The Ragged Edge of Night(104)
“He must have told you,” Rita said, laughing. “Now do you believe?”
This is a perpetual joke my mother-in-law and I share: her ribbing me for being an atheist, promising me in ominous tones that I’ll believe in God… someday. Meanwhile, I play along by pretending to hiss and cringe whenever she shows me a crucifix or a rosary.
That visit from Rita and Angie yielded more material for the novel. Angie, the first child of Anton and Elisabeth’s marriage, was actually born near the end of the war. Some of her earliest memories are of wartime life, and it’s from her that I learned of Unterboihingen’s heavy curtains, its penchant for trading, and—I will be honest—a few colorful German curses. Though she was very young at the time, she had vivid recollections of British and American bombing runs. It was she, not her older half sister, Maria, who hid beneath the altar in a pitch-black St. Kolumban during a bombing raid on Stuttgart, near Christmas Eve.
In fact, Angie had so many memorable childhood adventures that I included the best of them in this novel, attributed to Maria instead. (Angie, of course, doesn’t make her appearance until the final lines of the book.) The incident of the First Communion dress and the Misthaufen really happened to Angie—though it occurred at a neighbor’s house, not the family’s residence, as Anton and Elisabeth actually lived in a second-story apartment above a shop in town—and by the time Angie had her First Communion, the war was over. Angie was also the one who maintained a rivalry with her teacher—she is still bitter about it to this day—and would sneak away from school on a regular basis to make paper dolls in empty vacation cottages. It should be noted here, just in case my in-laws do watch me from some mysterious Beyond, that the real Maria Herter was an exceptionally well-behaved child. Angie was the naughty one of the family, and prone to amusing mishaps, besides, which has led Paul to dub his aunt the Anne of Green Gables of Germany.
It was Angie, too, who had a special bond with St. Kolumban’s priest—whose name was not Father Emil. The priest’s adoration of mischievous little Angie might have been what drew him to the Starzmann family in the first place, but it was surely Anton’s and Elisabeth’s essential goodness that kept him a firm friend of the Starzmanns. When Unterboihingen took in the refugees from Egerland, the Starzmanns took the priest into their home along with the family they hosted—and the father slept on the floor near Anton and Elisabeth, having given up his bed to those less fortunate. St. Kolumban’s father was also complicit with Anton’s resistance against the Nazis, though I have no way of knowing whether it was he who brought Anton into the work. It may have been Unterboihingen’s mayor—a man who did not appear in this novel, for simplicity’s sake, but who was nonetheless heavily involved in both of Anton’s dangerous schemes—the Hitler Youth–thwarting marching band and the removal and burial of St. Kolumban’s bells.
It may also have been the mayor who sealed the door in the ancient wall—or perhaps that was done well before the war. But the door is real, and you can see it if you travel to Wendlingen, the Württemberg town that has absorbed old Unterboihingen. Paul’s family traveled to Rita’s hometown several times throughout his childhood, and the cemented door remains as one of his most vivid memories of Germany. When, as a boy, he asked someone in the town what was behind the door, the only answer he got was “Nazi ghosts.” Neither Paul nor I have been able to verify the claim that Nazi soldiers were sealed up in that terrible passage, but it’s such a chilling image, I couldn’t resist using it in this novel.
Whether anyone else in the town joined Anton in his quiet acts of rebellion, we will probably never know. But we do know that the mayor and the priest were involved. Their names were listed alongside Anton’s in a certain letter, found on the abandoned desk of Unterboihingen’s gauleiter the day after Hitler’s death was announced. The letter read—as Rita paraphrased for me: “This town’s mayor, priest, and music teacher, Anton Starzmann, are traitors who have betrayed the Party. Come and arrest them.”
Yes, tiny, insignificant Unterboihingen had a gauleiter—unusual, for such a small town—and although his name was not Bruno Franke, the children did call him M?belbauer. Rita and Angie also swear that he had a habit of propositioning the town’s women, many of whom reluctantly gave in, fearful of what he might do to their families if they resisted. Like most other gauleiters, M?belbauer fled when the Nazi Party fell, certain of a trial at the hands of the Allies.
If M?belbauer had remained in Unterboihingen only a day or two longer—if he had sent that letter—the SS almost certainly would have taken Anton and his friends, for the SS still operated for some time after Hitler’s death. Anton would undoubtedly have died at the hands of the defeated Nazis, and my husband—and his wonderful family—wouldn’t exist today. It’s frightening—and somehow, strangely beautiful—to think how the best and most important parts of our lives can depend on a quirk of history, a sudden bend in the road. How different my life would be but for the passage of a few days, a few moments, in a tiny German town thirty-five years before my birth.
But history is never very far behind us. It’s the familiar ghost we trail in our wake.
On the night I finished writing this book, there was a march at the University of Virginia, a show of power by a faction of white supremacists, newly emboldened by the sudden bend in America’s road. The people carried torches, a snake of fire through a black summer night. They chanted “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us.” They chanted “Blood and soil,” the same words Nazis spoke in Anton Starzmann’s time. A cowardly man, threatened by the strength of those who stood in protest against evil, drove his car into the crowd, killing one woman and injuring nearly twenty other people.