Captain Georg von Plautus stands in the control car looking out at the landscape rolling up toward him from the northwest. In addition to the Captain there are three men in the control car. At the rudder wheel in the front, by the windscreen, is Erwin, dressed in the uniform of a German naval rating except that the band on his cap bears the legend League of Nations, which seems ludicrous to the Captain and would irritate him if he were not so good-natured. At the elevator wheel, at the side of the car, is a young Englishman named Starkadder (the crew is international), who is also dressed in a German sailor’s outfit. There is a navigator tucked into a little booth at the rear, who has almost nothing to do because the Captain prefers to do his own navigation. These four men are all that is needed to fly the airship in peacetime, when there is nothing complicated to do like landing, or dealing with a squall.
Through the windscreen, which is bent forward as though it is looking at the ground, the neat squares of the Württenberg landscape go by at a rate that seems slow if you look ahead but fast if you look directly down; the airspeed is fifty-eight knots. A few minutes ago the town of Mannheim passed on the right; Heidelberg is behind. The Captain has studied the map of this part of Germany until he knows it by heart and he seldom has to consult the chart on the navigation table. Passing on the left is Worms; he scarcely turns his head to gaze on the cartwheel-shaped old town where Liebfraumilch comes from and where Luther confronted the Diet. There is no sound but the cello-note of the engines, and now and then a murmur from one of the two maneuvering-wheels as the operator turns it.
Along with the map the Captain has the whole shape and design of the League of Nations in his mind: the complex skeleton of girders, rings, and wires, the sixteen immense gas-bags of linen and goldbeater’s skin, the large vanes mounted at the tail which turn the airship right and left, up and down, the stainless-steel cables running through the hull to control them, the four Maybach engines of eight hundred horsepower churning the air with their wooden propellers twenty feet in diameter, each mounted in its bean-shaped gondola with room for a mechanic inside. There are accommodations for a crew of thirty, including cooks and dining-room waiters, and forty passengers. There is a completely equipped galley and every amenity of a luxury hotel. The Captain himself has a monk-like cell of aluminum in the crew’s quarters, with a washbasin but no bath or toilet. In any case, the flight from Friedrichshaven to Frankfurt takes only about two and a half hours, and the Captain does not even have to urinate in that time. He is a military man and has trained his body to do just what he wants it to, no more and no less. He expects the same from his crew. Anyone who requests to leave his station in flight is told, “Do it in your pants.”
Captain von Plautus is forty-one and a veteran of the Great War. He is wearing the uniform of a German naval officer, with the jodhpurs and boots that are customary in the air service. On his cap is the emblem of the civilian Zeppelin Company. He is blond with a neatly trimmed mustache and a small beard of the kind called an imperial. His customary expression is one of slightly amused pessimism. Right now he is looking not at the terrain below but at the back of Erwin’s sturdy neck, his haircut which ends an inch below his cap, and the cap itself set at a slight tilt like the heeling of a pretty sailing-ship. Erwin’s hair is as white as flax and so are his eyebrows. The Captain breaks the silence in another attempt to get some human response from Erwin, whose taciturnity goes beyond the traditional Nordic to the sheerly malicious or pathological. Erwin is twenty-eight (he was eighteen when the Captain first encountered him in the Zeppelin service during the War) but seems only a boy, a distortion caused perhaps by the Captain’s erotic imagination. But Baltic Germans are immature, he tells himself with the emphasis of irritation.
“Erwin.”
“Ja, Herr Kapitän.”
“Do you think we get wiser as we get older?”
“Nein, Herr Kapitän.”
“Do you think we get more beautiful?”
Erwin goes on staring at the compass; he doesn’t turn his head. “Nein, Herr Kapitän.”
It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t turn his head, because the back of his neck is the part of him that the Captain prefers looking at anyhow. “I have to agree with you. Our actions, at least. They do not get more beautiful. I don’t mean what we are doing now, the running of this airship. That is professional. That is beautiful. That has some point to it. But the personal element. All this rushing around and fumbling and grasping in the dark and quarreling and desiring and hungering and despairing. What’s the point of it. Eh, Erwin?”
“I don’t know, Herr Kapitän.”
“What does it signify, Erwin?”
“Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten,” says Erwin, unconsciously quoting a well-known poem by Schiller. No getting anything out of him. Perhaps he learned the Schiller poem in school.
Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten
Pass ich so traurig bin.
A gloomy sentimental poem, just the kind of thing that the Captain detests about German culture. The word traurig. So mournful, so self-pitying, with its long drawn-out diphthong. Trow-ow-ow-rig. Like a dog howling, it is. Compare the English sad; just a short statement of fact. The French triste. Now there is a word! It’s almost a pleasure to be triste. The Captain starts to translate the Schiller poem into French (Quelle est donc la significance que je suis tellement triste) but decides this would distract him too much from his duties and leaves the task for another time.
He and Erwin have been speaking German, partly because Erwin knows no other language and partly because of the presence of Starkadder, but who knows whether the pesky Englander has learned some German in school.
“Ho, Starkadder. Sprechen sie Deutsch?”
The young English turns his thin intelligent face to him in incomprehension.
“Never mind, Starkadder. Carry on with your duties. Keep your eyes on the inclinometer. Dead level. Altitude eight hundred feet.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“You don’t need to go to the bathroom, do you, Starkadder?”
“No, sir.”
“Good, good.”
The navigator, sticking his head out of his cubbyhole, calls out a latitude and longitude.
“All right. All right.” Through the windscreen the Captain sees the silver-gray snake of the Rhine twining off to the north. He is exactly where he expected to be. The Captain has got the airship headed not toward Frankfurt, his eventual destination, but a little to the left, so that he can make a turn at the end and approach the aerodrome up-wind.
“East wind, Erwin. Keep a little right rudder.”
Fifty-eight knots airspeed, sixteen knots east wind; the League of Nations is clawing crabwise through the air at an angle of nineteen degrees. In addition to the other things he knows, the Captain has a large part of the trigonometry tables by heart. If he really wanted to know what the drift was, he could drop a smoke-bomb from the rear of the control car and train a theodolite on it through a little door. Or rather the quartermaster could; but the quartermaster is not present, and anyhow the Captain knows from the weather report that the wind is sixteen knots and from his nerves that the drift is nineteen degrees. Besides, why alarm the harmless Hessian peasants by dropping a smoke-bomb on them?
“Jawohl, Herr Kapitän,” says Erwin, and gives a touch more right rudder, unnecessarily, to show that he understands and is carrying out his orders impeccably, even to excess. A true German, Erwin, in spite of his snow-white Danish eyebrows and his Baltic neck.
“No need for smoke-bombs, eh Erwin?”
“Nein, Herr Kapitän.”
“Erwin. D’you ever think about women when you’re standing there turning that wheel hour after hour?”
“Nein, Herr Kapitän.”
“What do you think about?”
“I don’t know what I think about, Captain.”
“But what are you thinking about right now, Erwin?”
“Begging your pardon, I’m not thinking of anything, Captain, a person can’t be thinking about something all day long.”
