ACT ONE



1.

I grew up in Leitmeritz, a small Czechoslovak city forty miles north of Prague. My father owned a large leather factory called Brüder Weisberg. It was a business he ran for his family, out of filial duty and love, and if this story is to be about something, it is love, not war. And if we are to understand romantic love, we must first understand the languid, sedentary love of family.

My father was among the most well-to-do Jews in Czechoslovakia. We lived in a large house on a hill above the streets of Leitmeritz. Its long stone façades overlooked the city all the way down to the Elbe, over the tufted green hills where I played as a child and endured the bullying of instructors at a strict gymnasium. When I was young I worked at my father's factory. I learned the trade, and on holiday accompanied him to the aerodromes, where the fortune he'd accrued allowed him the luxury of flying private aeroplanes. One day, I was to take over the factory.

Every Sunday, while my father flew his planes, my mother took me into Prague to see her mother, my grandmother. We arrived at the main train station and she walked me through Wenceslas Var, across the Charles Bridge and up to the castle mount to buy some smazeny syr before crossing the city to my grandmother's town house. Black bulbs at the top of the cathedral stood out, imposing against the marbled sky. Walking up the cobblestone streets we passed cafés and bars where men stared at my mother's beauty as we passed. From the top of the mount we witnessed the drone of the Vltava pushing in its absolute grayness, bisecting Prague like some great creature finding it easier to keep watch over a city divided.

On one particular visit when I was thirteen, the city was overwhelmed by a gray, damp chill. It was late October and cold enough to erase most odor from the air. Only the pungent smells of meat held the power to waft by on our walk to my grandmother's immense town house in the Zizkov district. Cobblestones made a trail from the river, and beneath my feet I saw 2 ... 4 ... 16 ... 132 ... 17, 424 and on into infinity millions of cobblestones smudged to a variegated mix. The sky throbbed with fast-passing clouds. I walked with my arm in my mother's until she stopped. I looked up and saw pasted to a stone wall posters drawn by the Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha.

My mother stood staring.

She was an amateur painter, a habit my father supported with a complicated reluctance I could not understand. On our trips to Prague she would always divert us when my father was absent, eager to see what art she could. While she stopped, two men paused alongside us to look at these posters, as well. Green vines enwrapped the bodies and breasts of stark naked women, in their hands bunches of grapes. One of the men next to us said to the other in a shallow, informal Czech:

"Wouldn't you like to have one just like her?"

"Flat up against a wall like that," the other replied.

They both laughed and looked at my mother, expecting to have offended her.

She smiled at them.

She was not embarrassed by the nude women before us. The men's lecherous leers and ugly comments did not faze her.

They looked at me, and my skin prickled.

They walked away.

I watched a change pass over my mother's face: The skin about her eyes drew back and I saw there a kind of giddiness my father at all times looked upon with impertinent disdain.

We walked to my grandmother's. She lived at 30 Borivojova, in a town house painted canary yellow. The components of its face were those chisel-cut rectangular stones one might find all across the city. On the front steps leading to the door sat a pair of angry lions. Inside the entranceway the air was close. Grandmother Gertrude, whom we called "Traute," held my head to her bosom. She kissed me on my cheek and rubbed the invisible stubble over her upper lip against my nose. I longed to get away and departed for the lav, and when I reached it, I tended to myself. In the cobblestones that rose out of my memory came Mucha's women-only overlaid by that scrim of stones, they grew even more angular. This new image seared itself across the backs of my eyelids. I felt the warmth of their painted bodies come to life under my skin.

While I was cleaning up, I heard footsteps.

I froze.

They veered off into a room nearby. As I moved toward the sitting room where I'd left my mother and grandmother, I noticed the door to a little-used room off the main dining room was open. Inside, I found my mother standing before half a dozen paintings propped along the far wall. A burlap tarpaulin that must have been used to cover them was strewn across the floor. The angular girl in the painting before my mother sat with her legs spread, her hands below her small breasts and a mossy tuft just covering her exposed pink sex.

The two paintings next to it contained more of the same.

My mother took note of my presence. She blanched. Her shoulders drew back. A look crossed her face.

"I suppose I'm glad to see you like them," my mother said. "They're the work of a great painter, an Austrian called Schiele."

I looked away from the first painting and to one of an emaciated, naked older woman who appeared to be writhing in pain. My mother pushed it off to the side to reveal a portrait of a similarly angular woman with her legs spread as if to form a wishbone, between them heavy brushstrokes of dark gnarly brown. My mother explained that she had posed for Schiele when she was young, during summers she spent in Neulenbach, outside Vienna. There she would go to his atelier to see him with his woman, Wallie. She took my mother to buy beautiful hats until Schiele was sent to prison.

But I could not listen to her words-for on the face of the second Schiele girl, I saw something fantastic, something I hadn't noticed in the midst of my preoccupation with the fact that certain deep brushstrokes had been used to create the deep pink roundness of the areolae on that girl.

The face in that second painting was very young. But it was clearly my mother's.

If that realization wasn't enough, these paintings were the exact images overlaid by cobblestones that I'd seen when I'd closed my eyes in the bathroom minutes earlier.

I blinked hard.

It was as if I had crafted Schiele's style in my mind just minutes before. While I marveled at this coincidence, my mother said that before her marriage to my father was arranged she had sat for "her Egon" when Wallie was away. She had been the subject of a number of his paintings. Grandmother Traute had tracked down the others some time later, wishing them to be kept private.

"So what do you think, Poxl?" she said.

Again that look crossed her face.

"Let the boy to his tea," Grandmother Traute said. She had arrived in the doorway-when I couldn't say. "He hasn't had a thing to eat."

My grandmother sent me off to my tea. Voices rose from the other room and then cut out altogether. Something passed between my mother and grandmother. They returned to the drawing room. We ate. Mother sent me off for our coats and I heard corrugated words pass between them yet again. Soon we left without my learning what had transpired.

* * *

Then we were going home to Leitmeritz. My father planned to stay on another night in Prague to steal skyward one more day in his new plane. It struck me only later just how often one or the other of my parents was in Prague alone, each taking trips south almost weekly. Though in the years to follow I would learn from my father how to handle those small propeller planes that prepared me for the Tiger Moths I would later train on, my mother and I now rode the train home alone.

"Now that I know what you thought of the Schieles," she said, "tell me. Would you want to try your hand at painting one day?"

I'd only ever shown interest in books, and in my father's leather. The latter was the only viable option for me. The former could survive in mind only as a potential avocation.

"I'll take over Brüder Weisberg one day," I said.

"Well, yes, but you could paint on the side."

"If I was going to do anything," I said, "I'd write, or at the least study books, I suppose."

Her eyes grew gray. I did not know a thing about painting, but I knew my mother well enough to see I'd disappointed her.

I tried to say I could show her some of my writing if she wanted. But her eyes only darkened. She was staring out at the fallow fields alongside our window. Stands of sunflowers grew diffuse in the thickening evening light.

"Your grandmother felt very strongly against my having posed for Schiele when I was a girl," my mother said. She continued to stare out the window as she spoke. "I was just the age when a woman is supposed to have her marriage arranged. My parents decided your father was the man for me. His family still lived in Prague then. They were a good family. This was before the riots, just before you were born, before we moved to Leitmeritz for good. But that summer I lived in Neulenbach and Egon-" She stopped for a second. Not looking at me, she started up again. "The painter Schiele, whose work I've introduced you to, showed me how to paint. He suffered for his art. He was jailed after everyone in town complained he was corrupting their-that he should not be painting the portraits as he was painting them. It was only after his death that Vater would even let us keep his paintings in our house. Then Grandmother Traute became obsessed with tracking them all down, owning them."

