The Ragged Edge of Night Read online

  “No, my boy,” Anton says. “The Lord does not make men do evil things to one another. But the Lord gave us the right to choose. Whether we do good or evil, it is our own decision and our own responsibility.”

  Al squints at the stork. He watches as the bird weaves the branch into its lucky nest. “I don’t understand why anyone chooses to do evil.”

  Anton lays his hand on Al’s shoulder. The boy is as thin as a bird himself, bony and light. “I don’t understand it, either.” Then he makes himself smile. “I heard the bells and wanted to come see the church for myself. But I should head back to my room. My shirt needs changing before I have my supper. Would you like to come along?”

  “Mother won’t mind,” Al says, after moral consideration.

  They walk back through Unterboihingen. Tall as he is, Anton must shorten his stride to avoid outpacing the boys. It has been some time since he shepherded children anywhere. They bounce and skip and dart about, even Albert; no eleven-year-old can remain a thoughtful little man forever. There is a strange gulf between them—one of Anton’s mental making, he has no doubt, but knowing the source makes the divide no less real. There are so many years that separate us. If I was ever so young and resilient, I can’t remember now how it feels.

  “I wanted to tell you,” he says at length, grasping for the right words, “I don’t intend to replace your real father. In your hearts, I mean. It’s all right if you don’t ever come to love me the way you love him. I’ve come to help you boys—and your sister, and your mother. That’s all I intend to do—help.”

  “Why?” Paul says.

  He understands the boy’s question. Why do you care for us? We are strangers to you. He says, “Because God has commanded us to love one another.”

  “Are we even meant to love the Jews and Gypsies?”

  Al grabs Paul by the collar, as if he means to shake him to silence. But Al only stares around the street, wary and tense.

  I may never have been so young, but neither was I ever so frightened as this child.

  “Yes,” Anton says. “We are all children of God, no matter what anyone else may tell you. But”—with a glance at Al—“it’s best to talk about these things where we’re sure no one else can hear. Not everyone agrees with us, and sometimes when people disagree, they may become angry.”

  We are all children of God, made by the same hands—the Jews and Gypsies, the strong and the weak, the whole of mind and those who are fractured. Paul and Al are not so very different from the children he taught at St. Josefsheim. Elisabeth’s boys are bright. Few of Anton’s students had ever been called bright, but their innocence had been worth much to the Lord—their innate kindness, so much greater than one could find in any whole-minded person, and more generously given. Did You truly call me here, O merciful God, to play father to one widow’s children? Or is this of my own devising?

  He obeys the giver of all laws, but he knows, too, that he acts of his own will, hoping to redeem the irredeemable. Praying he might find, in the shape of these happy, living children, the resurrection of those he did not save, and relief from the burden of his sins. What are his sins? He numbers them in his thoughts—in every thought, in every beat of his heart. Cowardice; weakness; obedience to a regime that crosses the Father of All with every move it makes, every stride across the continent toward dominion.

  As they round the corner of the bakery, Maria appears, running, her fists clenched in determination and her knees making her skirt ripple and fly. She collides with Anton’s legs and stands there, stunned and wide-eyed. She is making up her mind whether to cry.

  “What are you doing here?” Al scolds. “You aren’t to go past the lane! And your dress is torn. Mother will be so angry. She has too much work to do already, and you only give her more!”

  Maria has decided not to cry. She says to Anton, “Mother is very tired.” Reciting a simple fact of the world—the sky is blue; cats have whiskers.

  Anton says, “You must go straight home, Maria, or Mother will be worried. When you get home, change into a new dress and give this one to your brothers. They will bring it to me at my room over Franke’s shop.”

  “All right.” Maria goes sunnily into the custody of her brothers, as untroubled by the possibility of an angry mother as she is by her torn dress.

  That evening, as Anton eats a simple supper of bread and butter and cold tinned beans—as he was used to doing at St. Josefsheim—Al and Paul come stamping up the stairs to his room. Paul holds Maria’s green dress balled up in his fist. “Mother was cross anyhow. We told her you said to bring it to you, and she threw up her hands and said, ‘Do what your father says!’ Are you our father now?”

  “I will be, once your mother and I marry.” He takes the dress and smooths it over his knee to examine the damage.

  “Why are you going to marry her?”

  Anton chuckles. “Is there a reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “No,” Paul says, while Al goes pink, flustered by his little brother’s unrestrained talk. “I like you for a friend, and I guess I’d like you for a father, too.”

