The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

Anton brightens. “I can.”

  “Well, then.” The priest stands, eager and energetic. He gestures to the rood screen behind the podium, to the shadowed space behind it. “Come along and show me.”

  Together, they climb to the chancel and step behind the screen. There the organ stands, shrouded in shadow, almost as old as St. Kolumban itself. It is all gleam of polished oak casing and smoothness of ivory keys, a forest of slender pipes with angular black throats sharply incised, ready to sing.

  Anton shakes his head in wonder. “I had no idea it was here, hiding behind the rood. It’s beautiful.”

  “Beautiful,” Emil agrees, “but I haven’t heard it played for years. We had a woman who knew how to do it, but she moved away, and no one in this town has taken her place. I’m quite hopeless when it comes to music—it has never been my strength—but even if I did possess some modest skill, I couldn’t play while leading the service.”

  “No, I suppose you couldn’t.” He can’t take his eyes off the instrument.

  “Don’t be shy,” Emil says, giving him an encouraging tap on the shoulder, almost a push toward the bench.

  Hesitant with awe, Anton approaches the organ. His pulse leaps, and in his chest, there is a telltale pressure, a poignant yearning, as if he draws near a sacred relic. He brushes the white keys with one hand. They are smooth and cool, worn by uncountable years. Then he touches the black keys, letting his fingers fall into the spaces between. He hardly dares to do more.

  Long before he ever touched a cornet or a flute, Anton began by playing the organ. It was so long ago now that it seems more than a lifetime has passed—as if it had happened to another man who lived long before Anton. When he was only a boy, younger than Paul, he came to know the organ’s keys and foot pedals. His legs seemed to grow with the express purpose of playing, unlocking for him a greater range of those deep, dark, rumbling bass notes. He grew tall and thin, with arms long enough to rival a stork’s wingspan, just so he could reach farther to the left and the right, and find new scales and octaves waiting. Long before he realized he ought to be intimidated by the sheer size and complexity of the instrument, the organ became his friend. It was his first love, the door that opened for him—but how long has it been since he played anything with a keyboard? Months, if not a year. Or more than a year—and that was the old piano in the music room back at St. Josefsheim, the one that never managed to stay in tune.

  “I do hope you’ll play something,” Emil says. “You are most welcome. I would love to hear this old dame sing again. I imagine she needs tuning, or fixing—whatever is done with an organ when it hasn’t been touched in years, except to clean the dust off now and then.”

  Anton takes the bench; it creaks beneath him, an aged and rusty whisper. Tentative, shy, he feels with his feet; the pedals push back against his toes with ready pressure. From this angle, the pipes tower overhead when he cranes back his head to look. They seem tall as St. Kolumban’s bell tower, and delicate as the arches of a cathedral. Humbly, conscious of his shortcomings, Anton begins to play. The music fills the church first, occupying the nave with its bright, sudden leap into being. A heartbeat later, it fills him—a simple chord to test the sound, but it shakes his bones like a roar, like a peal of the sweetest thunder. He holds the note. It goes on and on, around him, in him; his heart wells with the sound, with the feel of music, and then, when the glad weight in his chest is more than he can bear, his hands begin to move of their own accord. He reaches for the notes with instinctive confidence and lapses into the first musical thought that comes to him: “Großer Gott, wir loben dich.”

  The organ needs tuning, but still the sound is delicious, palliative. Music eases every pain we don’t know we carry. It banishes the fear that is so commonplace now, we have grown inured to its shadow and chill. Anton gives himself over to the simple pleasure of unrestrained worship.

  Hark! The loud celestial hymn

  Angel choirs above are raising,

  Cherubim and seraphim,

  In unceasing chorus praising;

  Fill the heavens with sweet accord:

  Holy, holy, holy Lord.

  The chords lift him higher, raising his spirit above the brass spires of the organ pipes, beyond the arches of St. Kolumban into the peace of a still blue Heaven. The Earth, with its man-made sorrows, seems to dwindle below.

  Spare the people, Lord, we pray,

  By a thousand snares surrounded:

  Keep us without sin today,

  Never let us be confounded.

  Lo, I put my trust in Thee;

  Never, Lord, abandon me.

