The Ragged Edge of Night(18)
At that moment, the bells ring out the hour. The sound fills the chapel, quakes the weary bones of the world. The notes, massive and mellow in every stroke, shake loose the strictures on his heart. He closes his eyes and the purity of their music fills him; a song spills over inside. There is no room left in his heart for doubt or fear. He thinks, These same bells have rung since long before the Reich existed. And they will ring still, even after it has fallen.
When the last stroke has sounded, Anton holds his breath, feeling the note’s dying hum. It vibrates in his chest, still, long after sound has faded. He exhales slowly, mindful of the silence, its fullness, its suffusion of hope.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Father Emil says. “The bells. They’ve hung in that tower for hundreds of years; imagine the things they have seen, the worlds they have known. When my thoughts are at their darkest, I listen to the bells and I remember that Germany hasn’t always been what it is now. Those bells remember it—the way we were before.” He casts a sheepish smile in Anton’s direction, and the prayer bench begins to rock again. “I know I sound like a fool—perhaps I am one. They are only bells, yet I can’t help but think of them as something more. Old friends, that’s what they seem to me.”
“You’re not foolish, Father. I was just thinking much the same thing.”
Emil turns on the pew and stares up to St. Kolumban’s ceiling as if he can see beyond its layered arches into the night-darkened bell tower. “If I’d had the misfortune to find myself in some other church—one without bells—I think the war would go harder on me. I’d be an unhappier man. But every time I hear them, I hear the past singing, too. I can’t help but remember all the people who came before. The ringing mechanisms are automated now, of course, just like a clock—I will show you how the gears work, someday—but long ago, it was the father of this church who made those bells sing. He knew everything that passed in his congregation. Every birth and death, every baptism, every marriage. Every cause for joy and sorrow. I think of them all—generations of people—families, friends, lovers. Theirs was a different world. They didn’t fear what we fear now.”
“But surely the bells rang in times of fear, too, as in times of happiness. This church would have sounded the alarm, I imagine, whenever fires or floods threatened the village.”
“Yes,” Emil says, chuckling, “and—who knows?—packs of wolves descending from the hills. Those were simpler times. Floods and fires and wolves can’t compare to strafing with English bombers. Yet the dangers those people faced in years gone by were no less terrifying to them. No one still lives who remembers simpler days. But the bells remember—they keep the memories for us, so we will never entirely forget the time when we were all brothers.”
Softly, Anton says, “That woman—the exorcism. What did you learn? How did you go on leading your church through so much worry and doubt?”
“I took each day as it came. I still do—what else can any man do? I can’t worry about what might happen in the future; I can only tend to my small flock here and now, today, hour by hour, and pray that what I do is what God wills.”
“Trust that everything is in God’s hands.”
Emil makes that strange, evasive movement again—not a shrug, not really, but something akin. He is leaving words unsaid, hanging in the silence where moments before the roll of the bells uplifted. Anton hears the words Emil will not speak aloud. All is in your own hands, just as much as God’s. And whatever your hands may do, do it with all your strength and will.
“It’s getting late. I should finish my work, then rest. Tomorrow is a new day.” The priest stands, smiles down, his eyes enigmatic. He offers a hand and pulls Anton to his feet. With a squeeze to Anton’s shoulder, he says, “The second of October. Then your new life begins.”
6
The bells will ring, even after the Reich has fallen. Everything in me that is sensible, everything that is rational, can’t believe it’s true. The Reich will never fall; it is too strong now, too deeply rooted, fixed in the routine of life. We have accepted. We have moved along, carried on with the business of our lives, and this is what our lives have become. My days are as long and dark as night; this war will never end. The pillar of evil will stand until the last day comes, until the angel neglects to sound his horn and everything that might have been withers, forgotten on an untended vine. But when, in moments of quiet, in my stillness of despair, I dare to ask what yet may be, the black veil parts and light pours in. It strikes me to blindness with its beauty. It floods my soul with tears.
O God, my Father, why do You do this to me? Can You not content Yourself to leave me in the surety of misery? You have laid bare the frail bones of my grief; You have humbled me before myself and proven to me that I am a coward, unfit for life. Yet I persist. I go on living. I will cling to hope, even knowing, as I do, that hope is worse than futile.
Why this relentless, this secret optimism—this resolve, hard and hot at the base of my spine, and buried none too deep in my breast? The cancer that gnaws at us is too hungry to be sated. And I am one man—one man. Christ Jesus, I always believed You were merciful, but this is a monstrous cruelty, to make me dream of a time when evil may fall. Whatever sins have brought us here still reside in our blood, even to the third and fourth generation.