The Captain contemplates the back of Erwin’s head. How I envy you, you fortunate creature, he thinks. Now for us intellectuals, those of us who have been to high school, it’s quite another thing. The native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, he quotes to himself with a gloomy voluptuousness, for he knows English literature as well as he knows the trigonometry tables. He goes on with the scene. Soft you now, the fair Ophelia! The girl coming in stops the Prince from thinking all right. He wonders if Erwin has a girlfriend. He probably does, but if so the Spanish Inquisition with meat-hooks couldn’t drag the fact out of him. From Hamlet and Ophelia he goes on to think of Hamlet’s mother, a creature for whom he has always had a certain sympathy, in spite of her murderous and incestuous inclinations. He can imagine himself having a little conversation with her. O Hamlet, speak no more, thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul, and there I see such black and grainéd spots as will not leave their tinct! The Captain thinks of mothers in general (a race rendered imbecile by love) and of his own mother, who was no Gertrude but had her peculiarities, and whom he loved much. This mother of his—well, she died in the influenza epidemic that swept over Europe in 1918, murmuring in her last moments only the single word “Zhorzh.” She was French and his father Prussian, and they each had their own ways of pronouncing his name: his mother Zhorzh, with the voluptuous vowel in the middle and something soft and moist at each end, like a French kiss, and his father Georg with the hard German G’s, so that it began with a blow and ended with another. From his mother he inherited his lucidity and logic, his finer sensitivities, his love of music, languages, and art; from his father his practicality and self-control, and his aplomb. As an admirer of the works of Thomas Mann, he associates himself not with the moony aesthete Tonio Kröger but with Thomas Buddenbrook, a man of integrity, imperturbably resisting the artistic and erotic forces that seethe within him and threaten him with the final disease of decadence, the Götterdämmerung of the soul. All his life he has had to fight against the notion that Germans, particularly of the officer class, are on the one hand rigid and authoritarian and on the other hand romantic. He is just the opposite of both of these. As an officer in the War he had to respect obedience, but it was the obedience of a player in a game to a fellow player who has been temporarily elected captain. The next day, it might be the other way around.
His father was not a bad fellow at all and always treated him decently. He was a mild devout man who enjoyed life in the country and loved animals. He had done his duty for Kaiser and Fatherland by mounting a horse in 1869 to trample over the French and rub Napoleon III’s nose in the mud (it was during the Prussian occupation of Nancy that he met his future wife), but he preferred to remain on his large estate near Friedland where he raised miniature Icelandic horses and knew each one of his three hundred peasants by name. He regarded his only child as another one of the animals he loved: something to be spoken to in an affectionate but mechanical intonation, to be nourished and housed, kept warm in the winter and doctored when sick, but not someone whose opinions were to be taken seriously. Georg’s mother on the other hand was witty, brilliant, lucid, a little willful at times, with flourishing chestnut hair which she brushed back and tied in a knot to reveal her pale and faultless complexion; she heartfeltly hated some persons (sullen servants) and passionately loved others (a favorite maid, her husband, a sister in Nancy whom she almost never saw, her son). Her husband, the Junker Adelbert, she tied to her with knots of French dexterity in bed; to her spoiled maid she gave her old gowns, to her sister in Nancy she wrote clever and satirical letters in the style of Madame de Sévigné, and her child she snatched from his crib to smother him in kisses and cry his voluptuous name with the eagerness of a votary; she dressed him in frills and lace, she fed him brandied chocolates, and she taught him to play Chopin with his pudgy fingers when he needed two cushions under him on the piano seat.
Georg grew up a contented and pampered boy. When he was not playing écarté with his mother (a travesty of a game in which she kissed and embraced him whenever he won a hand, or let her win one) he roamed the fields and barns and snared rabbits in the woods with traps he made from willow twigs. Yet all was not well, something in his secret soul knew, even at that young age. In addition to the Little Soldier, his father’s son, and the Good Boy, his mother’s son, there was also a Bad Boy who showed his pink pipette to the peasant lads in return for seeing theirs, and learned from the miniature Icelandic horses, erroneously, that the proper approach to a beloved object is from the rear. Georg the Bad Boy lived a rich private life of his own, in which reveries of creatures unclothed, tied up with ropes, or spread-eagled over barrels succeeded one another with the dizzying splendor of a kaleidoscope. When he got to the point where these visions produced spurts of a milky elixir in his pants, he realized that they were seriously wrong, but this only redoubled his shameful enthusiasm, so that he took up a pencil and made drawings of the unfortunate victims of his imagination in a notebook which he successfully concealed from the world, thus combining a not inconsiderable artistic talent with another of the skills of a military officer, the secrecy of documents. He played the cello and tried his hand at translating Maeterlinck’s Pelleas et Melisande; he learned to shoot quail and partridges, and he went with his father on a stag-hunt in Brandenburg where he was not allowed to carry a rifle himself but watched while his father brought down an enormous animal with a chest like a steam-boiler and a seignorial set of antlers, who lay on his side puffing and blowing blood from his mouth until the forester dispatched him with a pistol-shot. His father daubed blood on his head and said, “Next year you will have one of your own.”
But he never did. A strange and magic visitation intervened which was to be the turning point of his life. The next summer, when he was out on one of his boyish raids in the countryside looking for some mischief to do, a frog to torment or a little girl to jeer at, there came up over the horizon a strange pear-shaped object as big as a house, red with a broad white stripe around its girth. Suspended under it was what looked like a basket draped with grain-bags, and a tiny puppet looking out over the rim. It approached slowly and swelled as it came, until he could make out the cordwork that held up the basket and enclosed the red-and-white bag like a lady’s hairnet, the figure of the balloonist who had a mustache and was wearing a flat British cap, and the fat linen tube that hung down from the tapered belly of the balloon.
He began running toward it, even though it was coming in his direction and would be overhead in a short time. In the event he had to turn and run back the other way, because the balloon passed directly over his head and went on at the speed of a trotting dog, drifting lower until it almost touched the meadow, and even skipped and bumped as it passed over a low hillock and sank down on the other side of it. Georg ran on over the hillock and arrived puffing and excited at the point where the wicker gondola was resting on the grass with the large red-and-white bag standing over it, tilting a little to the breeze, and its owner, the aeronaut, out of it holding the wickerwork with one hand and trying to drive a stake into the ground with the other.
“Here, boy,” he cried as he caught sight of Georg, “hang on to this thing while I mend a hole in it, some sausage-eating bugger of a peasant has shot a bullet through it, probably thought it was a devil of some kind, this is an ignorant and benighted part of the world I must say, but it will take only a little patch and a brushful of glue, so here I go.” Whereupon he left Georg holding the rim of the gondola, which pulled upward with the force of forty-six eagles, while he scrambled agilely up the diamond-patterned network of cords with a brush and patch in one hand; finding the hole, he mended it, then calculated mentally where the antipodes of the spherical surface was (Georg imagined a geometry lesson in school, a straight line intersecting a sphere) and fixed that leak too.
Clambering down, he said that he was Thistlethwaite (a tongue-twister even for Georg who was an expert linguist) and that he was most grateful for his assistance. He was a thin reddish scruffy fellow with tufts of hair sticking out from under his cap and an untidy mustache; he had a scholarly air about him and Georg thought he might be a professor, but he never found out.
“There, that’s that. Where d’you come from lad, and what’s this part of the country called?”
Georg said that it was East Prussia and that the town of Friedland was not far away.
“D’they have hydrogen there?”
Georg didn’t know. He said that he lived yonder, pointing to the barns of the estate and the old scrollwork house with its wide verandas a couple of miles away.
“There? Why, that’s right downwind. Carry you there in a trice. Give a surprise to the pigs and goats. Hop aboard.”
Georg got in and looked around him with fascination. The gondola was an intricate and beautiful thing made of wicker with polished darkwood rails and brass fittings. It seemed curiously old-fashioned; it had an air about it of an antique ship or some fanciful contrivance to be towed through the air by geese in a children’s book. The ropes leading down from the gas-bag were tied to tiny wooden belaying-pins, there was a small brass compass that looked like a toy, and fixed in brackets was a collapsible spy-glass of the kind used by pirates. Thistlethwaite got in too, took a closer look at Georg, calculated that a stripling German boy was equivalent to two bags of ballast, and let the sand fall to the meadow. Obediently the balloon began to rise and the light breeze from the east caught it; Georg watched the meadow going by like a canvas strip in a diorama worked by rollers. A hundred feet in the air, the magic contrivance floated toward the cluster of farm buildings in absolute silence except for the creaking of the wicker. In a quarter of an hour they passed between the house and the horse-barn and were over the yard; Thistlethwaite pulled one of the ropes to release a little gas from a valve overhead.
