by Ariel Lawhon
“Irene!”
Gertrud wonders how Matilde does it, how she goes out the window without Irene. How she chooses her sons over her daughter. But she does. Gertrud blinks and Matilde is scrambling over the windowsill, her feet dangling, and then with a wounded cry that has nothing to do with fire or pain or burning, she drops to the ground below.
Leonhard reaches for Gertrud. He will not wait any longer. But the ship hits the ground and they are knocked apart, thrown to their hands and knees. Chairs slide and topple and join together in a giant knot between them. Leonhard reaches for her. Calls her name with such a note of fear that her heart stumbles in response
He is closer to the window than she is. He could jump. He should jump.
Gertrud reaches for him. “Please don’t leave me.”
THE STEWARDESS
Emilie opens her eyes. She blinks. She sees nothing but red and smells nothing but smoke. Something wet and warm drips down her forehead and into her eyes, and she realizes that her scalp is bleeding. She wipes the back of her hand across her face. Wipes the blood out of her eyes.
Emilie hears a deep groan and realizes it’s coming from her. She rolls to her side. Coughs. There is so much smoke in the room and it is so hot and she can’t order the frantic bursts of thought that ricochet inside her skull. Emilie tries to remember where she is and what’s happening. Matilde Doehner’s cabin. Something is very wrong. Something happened and she is hurt and she needs to get out of this room, but she can’t remember why or how. And then…
Oh.
An explosion.
Emilie raises herself onto her hands and knees. She crawls forward.
THE JOURNALIST
“I could never leave you,” Leonhard says.
He flings chairs out of the way. She hears this, barely, over the roar of the fire, and then his arm is around her waist like a steel cable and they are loping toward the window. He does not release his grip as they scramble over the edge or even as they hover there for a moment, their legs dangling into space. It is only when they drop into smoke and emptiness that she feels his grip on her waist relax, and only then because he does not want to fall on top of her.
The drop is no more than ten feet, but she has no way of preparing for the impact with so much smoke obscuring her vision. She hits the ground leaning forward with her legs slightly bent and she’s pitched forward, unable to break her fall. The impact knocks the air from her lungs. Gertrud lies there, stunned, the side of her face mashed into earth that is strangely damp and cool. Leonhard’s feet come into view, and then his hand is at her waistband, yanking her up. But she still can’t breathe. Her lips tingle and her eyes burn. There is a scratch on her cheek, and it feels as though she’s holding a hot coal in the palm of her right hand. She looks at it, confused, and sees angry red blisters where she beat out the fire on her hemline.
Gertrud feels a bright, clean thread of air entering her lungs and she gasps for it more greedily. Leonhard pulls her forward without an ounce of gentleness. He is almost brutal in his desperation to get out from beneath the burning airship. They run through the obstacle course of debris, fallen girders, flaming furniture, a charred body—she looks away from this—hunks of wreckage and objects so twisted by fire and the impact of the wreck that she cannot even identify them.
They run.
But not fast enough.
Gertrud feels the sparks on her shoulders and in her scalp. She looks up to see an inferno settling down on top of them.
THE NAVIGATOR
Max runs aft. Aft. Aft. He veers around the blazing purgatory toward the passenger decks. Emilie. That is all he can think of. Her name is scorched into his mind. He must find Emilie. He must. He will.
The base of the airship is on the ground and tilting badly, but that does not stop him from throwing his shoulder against the first section of glass that he can find. He expects it to shatter or explode or lacerate his arm, but it does none of these things. The glass leading into the observation deck beside the dining room simply crumbles and he finds himself staring up into the faces of two men and two women. Shell-shocked faces. Almost blank. None of these faces belong to Emilie, but he reaches his arms out nonetheless, pulls the people from the wreckage, shoves them forward. Away.
And then he hears the screams, pitched into the highest key possible by dread. The screams are his. He is calling her name.
“Emilie!”
THE STEWARDESS
Emilie hears Max calling her name. She hears the fear and the desperation, and it becomes her compass. Her true north. She turns, searching for it.
She cannot stand.
She cannot see.
She cannot breathe.
But she can hear him. She can hear him calling to her, and it is enough. Emilie crawls forward into the dark, swirling, strangling smoke.
Max.
Max.
Max.
She isn’t sure if she says his name out loud. If it is a whisper or a shout. But she calls it. From her heart if from nowhere else.
Hands, knees, one in front of the other. Emilie moves toward him.
“Max.”
THE CABIN BOY
Werner is alive. Wet and freezing and shaking so badly that he drops to the ground in an uncoordinated heap. But he is alive. He squeezes his eyes shut and waits for the pain. Because it is inevitable.
One minute. He can feel the heat of the burning ship rolling off the field.
Three minutes. This is when the screams really begin to bother him. Screams from within the ship. He can hear the terror and fear and pain of men caught in the flames. But there is something worse about the screams coming from every direction across the field. The spectators can do nothing but watch in horror as their friends and loved ones are consumed within the Hindenburg. They are watching people die. And they will live to remember it.
Five minutes.
