by Ariel Lawhon
THE NAVIGATOR
July 24, 1937, Hauptfriedhof cemetery, Frankfurt, 7:25 p.m.
This is not a place where people linger. The cemetery is so filled with shadows and sorrow that Max finds himself alone, as he has every other evening he has come to visit Emilie’s grave. This is a place that whispers of loss if you listen closely. And if you linger beneath the sprawling branches or walk among the worn headstones, you will be lured into an otherworldly trance. This frightens most people and they hasten away the moment their tears and flowers have been laid upon the ground. But Max knows that if you resist the instinct to run you will find something lovely here. You will find peace. And he craves that more than company these days.
Max sits beside Emilie, his shoulder pressed against the smooth granite of her headstone, watching the sun sink above a copse of spruce trees that have turned beryl and fragrant in the summer heat. In this gathering dusk the light has a spectral quality, a shimmering goldenness that is breathtaking. Humbling, even. The beauty of this silent, reverent place lifts the shell of numbness that Max has carried since the wreck. His body aches, desperate for Emilie’s phantom touch, the way she tugged his earlobe between thumb and forefinger when they kissed. Her cool hand at the base of his neck. Her laughter. Anything. Everything. Max misses the entirety of her. So he participates in this aching, visceral ritual. It is a cruelty he inflicts upon himself, the pulling of a scab from an aging wound, one he picks constantly to keep her near.
Her memory returns, hovers at his side as he prepares to read the letter again. Max can almost see her gliding through this verdant place, the beautiful woman who could have been his wife, now nothing more than ghost and memory. He can almost hear the sound of her laughter, can almost feel the warmth of her hand. This vision of Emilie evaporates as quickly as it came, but emotions follow immediately in its wake. They come first as pain—there are so many and they are so intense—but he closes his eyes and lets them wash over him. Soon they turn to other things. Sadness. Joy. Loneliness. Anger. Hope. Regret. Guilt. Love—this is the hardest to bear, and he bends beneath its weight. Max receives the emotions one by one, and when the wave has subsided he looks to the sky again. He breathes.
It took him weeks to understand that he asked Emilie to do the impossible. He wanted her to let go of her husband’s memory. To accept that he was dead. To move on. It was a foolish thing to expect. He knows that now. Her death proved that. There is no moving on from this kind of loss.
It was Emilie’s letter, however, that began the work of patching him back together. Max is shattered. He may always be. But he finally has the answer he wanted, and that is enough for today. Tomorrow. A lifetime perhaps. Max has memorized the words, but he reads them every evening at 7:25 anyway. It is the moment when the fire broke out, the moment when he lost Emilie. He unfolds the letter and turns his back to the setting sun so he will have light to read.
Max,
I’m so sorry I don’t have the courage to say this in person. But I imagine you sitting somewhere in one of those straight-backed chairs that you prefer, spectacles on the end of your nose (yes, I realize you don’t wear spectacles but this is my fantasy, so you must suffer through as I see it), sifting letters and sorting them into piles. I imagine you lifting this one from the stack. To be honest, I hope that your breath catches in your throat or that your heart beats a little faster. And I know it has taken me ages to come to that conclusion. But you must forgive me. My heart isn’t whole. It has been broken and badly put back together. Yet the truth is that I want you to lean forward a bit when you see your name in my handwriting. I want that. And it’s only now that I realize I need it as well. I need you.
So my answer is yes. It’s that simple. Yes, you can have my heart, all that’s left of it, at any rate. There’s a part of me that will always belong to Hans. There is nothing I can do about that. But it’s a part of me that lived a long time ago and now resides in distant shadow. All that I am today is yours. My heart is no great prize. I am scared and selfish and years away from being young. But I will be waiting for you on our return flight. Please come find me any day or night or anytime that you are not guiding us home with your strong and sure hands. In the meantime wear this. It’s not the key to my heart—we are too old for sentimental gestures—but it is proof that I trust you with it.