The balloon sank down gracefully in the exact center of the farmyard, sending the chickens and ducks scattering. The maids came out flapping their aprons, the face of his mother appeared mysteriously in a window, his father strode up in boots and put his fists on his hips, and a dozen or so of Georg’s peasant-boy companions ran up and stood around the balloon as though bewitched. It took them a little while to realize that the second of the aeronauts standing in the wicker basket was their own Georg. Thistlethwaite looked around benignly and took off his cap to mop his moist head with a handkerchief. Georg saw that the ginger wisps that protruded from the cap were all the hair he had; the rest of his head was bald. The balloon seemed to stir as though it wanted to take off again, rising and bumping on the packed dirt of the yard, and Thistlethwaite appointed a pair of peasant boys to seize the rim of the gondola and hold it down with their strong brown arms. The boys stared at Georg with an admiration totally free from envy; his position, first of all as scion of the estate and second as balloonist, was too much above them even to aspire to. It was enough that they had seen the balloon. This they could tell to their children.
The admiration of Georg’s father seemed a little more limited.
“What are you about here, man?” he demanded with his fists still on his hips.
“Why, I’m on my holiday, sir,” Thistlethwaite told him. “It’s a lovely country you’ve got here, excellent for ballooning, flat for the most part, but some of your natives are not very respectful, one of them shot a hole through my balloon. I don’t call that a neighborly thing to do, when our rulers are all cousins, don’t you know-our Dear Queen is the grandmother of your present Emperor.”
“That’s all very well, but you’ve landed your contraption in my farmyard, and without permission.”
“Why, it was just to bring your lad home,” said Thistlethwaite with a broad smile, thus defending himself while inculpating Georg as the ultimate Bad Boy, flying off into the sky when he was supposed to be attending to his duties on the farm. Georg thought it best to climb out of the gondola at this point, sending it straining upward so that two more boys had to come forward to seize it, knotting the muscles in their arms and showing their teeth.
“Well, I’d have to valve more gas to stay, so it’s auf Wiedersehen,” said Thistlethwaite, putting his cap back on. “Let go then, lads! loslassen!” he cried in his imperfect German, and pried the eight unclean hands from the rim of the gondola. Lighter now by the weight of a boy, or two sand-bags, the balloon sprang into the air and rose rapidly away, dwindling until it was only the size of a red-and-white rubber ball that boys might play with, soaring away into the wide heavens with its fortunate and privileged pilot; and Georg’s spirits soared, soared, soared with it, never again to return to earth, to the old prosaic earth that his heart left behind it at that moment.
Thenceforth all his thoughts were on balloons, and this at an age when most boys are thinking of girls. Thistlethwaite with his cap and his tufts of hair was permanently engraved in his mind as the epitome of the hero, of the Übermensch. In his notebook he drew balloons instead of dirty pictures, and in his math class he calculated the lift of a balloon twenty-seven feet in diameter which was six-sevenths full of hydrogen, a gas which has a specific gravity of 0.09, so that a cubic foot of it at sea level will lift a weight of 0.072 pounds. He read books about Montgolfier, the Communard couriers who escaped from Paris in balloons in the siege of 1870, and the ill-fated Andrée expedition which set out in a balloon for the North Pole in 1897 and was never seen again. He studied the history of early dirigible balloons, including those of Henry Gifford whose pointed cigar was run by a steam-engine, Renard and Krebs whose elongated gas-bag was propelled by an electric motor powered with batteries, and Santos-Dumont who won a prize by piloting an airship of his own design from Saint-Cloud around the Eiffel Tower in 1901, just a year after Georg’s encounter with Thistlethwaite.
As the war clouds gathered over Europe (“I always thought that funny-looking Englander in his balloon was a spy,” said Georg’s father, forgetting that the English Queen, now dead, was his Emperor’s grandmother) the German Army and Navy competed in their research with airships. The old Count Zeppelin set up a factory at Friedrichshaven on Lake Constance to build dirigible airships, which were soon called after his name. At eighteen Georg went off to the Naval School in Kiel, and three years later, graduating as a sub-lieutenant, he was posted to Friedrichshaven for training in Zeppelins.
Thank God for the War! Or Georg’s life would have been meaningless. He rose rapidly in this service for which he was inclined by temperament and talent and which seemed a miraculous culmination of all his secret reveries. By 1910 he was second in command of the experimental LZ-1, and at the outbreak of the War he was a full lieutenant in command of his own airship, the L-12. She had two Maybach engines, a pair of machine guns, and an open control car in which the crew wore arctic clothing against the freezing cold. She carried four thousand pounds of bombs, which hung by their tails from a girder running along the keel. There were no accommodations at all for her crew of twelve and no provision for sleep; when the mechanics came off duty in the engine gondolas they took up their posts at the machine guns.
In this ship, which seemed to him so magnificent that he could hardly believe it had been confided into his hands, he took part in raids on Paris and Verdun, and in 1915 joined the squadron which bombed London for the first time. George had never been in England—the land of Thistlethwaite, which lent it a slightly fabulous or mythic quality—but he soon knew the southeast part of it by heart: the rounded coast of East Anglia, the inlets at Ipswich and Colchester which on dark nights were easy to confuse the one for the other, the mouth of the Thames at Southend, and the sinuous twists of the Thames itself, each one of which he identified from the air until they came at last to Woolwich, to the Tower, and to the city with its vulnerable docks. The great metropolis was blacked out and lay motionless and scarcely breathing, attempting to conceal itself in darkness. They could turn out their lights, Georg thought, but they could never conceal their river, which pierced their land like a silver dagger pointed at the heart of London.
Georg dropped his bombs and watched abrupt pink blossoms spring out below him on the India Docks, in Hyde Park, and in Piccadilly. The anti-aircraft fire was heavy, not very accurate at first, but the British gunners improved. Some Zeppelins were lost in this dangerous work; the rumor spread among the crews that your chances of being killed were forty percent on any given raid. Georg’s L-12 was holed several times by non-incendiary shells which failed to ignite the gas in the bags, and while landing at Cuxhaven in a gale in early 1916 the ship was blown sideways against the hanger and destroyed. Georg was assigned another Zeppelin and went on with the same crew, minus two men who were killed in the accident. A little later a mechanic fell out of a gondola into the North Sea while trying to tighten a loose strut, and over London at night his executive officer had his head pierced by a stray bullet from a British fighter. Those people probably believed in Fate. I’m the enemy of Fate, he told himself. I’m not a Greek, I’m a Prussian. I make things happen. I’m invulnerable and immortal. This hubris sustained him, and he survived the War.
There was one unfortunate incident that left him and his crew unscathed but afflicted Georg with a nagging nightmare that stayed with him for the rest of his life. A night raid over London in April of 1916; a squadron of six Zeppelins approached the capital from the east. Von Plautus was nominally the commander, although such raids were loosely organized and each captain was free to take action on his own as the circumstances justified. Two ships were lost before the squadron reached the target: L-24 was shot down by anti-aircraft fire off Harwich and fell into the sea, and L-9 exploded over the mouth of the Thames in a fireball that turned the clouds pink. The four remaining ships made their way up the river at eight thousand feet. The targets were Charing Cross Station, Waterloo Station, and the Hungerford Bridge with its cluster of railroad lines connecting London with the southern counties. The wind was from the east so that the Zeppelins swept along at seventeen knots faster than their cruising speed of forty knots, making the landmarks of the blacked-out city spin by under them at a dizzying pace.
