The Ragged Edge of Night Read online

  ALSO BY OLIVIA HAWKER

  Writing as Libbie Hawker

  Tidewater

  Baptism for the Dead

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Libbie Hawker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503900905 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503900908 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503902121 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503902129 (paperback)

  Cover design by Rex Bonomelli

  First Edition

  In memory of our Opa, Josef Anton Starzmann, 1904 to 1988.

  And for my husband, Paul; my mother-in-law, Rita; and Aunt Angie, with love.

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART 1 FATHERLAND

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  PART 2 LET LOVE CARRY ALL YOUR WORDS

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART 3 THE WAYS A MAN MIGHT EARN HIS PAY

  15

  16

  17

  18

  PART 4 DEATH HAS ONE EYE

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  PART 5 BELL SONG

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  HISTORICAL NOTE AND AUTHOR’S REMARKS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In this work, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party), has been abbreviated as “NSDAP” or referred to as “the Party” or “the Nazi Party.” The Schutzstaffel (a paramilitary organization under the NSDAP) is usually abbreviated to “SS.” Certain factual elements, including the timing of some events, have been altered for the sake of storytelling.

  PART 1

  FATHERLAND

  SEPTEMBER 1942

  1

  The train picks up speed as it leaves Stuttgart. He grew up here, amid long shady streets footed in ancient cobblestones and gardens bright-spotted with afternoon light, but it is no longer the place Anton knew when he was young. Stuttgart is slowly falling, its gray innards exposed, blocks of cement cracked like bones, and the bowels of shops and houses ripped open, spilling into the streets. Dust, like ash, hazes the air. How many bombs have fallen on the city of his childhood? He lost count long ago. It is not the place he knew as a boy, but no place in Germany is the same.

  He presses his forehead against the window and looks back. The wire rims of his spectacles tick against the glass. In the train’s wake, he can just make out, if he strains hard to see it, the long black line of the track. Straight, perfectly straight, like the road to Riga, crossed by a whirl of cold gray cement dust, bomb dust, dancing this way and that, as if anyone has reason to dance.

  He cannot help but feel some affinity for all this gray. It hasn’t been a year since he put away his friar’s habit; gray still suits him, still offers mute comfort, even when he finds it in the corpse of a city. There was a time, those first weeks dressed in an ordinary man’s clothes, trousers and shirt, when he told himself that this would not be forever. When the war ends, he told himself, the Catholic orders will be free to practice again. I will be a friar again, and everything will be restored, will go back to the way it was. That is a story he no longer believes, a tale he cannot tell himself. Someone has remade this world—this place we, the people of Germany, once called home. What passed has passed, and gone is gone. He wears trousers every day now.

  Anton straightens in his seat. The newspaper in his lap, neatly folded, rattles its few dry pages together. He lays his hand upon it, palm down, like a friend’s hand falling on your shoulder or a priest’s quiet blessing.

  The last small houses at the edge of Stuttgart fall away. The scar of the city lies behind; here the earth’s flesh is whole and blooming—fields of barley ripening, browning in the late-summer sun, and cattle in their pastures, standing belly-deep in green ponds or arrested in their slow progress to the milking shed by the rapid perspective of the passing train. Color and life, sudden and everywhere, lift the pall of silence from the train car. Conversation picks up—tentative, low. Who does not speak quietly in public these days?

  In the seat behind him, a woman says, “I wonder if the White Rose will come here, to Stuttgart.”

  Her companion, a man: “Hush.”

  “I only wondered,” the woman says. “I didn’t say—”

  “Hush all the same.”

  You know it isn’t safe to speak of resistance. Not in a place like this, the narrow confines of a train, where anyone may hear and no one can hide. In this country, dissenters emerge like ants from every dark crevice. They are small and scuttling, but before they are crushed, they will bite the descending heel and leave a painful sting. The White Rose is not the only party of resistance. The Social Democrats—the Sopade—may have been banned when Hitler seized power, but despite the imprisonment and murder of their leaders, despite their dissemination by exile, they have not left us entirely. The Freie Arbeiter Union have not forgotten the part they played in the November Revolution. Their pamphlets have been outlawed—merely to possess one could mean death—but still they are printed, still they are read. Catholics and Protestants, who refuse to see eye to eye on matters of doctrine, have joined hands in this cause. It seems that every week Anton hears of another speech given by some brave Father in a public square, another treatise written by a preacher or a Jesuit or a doomed, earnest nun exhorting the German people to listen to reason, to heed the cold, choking voice of their own hearts.

