One Wednesday in 1947, in the winter months, during which British European Airways and the weather kept me from Françoise’s garden and before it was settled that she’d continue on in her life with William Rutherford, I arrived at 128 Park Sheen, only to find no answer at the door.
A week later I returned. Again I found the flat vacant. Mail lay piled at the door, letters Françoise couldn’t have read if she’d wanted to. I wondered if one even arrived from Heidi. But I would never know. I was alone for so much of those years after I left my home in Leitmeritz, but never in all that time was I as alone as I was during those weeks. They began to accrete: I’d lost forever the sedentary love of my parents. I was certain at that time I’d been all but disabused of the hope for romantic love.
Still I returned each week to Park Sheen with the hope Françoise might admit me again for tea. On the fifth Wednesday after Françoise had ceased to answer, I knocked, and she answered. She saw me in. She took me to her kitchen as if no time had passed. In the span of our relationship, I suppose it hadn’t.
She took out the teacups, lit the flame, cooled her palm in the sink, and served our tea. Sweat began to collect on my brow. I was about to say something when I looked at Françoise and recognized she was about to speak. This fact was signaled by a tightening around her eyes.
“My ophthalmologist is in Vienna,” she said. “I was being checked out. William set it up. He knows a man there. There’s scar tissue behind my left eye. My right eye is gone. Just glass. But the scar tissue behind the left must be cleared from time to time. While we were there we stayed to see Don Giovanni and to see a psychotherapist I’ve come to trust.
“Well, not see, after all. But.
“I had reason to talk with him this past month. There appeared to be some chance of restoring sight to my left eye. There was response from the optic nerve after the scar tissue was cleared this time.”
“You might have mentioned you’d be going,” I said.
I didn’t say it particularly kindly.
“I might have said a lot of things. I might have told you how confused I was in the days after you left Rotterdam, when Veerhaven was bombed to dust. When many died. When I was left alone to deal with it, wondering where on earth you’d gone. Do you know what it feels like to be abandoned again? I can no longer see, but I haven’t forgotten what color looks like. How often do I think of that afternoon when we biked to the tulips fields, when I told you of the American who bought me my mandolin, who left me without explanation. And then there I was, again, left alone. Without a word. Even after you knew it was my greatest fear to be abandoned. Some actions you can’t take back, Poxl. Most of them, in fact. Mostly we do things in our lives and they affect the people around us. You. What you did. To me. You ask for forgiveness? You offer apology? As if that could undo what’s been done.
“Greta and I were lucky to live. You weren’t there. It was only through William’s generosity that I was able to come to London. One man, one person who finally did what he said he would do. There was always a promise of a different life. Only William took action. Was it what I most wanted? Was this the version of my life I’d have chosen? I’d even fallen in love, really in love, with a Jewish boy from Czechoslovakia at one point, but he flew from me without a word. After the bombing that spring, I would have done anything to leave. Do you know what it is to wait out nights in a basement, waiting to be burned as if you were in a kiln? There’s nothing I wouldn’t have done to get away. Nothing.
“William had a flat in Knightsbridge. We made it all the way through the heaviest nights of the Blitz without being hit. I was finally away from Rotterdam. I was finally safe. We were lucky. Neighbors were left homeless. Plenty of scares. Our town house remained intact. Months passed. Soon they were no longer scares even — there was no more real fear. We let ourselves believe it. What we can let ourselves believe if only we want to believe it badly enough. The rumbling of buildings being hit, the hiss of incendiaries, those became the natural sounds of life.
“One night in February we were to go into London to see some friends. William hired a car to pick us up. At the last minute he decided he would shower. Would I mind looking after the car? I said I wouldn’t.
“Now, you might wonder — didn’t I know better than to stand by a window? My life had grown so circumscribed. Sometimes I allowed myself indiscretions. I didn’t even want to acknowledge the war was going on outside. For just one evening I would stay in our flat without the blackout curtains pulled, the lights out in the room but the curtain open that I might look on the park across from our building, which reminded me so of those parks I’d loved in Delfshaven. A late-night walk in that park, even, if William was at hospital.
“That night, I allowed myself to stand by a window without the blackout curtain drawn.
“The first thing I thought was that the wall had somehow fallen and hit me in the face. A rush like a conch shell up to each ear. My eyes were closed. I couldn’t press my face off the wall. Then I realized it wasn’t a wall; it was the floor. I couldn’t get up. I could hear William calling me. All I could think was to henpeck at him for his tardiness, to say, ‘Finish your damn shower; the cab’s coming.’ Even when I came around in hospital the following morning, even when my body knew I wouldn’t be able to see any longer, in my mind I felt anger at William, wishing he’d finish that bloody shower.”
She made a little sound, not a sigh really, but a kind of harrumph I’d not ever heard her make before. Then she stopped. She fingered her teacup, and it appeared she wouldn’t say anything further.
“I was a squaddie in those days,” I said. “I drove around looking to save people like you.” Françoise didn’t say anything. “Later I flew a bomber. I trained on planes that bombed Germany. Bombers that flew deadly runs on Hamburg. That destroyed entire German cities.”
It was meant as a complement to the story Françoise had just told. An exchange of information. A chance at retribution. One of us was in her flat in Knightsbridge when a Luftwaffe bomb stole the visible world from her. The other trained on a bomber a couple of years later that either exacted revenge, or perpetrated the same evil upon Germany. Whichever it was — vengeance or villainy, quid pro quo or quid quid quid — I know only that in that moment I honestly thought she wanted me to tell her my story in exchange for hers.
Behind the skein of scar tissue that surrounded Françoise’s eyes the muscles in her face twitched. They’d gained their own new memory. Her eyes stayed fixed in their sockets, both the eye she’d been born with and the glass eye, identical in every way. Her eyes were open, but their senses were shut. Their rheumy stare was still directed over to the window above her sink.
“I might ask how that was for you, but to be honest, I don’t want to know,” Françoise said. “We all did what we needed these past years. I’m not here to conduct a postmortem.”
Françoise’s words suggested liberation, but in hearing her talk, I understood that what she needed to be liberated from was her past. Françoise was not a ghost; she did not do any haunting. She was haunted by a ghost of her own. Her ghost was a capricious young Czech kid who came into her life and flew just as he came, without explanation. What Françoise needed was the very liberation I thought I’d come to gain from her. From the pain of events long past.
From me.
In those moments, I began to understand something that wouldn’t grow in my conscious mind for months: I would have to stop. I had found Françoise and one day I would have to leave her. But that did not keep us from talking now. I could attempt to apologize once more, but now I understood something new about the nature of apology: It is the request for a gift. Forgiveness. It was not a gift I deserved.