where we were standing, bringing back the wood smells of my father’s office in Leitmeritz — bright, clean, citrusy wood shot light through my head. An image of my father’s officious pose in his room above the Elbe in the Brüder Weisberg factory stuck in mind. My nose was filled with wood smell.
“Did you know any of her friends?” I asked. “Rosemary? Was there a half-Asian girl named Rosemary?”
“There were all kinds,” Rheinholt said. “I’d lie if I said I could remember any other than Greta. Though that does sound familiar … sure,” he said. “There might have been a Rosemary.”
It was too much. Françoise’s face appeared less and less in my mind, yet again she became a reality in our conversation as the wood smell overtook it.
“Françoise?” I asked him. “Was there a Françoise, tall and freckled? Played mandolin in a band, a sisters’ band?”
“I couldn’t say,” Rheinholt said. I was so full of memory and rage, my fists and teeth were clenched. “I just don’t remember this one.”
“Well then, what of Greta?” I said. “What of her as the war went on?”
“Oh,” Rheinholt said. “Some of her kind we had to move out of the Netherlands once things got bad.” His face displayed no emotion concomitant with the joy he had only moments before displayed. Some of these men were real men and became friends; others were as hateful as the cardboard version of those Nazi villains that has stuck in the world’s memory in the days since. This man belonged to the latter.
I watched as Rheinholt crushed out his cigarette. I did not move or look up as he walked away. There was no evidence of Françoise, but there was no evidence of her demise, either. I clung to the fact. That afternoon I took to the half-paved runway and found a draconian new strategy for getting the men in my charge to work.
“You, over there, Klemperer!” I shouted at a former Dornier pilot least in my favor. “Off the ground. Get to work!” Klemperer looked at me. I lifted this man by his grubby collar in the warm July evening and set him down to work next to his fellow men. “There will be no further laxity on this detail!” That night in the mess, I found my tongue loosed as if it had been given similar orders. Françoise! I only wanted to see her again, for her to see me — for the one person left whom I’d loved to help acknowledge my existence. She was my Mnemosyne. If she was alive, she bore memories of me, just like I had mine of her. If she bore memories of me, those memories were the wrong memories. Perhaps the past can be undone. At the least it can be unearthed, long-buried bones torn from the ground by aerial assault. I would find her again, no matter what state I found her in.
18.
News of V-J Day came from our superiors around the time we were nearing completion of the airstrip. The last of the Axis powers had given up.
The war was over.
A cheer arose across camp, a great electricity flowing through the men who’d seen more than their share of destruction. Even the POWs under our supervision were brighter that day, despite their nominal loss — not much of one, given how long it had been since Germany itself had capitulated. I managed to enjoy myself among my fellow Brits. I drank a glass of champagne with Percy Smith, who, upon news of the Japanese surrender, sought me out in the mess.
“Who would have thought of all those men in S-Sugar,” he said, “it would be me and the injured Polack celebrating together?” He saw the old fierce look on my face. “Okay, yes, yes. I know, I know. The Czechoslovakian. The Czechoslovakian Jew, Poxl West — the man who flew me over Hamburg.”
Smith put his arm around me. Over the coming weeks, as we proceeded apace in our work, he and I came to develop what would end up the most lasting of all my relationships of that period. Françoise wasn’t the only friend I’d made who might still be alive; Smith himself was here. While we came to befriend a number of the others we’d now been at work with for close to a year here in Germany, it was mainly the two of us in each others’ confidence.
My prevailing memory of that period, that stretch after the glee of our victory began to mature into a more nuanced emotion, came one day soon after. It was during another of our long card-playing evenings. Percy and I were big winners at whist. One of our fellow men, an officer called Berend, with whom Smith had had a close friendship, and who knew our history in S-Sugar, joked, “It’s nice to see two former enemies fighting alongside each other.”
Percy put his arm around me and said, “Former enemies is a little too harsh, don’t you suspect, Poxl?”
I breasted my cards.
“You two were in the same squadron, isn’t that right?” Berend said.
“We were stationed together north of Grimsby,” I said. “We flew together in the Battle of Hamburg.”
“Proper war heroes, at that!” Berend said.
Another officer with whom Percy had a long history and who knew about the bombings our wing undertook, Landsman, said, “Or something like that.”
Berend inquired after his meaning.
“We heard all about it,” Landsman said.
“All about what?” Percy said.
“The tens of thousands of German civilians killed in those bombings,” Landsman said.
“There were people killed in all the bombings!” Percy said. “They were bloody bombings! What were you, some radio operator down on the ground, you bloody moralizer, sitting back in your armchair with the WAAFs on your lap, sitting in judgment of those who saved you!”
Percy lunged at Landsman. Had I not been nearby to grab him, he might have done some damage. I didn’t know quite what had set him off. Perhaps Percy was unable to deal with the calm settling in after the final armistice. He was a career officer, one who seemed uncomfortable in the skin of civvy street, a prospect now arising for all of us. Regardless, with the help of this man Berend, I pulled him out of the Nissen hut. We took to a field nearby to smoke. Out among the fields, cicadas chirruped in the late-summer evening. Nightdew lifted off the Rhineland grass. Far above, the stars of Orion’s belt blinked. We walked long enough to smoke two cigarettes before Percy spoke.
“Bloody Landsman,” he said. He proceeded to explain that this officer had always been an antagonizer, always taking up the counterargument. The more silence fell in around us, the more the noise of cicadas filled the air. We kept walking. What in Landsman’s attitude had pushed Smith so far? I knew his stance on the need for a “press-on” attitude during our tour. He had little tolerance for the kind of self-doubt that could develop among pilots who weren’t inculcated into the military thinking he deemed acceptable. But the war was over. We were standing on occupied German soil. What losses we’d suffered, we’d endured, and now we had to try to move forward. As the cicadas chirruped in the dark I awaited his attack on my moralizing.