  He doesn’t realize he has sung aloud until he reaches the end. As the last chord echoes in the nave, he hears the song’s final words coming from his throat, thin below the confident harmonies of the organ. He falls silent and takes his hands reluctantly from the keys. He waits on the bench, humble and still, but filled with a satisfying ecstasy, an unexpected nearness to God.

  When silence fills the church again, Emil says, “You sing beautifully.”

  “Thank you.” Anton’s face is hot; he has seldom sung in front of anyone, except to guide his students to the correct notes on their horns, and that hardly counts as singing.

  “And you play as if you were born to it.”

  He laughs, self-deprecating. “I was not born to it, I can tell you that. But the priest of my church—I mean, the one my family attended when I was a child—he let me experiment until I learned how it was done, more or less.”

  “More or less?” Emil says wryly. Then, “I’ll pay you ten reichsmarks a week, if you’ll play at service. It’s not much, I know—and on weeks when the collection is small, I’ll be forced to pay you even less. It’s the best I can offer for now. But if you will do it, Herr Starzmann, I know the whole village will be grateful. We need to hear the sound of our own music again.”

  “I’ll be glad to,” he says. “And please, call me Anton.”

  Emil brushes his hands together, a businesslike gesture. “As for your music lessons—there are two families in Unterboihingen who own pianos.”

  “So many? Here?” Who would think to find such luxuries as pianos in this quaint old village?

  “It seems unlikely, I know, but the Schneider and Abt families are well off. They always have been. They’re blessed with—what is the phrase?—Altgelt.” Old money. “It seems the war has hardly touched them, lucky souls. I must say, they have been unfailingly generous to everyone around them, and have shared their good fortune with those in need. I can’t fault them one inch. A priest can ask nothing more of his parish than kindness and generosity.”

  “And you think they’ll pay for music lessons?”

  “It’s worth asking. Both families do seem to place a certain emphasis on culturing their little ones. To tell you the truth, I wonder that they never moved to Munich or Berlin, generations ago. But perhaps they simply feel Unterboihingen is too pretty to leave.”

  It is a lovely place. With his newfound prospect of a little pay, Anton likes the village even better. “I’ll speak to them,” he says eagerly. “I’ll pay a visit to both families today, unless you think I had better wait.”

  Father Emil squeezes Anton’s shoulder. “Let me find a pencil and some scrap of paper. I’ll give you their addresses. But if you’ll come and play at tomorrow’s service, you can impress them with a display of your skills firsthand.”

  Anton spends the remainder of his Saturday inside the body of the organ, among old shadows that smell of ancient wood and dark grease. He tunes, adjusts, tests the notes until the sound is perfect and clear, until it slips down the length of St. Kolumban smooth as a silk ribbon pulled through your fingers.

  The next day, when he enters the church beside his family, he pats Elisabeth on the hand—she glances at him, surprised by his affection—and says, “Excuse me, please.”

  “You aren’t going to sit in the back again,” she says, “now that we’re married.”

  “No.” He wink
s at the children. Then, because he is brimming with confidence, he winks at his wife, too. “I’m going to sit all the way in front.”

  “Anton? What do you mean?”

  But he makes off without answering, straight up the aisle to the heart of the church. He has worked out the details with Father Emil already—when he should begin, which songs he will play—and when the moment comes, when the nave is half full, he touches the keys and raises from his instrument a cascade and a rumble, a chorus of bright, fulsome praise. He cannot hear the parishioners exclaim, but he can feel it—their wonder unfolding, their shudder of awe, shared in his own warming heart.

  When the morning’s music has concluded and Father Emil takes his lectern, he tells the congregation, “We are blessed to have a musician among us again—our new neighbor, Anton Starzmann, husband of our beloved sister Elisabeth.” And at the end of the service, when the last hymn is finished, Anton rises from the organ bench to find Elisabeth standing at the foot of the chancel steps. She’s holding their children’s hands. She smiles up at him with appreciation, with unrestrained pride, and the light of her happiness is the most beautiful sight he has seen since he turned his back on Riga and marched the other way.

  He thinks, I might, after all, avoid making a mess of this new life. I might even excel at this husband business—who can say?

