The Ragged Edge of Night(12)

Anton goes to him. He smiles at the half-waxed sideboard, the grape leaves carved along its edge. “Fine work. I carve, a little—or I used to. Haven’t tried in a couple of years.”

Franke grunts. He turns back to his business, working the deep-brown wax into raw oak with hard, heavy circles.

“I’m paid up through the week,” Anton says, “for my room.”

“So you are.”

“I would like to extend for another week, if I may, but after that time, I’ll stop walking on your alarm clock.”

Elisabeth has asked for two weeks—fourteen days of prayer and reflection, time to ready her family for the change. It’s clear she knows this union will benefit the three small souls who depend entirely on her, but she still seems unable to reconcile herself to the decision. In another time and place—in a gentler, saner world—she might find it easy enough to go on as a widow. In another time and place, God might never have taken her husband away.

“Leaving so soon?” Franke says, still polishing. He hacks a short laugh. “Unterboihingen not to your liking?”

“On the contrary; I intend to stay for a very long time. I’m to be married, you know.”

“What?” Franke drops his rag, stares in disbelief. “Married? To whom?”

“Elisabeth Hansjosten Herter.”

“The widow?” Franke laughs again. “She’s a cold one. Believe me.”

“She’s not cold; she’s only frightened.” Surprising, how quick he is to defend her. Are a husband’s instincts burgeoning in him already? “Isn’t everyone frightened now?”

“No.” Franke’s gaze darkens. Suddenly Anton can smell his sweat, sharp and acrid like the polish in its dented can. “I’m not. I can’t think why I should be—why any loyal German should be.”

Remember the man on the train. Ready to fight, rather than submit—relieved Anton wasn’t one of them after all, a nationalist. We must all be careful what we say. There are a few in Germany—even here, in this idyllic paradise—who love the Führer and rejoice in his power.

“Of course,” Anton says, smiling as if he means it, “there’s nothing for you and me to fear. We’re good, honest men—loyal. But women and children, you know. They’re frightened by the Tommies, the bombs.”

“The Tommies.” Franke looks as if he might spit—would, if he weren’t standing in his own shop. “There’s nothing to fear from those cowards. Those Inselaffen in their cardboard planes.” As if Stuttgart doesn’t lie gutted, deboned, less than thirty kilometers away.

“Anyway—in two weeks’ time.” Anton passes the reichsmarks to his landlord. He leaves as fast as propriety will allow, before Franke can prod him into saying more. With his back to the man, Anton makes the sign of the cross, though he doesn’t know whether he is blessing himself or Herr Franke. Forgive the man, Father. Lord, forgive him. He knows not what he does.

As he steps outside the shop into the dry dirt road, the church bells ring the hour. Anton pauses, hat in hand. The great, mellow roundness of the sound rolls across the land, pasture and field, street and quiet lane. It echoes from a line of low black hills. He has always loved the sound of bells, but these are especially moving. The music seems bigger than Unterboihingen itself—older, an aged-bronze call rich with the memory of countless years. They have sung in times of peace and war. They remember when all the world was peace; every stroke of hammer on dark metal curve resonates with remembered joy. For a minute, as the bells sing, he believes that, somehow, all will be well, and the space inside his chest, the hollowness where fear coils tight in its shadows, quivers with sympathetic hope.

Drawn by the sound, he finds his way to the church. A low sign, carved in dark wood, stands outside: “St. Kolumban.” It is an unadorned building, sturdy and square, with plain, dark, arch-topped windows set into plaster walls aged the color of new butter. A single ridge beam runs the length of a red tile roof. Even the buttresses are uncarved, clinging dutifully to the church’s shallow wings. The bell tower is massive, square, flat-faced. It reminds him of the obelisks in Egypt; not that he has seen Egypt with his own eyes.

As he stands staring up at the tower—the final peals draw themselves out in a thin, bronze-throated hum—two small figures clamber up from the ditch at his feet: Albert and Paul, their legs streaked with mud.

“Heavens,” Anton says, “what has happened to the pair of you?”

Albert says, “Nothing. Mother told us to go play for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Do you always play in drainage ditches?”

“They’re good fun,” says Paul, stamping his feet aimlessly, full of a boy’s natural energy. “We play at being soldiers.”

“Mother said you were a soldier.”

“Only for a very short time, Albert.”

The boy thinks hard for a moment, pressing his freckled lips together, squinting into the distance. At length, he says, “My friends call me Al, so you can, too, if you think it’s all right to do it.”

“I think it would be just fine, as long as it suits you.”

“What are we to call you?”

Paul says at once, “I won’t call you ‘father.’” Then he blushes, alarmed at his own boldness, and hides his face against Al’s back.