THE NAVIGATOR

“She’s down there,” Willy Speck says when Max enters the radio room. He gives a pointed nod at the ladder that leads down to the control car.

“Who?”

“Your girl.”

Their relationship seems to be an established fact for everyone but Emilie herself. Max can hear her then, asking Commander Pruss to have someone paged. He pushes past the radiomen and slides down the ladder as quickly as he can. Finding Emilie in the control car like this feels a bit like finding her in his bed. It’s not unwelcome, just startling, as though she has made herself familiar with his things. The way a lover would. And, as he would most certainly feel in that situation, Max does not know what to do next. She hasn’t ventured into the navigation room but stands patiently in the utility area waiting for Commander Pruss’s decision.

She’s good at this, he notes. Emilie does not push. She doesn’t demand answers. And in the end Pruss asks him to call for Dorothea Erdmann. But Emilie does not escape the control car before revealing her own fascination with Max’s domain. She watches him for an unguarded moment and is then dismissed by Commander Pruss. But Max does not watch her go. They will give him hell if he does.

“Ruhe, bitte!” Max warns, a slight growl in his voice, when he turns from the window, bullhorn in hand.

Pruss is standing in the doorway to the chart room, his cap so low on his forehead that Max can’t tell whether he looks stern or amused. “Where were you?”

“Mail,” he answers.

“Not chatting up the female employee again?”

Max snorts. No secrets indeed. He casts a derisive glance at the ladder as an answer. How could he be chatting her up, the look says, when she was here with you?

Pruss simply turns and without preamble gives the order to begin preparations for casting off. Max takes his position in the chart room amid his maps and logbook, his charts and his direction-finding instruments.

Commander Pruss may be in charge of the airship on this trip, but it is Captain Ernst Lehmann who usually flies it, and this is a privilege he considers sacred. To be at the helm is almost an act of worship for the director of flight operations. He’s in the control car for castoff despite technically being an observer on this flight—a symbolic role while en route to America to prepare for a book tour promoting his biography, Zeppelin. His co-author—a journalist of some repute—is on board as well, though Max hasn’t met him yet.

While Pruss prepares for liftoff, Lehmann stands with hands clasped behind his back, restraining himself from giving orders. He watches as they methodically go through the pre-flight checklist, as they check gauges and ballasts, wheels, rudders, and elevator lines. When all seems to be in order, Pruss takes the bullhorn from Max’s table and leans out the open window. “Zeppelin marsch!”

Pruss’s voice is strong and authoritative. Loud. Max hears the metallic clang of the gangway ladders being slammed into place, and there is an immediate, subtle shift beneath them. The passengers on B- and A-decks likely don’t feel it at all. But the control car, only a few feet off the ground, vibrates with the movement.

The Hindenburg’s forward landing wheel is located directly beneath the chart room where Max stands. The wheel is accessed by a panel under his feet and is one of three points on which the airship can rest when on the ground, the other two being the gangway stairs and the rear landing wheel. Like the blade on an ice skate, each wheel is simply a point of contact on which the ship balances when moored to the ground. Operating this small but vital piece of machinery is Max’s job during every takeoff and landing, regardless of time or day, regardless of shift. And while the mechanics of it are easy enough—he raises and lowers the wheel using a valve to direct the flow of compressed air and a detachable control to keep the wheel and its housing turned into the wind—it is, in actuality, a tricky task requiring a steady hand and no small amount of concentration.

Max slides the floor panel aside so he can raise the wheel. It lifts into the ship smoothly, without shudder or noise. He pulls the retractable control gears from the floor slot so the wheel can’t drop again. Max checks the locking mechanism to make sure the wheel is secure within its casing, and the rest is a matter of waiting.

“Well done, Max,” Pruss says.

He nods in response, pleased with himself, and stands aside to watch the ground crew take over below. Peering out the portside window in the control car, he watches the yaw ropes being held tightly in the hands of the ground crew. First one rope, then the other, stretches to its full length. Max can feel the portside ropes tighten with a subtle shift of the wind, and the Hindenburg is pushed starboard in response. The airship is held to the earth by little more than these ropes and the determination of a few men on the tarmac.

The Hindenburg shudders to life. Each of the four engines—separated from the main body of the airship by steel girders and a narrow catwalk—rumbles, then smoothes into a steady purr. Some of the ground crew grip the yaw lines and lean away from the ship’s mass at exaggerated angles. They disconnect the ropes from the heavy anchors driven into the tarmac but keep the lines taut, straining against the wind. Other crewmen are lined beneath the engine gondolas, gripping the rails. Together they walk the Hindenburg away from the hangar, and she glides forward as though weightless, as if her great mass were nothing more than a breath.

The air horn, much louder now that Max is in the control car, gives a long and strident blast. The muscles in his neck and jaw seize in response. He makes a mental note to research alternative notification devices once they are back in Germany. The ground crew stops in unison, the muscles in their forearms straining to keep the airship under control. Pruss is still at the window, and he waits for a count of three before shouting, “Schiff hoch!” into the bullhorn. Up ship.

Max notes their departure time as 8:18 p.m. in his logbook.

The great web of handling lines are drawn into the ship at Pruss’s command, and the crewmen beneath the gondolas give a heaving, upward push. There is a lift and a pull, and she hovers twenty feet off the ground for a moment as the crew cheers. Then Pruss gives the order for two tons of water to be released from ballasts on either side of the ship, and like a balloon no longer tethered to the hand of an impatient child, the great silver zeppelin rises into the rose-colored Frankfurt sky.