by Ariel Lawhon
He will not open the package, but his curiosity is aroused. He gives it a gentle shake, then presses his ear against the brown paper wrapping. Within he can hear the faint chimes of a music box, a few random notes let loose by the movement. Erdmann could have given his wife this gift in Frankfurt when he’d had her paged. But no, he had waited. And Max believes he had done so purposefully. This was to be a gift she would receive in the event of his death. A farewell. He slides the package carefully to the side, incapable of sorting through his emotions.
Erdmann’s is the only package in the box. The rest are letters and postcards. He pulls them out and places them in two large stacks to be counted. There are 358, but this is not something he will be able to say with any degree of certainty for at least an hour. Because he has counted half of the first stack when he finds the letter.
There is no stamp. No address—return or otherwise. Just one name written hastily in black ink.
Max.
His own name. And he recognizes Emilie’s direct handwriting.
The letters blur before his eyes, and frantic blinking does nothing to clear his vision. He lays the envelope on the table and presses it down with a trembling hand.
Max Zabel drops his head to the table and weeps.
THE CABIN BOY
Werner won’t back away from the cordoned-off wreckage despite orders from the gruff soldier. The man can’t be much older than Werner, but he’s had the fear of God put in him and he won’t let Werner near the airship. American soldiers stand at regular intervals guarding what’s left of the Hindenburg. They hadn’t moved quickly enough the night before, so spectators made off with bits of the ship and various objects. Now they don’t know if important clues were lost. Commander Pruss blames this on the Lakehurst leadership. They blame it on him. Tension sweeps through both ranks, and the finger-pointing and the whispering have already begun.
In theory Werner could move down the line and try his luck with the next soldier, but he doesn’t see the point. The base commander has given him permission to search for his grandfather’s pocket watch, and he intends to do just that.
“My name is Werner Franz—”
“I don’t care who you are,” the soldier says but then hesitates when he notes the heavy German accent.
“—And I’m cabin boy on this ship.” Werner chooses words that he knows. Simple, clear words. He speaks them loudly. With confidence. “Rosendahl gave me permission.”
He doesn’t break eye contact and he doesn’t betray any emotion. The soldier looks uncertain, but Werner stands there, hands clasped in front of him, waiting. He’ll go back and get it in writing if he has to.
“Let him through, Frank!” someone shouts from twenty feet away. “That’s the kid I told you about last night.”
Werner turns to see the soldier who had so kindly lent him a coat. He waves a greeting and then ducks under the rope before anyone else has a chance to object.
The ship has burned its mark into the field; a patch of scorched earth the exact length and width of the Hindenburg. Werner stands at the edge, unsure how to enter. It’s only when he catches a glimpse of Max picking his way through rubble at the rear of the ship that Werner finds the courage to step in.
He goes first to where the officers’ mess was located. Even with nothing left but ashes and blistered metal, he finds the place by instinct, making turns where corridors would have been, imagining the steps down to B-deck. Werner knows the pocket watch could not be here, but he doesn’t think he’ll get another chance to look around. Besides, he wants to find a souvenir if he can. Perhaps a bit of the fine china on which he used to serve meals to the officers. He wants proof—something he can hold on to with his own hands—that he was on the Hindenburg and that he survived. Seeing his name in print this morning has made him fear his own mortality. But it has also made him proud of his service.
There is nothing left of the officers’ mess. Not a dish. Not a table. Nothing but bits of broken metal and melted glass. So he moves on toward the crew quarters and the room he shared with Wilhelm Balla. He has a sinking feeling in his heart that the watch has been lost forever. How will he explain that to his father and his grandfather? They gave the watch to him, not Günter. He should have taken better care of it.
Werner is mentally berating himself when he steps through what is left of the doorway to his cabin. The fabric-covered walls, the carpet, the beds have all been burnt to ash. But he sees a glimpse of what used to be the closet. He kicks at it with his foot and it crumbles further, revealing the corner of a burlap bag. Hope trembles in his chest. Werner squats to pick through the bag. Bits of burned clothing and the heel of a shoe are all that’s left. Or at least he thinks so until his fingers touch the unmistakable links of chain.
He lifts his grandfather’s pocket watch from the ruins with the tip of one dirty finger. He sits back on his rear end, right in a pile of ashes, astonished. Had he been forced to wager, he would have said the watch was lost. Yet here it is, cradled in the palm of his hand, its survival as improbable as his own.
Werner sets the watch in his pocket and dusts the soot from his pants. He isn’t certain what to do with himself now that he has no duties to perform. The officers and crew members who survived are either in the infirmary or meeting with the base commander to figure out what happened, how this could possibly have happened, and what they will do about it now. There is no place for Werner, so he wanders away from the wreckage, circling it aimlessly.
He has seen the small clumps of flowers, but it’s not until the toe of his boot catches one for the third time and he stumbles forward that he stops and looks at them. The petals are small, but they are bright and open and they smell like spring.
Werner Franz has something to do after all.
He picks a messy handful of the white starbursts and jogs back to the main office where he left the newspaper earlier that day. He scans the list of names more thoroughly this time now that the shock has worn off. He finds the one he’s looking for and reads it three times, just to make sure. He sounds out the letters carefully, using the tricks that his mother taught him.