Again she stopped and looked out the window.

We both stopped talking. My mother went to sleep. She was a small woman with the curly rust-red hair a minority of Ashkenazi Jews are blessed with. A pair of earrings dangled from her lobes, each with a piece of amber the size of a child's shooting marble. I put my head against her clavicle as I always had when I was a child. In her half-sleep, she pulled me to her, then took the amber from her ears. She clacked them against each other in her left hand. Only when the knocking of amber quieted did I know she'd passed fully into sleep.

I put my finger to her ear as I had when I was a child, as I would never stop longing to do. She lay against the door, stilled, sedentary, a woman frozen, having been captured in paint and only half-released back to the world moving past her. Her earlobe grown soft, ceding to the amber's pull, drooping, awaiting the next trip to Prague.

2.

My name has appeared as pilot at the top of more flight manifests than I could possibly count. But you will not find a written record of the most memorable time I rose skyward. It was little more than a year after that trip to Prague with my mother. After many years left standing in a field at the aero club my father belonged to, watching him fly off and waiting for minutes, hours, until his plane appeared again in the sky-he a distant cloud obscuring the sun as I waited below-when I turned fifteen we drove down together to fly in his new Beneš-Mraz Be-50 monoplane. Business must have been going well, a real fortune accruing, for this was the first plane he owned outright. For weeks prior, my father had quizzed me on flight safety, and I had complied. And now here we were.

There was an overcast sky that early-spring morning. We'd left Leitmeritz before the sun rose above Radobyl and spoken little in the morning haze coming down, and we were alone at the aero club when we arrived. My father liked very much to teach me about the leather business, but there was a newfound energy in him that morning-one I'd observed many times before and now could finally share for the first time. In the small hangar I was overcome by the smell of petrol filling the air. As my father went about his work, prepping the parts of the wooden wings of his new plane, we talked with a freedom I rarely experienced with him. His hands were busy, and when your hands are busy, it liberates your voice.

"Do you like the books you're studying at the gymnasium, Leopold?" he said. Only my father called me by my full name. Everyone else just called me Poxl. "Your mother tells me you long to study books. Perhaps you'll be a writer."

"I didn't tell her that," I said. "I want to take over the business. But I told her that if I were not to take over the business, I'd be more interested in books than I would in painting."

His hands stopped moving along the wood of the ailerons he'd been working on. I watched him make twin fists, knuckles pink against white skin, and then release them. Then he began again at his work.

"Yes, your mother and painting," he said. "Very hard to get her off that topic once she's begun."

I agreed with him and though I thought of mentioning the Schiele paintings, asking him about my mother's life before I was born, before they met, I quickly thought better. I recognize now that of course my father knew more about my mother and her business than I possibly could have gleaned, but I was her son and a teenager, so what really could he have told me? Here we were together. It was precious time, this time alone with my father, and I had none of the petulance of a teenager that morning. I had a goal and that goal was to get into my father's new monoplane and see our world from above.

And so we flew.

My father sat in the cockpit and I sat in the passenger berth behind him, both of which were open, and he called out to ask me if I was ready, and when I said I was, we began taxiing. As the nose of the plane began to lift, I could feel the middle of my stomach dip toward the balls of my feet, and then the ground was lifting away from us. The field drew in at its edges below us and the Be-50 made a mighty racket, a whirring I could feel shaking deep inside my ears-but here it was! The gray of overcast skies pushed cloud masses against my eyes, and with the wind stiff and bracing against our faces in those open seats, the smell of petrol blew away. Instead, there was now the smell of droplets of water in my nose, the fresh morning smell of clouds. My father veered west, and soon we were passing in the sky above the old city of Prague. From thousands of feet above we could see every block-down below was my grandmother's house in Zizkov among the many terra-cotta roofs, I knew, and to the west the castle mount, and what I remember most then was how I longed to talk to my father about it. I wanted to tell him what it looked like to see that city from above, how close it all seemed and how absurd that a walk from the Charles Bridge up to Grandmother Traute's should feel significant, now seeing that one was but a thumb's length from the other.

But even a shout was lost in the racket of the air in those open areas, and my joy at that flight came in my simply sitting back and taking it in, knowing that my father was taking me skyward. While he had a certain genius at business, in all other venues in life I could remember him only as passive-it was as if he was saving up all his energy and mastery for the two things he cared for most: selling his leather and flying his planes. I do not blame him for it; I know he didn't see that it could make my mother feel he did not give her the attention she deserved, or that it might make me want and need more than he could give.

As we flew southward all the way down to Ceský Krumlov, where we could see the great oxbow in the river, my father's right hand shot out to the leeside, pointing at the massive medieval castle at the village's center. The cloud cover began to burn off, and while wisps of cloud might appear far ahead, that's not what I could see, and it's not what I remember. What I saw for that whole long flight each time my neck grew too stiff to continue craning, to look out at the land below, was the same thing I would see every time I flew with him in the years ahead, the same thing I would see when my father bought a Tiger Moth biplane the following year, that same invisible guide that would be emblazoned on my eyes whenever I flew: I saw before my eyes the back of my father's helmeted head.

3.

March 21, 1938.

Hitler marched on Austria.

The Anschluss was under way. I was eighteen. Much to my surprise, my father came to me that afternoon not to keep me close, but to present me with an unexpected wish: I was to leave for Rotterdam as soon as arrangements could be made. There was business to be done there with his Dutch counterpart in leather sales. But that was not the immediate reason for my flight. My father felt it wasn't safe for me to stay in Czechoslovakia. I was a young Jew with a future to protect. He himself refused to leave. He would take care of Brüder Weisberg, and see to his planes down at the aero club, but I was to leave. He and my mother had had an arranged marriage. I was to have an arranged emigration.

Until that moment my life had had a single trajectory: I was to take over the tannery. I'd had an education that might allow me to cultivate interests like my father's in his aeroplanes or my mother's in her painting, or the life of books that held my interest more, but my central concern was the factory. And so in my mind it was equally settled: I would stay, no matter what my father's arrangements.

On a Tuesday two weeks later I had lunch at my uncle Rudolf's. His daughters, my cousins Niny and Johana, had departed for a new life in London the year before. My father's demands ran through me like current through a wire. I excused myself as soon as I could. I would plead with my mother to convince my father I should stay. And I would have succeeded, had it not been that that afternoon I discovered more about my mother than I'd ever hoped to know.

The first thing I saw on my return from my uncle's was a large, hard suitcase our maid Josefina had packed for me days earlier in advance of my planned departure. I walked into the hallway, where it had sat since it was first packed. A pair of wool pants was folded on top of a sweater on the luggage. Then I saw a pair of canvas pants hastily left crumpled on the floor, covered in variously colored splotches of oil paint. My father did not own such a pair of pants, and his only hobby was flying. If a pair of his pants were to be soiled it would surely not be by oil paint.

I saw my mother next.

She was on her knees. This is not a position to which I was accustomed to seeing my mother, who knelt for no one. The only time she'd ever acted against her will was in accepting her arranged marriage to my father. My view of my mother was obstructed by the most unpleasant sight. When her eyes opened and she saw me, she stopped the business at which she was engaged. She stood bolt upright. This action only doubled the discomfort I was already feeling.

I'd never before seen my mother naked-I'd seen that young version of her in the Schiele portrait years earlier, I suppose, but surely I had not seen her so in person, and not at such lascivious business. None of the involved parties had the wherewithal to alleviate the awkwardness of the moment. My mother did not cover up, but simply said, "Oh-Poxl. Oh."

