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.