Skybound (3 page)

His lips curve again in that reckless expression.
You’ll see,
that smile says.

He’s still coughing on the train. Unsure what we can or should say, we’re both reading, he the Herodotus, I the newspapers, against my better judgment. Just a few weeks ago, we were “winning the war.” Now, though, propaganda has become resigned, accusatory, as if all the losses and destruction are our fault. Even the authorities cannot uphold appearances. Reality is too stark, whispers too pervasive.

A friend of Vogt’s picks us up at the train station in Neustadt. It’s a small town and must have been very pretty before the war, but now it’s half rubble. Burnt beams sticking out of smashed bricks like gravestones of houses. Vogt’s friend tells us that city hall and the hospital are gone. More than three hundred dead. Vogt’s jaw tightens, and I know what he’s thinking. As much as the defenders try, they can’t be everywhere, unlike the enemy. I say nothing, hoping the bombers won’t reach my family hidden away in the forests. I know the place where my parents are. Ten houses, built of wood, nested against a hillside—what counts as a village in those parts. My mother’s sister is married to a gamekeeper; they will even get plenty of fresh meat if my past visits are anything to go by.

When Vogt opens the door of his house—it’s still standing, despite two houses hit at the start of the street—there’s nothing but silence. I assumed there would be family to welcome him back, yet the place is quiet and still.

He drops in on the neighbour and returns with a basket of food covered with a red-and-white chequered kitchen towel. Day-old buns, butter wrapped in waxed paper, liver-red strawberry jam in a glass jar secured with a rubber band, a thin side of ham, some eggs with the occasional feather still clinging to them, and beer in stein bottles. I doubt whoever bought this used Vogt’s ration card.

He pauses for a moment, gazes down at the towel, and we might be thinking the same—that it looks, from the corner of the eye, like blood-spattered cloth. The pattern is too regular, however, and the whole ordered madness of war is in dissolution everywhere else, so it can’t live in that basket.

He makes me sit in the kitchen while he cracks eggs and cuts ham and tosses both into a heavy iron skillet. My fingers itch. I should be doing this, although the fact that I’m his guest already challenges the rank difference between us. He is not a man who sits still easily, so I watch him move, watch him suppress a cough every now and then. All the while wondering what we can talk about.

“Why did you fail the test?” he asks eventually.

It doesn’t sting anymore that I did. I’m not made out of the same stuff he is. I’m content where I am and with what I’m doing. “I crashed a machine.”

“Did you?” He turns around and grins. “Why?”

“I lost my nerve, was confused . . .” And crashed the training plane.

“Were you court-martialled?”

“Yes, but I was innocent. They still suggested strongly that I wasn’t good enough, so I became ground crew.”

“I’ve crashed two.” He stirs the bubbling egg-and-ham mixture in the pan as white steam rises and spreads the first smell of food through the room. “Bailed once over Malta, once in Russia. Malta was a complete loss, but in Russia we salvaged the engine and the instruments. Damn sight luckier than my
Katschmarek
.”

His wingman. I swallow against something in my throat and am not sure if it’s fear or nervousness. “What happened?”

“He came down behind the Russian line. Took ground fire. We were battle pilots.”

Engaging enemy formations low over the ground, spooking men and horses, and throwing bombs from a low altitude. I look at him, try to read his features, but his eyes are unfocused, staring into a distance the dark kitchen doesn’t yield.

“We were circling and watched the Russians get to him. They beat him to death with the butts of their rifles where he stood, hands raised.”

“What did you do?”

“Machine-gunned the lot,” he says and shakes his head. “We’d heard that the war in the east was different. No gentleman’s agreement, no honour, all rules of war thrown into the fire.”

“I’m sorry to hear.”

He smiles. “I’d rather fight the
Amis
or Tommies. Haven’t seen any of them beat a prisoner to death. Maybe it’s only a matter of time now.” He turns back and serves the eggs and ham onto two plates, then puts one in front of me. “But Berlin is far in the east.”

I take the plate and pull it closer. Thinking of Russian tanks in Berlin makes me feel ill. Somehow, my mind was always too exhausted to think that far until now. We all know defeat is coming, or maybe a truce just in time to save us all, though the Führer will never yield. Nobody can imagine him petitioning for peace. Short of all the angels of the Lord descending from heaven to fight on our side, there’s just no other way this war can go.

My mind usually freezes before I reach that point in my thoughts. I keep busy just to not think about it. I can fix an engine, reload and fuel a plane—I can’t fix this war. I’m not sure I’d want to. Maybe the Nazis aren’t that wrong in leading us all to Ragnarök. Maybe they are right, and living as slaves is a fate worse than death. Maybe Germany
did
squander her chance at greatness. Maybe something will happen that stops the end from coming just in time.

I tuck in, my body too used to eating when it can and sleeping when it can to allow such thoughts to ruin a good meal. Vogt pulls a bun apart and watches me with interest.

“Why am I here?” I ask as I scrape the last few morsels together, then wipe them up with a piece of bread.

“You said your family is too far away to visit on leave.”

“Like yours?”

He shakes his head. “We don’t speak.”

“Why?”

“My father lost his business because I wasn’t there to take over.” He collects the plates, clearly restless to be doing things.

At the rate at which he’s been flying, I doubt he’s found any rest recently. From briefing to mission to debriefing and yet another briefing and mission until weather and light and naked exhaustion put a stop to the relentless rhythm . . . No wonder he can’t sit still. They haven’t let him for a while, and even with the smoke still burning his lungs, I can see that he thinks he should be doing something. Maybe it was a bad idea to come here at all. His
Staffel
is going to miss him, and definitely
Hauptmann
Wischinsky, the captain of the squadron.