The hairy thing in front of me was not my father. What he revealed to me presented a proper exclamation point to their act, evidence that was now rapidly becoming detumescent without achieving its ends. My mother stood and turned her back to me, which, again, did very little to alleviate the awkwardness of the situation.

My failure to speak or depart from the doorway in which I stood also did little to help. I know I'm not without blame for not simply fleeing right then, but what would you ask of an eighteen-year-old upon finding his mother in such a state? My luggage sat in the hallway opposite from where I now stood. Until that very moment I'd not allowed myself a real thought of leaving Leitmeritz.

Now it was the only option.

I would not be able to keep this event from my father. What this, coupled with what was now clarifying itself about that Schiele afternoon with my mother years earlier, was coming to show me was that a different kind of trauma was accruing in my parents' home. I 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, 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.

"Do 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 little.

"Am not a waiter," I said, using the tiny bit of English I had learned from my grandmother's American cousin. "I find one."

"I do not want a waiter," she said. She spoke to me in German now, having picked up on my accent. "I saw you listening to us. From looking at you I thought you were an American and perhaps a fan of brother-duo singing music. But you are not."

"I am not," I said.

"You should know!" she said. "He is the greatest American folksinger of all American folksingers. Bill Monroe, one of the brothers in the Monroe Brothers, along with his brother Charlie Monroe. They are the finest of all brother-duet singers in America, the Monroe Brothers."

"I don't know their music," I said. And with a boldness I would never have had back in Leitmeritz, a young man on his own in a new life, prepared not to repeat the mistakes he'd witnessed in his father's reticence, I said, "But I'd like to hear more of it."

"We're here every Saturday night," she said.

Although I'd begun working at the café I did go to see Johann Schmidt, my father's business associate, who might have provided me some lucrative work but who told me he would be leaving for the United States in only a matter of weeks. He was sorry he could not be of more help, and he handed me a wad of guilders to absolve himself of whatever guilt he felt. It was enough money to give me some freedom for a month or two, and I did my best to convince him I was simply grateful for his generosity.

The following Saturday, the Tennessee Sisters were to play again, and again I listened. With every song she sang it seemed that the lead singer was looking right in my eyes. I'm sure, looking back on it, that every man there felt that way, but I only knew then that I did. I was leaving for a walk along the Nieuwe Maas when I saw some boy about my age attempting to talk to her. Accosting her, more like. He was speaking loudly when I approached, and when he saw me, his voice dropped to a guttural growl.

"Finally, he has arrived," Maybelle said. She and this dark boy both turned to look at me. "Are we to go listen to some of the music of Bill Monroe and his brother Charlie now, as you promised? The new LP from Decca Records just arrived from America."

The boy thrust his hands low in his pockets. His shoulders moved forward and there was a bulge down where he held his hand. We had not talked again since that first meeting. I did not want trouble with this boy.

"You were going to meet me at the front of the café," I said, picking up her meaning. The pink scar beside her cheek drew brighter as she smiled, took me by the arm, and took a couple steps away from the guttural boy.

"Next time we will decide to speak in either Dutch or German," she said.

We walked quickly away before the boy could speak again. We walked all the way to the Nieuwe Maas, gas lamps lighting the path to the harbor.

"Will you tell me your name, then?" she said. "I am Françoise."

"I thought it was Maybelle Tennessee."

"That's my stage name. I'm Maybelle, and my partner Greta is Lilly. These names work better with Tennessee than our own."

"I'm Poxl," I said. She looked at me. "Leopold Weisberg. Leopold, Leopoldy, Leopox, Leopoxl, Poxl."

We walked together up the Nieuwe Maas. I told her about Leitmeritz and about my passage on the train from Prague just the week before. We walked near each other as we passed under the lights along the harbor's edge. Uneven cobblestones lined the embankment.

"What was that boy after?" I said.

"Something he could not afford," she said. She was looking at her hands when she said it. Now she looked up at me. "But," she said. "Thank you."

Now she grew quiet, as if in showing her gratitude she'd ceded some ground to me she wished she hadn't. In our silence she walked upright and reserved for the first time. In the quiet of the haze lifting off the river, the air lightened between us. I noted something I'd not seen on that evening of our first meeting: In Françoise's ears were earrings similar to those my mother wore-pellucid amber, shaped like playing marbles, casting tawny shadows on her cheek. Mist grew thick around the yellow glowing gaslights, comingled with Françoise's earrings. I found myself telling her that my mother had earrings just like the ones she wore.

"It's not a good idea," she said, "to tell a girl you've just met that she reminds you of your mother."

I spent some of the wad Johann Schmidt had gifted me on dinner and she talked to me about music I'd never heard of.

"Bill Monroe is not only the greatest American folksinger," she said. "When he was a young boy, he was cross-eyed. He could not see. This is why he learned to play the mandolin the way he did." She paused and took a breath. "When I was a child, I was cross-eyed, too. My mother saved all her earnings for many years. We had my eyes fixed. I believe it is why I can hear the music of Bill Monroe so clearly. But you can't tell they were ever crossed, can you."

"No," I said. Over the smell of meat I could detect the heavy scent of patchouli oil on her skin. "No, I would not ever have known."

5.

One night two Saturdays later, after her set ended, Françoise asked me if I would like to accompany her to a party. She led me ten blocks into the thick of the city and over to Rochussen. Two girls Françoise's age awaited us. They were her bandmate Greta and their friend Rosemary. The party would be just the four of us, Françoise explained on our walk over. When for the first time I asked her what her friends did, how she knew them, she simply looked at me.

"We work in the brothel," she said. "We play with our band there at times. And."

I put my hands into my coat pockets and pushed my fingers against my palms. In Greta's flat, Bill Monroe was on the phonograph. We drank wine thin as vinegar. Greta arose to dance and pulled me up alongside her. I protested with the little Dutch I had-I told her I was not a dancer, that I would prefer to watch. While my facility with Dutch wasn't enough to let me argue with them, I could comprehend their conversation.

"So he is that kind, is he?" Greta said.

"I haven't yet discovered what kind he is," Françoise said.

"You'll have to find out yourselves," I said.

I stood up and took Greta's hand. Did I imagine I was my tepid father in those moments of action, slipping along the Elbe away from my mother's flirtations? I didn't. I pictured myself a painter unafraid to stand in another man's home without a stitch of clothing, my paint-splattered trousers on his floor, attempting to speak reason to his son. Greta was a substantial girl, her brown hair twisted up like a bundle of kindling. She changed the record to some big-band music and danced up close to me while Rosemary moved against Françoise on the velvet-upholstered sofa on the opposite side of the room.

Rosemary stood and began to dance behind Greta. Then her hands were up under Greta's shirt. Greta began to kiss Rosemary. I had never seen women kiss each other. They grew more sensual. Rosemary lay Greta down and undressed her, then put her face down into Greta's lap and pleasured her until she let out a little shriek. This was the first time I had ever seen female genitalia, let alone tended to so. Françoise was watching along with me, and without giving me time to anticipate it, she kissed me. She'd had a lot of wine. I'd had a lot of wine.

"Take me back into Greta's bedroom," she said. She pointed behind me to a thin silk curtain.

"Do you think we could find somewhere less out in the open?"

"These are my friends," Françoise said. Her freckled skin grew bright with embarrassment. "They won't mind."

"I can see," I said. "It's just that," I said. I could feel the heat slipping from between us. "It's just that I haven't ever seen that before. Or, you know."

Her face brightened until it was almost brown. I could only imagine the shade of red mine now turned. She took me by my hand. Her palms felt as soft as uncooked rice.