  Al is quick to correct him. “A stepfather.”

  “I hope I didn’t anger your mother by sending for Maria’s dress.” He rises from the edge of his bed and opens one of his trunks to search for his small roll-out sewing kit, bound in leather. The glitter of late-day light over smooth brass captures the boys’ attention; they both hurry to the trunk and peer down inside.

  “Prima,” Al whispers.

  Anton says, “You can take the instruments out, if you’d like to look at them closer. But better not to try to play. We don’t want to disturb Herr Franke downstairs.”

  “Good that you don’t upset Möbelbauer,” Al says as he examines a cornet, fascinated by its tubes and turns, its slick, cool surface. The pure-white keys are capped in mother-of-pearl.

  “Why is that? Is his temper very bad?”

  “Yes. And also, he’s our town gauleiter.”

  Surprise steals Anton’s breath, even as he unrolls the sewing kit. He gives every impression of unconcern—doesn’t want to upset the children—but there is a painful pressure in his throat. Unterboihingen, of all places, has a gauleiter? They are the Reich’s eyes and ears, governors of districts on behalf of the National Socialists—and to a man, every gauleiter is tucked deep in the pockets of Hitler and his highest men.

  “Funny,” he says casually, testing the point of a needle. “I’d never guess a place like Unterboihingen had any need for a gauleiter.”

  “We haven’t any need,” Al says quietly. “That’s what some of my friends say—that’s what their fathers have told them. No one thinks of us here, in this small village. We aren’t important.” He relaxes subtly as he speaks, his thin neck bending over the cornet. The boy derives some relief from the simple fact: we here in Unterboihingen count for nothing. Now that he thinks on it, Anton finds it comforting, too. “But Möbelbauer,” Al says, “has ambitions.”

  The boy makes this pronouncement so solemnly that Anton almost laughs, though it’s hardly amusing. He can just imagine the schoolboys, with their short pants and skinned knees, whispering hedge to hedge: Watch out for Möbelbauer. He has ambitions. Their parents’ words, repeated like a charm against warts. But a man with ambition is dangerous in this place and this time. Al and his friends seem to know it.

  “Don’t you dare repeat that to anyone,” Al says to Paul.

  Paul looks up, surprised to be addressed. He has been engrossed the whole while in the treasures of Anton’s chest—the horns and flutes, the little cymbals muted with pads of felt.

  “He hasn’t heard me, anyway,” Al says. “It’s a mercy. Paul can talk and talk, and never shut his mouth.”

  “You have a big responsibility, looking out for your brother and sister.” The green thread in Anton’s sewing kit is not the right shade to match Maria’s dress, but it’s the closest one can hope to find. Textiles do not come readily to hand these days.

  Al ma
kes no reply, and so Anton begins to stitch. He watches Al from the corner of his eye as he works. The boy depresses the valves of the cornet, slowly and carefully, one after another. They make a softly hollow sound, a faint, padded sticking and tearing.

  After a while, Anton says, “I can see that you do a good job of keeping your family safe. That’s honorable work—a man’s work.”

  “You didn’t seem worried to hear that our town has a gauleiter.”

  He hears the boy’s unspoken question. Why aren’t you frightened? Are you so loyal to the Party that you have nothing to fear?

  “I’ve dealt with my share of gauleiters before.” His tone is conspiratorial. “And men worse than they, too.”

  Much worse. But the SS won that encounter, didn’t they? The sight of the boys with the instruments in their hands scours Anton with fresh pain. He watched the last children who ever held those instruments loaded onto a gray bus. They all went, trusting and smiling, as was their nature—skipping past the men with guns. Men who herded them into the belly of the hearse. Trusting and smiling, while Brother Nazarius and the rest of the friars quietly pleaded, or placed themselves gently in the way, only to be pushed aside by the muzzle of a Karabiner. Stand in my way again, and I’ll run out the bayonet. Cold steel pressed hard into Anton’s chest.

  The needle pricks him, and he pinches his thumb against his fingertip until the bleeding stops.

  “You needn’t worry,” Anton whispers to Al. “Herr Möbelbauer answers to his ambition, but I answer only to God.”

  Al puffs out his chest. He is pigeon-breasted, like his wiry stepfather. “So do I—only to God.”

  “You’re a good boy. I’ll be very proud to be in your family.”

