The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

  “Boys, quickly,” he says. They don’t move, too frightened to obey. He speaks low and calm, firm and commanding. “Boys. Do as I say. Now.”

  They tear themselves from their mother and scramble down the ladder into the cellar. Anton nods to Elisabeth; she follows, and as soon as her feet are on solid ground, she reaches up for Maria. He passes the girl down to her mother. Only when his family is tucked away does Anton crouch and find the rungs with his groping feet. He descends into the shelter as quickly as he can and then slams the trap door overhead.

  Even here, buried beneath the floor of St. Kolumban, in a passage hidden by some ancient closet, the engines with their hellish screams overwhelm every sense and all rational thought. Still clinging to the ladder, Anton fights against his fear, forcing himself to observe, to know. Emil’s small candle lights the whole room. The room is close, lined with shelves. There are four sturdy benches, one along each wall, and on the shelves, a supply of food and water in jars and tins. The family huddle with their priest on a single bench, pressed close together. Maria is curled in a ball on Father Emil’s lap, still screaming with a fear that can be expressed no other way. Anton staggers to his family. He stretches his arms wide, sheltering his wife and sons—as if he can protect them, as if he can do anything to stop the bombs from falling. And after the bombs, the bricks and masonry and timbers of the church. He can feel the weight of the building overhead. Through the engines’ roar, he can almost hear St. Kolumban grinding, sighing, ready to fall.

  No one speaks. They wait; they shiver. They count their heartbeats, listening for the blasts, wondering whose houses and lives will be gone, wiped out, when they emerge from the cellar, if they emerge at all.

  The roar thins and dwindles. The planes are still out there, but they have passed over Unterboihingen, passed the village by. Did they never see us huddled here, or are we merely unimportant? Anton fills his lungs with cold, wet air. He releases his family slowly, his hand sliding over the fur of Elisabeth’s collar. We will not be bombed—not tonight. He thinks with great effort; he orients himself by force of will, dragging his mind out of terror, sequestering what remains of his fear in an unused corner. He mentally retraces their steps as best he can, the route they took as they fled the nave. He believes they are on the south side of the church. That means the planes are headed west.

  The fist of this family unclenches. They sit up and move apart, just enough so that each can breathe, and Maria’s sobs taper off to whimpers.

  And then the bombs fall. The impacts come first as vibrations through the earth, low, dull thuds like the distant tread of giants. They are followed moments later by the sound waves, a tin-can crash of faraway explosions.

  “Stuttgart,” Anton says, both saddened and relieved.

  Elisabeth murmurs, “Again,” and crosses herself.

  Father Emil pats Maria’s back until she sits up, sucking her thumb. “One would think poor Stuttgart has had enough by now.” Then he prays for the souls who will lose everything tonight. “Lord, extend your mercy. Let no one suffer; take those who must die quickly, and comfort those who must go on alone.” The family murmur as one, “Amen.”

  After a silence, a pause to honor the newly made dead, Anton says to the priest, “Back there in the nave, I thought you were going to take us outside.”

  “Outside?”

  “To the door set in that wall, all covered with ivy. When I first saw the door, I thought it was a bomb shelter.”

  “No.” Father Emil’s face darkens, and he turns his eyes down to the hard earth. “It’s not a shelter.”

  Al says, “What is it, then?”

  “An old, old tunnel, dating back to the age of kings.”

  The boys rustle on the bench, intrigued, already forgetting the bombs—the resilience of youth.

  Emil brightens, settling into the story. “The tunnel was used by messengers. There are other tunnels, too, running from one town to the next. The messengers could go from one village to another without being seen, and warn their friends if danger was approaching.”

  Paul says, “But it’s dark in a tunnel. How could they see?”

  “The same way we see now.” He indicates the candle, burning with a light that seems too cheery, forced and false.

