The Ragged Edge of Night(16)

Anton crosses the yard and searches for the trimmer in the grass.

“You are the man who has come to marry Elisabeth,” says the father. “Herr Starzmann?”

“That’s so. You know me already? I’ve been here only two days.”

“Small town, you know.” Another laugh, rueful and apologetic. “Our ways must seem strange to a man used to city life. Or if not strange, then too rustic for comfort.” He shrugs. “And I saw you at service yesterday, sitting all the way at the back of the nave.”

Anton hands him the trimmer. “I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself then. I meant to, but, well…”

Elisabeth had been there, each of her children scrubbed to pinkness and dressed in their patched Sunday best. Little Maria had showed the hem of her dress, mended, to anyone who would stop and look. Elisabeth had asked for privacy—two weeks to pray, to think, to contend with her memories. Two weeks to resolve herself and accept what she must do. Anton had given his word: he would leave her entirely alone, unless she sent for him. Courtesy is a small favor to ask, and he is a man who respects grief. He has come to understand it well.

Good-natured and grinning, Anton says, “How much has Unterboihingen said on the subject of Herr Starzmann? Did you know, for example, that I used to be a friar?”

Father Emil did not know. He takes a step back, rests his thumbs in the wide black sash of his robe, a posture of respect and admiration. Anton wishes he had his rope belt swinging from his own waist. It was like an anchor chain, holding him fast during hours of storm. Of late, he has felt unmoored.

“They disbanded your order?” Emil guesses.

“Yes, and shut down my school.”

“You were a teacher?”

“I was.” He finds he can’t hide his joy or pride, any more than he can hide his sadness. He means to say more on the subject, but the words will not come. Pain like a hard hand grips his throat. The loss of the little ones is still too fresh, too near. All those sweet faces stilled forever; the mouths that once opened in ready laughter now hang wide in death, death’s ever-triumphant grin. In a gray camp somewhere, behind a gray wall, there is a stack of little bodies piled sixteen high. They were always so quick to laugh. Any common miracle could move them to gladness—a butterfly, a puppet show, rain tapping on a classroom window.

The priest takes Anton’s arm in brief, silent consolation. Then he blesses him with a cross. In the presence of the holy sign, Anton feels nothing, except gratitude for the father’s concern. He doesn’t know when it happened, when he ceased to feel the power of the cross. But it was long before the SS came. He thinks it was, in fact, the night the Reichstag burned.

“When are you and Elisabeth to marry?”

“The second of October.”

Emil nods. He tests the weight of the hedge trimmer in his hand, finding its balance, his eyes downcast and thoughtful. “God brought you to her. She is a good woman, devoted to her children and the Lord.” His words imply, God gives the best to the best. You are her reward for faith, even in the face of misery.

“I sense that in her,” Anton says, “that she is good, though I hardly know her. But I find myself frightened, Father. No, not frightened, exactly. But doubting. You see, I don’t know how—” He falters. He goes still. The priest’s kindness and patience work their intended spell over Anton, bending him, wind against grass. He opens his heart to the man, spilling out reservations he only half suspected before. “I don’t know how to do this the right way. I came to help her, but how can I help? What shall I do? I have never been a husband, or a father.”

“Of course you have not.”

“I don’t know how it’s done.”

Mildly, Emil says, “I have never been a husband, either, my friend. Nor a father—not the kind you are about to become. But I think it can’t be so different from being a man of the cloth. You must be guided by integrity, mercy, and justice. You must let love carry all your decisions, all your words. That is what the Lord asks of us in every role: father, mother, brother, child. Neighbor and friend—nun and friar. That is all the Lord asks—that we live by Christ’s example.”

How can any man claim those qualities now—integrity, mercy, justice? Everything the Reich has done, all the cruelties and death, the burial of our rights in an unmarked grave—none of it has been Anton’s will, nor does he approve. Yet he can’t help feeling he is to blame. And aren’t we all to blame? What has brought us here, if not heedlessness or willful neglect? We have forgotten some crucial lesson our forefathers learned long ago, but ignorance is no excuse; the price must be paid. How did we err, and how did we sin, to allow the Reich so much power? How far back must we go—we, as a people—to undo each small step toward infamy? The first thin roots of this evil twine through history’s soil. But where do they start? We cannot look to 1934, when the chancellor Adolf Hitler declared himself Führer. That was only the culmination of a long black line of discord. The kaiser signed the armistice and we became, suddenly, a republic, reeling and disoriented. Was it then that we turned? Or will we find the first track of this bleak progress in 1918, one generative footprint lying stark and crisp in November snow? Must we look further still—to Wilhelm I wrenching power from the states; to 1814, Vienna, a confederation still reeling from Napoleon’s blow? We look back—the Thirty Years’ War. The Peace of Augsburg, and forty years before, at Martin Luther tapping his tacks into the dark, blank face of an old church door. A third of us dead in 1348, riddled with seeping black boils, and no one to help us, no one to bury us, no one to comfort the dying. Further back still, to Widukind submitting, debasing himself before gold-robed Charlemagne. Baptismal water washes from his hard, Germanic face a war paint made of boar’s blood. It drips onto the black fur of his garments and from there to the clean stone floor. It carries away the smell, the feel of his oaken, pagan groves. We have nursed this cancer from our earliest days. How deep into the heart of Germany has the tumor spread? Or did it originate there, in hot red fiber and pumping blood, in the secret pockets of darkness we hide from our neighbors and deny day to day? Whatever the source of our rage, we have carried it too far now. We cannot excise this disease without bleeding our nation dry.