Cards on the Table

The Airfield at Frankfort am Main is new. I can practically smell the fresh paint. White. Is the color of the paint. It’s a spacious, many windowed, high ceiling-ed, building, which makes me think of freedom.

My flight hasn’t been called yet. I’m reading a newspaper, sitting in a lounge on the second floor, in front of an enormous window looking out on the field. I can see great heaps of baggage, trunks, suitcases, bags. The heaps are very neatly arranged. God forbid someone should complain about the mistreatment of their luggage, or find a scuff when we arrive in America.

A uniformed man comes into the lounge to check tickets and passports. Documents, documents, documents. Everything is papers in the New Germany. I feel as if I could drown beneath a sea of papers, and they would stamp my dead heart with a rubber seal. It would say Juden. Or Verräter. Or Physiker.

They come to the man next to me, and then to me. I give the man my papers. My heart beat drums hard in my chest, because this is the moment.

The name on my passport isn’t mine, but the photograph is.

This is the moment where it either works or it doesn’t.

A colleague of mine has written about this recently. A cat is trapped in a box. There is a mechanism in the box that will either kill the cat, or it won’t. 50/50. But wait. Don’t open the box. Is the cat alive? Is it dead? The moment when you open the box is the moment when reality goes in one direction or another.

This is the moment when I escape. This is the moment when they take me away.

“Danke, Herr von Braun,” the uniformed man says to me.

I don’t sigh with relief. I don’t make any visible gesture at all. I continue reading my newspaper.

The uniformed man finishes his inspection, and we wait, but not long. Precisely one hour before our departure time, a steward announces that we may board. Our luggage has already been taken to out staterooms. We should make ourselves comfortable before departure.

I fold my copy of Der Spiegel and leave it behind. I try not to feel elated, but I fail. I’m 26. In three days I will be in Amerika. I’m leaving this retched place on the most glorious aircraft that has ever taken to the skies: Der Hindenburg.

* * *

Precisely one hour later I am in the lounge of the Hindenburg. It is a very fine room, with a large map of the world on the interior wall, and a great bank of windows with a view of the airfield. We are about to embark, and I want to see take off.

It turns out not to be much of an event. They cast off the mooring ropes, and we rise into the sky without any perceptible sensation at all.

I had read about this, but it still thrills me. I decide to perform an experiment. I remove a pencil from my coat pocket, and I attempt to balance it on end on the table in front or me.

It only takes me a moment. Balancing things on end is a bit of a habit of mine, but I’m still awestruck by the result.

Most people don’t notice, or at least they don’t remark it, but when you’re on boat, or a train, or in an aeroplane, you can feel the engine going. The sensation might be subliminal, but the truth is that when you travel, you’re being shaken like a Martini. Any sort of equilibrium, and therefore balance, is impossible.

On the Hindenburg, we’re anchored to the sky by simple physics. The hydrogen in the envelope is lighter than air. Pure buoyancy, like we’re afloat in a completely calm sea. Our engines convert fuel into forward momentum without any kind of energy waste, like jostling the aircraft.

The zeppelin really is the most perfect form of transport known to man.

* * *

I return to my cabin. It’s small, like a sleeper compartment on a train, just a bed, a bureau, a bathroom and a window. Unlike on a train, the view is incredible: northern Germany from 200 meters in the sky.

I’m not traveling with a trunk, just a cardboard suitcase that one of the stewards has placed on my bed. Inside there I have three shirts, a pocket handkerchief and six pairs of socks. My exit papers were approved for a three day stay in America. I have a return ticket on the Bremen in my coat pocket that I won’t be using. If I’d tried to leave with much more than this it would have looked suspicious.

That said, I also packed several items of a personal nature. In the case there is also a gold pocket watch, a photograph, and my thesis, less the cover page. Too risky to bring that, it has my real name on it.

I have one other thing: hidden in the lining of the suitcase is a letter of introduction addressed to Dr Einstein. It is a tricky thing this letter, praising me in no uncertain terms without actually revealing who I am.

I don’t bother unpacking the suitcase, but I do move it under the bed. The room is small because the expectation is that the passengers will spend their time in the lounge, or the writing room, or the bar, rather than spending time in their staterooms. I should do that, to keep up appearances if nothing else, but for now I sit on my bed. I am what Dr Jung calls an Introverted Intuitive type. That means that I find socializing taxing, I enjoy being alone. I have a new Agatha Christie novel in my coat pocket: Murder in Mesopotamia. So I take it out and I read until dinner.

* * *

The restaurant of the Hindenburg is like a cafe: small tables, crisp linen table cloths, informal. Guests are not expected to dress for meals, thankfully. I arrive around 6:30 to find the room very crowded. That isn’t entirely a surprise, sometime during the next hour the Hindenburg will pass the west coast of Ireland and we won’t see land again until America. I’m obviously not the only one who wanted to see that moment.

The steward seats me at the only remaining unoccupied table and hands me a menu. I’m deciding between the Salmon a la Graf Zeppelin and the Roast Gosling when the steward returns looking nervous. I look up and I see a uniformed man by the door. He’s looking at me.

I try not to appear frightened.