Yes, I will be your wife if you will still have me.
Emilie
The first time Max read the letter he didn’t have the courage to take her necklace from the envelope. But he wears it now, tucked beneath his uniform. Emilie gave him everything she was capable of giving. More than he deserves. He has the letter and he has her key. And now he is the one who will hold memories and mourn her loss. Max will carry her the way that she carried her first husband. She will be the beautiful, painful wound that will never entirely heal.
THE JOURNALIST
August 10, 1937, Frankfurt, Germany, 9:15 a.m.
Gertrud steps into her own kitchen. It is filled with morning light, and the windows are open. A bee buzzes at the screen. She can hear the neighbors talking about road conditions and rationing. Leonhard is still in the driveway, pulling bags from the car. He calls to them and they answer back, but he sounds older since the wreck. There is a coarseness in his voice that wasn’t there before. This trip aged him, and for the first time since they married he looks two decades older than her.
Gertrud’s mother sits at the kitchen table sipping a cup of tea, her focus on the morning paper and its blaring headlines. There, in black and white, is a photo of the Hindenburg in all its blazing, horrific glory. Gertrud blanches at the sight. It has been months and she still can’t look at the pictures or read the articles.
She stands there for a moment waiting for the absurd panic to subside. She listens. Waits. And then, when she is certain that she can speak without her voice trembling, she says, “Mother,” and to her ears she sounds like a child.
“You’re home!”
“Where is he?”
Her mother rises from the table and reaches for her. She wraps Gertrud in warmth and comfort and then speaks slowly into her ear, “There is something I need to tell you.”
Gertrud grabs the counter for support and her mother realizes her mistake. “Egon is fine,” she says in a rush. “Absolutely fine. You can go to him in a moment. But you must know something first.”
“What?” Leonhard stands at the kitchen door now, a suitcase under each arm.
Her mother places a finger over her lips and nods toward the neighbor’s house. They are quiet now. Listening, perhaps.
“The Gestapo,” her mother mouths the words.
Leonhard sets the bags down carefully. He pushes them away with his foot. “What about them?”
“The crash has been all over the news for months. And they are concerned.”
They lean toward one another like the legs on a stool, their whispers no louder than the bees at the screen.
“Why?” Gertrud asks.
“They have visited several times. The Ministry of Propaganda is worried that you have been telling a version of events that they do not approve of.”
“We have been in America for months!”
“That is exactly the point. They could not control what you said or who you spoke with. Know that they are watching. They are listening. They came here three times while you were gone, asking the same questions in different ways.” She shakes Gertrud’s shoulders. “You have no friends. Do you understand? None. You have me. And you have each other. That is all.”
“It is enough.” Leonhard lays his hand across the small of Gertrud’s back. He kisses her temple lightly. “Go to him, Liebchen.”
It has been months since she has walked through the rooms of this home, but her feet carry her around the corner, down the hall, and to the doorway of Egon’s room. She hears him before she sees him. Hears him laughing and chattering to himself.
Gertrud’s heart is loud and tight within her chest. She stops two feet from
the door and listens. She drinks in that glorious sound. And then she steps forward.
The windows in Egon’s room stretch from floor to ceiling, and he stands before one, his back to her, watching a butterfly on the bush outside. He is mesmerized. Delighted. Her son wears only a cloth diaper. The light catches his hair. It is curlier than when they left. Longer. It is soft and molten, like caramel, and she longs to loop one of those lazy curls around her finger.
Leonhard rests his chin on her shoulder. They watch their son for a moment and then he whispers in her ear, “Go on. Don’t be afraid.”
“What if he has forgotten me?”
“You are a silly thing, Liebchen. No man could forget you.”
The tears come and she has to swallow them. She has to breathe. She has to compose herself. Gertrud drops to her knees in the doorway.
“Egon.”
