“What are these?” he said, pointing to the dish I had set down in front of him.
“Scones,” I said. “I baked them yesterday, but they’re still fine, I think.”
“Scones…” he said. “What’s going to become of you?”
“Where’s…”
“Job-hunting.”
“Job…”
What had been the start of a grin now crinkled into a full-fledged smile. “She’s going to fly.”
I stared at him. My mouth fell open.
My father began laughing, as if he suddenly saw the humor in it. “She’s applied for a job as a stewardess.” He laughed harder and harder. I looked at him. I couldn’t help it, I started laughing too.
“She’s going to fly!” My father slammed his hand down on the table. The teapot jumped and the candle flickered in the tea warmer. He howled with laughter. I howled with laughter. We lay facedown on the table, our heads buried in our arms, and laughed until we cried.
And then, all at once, there was silence. I sat up, my cheeks damp from laughing, and as I stared at my father, who was still grinning and wiping his eyes, I suddenly remembered what my mother had said, that everything must come to an end, and there, at that moment, the feeling I had had for the past few weeks suddenly vanished, that sense that we were living in a bubble, that we had landed in a place in time where we were safe and sheltered, invulnerable to sorrow and woe…I looked at my father. The last trace of a grin faded from his lips, the sparkle in his eyes faded.
MY FATHER AND I finished off the last few planes together. We sat at the table and silently passed each other parts. Now and then, whenever a new box was opened, my father would tell me something about the model, that the Messerschmidt 110 was a slow turner, for instance, but was dangerous to attack because of the tail gunner, and then we’d look at the picture on the box before we went on, sorting parts, filing wings, gluing, and painting. I gazed at the shrinking pile in the hallway like a prisoner who was counting the days that separated him from freedom.
And then, one day, I came home from school and the pile was gone. As I peeled off my wet clothes next to the coat rack I heard a metallic rattling coming from the living room. I stood among my dripping things and listened intently. A bell tinkled. I lowered my jacket and schoolbag to the floor and walked carefully toward the living room door.
My father was sitting at the breakfast bar. Before him, in a sea of crumpled paper, stood the old portable typewriter. A cigarette lay in an ashtray. Smoke curled up lazily to the ceiling. My father greeted me wearily and pointed to the teapot, standing over a flame. He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and continued typing. The bell tinkled and he pulled back the carriage, blew out smoke, and hammered away at the keys. After a while, he stopped. I sat across from him, on the other side of the typewriter. He had stubbed out his cigarette and drank large gulps of tea. It was a long time before either of us spoke.
“We can’t go on making planes forever, boy.” He looked at the sheet of paper hanging out of the typewriter. “Though I must say, I think I’m better at building planes. When you have to describe your life in a few lines, it all seems like nothing more than chance and coincidence.”
“What do you do for a living?”
My father looked up with an expression that bordered on amazement. “God,” he said after a while. Faint lines rippled across his forehead. There was a long silence.
“I’m going to go do my homework,” I said.
“Wait! Wait.” He frowned, then shook his head. “I…”
Suddenly I saw him again as the flier, the model airplane builder, the engineer who invented machines that made him unnecessary. I was standing next to my stool, half turned away. Faces, each one slightly different than the last, slid in front of the other. One man, so many faces.
“What do you want to be, when you grow up?” he asked.
“A cook,” I said.
“I thought as much. Do you really want to be a cook? Is that the only thing you really want?”
“I do now,” I said. “But perhaps it’s not what I imagined.”
“Nothing is,” he said. “It never is.”
We looked at each other for a while.
“Nothing ever is all that great.” He raised his hand, as if to stop any objections. “But that’s not the point. You have to hold on. If you really want something, you have to hold on to it. That’s at least as important as talent.”
“But…”
He took out a cigarette and lit it. In the cloud of smoke that poured from his mouth, he said. “Did I ever tell you what I did after the war?”
He had come back and started flying for spray companies. And then he had had that accident.
“No, before I came back. I stayed in England for a while.” He beckoned. “Sit down a minute.”
I poured fresh tea and he told me how, in those days, victory had come, an end to the war, and how he had discovered that his life, from one moment to the next, was no longer a path paved by circumstances outside himself. “It was,” he said, “as if there was an empty plain in front of me, and I knew that I had to go out into that emptiness. At least, that’s what I supposed life was: an expedition to the South Pole, but before Amundsen and Shackleton had set foot there, New Zealand before Tasman, South Africa before Van Riebeeck.”
Like so many exiles, he reported weekly to the Dutch embassy, in the hope of getting news of his parents. Most of the others were Engelandvaarders, men who were often somewhat older and who, during the war, had crossed the