It is not a pleasant task but Werner will keep his promise. He finds Irene Doehner laid out beside her father, arms crossed over her chest, a blanket laid across her body. Their names are written on cardboard signs at the base of their cots. There are almost three dozen bodies in the room, and hers is the smallest of them. Werner does not see her mother or her brothers, either on the cots or anywhere else, and he wonders where they might be. He wonders, but he doesn’t go in search of them to offer his condolences because his business is with Irene alone.
“I told you that I would bring you flowers today,” Werner whispers over her still, slender form. He lays them on her chest, then presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and rubs. The tears spill around then. Down his cheeks. Over his chin. Werner stands beside the body of Irene Doehner and cries until his throat is dry and his nose is red.
THE NAVIGATOR
Twenty-four hours ago Max was kissing Emilie for the last time and now he’s standing inside the burnt skeleton of the Hindenburg. The sight is confounding. This is the ship he has lived in every day for almost two years, but it’s only an echo of the ship he knew. The bones are here but the flesh is gone. The shape is broken. Twisted. Warped by heat and impact. And yet he knows exactly where he is. The axial catwalk is usually forty feet in the air and hangs directly over the keel catwalk. But they lie parallel on the ground now, and Max stands between them, hands in the pockets of a borrowed U.S. Navy petty officer’s uniform. It’s the best they could do on short notice, and judging by the uneasy glances he has received for the last three hours, they’re eager for his clothes to be laundered and returned.
The fire started here, somewhere in the vicinity of gas cell number four. That’s what the witnesses on the ground reported to Pruss. Now that Lakehurst is swarming with reporters and cameras and gawkers, the crew will be called upon to give an answer. There
is a rumor, though he can’t believe it is true, that the explosion was recorded and broadcast over the radio and that the entire wreck was filmed for a newsreel. They are saying this disaster made history.
The questions are coming from all directions. Why? How? No one knows. Not yet. But Max is here, picking through the rubble like every other crew member who can stand without crutches, in an effort to give his commanding officers an answer to these questions.
Airships crash sometimes. And they’ve been torn apart by storms, but Max has never heard of one exploding for no reason. During battle, yes. But the Hindenburg wasn’t taking fire and it wasn’t under duress—the strain of their near miss off Newfoundland and again during landing might have torn a gas cell, but still, there would need to be a spark to ignite the hydrogen. It couldn’t have been lightning. That happens often enough. And the ship was built to withstand it. He can think of no plausible explanation for how the ship exploded. So he looks for one instead.
For an hour Max searches the rubble, at times focusing on the larger, twisted skeleton for clues, and then digging through the ash itself. The wicker cages that held the dogs are gone but he finds a collar—little more than burnt leather and a melted nameplate that reads ULLA. There are charred bones as well, but he can’t bear to look at them, so he walks away.
Max misses the object at first. It appears to be nothing more than a lump of blackened metal caught on the twisted girders at the rear of the ship. But something catches in his mind and he turns to look at it again. Bends lower. He nudges it with the toe of his shoe and it slides loose, clatters across the metal, and comes to a stop three inches from his foot.
It is a pistol. A Luger. He knows the shape of this gun because he owns one himself. Or he did until it was taken from his cabin. He doesn’t have to check the serial number stamped on the side to know that this is his weapon. With a detached calm, Max opens the chamber and counts the bullets inside. One round is missing. A single shot. He has seen muzzle flash on countless firing ranges. It’s not just a spark, but a small bolt of flame large enough to ignite an airship carrying two hundred thousand cubic meters of combustible hydrogen.
Max Zabel stares at the weapon in his hand with the stupid, horrified expression of a man who is slowly coming to a terrible conclusion. The gun issued to him brought down the Hindenburg.
U.S. COMMERCE DEPARTMENT BOARD OF INQUIRY
HINDENBURG ACCIDENT HEARINGS
May 19, 1937
Naval Air Station, Main Hangar, Lakehurst, New Jersey
Though sabotage could have produced the phenomena observed in the fire that destroyed the Hindenburg, there is still in my opinion no convincing evidence of a plot, either Communist or Nazi inspired. The one indisputable fact in the disaster is that the Hindenburg burned because she was inflated with hydrogen.
—Douglas H. Robinson, Giants in the Sky: A History of the Rigid Airship
Max has decided on his lie, but in the end it doesn’t matter. The Board of Inquiry is not interested in the people who traveled on board the Hindenburg—the quarrels and plans, the passions or the duplicities. They are interested in gas valves and bracing wires and stub keels. They are interested in technicalities. The Board of Inquiry wants to know if the tight turns the airship took in its second approach toward Lakehurst resulted in structural damage that punctured the gas cells. They want to know if everyone on board followed protocol. The committee of experts gathered to investigate the disaster is focused on mechanics. They spend a good bit of time talking about lightning strikes and static electricity. An hour is spent discussing wind speeds. Another twenty minutes on mooring lines.