  Resistance is everywhere, but the White Rose is, perhaps, the most poignant incarnation. It is a children’s movement—or, at least, Anton can’t help but think of them as children. Half his age and braver than lions, braver than he ever was. The young students of Munich have taken to the streets with pamphlets and paint. Since June, they have covered brick walls with their slogans, imploring their fellow Germans to resist: “Widerstand!” They have covered the streets with their leaflets—God alone knows who prints those subversive and deadly things. In the three months since these children have risen to their feet, Anton’s mood has grown darker and his sleep more restless. How long can resisters hold out? Once Hitler turns his flat, cold stare on Munich, the White Rose will wither and fade. The Führer will pluck those tender petals one by one and grind them underfoot. Anton could almost accept it, if these were grown men and women. But the founders of the White Rose and the students who follow them—they are too young, too precious. The whole of their lives lies ahead. Or should lie ahead, if God had more power in Germany than Hitler.

  There was a time when children sang before church, Dear God, keep
me pious, so I will go to Heaven. Now we chant in pubs and on the streets, at dinner parties and in our sleep: Lord God, keep me quiet, so I don’t end up in Dachau.

  After a pause, the woman on the train says, “I thank God we’ve been spared the worst of it here. There’s much more damage in Berlin.”

  “A funny thing, to thank God,” says the man beside her.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Silent, listening, Anton watches the countryside pass by. A hedgerow of sunflowers splits a mown field. He remembers playing among the sunflowers as a boy—their dry-smelling stalks like a palisade, the whisper of their leaves. Yellow light that came down, filtered through the petals. His sister made a playhouse among the sunflowers: Anton, you must be the father of my house, and tell my little children: if you don’t wash up for supper, Mother will be cross!

  “I mean,” says the man, “there isn’t any sense in bringing God into the war. What has He to do with any of this? Don’t tell me you think anything the Führer has done is part of God’s plan.”

  The woman does not speak. Nor does Anton. The sound of his sister’s voice vanishes from memory.

  At length, the woman says, “You talk as if you don’t believe in God at all.” She sounds as if she might cry.

  Her companion is quick to answer, quick to defend. “It’s only this: I’ve never seen God. Why should I credit Him for a blessing, or leave Him any blame? Men are quite capable of destroying the world on their own, as we can plainly see. They don’t need any help from above.”

  Before he can stop himself, before he can think, Anton turns in his seat. “I have never seen Hitler, either—not in the flesh—yet I believe in him.”

  The couple are young. They stare at him, faces blank with shock. Moment by moment, they go pale, then paler still. The woman lifts a hand to cover her mouth. Her neat dark hair is rolled and pinned above her smooth, pretty brow, but fear mars her beauty. The man’s eyes widen with panic and then a black flash that says, I will fight; you won’t take us easily. An instant later, grim acceptance settles over his features. His mouth turns down, steel-hard and calm. Anton can see the fellow bracing himself, reconciling with whatever must come next. What he said about the Führer . . . what his companion said about the White Rose, that wistful tone in her voice, the tentative hope upwelling. One never knows, these days, who listens and reports, and who listens and agrees.

  Lord bless me, I have frightened them out of their wits. Anton smiles. It is a friendly, calming smile, so wide it seems too large for his narrow face. Straightaway, without sound reason, that smile puts the young couple at ease. He can do that without thinking: put a person at ease, convince them all is well, there is nothing to fear, life and the Lord are good. It’s one of his gifts. He uses it liberally, whenever occasion demands. If God gives you a gift, are you not obligated to employ it? Lord, grant me the strength to use what poor talents You have given me, wisely and well. And whatever I do, let me do it for Your true purpose and not the whim of any man.

  The young fellow crosses his arms, sighs, and settles back in his seat. He won’t look at Anton now but studies the passing landscape with a frown. All the same, Anton can see relief flooding his body. His cheeks color more with every rapid beat of his heart. The woman giggles. She kisses her fingertips to Anton. He has taken her part in the argument; that’s as good as a win. Anton offers an apologetic shrug—sorry for startling you—and turns again, determined this time to mind his own business.

  He never has seen Hitler, not face-to-face. But how could he fail to believe? The proof is ever-present; memory, knit red into his marrow, will never let him rest.

  The land, the world, tracks backward through time. From the hard, colorless age of Stuttgart—a place that is all stiff joints and stubborn resistance against the Tommies—the Württemberg countryside flourishes into soft green youth. Beyond farm and pasture, dark reaches of woodland extend along ridges never touched by a plow, as if the Black Forest, too, is making its way consciously east, leaving ruin and desolation behind. To the south, the Swabian Jura rises and falls, waves of varicolored blue, mountain crests lost in a glow of low-hanging, mist-white cloud. Stuttgart looked like this once, when Anton was a child. He thinks of the children—the living ones, the ones in whom hope still resides—and he slips his hand down into the pocket of his jacket, where his rosary hides. He prays Hail Mary, pinching every pale bead. The beads, like years lost, lives lost, impress themselves in his flesh. Heilige Maria, Mutter Gottes, bitte für uns Sünder jetzt und in der Stunde unseres Todes.

