The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

  “For your children?” Anton guesses.

  The look she gives him then is almost enough to wither. “Mother of mercy, no. I hope you don’t think me selfish, Herr Starzmann. At the end of the day, before the drivers came to load the boxes on their delivery trucks, I hid the extra eggs among the neediest families’ rations. The ones with little children and dead fathers, or sick babies, or mothers who had grown too sad to go on as they should, as we all must.”

  Abruptly, she looks down at her feet and will say no more. He wonders at her sudden silence, but a moment later, he finds the reason in her reddened cheek and the narrowing of those determined eyes. She has told him too much—this stranger, this man she has known for only an hour but whom she will marry, if God is willing. She has let him inside her heart. It’s not a mistake she’ll be quick to make again.

  Elisabeth leads him down a rutted lane. Hollyhocks lean across rank ditches, proffering spikes of faded flowers, the last kindness of summer. Beyond the hollyhocks stands an ancient orchard, gnarled branches heavy with golden fruit, and amid the trees, a white stucco farmhouse, its first floor made of brick.

  “This is your home?” Anton says, pleasantly surprised.

  “No,” she answers, apologetically. “Frau Hertz lives there—my landlady. She lets the old house in back—the original farmhouse, at least a hundred years old—and that’s where we live, the children and I.”

  He can see the old house now through the glossy foliage of the apple trees. Age and tradition are evident in its simple utility. A gabled roof, undersized windows, the wood darkened by years, almost to black. The house stands high above the earth, raised up on thick wooden piers. A stone-and-mortar wall surrounds the first floor; blue daylight and a slant of umber shadow share the space between the top of the wall and the bottom of the house.

  Elisabeth leads him under the crisp, sweet branches of the apples. Calf-high grass whisks the hem of her skirt, and when she bends her neck to avoid a low-hanging branch, the movement is unconsciously graceful. The air around her is spiced with sun and dampness and the richness of ripe fruit. They approach the old house. Something heavy stirs in the shade among the house’s piers, and into the sigh of breeze comes a slow, rhythmic grinding—the sound of animals at rest, animals chewing. He looks over the stone wall into cool blackness. Two white goats look back at him; they bleat in hope. The family’s dairy cow, soft-eyed and pale, reclines at her ease.

  Elisabeth, embarrassed by the rusticity, knocks grass seeds from her skirt with an impatient fist. “You see what I mean, why I thought it a curse to live here, once. This is the way peasants lived, isn’t it? In the olden days. It seems too ridiculous for us now. This is the twentieth century, not the Dark Ages. But it’s not as filthy as it seems. The muck from the animals runs down the slope of the floor and into the Misthaufen, there.”

  A trench runs around the inner perimeter, lidded by a rudimentary screen of narrow planks. At the house’s north corner, where the Misthaufen has its outflow, flowering weeds grow up in tangled profusion. There is a smell, of course—but somehow, it’s not unpleasant. The dung trough and the animals, the thick greenness of weedy growth—together they smell of times long ago, of centuries past. The olden days, as Elisabeth has said. The smell raises in him a throb of Sehnsucht, the pleasant pain of longing for an era he has never known. There was a time when we were not at war. There was a time when Germans could be proud of who and what we were.

  “I like your house.”

  Elisabeth says briskly, “The animals below are great for heat in the wintertime. I suppose that’s why they did it this way, in the days before coal stoves.”

  “It’s an ingenious system.”

  “We only have to burn our coal on the chilliest nights. That leaves enough left over to trade. God makes every kind of unexpected blessing.” A smile; Anton can’t say whether it is bitter. Elisabeth cups her hands around her mouth and calls, “Children, I’m home! Come down!”

  A moment later, their footsteps clatter down an unseen stairway. That graceless, eager, joyful thunder shakes Anton to his soul. The last time he heard children running for the pure fun of it, he was a teacher at St. Josefsheim, enjoying his pipe in the shade. The boys chased each other around and around, breathless and laughing. A ball rolled slowly in the dust, forgotten, along with the rules of the game young Bruder Matthias had tried to teach the children. “Don’t take it personally,” Anton told Matthias. “Some of these boys—they understand very little, except for love. But love is all they need.”

  The children—the living ones—come bounding around the corner of the house. They move with a freedom and gladness that belong to all children by right, but there is something restrained in their smiles. Is it only the war, which subdues us all, or are they still haunted by the loss of their father? As yet, he knows nothing of their grief—how fresh it may be, how long they have suffered.

  The little girl, Maria, bears a smear of red marmalade across her cheek, and her yellow hair is tangled. She runs toward her mother, but the eldest boy catches her hand and stops her. He wipes her face with his kerchief while Maria whines and struggles. Albert’s face is as serious as his mother’s. He bends over his sister with a furrow in his brow. Paul hangs back, kicking pebbles in the grass, watching Anton with equal parts curiosity and caution. His knees are skinned and pink, his short pants too short to keep up with a nine-year-old’s coltish growth.

  “This is my Albert,” Elisabeth says formally, “and Paul, there behind him. And my girl, Maria.”