Max Zabel sits in his wooden chair before a room full of people and carefully explains how he lowered the forward landing wheel. He tells them how strong headwinds delayed the trip by twelve hours over the journey of three and a half days, how the first landing attempt was thwarted by storms.
He is never asked about tensions between the passengers or secrets kept. He is never probed about his relationship with Emilie or the confiscation of her travel papers. He is not called on to account for his missing pistol or why his name was listed on the manifest as the owner of the second dog. Nor does he volunteer any of this information.
The German and American aviation experts gathered at Lakehurst are here to absolve themselves of blame. They are concerned only with things that do not matter. They are each determined to acquit their own countries. The one great success of the Board of Inquiry is that they agree on a single thing: they agree that they do not know why the airship crashed, only that it did. Only that its massive, combustible stores of hydrogen are at fault.
Sabotage is mentioned, of course. It has to be. But there is no proof. And while this might not be a court of law, they still require an eyewitness. A weapon. A motive. And none of these things is readily available, so the possibility of malicious intent is cast aside before it can be seriously considered. The results of this great raucous investigation are inconclusive. And that answer is more than good enough for both countries.
THE CABIN BOY
May 22, 1937, aboard the steamship Europa, 6:05 a.m.
Werner Franz has forgotten that today is his fifteenth birthday. He sees this reminder written on a cardboard sign in the hands of Xaver Maier when he enters the steamship’s elegant dining hall. He stands in the doorway as a small group of surviving stewards and kitchen crew members let out a chorus of raucous shouts and whistles. Most of his fellow crew members cluster near the chef, but a handful linger at the door, waiting for him to enter. Waiting to slap him on the back. Xaver steps away from the small round table to reveal a birthday cake.
The chef shrugs when he sees Werner’s stunned expression. “They let me use the kitchen.”
“You made that?” Werner asks.
There is something mischievous in Xaver’s smirk. He tries to hide it by drawing on the lit cigarette in his hand. “It’s a big day.”
Even though they are on board the Europa as passengers, Werner cannot shake the habit of rising early and reporting for duty. The others have teased him about this for days, but Werner can’t help it. He doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore. He doesn’t know how to let others serve his meals or make his bed. Nor does he enjoy this languid rocking pace at sea. It makes him nauseous. He is restless and out of sorts. So he sticks with the comfort of long-established routine. Yet this is the first time any of the crew has joined him in the dining room so early. He has gotten used to eating alone. Werner finds that he is so grateful for the company that he has to twist his face so they won’t see him cry. The sight of his friends and this gift is so overwhelming that he can allow only one delighted smile, a small nod, and then he stares at his shoes. It is too much.
He is wondering how to get control of these erratic feelings when suddenly there is a frigid torrent rushing down his shirt and into his trousers, followed by the sound of splashing water. Werner gasps, eyes squeezed shut, arms out, mouth open. When he tries to yelp he chokes on ice water. The water keeps coming, and he can hear laughter and cheering. He tries to speak but coughs instead. He stands there, before his fellow crew members, dripping wet. Werner shakes his floppy hair and water splatters across the plush carpet.
The cabin boy is frozen in place, dripping from head to toe, staring at Xaver Maier, who laughs so hard he has to steady himself against the table. “You look like a drowned cat.”
Werner spits a mouthful of water into his hand. “What did you do that for?”
“It was my idea.” The boy turns slowly at the stern voice of Heinrich Kubis. The chief steward holds an empty bucket in one hand and a towel in the other. “Congratulations, Herr Franz, you have just crossed the line.”
A sailor’s baptism can take many forms—most of them far more cruel than what Werner experienced—but they all have one thing in common: a new sailor is initiated upon crossing the equator for the first time. It’s a sign that he can handle a long journey, that he is accepted by his peers.
Werner has heard the stories often enough, but he never thought that he would experience the ritual.
“But we didn’t cross the equator,” Werner argues.
He has never seen the chief steward smile before. Under different circumstances he might mistake it for a wince.
“Perhaps not,” Kubis says. “But today we land in Bremershaven and this voyage will be complete. You have carried yourself like a man. You deserve to be recognized.” He looks directly at Werner and when he speaks again his voice is filled with sincerity. “You have passed your probationary period, Werner. Would you like a permanent position with the Zeppelin-Reederei?”
He is confused. “But the ship is gone.”
Kubis appears unconcerned. “They will find a place for you.”
“You mean I still have a job?”
“Not just any job.” Kubis pulls a telegram from his pocket and hands it to Werner. “You have been invited to become a steward on the Graf Zeppelin. By Captain Hans von Schiller himself.”
Hope, that small fluttering thing, beats against his rib cage. Werner has been mourning the loss of his job as deeply as he has mourned his friends. He did not know how much he loved flying until he set foot on the damp, rocking deck of the Europa. Every day on board the steamship has been a small, acute death for him.
Werner takes the telegram from Kubis and reads it for himself. Slowly. Carefully. If he struggles over a word or two he does not let on. He stands there for a moment letting the invitation sink in. Werner is no longer a cabin boy. He is a steward.
Heinrich Kubis grabs Werner’s hand and shakes it with a firm, confident grip. Man to man. “They are expecting your response this morning. But first you should have some cake.”