The four Zeppelins were flying in loose formation, L-22 and L-23 ahead, and L-8 and Von Plautus in L-14 behind them and a little higher. As they crossed Tower Hill Georg saw a weaving cone of searchlights ahead. The roses of anti-aircraft fire were already flashing in the air. Those fools Schieffer and Winckelmann were headed right into it. Impatiently he broke formation and ordered up elevator, left rudder, and flank speed on the engines. The ship rose up like a seal springing from the waves, her girders groaning from the strain. The two Zeppelins ahead sank out of sight, and he saw through a gap in the clouds the barrel-shaped glass roof of Waterloo. It was coming up fast. The bombardier was bent over his rapidly tilting sight. Georg: heard him shouting over the speaking tube to the gunner’s mate in the keel.
“Ein, los! Zwei, los! Drei, los! Vier, los!”
The four sticks of bombs were gone, at intervals of a second which would spread them over a range of a hundred yards. Georg sprang to the window on his left and looked down to see their effect. At that exact moment there was a heavy thump from underneath like a thunderclap, then another and a third. The aluminum floor under his feet leaped up as though hit with a hammer, and the air sprang red, illuminating the river ahead, Lambeth Bridge, and Lambeth Palace in a flash of blood-colored sunlight. L-23 had been to his left and a little lower when he broke formation; he had moved to a point exactly over it when he dropped his bombs.
A chill sprang out on his skin. Nobody spoke in the control car. The Captain of L-23 was Bobo Winckelmann, a classmate of Georg’s in Naval School, a pudgy cheerful fellow who was fond of women, wine, and Viennese waltzes. There were eighteen other men in his crew, including the son of the Commander of the Air Wing of the German Navy. There were no survivors. Waterloo Station was slightly damaged by the bombs that missed the Zeppelin. The L-23 was listed as lost to enemy action. Only three Zeppelins returned to Germany of the six that had left Cuxhaven at sunset. Nobody in the L-14 crew ever mentioned this incident to anyone for the rest of their lives.
Georg made several more raids over London, like an automaton that goes on running because someone has forgotten to turn off its switch. But the Zeppelin war over England died away to a trickle as the British perfected their defenses. In July of 1918 Georg’s L-14 burned in its hangar when the Zeppelin base at Tondern was bombed by Sopwith Camels, and in August Fregattenkapitän Peter Strasser himself, the Navy Chief of Airships, perished when the L-70 in which he was flying as an observer was shot down by RAF fighters over Great Yarmouth. After that the heart was gone out of the thing, and four months later the War was over.
Georg received an Iron Cross for his unblemished heroism in combat. His mother died of the flu, and his father broke his hip and had to limp around the estate at Friedland with a cane, held up on one side by his steward. These disasters Georg irrationally attributed to the War, and in a shadowy part of his mind to his stupid blunder that had killed his comrades.
In the spring of 1919, not knowing what else to do with himself, he married. The thing was arranged by his Prussian relatives (his father was too cross and feeble to have much to do with it), and the bride was Mitzi Falkenburg, the heiress of a prosperous estate in Pomerania, which would be useful to Georg since his father had not made very much money raising miniature Icelandic horses at Friedland. For the time, they took a house in Berlin. Mitzi had expensive tastes and the household ran precariously even with the income from her large dowry. It would be at least thirty years, Georg calculated, before his Pomeranian father-in-law died; he was in perfect health and an athletic horseman.
Georg sought about for various expedients to make a living, partly to contribute to the household economy and partly to maintain his self-respect. He asked for advice from a Navy friend who was said to be knowledgeable about such matters, and this friend persuaded him to invest a large sum of his wife’s money in a scheme to use monkeys captured in Africa to perform simple tasks in factories. The monkeys were actually apes called bonobos, somewhat smaller relatives of chimpanzees, and one of mankind’s closest relatives in the primate world, interesting to zoologists because they are the only known animals except for humans to copulate face to face. Hundreds of bonobos were brought from the Congo to a warehouse on the outskirts of Hamburg, and former zoo employees were hired to train them to turn handles, tighten bolts with a wrench, and walk in treadmills, with a view to setting them to work later on factory lines in the American manner. Georg himself, with nothing on his hands to do, went to work in the Hamburg warehouse as a manager.
The scheme was a terrible failure. Georg lost everything he put into it. He came to hate monkeys with a force usually reserved for nationalistic and ethnic prejudices. Their mocking, clownish, irresponsible ways. Their malicious agility. Their brains which seemed so supple and extraordinary and in the end were adapted mainly to outwitting the wills of people who wished them to do things other than as they pleased. A monkey, he discovered, never does anything but what it wants to do. A monkey could spin a wheel, but delighted in spinning it the wrong way. Or the right way for a few turns, then the wrong way for a few turns, and so on. Monkeys could pull ropes, but only at the wrong time, and the wrong rope. Monkeys could work treadmills, but put six of them in a turning wheel at once (they were so small that one of them alone could not work it) and you saw an army of midgets gone berserk and falling into piles on each other at the bottom of the wheel; and for some reason monkeys loved to fornicate at the bottom of treadmills. Monkeys could peel fruit with great skill for their own account, but woe betide anyone who tried to make them work in a canning factory. It was expected that the monkeys would reproduce themselves and thus produce a constant supply of new workers, but monkeys proved to be agile at coitus interruptus, premature ejaculation, and other contraceptive techniques.
Georg wrote off his loss and pondered over a scheme of his own invention. It came from the improbable connection between Iceland, where his father bought the breeding stock for the miniature horses he raised on the estate, and aluminum, which had aroused Georg’s interest because of its use in dirigibles. Aluminum was a magic substance to him, light, silvery, shining, incorruptible, as strong as steel if alloyed a little with other metals. Aluminum is silver made from clay. Its ore, bauxite, is one of the commonest substances on the face of the earth, but its refining requires tremendous amounts of electric power. Iceland had electricity in abundance, from waterfalls and boiling water springing from the earth, but nothing much to do with it. Georg formed a company to bring bauxite to Iceland in ships and to build factories to refine it. The scheme was economically sound, but came to nothing when the Icelandic government, which had previously given its permission for the factories, discovered that for every shipload of ore which came to the island country ninety-nine and a half percent was left behind in the form of slag. In vain did Georg protest that this waste material could be spread out over shallow bays and would become valuable farmland, all the more so because Iceland was a mountainous country and short on flat surfaces. He found that the Icelanders were proud of their mountains and disliked flat surfaces, and also that their scientists (he had no idea that there were such things as Icelandic scientists) had determined that the fumes given off in aluminum refining were bad for the health. A healthy, proud, plain-hating race, the Icelanders. In short, he lost half of his wife’s dowry on this venture and the other half trying to train monkeys to work in factories.
About this time his father broke another leg and died of septicemia, and the estate in Friedland was sold up to pay the creditors. Georg’s ancestral home was gone; he had nowhere else to live now but in the arms of Mitzi. This was an uneasy place of repose, because Mitzi had never loved him any more than he had loved her, and besides she was annoyed at him now for losing all her money. As a husband and a Prussian, he disciplined himself in a steely way to perform the conjugal duties that God and society expected of him. For years he strove to please Mitzi with all his might and main, like one of the Teutonic knights who were his ancestors setting out with raised spear against dragons. But the spear drooped. At one point he tried a clever Swiss device which had to be inserted into his shaft of manhood by surgery; it hurt when they put it in, it hurt when they took it out, and it hurt during the two weeks that he used the thing, or tried to make it work. He encouraged Mitzi to have lovers, throwing young lieutenants and so forth at her. This didn’t work because she didn’t seem to care much for men of any sort, perhaps because of her experience with him, and it only made him feel guilty. Now in addition to his other failures he was an unsuccessful cuckold.
