The Ragged Edge of Night(17)

“Your thoughts are dark,” Emil says.

“My thoughts are often dark, these past years.”

Emil nods. There is no need to specify; we all know. These years since Poland. And before that, the chaos of the summer of 1930, when there was no parliament to check the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. By the time the autumn came, and tempers cooled with the season, Herr Hitler had won the hearts of the people—or enough people, at any rate, for him to plant his boots in the Reichstag, where he stacked kindling for his fire. Desperate hearts are easy to secure. When her children are starving, a woman will believe any vile promise you whisper in her ear. When a man is cornered, he will trust you if you tell him he cannot sin.

“But you are not to blame,” the priest says, “for the dark things, for the world’s evil.”

“I want to believe that’s true. There are days when I can’t convince myself, though.”

“I know.” The priest chuckles, but it’s a sound without humor. His smile is bleak with disbelief. Look where we found ourselves, reeling, shame-faced Germany, before we even knew we were in danger. “Most days, I can hardly convince myself, either.”

“How can I do it?” Anton says. “How can I be a good father to those three little children—how can I be a good husband to that poor widow—when I cannot even… ?”

What he cannot do is unspeakable, indescribable. Most of all, it is unforgivable. I can’t turn back time. I can’t tell where we first went wrong—we, this people, this nation to which I belong. And if I could, I would have no way to stop whatever progress has led us here. I am too weak, too human.

“Come inside.”

Anton follows the priest into the church. Its beauty strikes him anew, as it did at Sunday’s service. Outside, the building is plain and functional. Inside, St. Kolumban, lit by a few old-fashioned oil lamps, soars with ivory arches lined in dark brick, with white angles that cross and climb and lead the eye up, ever up to Heaven. It is more beautiful than any church in a tiny country village—a place of no consequence—ought to be. This simple act calms him a little, stepping inside the house of God. Together, Anton and Emil dip their fingers in the holy water. They bow as they pass before the altar and sit in the nave’s first row. The priest sighs and puts his feet up on the prayer bench in front of them. It’s this act of familiarity that makes Anton like the man all the more, wholly and beyond all reason.

“Years ago,” Emil says, “when I was newly come to the cloth, I was called upon to perform an exorcism. Ordinarily, I think, the work would have fallen to an older priest—one with more experience. But this was in a very small town, you see—not Unterboihingen, but much the same—and I was the only priest to hand. It was a woman who thought herself possessed. A mother of four. She was perhaps thirty-five years old.”

“Thought herself possessed? You don’t believe in possession?”

Father Emil makes an evasive gesture, not exactly a shrug. Anton understands. The Bible tells us there are demons, and what sort of Christians would we be if we didn’t trust in God’s word? But in these times, what terrors can we find in the common threats of Hell? There is an old, old saying: One man is devil to another. Among the Tommies, the words are different, but the meaning is the same: Man is wolf to man. In this world, evil heaps itself on evil, and the spire of unchecked power climbs higher by the day. This is a tower of man’s own building. Around its base the wolves circle, greedy and grinning—white, cold eyeteeth bared, numberless as stars.

“I worked with that woman and her family for five days,” Emil says, “but none of my prayers had the least effect. She moaned and shook in her bed; she screamed like an animal in a trap. She wept, Anton—wept for hours, but her tears seemed to have no limit. They fell and fell from her eyes—I can see them still, that far, blinded look. The whole of her spirit was concentrated on some terrible affliction I could neither understand nor reach. Whatever had affected her—grief, pain, suffering—perhaps it was, after all, a demon—I couldn’t close the door. I had no power to banish it, to make it leave that poor soul in peace.”

The priest falls silent. His gaze is fixed on Mother Mary, painted in broad blue strokes behind the pulpit. His foot tips the prayer bench, rocks it gently on stout legs, forward and back.

After a pause, Anton says, “What happened? Did the woman recover?”

“She did.” The bench comes to rest again, squarely on its old carved legs, sure of its place. “She seemed to heal herself. To be sure, it was none of my doing. She was simply better on the sixth day. It was like a fever breaking, or a winter storm passing. Her family thanked me and praised me as if I had done it, but I knew the truth. I had played no part, despite my best efforts.

“I went on, Anton—carried on with the business of my life. That is the way of things, isn’t it? That’s the way we’re made, to carry on. But the experience stayed with me for a long time. I was far more shaken by my failure—my helplessness—than I had been by the woman’s torment. Her terrible screams, the foul things she’d said in the throes of her anguish—they were nothing beside my fear and my doubt. Time and again, I asked myself, ‘Emil, how can you continue to lead a congregation?’ I lay awake almost every night, knowing myself to be weak, fallible, and knowing that even with God on my side, I would surely fail again.”