He was silent. Night birds called out from a stand of pines beyond the fields.
“There’s a lad on my detail,” Percy said. “Twenty-year-old called Schlict. Always yammering. Never made pilot, never got on a Luftwaffe bomber, stuck with a job as a firefighter at home.” Percy drew on his fourth cigarette since we’d left his altercation with Landsman. Only its red ember showed in the dark. “This boy talks. No matter how many times I’ve put him on the most menial duties, he cannot keep his Jerry mouth shut.”
Percy stomped out his cigarette and lit another.
“Early this week, he started in on how the war is over but that he doesn’t have a home. Started again about how he had been a firefighter. In Hamburg, he said. When it started the first night, he said, he took to a bomb shelter. Once the blockbusters finished falling, he went out into the firestorm.”
A steady breeze picked up out in the field. It forced a cloud across the moon. Percy took a drag off his cigarette. With one fag already lit in his mouth, he took another from the packet and played it over, end over end, in his hand.
“The main waterline in the city was broken by one of our bombs early that night. Schlict and the other firefighters had to go to the river to begin pumping from the source itself. There they saw hundreds of people diving into the water. Directly before his crew were four women. They’d been hit by incendiaries. Phosphorous was burning their arms and backs.
“One of those women kept running into the water to douse her arms. When she emerged, the phosphorous was so hot — burning to the bone — it would light itself again. She kept jumping into the water. Each time she got out, her arms would set themselves afire again. The way this Schlict described it: these women running into the water, screaming, coming out, igniting again. Over and over, until he and the other firefighters were able to get ahold of them, wrap them in fire blankets, and take them back to the station.”
Percy stopped. He took a long pull off his cigarette. The red ember at its end was dancing with the shaking of his hand.
“Phosphorous in those incendiaries could do that if it hit you,” Percy said. A hitch crept into his voice. “I told this Schlict kid to get back to work. To stop with his propaganda. Normally he would have started at me again, yammering until he’d had everyone convinced. For the first time since the lad had started talking, he stopped. I saw his pale face. He hardly even believed himself, the horror of this story he’d witnessed with his own seeing, remembering eyes. I could see him thinking, Maybe it hadn’t happened that way. So awful his mind allowed his memories to be undone.”
Percy stopped talking. A taste of bile was rising in my throat. I would like to think now maybe it was all the cigarettes we’d smoked. But maybe it was that up until that moment, no matter what we’d done, we’d assumed we were like the vast majority of men — like Lear himself — self-judged to be more sinned against than sinning. Now something was changing in both of us the more Smith talked. As I say, if you met him in life, years later, even Iago might have turned from his role. But it could work the other way, as well, couldn’t it? That line from The Merchant of Venice had crossed my mind many times in the years since Glynnis’s mother and I first read it: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Somehow, I’d not thought quite clearly that this line had been uttered by one of Shakespeare’s great villains, not one of his great heroes.
We looked at the dancing of that red ember at the end of Percy’s cigarette.
“What I haven’t told you about the days back when we were in S-Sugar,” I said, “was why I signed up for the RAF.”
Percy didn’t say anything. I did. I talked to him about Glynnis Goldring and her mother. I told him about Johana and Scott Prichard. I told him about my parents and my long-since-passed desire to run Brüder Weisberg, and that I’d fled from Leitmeritz without ever saying good-bye to either of my parents, not knowing I would never again see them. If I had it in me in those days to cry, I might have cried, but I only said that now — now — I wanted to find Françoise as much as anything. I needed to know if she was still alive.
“None of it changes much for us, does it?” Percy said.
“How so?”
“We dropped those incendiaries ourselves, Poxl.”
I said I supposed we had. “But like you said in those moments before we went on our run,” I said. “We signed up to fight Nazis who had bombed us in London. We continued with ‘pressing on,’ as you put it. That’s never changed. Has it?”
Percy’s cigarette was bobbing. I reached out to steady his hand. He almost didn’t notice I’d touched him. In the darkness, we couldn’t see each other’s faces. We were out among night-wet grasses. Hardly a sound save for the swishing of our boots and all those chest-plated bugs we couldn’t see up in the treetops, vibrating their internal coils. We walked for another fifteen minutes over the landing strips we’d built, over dusty fields unpaved and past half-constructed radio towers and unused nacelles and Merlin engines of decommissioned planes left piecemeal at the base. Night smells of gathering dew and stoked fires carried across the grasses. We kept as far as we could from the lights and laughter in the Nissen huts without entering the forest on the other side. We were again approaching the distant glow.
“You should go as soon as you can,” Percy said. I looked at him in the dark, but I couldn’t quite make out his face. “Listen to me, Poxl,” he said. “You should go to Rotterdam.”
I asked him what he meant.
“The war’s over. I’ll talk to the major. I’ll get it set up. You can take enough time there to see if you can’t find Françoise, see if she’s still there. Still — well, still there’s enough.”
“And what if there’s nothing to find?” I said.
“I’m sure there is,” Percy Smith said. My eyes had adjusted enough to the faint light cast from the Nissen huts across the field that I could now see Percy’s face. There was so much certainty in his eyes when he said it, like it was the surest he’d ever been of anything he’d ever said.
He needed it to be true.
So did I.
And then Percy Smith said something else that I’d needed for so long I didn’t even know I needed it.
“And Poxl,” he said. “If you do find her — when you do find her, see if she’ll forgive you for leaving.”
I would have to press on until I was able to find Françoise, and if I did find her, I would have to tell her everything.
“But just go find her,” Percy said. “Get a transfer, go AWOL. Return to civvy street and catch a flight from free London.
“Go.”
19.
The night Percy Smith told me Schlict’s Hamburg story was filled with the reality of Françoise. Yet again I had no image of her face. I had only the pervasive sense of her absence. Her memory was more present than ever, but her face hadn’t arrived to accompany it.
That void couldn’t remain. I stopped trying. In the moments that followed, in my lightest sleep, a new image came to me in my dreams. Three women were doing something strange a couple hundred yards off. These women were submerging themselves in the Elbe, walking out of the water and then running back in. It wasn’t the German Elbe of Hamburg I’d seen from thirty thousand feet, but the Elbe of my childhood, running through Leitmeritz. Radobyl stood off in the near distance. I kept walking closer, lugubrious, as if my feet were plunged ankle-deep in wet sand. I was stuck to the ground. I had to pick my whole self up with the lassitude of each step. As I walked, those women ran into the water and out, stopped on the banks of the river and then went in again. When I got close, the three women acquired familiar faces.