Back at her flat, it was as if Françoise was returning to adolescence. She was nervous, as if this was her first time as well. She turned on a softly glowing lamp. She walked over to the stovetop in the corner of her room, turned the governor on low, and lit a burner with a match. She placed a black teapot on the burner and pulled some chamomile tea from a cabinet above her stove. While I stood silent in a corner, she waited for the tea to steep, poured two cups on the countertop, and then walked over to me.

"I love the smell of this tea, don't you?" Françoise said.

Before I could answer her, she kissed me. Her hand was clutching me. On the coarse pallet on her floor, I took Françoise's clothes off. I was a miner seeking some long-sought vein-only after its ore was heated could the precious metal be extracted. Something different happened to Françoise than was happening to me. After I'd finished she grew as cold as the tea on her counter.

"I won't ask it again," Françoise said. "It's been a very long time since I asked it of someone, but with you I feel I can."

The room filled with the smell of tea. Until she stood and walked over to the lamp by her bed to turn it out I didn't understand what she was asking, but then I saw: she wanted the quiet privacy of darkness. In the slick, dim room she moved beneath my fingers until she was done.

When I woke the next morning Françoise had already left. There was no note, no sign of her. I gathered my things and returned to my flat. That night I worked my shift, and the next two, and did not see her again until the next time her band played. When they finished, she told me to meet her at her flat in an hour.

She was in just a robe when I arrived. She had her mandolin out. She began to pick some American folk song she'd learned from her records. While she played, I had a chance to take in her flat with the lamp lit. Clothes lay upon its floor in squalor. But I soon came to learn that if we needed to leave, she always knew just where to find a blouse, a sweater. She kept a fresh tulip on her windowsill each afternoon. Years later, when the war was over, an old Dutch woman would tell me of friends who ate the tulips from their gardens when they were the only thing left to eat. But there in the serenity before the war broke out in earnest, the splash of violet or carmine or vermilion on Françoise's windowsill lent order to her room. She may have been born cross-eyed, but Françoise as I knew her could see and see and see.

6.

One night Françoise invited me to the home of a couple she knew well, and whose complicated role in her life would grow clearer to me in the weeks after I met them. The Brauns lived in Delfshaven, a quiet neighborhood fifteen blocks from Françoise's flat-236 Heemraadssingel. Their block followed a canal up from the Nieuwe Maas. Over the glassy, still surface of their canal, languid willows dipped their arms down to the water as if searching for something just below its surface.

Inside we encountered Herr Braun, a dentist, and Frau Braun, his wife, who had been Françoise's teacher. By the time she was sixteen, Françoise had already been at work in the brothel for a number of years. Frau Braun had been attractive then-now she was obese, but the clear blue of her eyes allowed me to imagine her in her youth. One afternoon as Frau Braun sat alongside her before an old piano, Françoise had put her hand on her teacher's arm. Frau Braun had pulled it away. Three years later, when Françoise was no longer attending school, Frau Braun had seen her performing with Greta at Café le Monde. They returned together that night to her house, and Françoise visited the Brauns' home regularly in the years to follow.

That night the four of us ate sauerkraut and bratwurst. We looked out on their garden. The Brauns were attentive to Françoise's needs, which they seemed to anticipate even before she asked for things. There was a familiarity between them that felt almost paternal. They were cold to me, and at first I didn't know if it was because they were protective like parents-or if they felt some other kind of propriety with Françoise.

"What of your work?" Herr Braun said.

"I've just found something permanent," I said. "Working in the cranes. In Veerhaven." I'd been walking down Schiedamsedijk when I heard the familiar sound of a man speaking Czech. Along the canal were dozens of cranes, which served to take the cargo from ships entering the harbor. This Dutch shipping company had bought cranes from Czechoslovakia, but all the men who ran them except him had been called to the army because of the fear of German invasion. In the weeks and months to come, I used these cranes to unload shipments. The money Johann Schmidt had given me was beginning to run out, and it was providential for me to find this work.

"Poxl has done quite well since he arrived," Françoise said. The Brauns nodded and dragged their knives across their bratwurst. "I've even taught him to play some guitar."

We'd settled into some after-dinner port when the Brauns' daughter joined us. Heidi was eleven. She had wiry black hair and skin tawny as if she'd been too long in the sun. She seemed a bit shy with me, but she immediately walked over to Françoise. It was clear they knew each other well.

"Heidi," Herr Braun said, "would you like to sing a song for our guests? Why not one of those American folk songs your mother has taught you?"

Françoise and Frau Braun were suddenly quiet. Now even Herr Braun grew red at the collar. Heidi walked over closer to Françoise. She blanched white as if a cloud had passed between her and the rest of us.

"You want to sing and you won't, so off with you, then!" Herr Braun said.

"Poxl can play guitar for us," Françoise said. "Heidi, we could do that new Rice Brothers Gang song."

Heidi's soft skin regained its color. She looked Françoise in the eyes. At the back of the Brauns' house I picked up a guitar and began to hack at the only three chords I'd learned since arriving in Rotterdam-G, C, D. It took me a second to change between each chord, setting each finger slowly on its fret, but I could essentially manage it now when given the time. Françoise had been playing that Rice Brothers Gang record incessantly, and in particular a song that was new at the time but has grown quite familiar to listeners in the years since, "You Are My Sunshine." It was the only song I knew. Françoise sang the end of the verse: "If you leave me to love another, you'll regret it all one day."

When she came to the chorus, Heidi sang a perfect tenor, three notes above. Her voice was naturally a few steps higher than Françoise's, but it was as if the same voice was singing the two parts together.

* * *

One night the following week, when we'd just arrived home from one of her performances and had had a lot to drink, Françoise said we needed to talk. I was full of wine and ready for bed, but clearly something was eating at her. Hazy as I was, I sat and listened.

"For a long time I've wanted to tell you the story of my childhood," she said. "Now that you've met the Brauns, and will surely see them again before long, I'll tell you. But before I tell you, before I do, first I must know something from you, something I've been needing to know: What do you think of my work? Of what I do for money?"

She turned on a lamp, stood and lit the burner on the stove, brewed some tea. This wasn't going to be a quick conversation, and I steeled myself for it. Unlike our first time together, now when Françoise made tea for me, we would go through the ritual of allowing it to steep, and then actually drink it. I'd learned to wait patiently while she finished this ritual before we could talk again. It gave me time to consider an answer. I was not displeased with her. I did not long to leave her. I'd never known a different version of her-this was simply Françoise, the same Françoise I'd first met. I'd tried in the past, against my better judgment, to think of her with her clients, but all I could think of was my mother and her cuckolding painter. I grew angry, but not at Françoise. I did not know where to put the anger. In our time together I'd learned not to ask. I did not know then what I even thought love was-I only knew that in the moments when I was with Françoise I did not want to be anywhere else in the world.

But I could not say any of that now. When Françoise returned with our tea I said, "You do what you do. It's the only way I've ever known you. What can I say? When I'm with you, I'm happy."

Françoise handed me my tea. She did not look me in the eyes, but sipped at her tea while I sipped at mine.

"I think I knew that," she said. She sighed, and we were both quiet.

And then she started in on her story.

Françoise explained that her father was a colonialist who had gone to the Congo, a Dutch protectorate at the time, to oversee an investment, and had returned with her mother, who was herself the daughter of a colonialist. Her mother, Françoise's grandmother, was Congolese, though from my time growing up in Leitmeritz, I'd never encountered anyone with such a background, and I did not know until she told me that Françoise was one-quarter African. She was taupe. Freckled. There was a touch of albinism in her tan skin, which to the eye of one who knows such things might have been a distinguishing feature of her background. To a young Czechoslovak who for the first time was seeing a Dutch woman in Rotterdam, she was simply bronzed.