He held dialogues with himself. I am the way God made me, the one Georg told the other.
No you aren’t, you coward. You are what you make of yourself. Leave God out of it.
Each man is born with a nature, said the first. He must be true to it.
No, said the other, he has a race, and it is to that that he must be true. Deutschland über alles!
The Prussians are a much maligned race, Georg thought. They just try to do their duty to God and the Fatherland, and everyone thinks they are stiff and inhuman. Well, by God, they are, thought Georg. The Tahitians lolling under their coconut trees are not stiff and inhuman. They know how to enjoy life. Maybe I should have been born a Tahitian, said Georg. But I was not. I was born a Prussian. He knew now without a doubt that he was two persons. He was Von Plautus, and he was also Georg, a Bad Boy. Von Plautus strove in conjugal labor to be a proper husband, and perhaps a father, and the Bad Boy drew pictures in his notebook. This was getting him nowhere and he decided that maybe it was time to try being a Bad Boy, a Tahitian.
He left Mitzi and took lodgings in Träumerei Strasse, in a rather disreputable part of Berlin behind the zoo. There he spent his days sleeping and reading erotic magazines, and his nights in the cabarets around the Alexanderplatz: loud smoky rooms filled with Negro jazz musicians, wealthy American degenerates, Polish women who claimed to be countesses, breastless flappers in tiny cloches and short skirts, Brazilian heirs with tickler mustaches, German boys with rumps swelling in tight white pants, and melancholy former officers like himself. His favorite of these places was the Pinakothek in Fleischmarkt Strasse, which was the most expensive but had Manet and Renoir reproductions on the walls, and operetta music instead of savage tribal clangor. The air was thick with smoke, the waiters had whitened faces and wore lipstick, and the cadaverous girl who sang Lehar songs smoked cigars at the bar when she was not performing.
It was there that Georg encountered Albertino, a well-known figure in the quarter, lean and suave, clean-shaven, with a skullcap of glistening black hair and a fluent German accented with something Mediterranean, or perhaps it was Romanian. He wore evening clothes even in the daytime; Georg had once seen him in his tuxedo at noon Unter den Linden, parading his cigarette holder and gazing disdainfully into the shops. At that point he knew him only by sight, but one night at the Pinakothek in the early hours of the morning (the doors of the place were locked at midnight) Albertino slid into a chair across from him as though they had been friends for years.
“Bonsoir then, Herr Leutnant, or may I say Georg? Comment ca va? Eh? And one really, doesn’t say bonsoir at this time of the day, I suppose, but we don’t have any other expression for it. Ordinary decent people are tucked into bed at this hour. Guten Abend, gute Nacht, schlaf’ under dem Dach. If you have a roof. Nowadays people are sleeping under bridges, Herr Leutnant. Times are bad.”
“It’s our own fault for getting in that damned War and letting them beat us,” muttered Georg.
Albertino said, “Still there are a few pleasures left to us. Art museums, for example.” He drew on his cigarette holder and looked at him narrowly.
“You mean here?” said Georg. “It’s a pleasant enough place.”
“You’ve come to the right spot here, eh, Herr Leutnant. There’s plenty of what you’re looking for here.”
Georg inspected his expression. He seemed friendly enough and there was nothing mocking in his manner, instead it was offhand and confiding. After a moment Georg said, “Yes. The trouble is, it’s all for sale, it seems, and I can’t afford it.”
Albertino ran his hands over his deluxe skull to smooth the air. “Why, Herr Leutnant-may I call you Georg? You see, I too have been an officer in the past, in my own way, so you’ll excuse the familiarity. Why should you pay for anything? You’re still young and good-looking. I could introduce you to any number of people who would be your good friends, some of them right in this room at the moment.”
As one example, he pointed to an old Graf sitting at a table by himself, a man of seventy as stiff as a rake, dressed all in black, with tobacco-stained mustaches and brown bags under his eyes. “He has millions, and I mean dollars not marks. He only needs to be skillfully kissed, to have someone as handsome as you bend his head over him, to be a happy man.”
Georg stood up, stared at Albertino for a moment undecided whether to slap him, then left the cabaret, hurried away to his lodgings behind the zoo, and threw up; he was too proud to do it in public. After he was done he wiped his chin with toilet paper and looked at himself in the mirror. There was no plumbing in his room and he was standing in the small lavatory at the end of the hall, with a bare light bulb overhead and a mirror gray with patches like an antique map.
The mirror did its usual trick, reflecting back a little movie of somebody or other. Who was that? Not he. The mirror reversed the part in his hair and put his ring on the wrong finger. It was a doublet of himself, a facsimile whose vantage on the world was switched end for end, and no doubt his thoughts too. This creepy-looking character was probably the one who was capable of fucking Mitzi. He cursed his fate for afflicting him with this desire for the wrong half of the human race. But then he reflected that ordinary men are afflicted in just the same way; they happen to be afflicted with a desire for the right half of the human race, but the situation is just as unsatisfactory, torturing, and demeaning, with the additional disadvantage that they (the proper lovers, husbands, and papas) don’t have the satisfaction of being special, of membership in a kind of cursed and tormented elite. Why would he want to be like them? His soul stiffened and he threw away this temptation. Better to remain as one of the Miltonic outcasts, the dark angels who, in congress with their own kind, plotted rebellion against Heaven. Still standing before the mirror in the lavatory, he saw himself as a petty German Beelzebub, an officer on half pay donning dark wings from a costume shop.
The Devil take it! He went back to his room, threw off his clothes, and slept for what was left of the night. He dreamed deeply. In the dream, Georg penetrated into the jungle of his own richly flowering soul, finding there a wisdom he could only grasp in fragments, like particles of fog. He wandered over faint tracks in the grass, through thickets and clearings, coming back often to places he had been to before, only slightly altered. His lover, his adversary, the Other he was looking for, concealed himself cleverly. He, the Other, moved through the jungle when it was night, with no weapons except his skin, his hands, and his erect penis. He wore the skull of some animal over his head, an okapi or a stag. The only way was to trick him, to pretend that it was night when it was day, or to put something over his own head to conceal his soul, to protect his brain from the insects that swarmed around it as he walked. What he found was a human skull. Wearing it, he maneuvered with shrewd trickery until he managed to see the Other coming toward him down the path. The two shapes merged for an instant, Georg felt the warm embrace of a shadow, and then he was alone; he turned and clutched at the thin fog that lay over the jungle but there was nothing. The bitter taste of fear lay in his throat.
Georg woke up, shuddered, got out of bed, and drank a cup of coffee. But was he really awake now or was all consciousness only higher and lower levels of his dream? The world about him, when he went out into the streets, seemed evanescent and thin, changing constantly, slipping away from his grasp when he reached for it. In Träumerei Strasse, near his lodgings, he saw a female dog lifting her leg to piss against a tree. In the Pinakothek the boys dressed as girls and the girls dressed as boys. If a plumb-bob hangs sideways, Georg thought, it probably means that something is wrong somewhere.
He threw away the erotic magazines, he no longer went to cabarets and slept all day, and for a week he sat in cafés reading newspapers. In one of them he finally found the sign he had been waiting for, in a single word that sprang out at him from the banal rectangle of newsprint.
Luftschiffbau.