  He holds up Maria’s dress, and Al and Paul both examine the hem. Except for the off-color thread, it is perfectly repaired.

  Awestruck, Paul says, “But men don’t sew!”

  “This one does. When I was a friar, I did all my own sewing. I had to; a friar has no wife to do his mending.”

  The youngest boy goes wide-eyed. Somehow, in whatever discussion the family has had about Anton and the pending marriage, the fact that he was once a friar has escaped Paul’s notice.

  “You might learn to sew, Paul,” Anton says, “so you can help your mother and Al. Then they won’t be so tired all the time. A big, strong boy like you—I imagine you could be a great help to the family. Wouldn’t you like that, to help like a grown man?”

  “I’ll do it, if you’ll teach me how.”

  Anton ruffles his pale hair. “One of these days, we’ll have a sewing bee—just we two fellows. It’s not as hard as it looks.”

  Paul stares for a moment at the cornet, still clutched in his big brother’s hands. “Will you teach me to play music, too?”

  Anton folds the dress carefully and passes it to Paul. “Maybe I will, little man.”

  5

  Beyond the road, in the shadowed confines of the churchyard, wind bends the grass that has grown up, knee-high, between the tombstones. The stones are so old you can no longer read the words carved into their faces. “Sacred to the Memory” and “In His Will Is Our Peace”—lichen has pitted and degraded every surface. If Anton were to touch a stone, run his hand across a face where once a name was written, he would feel granite crumbling to dust. The yard needs cutting, but no one will do it now. It is late. Dusk has settled in, a restless purple half-light below a shy white sickle of moon. The wind tugs at his hat; it rattles the stork’s nest like bones against the flat, colorless stone of the bell tower. The breeze pushes Father Emil’s robe against his legs. The priest works in near darkness. Across the churchyard, above it, the sloping shoulder of a hill lifts its ancient burden toward the sky: a black vastness of woodland. At the foot of the hill there stands a wall—age uncountable, old beyond knowing—and spilling down the wall, a heavy curtain of ivy. Wind stirs the ivy leaves and reverses them, bottom to top, silver undersides exposed. The priest is cutting back the ivy, clearing the way around a steel door set into the wall, sunk into the hill. He moves with the stiff, sharp gestures of reluctance.

  Despite the dim shadows of dusk, Anton can tell the wall and hill and ivy are each too old, too long-established, to be reactions to our present difficulty—the Tommies with their cardboard airplanes. But the door—the door is new. Steel rivets shine, even in this pale disjection of moonlight. Does some cave or tunnel wait back there, dug into the hillside and smelling of ancient earth, lined with blankets and lamp oil and tins of food, a bulwark against British retribution? Out here in the countryside, tunnels run from town to town, a warren of hidden passages through which, in ages gone by, pilgrims or messengers in medieval tunics crept, lit by the sallow fires of smoking torches. Those tunnels would make fine shelters when bombs fall.

  By chance, the priest pauses in his work and looks up. He sees Anton standing there, thin and stretched, pale as a specter among the graves. His body makes an involuntary jump; the trimmer falls from his hand into the long grass underfoot. But then with a laugh, charming self-deprecation, he waves in greeting.

  Anton crosses the yard and searches for the trimmer in the grass.

  “You are the man who has come to marry Elisabeth,” says the father. “Herr Starzmann?”

  “That’s so. You know me already? I’ve been here only two days.”

  “Small town, you know.” Another laugh, rueful and apologetic. “Our ways must seem strange to a man used to city life. Or if not strange, then too rustic for comfort.” He shrugs. “And I saw you at service yesterday, sitting all the way at the back of the nave.”

  Anton hands him the trimmer. “I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself then. I meant to, but, well . . .”

  Elisabeth had been there, each of her children scrubbed to pinkness and dressed in their patched Sunday best. Little Maria had showed the hem of her dress, mended, to anyone who would stop and look. Elisabeth had asked for privacy—two weeks to pray, to think, to contend with her memories. Two weeks to resolve herself and accept what she must do. Anton had given his word: he would leave her entirely alone, unless she sent for him. Courtesy is a small favor to ask, and he is a man who respects grief. He has come to understand it well.

  Good-natured and grinning, Anton says, “How much has Unterboihingen said on the subject of Herr Starzmann? Did you know, for example, that I used to be a friar?”