As Françoise told me this I sat up on a sofa in her apartment, giving her full attention, attempting not to slouch. Françoise was sitting across from me, her legs tucked under her on a straight-backed chair. When I think of her now I think of the way she was that night: The lightness of her freckles was very light then, the brownness of her cocoa nipples very deep. Her eyes were wide, trained on me as she spoke. She was so young and so unblemished in those days, days when she seemed the most worldly woman I'd ever met.

When Françoise's parents returned to Rotterdam they found the house her father had grown up in destroyed by fire. Her father's investments in the Congo had come to nothing. He sank into a deep depression. Her mother was unable to find a respectable job. The fire and penury led Françoise's mother to work in a brothel near their home. She sometimes brought home more money in a night than Françoise's father earned in a week, if he was seeking work at all.

"By fourteen, I began to work the ships in the harbor myself," Françoise said, "where sailors had comfortable accommodations belowdecks.

"I was good at my work. Being good meant many things. Different things. Some men liked to have me simply for how young I was. Some liked to give me things-mandolins, records, bottles of French and Spanish wine. But I had one immediate need myself in my endeavor, and that was that I not get pregnant. And somehow I was lucky even in that realm: I never had even a scare. It appeared I was barren."

Françoise put her head down again on her pillow. She turned to me and expressed a truth I was coming to learn: Sometimes even the most steadfast facts of our lives can be undone by time and chance.

"Then when I was sixteen," she said, "I noticed one day my menstruation had stopped. Years of work each day the same, each day a different challenge but the same results. Here I was now. Suddenly pregnant." Her mother told her she must not keep the baby. Her father had recovered himself during that period, and had made plans to return to the Congo, where he would be embroiled in a business transaction that could keep them from returning to Rotterdam even to visit for years. Her father was lucky to have found work again. Françoise would not be able to join them if she was with child.

At that moment in her telling me all of this, a new tear appeared in the outside corner of Françoise's eye like the tear that comes upon first waking. It rolled down her cheek and into her ear. Now her face was all hot and wet. It was the first show of defeated sadness I'd ever observed in her. Being full of wine herself, her energy started to flag. She came over to the sofa where I sat and buried her nose in my neck. We lay down together on the long sofa.

"Isn't it silly?" she said. I had my arms wrapped around her now. "The choices we make."

And then, before finishing her story, she closed her eyes. "It's hard even to think of it now," Françoise said. She stopped speaking. Her breathing grew slow and heavy. Minutes passed with us lying that way. I did not have the heart to wake her. While I waited, too lit by the story to sleep myself, I was plunged into the memory of my last moments with my own parents: The week before my father told me I was to leave for Rotterdam, the three of us had traveled to Prague together. My father had just made a major upgrade to his Tiger Moth biplane, and he wanted to take us each up in it. But when we arrived, my mother refused to join us, no matter how my father implored her. She was afraid of flying, she said, though she'd been up before, and she didn't want to go.

"Take Poxl," she said, her hand distractedly playing with the amber of her earring. "He likes to fly with you. I'll take the car to town for the afternoon."

There was some loose skin around my father's eyes that twitched when he was most agitated. It twitched then without abandon. It wasn't until this moment, lying alongside Françoise, that it struck me this might have been a sign my father knew of my mother's indiscretions.

We took to the sky that afternoon while my mother was in town. A second throttle sat in my rear seat. After flying me faster and more recklessly than my fastidious father ever had before, he shouted back to me, "Take over, Poxl."

For the first time after all those flights watching the back of my father's helmeted head, first in his Be-50 and then in this Tiger Moth, I took that plane upward. The slightest nudge of the throttle sent us down at an angle that seemed to me to cause mortal danger. I straightened us and then my stomach made quickly for my feet. But soon I had us horizontal. A kind of ease overcame me in my seat. Thin fog passed through us like the skin of vacated bodies, and when I looked far enough across our leeward side, I saw that these were the wisps of clouds we were inside of. Wind forced us up and I pushed in, sent us down. I'd been flying I don't know how long before, for the very last time, my father's invisible hand retook control of the throttle from me, and he again maintained control of us in the sky.

"Ace flying, my boy," my father said. By the time we returned to the hangar, my mother was again with us. A new pair of larger amber earrings were in her ears.

"Do you like them?" she said. She did not look at my father. I told her I did, sure. "I met up with Grandma Traute," she said. "We shopped down in Wenceslas Var."

She and my father didn't speak again until we arrived in Leitmeritz. I nodded off on the ride and in my head I was back up in the clouds-my body had maintained that altitude, and the clouds that passed through us or we through them were all around us again, and I was untethered. When I came back from my reverie, Radobyl was to our northeast up in the distance, and we were driving past the fortress walls of Terezin, which then held none of the meaning it later would, just the remnants of another, more belligerent time in the town to our south, walls I'd seen a thousand times before.

Presently Françoise woke again and broke me from my memory. She sat up, so that we were next to each other on the sofa.

"There is one more part of this story I've been telling you," Françoise said. "Where was I? Right. Of course I did not go with my parents on their new junket in the Congo. I was going to keep the baby. My mother was furious at my decision, and she and my father left me.

"I might have been in real trouble had it not been that around that time I had just begun seeing the Brauns. At first I worked for only Frau Braun, but she began to take me home to her husband as well. They were paying for it, but they were gentle and generous with me, nonetheless, and I came to trust them both. I don't think I sought them out for the sake of the baby at first-honestly, I didn't know what I'd do. But Frau Braun had wanted me, and here was this wealthy couple who had no children of their own. I began to see that it was providence, their having come back into my life.

"When the dentist noticed my swollen belly, he erupted at first, thinking I was claiming it was his, that I wanted money from him. Strange as it might sound, when he came to understand that the baby wasn't his and that was not what I was asking, he calmed. And at that same time, a preternatural peace seemed to come over Frau Braun.

"I have learned from my work how to read people. I saw something in Frau Braun's face-something I'd come there looking for. So I stopped pleading. I made my proposal overtly." And so I came to understand that this was what had taken her back to the Brauns that night. There was some safety in her knowing her baby would have a comfortable home with them, and that she could go to see her if she wished.

She stopped talking and looked at me.

"So, you see," she said. "Heidi Braun, the Brauns' little girl-she's mine."

And with her story complete, Françoise said she was tired. There was nothing more to say. It occurred to me, among other things, that Françoise was a good bit older than I'd assumed her to be. But surely I wouldn't remark on such a fact-now, or ever. We crawled off to her bed and went to sleep.

7.

Inside my door one afternoon weeks later I found a travel-worn envelope. My father's rendering of my address there on Scheepstimmermanslaan was barely legible. The first part was dated August 8. It had long been delayed in its arrival.

"Dear Leopold," the letter began.

Thank you for your letter no matter how brief or belated. Your mother is fine and I am fine and little Pitzky the dog is fine. We have all been wondering about you. We are each fine. In spring Hitler slept the night in Hradcany to spit in our faces. The German soldiers took over Prague with tanks and guns, but not Leitmeritz. I have written the national bank in Prague and I have heard nothing back but we can no longer maintain our funds and we can no longer make purchases and we can no longer liquidate our assets.

