The Last Flight of Poxl West Read Online Free PDF

she lost her footing. Her foot dunked straight through the straw into one of the vats. She and my father both looked down at it. My cousins and I were too far to smell it, but we saw the way my father’s shoulders dipped perpendicular to the horizon as he lifted my mother from the ground, expertly held her in his arms, and ran her to the river to soak her in its waters. I recognize now the opportunity that had passed—that my father never had a chance to loosen up, to give my mother the love she wanted. But I suppose it’s too hopeful to imagine he would have changed. Who could say how many more times this scene had played out, or one like it, my mother needing something my father couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give. But I didn’t see all that then. What I saw was my father acting when action was needed, carrying my mother riverward. The last thing any of us saw—was I the only one to see it? Did Niny and Johana see it as well? Or was it so dark none of us could see it, and I’ve only invented it in my memory over the years?—was the look on my mother’s face: the relaxed eyes, the taut, smiling lips of a woman who has achieved happiness so momentary it is a flash more fleeting than the look captured in a painting.
    My cousins and I did not say a word to one another. We walked back down to another part of the river to swim.
    4.
    In Prague I was forced to wait for the evening train. When night came, we rode out of Hlavni Nadrazi. Lights scattered across the Zizkov hills like trails of a thousand small fires burning. Holland lay before me, five hundred miles west. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the Vltava flowed dark alongside my window. In the distance, the peaks of St. Vitus Cathedral pronounced themselves against the night sky. The church was lit from below as if to say good-bye to her departing Semitic son. A flock of waterbirds lifted off the dark water in unison. The moon lit the river not yet signifying a bombing, but only Czechoslovakian night.
    I arrived in Rotterdam two days later and was let off at the station not far from the harbor. My mouth was full of a long night’s cigarette smoke, my head not a fit for my brain. Already I’d fared poorly—the bag our housekeeper had packed was lost on the train. I only had money enough for a couple nights’ sleep in a hotel until I could find work. Once I was settled I would seek out whatever business connections my father had set up for me there. First thing, I found a room above a small restaurant called Café le Monde on Schiedamsedijk, and at the café a job busing tables.
    The first night there was a Saturday, and as the dinner crowd thinned, a group of musicians filed in with their large black cardboard instrument cases. They set up outside, and inside the café I could feel only the thud of the double bass. Toward the end of their set I went out front. They were a quartet, a pair called the Tennessee Sisters, backed by two men, and they played a kind of music I’d never heard before. That bass and a banjo backed up two young women, who sang high harmonies.
    The lead singer was called Maybelle Tennessee. Her face was the color of untreated pine, dusted with ground cardamom. Her dark hair wasn’t quite black and was kinky as if even the ends of her hair longed to stay as close as they could to her head. There was a gap between her two front teeth wide enough to slip in a chapbook of love songs, and in this slight imperfection she was only more alluring. Next to her ear, a brown-pink scar drew bright against her earthen skin before she sang. I stood there and watched. Here I was, alone in the world, listening to two Dutch girls sing American folk songs.
    After their set, I cleaned the tables out front, where people had sat to listen to them.
    â€œDo you have a deep, enduring love for the American folksinger Bill Monroe?” Maybelle said to me. She said it in English, of which I knew only a