Now he remembered-it was incredible that he had forgotten his first love, the one true love of his life, which had seized him even before his voice had deepened and his groin sprouted hairs. In a fever of excitement he read the rest of the article. In Friedrichshaven, in the south of Germany on Lake Constance, the Zeppelin Gesellschaft GmbH was once again into the business of building dirigibles. The Treaty of Locarno, recently signed, had removed the last obstacle to Germany’s building airships large enough to be capable of crossing the oceans.
Taking with him only what he could carry in a traveling case, Georg abandoned his room without locking the door and caught the first train to Friedrichshaven. With his qualifications as a wartime Zeppelin commander, he was offered a position as advisor to the company, which was laying plans for the building of the LZ-126, a passenger dirigible capable of crossing the Atlantic at seventy knots. Its commander was to be Hugo Eckener, the managing director of the company and the most skilled dirigible pilot in Europe. The new ship was to be finished in only a few months. To Georg was held out a vague promise of a position as a watch officer, or perhaps as its second in command.
He took a room in the Kurgarten Hotel in Friedrichshaven and commuted every day on a bicycle to his work in the big hangar on the lakefront. He could hardly believe his luck that, after all his travails and troubles, he was once more back in his beloved world of airships. His duties were mainly symbolic; he spent most of his days watching the assembly of the gargantuan structure in the hangar and pretending to supervise it. All about him was aluminum, finer to him that silver or gold; he had the machinists make him a ring of the precious metal which he wore on his left hand as if it were a wedding band.
When the four Maybach engines arrived he peered through the openings of the crates to catch a glimpse of them, trim like racing engines with their vee-pattern cylinders and their superchargers. He passed his hand over the steel bottles of hydrogen stored at the end of the hangar: the Divine Element, the purest and simplest of the atoms, a single electron spinning around a single nucleus. Even the danger of hydrogen fascinated him, its propensity to explode with immense force if ignited with the proper mixture of air. He stood in the half-finished control car, with nothing but open girders around him, and imagined the placement of the controls in minutest detail, the rudder wheel forward and the elevator wheel on the left, the compass tilted up perkily at the helmsman, the engine telegraphs overhead on the right; the neatness, sparseness, and efficiency of this silver cabin from which the largest airship ever built would be controlled.
In these weeks at the factory he lived in a continuous heat of boyish fervor and joy, which he concealed as best he could from the others around him. Only one cloud hung in the summer sky of his happiness: that it was Dr. Eckener who would command the LZ-126 and not himself. This was an arrangement perfectly logical and just on the face of it, since Dr. Eckener had flown airships when he, Georg, was still a schoolboy in Friedland, and was the chosen heir and successor of the old Count for whom the company was named. It was an irrational feeling but it sprang up in him anyhow; we are not responsible for our emotions, only for our actions. Eckener (a plague take his doctor’s degree) was a civilian, an engineer not an officer, one who didn’t belong to the brotherhood of those who had raided London and Paris and steered their ships through the deadly roses of the anti-aircraft fire. This jealousy was a novel feeling for Georg. With a taste of bile in his mouth he struggled in the grip of this powerful green monster. It was, he found, a passion almost equal to that of sex, and one that like sex could be subdued by stern acts of character. No one ever suspected it, just as no one ever suspected his boyish elation over his return to the world of airships.
As it happened, Dr. Eckener turned out in the end to be his friend and benefactor. One day when the frame of the 126 was almost finished he was called to the Director’s office and found a ruffled and distracted Eckener shuffling through the papers on his desk.
“Ah! There you are, Von Plautus. Sit down. Have a cigar. A drop of brandy? Very well. I know you’re an ascetic, a stoic, a Prussian, a man who doesn’t permit himself any pleasures of the flesh. Ha ha! Von Plautus, I need to have a little talk with you.”
Georg the pessimist was sure that he was going to be fired.
“An American lady has been visiting the works, Von Plautus. It seems that she’s immensely wealthy. And a little gaga. But no matter. The point is that she wants to buy the 126.”
“Buy it!” Georg could hardly believe his ears. “Why don’t you tell her to go about her business?”
“But you see she offers very attractive terms.” Eckener was embarrassed. “We still have all the jigs and forms to use on the next ship, and the Maybach plant can make more engines quickly. It would delay us a year or so, no more, in building our own ship.”
A year! Georg began to doubt that he would ever set foot in a dirigible again. Many things could happen in a year. He saw his improbable dream fading, turning to mist in his hands like the Beloved Enemy in his dream.
“An American lady! What does she want to do with it?”
Eckener took the cigar out of his mouth and examined it as if it were something he was very interested in. “Go about the world in it, I imagine, spreading her Divine Message.”
“Her what?”
“You see, she’s religious, of a sort. I’m not sure what message it is that she’s spreading, but she’s a formidable person, and she seems to have made a lot of money out of her religious venture, if that’s what it is.”
“Herr Direktor, this is crazy.”
“Yes, isn’t it. You see, Von Plautus, the fact is that the Zeppelin Gesellschaft is badly short of capital. The Kaiser is no longer paying the bills as he was during the War; he’s chopping wood in Holland. We’re a commercial enterprise now. We wouldn’t be able to finish the 126 unless we raise more money, and we don’t know where it would come from. This contract will enable us to start immediately on an LZ-127, with the certainty that we have enough money to finish it.”
“Contract?”
“Yes, we signed it this morning. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about, Von Plautus. The reason I sent for you is that this lady, Mrs. Pockock is her name, has also asked me to help her in assembling a crew, and I’ve suggested you as her commander.”
Hope sprang in Georg like a leaping dolphin. “Me?”
“She wants an international crew.” He looked at Georg as though he hoped Georg knew what this meant. “A kind of brotherhood of nations, so to speak. But I persuaded her that for the commander and a few key personnel she needs Germans who are Zeppelin veterans, who have …”
“Steered their ships through the deadly roses of the anti-aircraft fire.”
“Exactly.” Eckener looked at him a little queerly on account of this excursion into poetry. “Of course there are British too who have rigid airship experience now. You have no objection to the British?”
“None whatsoever.”
“And I daresay some Italians and French. What languages do you have, Von Plautus?”
“English, French, Italian, and a little Spanish. I don’t suppose you’d count Latin.”
“You don’t say. Well then, your qualifications seem complete. Mrs. Pockock—she doesn’t call herself that, by the way, but that’s what we’ll call her between you and me—wants to settle all this immediately. I’ve found that Americans are like that. They plunge right ahead and take no account of the difficulties. She’s leaving Germany tomorrow. If you don’t mind, we’ll go around to her hotel and you’ll have a chance to meet her. And she you, of course.” Eckener still had the air of a man who was struggling with great difficulties inside himself and could only partly share his attention with the other person in his office. “She’s staying at the Majestic in Konstanz. I’ll call my car.”
Before Georg could object, he was in the Direktor’s sedan and they were on their way around the lake to Konstanz. The driver was a young man with a broad neck and a black chauffeur’s cap. Georg knew that neck very well.
“Why, you’re Erwin Giesicke,” he told him from the back seat. “You were in my L-14 during the War.”
“Begging your pardon, Herr Leutnant, I am that same person,” said Erwin without turning his head.
“What have you been doing with yourself all these years?”
“With your permission, Herr Leutnant, for the last couple of years I’ve been employed here at the Zeppelin works.”
“Giesecke,” said Eckener, who now seemed embarrassed in a new way, “would like very much to be a member of your crew in the 126. Mrs. Pockock, by the way, has told me that it’s to be called the League of Nations. I’ve told him that he should talk to you.”
“Later,” said Georg. “I haven’t agreed yet that I’m going to do this thing.”
