The Ragged Edge of Night(2)
There was a time when children sang before church, Dear God, keep me pious, so I will go to Heaven. Now we chant in pubs and on the streets, at dinner parties and in our sleep: Lord God, keep me quiet, so I don’t end up in Dachau.
After a pause, the woman on the train says, “I thank God we’ve been spared the worst of it here. There’s much more damage in Berlin.”
“A funny thing, to thank God,” says the man beside her.
“What do you mean by that?”
Silent, listening, Anton watches the countryside pass by. A hedgerow of sunflowers splits a mown field. He remembers playing among the sunflowers as a boy—their dry-smelling stalks like a palisade, the whisper of their leaves. Yellow light that came down, filtered through the petals. His sister made a playhouse among the sunflowers: Anton, you must be the father of my house, and tell my little children: if you don’t wash up for supper, Mother will be cross!
“I mean,” says the man, “there isn’t any sense in bringing God into the war. What has He to do with any of this? Don’t tell me you think anything the Führer has done is part of God’s plan.”
The woman does not speak. Nor does Anton. The sound of his sister’s voice vanishes from memory.
At length, the woman says, “You talk as if you don’t believe in God at all.” She sounds as if she might cry.
Her companion is quick to answer, quick to defend. “It’s only this: I’ve never seen God. Why should I credit Him for a blessing, or leave Him any blame? Men are quite capable of destroying the world on their own, as we can plainly see. They don’t need any help from above.”
Before he can stop himself, before he can think, Anton turns in his seat. “I have never seen Hitler, either—not in the flesh—yet I believe in him.”
The couple are young. They stare at him, faces blank with shock. Moment by moment, they go pale, then paler still. The woman lifts a hand to cover her mouth. Her neat dark hair is rolled and pinned above her smooth, pretty brow, but fear mars her beauty. The man’s eyes widen with panic and then a black flash that says, I will fight; you won’t take us easily. An instant later, grim acceptance settles over his features. His mouth turns down, steel-hard and calm. Anton can see the fellow bracing himself, reconciling with whatever must come next. What he said about the Führer… what his companion said about the White Rose, that wistful tone in her voice, the tentative hope upwelling. One never knows, these days, who listens and reports, and who listens and agrees.
Lord bless me, I have frightened them out of their wits. Anton smiles. It is a friendly, calming smile, so wide it seems too large for his narrow face. Straightaway, without sound reason, that smile puts the young couple at ease. He can do that without thinking: put a person at ease, convince them all is well, there is nothing to fear, life and the Lord are good. It’s one of his gifts. He uses it liberally, whenever occasion demands. If God gives you a gift, are you not obligated to employ it? Lord, grant me the strength to use what poor talents You have given me, wisely and well. And whatever I do, let me do it for Your true purpose and not the whim of any man.
The young fellow crosses his arms, sighs, and settles back in his seat. He won’t look at Anton now but studies the passing landscape with a frown. All the same, Anton can see relief flooding his body. His cheeks color more with every rapid beat of his heart. The woman giggles. She kisses her fingertips to Anton. He has taken her part in the argument; that’s as good as a win. Anton offers an apologetic shrug—sorry for startling you—and turns again, determined this time to mind his own business.
He never has seen Hitler, not face-to-face. But how could he fail to believe? The proof is ever-present; memory, knit red into his marrow, will never let him rest.
The land, the world, tracks backward through time. From the hard, colorless age of Stuttgart—a place that is all stiff joints and stubborn resistance against the Tommies—the Württemberg countryside flourishes into soft green youth. Beyond farm and pasture, dark reaches of woodland extend along ridges never touched by a plow, as if the Black Forest, too, is making its way consciously east, leaving ruin and desolation behind. To the south, the Swabian Jura rises and falls, waves of varicolored blue, mountain crests lost in a glow of low-hanging, mist-white cloud. Stuttgart looked like this once, when Anton was a child. He thinks of the children—the living ones, the ones in whom hope still resides—and he slips his hand down into the pocket of his jacket, where his rosary hides. He prays Hail Mary, pinching every pale bead. The beads, like years lost, lives lost, impress themselves in his flesh. Heilige Maria, Mutter Gottes, bitte für uns Sünder jetzt und in der Stunde unseres Todes.
The train jolts over some rough stretch of track. The newspaper shivers and slides across his lap, threatening to fall to the floor. With his free hand, he stills it. It would seem almost a sacrilege for that paper to land among the tramping feet, the mud and dust. It’s this newspaper that brought him clarity, renewed ambition, and strength of will when he’d thought all hope gone for good. Lulled by the rocking of the car, he dozes, rosary in one hand, purpose in the other, until the train slows in a hiss of steam and the conductor calls the stop at Neckar and Unterboihingen.
When he steps from the train, he bats away a cloud of steam that reeks of coal and heat and settles his hat in place. The sun is bright this afternoon; it raises a glare from the white stucco station and the houses beyond. Unterboihingen is a village from a fairy tale, all brick and white plaster, high-peaked roofs, dark beams of ancient wood crossed below steep-angled eaves. This is the old, the original, Germany, unaltered since the days before there were states or Deutsches Reich, before there existed any Axis of power.