Maybe that’s what he thinks, that he should be out there, leading his men and supporting his captain in one of those many attacks. He’s emanating restlessness, uneasiness, and I hate to think I’m the one thing holding him back from where he’d rather be. We’re both at loose ends without the machine that connects us, however furtively.

“What’s on your mind?”

I inhale deeply. “Just wondering why I’m here.”

“I wanted to thank you.”

And for that, you’ve dragged me away from the airfield?
I smile, but don’t really look at him. “Least I can do if I can’t fly.”

“You still pulled me out.”

He’s right, so I shrug. I don’t want to admit to the childish fancies I have about him. For me, he can walk on water, dance in the clouds. I know he can’t, really, but what he can and can’t do pales into nothing when I look at him. Something pulls me towards him, irrespective of the impossibility of it all. I hope that he doesn’t notice just as much as I hope that he’s pulled, too. What am I compared to a wingman he protects and who protects him, who knows what it is like to soar? Compared to comrades who stood by him in Russia? I merely maintain engines, change oil, and help with the other tasks, dirty, exhausting, and not glorious at all.

“I’m glad I did.”

“So am I.” Vogt looks solemn.

This house is too big for us—it seems to loom in the darkness, filled with furniture that has lived in strangers’ memories. This isn’t home, and I’m dreading closing my eyes here. I want to go home, or at least to a place where I’m among my own kind. Wherever that is.

We settle somewhat uneasily in the living room. Vogt cleans a layer of dust from the piano in the corner, but doesn’t touch the keys. Unplayed sound is like unspoken words. He turns back to me just as I’m about to make my excuses and ask to be shown to my room.

“I did notice your face under the oil.”

I can’t suppress the urge to rub at my cheek with one—clean—hand. He makes me feel like an ash-covered Cinderella. I watch him, wondering where this will lead. I stifle a yawn, and whatever he was about to say next, he smiles instead and leads me to my room.

I set my bag down, and I expect him to say goodnight. “You know, a friend of mine told me a story about the black men in his wing.” He pauses, but I don’t offer anything. Who knows what pilots say about us amongst themselves?

“One commander was concerned that the black men looked untidy when Wolfram von Richthofen came in for an inspection.
Baron
von Richthofen. So he has the pilots stand at attention, and the ground crew assemble behind a shed, hoping he won’t see them. But von Richthofen does, of course, and asks who do those men belong to. So the commander has to admit they belong to his wing, and von Richthofen tells the ground crew to come forward and take their rightful place. The Baron didn’t think for a moment that they looked out of place next to all the crisp and clean pilots.”

Told by one of ours, this story would have gone differently. I get what he’s saying—that we belong to the wing, just as essential to it as the iron and steel without which a pilot is merely a soldier staring longingly into heaven. I
knew
that. That he has to tell the story at all leaves a strange taste in my mouth.

He means well. He’s being generous. In some odd way, he means to tell me we’re comrades, even maybe, possibly, equals. That he feels like he has to say it betrays that we’re not, to his mind.

“Goodnight, Felix,” he says when I don’t really respond. I don’t think he expected much more from me. So why do I feel like I should have said something when I close the door?

The bed is cold despite the heavy feather-stuffed duvet. It takes a long time before the mattress gives up the clammy chill that I imagine settled in here while the house was deserted. How long has Vogt been flying—half noble protector, half avenging angel—and not come home? Pilots are hell-raisers off duty, spending their pay without thoughts of tomorrow. Lately, the thought of tomorrow is like the thought of a hundred years into the future. Who can imagine that Germany will still exist?

I’ve been too harsh on him. He dragged me out here for company because, for whatever reason, his comrades in his squadron wouldn’t do. He needed a stranger, somebody on the periphery of the flying circus. Maybe he’d felt comfortable, sharing that cigarette.

I did notice your face under the oil.

I touch my fingertips to my cheek, trace the skin there, touch the corner of my mouth. Maybe I resent him because he is what I failed to become. I’m the eagle who died in his egg while my brother grew up strong and proud.

You’re the lucky one.

Now I can’t sleep, although the mattress is finally warm. I push my legs out from under the covers and get dressed again, shivering in the night chill crawling into the house. I leave the guest room and walk downstairs. There’s soft golden light under the door to the living room, and I push it open without knocking.

He’s sitting at the piano, a snifter of cognac standing naked on the highly polished wood. He’s bowed deep over the keys, fingers silently tapping them, not pressing hard enough to make any sound. A silent music only he can hear, and whatever he’s hearing, it’s slow and deliberate and terribly melancholic. And, the strangest thing is, I can almost hear it too.

The sudden realisation chokes off my next breath. I must have made a sound, because he straightens and turns around, a thin strand of his straight hair falling onto his forehead with a rakish air. His expression is contemplative, but not, I notice, surprised. I want to move away, back into his blind spot. I want to tell him what I feel when I see him take to the skies, and what I felt when he trailed the dark smoke behind him. How I’d hoped he wouldn’t have to bail to avoid being burned alive, because at that altitude, his parachute wouldn’t have opened in time. And I simply wouldn’t have been able to see him die on that airfield.

“I don’t know why I care so much, but I do,” I finally admit.

His fingers touch the keys, gently, as if he were getting to know the piano. “I can see that in your face.” He bends his neck. “You watch me.”

You must be watching me too if you can tell that.
“Like right now, you mean?” I’m forgetting my place. We are not exactly friends or familiar in any other way. But I care. We could know each other, if any man can ever know a hero.

His lips twitch, then he suppresses another cough and spreads his fingers out on the keys, depressing them a little, still making no sound. With his manic energy, I’d expect Beethoven from him, though right now he looks like someone contemplating Chopin.

“So, you couldn’t sleep?” he asks. “Cognac?”