I have not heard from Johann Schmidt and I learned only the other day he has left for New York and could not have provided you with leather work so you cannot have work from him. What are you doing to keep aloft, my son? Please write to tell us. It pains me that we did not say good-bye to each other before your departure, but your mother explained you'd had a fight over money and so you left. I'm sorry that I was not there to see you off and know that I worry about you. Please understand I will do for you what I can from afar. And that I already have. Poxl you should go to the Leathersellers College in London. It will be possible for you to obtain a student visa to attend the school there. Johana and Niny can provide you a place to live and an introduction to the city. I have made arrangements with an associate in the consulate for you to have an exit visa from the Netherlands and a visa into England. You should leave immediately.

You ask after our lives here-the Bauers' sugar factory outside of Prague has been taken. I have gone to the Central Jewish Office and registered. I have papers and no one else has the expertise to run Brüder Weisberg. At the office in Prague they say they will send up a Devisenschutz Sönderkommando to look over our records. A troop of German soldiers has come through our neighborhoods in Leitmeritz, asking, and we are sure to see them again. One came up the Muehlengasse a few weeks ago and asked after our business and I asked was he theDevisenschutz Sönderkommando and he asked after my papers, but I told him I didn't have them and he said he would be back. He was the man who came through to find out. I would see others soon enough, he said.

Here there was a break in my father's letter. After the caesura my father had written the new date, September 22, in a hand substantially less neat than the one that proceeded it.

I write again without amendment or revision. The Devisenschutz Sönderkommando has come to the house. We will not control Brüder Weisberg and I would not tell you Leo that I put up a fight. But what could I do? There was nothing to do. What will become of it anyway? No one could tell you, least of all me.

Leo I am looking to London, from where we might be able to reach Palestine now and you must do the same and come from Holland this minute if you have not already. You must go to the British consulate in Rotterdam where I have arranged for a visa in London.

Your father

I did not note at the time the absence of any mention of my mother at all in the second part of my father's letter: the cease of majesty dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw what's near to it. Wise as my father's advice might have sounded, and wise as it clearly was in retrospect, leaving Rotterdam meant leaving Françoise.

I reread the letter.

I thought of Heidi, and it made me think of Françoise with the Brauns, but that was not enough to rend me from her. I sat down at my desk and wrote a long reply. I told my father I wished him and my mother well in their travels to London and hoped they would arrive safely. He should write me at the address I gave to tell me he'd arrived. I'd met a woman now, and while I didn't tell him it was love that was keeping me-who can say in the moment what makes him do anything?-I told them that I was happy to be there with her. My home now was in Holland, with Françoise.

8.

War broke out across Europe. My father did not write again. The Tennessee Sisters played their gigs at the Café le Monde. Greta lent a high close harmony a third above Françoise's leads as they sang "What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?" Their English was still a little rough, a little full of umlauts I now understand one does not generally find in a bluegrass song. Their clients had provided them with rawhide boots embroidered with colored leather, and shirts with studs and peaked shoulders. They looked the part. If he wears the uniform long enough, even the most peaceable man may grow to be a soldier.

I tried not to think about where Françoise had gotten those clothes each time I saw her play, but on the Saturday-night gig after my father's letter, for the first time it began to eat at me. My father's letter had begun to place some new thought in my mind: I imagined him at work the day I found my mother with her painter, going about his business while my mother went about hers. Was I so different now here in Rotterdam? Well, I knew about Françoise's profession in a way my father didn't know of my mother's surreptitious actions. But was that only rationalization? There was a visa to London. I was staying here with a woman who received all these things in exchange for-what?

Françoise's and Greta's voices blended beautifully. There was something to the act of harmonizing itself that smacked of precision: two voices doing two different things, diverging so they might come together as one, greater than either alone.

Françoise looked as happy as she ever had that night. Fifty Dutchmen were in the crowd. Who had come to listen, to see them, knowing them in the many ways a man can know a woman? Who'd simply stopped on the street upon hearing two Dutchwomen singing American gospel songs? I will never know. Françoise's fingers traveled deftly up her instrument, pulling out double stops and picking loose melodies over Greta's guitar playing. When they finished, Françoise showed me her mandolin case, which was piled full with guilders she'd received as tips, and she was too happy then for me even to think of starting a serious conversation about the future.

* * *

I suppose there are men who when they are in love know to call it love, who know its shape, its demands. Who are able to tell when its wings have begun to rust. You will not find my name anywhere on that manifest. My understanding of my concerns was somehow more immediate in those days. Since the afternoon I'd fled my mother's house I had only one direction and that direction was forward. To stop and survey, to stop and understand how I was feeling, would have been fatal. Perhaps it was this myopia that caused the most catastrophic decisions during that period of my life. Perhaps that's too easy.

When I think of it now, I can say that I do know what happiness looked like then. On Saturdays when we did not need to work, afternoons before she was to play gigs with Greta, Françoise and I would borrow bicycles from my boss and ride east out of Rotterdam, the direction opposite from the harbor. Not ten miles out of the city was an area where upon the horizon the green and brown of flat grasses gave way to brilliant swatches of color: tulip fields. Françoise would strap her mandolin in its case to her back, and I would strap a guitar to mine, and after ditching our bikes we would secret ourselves back amid acre upon acre of those definitively Dutch flowers. No farmer would disturb us on those weekend mornings, and after we made love, Françoise would teach me to make new chords on the guitar. She was a mandolin player primarily, but now I saw she knew how to play guitar as well as Greta. She would hold the instrument in her intelligent hands and show me three new voicings of G chords that sounded more open and fuller than the basic version I'd first learned. One morning in early spring, the first of a spate of warm days after winter's chill, I asked her to show me another new voicing of a G7, with the diminished seventh in the bass of the chord. But for some reason, she began to fumble with it.

"It's odd," Françoise said, giving up on it for a moment and cradling the guitar between her crossed legs. "I can make that chord easily if I don't think about it. But thinking about it now, trying to think where to fret it, I can't make my fingers do it. It's just muscle memory, making these chords. You wouldn't be able to think about it fast enough when playing in time if you tried. So you make your hand make the chord over and over until you don't have to think it, exactly. You just go to make the chord, and there it is."

She looked up at me, and in her face I could see she felt she'd expressed herself perfectly. But I didn't have that muscle memory, and I didn't fully comprehend. I told her I didn't know quite what she was talking about. Now the skin on her lips bunched together, and I watched the skin around her eyes tighten.

"Perhaps you need to listen better," Françoise said. She was no longer looking me in the eyes.

"I mean, you know the chords, right?" I said. "Of course you're thinking about it."

"Well, I know them, yes," she said. Her eyes were still narrowed and diverted from mine. "But I don't think, C, and then a C chord arrives. I just know I'm about to play a C chord and my hand is gripping the neck. I don't think it. I just do it. Maybe if you learned how to give yourself over to it, you'd learn how to play quicker yourself."

I looked down at my hands. I wished so much then that I understood what she meant-how to give myself over to it, to develop the muscle memory. But I could make chords well enough, I thought.

"You really don't see what I mean, do you?" Françoise said.

"Not really."

To my surprise, after I admitted again that I didn't understand, something eased in the tension that had gripped Françoise's face. It pleased her I'd confessed, at least, what it was that confused me.

"To act," Françoise said. "I just act with you now, Poxl, too."

"What do you mean?"

"For so many years I've learned how to perform for men. I read what they need from me, and I give it to them. That's the transaction: for me to fulfill their needs. And that's the right word: performance. But with you, Poxl..."

She stopped speaking. I do not know if a conversation like this is what it is to be in love-to disagree but to stay around and find out why, so it is no longer a disagreement. To do something so simple as to talk honestly, and then to listen. But I do know it's what it means to begin to know someone: confession, revelation, reconciliation.

"What is it?" I said. "I want you to tell me. Honestly."

