The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

  Anton rests on the cottage’s lowermost step, transferring his pipe from one hand to the other, watching Elisabeth hang up her clothes. Every article is spaced along the drying line at precisely the right distance. Nothing is crowded, and not a hand’s width of line goes unused. She bends to her laundry basket, lifts a damp dress, and pins it to the line with a casual grace she doesn’t even know she possesses.

  When she pauses in her work—every time she rests—Elisabeth’s eyes wander up to the peak of the cottage roof. Still, she is thinking of the tiny attic space, the unused void above her family’s heads. Still, she wonders. There are those in Unterboihingen who would call Elisabeth cold, but Anton knows she is not—not where it matters most, in the center of her soul.

  When she has hung the last garment on the line, Elisabeth wanders to the stairs with her laundry basket balanced on her hip. She lets the basket fall to the dry golden grass and then lowers herself to the step beside Anton, sighing.

  “You know I don’t like it when you smoke that thing.”

  “I know.” He puffs and grins at her, teasing.

  “I suppose I can’t complain, though, after the wonders you’ve worked with Maria.”

  Anton has convinced the girl not only to attend school daily but to maintain her best behavior, too. He still can’t credit his own achievement. When he looks back on the complex web of scolding, religious lectures, and bribery—largely involving old magazines, which Maria may use for her paper dolls—the route to his daughter’s reform makes him quite dizzy.

  “I don’t suppose Maria’s teacher has had any cause to complain recently,” Anton says, cautious.

  “Not a bit. She seems quite satisfied with Maria’s behavior. So you may smoke away, as far as I’m concerned.”

  The boys’ shouts carry, thin and distant, across the pasture. Anton and Elisabeth turn to watch as Paul and Albert scramble through knee-high dull-yellow grass. The two white goats leap away from the boys and run to the farthest corner of the field. The sun will set soon; the goats must be penned in before dark, bedded down with the milk cow in the stone foundation of the cottage.

  “One would think those boys would have learned how to manage goats by now,” Elisabeth says. “They’ll never catch them by chasing.”

  “They’re only playing. The good Lord knows, it’s no easy feat to find some fun nowadays.”

  Elisabeth watches the boys in silence for a moment. Albert gestures, and Paul runs in a wide arc across the pasture, trying to outflank the goats as they mill and dart. Al waves his arms; the goats break toward Paul, then dodge in another direction when Paul springs at them like a tiger from the tall grass.

  “I’m glad they have one another,” Elisabeth says. “I’m glad they’re close.”

  “As close as brothers ought to be. Imagine what an Eden our world might be if we were all as close as brothers.”

  “I’ve seldom seen brothers as tightly knit as Paul and Albert. The Kopps, maybe—but few others.”

  Perhaps it’s the war that has tied Paul and Albert so closely together. In a world that might upend itself at any moment, blow itself inside out in a ball of fire and noise, maybe brotherhood seems all the more precious.

  “I’m worried about them,” Elisabeth says suddenly.

  Startled, Anton takes the pipe from his mouth. “What—worried about Al and Paul?”

  “Yes. They haven’t been eating as much as they used to. Haven’t you noticed? At suppertime, they don’t take as much food. Could they be ill?”

  “We’d know for a certainty if they were ill.” Anton frowns across the pasture. Al and Paul have captured the white goats at last. They lead the animals by their collars, moving quickly through the tall grass. The boys seem as energetic as ever. “I can’t find a thing wrong with them—except now it’s Al who’s struggling with his shoes, not Paul. Look; can you see him limping?”

  “Yes.” Elisabeth rests her chin in her palm and props her elbow on her knee, the very picture of dejection. “It never ends, does it? I should be grateful to God that He has allowed my children to thrive on little more than rations. Instead, all I can think is, ‘They grow like weeds, and how will we ever keep up?’”

  Anton reaches into his pocket and counts out a few reichsmarks, which he hands to Elisabeth. “We’ll manage. Don’t worry, my dear.”

  She tries to refuse the money. “There will always be more things we need, more we must spend.”

