Vango by Timothee de Fombelle

Author:Timothee de Fombelle [Fombelle, Timothee de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7636-7583-7
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2013-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

They ordered dinner. Their time together passed very enjoyably. They talked about engineering, clouds, the difference between Scottish and German cabbages, and above all about their memories of that voyage they’d made together around the world in the zeppelin.

Ethel could paint the portraits of several passengers. Eckener was struck by how accurately she could recall them. Each moment was engraved on her memory. She could describe the leather braces of one traveler or the entire hangar where they had stopped off at Kasumigaura, in Japan.

Ethel ate enough for four. She looked stunning in a dress her mother must have worn to dance the Charleston in America after the war, flicking her heels behind her to the rhythm, first one then the other, until they touched her hands.

Ethel listened to Eckener telling her about an expedition he’d attempted to the North Pole. The Graf Zeppelin had been able to land on the Arctic Ocean, near Hooker Island. Ethel shivered and then laughingly begged for some tropical destinations instead.

So he spoke to her about the pyramids and about Jerusalem.

Ethel had taken off her shoes.

The people around them were whispering. Perhaps they thought she was old-fashioned, with her 1920s dress. They whispered that she was laughing too much. But neither the women nor the men could take their eyes off her.

Everybody was craning their neck. And Hugo Eckener was enjoying himself greatly.

But the only thing on his mind was a name neither of them had mentioned yet. Which proved they were both thinking about him.

“I was wondering about something,” said Ethel.

Hugo Eckener put down his glass. The time had come.

“Do you remember,” she asked, “that boy . . . Vango?”

Eckener smiled. She had screwed up her eyes as she uttered his name, as if she wasn’t quite sure whether or not she’d gotten it right, even though she’d just shown herself capable of recalling exactly what color socks the lowestranking engineer on board the zeppelin was wearing.

It didn’t ring true, and this was the third time in a few months that Eckener had experienced such a scene.

First of all, there had been that Frenchman, claiming to be a canned-goods businessman, who had come to pay him a visit. One Auguste Boulard.

After talking about canned meat and spinach while heartily recommending them for the provisioning of the Graf Zeppelin, after refereeing the match between dried beans and canned beans, after a poignant depiction of the agony of the fresh bean (flaccid, sad, and bound to turn yellow after three days of travel), he had finally popped the question: “Do you remember that boy . . . Vango? Do you have any news of him?”

Then there had been the passenger on a crossing to Lakehurst, near New York. A Russian whom he already knew and who had asked him, “Do you remember that boy . . . ?”

To each of them, Hugo Eckener had replied that he remembered him very well, yes, absolutely, a delightful boy, but he hadn’t had any news of him for five years now.

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