  Two other women join Elisabeth below the chancel. They are dressed as humbly as anyone else in the church—no bright colors, no diamonds or furs—but there is a newness to their dresses, a freshness of style, an unfaded quality that sets them apart. These, then, can only be Fraus Abt and Schneider, the Altgelt mothers of Unterboihingen.

  “Vater Emil told me you are available to teach the children music,” one says. She is the taller of the two, dark-haired and dark-eyed. Her face seems to hold an expression of natural gladness, for the corners of her mouth turn up on their own, even when she isn’t smiling. She must be of an age with Elisabeth, but there are no weary lines around her eyes or her mouth, no trace of a permanent frown crossing her forehead. She is unmistakably pretty; yet somehow, Anton can’t help feeling his wife is more beautiful still.

  The woman clasps her hands, eager and hopeful. “I am Frau Abt. I regret we haven’t had occasion to meet until now, mein Herr. But I have a piano, and I would be grateful if you would come and teach my children how to play. Once or twice a week would be ideal—or whenever you are available.”

  “And I,” Frau Schneider adds. “I’ve a piano, too. Will Wednesdays do for you?”

  12

  The new wool cost Anton dearly—eight hundred reichsmarks, well more than a good pair of shoes might cost in a black-market Berlin alleyway. But for that extravagant price, he secured an entire bolt of plain brown tweed—enough to last the family through two winters, he prays.

  Elisabeth is thrilled with the acquisition. She sends Albert to his room to try on his new trousers, and when he reemerges, she kneels beside her son to fuss with the cuffs, smiling in satisfaction. “They look splendid on you, Albert. Hold still, now, while I pin everything in place. With a little luck, you won’t outgrow these quite so fast.”

  “I’ll try not to,” Al says.

  “Off you go, then, and bring these back to me. Be careful not to prick yourself on the pins when you take them off.”

  When Albert returns the trousers, Elisabeth moves two candles close to her sewing chair and begins fixing the carefully rolled cuffs in place.

  “You make the finest stitches I’ve ever seen,” Anton says, watching over her shoulder.

  “Flatterer.”

  “It’s not flattery if it’s true.”

  “I never had to work while my first husband was still living, of course. But after he died, I had some hope that I might support the children by sewing alone.”

  She might have succeeded, had the war not dragged on so long. “I am sure, if people had any money to spend, you would be the most popular seamstress in all of Württemberg.”

  “Now that is flattery.” Her smile fades as she works a few more stitches. “If we had more money to spend . . .” She trails off, her cheeks coloring.

  “Don’t be afraid to speak,” Anton says, not without a twinge of wariness.

  “We could do with a few more things. But when not? I don’t want to seem ungrateful, Anton. I know this cloth was expensive.”

  It was. The Abts and Schneiders paid generously, but even so, Anton was obliged to dip into his meager supply of money to afford the wool. Precious little remains. The cloth is not a miracle he can repeat. But what has he come here for, if not to provide? “Tell me, Elisabeth.”

  “Paul needs shoes. His old pair are pinching his feet something terrible. He tries to hide it from me—he’s such a dear little heart—but I can tell, all the same.”

  “Every child receives shoes from the rations.”

  “But only once a year, and Paul is growing almost as fast as Albert.”

  “I see. And you’ve already asked around town, I suppose—”

  “Of course.” She doesn’t look up from her needle and thread, not wishing to be confrontational. But Anton can sense the impatience in her words. It was a ridiculous question to ask. Who doesn’t seek a trade before spending precious money?

  “I could find larger shoes for Paul,” Elisabeth says. “Something man-size, or close to it. But then I would have to stuff the toes with rags, and he wouldn’t be able to run and play. It would be as good as hobbling him. I’m sorry, Anton—I know it’s a burden to you. But what else are we to do?”

  “Don’t apologize. The boy needs what he needs.” And what is a father for, if not to give his children whatever they need? Heaviness settles in his chest. Lessons from the two families won’t be enough. He will need train fare to Stuttgart and enough reichsmarks to convince the back-alley traders to part with a good pair of shoes—just big enough for a boy to grow into, but not large enough to keep him from running. Anton must find more work, and soon.