  “If Albert needs shoes, there’s nothing to be done but see that he gets new shoes.”

  Elisabeth takes the bills and crumples them in her hand. “You’re right, of course.” Then she brightens. “What would we have done if you hadn’t sold those instruments? The extra money has been such a blessing to us, Anton. I almost feel rich.”

  He smiles, but he can’t quite meet Elisabeth’s eye. He should tell her—confess everything—but the thought of it makes him blanch. He hasn’t sold a single horn—not one. He never even considered it. The instruments are too dear to him, the memories they hold too intimate and raw. Silence stretches at the tail of Elisabeth’s remark. In another moment, Anton’s stillness will come to feel like secrecy, and then she will question him, then she will pry—

  In the heart of the village, the bells of St. Kolumban ring the hour. Anton and Elisabeth turn as one, savoring the sound. The low, rich music spreads itself across the land. It drowns out the memory of airplanes’ engines, of the dry, rattling blasts from Stuttgart. It even silences, for a short time, haunting cries of vanished children and the sound of a gray bus idling outside St. Josefsheim. In the field, the boys stop to listen. Even the goats prick their ears.

  When the last peal rolls past the cottage and out to the distant hills, Elisabeth wraps her arms around her knees and speaks. “I love the sound of those bells. I sometimes think I’d go mad without them. They make this place feel like a home, don’t they?”

  Anton nods. He chews the stem of his pipe.

  “It’s funny—these bells don’t sound quite like any others. Have you noticed?”

  “Every bell has a different voice, I suppose. It must depend on how it was made.”

  “Or perhaps,” Elisabeth says, “it has more to do with our surroundings. The countryside—perhaps the wide-open space allows them to sing more beautifully. There were church bells in the city, of course, but I never truly loved the sound of bells ringing until we came to Unterboihingen. In the city, they always sounded harsh to me—clanging like some terrible alarm. But here, they truly sing. Here they sound like home.” Wistfully, she smiles. “I remember those bells ringing at Maria’s christening. I remember everything about that day—how glad we all were, how full of hope. The world seemed new, and . . . not so dark as it seems now. The bells seemed to say, ‘Goodness will come again—goodness like this new baby girl. The darkness can’t last forever.’

  “And I remember how the bells rang at my husband’s funeral, too.” She hangs her head. “I shouldn’t talk of it, I suppose—”

  “Go on,” Anton says. “I don’t mind.”

  For a moment, she sits in pensive silence, her face turned away. But then she rounds on Anton with sudden, despairing passion. “I’m glad he didn’t live, Anton—and I know it’s terrible to say it, terrible to think it, but I can’t help it, all the same. I’m glad. He was such a kind man, so good, so sweet. I’m glad he never lived to see what the world has become.” She sniffs and wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “But I don’t know how to explain it to his children. How do I tell them what the world was like before, and why it has changed?”

  His children—my children, Anton thinks sadly. How do we tell anyone?

  Elisabeth shakes her head, laughing without humor at her own reaction. “I’m a fool. There’s no point carrying on so.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  “But it does no one any good.” She straightens, and seems to lift her own spirits by force of will. More brightly, she says, “Every hour, I feel I can’t go o
n any longer. I feel the world is too wicked to bear, and too broken to be made whole. And then—every hour—I hear the bells of St. Kolumban ring, and I know I can go on. Sometimes I even think that God will manage to patch up this wreck of a world, after all—somehow. Do you know what I think it is about those bells that makes me love them so much? It’s because the whole village hears them, too. It’s something we all share, isn’t it?”

  Not a soul alive doesn’t love to hear those bells ringing. And not a soul alive doesn’t feel, between one peal and the next, hope and peace return to the world, if only at the close of the hour.

  20

  Anton has delivered, by now, more messages than he can count. To Herr Pohl; to a handful of other barely familiar men and women in the towns scattered around Unterboihingen. The woman of fifty or so, with the bent spine and spectacles that are always spotted with dust. The man with the red hair, who appears in Kirchheim whenever Pohl does not. The youth who can’t be older than eighteen—he looks so much like Anton did when he joined the Franciscans, fresh and eager, confident that he could change the world. Countless messages, innumerable handshakes, more folded scraps of paper falling from Anton’s hand to the sidewalk than there are stars in the sky. And still no word from Berlin or Prussia. Still, the Führer goes on.