The boy jumps, then turns around. For one second the blankness on his face confirms her fear. He is afraid. He will cry. But no, he is only startled. His small, pink lip trembles for a moment, and then his face is transformed into joy. Nothing but pure, breathtaking joy. He has four teeth now. His dimples are deeper, his eyes are bluer, and he can walk.
Egon Adelt grins with unabashed delight, raises his arms, and takes three triumphant steps toward his mother before dropping into a frantic crawl. He knows her. He comes to her. And she scoops him up, overcome. Gertrud inhales the clean smell of him. The powder and the sweetness of his skin. She laughs and she weeps as Leonhard folds his arms around them both.
They are home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
They said it was an uneventful flight. This phrase is repeated countless times in the hundreds of pages of eyewitness testimony compiled by the Commerce Department Board of Inquiry. Leonhard Adelt, a German journalist, later wrote, “Our trip on the Hindenburg in May was the most uneventful journey I ever undertook in an airship.” In November 1937 the American heiress Margaret Mather wrote an article for Harper’s in which she described the trip with such banality that one has to wonder why the passengers didn’t sleep the entire time.
An uneventful flight.
But here’s the problem: I don’t believe them. Ninety-seven people traveled on a floating luxury hotel for three days over the Atlantic Ocean. The events that took place on board might not have been explosive—at least not until the end—but I doubt they were uneventful. I’ve taken enough transatlantic flights to know you can’t place that many people in such a small space for any length of time and not have tension brewing beneath the surface. But if you’re going to call bullshit on historical events, you’d best have a good theory to offer as an alternative. This novel is my attempt at a theory. It is the result of my short-term love affair with that spectacular moment in history. I hope that you will humor me. And I hope you enjoy the ride.
I’ve long been familiar with the iconic photos of the Hindenburg’s destruction and with Herb Morrison’s famous exclamation, “Oh, the humanity!” But until I began researching this book, I couldn’t tell you the name of a single person on board the airship. Thirty-six people lost their lives when the Hindenburg exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey, and I wanted to know who they were.
In writing Flight of Dreams I was determined to use the real people who were on that last ill-fated flight. I was determined that I would not change their fate—even when it broke my heart (which it did many times during the month when I wrote of the disaster itself). If they survived in real life, they survived in this novel. If they died in real life, they died in this novel.
But since I was writing about real people, I needed help. We’re talking about men and women who lived and died almost eighty years ago. Most of them were not famous. No biographies were written about them. No articles. By and large, history remembers them with only the occasional anecdote or footnote. Which is why Patrick Russell’s Web site, www.facesofthehindenburg.blogspot.com, was such a godsend. He has spent years compiling extensive biographical information on every passenger and crew member on that last flight. Every article is filled with fascinating minutiae about them. Among many things, I learned from Mr. Russell that Gertrud Adelt’s press card had recently been revoked by the Nazis, that Werner Franz’s grandfather gave him a pocket watch, that Max Zabel had recently taken over as postmaster, that the American worked in the same building as Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda, and that Emilie Imhof was the only woman ever to work aboard a zeppelin. To me, these seemingly insignificant things—when studied and sifted and rearranged—became the spine of this story. Tiny true things made bigger and more relevant when added together.
I confess that prior to writing this novel I knew absolutely nothing about zeppelins. And why would I? The reign of airships ended on May 6, 1937, in that New Jersey field. It was the first disaster of that scale ever to be recorded on film. And while it was not broadcast live, as we’ve often been told, it was played on air later that night. And then played repeatedly on every newsreel in every theater around much of the world afterward. Today zeppelins are the stuff of fantasy and steampunk. But they were highly functional engineering marvels at the time. And to re-create those three and a half days in midair I needed to become a pseudo-expert on airship travel and construction. Dan Grossman’s Web site, www.airships.net, and Rick Archbold’s book Hindenburg: An Illustrated History provided everything I needed to know about the engineering and operation of the Hindenburg. I endeavored to faithfully portray the airship—its strengths and weaknesses, its peculiar quirks—and consulted these resources daily while working on Flight of Dreams. However, my primary focus has been, and always will be, the people on board. So any mistakes with the airship itself—how it was designed and how it functioned—are entirely mine. I offer my advance apologies to any students of airship history who find fault with my fictional rendering of the Hindenburg.