"It's like undoing the notes of a chord and then making a whole new chord. Then practicing long enough to make a new muscle memory. For years being with men was like the same basic chord. But since we've been together it's like I've begun to unlearn how I've voiced things in the past. And it grows more complicated. I tried something like this once before-"

"Before?"

"It's where I got these instruments. There was an American, I've mentioned him before. He gave me all these records, gave me my first mandolin, my first guitar. He seemed not only to want things from me but to want to give. He told me he would take me back with him to the American city of Nashville. I believed him. Then I never saw him again."

We were both silent. If love shows itself at times by giving us a sense of propriety, I suppose I came close to understanding it in that moment: I didn't want to hear about her American. I'd kept tucked away any jealousy that might accompany our relationship, her work, but for the first time now I felt it. Blood came to my cheeks. Off in the distance the wind swayed the flowers, a huge patch of yellow tulips dipping away from us and then back in our direction. A cloud passed over the sun, dimming the world around us and honing sharp teeth in the cold air. I almost spoke, almost said that I didn't want to hear about her American. Perhaps if I had then, if I'd admitted that feeling, things might have gone differently in the days ahead. But the smallest thing can change us if we let it, and I did not speak. The cloud blew past, left the sun, and our world again warmed.

"I've never told you why I left Leitmeritz when I did," I said. Françoise looked up from her guitar, where her left hand had begun to form chords again while she listened, though she did not strike the strings with her pick. The skin around her eyes drew slack, bearing relief at having told me about her American, and gratitude for my not pursuing it when she'd finished. "That afternoon," I said, "I came upon my mother in the drawing room of our house with, well, with a painter. Some man. Some man who wasn't my father."

"And you didn't know of your mother's infidelities."

"No, I didn't know! Of course I didn't."

"How did you know he was a painter, then?"

I told her that I'd seen his paint-splattered pants in the corner.

"I'm sorry, Poxl," she said. "I'm sorry, but I do hope you'll think about what must have pushed your mother there. I hope you'll consider how complicated a marriage must be, years down the road."

Now I stopped talking as well. No cloud came to darken those fields, but I drew inward. What did I want in those moments? To argue with Françoise, to defend my father or defend my mother? To parse that old memory of seeing them in the leather yard when I was a kid, to understand what had passed between them? What I found was not what I expected: I simply felt as if my burden had eased, having spoken it aloud. The bright sun lit the tulip field beside us like a sail filling with wind.

Françoise's left hand gripped the guitar again. She struck the chord.

"That's the G7," she said, and she handed me the guitar.

I suppose there are men who know to call it love when they've fallen. Though it's pained and even ruined me over the years, I know only that if I'm happy in a moment I don't want it to end-only to move on the next day, to the next desire, then the next. I have much reason to long for forgiveness, but for that I'll never apologize. I took the guitar back and played the new chord myself. I moved slowly, putting down my ring finger on the high E string, my index finger on the first fret of the low E string, fumbling only to grasp it later. My hand didn't yet have the muscle memory to get it at once. Only time and practice could make that happen.

9.

One evening a month later, as spring was just fully upon us, my gaze fell to the harbor, whose waters were choppy in the wind blowing out to the great open water along the longest port in Europe. Thirty feet below my perch, Françoise, Greta, and Rosemary were standing next to a small dinghy that bobbed along the choppy surface. I saw Greta stick out one of her legs toward the boat and nearly fall forward until Françoise grabbed her arm. Rosemary followed. Then Françoise got in.

I called out to her, this woman I'd stayed in Rotterdam to be with at great personal risk. "Françoise! Up here!" But with the sound of the wind she did not hear me. I tried to return to my work. Ten minutes later three men passed in their sailors' woolens. These men were around my age, perhaps more properly boys than men, as I now understand I was at that moment. They, too, entered a dinghy to return to their boat out in the harbor-the same boat Françoise had just paddled out to. I could swear to this day that one of those boys was the same boy I'd seen talking so gruffly to Françoise just after she and I met. These boys must have been en route between some far shore and the great expansive continent. Perhaps they were Americans, even. Perhaps one of them was the very American who'd given Françoise her mandolin and her records. It was unlikely, I know that now and I'm certain I must have known it then. But it could have been the case. It wasn't, but I might have believed it. This boy I recognized wasn't the painter of my mother's cuckolding, either. But he might as well have been.

I tried to return to my work. A seabird landed on its perch, returning from wherever it is seabirds are always going to and returning from. It looked at me with its black beady eye. Was I my father in his evasive way eluding my mother's grasp alongside the Labe, a river he veritably owned? Or was I my own man, newly aloft in a new city I'd now lived in long enough to call home?

I crawled down from my perch. I found an idle dinghy. The oar left knocking against it was rotted. As I traveled into the harbor gloaming, the boat tossed in the waters of the Nieuwe Maas. Mists rose. Drops sprinkled my face, sending my memory back to the days of my youth by the Elbe, when the mist of the river was lifted to our faces in Schalholstice by the big turning wheel of my father's factory.

I pushed on.

Though for some time I saw nothing but waves, I finally spied the destination Françoise and her friends had reached. For more than a year I'd been unaffected by my knowledge of her profession. Here, faced with the tangibility of this ship, I found a crack I'd known was there splitting into a deep fissure. I found Françoise's dinghy tied to the ship's prow. I managed to square mine alongside it. The deck was slick with harbor mist. I stood by the bow. The only sound was the harsh break of waves lapping at the ship's starboard side. Twenty-five feet ahead of me a portal glowed against the evening's half-light. Looking down through the window, I saw three women pleasuring three young sailors. Strewn over the arms of a pea green ship bed and two desk chairs were wool sweaters with roll necks bunched up like chastised house pets. On the floor, a white cotton undershirt like spilled milk.

Françoise was the most active of the three women. She was sitting up atop the insubstantial, hairless body of that same young deckhand I'd observed paddling out to the ship, moving all about with an energy I'd never seen her take on with me. She had on no shirt. She was utterly undressed, naked in a way different from that she'd ever been with me. I saw a guitar leaning up against the wall in the corner of the berth. I allowed myself to be sure now I'd seen this boy speaking to Françoise that first night I met up with her. As I knelt on the deck of that ship watching Françoise on top of this boy, the guitar in the corner, I tried to convince myself it was nothing. Was it nothing? Then Bohemia and all that's in it is nothing. Seasickness gripped my stomach. Though it went against the most difficult decision I'd made in those months, I resolved at that moment no longer to leave myself subject to the feeling I had then, the same embarrassment my father had so clearly left himself subject to. The facts began to matter less and less. It was what I was feeling that mattered, and I had only one instinct-to flee.

I turned from the window. Just as had been the case that last day I was in Leitmeritz, there was no decision left to be made. It had been made for me, before my eyes. My body did have muscle memory after all, and it wasn't the memory of making chords. It was the memory of leaving Leitmeritz that afternoon I saw my mother with her painter. One foot before the other, all the way to the train station. My body knew just how to leave.

That night I packed. Next morning I left my flat for the British consulate to get the visa my father had arranged. With U-boat attacks on ships in the Atlantic and the North Sea all winter long, travel was dangerous, but my body was determined to reach London. In a room at the back of the consulate I was provided a secondhand longshoreman's sweater and a ticket for passage to Britain. I would enter the country at the port of Grimsby, from which I could travel by land to London.

On my way to the harbor I stopped to see if Françoise was at her position at the café. I was about to risk death to put the North Sea between us, but my mind was like melody and harmony in counterpoint-there was a second kind of memory in my muscles and it longed to see Françoise once more.

But she was not there.