  Returning from his latest assignment, Anton passes the Kopp field on the edge of town. The brothers brought their harvest in early last week; now the spent vines lie flat and brown, wilting down the length of the field. Far across the sleeping ground, Anton can see Paul and Albert loitering near the hedge, just as they’d done that day last summer when he caught them with the dead grenade. As before, he stops to watch. The boys aren’t playing now. They are squatting at the field’s edge, shifting aside dry potato vines. They reach into the soft earth and paw through it. Puffs of dust rise on still air.

  What on earth are they doing? Anton squints across the distance, as if that will help him make sense of the strange activity. Then he understands: they are pulling up potatoes, digging them out, turning the tubers over in their hands. He watches as the boys brush soil from yellow-brown skins.

  A weight of sorrow drags at Anton’s heart. This is theft; his sons are stealing. Even if the harvest is over, and these potatoes were overlooked, it’s still theft. Without permission from the Kopp brothers, what his boys are doing now is a sin.

  He waits in the shade of a roadside oak, careful not to move. He doesn’t want to draw the boys’ attention. He remains there until Paul and Albert rise, brushing the dirt from their knees as they did from the potatoes. They disappear through the leafless hedge—heading toward their forest stronghold, as Anton suspected they would. This time, when he follows the boys, he does it with more dignity than he managed at Easter. The October wood is warm, spiced with the smell of fallen leaves. Its fragile, fleeting beauty wracks him with pangs of melancholy. Death is the very heart of this season—the passing of summer warmth, the fading of all that is young and green. A long, cold spate of colorless dark stretches before him.

  When Anton enters the hidden clearing, the boys look up from their fire. There is a moment of dry, quiet tension as they sit, hunched upon a damp log, waiting for him to speak. Their eyes are bright and round in their solemn faces. The fire snaps, releasing a drift of sparks, but no one jumps at the sound, no one moves. Then, as if coming to an unpleasant decision, Al rises slowly. How tall the boy has grown; he will be a man soon. Anton can see very little of Elisabeth in his face, though Al has inherited his mother’s meticulous nature and her habit of quiet observation. But it’s the boy’s biological father Anton sees now. Albert, watching Anton with a man’s sternness and knowing. There is no mistaking the determination in his eyes, the somber paleness around his freckles. His height, his posture—he is strong, growing stronger and more his own man every day.

  Anton thinks, Herr Herter, you and I could have been friends, in another life. Your children are good people—even little Maria—and through them, I have been gifted with fatherhood, a blessing I never thought to receive.

  He doesn’t wish to anger Herr Herter’s shade, nor insult him. But it has fallen to him, Anton, to teach these children whatever the war has not taught already.

  “I saw you take the potatoes,” he says. He can feel Paul Herter’s spirit there beside him, likewise mournful.

  The boys hang their heads—even Al, tough Al’s eyes flash up, briefly and only once, to gauge or challenge Anton’s severity. In that moment, for the first time, Anton feels as if all the work he has done—the trips to other towns, carrying the coded words—everything he has wrought and risked to bring down this damnable regime—all is for naught. What is resistance for, if we fall back into evil?

  Paul says, “They were left after the harvest.”

  “But they weren’t yours to take.”

  “We know,” Al says. “We talked it over. Didn’t we, Paul? We never felt good about it—we knew it was wrong—but we thought, in the end, it was more loving and kind to do it. Even though it’s wrong to steal. And we thought, if we only took the potatoes left at the end of the harvest, it wouldn’t be so bad. Then we wouldn’t be hurting the Kopp brothers. It’s wrong to steal, but if we’re not hurting anyone . . . and if it’s more loving to do it . . .” Al trails off, biting a dirty nail. His gaze shifts to Anton’s feet and stays there.