They arrived at the hotel and were handed out of the car by a doorman dressed like a Swiss admiral. It was the best hotel in Konstanz. They were shown into a suite on the second floor (Erwin remained below, standing by the car with his jodhpurs crossed and his cap set exactly square on his head), and after a few minutes’ wait there appeared in the doorway a woman with green eyes and golden hair, wearing a simple linen gown that came to her feet. Behind her was another woman clad in black, taller than Mrs. Pockock, with a tumor in her forehead like half an egg.
Mrs. Pockock was an extraordinary creature. She was preternaturally thin, but her thinness gave the impression not of emaciation but of an extraordinary spiritual discipline, a reduction of her physical flesh to the minimum needed to sustain life. Her fragile neck and the finely modeled bones of her face were those of a woman of great beauty, yet the effect that she gave was not that of sexual attraction. Or it was sexual, but it went beyond male and female to the very center of human desire and beauty; it represented the sublime inner goal that sex attempts to achieve, not the mere surface attraction of sex itself. Georg felt that he was in the presence of something rare and potent, something that transcended the limits of his ordinary experience. At the same time, the skeptical part of him saw the ridiculousness of the situation: the theatrical staging of the meeting, the bizarre dress of the two women, their sudden appearance in the doorway like two apparitions, the glow that emanated from Mrs. Pockock’s face as though she had rubbed it with powdered phosphorous. He saw now that Mrs. Pockock’s gown was embroidered all over with little M’s, in the same color as the stuff so that they were almost invisible.
“Mrs. Pockock. Lieutenant von Plautus,” murmured Eckener.
Mrs. Pockock remained silent. It was the other woman who spoke. “What is your full name?” she asked Georg.
He gave her the benefit of a Prussian bow with heel-click. “I am Georg von Plautus.”
“In the Guild of Love we call people by both name and surname,” said the tall woman. “For women, it’s demeaning to be labeled either Miss or Mrs., and men too we call by their full names, just to be symmetrical. And so you are Hugo Eckener and you are Georg von Plautus. But Moira is not Moira Pockock, but just Moira.” After a moment she added, “I am Aunt Madge Foxthorn.”
So far Moira had not spoken; she only stared at the two Germans out of her unsettling green eyes. A formidable person to have for an enemy, Georg thought. She probably had no need of friends. But she has a dirigible, the thought flashed with ardor in his mind. When she spoke at last she came to the point immediately, without preliminaries.
“Do you believe in the Invisible, Georg von Plautus?”
Some intuition told him that his future happiness, his very existence, depended on his finding the right answer to this question. “I believe in the visible world. And since we speak of things that are visible, there must also be things that are invisible.”
He seemed to have said the right thing, whether it came from inspiration in some way or just out of chance. Moira said, “Exactly.” She asked a few more questions. Was he married? Did he believe in equality for women? Did he believe in the equality of races? Did he believe in Free Love? Was he a member of a religious organization with a fixed dogma? (The correct answer to the last one was no, to all the others yes). Could he steer an airship to any place in the world? He explained that a dirigible had two steering wheels and that other people would manage those, but that he was capable of commanding (he felt that this translation of kommandieren was not quite English) an airship to any place in the world.
Moira and Aunt Madge Foxthorn exchanged a glance. They seemed to be privately amused about something, with a trace of complicity. After a moment Moira said, “Hugo Eckener” (how strange this sounded, as though it were some schoolboy she was talking about) “tells me that you served in the War.”
“Yes.”
“Did you suffer?”
“I?” He wasn’t sure what she meant. “Not personally.”
“You see, Georg von Plautus”—and now she seemed to speak to him directly, not to Eckener, not to anyone else in the world; it was as though the others were not there—“you see, I have a special gift of Vision that allows me to see into the heart of the world, and this has revealed to me that the German race has played a tragic part in the drama of history, in my Astral journeys, I have seen the nobility of its men and the sacrifice of its women. I know that because of the suffering the Germans have undergone, and because of the sufferings they have inflicted on other people, they should be regarded with a special understanding and compassion. We should all work with particular diligence to free the Germans from their Karma, so that their spirits can rejoin the universal Atman of brotherhood.”
Georg remained silent at this. It seemed to him absolute nonsense. She seemed to be saying that, because he had dropped bombs on London, he was an unfortunate person who should be treated with special consideration. He murmured a phrase he would never have pronounced under any other conditions. “There is enough suffering to go around for everybody.”
He was aware of the other woman’s forehead-bulb pointed in his direction. It was slightly unsettling. The two women seemed to have nothing more to say. Moira didn’t shake hands, nor did she offer tea or a glass of sherry. She held her green smile while Eckener and Georg left the room (Georg felt vaguely that they ought to back away, as from the presence of Royalty). The car whisked them back to the plant, and in his office Eckener told him for the first time what the terms of the position were. The monthly salary was more than he had earned in the year previously, and it was paid in dollars. He was to have absolute command of the maneuvering and navigation of the League of Nations, and Moira was to tell him where it was to go.
“You’re a lucky fellow,” Eckener told him. “It’s settled then. Here’s your copy of the contract.”
They shook hands on it themselves, since it wasn’t evidently the custom of the two American ladies to shake hands, and Eckener produced his bottle of brandy. At this point, only two hours from the moment he had first heard of Moira, Georg had no idea who she was or what her plans were. It didn’t matter. The words She has a dirigible still glowed in his thought-vault, along with the memory of her penetrating green eyes and the gown with M’s all over it.
A strange business. Georg clutched its strangeness, which was also the strangeness of his own special destiny. He went on in this way, exalted and blissful, concealing his inner state and showing the world only his steely exactness and military probity, during the months in which the airship was finished to the highest standards of the Zeppelin Company, in which he conducted its trials and trained its crew, to the day when it rose from the concrete apron at Friedrichshafen and turned its nose to the north. And to think that during the War he had not believed in Fate! Who then had dropped that newspaper into his frame of vision as he sat in the café in Berlin? Who had caused this green-eyed demoness to swim into his ken, like an unknown planet into the telescope of an astronomer? Fate! Fate!
*
“Ten degrees right rudder,” he orders.
“Ten degrees right, Herr Kapitän.”
The Captain is starting his broad turn south of Mainz in order to make his approach to Frankfurt, fifteen miles to the east. The compass turns, clicking for each degree. “Steady on zero eight zero.” Frankfurt is visible ahead now; he can see the soot-stained jumble of the city and, a little to the right, the hangar at Zeppelinheim in the southern suburbs. Although there are only a few fluffy clouds overhead, there are dark nimbus to the east, over the Vogelsberg. He doesn’t think the rain will arrive in time to interfere with his landing, but he keeps a wary eye on it. He looks around for something that will give him a clue to the wind, a flag or a smoking chimney. Frankfurt radio reports good weather; they don’t seem to have turned around to look at the mountains behind them.
He catches sight of a farm chimney with its smoke drifting weakly to the west. The wind is only about ten knots; it will be a couple of hours before the rain arrives. But now his attention has been caught by something else he sees through the windscreen. He gets the binoculars from the rack. In a clearing in the woods, two froglike creatures are weaving and circling. Naked human beings. He adjusts the glasses and peers more carefully. He can tell that one is female and one male, not from any external signs, which are indistinguishable from this altitude, but from their motions, the one running with flailing arms, the other with legs pumping and elbows tucked in like an athlete. A clearly understandable little drama, banal, but enough to hold the Captain’s attention for a few seconds. He wonders how long it will be before they notice the airship. It is only about a quarter of a mile from them now; its darkening shadow races toward them through the woods.