  Watching the candle’s flame, Anton sees suddenly beyond it, past the jars that line the shelves. There are deep, square shadows back there, set behind Father Emil’s prudent supplies. The walls of this pit are lined with recesses, all of a size, reaching back into the stone foundation of St. Kolumban. The candle’s flame jumps for a moment, stirred by a child’s breath, and in that brighter flash, light just illuminates the gray curve of a skull, the black of an eye socket peering out from behind a tin of potted meat. St. Kolumban has an ossuary—the final resting place for generations of priests who have served here, long before Father Emil’s time. And someday, Emil’s bones will lie here, too, sleeping among his predecessors.

  Unsettled, prickling with chill, Anton looks away from the skull. He doesn’t want to bring the thing to the children’s attention. Let them be comforted, distracted by Emil’s stories of times long past, the age of kings. But he can feel the relentless gaze of that dark socket. He can feel its set gray grin. Death has one eye on him.

  Maria has recovered herself enough to talk. “Can’t we go up now?”

  “Not just yet,” Emil says. “We should make certain there are no more planes coming.”

  “Then you must tell us everything about the old kings!”

  The boys agree; they pepper Father Emil with questions, and the priest has an inexhaustible supply of answers. Elisabeth sighs to see Maria restored to her old ways, as if she can finally release a mother’s fear—as if she believes that one day, the planes will steal away her children’s spirits, leaving them as dry husks, empty shells. Today is not that day, thank God. Anton has seen children like that, their souls ripped away by horrors even a grown man can’t contemplate. He would rather see these children—his children—dead than broken. He wonders how many empty husks will be made tonight, and how many orphans. How many children of Stuttgart will go dull-eyed and quiet, with all the anticipation of Christmas forgotten, and tainted forever?

  “Tell us about the knights,” Paul says, “in the time of kings.”

  “Yes,” says Al. “Let’s have a story about knights with swords!”

  “It’s Christmas,” Elisabeth says suddenly.

  “Not yet,” Maria says, sulking. “I want a story about knights!”

  “Let’s hear about the Nativity instead.”

  “That’s a fit tale for Christmastime,” Emil agrees. “Long, long ago, in a land far away, the Lord chose Mary to be the Holy Mother, for she was better than all other women—the kindest and most caring, the most faithful and good.”

  The children resign themselves to the familiar story. They settle back against the shelves, and Maria snuggles against Emil’s shoulder, listening as he tells of the Annunciation, the Mother’s long journey on the back of a donkey, her travail in Bethlehem. Emil makes the great star shine brightly in their imaginations; he decks the roof of the humble stable with a choir of angels.

  “And do you know what song the angels sang when the Christ Child was born?”

  The children shake their heads. The night is still and quiet, Stuttgart settling into dust.

  Father Emil sings:

  Break forth, O beauteous heavenly light,

  And usher in the morning:

  Ye shepherds shrink not with affright

  But hear the angels’ warning;

  The child now born in infancy,

  Our confidence and joy shall be . . .

  Anton can’t resist the music. He joins the hymn, lending his voice in harmony with the priest. Elisabeth sings, too, entering on the same word, the same note. Husband and wife glance at one another, shy and surprised by this unexpected unity, but they do not cease to sing.

  The power of Satan breaking,

  Our peace et
ernal making.

  PART 3

  THE WAYS A MAN MIGHT EARN HIS PAY

  FEBRUARY–MAY 1943

  15

  The earth lies hard and dead under layers of compacted ice. Along the road, up the slope of its verge, across the flat breast of distant fields, whatever is blanketed by snow is grayed by clinging dust, the thick, colorless residue of coal smoke and woodsmoke, of bombings and fires carried in from the cities by the steady seasonal winds. And everything is covered with snow. February is the coldest part of the year. Why should it be so? It’s the winter solstice, days before Christmas, that marks the darkest hour—that fearful time when night seems to swallow all the world, when even at its best the sun is weak and low, riding through a sky burdened by cloud. Why now, when the days have lengthened enough that you can notice the change, when there is just enough light to see by—why should the cold be so bitter, so persistent? St. Kolumban is flattened against the landscape, and the gentle yellow of its aged stucco walls is paled and whitened by winter. The bell tower is laced in frost.