  The train jolts over some rough stretch of track. The newspaper shivers and slides across his lap, threatening to fall to the floor. With his free hand, he stills it. It would seem almost a sacrilege for that paper to land among the tramping feet, the mud and dust. It’s this newspaper that brought him clarity, renewed ambition, and strength of will when he’d thought all hope gone for good. Lulled by the rocking of the car, he dozes, rosary in one hand, purpose in the other, until the train slows in a hiss of steam and the conductor calls the stop at Neckar and Unterboihingen.

  When he steps from the train, he bats away a cloud of steam that reeks of coal and heat and settles his hat in place. The sun is bright this afternoon; it raises a glare from the white stucco station and the houses beyond. Unterboihingen is a village from a fairy tale, all brick and white plaster, high-peaked roofs, dark beams of ancient wood crossed below steep-angled eaves. This is the old, the original, Germany, unaltered since the days before there were states or Deutsches Reich, before there existed any Axis of power.

  A young man in a smart station uniform approaches and stands ready beside the compartment. “Any bags, mein Herr?”

  “Oh—yes,” Anton says, rather hesitant. “A few, I’m afraid.”

  The attendant raises the baggage-hold door.

  “This trunk here.” Anton points; the attendant retrieves the old chest with its creaking leather handles and age-worn straps. “And that one, with the ropes tying the lid shut.”

  “Heavy,” the young man notes.

  “This one here, and that one in the back.”

  The attendant stifles his annoyance as he crawls on hands and knees into the belly of the compartment. He drags the heavy trunk out and lets it fall hard onto the platform. Anton slips him a few coins for his trouble. Then the attendant raps a signal on the car door, and the train coughs, groans, and crawls away.

  Anton waits beside his baggage. Eastward, the train diminishes. When it has gone, taking the stink of its hot breath, the natural scent of Unterboihingen flows in around him like a flood: dry grass; slow water in the ditches; the sharp, rustic bite of animal dung. In the distance, cattle low to the hollow accompaniment of their collar bells. The music carries, as sound is apt to do on a still summer day, broken and intermittent, comfortable across a long stretch of hazy afternoon.

  A handful of boys tumbles onto the tracks, scuffling and laughing together, forelocks sticking to sweaty brows. They are thirteen, fourteen, playing in the last summer of their youth. They search between the sleepers for bits of flattened tin. In a year or two, three at most, they will be old enough for the Wehrmacht. They will be pressed into service, channeled to the Eastern Front via Hitler Youth. Serving the country, as if this country can find no better use for its children than to catch bullets in some Russian field.

  “You must be Herr Starzmann.” The thick voice belongs to a stout man with a little dark mustache not unlike the Führer’s and a bald pate shining through patchy hair. He emerges rather languidly from the station’s shaded porch. Perhaps all things move slowly in a town like Unterboihingen—men, cattle, the bleak thoughts that follow you everywhere. The stout man extends his hand; Anton shakes it. “Bruno Franke. Pleased to meet you.”

  “My new landlord.” Anton offers one of his winning smiles; Herr Franke takes little notice. “I’m very glad you found the room to board me, Herr Franke. This is such a small village. If you hadn’t had that room available, I wou
ld have found myself bedding down in a pigsty come nightfall.”

  “It’s not an especially large room,” Franke says with a withering look at the four travel trunks. “You might prefer the pigsty.”

  “God willing, I won’t need to board for more than a week.” Unconsciously, he pats the newspaper, tucked tight beneath his arm.

  “I’ve brought my truck. There’s room for your things, but I’m afraid I can’t help you load them up. My knees aren’t what they used to be.”

  “And my back leaves something to be desired. A Wehrmacht injury. We two old fellows, eh?”

  Herr Franke shrugs and turns back toward the station.

  Something darts among the railroad tracks. The sudden motion among Unterboihingen’s wheat-dry laziness catches Anton’s eye. One of the boys has bent to retrieve a bit of something from the gravel, hot and black with coal dust. He holds it up; the little treasure he has found winks in the sunlight, and he crows to his friends.

  “A moment,” Anton calls to Herr Franke. He steps down from the platform and approaches the boys. “My friends”—smiling—“how would you like to earn a little money?”

  They abandon their hunt for mangled bits of tin. They flock around him, eyes bright and eager.

  “I’ve got four big trunks to load on a truck, and then they must be carried up the stairs to my boarding room. Who will help me?” Five boys; he calculates quickly what money he has, what he can safely spare. “Twenty reichspfennig to everyone who helps.”

  The boys cheer. Twenty reichspfennig will buy you a nut bar or even a bit of chocolate, if you know where to find it. He only prays the boys won’t spend their money on the sticker books the government has placed in every toy store and candy shop from Munich to Cologne. Each page has frames, and titles, but no portraits. The object, you see, is for children to hunt down and trade for the sticker cards that will complete their album. What better way to make a child love the Führer and his pack of demons than to make those vile creatures the center of a harmless game?

  The boys follow Anton like pups, jostling and yipping, cuffing one another in good-natured excitement. In no time, they have carried all four trunks from the platform and lifted them to the bed of Franke’s truck.