  Albert turns Maria around to face her mother and Anton. The girl twists petulantly in her brother’s grip until he lets go of her shoulders, but then she spins impulsively, throws her arms around his neck, and rises on her toes to kiss his cheek. Albert’s smile is shy but pleased.

  “This is Herr Starzmann,” Elisabeth tells her children. She hesitates. How to explain? “My . . . my new friend.”

  Anton sinks to his heels. He opens the box of cookies. “Look what I have here. Do you want some?”

  Maria runs to the cookies at once; she takes one in each hand and crunches. In an instant, chocolate replaces the marmalade her brother cleaned away. The boys are slower to react—polite, or wary?—but the sight of Hausfreunde brightens their eyes. Paul backs away once he has his cookie, but his grin is wide and unrestrained.

  “I’m very glad to meet all of you,” Anton says.

  “Pleased to meet you, too, Herr Starzmann.” Albert offers a hand to shake, well trained by his mother.

  “You may call me Anton, if you like.”

  Albert glances at his mother. Such a quiet intelligence in his eyes, in the tensing of his freckled cheeks. He takes a meditative bite of his cookie, then says, “But you aren’t from Unterboihingen, Herr Anton.”

  “You haven’t seen me around, is that it?”

  Paul shouts, “We know everybody in Unterboihingen! May I have another cookie? Maria got two.”

  Anton opens the box again. “You’re correct: I am new here. I grew up in Stuttgart, but I worked in Munich for many years, so that city was my home, too, as much as Stuttgart ever was.”

  “But why have you come here?” Albert says.

  Elisabeth tuts quietly. The question is not exactly rude; perhaps she is afraid of how Anton might answer.

  He considers carefully before he speaks. “I have come to help people in need. There are so many people in need, just now.”

  “Because of the war,” Albert says, sagely.

  “That’s exactly it.”

  Fists on hips, Maria shouts up at Anton, “Let me put on your glasses, Herr!”

  “No.” Elisabeth grabs her daughter by the hand. There is an air of victory in the moment; it seems Maria is not one to stand still for long.

  Albert goes to his mother automatically and takes charge of the little girl. He slides his own hand into Elisabeth’s grip, then nods up at her once, as if he has understood from the start what is happening here—what must happen, if th
ey hope to keep on until the war finally ends.

  It’s not until Albert has approved that Elisabeth faces Anton squarely. “All right.” Her voice is low, as if she is afraid the children will hear—afraid of what the younger ones might say, once they understand. “If you are still agreed, I will marry you, Herr Starzmann.”

  Anton lays his hand gently on Paul’s sun-warmed hair as the boy edges closer to the cookie box. Of course he is still agreed.

  4

  Anton removes his hat as he enters Franke’s Fine Furniture. The shop’s bell chimes behind him, bouncing on its coiled spring. The interior glows with afternoon light, flooding in at the window, bouncing in all directions from the polished curves of chair backs and table legs. Franke looks up from a sideboard; the rag in his hand is brown with wax, and the room holds the smell of it, mineral warmth mingled with the caustic bite of chemical spirits. Franke’s round face is pink, damp, flushed with the effort of his work.

  Anton goes to him. He smiles at the half-waxed sideboard, the grape leaves carved along its edge. “Fine work. I carve, a little—or I used to. Haven’t tried in a couple of years.”

  Franke grunts. He turns back to his business, working the deep-brown wax into raw oak with hard, heavy circles.

  “I’m paid up through the week,” Anton says, “for my room.”

  “So you are.”

  “I would like to extend for another week, if I may, but after that time, I’ll stop walking on your alarm clock.”

  Elisabeth has asked for two weeks—fourteen days of prayer and reflection, time to ready her family for the change. It’s clear she knows this union will benefit the three small souls who depend entirely on her, but she still seems unable to reconcile herself to the decision. In another time and place—in a gentler, saner world—she might find it easy enough to go on as a widow. In another time and place, God might never have taken her husband away.

  “Leaving so soon?” Franke says, still polishing. He hacks a short laugh. “Unterboihingen not to your liking?”

  “On the contrary; I intend to stay for a very long time. I’m to be married, you know.”

  “What?” Franke drops his rag, stares in disbelief. “Married? To whom?”

  “Elisabeth Hansjosten Herter.”

  “The widow?” Franke laughs again. “She’s a cold one. Believe me.”

  “She’s not cold; she’s only frightened.” Surprising, how quick he is to defend her. Are a husband’s instincts burgeoning in him already? “Isn’t everyone frightened now?”

  “No.” Franke’s gaze darkens. Suddenly Anton can smell his sweat, sharp and acrid like the polish in its dented can. “I’m not. I can’t think why I should be—why any loyal German should be.”

  Remember the man on the train. Ready to fight, rather than submit—relieved Anton wasn’t one of them after all, a nationalist. We must all be careful what we say. There are a few in Germany—even here, in this idyllic paradise—who love the Führer and rejoice in his power.

  “Of course,” Anton says, smiling as if he means it, “there’s nothing for you and me to fear. We’re good, honest men—loyal. But women and children, you know. They’re frightened by the Tommies, the bombs.”