When I think of it now, do I recognize what I was doing, the mistake I was making by leaving Françoise without saying good-bye? If you have had such wisdom in the moments when you were driven by emotion, by jealousy and confusion-well, nostrovia, as the Russians say. Had I taken a day more to think about it, had I taken Françoise back on a bicycle to the tulip fields, where we could have talked about it, could she have alleviated the anger I was feeling? Would it have changed what I was feeling? I'll never know. What's done can't be undone.

My decision was made. My body was in motion. I would not vacillate further. So I traveled along the same path as during the previous day's trek, and only an hour later a large ship run by William Muller and Company had a space for me, and I boarded.

We embarked.

10.

The open sea was cold. I spent the long passage out the Nieuwe Maas up on deck, looking north and gazing at the waters trying to imagine I could see the U-boats circling us, seeking our demise. While up there I experienced a feeling of the loss of love I'd only experienced something close to one time before. When I was twelve, most of my summer was spent by the oxbow in the river below my father's factory. Evening would arrive as we relaxed upstream from those waters, which served as the waste bin for whatever refuse was sloughed off by the workmen at Brüder Weisberg. Each afternoon before dark the children of Leitmeritz would walk down to the Elbe to the same bend in the river where my cousins and I had spied my mother and father in their broken flirtation when we were too young to know what we'd seen. There we swam. Fifty feet out into the middle of this stretch of water our father's fathers had built a birch-wood dock. Across from this dock dangled a rickety ladder.

One day I walked amid the din of afternoon cicadas crying in treetops. We children of the little city of Leitmeritz worshiped at the brown river's ankles. My cousins lived between my family's house and the river, and I picked them up for the walk. I could think that day only of a little girl named Suse. My pursuit of her had become an idée fixe. She was in Niny's class at the gymnasium, the daughter of one of my father's workmen. I'd known her father, Vladek, since I was a child. He was a dedicated worker who did not speak much. His disdain for his station and for my father was never obvious, but I'd always surmised it must be present.

Suse was a mediocre student. She wasn't dim, but she never seemed to hold an opinion of her own. Even at that young age she was a person who is not living her own life, but waiting for someone to live it for her. There was something not wholly unpleasant in this manner-a certainty to her acceptance of life and its hardships that smacked of a kind of counterintuitive confidence-and it was, for a boy coming from a home like mine, immediately attractive. I told Niny, my sole conspirator, about my design.

"You'll help me speak to Suse today," I said.

"Do what you will," Niny said. "I won't help, but I won't get in your way." Even then Niny knew how to handle me.

She returned to conversation with her sister. I spotted Suse. She was the only girl in our class who'd grown breasts. In the hamstrung light of the evening my eyes settled upon her shape. Niny and Johana and I swam our bodies content while all along I tracked my whereabouts on the banks of the Elbe, always knowing where in the water Suse was. I found myself at day's end resting on that birch-wood dock, next to Suse and Niny.

Niny had always been my favorite. We'd taken long train rides to visit the other Weisberg cousins outside of Debrecen, Hungary, when we were little. We would play games, seeing who could count all the yellow sunflowers outside the train window. By the oxbow behind Brüder Weisberg it was always Niny who would walk upstream from the mill wheel to explore the dark woods that sat a couple hundred feet above our land. Niny's presence provided me confidence in speaking with Suse each time she returned to shore. I said, "You're cold-let's put a towel around you." She only greeted me and then returned to conversation with Niny. I listened. They were talking about their Czech history class.

"Bratislava was once the capital of Hungary," I said.

Suse just looked at Niny, not knowing how to respond, not knowing really what I was talking about. Niny laughed at me. She knew if she was too much in my corner, it might tip Suse to my desires. Suse followed her lead and laughed, too. She was not snobbish or curt about it, which gave her a new power over me.

Soon we were all dressed. An early-evening moon stood sentinel over us, lucid in the receding sky. The banks of the Elbe were suddenly new to me, the fields of some distant planet we'd been transported to. Flies lifted out of the low grass in ululating swarms as if shaken off the earth's floor by the vibrating strength of my desire. A low waft of fragrant pollen rose in the night air. Johana joined Niny at a game of cards. I stared up at the purpling sky. The sun was too far behind the western bank of the river and the trees for us to see it set.

Across the way Suse was out of sight. She had trekked off to the stand of trees away from the river. I walked to the cusp of the wood, on the other edge of the purple tamarisk blossoms, where she'd gone to pack her swimsuit. She heard me coming. I said, "I believe I'm in love with you." Something in my honesty held her there long enough for me to speak again. "But I can see you're not interested in me."

A sudden wave of shyness overtook me. I turned away. Behind us the setting sun threw its light onto our little mountain Radobyl. The breeze was slow at my back. It was so close to dark now, I thought there might not be time to await Suse's answer. Then, a couple of steps away, I heard the crunching of footsteps on early-spring wood fall.

Suse's hand was at my back.

I closed my eyes and pushed my lips hard against hers. Suse kept her mouth open while stroking my neck with just the tips of her fingers. Her tongue felt huge against mine, covered in bumps at its side, which presented in my mind the image of a large squid. She pulled me toward her as if she were the man, something I could imagine her father, Vladek, doing to her mother, something I knew in my bones already would have been wholly out of character for my father.

When the sound of crackling branches came again I was so caught in our dark vertigo that I didn't react. Suse was not so intoxicated. She broke away and we turned to see that twenty feet from us a boy from one of the older classes at the gymnasium, whom I'd seen many times but whose name I did not know, was looking at us. My hand had been snaking up under Suse's shirt and had almost found its way to its goal.

He pointed at us and in his loudest voice said, "Little Suse is kissing the Yid from the leather factory! Suse and the Yid, kissing in the trees!"

She pushed me away. My hand sprang toward her again, snarled in her shirt. The boy ran off, yelling to his friends to come see, come see. But before anyone could arrive, Suse ran away home.

When I saw Suse in the future, she did not speak to me. Ours was not a Jewish town, but we Jews lived in relative peace at that period with our Czech neighbors. My insecurities kept me from seeking her again. It was not clear if I had jilted her or had been jilted, only that I no longer had what I wanted. Soon other boys were with her. By the time Suse and I were sixteen, the particular blankness of her character had begun to develop into a hollowness in her eyes. She was tiring from the variety of relationships she had with so many of the boys from Leitmeritz. She became everything to the men who needed her, even men who would point at me and call me malign names.

In turn she became invisible to everyone but the men who had lost her. She lingered in my mind like the wisps of cloud I moved through-or which moved through me-when I was aloft in my father's plane. Some men would embarrass her. Their hungry hands would be all over her in public, hands that seemed guided by lascivious spirits uncontrolled even by their owners. Others were gentlemen. None elicited an observable response, but they weren't thrown off until their own insecurities or boredom drove them away.

Many years later, Niny would tell me that she had learned Suse took up with an SA officer who came to love her during the occupation. When the Russians liberated Leitmeritz in May 1945 on their push through to the German border, she was dragged into the street. Townspeople, all of them men, tore her clothes. They pushed her to the ground. Many were the same men who had made love to her before the war, groped at her, and then left or were left by her.

It was their vicarious shame, Suse's consorting with the Nazis.

She became the living declaration of their own helplessness in the days after the occupation. We lived in a time where such things were possible-when the abstractions of our day could be encapsulated in the body of a living woman. What idea I was leaving behind me then, in the body of Françoise, I could not yet comprehend. It hadn't even fully hit me yet what I'd done in leaving her to begin with-only that I'd lost something, and it was too late to return.



Copyright © 2015 by Daniel Torday