The sun has been up for hours when Werner finally wakes. He hasn’t moved all night, hasn’t even rolled out of fetal position, and his right arm is rubbery and asleep. The strange clothes he’s wearing are clean and dry—it takes him a moment to remember where they came from—but he can smell smoke in his hair and on his skin. Everything comes back to Werner. He drops his face into his hands and takes a few deep, shuddering breaths between his splayed fingers.
When he lifts his head again he sees that the barracks are empty. Every bunk but his has been made, the blankets are stretched smooth and tucked tightly beneath the mattress. The air is still and warm, but he can hear muted shouts and the rumble of machinery outside. He doesn’t want to leave his bunk a mess, so he pulls the covers as snug as he can.
The cabin boy steps blinking into the sunlight. The airfield looks different during the day. The clouds are gone, the sky is crisp, and the wreckage sprawls before him, unavoidable. Werner does not understand why the airship looks larger than it ever did, now that it is burned and broken. But it does, lying there stretched beside the mooring mast.
He is still standing there staring at the Hindenburg sometime later when a hand rests on his shoulders. Wilhelm Balla passes him a newspaper and says, “Telegram your parents. Tell them you’re not dead.”
The front page shows the airship falling and consumed by flames. The headline screams: HINDENBURG BURNS IN LAKEHURST CRASH: 21 KNOWN DEAD, 12 MISSING; 64 ESCAPE. All eight columns are devoted to the tragedy, and one of them lists the names of known fatalities. The last name reads: Werner Franz, cabin boy.
It is a strange thing to see yourself pronounced dead while you are still in possession of a beating heart.
“Where?” Werner asks, but his voice cracks so he clears his throat and tries again. “Where can I send a telegram?”
“The office in Hangar No. 1.”
The boy doesn’t move immediately. He’s staring at the paper still grasped in his hands—hands, he notes, that do not tremble at all.
“Why do they think I’m dead?”
“Probably because they couldn’t find you last night.” Balla waves an arm around the chaotic scene.
Werner feels ashamed. He didn’t mean to cause anyone to worry. Especially his parents. “I was sleeping.” The admission feels juvenile.
Something ripples across Balla’s usually impassive face. A stray, unguarded emotion. Compassion. His eyes soften and he lays a comforting hand upon the boy’s head. “As well you should have.”
THE NAVIGATOR
Stiff. Cold. Devoid of all emotion and thought and logic. This is Max as he sits beside Emilie’s still form. She has been laid straight on the cot, arms at her side, her head turned slightly to the left. Covered with a thick wool blanket. He has not seen what lies beneath. He has been told he does not want to. And yet he sits here, as he has the entire night, his eyes fixed upon her chest, willing it to rise and fall beneath her shroud.
It has not.
It will not.
He knows this somewhere, in the deeper parts of his mind, but he won’t admit it to himself yet.
Because he can hardly breathe himself.
Max Zabel does not move from her side. He cannot move at all.
He marks the passage of time by the sun at his feet. The rectangular patch from the window far above his head has moved three feet when someone drops the lockbox beside the cot. Later he will remember that it must have been last year’s postmaster, Kurt Sch?nherr, because a key is pressed into his hand as well. He squeezes Max’s shoulder and then leaves. There are no words to fix this, and the helmsman is smart enough not to try.
Max looks at the lockbox, charred but perfectly intact, and then at the key in his palm. The part of his mind that controls thought and reason and choice wakes up and pushes aside the instinct he has been surviving on for the last nine hours. He looks up. He sees people going about their work. The smell of smoke and disaster still hangs heavy in the air, but something else is present as well: spring. The hangar doors are open and a southerly breeze brings an occasional breath of fresh-cut grass and warm pine. Max turns his face to the light and breathes deeply and long through his nose.
Emilie was pronounced dead last night, but she was only positively identified an hour ago. He had held out hope, of course, that he had been keeping vigil over the wrong woman. That there was some mistake. That Emilie was simply on another part of the airfield, asleep or unconscious. But in the end it was Xaver Maier who took his last shred of hope and ground it to dust. Max had not even known that Emilie had fillings in her teeth. But the chef did, and the medical examiner confirmed the size and location that Maier described to him. And all the while Max sat beside her, his gaze on her still form, and prayed for a miracle that would never come.
So far Maier is the only one who has been brave enough to acknowledge his grief, and this one small gesture enables Max to forgive the chef.
“I am so sorry,” Maier said when the medical examiner pulled the blanket back over Emilie’s body.