The Reserve by Russell Banks

Author:Russell Banks [Russell Banks]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061809583
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

The doctor shook the young woman’s hand and said, Good-bye, Vanessa, and bon voyage. Your luggage will be in your stateroom, he added, and she nodded as if agreeing. He turned her toward the other passengers, and she followed them onto the bus. When the bus had departed, the doctor walked into the hotel bar and ordered a schnapps and filled his pipe with tobacco and lighted it. A half hour later, in a soft, drizzling rain, the passengers arrived at the airfield and were taken inside a cavernous hangar, where they were inspected a second time for matches, lighters, and batteries. Beyond the hangar, tethered by its nose to a mooring mast, the enormous zeppelin floated in the air, ten feet from the ground. The silver ship was nearly a sixth of a mile long, shaped like a gigantic whale. An open staircase extended from its gleaming belly to the ground. One by one, the passengers climbed the stairs and entered the leviathan. A steward escorted the American woman to her room on Level B and left her alone there. She removed her hat and veil, exposing a single red spot above each eyebrow, tiny circular wounds recently healed. After a few moments, she stepped to the large rectangular window and looked down at the crowd of well-wishers and officers on the ground. A uniformed brass band played “Muss I Denn?” and a choir of Nazi youth sang the “Horst Wessel Song” and “Deutschland Über Alles.” Gradually, the crowd below—the brass band, the Nazi youth contingent, the Zeppelin officials and groundsmen, and the government officials and SS officers—began to diminish in size. Without a ripple of felt movement, the airship was silently rising. At about three hundred feet the muffled sound of the diesel engines penetrated the silence of the stateroom, and the great zeppelin slowly turned northwest and in the gathering dusk headed toward the lights of Koblenz, following the Rhine to the sea.

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