But now something new and inexplicable is happening. The male has approached the female closely and is circling around her, but she, instead of repulsing his advances, or surrendering to them, is batting at the air around her as though beset by invisible ghosts, pirouetting, bending, straightening up, swinging her arms as though exercising with Indian clubs; and look, he is doing the same! twirling, slapping his thighs, then his head with one hand and his stomach with the other, as if attempting that difficult trick where you pat the one and roll your palm on the other, sitting down, standing up, running a few yards, making a spasmodic jerk, then coming back to the female and uniting with her so suddenly that the two figures fall to the ground, roll over, and scrunch convulsively together like two dying slugs.
A clear enough end to the dance; the rest of it is perhaps some ritual common to these two individuals. The white blob passes away under the bulk of the dirigible and becomes invisible; the Captain puts away the binoculars. The incident reminds him that the universe doesn’t consist solely of his humming airship and its efficient, well-trained, responsive crew; down below is the old world with its strife and cruelty, its urban soot, the stench of politics, its suffering without remedy, the muddled and tormenting, inefficient spasms of sex. Erwin, although he is looking out through the windscreen, has apparently not noticed this vignette below.
“What are you heading?”
“Zero eight zero, Herr Kapitän.”
Right on course. He has been watching the compass closely and is too well disciplined to lower his eyes to anything else.
“Elevators steady; there’ll be an updraft here as we cross the Rhine.”
“Steady, sir,” replies the young Englishman.
The grimy sky of Frankfurt is more clearly outlined now, rising up from the horizon. It is a town that the Captain knows well, although he has no particular affection for it.
“Erwin. D’you remember the Bierstube that we airshipmen used to frequent when we were in Frankfurt, eh? The Heldenkeller.”
“Ja, Herr Kapitän.”
“We might drop around there tonight, d’you know, just for old time’s sake. We Germans that is. The old gang.”
“Ja, Herr Kapitän.”
The Captain thinks that in the future airships may be steered by an automatic helmsman—a shiny silver box where the rudder-wheel now is, plus a little parrot that sits by the windscreen and says “Ja, Herr Kapitän” from time to time. As the dirigible passes over the Rhine the elevator man corrects for the expected updraft; first its nose wants to go up, then its tail, and he spins his wheel one way and the other to keep it level.
“Steady at eight hundred, sir.”
The Captain nods without speaking, checks the altimeter himself, then sights out through the windscreen at the still tiny shape of the hangar south of the city.
“Five degrees down elevator.”
“Five degrees down, sir.”
The Captain rubs his front teeth together, a beaver-like tic he has when he is alert. He is enjoying himself now; he is doing what he’s good at and his mind works with the precision of a Swiss watch. “Fifteen minutes!” he shouts into the speaking tube.
A bell trills, calling the crew to their landing stations. A quartermaster appears and takes up his position at the engine telegraphs, and another crewman stands ready at the ballast toggles.
“All ahead slow.”
The four telegraphs clang, then twitter again as the answers come back from the engines. The horizon has risen up now until it is fixed in the sky a little higher than usual. The inclinometer reads down ten. The sound of the engines changes; the cello-note dies away to a whisper in which the grumble of the individual cylinders can be heard. A sound the Captain loves; he can feel it vibrating like a caress in his bones. The landscape below rises slowly toward the dirigible.
The next thing that happens is that he becomes aware with the eye in the back of his head that Mrs. Pockock has come down the aluminum ladder and is standing at the rear of the car with Aunt Madge Foxthorn. He swivels his head briefly to look. The two of them are clad as they were when he first caught sight of them in the hotel in Konstanz, except that Mrs. Pockock is now wearing a round linen hat with a floppy brim to match her gown. Civilians (as the Captain thinks of everybody in the world except airship crews) are not allowed in the control car, but in this case it’s her dirigible, so she can do as she pleases. The phrase She has a dirigible still hangs in his mind like a dim votive lamp in a church, illumination him with a strange kind of emotion for her, a dark, sexless, visceral, half-resentful love such as one might have for a God one dislikes. Zu Befehl, meine Dame! I shall take you to the ends of the earth, yet my soul shall not bend before you.
The League of Nations (he is reminded of its ludicrous name now that she is standing behind him in the car) sinks slowly in the fading light of the afternoon. He can see the hangar more clearly now, and even the stub-mast on wheels and the broad stretch of grass before it where he is to land. This is the field that the old Count Zeppelin planned as a base for his international airship service to America, to South America, and even to Africa, to wipe out the war-shame, to lift the spirit of Germany and restore its place in the proud family of nations, and now it has come to pass! The field is ready, waiting only for the new airships to emerge from the factory, and fitly named for the Count himself—Zeppelinheim, a locution that, in the copulative way of German diction, combines the two most beautiful words in the language, and gives the Captain a swell of pride, of love, of nostalgia just to think about it. He is ready to let the others moon over Mutter, Vaterland, and Liebe.
“Three and four stop!”
The two telegraphs clang again. Closer to the earth the breeze is not so strong; the power of the two engines propels the dirigible slowly against the wind. Altitude four fifty. In the late afternoon light, with the sky still blue to the west, the League of Nations becomes a giant submarine moving forward in an indistinct medium, sinking gradually deeper. A submarine is very much like a dirigible, he thinks. Both are long cigar-shaped machines made of metal, with propellers sticking out on the sides, and the same vanes for turning right and left, up and down, intersecting the fluid in which they move. They even have the same controls, a steering wheel, an elevator wheel, and an engine telegraph. Yet the Captain never doubts the superiority of his own machine. An airship is to a submarine what a God is to a man. If submarines could think, they would imagine gods in the form of dirigibles, similar to themselves but composed of finer matter, and moving in an ethereal medium. You can see something out of a dirigible, even though only in one direction, down, but you can see nothing out of a submarine. Another difference is that U-boats are far more dangerous than Zeppelins, just as life is more dangerous for men than it is for God. Several of the Captain’s friends at Naval School went into U-boats and they are all dead now. Hofstadter, Von Klamm, he remembers, Kopnick, Franckenstein who cheated at math, Vogel whom the others twitted on account of his high voice and his fondness for Cologne water. Strange thing, life. A banal thought, but the very banality of the phrase is part of its strangeness. Do all men feel this? Surely not. In any case, not Erwin. “Never mind the compass. D’you see the hangar ahead now, Erwin? Just steer for the thing.”
“Ja, Herr Kapitän.”
The shadow of the dirigible extends ahead of it, across the farmland and then the bleak suburbs of the city with its factories and crisscrossing roads. Altitude two hundred. The airship is barely making headway now against the light breeze; at this speed it is at the mercy of every current of air and must depend for its trim on ballast and gas-venting. The Captain orders a little gas released from Number 2 cell, forward in the hull just over his head. The ship noses down until it is drifting directly toward the mast. A swarm of ants rushes toward him from the hangar. The three handling-lines drop from the bow; the Captain sees them tumbling down in coils in front of them, then straightening as they trail across the grass. The ground crew snatches the center handling-line, and the big ship is slowly winched forward to the top of the mast. The control car stops only eight feet from the ground. A half-dozen of the ground crew come up trundling a gangway on wheels. Behind him he hears Mrs. Pockock’s silvery voice: “I must be the first to descend.” He notices for the first time that among the people swarming around the control car are a number of photographers, bearing their cameras with trays on the top of them for the flash-powder, and other men in soft black hats who must be journalists. The door of the car opens and the gangway clangs a little against the aluminum until it is adjusted.
Nobody pays any attention to the Captain. Musing with irony over the way she has taken over the scene with the sheer force of her personality, he clicks his heels. “Good evening, Mrs. Pockock.”
“Moira,” corrects Aunt Madge Foxthorn.
Moira descends the metal stairway, and the cameras flash out blindingly like shells over London.