  A footpath, trampled through the snow, crosses the churchyard, a slash of white through the dull, gray stillness of the cemetery. Anton takes the path and knocks on the little side door, the one Father Emil uses to come and go.

  “My friend.” That’s how the priest greets him when he opens the door. “Come in, my friend.”

  It is Tuesday; the church is empty. Father Emil leads Anton past the small chamber that serves as the priest’s living quarters to the stone stoop, where they cross themselves with wet fingers, and into the grand, sweeping arches of the sanctuary and nave. No matter how many times Anton sees the interior of St. Kolumban, it never fails to impress him. The wooden pews, gleaming from eight hundred years’ worth of polish, bisected by the perfect aisle, roofed over by a dark brick web of sexpartite vaulting. The altar, framed and glittering with what little gold Unterboihingen possesses. To gospel side and epistle side, arching above the chancel, Mother Mary and her saints process toward Heaven. They are painted in flowing robes with halos of brilliant color.

  Together, the two men bow to the altar and make their reverent approach. The organ waits in peaceful stillness, tucked behind its rood screen in the shadows of Mary’s statue and Father Emil’s pulpit. That quiet corner, hidden from the congregation, is as familiar now to Anton as the palms of his own hands. He takes his accustomed seat on the bench and plays a few experimental chords. The church swells and echoes with the sound.

  “What is the problem, exactly?” He tries another chord, and another. He can detect no sour note, no wavering vibration.

  “I don’t know, precisely,” Emil says. He leans against the rood screen’s dark upright beam. Casual, yet without the least air of disrespect—how does he manage to do it? “I was only amusing myself yesterday, plinking about on the keys—I’m not an accomplished musician like you, Anton—and something sounded off.”

  He runs up a scale, then down. His fingers know the way, unthinking, like scratching an itch or tying the laces of your shoe. “Which note sounded off? Which key?”

  “I, er . . .” Emil shuffles his feet, clasps his hands behind his back. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  Patient as always, Anton smiles. “White or black? Or was it one of the pedals?” He tests those, too, depressing each long plank of wood in turn with the toe of his wet boot. The bass notes rattle St. Kolumban’s bones, but the sound is true.

  He plays a verse, then another: “Mary Walked Through a Wood of Thorn.” What did Mary wear beneath her heart? Kyrie eleison! A little child, free from pain. That’s what the Mother carried in her heart. Jesus und Maria.

  “Everything sounds fine and well to me,” Anton says. Hands and feet go still, and the chords’ echoes murmur up there in the arches, among the high ceiling like birds in a sleepy roost.

  “My mistake, then,” Emil says. “Entschuldigen Sie.”

  “Think nothing of it.” He is reluctant to rise from the bench. He never likes to leave his music.

  “It was good of you, to come tramping all this way in that bitter cold, to humor me with my complaint about a broken organ.”

  “We should only be glad it’s not damaged. Who knows where we might have found the parts to repair it?”

  “Some other church, in some other town, might have had a part to spare. But I never would have known what to ask for. I’d have been obliged to send you off to another village, carrying the message on my behalf.” Emil turns away, heading back for the pews, but the movement is too abrupt. It catches Anton’s attention, holds him in a tense grip. He sits, fingers of one hand spread across the ivory keys from the low G to the octave above. The silence Emil leaves behind is lively, crackling with unspoken meaning.

  When he does rise from the bench, Anton finds the priest sitting in the front pew, as is his habit, gazing up at the procession of painted saints. He’s staring at Mary in particular, standing below the rest with her benevolent hands upraised, pointed up a ladder of clouds.

  “You don’t need to head back yet, I assume,” Emil says.

  “Not just yet, no. I told Elisabeth I’d be gone for an hour at least.”

  “Then sit with me a while, my friend.”