He feels nothing more than a scratch on the palm of his hand where he caught himself. It’s not deep. But it stings. And this pain—insignificant though it is—is the thing that roots him to reality. It is the thing that convinces him that he isn’t dead.
THE JOURNALIST
Leonhard shoves her. A ruthless thrust to her back that sends Gertrud stumbling forward with a grunt and a curse. Her limbs sprawl and she hits the ground so hard that her vision blurs. The last thing she sees before the Hindenburg collapses and explodes into a cloud of sparks is Leonhard lying beside her in a heap of elbows and knees bent at unnatural angles.
They lie ten feet from a girder that glows so red she fears it will melt and the metal will spread toward them. Leonhard reaches out. Grabs her hand and gives it a tender squeeze. But pain rockets through her and she pulls away.
“You’re hurt.” Leonhard is on his knees now, inspecting the raw flesh of her palm.
“It’s not that bad.”
“It’s not good, Liebchen.”
A high-pitched keening begins somewhere near them as they scramble to their feet. A form stands in the flames on the other side of the structure, waving madly. Begging. A man, she thinks, desperate to find his way out of the inferno. She is frozen at the sound of his screams. Terrified. Appalled. But something wakens in Leonhard and he lurches forward with a demon-like urge toward self-destruction, like a moth driven into the flame.
It is Gertrud’s turn to save her husband. She calls to him once, twice. She begs him to stop, but he is compelled by the burning figure. Gertrud grabs his arm, her fingernails digging into the bare skin of his forearm, and she throws her weight backward, nearly sitting on the ground before she stops his forward momentum.
“No.” Her command is loud and clear and final. She will not let him go.
Leonhard stops and looks at her, startled. He reluctantly allows himself to be dragged away, the screams still ringing from a dozen places within the ship. Men. Women. Gertrud chooses not to think of Irene Doehner as they stumble away.
THE NAVIGATOR
Max can’t see anyone else ins
ide the ship. Everything is consumed by flames. So he stumbles backward. Catches his heel on some plant with deep, sprawling roots.
“Fuck-bloody-fucking-hell-shit-damn-sonavabitch.” It’s a prayer. It’s a litany. It’s the cry of a heart that has found itself in hell and is begging God, not for release, but for the chance to free another.
“Where is she?”
“Where is she?”
“Where is she?”
He repeats this over and over and over as he stumbles away again, toward the control car. He hadn’t even bothered to see if anyone remained there. He has simply run after her.
The control car is illumined by raging flames, and when he stretches onto the balls of his feet to look inside he finds it empty. To the bow, then, and around the other side. This is what he intends. There are twelve men in the bow of the ship. No, he thinks, there were twelve men. None could have survived. The nose of the ship is completely incinerated. Rescuers carry a man, a body, still burning, from the blackened hull. He can smell the scorched flesh. The burnt hair. He can hear the gurgling, final groans of a man who did not die quickly enough.
Max Zabel vomits onto his shoes.
Then he breathes in the stench and hurls himself forward again. He circles the fiery mass to the starboard side. Flames press against the window. He sees the silhouette of a hand pressed against the glass and then it clenches and falls.
He moves toward it but someone—nameless and faceless, there might be two because each of his arms is clamped into a vise-like grip—drags him away. Drags him kicking and screaming and cursing and bellowing the only single coherent word that he knows right now.
“Emilie!”
THE CABIN BOY
Werner is on his feet. He isn’t sure when he stood or even how he made the decision to do so, but he’s away from the wreckage, watching the flames as bile rises in his throat. He doesn’t want to witness any more, but he can’t seem to turn away.
“What are you doing?”
The voice is harsh and familiar. When a large, heavy hand clamps onto his shoulder he knows who it belongs to: Heinrich Kubis.
Werner turns a dazed and dirty face to the chief steward. The man has never been one to offer pity, but he does so now. Fear has softened him.
“Why are you standing here?” he shouts. “Get away!”
Kubis shoves Werner to get him moving, but the boy, exhausted and confused, goes in the wrong direction. He stumbles into the blanket of low-hanging smoke, toward the blazing wreck instead of away from it.
“Get off the field, you idiot! You’ll die!” The words are English, and Werner only catches half of them in the commotion.
His English is limited, and under the circumstances he can’t think of the right words to respond to the soldier who has risen out of the smoke. Not with the heat and noise and this man trying to drag him away from the ship.
So finally Werner digs his heels into the ground and points at the fire, then back at himself. “Ich bin der cabin-boy vom Hindenburg!” And again, louder this time. “Ich bin der cabin-boy vom Hindenburg!”
The soldier takes in his grubby uniform and then lets go, speechless. Then he claps Werner on the shoulder and calls out to the men around them, “Hey! This is the cabin boy!”
Werner is swarmed by young American soldiers who pat him and hug him and shake his hand. They ask him questions he can’t answer. They congratulate him on making it out alive, as if his surviving was up to him and not a matter of providence and stupid luck.
The first soldier is the only one to notice that Werner is soaked to the skin and shivering. He takes off his coat and wraps it tightly around the boy. The coat is six inches too long in the sleeves and hangs to the middle of the boy’s thighs, but the warmth is a gift. Werner feels his muscles uncoil. His teeth stop chattering. Werner Franz stands with these strangers and watches the Hindenburg burn.
