The Ragged Edge of Night(10)
But the British were not subdued, were they? And now, with their fleet bombed last December in Pearl Harbor, even the circumspect Americans have been goaded to fight. You hear the news in Munich. A man pulls his hat lower, sheltering beneath its brim. He says, They never meant to bombard London in the first place. There’s not a damned thing that fool of a Führer can get right. You hear the news in Stuttgart, passed from mouth to ear beside the ruins of a church where smoke and dust still rise like incense to Heaven. The Reich suppresses and contorts the truth. The Reich lies outright, and what are we to do about it? The papers, like whipped dogs, piss themselves and cringe. Reporters sit up and beg. When the Master snaps his fingers, he wants a show of loyalty. But what can we expect? Any press not controlled by the Party disappeared by ’34. Editors and journalists, declared racially impure, were made enemies of the state. If they didn’t see what was coming and flee to France or Canada, then they met their ends in Dachau, knees knocking together in the predawn snow. Truth cannot feed your children. Integrity doesn’t keep a man warm.
They pass a farmhouse. Barred and speckled hens scratch in the yard, cackling now and then as they fight over grubs. Elisabeth watches the birds until the farmhouse lies behind them. Then she turns again to face the road ahead. “Until this spring,” she says, “I worked at the ration center. There were fifty or so women who worked with me; they came from every village along the Neckar, and each of us was responsible for packing the weekly ration boxes with our particular type of food. One lady cut salted pork to the right size, another put the pork into the boxes. Another put in the butter, another the cheese, and the marmalade, the flour, the sugar, and so on. Eggs were my duty. Each of us was expected to waste a certain amount of food every day. You can’t help it, sometimes; even the most careful person will drop a bit of cheese or a jar of preserves every now and then. I never dropped a single egg, though; I simply wouldn’t allow myself to do it. Those eggs were too precious. But I marked them down on my sheet, every day—the ones they expected me to drop, the eggs they allowed me to waste. When no one was looking, I slipped the extra eggs into my skirt pockets.”
“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.