“Excuse me, Herr von Braun. This is difficult,” the steward says, seeming agitated, “The gentleman noticed in your papers that you speak English. We have an English lady traveling with us, and no spare tables. Since you are dining alone anyway, I must ask to impose upon you and seat her with you. Will that be acceptable?”

I feel relief. This isn’t at all what I was expecting, but since Herr von Braun and I both do in fact speak English, I don’t see anything wrong with it.

“Ja, dass wird gut,” I tell him.

He visibly brightens. “Thank you, Herr von Braun,” he says to me in German, “I will arrange for you both to have a complimentary cocktail.”

He gestures towards the uniformed man who opens the restaurant door and beckons for the English lady to come in. She is not what I expected either. She’s about 20, and very pretty, not the fussy old woman I imagined when I read about Bertie Wooster’s aunts.

She sits down across from me with a smile. The steward hands her a menu and leaves us alone.

“Awfully good of you to share your table with me, Herr von Braun,” she says, and extends her hand to me. “I’m Evelyn Goss.”

I take her hand and squeeze it. “Please, Wernher,” I lie. “It will be my pleasure to dine with such a charming companion.”

“Actually, Wernher,” she tells me, “I’m an Introverted type. I won’t require conversation, although it is kind of you to offer.”

This takes me aback, but I smile. “I am also an Introverted type. I will enjoy dining quietly in proximity to you, Miss Goss.”

“Call me Evelyn,” she says, “If you find you must speak to me again.”

I nod. “I will.”

The steward returns with two martinis. We both order the Salmon a la Graf Zeppelin, and enjoy our drinks in silence.

* * *

We are both drinking coffee when I find that Evelyn’s attention has fixed on me once again. She’s studying me from across the table.

“You know,” she says, “Our meeting like this has been a pure accident. There really isn’t any reason for either of us to know the other at all.”

I don’t know why Evelyn has broken our silence to pursue this line of conversation, but I agree with her.

“That means,” she continues, “that you could kill one of my enemies, and I could kill one of yours, and no one would ever piece together what had happened. We’d both be off scot-free.”

I’ve never been so instantaneously smitten with someone in my life.

“What a fascinating observation,” I say sincerely, “You are not, by any chance, an aficionado of the great English writer Agatha Christie, are you?”

“Rather,” Evelyn says, “I’m her niece.”

“How extraordinary! I have her Murder in Mesopotamia in my coat pocket.”

“That’s not the latest one,” she tells me, “Do you read them in English or wait for them to be translated into German?”

“I read them whichever way I can get my hands on them.”

“The new one is Cards on the Table. I can loan it to you, if you like.”

“Rather!” I say with enthusiasm.

She smiles at me, and then leans in conspiratorially close. “So shall we do it then? Who do you want killed?”

“Oh,” I say, “well, probably no one really. My life isn’t that interesting. Unless it’s Adolph Hitler.”

I realize what I’ve said. My world crashes down all around me. It took so much careful planning to get me here, and I’ve just given up the entire game by saying something stupid to a pretty girl.

I look at her in horror, and she looks back at me grimly.

She leans in even closer and whispers, “Deal then. I’ll do Hitler for you, if you’ll do Mussolini for me.”

She extends her little finger towards me. I don’t know what this means.

“Pinky swear,” she whispers.

We wrap our little fingers together and shake hands.

I’m too stunned to say anything, but Evelyn relaxes back into her seat.

“I’m in cabin 16,” she says, “Drop by for the book later.”

Then she gets up and walks out of the restaurant.

* * *

Sometime later, I knock on the door of cabin 16. Evelyn opens it.

“Werner!” she says with a smile, “come in.”

I go into her stateroom and she shuts the door behind me. Her room is just like mine, bed, bureau, door to the bathroom.

Some people might feel that there is something indiscreet about a young man and a young woman being alone together in the young lady’s bedroom. I rather hope they’re right. We are standing very close together.

“So you want Cards on the Table,” she says with a coy look.

“Yes,” I tell her, but she makes no move to get the book.

“It makes you want to live in the moment, doesn’t it?” she asks, “knowing that there are 200 tonnes of hydrogen gas right above your head, and it could all explode at any time.”

“It is the farthest thing from my mind,” I tell her. “It seems improbable to me. We Germans are great observers of safety precautions.”

“Oh,” she says, looking taken aback, and fair play: I also wish that I had said something else.

“It occurs to me that I should have just said ‘Yes,’” I tell her.

She raises an eyebrow and then shakes her head.

“What am I going to do with you, Werner?” she says. “Let’s try not saying anything again, it was so nice the first time.”

And then she kisses me.

* * *

Afterwards, we lie together in Evelyn’s bed.

“We should run away together,” she tells me.

“We’re two Introverted types,” I say, “it would never work.”

“That’s just what I mean. I think I would enjoy going through life, quietly, in proximity to someone. If it was the right person.”

I consider it, and find that I rather like the idea after all. If it was the right person. “Actually, you caught me at a good time” I tell her. “I’m already running away.”

“It’s a deal then,” she says, nuzzling my neck.

So it’s a deal then, as the Americans say. We have two more days in this palace in the sky, and then our future is in America.

We’re going to be so happy.