Some of the events, conversations, meals, and rivalries described in this book really happened. But most of them, to the best of my knowledge, did not. Having done my research and committed to writing about the real people on board, there came a point when I had to tell my own story. My version of the events. What I believe could have happened, not necessarily what did happen. Because none of us will ever truly know what occurred on board or why the Hindenburg exploded. And believe me, people have tried to find these answers for almost eighty years. Theories abound—I did my best to give a nod to each of them—but facts are hard to come by. It was this mystery that drew me to the story in the first place. The fact that we do not know what happened. The fact that we will never know. I built this story within those blank, unknown spaces.
My job was to find a plausible explanation for the spark. The Hindenburg burned in thirty-four seconds. Half of one minute. That is mind-boggling if you think about it. And all that we truly know is that it burned so quickly because of a combination of hydrogen and thermite (a huge thanks to Mythbusters and their countless experiments for answering that long-standing question). But no one has ever been able to say for certain what ignited the hydrogen. I know there are a myriad of possible technical, mechanical, and meteorological causes for that spark. But when my turn came to tell this story, I wanted the catalyst to be human.
That said, much of what happens here is pure fiction. I took all the known disparate details, from the dogs on board to the mail drop over Cologne, and wove them together in a way that made sense to me. I claim to have no special knowledge. I simply wanted to find a good story and then tell it in a way that would bring these people and their journey to life for you. And in so doing I am deeply aware that I have written about people who really lived. I have assumed things about them. I have put words in their mouths. I have made them do things—sometimes noble and sometimes despicable—that they likely never did in real life. That is the risk I took, and it is sobering to say the least. I know from experience how the loved ones of real people may read a fictionalized account of an event and then feel compelled to contact the writer. So I did my best to be honest and ho
norable on these pages.
In some instances dialogue and phrases were taken directly from written accounts and interviews of Hindenburg survivors. A few examples include the incident with Joseph Späh and his arrival at the airfield, both the ruckus he caused and the soldier’s examination of his daughter’s doll. Leonhard Adelt said the ship was “a gray object in a gray mist, over an invisible sea.” I took the liberty of using his words in a scene with Emilie Imhof. The near crash off the coast of Newfoundland actually occurred during a flight to Lakehurst in 1936. Gertrud’s trouble with the customs officer in Frankfurt was an event that in reality happened to Margaret Mather. Werner Franz’s dramatic escape from the airship—although seemingly unbelievable—unfolded exactly as written here and has been described in numerous places over the years. In the end I wanted the passengers’ thoughts and words and experiences to permeate this novel. It is about them, after all, and to portray this flight as they saw it was important to me. Again, my primary sources of research—in particular Hindenburg: An Illustrated History and www.facesofthehindenburg.blogspot.com—helped tremendously in my search for specific details of their experiences, escapes, and tragic deaths.
It bears repeating that this book is fiction. But it is my fiction, and I am desperately proud of this story. I hope you come to love this book the way I do. And I hope you remember these men and women. Because they deserve to be remembered.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“ ‘Thank you’ is the best prayer anyone could say.”
—Alice Walker
Thank you. Simple words, really, but so hard to get right. Especially for someone who trades in words for a living. But I will do my best and I ask that you bear with me for a moment while I extol those who helped make this book a reality.
Literary agents don’t come better than Elisabeth Weed. She is brilliant. Kind. Patient. Funny. And she never makes me feel stupid when I call her with stupid questions. I have worked with her for almost four years and can’t imagine navigating the choppy waters of publishing without her. She has been a friend and life preserver and a constant encouragement. Her assistant, Dana Murphy, is lovely and helpful and I’d steal her away in a skinny minute. Jenny Meyer handles foreign rights and I suspect she moonlights as a superhero. Thank you.