  He does, though not without some trepidation. Father Emil is not his usual self today. There is something chary about the old priest; his jovial light is smothered under a clandestine bushel.

  “How are you and Elisabeth faring?”

  “Well enough.” It’s not a lie; since their argument over the hidden brass, there have been no further quarrels. Yet he can’t help feeling he has deceived Father Emil. In all things, Anton and Elisabeth have been cordial, cooperative, respectful. Anyone would call their relationship admirable—if they were neighbors instead of husband and wife. She hasn’t mentioned the instruments again, but her knowledge and her need have hung over Anton all those weeks since the end of October. At night, he hears unspoken accusations whispered in her sleeping breath.

  “I wish I could pay you more for your services on Sundays,” Emil says. “You play so beautifully, and I can see how much the congregation enjoys your music. You have brought considerable light to us in a time of grave darkness.”

  “It’s my pleasure. I know a parish can’t afford much in the way of pay. Not in times like these, when all of us struggle for our daily bread.”

  A pause. “Just how much are you struggling, Anton? The children—do they have enough to eat?”

  “We get by.” Now, in the deadest and coldest part of winter, there are times when Maria and Paul cry because their bellies ache with hunger. But although sometimes the food is less than filling, Elisabeth sees to it that her family eats three meals a day. It seems disloyal, ungrateful, to mention any small lack when so many in the country—indeed, in the world—suffer far worse. “We’re luckier here in Unterboihingen than we deserve to be. Even in the winter, the hens still lay a few eggs, and our shed is full of roots. We’re blessed, aren’t we, to be able to trade with one another. It makes our ration stamps stretch a little further.”

  “The trading is good,” Emil agrees. “But for you, a man on your own, to take on the support of four other souls—and three of them helpless children. Well, I imagine you find yourself in a difficult place. That’s why I say, ‘If only I could pay Anton more.’”

  He lays a hand on Emil’s shoulder. “Really, there’s no need to worry. I’m still teaching Frau Becker’s daughters the piano.”

  “Only the Becker girls? What happened to the Abts and the Schneiders?”

  He withdraws his hand, sighing. “They’ve had to delay lessons until the spring, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah. Even those families feel the pinch, I see.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  Those words open a door. Emil turns to him, wordless, but his stare is forceful and direct, laden with meaning. For a long moment, they merely look at one another, the priest pressing his lips as if fighting the urge to speak again, Anton prickling under a wav
e of caution.

  At length, Emil says, “Spring is a long way off.”

  “Not so long. Six weeks, perhaps.”

  “I think about how much can happen to a man—and to the world—in six weeks. The thought makes me shiver.”

  Anton shivers now. Is it only this strange turn in Emil’s mood that has set him on edge, or is some other force at work? There is a tremor in his soul, a quaking fire as before the presence of the Holy Spirit. This hour, this moment, is important. He waits for the priest to speak. In the silence, in the dense winter stillness of the air, he feels two unseen hands upon his head, and a wash of holy fire.

  Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds. When the morning is light, they practice it, because it is in the power of their hand.

  Emil says, “There are other ways a man might earn a little pay. Something to stretch the rations.”

  And they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.

  Anton nods. Go on; speak.

  “I tell you this only because I consider you a friend. I am right in that consideration, I hope.”

  “You are.”

  “These ways to earn a bit of money . . . they amount to no more work than walking from one town to the next.” Emil turns back to Mother Mary. Casually, he says, “Or if it’s too far to walk, you might take the train, or a bus. Sometimes business may take you farther afield.”

  “Business?”

  “Walking. Just walking. And carrying something for me.”

  A pause, long and cautious. “Carrying what, Father?”

  “Only words.”

  “Messages.” He is robbed suddenly of breath. Anton’s voice, a whisper, barely fills his own mouth. But the fire that fills his soul, the ice that floods his heart and makes his body quake . . . He says, stronger now, “Whose messages? Which side do you serve?”