The Ragged Edge of Night(24)

“You look funny.” Maria clutches the edges of her blanket and sheet.

He draws the covers up to her chin. “They didn’t make this room to fit me.”

In the candlelight, he can see that her eyes are red. She cried over the dentifrice after all.

“I want to hear a story,” she says.

“Prayers first. Then a story.”

She closes her eyes and presses her small hands together in a peak just below her lips. She whispers, “Dear God, thank You for sending us a good new Vati. I will try to be nice to him. And please make Mutti less sad now, since she has someone to help her.” She opens her eyes. “Is that good?”

“It’s a very nice prayer. And now you say—”

“Amen.”

“Well done, Maria. If I tell you a story tonight, will you be good tomorrow night, and clean up without your mother watching to be sure you do it properly?” This seems the sort of thing a father ought to say to his daughter.

As Maria is in ready agreement, he recites an excellent story, a fairy tale about a funny old witch who lives in a house with chicken legs. Where did he hear it first? St. Josefsheim, from one of the other friars? Or did he pick it up in the Wehrmacht, on the long march to Riga? He can’t remember now.

The girl is getting sleepy. Eyelids heavy, she says, “I thought you would tell a Bible story, since you were a monk.”

“I was a friar. That’s different from a monk. Do you want a Bible story next time?”

“No,” she says quickly. “I like friars’ stories better.”

Before he knows just what he is doing, he is leaning forward to kiss her forehead. The gesture surprises him, but the glad ache in his heart surprises him more—how easily he has come to love these three little souls, how readily he has taken to this new role. Maria isn’t troubled by the kiss, nor does she seem surprised. She sinks at once into sleep, her breath steady and slow.

Awkward in the cramped space, he stands and edges close to the room’s tiny window. Before he moves the curtain aside, he remembers that he ought to blow out the candle. Out there, in the world beyond this small sanctuary, night deepens over the countryside. Fields and hills ripple one into another, black into dull, dark silver. The autumn stars are pale but numerous, not a single point of light overwhelmed by the distant glow of any city. The western horizon is lightless where Stuttgart ought to be. The city is blacked out tonight—power grid blown or taken out by some earlier offense, inaudible here in our secret village. We are invisible from the sky. Or perhaps in Stuttgart they have only run out of candles. Tonight, with the world black and quiet, no bombs will fall. There is nothing to see, no one to target, and we may sleep without fear.

He pulls the curtain closed, sheltering his small new daughter from harm.

When he reenters the sitting room, Elisabeth is waiting in her chair. A man’s shirt is spread across her lap; she’s looking down at it with an attentive air that makes him think she half expects the garment to get up and dance. But she isn’t sewing—only looking. The boys have gone to bed. Tired as they are from the day’s excitement, they may be asleep already.

Elisabeth folds the shirt and lays it carefully on her sewing basket. She rises; half a room apart, they stand together in awkward silence, neither quite looking at the other, neither knowing how to approach the subject of where Anton is to sleep.

At length, she says, “You might come and sleep in my bed, as there is nowhere else but the sofa, and it isn’t very comfortable. But you needn’t think—”

“I don’t think,” he says, smiling to put her at ease. “I quite meant what I said—our agreement, you understand. I’ll give you some time to change. I’ll just step outside and have a moment with my pipe.”

Relieved that the matter is settled, easy as that, Elisabeth disappears into her room, the one at the back of the old house. Anton slips out the door and descends the stairs as silently as he can manage.

Once out of doors, he realizes there is not as much starlight as he’d first thought. The night is as dark as the bottom of a well, and beneath his feet, the steep stairway feels rickety and treacherous. By the time he eases down the unfamiliar steps, he has lost all desire to smoke. In the shadows below the house, the animals sigh. With one hand, he feels his way along the stone foundation and finds the little shed where Kartoffelbauer left his things. The door sticks; it scrapes over the old stone threshold. He opens one trunk, then another, groping through them in perfect blackness, searching for his necessities by feel. The world is so lightless, the night so cold, that he is seized all at once by instinctive terror. The hair at the nape of his neck rises, and his spine burns with a ripple of dread. When he was a child, fear of the dark would take him this way, every now and then, sudden and strong. In those moments, when he froze in the grip of panic, he would often imagine a tiger crouching just where he couldn’t see, its body tight and quivering, gape-jawed and hungry. Or sometimes a Nachzehrer, a blood drinker, wearing the guise of a long-dead uncle or a cousin Anton never knew, trailing its funerary shroud and chewing on its own bones. Those were a child’s fears. Now he dreads something altogether different. The bayonets, the rifles, the gray bus belching smoke from its rotted belly. And in Riga, by the light of a church on fire, women who were once raped by Russian soldiers raped again by their German liberators.

He finds his bundle of clothing, spins to face the darkness, and leaves the lid of the chest to slam shut behind him. He had expected a shadow moving across the old shed’s threshold, reaching out one black hand to claim him. But there is nothing beside the open door, nothing over his shoulder but a mire of memory.