  “More loving? What do you mean?” Then Anton notices the small white bones strewn around the clearing, kicked to the edges where carrion birds can pick them clean. Rabbit bones. As Al shifts restlessly on his feet, Anton sees the sling trailing from his trouser pocket. It’s a homemade affair, fashioned from scraps of soft leather. He thinks, I never went to Möbelbauer for the leather. They must have done it themselves. I never helped them make the slings. I never taught my sons how to hunt. What kind of a father am I?

  “We remembered what you said, that day—you know, with the grenade—about hunting and fishing.” Al swallows hard, but now he meets Anton’s eye directly. “We would have liked for you to teach us, but you haven’t had the time.”

  “That’s true,” Anton says hoarsely. “I haven’t found the time.”

  “We thought, if we could hunt up our own food, and take the potatoes no one wanted anyhow, we could leave more on the table for Maria and Mother.”

  So his boys are no soldiers, after all. This is the act of a teacher, a father. Their generosity—and his soaring relief—move him almost to tears. “I only regret that it wasn’t I who taught you how to hunt. But in truth, it has been so long . . . I would have been a poor instructor. I’m afraid you wouldn’t have liked learning from me. Who taught you?”

  “No one,” Paul says. “We figured it out on our own. Well—there was a magazine we found at school, a boys’ magazine. We read how it’s done, and tried it.”

  “We worked at it for weeks,” Al says. “We made little houses out of sticks and practiced knocking them down.”

  Paul pulls his sling from his pocket and holds it up for Anton to see. He has warmed to the story, swept up in the excitement of the telling. “Every time we hit a stick house, we had to take a step back. That was the rule. Soon we could hit them all from fifty paces away!”

  “That is impressive,” Anton admits. “But rabbits run; they don’t stand still and wait for the hunter to come.”

  “That was the hardest part,” says Al. “We had to learn how to aim all over again. But we’ve done it; either of us can bring down any rabbit in the forest.”

  Paul whirls his empty sling, a demonstration. “I’m going to hunt partridges this winter.”

  “Look,” Al says, suddenly stubborn, as if he expects Anton doesn’t believe his boast. As if Anton can’t see the bones among the tree roots. The boys shift aside, revealing their fire. A rabbit, pink-brown and spitted on a long, charred stick, sizzles over the flame.

  Softening, Al says, “Do you want some meat? The potatoes won’t be done for a while yet—we’ve buried them in the coals—but the rabbit is good.�
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  “Thank you; I’d be glad for a bite.”

  Anton joins them on the log beside the fire. The spit is wedged between two large rocks; Paul works it free and rolls it in his hands, twirling the roasted rabbit in the air to cool the thing down. When the fat no longer hisses and snaps, Al tears off a shoulder, carefully, then holds the spit so Paul may do the same. Then it is Anton’s turn; he takes a haunch, still hot enough to burn his fingers, but smelling like the first meal out of Eden. The meat is delicious, even unspiced, flavored only by forest and field. When they have picked the rabbit clean and licked grease from their fingers, the boys poke at the embers with broken branches; they roll the potatoes roasting in the ashes. Anton finds a branch of his own. He stirs the ashes alongside his sons and helps them fish out the stolen potatoes, leaving them to cool on a bare stone. He cuts the potatoes open with his pocketknife. When they’re no longer steaming, Anton eats alongside his boys, all sins forgiven and forgotten. After, they snap their branches into pieces and toss them on the smoldering fire. They talk of slings and hunting, of fishing in the river. They talk of trucks and mountain paths and love and generosity—things boys like, things men like—until the sun has almost set.

  When night’s chill has settled over the wood, Anton rises reluctantly. He stretches his stiff back. How he feels the cold, these days. It’s getting late; Elisabeth will be wondering what has kept him so long.

  He says, “You must teach me how to hunt. Refresh me. You know more about it now than I do.”

  “So we’re forgiven for the potatoes?”

  “You should probably confess the theft to Father Emil and do your Hail Marys, just to be on the safe side. But I think God will look the other way. You had good intentions, after all, and you are helping your mother and sister.”