  “The Tommies.” Franke looks as if he might spit—would, if he weren’t standing in his own shop. “There’s nothing to fear from those cowards. Those Inselaffen in their cardboard planes.” As if Stuttgart doesn’t lie gutted, deboned, less than thirty kilometers away.

  “Anyway—in two weeks’ time.” Anton passes the reichsmarks to his landlord. He leaves as fast as propriety will allow, before Franke can prod him into saying more. With his back to the man, Anton makes the sign of the cross, though he doesn’t know whether he is blessing himself or Herr Franke. Forgive the man, Father. Lord, forgive him. He knows not what he does.

  As he steps outside the shop into the dry dirt road, the church bells ring the hour. Anton pauses, hat in hand. The great, mellow roundness of the sound rolls across the land, pasture and field, street and quiet lane. It echoes from a line of low black hills. He has always loved the sound of bells, but these are especially moving. The music seems bigger than Unterboihingen itself—older, an aged-bronze call rich with the memory of countless years. They have sung in times of peace and war. They remember when all the world was peace; every stroke of hammer on dark metal curve resonates with remembered joy. For a minute, as the bells sing, he believes that, somehow, all will be well, and the space inside his chest, the hollowness where fear coils tight in its shadows, quivers with sympathetic hope.

  Drawn by the sound, he finds his way to the church. A low sign, carved in dark wood, stands outside: “St. Kolumban.” It is an unadorned building, sturdy and square, with plain, dark, arch-topped windows set into plaster walls aged the color of new butter. A single ridge beam runs the length of a red tile roof. Even the buttresses are uncarved, clinging dutifully to the church’s shallow wings. The bell tower is massive, square, flat-faced. It reminds him of the obelisks in Egypt; not that he has seen Egypt with his own eyes.

  As he stands staring up at the tower—the final peals draw themselves out in a thin, bronze-throated hum—two small figures clamber up from the ditch at his feet: Albert and Paul, their legs streaked with mud.

  “Heavens,” Anton says, “what has happened to the pair of you?”

  Albert says, “Nothing. Mother told us to go play for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “Do you always play in drainage ditches?”

  “They’re good fun,” says Paul, stamping his feet aimlessly, full of a boy’s natural energy. “We play at being soldiers.”

  “Mother said you were a soldier.”

  “Only for a very short time, Albert.”

  The boy thinks hard for a moment, pressing his freckled lips together, squinting into the distance. At length, he says, “My friends call me Al, so you can, too, if you think it’s all right to do it.”

  “I think it would be just fine, as long as it suits you.”

  “What are we to call you?”

  Paul says at once, “I won’t call you ‘father.’” Then he blushes, alarmed at his own boldness, and hides his face against Al’s back.

  “I won’t require it.” Smiling gently. “I promise you that. You can call me Anton, if you like.”

  “Mother may require it.” Al twists, side to side, as if unsure what to do with his confusion, the snarl of feelings inside.

  “Then I will speak to her about it. We’ll come to an agreement. Would that be all right?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  Behind the bell tower, where the roof meets its monolithic face, Anton can make out an untidy pile of sticks and leaves and a few clinging white feathers. The boys pause for a moment in their fidgeting. Something has drawn their gaze to the sky—a shadow passing over grass and road or the whistle of stiff wings cutting through air. A great bird flies lazily overhead: white body, black-tipped wings, trailing red legs knobby at the joint. It carries a long, slender branch in its beak. The stork circles once, twice, then descends to the church roof with an awkward fold of its wings.

  “They never stop working on their nests—even at this time of year, when their chicks have grown up and flown away,” Anton says to the boys. His future stepsons.

  Al says, “Vater Emil told us the nest is good luck.”

  “He is the priest of this church?”

  Al nods. “Storks on a bell tower keep evil away—that’s what the father said. But I don’t believe it, not entirely.”

  “Surely the priest would never lie to you.” Anton watches the stork again, so the boys will see no glimmer of amusement in his eyes.

  “I don’t think he lied, exactly. But only the Lord can keep evil away.”

  Paul cries with sudden indignation, “The Lord made storks and tells them where to fly!”

  “That’s so,” Anton says. “The Lord made all good things.”

  “Did the Lord make bad things?” Al’s question is quiet, almost
a whisper.

  “What sort of bad things do you mean?”

  Paul shouts, “Spiders and poison snakes!”

  Al shakes his head, tolerant of his little brother. He says, “I mean, people who hurt others.” He is growing up too fast for a boy his age, but that is the way of children raised among suffering. Like seedlings sprouted in a dark corner, they shoot up thin and spindly, grasping and pale. Who can grow strong roots when the very earth is unsafe, when we are starved for light?

  “You’ve heard stories about people who hurt one another?” He prays these boys haven’t seen violence with their own eyes, young as they are.

  “Yes,” Al says. “I don’t like the stories. I wish they weren’t true, but they are true, aren’t they? The boys at school tell me about . . .” He pauses and looks around cautiously. This young boy has learned already that some thoughts are too dangerous to speak aloud. Father of Heaven and creation, why did You make us to live through such times? Why should a child fear to speak truth? “The boys tell me about bad things soldiers do.” Pragmatically, he doesn’t specify whether German or Tommy soldiers are to blame.