The Last Flight of Poxl West Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked up and before my eyes was a flash of memory of an afternoon along the Elbe, but as quickly as it arose, it disappeared. The eggy smell of river water entered my nose and evaporated.
    My bag was already packed.
    A visa to Holland had already been arranged.
    A rucksack with my books was sitting on our porch.
    I walked across the room and lifted the trunk, but its lid was not latched. I’d not thought to latch it—the main intent of my actions was overwhelmed by my trying not to look at this unclothed man—and its contents tumbled to the floor. Now here they were, all the clothes I was about to take to Rotterdam with me, crumpled on the hallway floor. While I assumed the beast before me could do no worse than receive oral pleasure from my mother in my father’s house, effectively exiling me from my childhood home, the hairy golem proved me wrong.
    Not only did he charge over to pick up the contents of my trunk but he still had done nothing to cover himself. His paint-splattered canvas pants still sat in the corner opposite. In charging over in so disrobed a state, and rapidly going flaccid, he also pronounced quite explicitly that he was not a Jew himself—as evinced by a rather ugly piece of pachyderm skin, which proved that, unlike Abram five thousand years earlier, he’d not made the essential covenant with the Lord that my people had made with every male birth since.
    I had to put up a hand to stop him from taking another step.
    He stopped.
    All this time my mother continued to stand in a corner. I latched the trunk and collected my rucksack and was out of the house and down the hill to the Leitmeritz station without having said a proper good-bye to my mother or my father. The smell of the river lodged in my nose and piggybacked along with it was the image of that cuckolding suitor of my mother’s, and a heat rose up into my cheeks I couldn’t cool.
    I got on the next train south.
    As I left the house that day I expected anger—but marrow-deep anger follows action after a lag of days, not hours. The sulfurous river smell returned to my nose as I descended the hill toward its source from our house, and before me was the memory that longed to gain purchase:
    I was too young even to know how young I was, before my father ever took me up in his plane. My cousins and I had just returned from an afternoon sunning along the Elbe, one town over, in Schalholstice. This is where our fathers’ leather was tanned, where the current was strongest and could lend the most power to the mill wheel. My father would select the hides of cows in Prague, in Brno, in Budapest, or travel to the port in Rotterdam, and the raw hides would then be dipped into these huge oak barrels dug into the ground and covered over with straw. From there they would be taken to the factory for finishing, packaging, and shipping.
    We reached those huge circular vats dug deep into the muddy soil alongside the river, where the mill wheel of Brüder Weisberg turned day and night. And there between sunken vats my mother was holding my father’s hand. They were only bodies against the backdrop of leather tanning vats, looming above holes in the brown ground. My father stood stiff. His shoulders were held perfectly parallel to the ground. None of the ease I’d witnessed in watching my father full of life before flying his plane was evident. He looked stiff—and uncomfortable. My mother tugged his sleeve toward her, French cuffs I knew so well pinned together with links adorned with Czech amber, the liquid solidified millions of years long since passed. My father did not move. My mother pulled herself by his sleeve, pushing her chest against his arm. She was flirting, but he was not flirting back. Even as young as we were then we could see it. They were standing only a few feet in front of the nearest vat to one side, closer even on the other.
    Still my father did not move.
    Only now, as my mother went around him,