After several minutes, a familiar face wanders into view. Wilhelm Balla. He’s limping slightly but doesn’t seem to be hurt otherwise. Werner has never been so glad to see the sour-faced steward, especially when Balla wraps a protective arm around his shoulders and leads him away.
“Come on, son,” Balla says, “there’s nothing more we can do here.”
The last thing Werner Franz sees as he leaves the airfield is the pristine form of Xaver Maier standing near the wreck, his white jacket as clean as though it has just been laundered. Not a smudge anywhere on him. The only thing missing is his toque. Maier doesn’t look amazed or afraid or sad. He looks lost, as though for the first time in his entire life he isn’t sure what to do.
Werner watches as the chef dips two fingers into the breast pocket of his coat and pulls a cigarette from the pack he keeps there at all times. Xaver tips the end of his cigarette into a burning pile of rubble, then puts it to his lips and inhales. The chef walks away, nonchalant, having once again found his bearings.
THE JOURNALIST
Gertrud can feel the heat of the fire only in her palm but she can smell it everywhere: in the smoke and the wisps of burnt hair that drift toward her nose. She can smell the bodies. She can smell urine and vomit on the stumbling forms she and Leonhard pass in the field. Gertrud can smell the despair.
A man in a white Panama hat—so startling and clean compared to everything around him—appears to sprout from the ground in front of them.
“This way!” he yells and grabs Leonhard’s sleeve.
This bizarre, pristine stranger leads them toward a limousine that idles at the edge of the field. The car was meant to ferry the passengers from the landing area to the hangar, but it’s being used as an ambulance instead.
The man opens the car door and motions them to get inside, but a wild, desperate voice screams at him from within.
“There’s no more room in here! Go away!” It is female. German. Deranged.
Gertrud braves one glance and sees Matilde Doehner crouched in the otherwise empty vehicle, a badly burned son tucked beneath each arm. She is a fierce, feral lioness protecting her children.
THE NAVIGATOR
Hangar No. 1, the closest structure to the wreck, has been set up as a makeshift infirmary. It was a spontaneous decision made by whatever rescuer pulled the first broken body from the airship. A matter of practicality. Less distance to drag, carry, pull the wounded.
No, Max thinks, as he limps toward the hangar, not everyone within is wounded. That word implies survival. And he knows that some of the people he has seen being carted through the wide, gaping doors no longer exist on this side of eternity.
Max does not know how long he sat there in the field. He only knows that it was damp, because of either the rain or the water ballasts, and that he couldn’t move or think or function. He simply sat, hunched over, head lolling to the side as the ship consumed itself.
No one should have survived. And yet here they are, wandering around like scattered sheep after a storm. Passengers. Crew members. Ground crew. Reporters. Spectators. All here in the field together. All of them disoriented. All of them horrified. And there are cars zooming about. Not just military jeeps but civilian cars as well, ferrying the survivors hither and yon. Who the hell can tell where anyone is in this mess?
Max has never had to think about setting one foot in front of the other before. He has never had to give his body specific, simple instructions. But he does now. And it seems an age before he reaches the hangar and stumbles inside.
Someone yells for help, then wraps a blanket around his shoulders. Asks a series of nonsensical questions in English. Who cares what year it is or what his name is or who the president is?
“Where is Emilie?” He croaks the question out. Coughs.
The overly talkative, curious stranger shoves a cup of water into his hands. Urges him to drink. And he does, marveling at the miraculous properties of water. The coolness. The wetness. The perfect satiating waterness of it.
It takes only a moment for the stranger to assess that the worst damage Max has suffered is shock.
He’s led to a cot that immediately collapses the moment he puts his weight on it. He’s yanked to his feet, as though this is his error and not the fault of poor assembly. He wanders away while the man tries to make the cot sturdy enough to hold his weight.
The hangar is huge, almost twice the size of the Hindenburg, and is filled with cots and bedrolls and people shouting, wandering through its cavernous belly. People lie everywhere. Others stand in groups talking in hushed whispers. Doctors call for help. Nurses rush from one victim to the next, substituting busyness for help because really, there is nothing that can be done for most of them.
Max picks an end—it doesn’t matter which one—and begins to work his way down the row of cots. He stops. Looks. Searches the ruined faces. And at every bedside he asks one question: “Emilie?”
THE JOURNALIST
It’s a hangar. She knows that much. And it has been turned into an infirmary. There are people sprawled across cots and on the floor. There are people running around and shouting directions. A handful of young, fresh-faced girls in white nurse uniforms look on, horror-stricken.
Someone has found a chair for Gertrud and she sits still and quiet, watching Colonel Erdmann dying at her feet. Leonhard has gone to get help for her hand, but she has lost sight of him. A priest stands ten feet away giving last rites to a crew member. The priest has been going down the line, attending these men by order of who is closest to dying.
“My shoes are too tight,” Erdmann says.
His skin is singed black in patches. Portions of his clothing are burned off and others are melted to his skin.