  Father Emil did not know. He takes a step back, rests his thumbs in the wide black sash of his robe, a posture of respect and admiration. Anton wishes he had his rope belt swinging from his own waist. It was like an anchor chain, holding him fast during hours of storm. Of late, he has felt unmoored.

  “They disbanded your order?” Emil guesses.

  “Yes, and shut down my school.”

  “You were a teacher?”

  “I was.” He finds he can’t hide his joy or pride, any more than he can hide his sadness. He means to say more on the subject, but the words will not come. Pain like a hard hand grips his throat. The loss of the little ones is still too fresh, too near. All those sweet faces stilled forever; the mouths that once opened in ready laughter now hang wide in death, death’s ever-triumphant grin. In a gray camp somewhere, behind a gray wall, there is a stack of little bodies piled sixteen high. They were always so quick to laugh. Any common miracle could move them to gladness—a butterfly, a puppet show, rain tapping on a classroom window.

  The priest takes Anton’s arm in brief, silent consolation. Then he blesses him with a cross. In the presence of the holy sign, Anton feels nothing, except gratitude for the father’s concern. He doesn’t know when it happened, when he ceased to feel the power of the cross. But it was long before the SS came. He thinks it was, in fact, the night the Reichstag burned.

  “When are you and Elisabeth to marry?”

  “The second of October.”

  Emil nods. He tests the weight of the hedge trimmer in his hand, finding its balance, his eyes downcast and thoughtful. “God brought you to her. Sh
e is a good woman, devoted to her children and the Lord.” His words imply, God gives the best to the best. You are her reward for faith, even in the face of misery.

  “I sense that in her,” Anton says, “that she is good, though I hardly know her. But I find myself frightened, Father. No, not frightened, exactly. But doubting. You see, I don’t know how—” He falters. He goes still. The priest’s kindness and patience work their intended spell over Anton, bending him, wind against grass. He opens his heart to the man, spilling out reservations he only half suspected before. “I don’t know how to do this the right way. I came to help her, but how can I help? What shall I do? I have never been a husband, or a father.”

  “Of course you have not.”

  “I don’t know how it’s done.”

  Mildly, Emil says, “I have never been a husband, either, my friend. Nor a father—not the kind you are about to become. But I think it can’t be so different from being a man of the cloth. You must be guided by integrity, mercy, and justice. You must let love carry all your decisions, all your words. That is what the Lord asks of us in every role: father, mother, brother, child. Neighbor and friend—nun and friar. That is all the Lord asks—that we live by Christ’s example.”

  How can any man claim those qualities now—integrity, mercy, justice? Everything the Reich has done, all the cruelties and death, the burial of our rights in an unmarked grave—none of it has been Anton’s will, nor does he approve. Yet he can’t help feeling he is to blame. And aren’t we all to blame? What has brought us here, if not heedlessness or willful neglect? We have forgotten some crucial lesson our forefathers learned long ago, but ignorance is no excuse; the price must be paid. How did we err, and how did we sin, to allow the Reich so much power? How far back must we go—we, as a people—to undo each small step toward infamy? The first thin roots of this evil twine through history’s soil. But where do they start? We cannot look to 1934, when the chancellor Adolf Hitler declared himself Führer. That was only the culmination of a long black line of discord. The kaiser signed the armistice and we became, suddenly, a republic, reeling and disoriented. Was it then that we turned? Or will we find the first track of this bleak progress in 1918, one generative footprint lying stark and crisp in November snow? Must we look further still—to Wilhelm I wrenching power from the states; to 1814, Vienna, a confederation still reeling from Napoleon’s blow? We look back—the Thirty Years’ War. The Peace of Augsburg, and forty years before, at Martin Luther tapping his tacks into the dark, blank face of an old church door. A third of us dead in 1348, riddled with seeping black boils, and no one to help us, no one to bury us, no one to comfort the dying. Further back still, to Widukind submitting, debasing himself before gold-robed Charlemagne. Baptismal water washes from his hard, Germanic face a war paint made of boar’s blood. It drips onto the black fur of his garments and from there to the clean stone floor. It carries away the smell, the feel of his oaken, pagan groves. We have nursed this cancer from our earliest days. How deep into the heart of Germany has the tumor spread? Or did it originate there, in hot red fiber and pumping blood, in the secret pockets of darkness we hide from our neighbors and deny day to day? Whatever the source of our rage, we have carried it too far now. We cannot excise this disease without bleeding our nation dry.