  He goes to the hook beside the door and fishes for his pipe in the pocket of his jacket. It’s only now he sees how thin and patched his coat has become. He won’t bring it to Elisabeth’s attention; let her keep the precious wool for the children’s clothes.

  “Where are you going?” Elisabeth asks.

  Anton holds up his pipe. “The tobacco rations are still useful, at least.”

  “You aren’t angry?”

  “No, Elisabeth—no.” Only worried. What else should he be? “A man merely needs some time alone with his pipe and his thoughts, now and then.” Time to plan. Time to fret where no one can see the despair hardening his face. He steps outside and descends to the dusky yard.

  Strange, how quickly warmth vacates the world, how ready the season is to sink into darkness. Every year it takes him by surprise—the shortening of daylight hours until it seems the natural state of the world, since the day of first creation, is twilight or the time just before it, the soft gray dullness of a sunset lost behind a wall of cloud, and a smell of promised rain.

  He has been working for two weeks now, but what has he to show for it, really? For a fortnight, he has been able to call himself a teacher—something he’d thought he never could be again. The work lifts his spirits, when spirits can be lifted, but darkness still catches him now and then. That’s the nature of darkness. It comes at the end of every day, predictable as the striking of a clock’s chime, even in the heart of summer, when the light is full and lingering. You can never quite escape the night. Perhaps that’s as God wills; this must be His design. How are we to know when our lives are good and when we are blessed, if we have no sorrow, no deprivation for comparison’s sake? There is, he believes, a purpose to all the Creator’s ways. But the mind and heart of God are beyond the understanding of Man. You can know your suffering serves a purpose—that the suffering of others plays some inscrutable part in the grand drama of Creation. But knowing brings you little comfort. When night drops its heavy curtain across the world, darkness is cruel a
nd unforgiving. The way all your happiness can snuff itself in an instant, like the flame of a candle pinched between a licked finger and thumb—it can shake your faith, or strip faith away entirely, if you let it.

  On the long march to Riga, the men had often sung. Whenever that straight, unvaried road passed by empty fields or forests instead of homesteads—whenever they could feel sure no one was listening—they would take up the thread of some old-fashioned tune. They held to the music, clinging to it with chapped and trembling hands—and like a guideline, it pulled them through the cold and the dark. The songs were simple. Folk music, reminders of times long ago when the country was something different from what it is now. When we could find real pride in the mere fact that we were German. And sometimes they sang hymns, Catholic and Protestant, with every man joining in. They sang songs written by that Lutheran hymnodist, and “Warum sollt’ich mich denn grämen.” They sang “In Christ There Is No East or West.” The Lutherans have such lovely music, Anton can forgive them for their heresy.

  But singing while you tread the endless road, just to keep warm—your wool uniform soaked with dew and your teeth chattering in the Prussian night—isn’t the same as playing. He hasn’t played, not like this—the organ at St. Kolumban and even the piano beside his young students—since well before the order was disbanded. There was no time for playing in the Wehrmacht, though, Lord knows, he spent as little time in service to the Party as he could contrive. When you play music, when you put an instrument to your lips or merge your hands with ivory, the act transforms. It makes of you a conduit between Heaven and Earth.

  There are some feelings, some states of mind, that cannot be expressed in words. The transcendent beauty of moonrise over a quiet field, when your soul stills itself for a time, just long enough to remind you that you are still alive, still human, in a world that seems ravaged by inhuman beasts. And the deep, haunting song of loss, with its crossed harmonies and poignant discords, the way it reaches to the inside of you and turns your spirit out, everts the essence of your being through your heart or through your mouth and leaves it to hang there, vulnerable and exposed. There are some refrains that have taken up residence in his heart and mind and become a permanent part of him—and sometimes he likes to imagine that the men and women who composed those works felt exactly what he feels when he listens or plays. His very thoughts are theirs, and through the spell of rhythm he can sense, across the improbability of time and space, every throb and ache of the composer’s heart. Music is a way of transporting emotion from one breast to another. It is a way of knowing the unknowable, of feeling what we can never allow ourselves to confront in any other way. These agonies and ecstasies—they can break us, use us up, burn us away unless we shield our hearts with music.