The Ragged Edge of Night(3)

A young man in a smart station uniform approaches and stands ready beside the compartment. “Any bags, mein Herr?”

“Oh—yes,” Anton says, rather hesitant. “A few, I’m afraid.”

The attendant raises the baggage-hold door.

“This trunk here.” Anton points; the attendant retrieves the old chest with its creaking leather handles and age-worn straps. “And that one, with the ropes tying the lid shut.”

“Heavy,” the young man notes.

“This one here, and that one in the back.”

The attendant stifles his annoyance as he crawls on hands and knees into the belly of the compartment. He drags the heavy trunk out and lets it fall hard onto the platform. Anton slips him a few coins for his trouble. Then the attendant raps a signal on the car door, and the train coughs, groans, and crawls away.

Anton waits beside his baggage. Eastward, the train diminishes. When it has gone, taking the stink of its hot breath, the natural scent of Unterboihingen flows in around him like a flood: dry grass; slow water in the ditches; the sharp, rustic bite of animal dung. In the distance, cattle low to the hollow accompaniment of their collar bells. The music carries, as sound is apt to do on a still summer day, broken and intermittent, comfortable across a long stretch of hazy afternoon.

A handful of boys tumbles onto the tracks, scuffling and laughing together, forelocks sticking to sweaty brows. They are thirteen, fourteen, playing in the last summer of their youth. They search between the sleepers for bits of flattened tin. In a year or two, three at most, they will be old enough for the Wehrmacht. They will be pressed into service, channeled to the Eastern Front via Hitler Youth. Serving the country, as if this country can find no better use for its children than to catch bullets in some Russian field.

“You must be Herr Starzmann.” The thick voice belongs to a stout man with a little dark mustache not unlike the Führer’s and a bald pate shining through patchy hair. He emerges rather languidly from the station’s shaded porch. Perhaps all things move slowly in a town like Unterboihingen—men, cattle, the bleak thoughts that follow you everywhere. The stout man extends his hand; Anton shakes it. “Bruno Franke. Pleased to meet you.”

“My new landlord.” Anton offers one of his winning smiles; Herr Franke takes little notice. “I’m very glad you found the room to board me, Herr Franke. This is such a small village. If you hadn’t had that room available, I would have found myself bedding down in a pigsty come nightfall.”

“It’s not an especially large room,” Franke says with a withering look at the four travel trunks. “You might prefer the pigsty.”

“God willing, I won’t need to board for more than a week.” Unconsciously, he pats the newspaper, tucked tight beneath his arm.

“I’ve brought my truck. There’s room for your things, but I’m afraid I can’t help you load them up. My knees aren’t what they used to be.”

“And my back leaves something to be desired. A Wehrmacht injury. We two old fellows, eh?”

Herr Franke shrugs and turns back toward the station.

Something darts among the railroad tracks. The sudden motion among Unterboihingen’s wheat-dry laziness catches Anton’s eye. One of the boys has bent to retrieve a bit of something from the gravel, hot and black with coal dust. He holds it up; the little treasure he has found winks in the sunlight, and he crows to his friends.

“A moment,” Anton calls to Herr Franke. He steps down from the platform and approaches the boys. “My friends”—smiling—“how would you like to earn a little money?”

They abandon their hunt for mangled bits of tin. They flock around him, eyes bright and eager.

“I’ve got four big trunks to load on a truck, and then they must be carried up the stairs to my boarding room. Who will help me?” Five boys; he calculates quickly what money he has, what he can safely spare. “Twenty reichspfennig to everyone who helps.”

The boys cheer. Twenty reichspfennig will buy you a nut bar or even a bit of chocolate, if you know where to find it. He only prays the boys won’t spend their money on the sticker books the government has placed in every toy store and candy shop from Munich to Cologne. Each page has frames, and titles, but no portraits. The object, you see, is for children to hunt down and trade for the sticker cards that will complete their album. What better way to make a child love the Führer and his pack of demons than to make those vile creatures the center of a harmless game?

The boys follow Anton like pups, jostling and yipping, cuffing one another in good-natured excitement. In no time, they have carried all four trunks from the platform and lifted them to the bed of Franke’s truck.

Franke is already waiting at the wheel, staring out rather peevishly above the sign painted on the truck’s door: “Franke’s Fine Furniture.”

Anton grins at his new landlord. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll ride in the back with the boys.”

“Suit yourself.” Franke starts the engine.

Anton climbs up to the truck’s bed. For a moment, he feels happy and energetic, as he must have felt when he was thirteen, fourteen, but that was so long ago. Like the boys, he sits on the lid of a trunk. He takes the promised coins from his pocket, passes them around, and the children hush themselves, turning the reichspfennig over in their dirt-blackened fingers. There is a sort of magic in those coins, the bright metallic gleam of something unexpected: an adult who has kept his word to children.