The Ragged Edge of Night(4)
“I have this, too.” As the truck makes its way along the dirt roads of Unterboihingen, Anton retrieves a packet of waxed paper from his knapsack. He opens it carefully, revealing amber chunks of hard honey candy. “Take as many as you’d like.”
The boys make quick work of the candy. “These aren’t like the honey drops we have here,” one says. “Where did you get them?”
“Prussia.”
They look at Anton with greater reverence now, all wide eyes and cheeks flushed with awe.
“Are you a soldier, mein Herr?”
“I was,” he says. “But my back, you know. It’s a minor complaint, but still—that’s why I couldn’t manage the trunks myself.”
“How was your back hurt?” They nudge each other, elbows to ribs, fidgeting in anticipation of his answer. Who is greater, what fellow is more a man, than the soldier with his guns and his grenades? What man is better than one who fights to defend the Fatherland?
He can think of a thousand better men. But it wouldn’t serve to teach these children any better if he were to scold them or cast shadows on their boyish fantasies. He didn’t stand fifteen years at the head of a classroom for nothing. He knows how to hand along a lesson, and how to make it stick.
Offhandedly, he says, “Jumped out of an airplane, going into Riga.”
Two of the boys shout together, “Prima!” Another cries, “Cool!” It’s a Tommy word, the sort of thing a Brit or an Australian would say—a puppet of the International Jewry, to quote Goebbels. The boys goggle at their friend for a moment, stunned by his audacity. Then they dole out his punishment: a hard slug on the arm, one from each. The offender takes his licks with red-faced meekness.
Anton laughs gently as the boy rubs his smarting arm. He finds one last piece of candy in his pocket and passes it to the lad; all is forgiven. But laughter feels foreign to him now. When he looks back on his Wehrmacht days, it is not to find joy or pride in heroism. The Fatherland holds no claim on Anton’s heart; it deserves none of his loyalty. The Führer took Anton and held him under duress. Hitler and those poor, damned souls who follow him ripped away the friar’s habit and replaced it with a soldier’s uniform. The injustice of it still takes his breath away whenever he allows himself to think of it—as does every outrage, every numberless affront, that has followed. And yet, Anton was lucky. He only marched, and fired his rifle in the direction of men he never intended to hit. There was no crueler service to which he could be compelled, no more heartrending work the Party could force upon him. A friar has no wife, no children—no love that may be weaponized. There is no tender, hallowed gun to press against his temple. The only life he stands to lose is his own, and so he is as good as worthless, impervious to the Führer’s tactics.
But he did see Riga burned. He smelled the thick black smoke, heavy in the hot July air. He had gone to Latvia under the banner of liberation. He could have borne the loss of the friar’s life, if his company had freed those people from Soviet oppression. But the Reich had intended no such thing after all. The Latvians who welcomed German intervention fell at once under a new brand of despotism, almost before their cheers had died on their lips.
My back, you know. A hard landing in a black field, on a warm but windy summer night. Rolling in the lines of his parachute, the tumbling world a thunder in his ears. The Franciscan novitiate did not instruct its men in the art of paratrooping. A minor complaint. His back was hurt in the jump, but even so, he could have marched for miles more, days more, years without end. But he decided in Riga, under flags of smoke, with the screams of hopeless women in his ears: never again would he lend his back or his legs, nor his hands nor his heart, to any purpose that served Adolf Hitler.
He lied to evade further service in the Wehrmacht. A damaged back. To lie is a sin, but God also commanded: Du sollst nicht t?ten—thou shalt not kill. The Lord will be his judge—a God he has never seen, but in Whom, nonetheless, he believes.
2
Herr Franke had not been lying when he said the room was small. There is barely space to fit the four trunks, let alone Anton. A narrow bed stands opposite the door; above it is a small window with a heavy curtain, dark blue, pulled aside to admit a peaceful golden light. A washstand, a round mirror above it, a porcelain pot beneath the bed. Pinned to the drapery, a note in precise handwriting: Achtung! Halten Sie den Vorhang bei Dunkelheit geschlossen. Keep the curtain closed after dark.
Once the boys have gone, clattering down the staircase—at least the boarding room has a private stair—Anton stands in the middle of his new home, hands on hips, head ducked to avoid the sharp, treacherous slope of the ceiling. Below, he can hear Franke going about his business in the furniture shop, thumping and scraping, cursing at a child or a dog.
He checks his pocket watch, the one his father gave him when, at age eighteen, he ceased to be Josef Anton Starzmann. He donned the gray robe of his order and became Bruder Nazarius instead. Never had he imagined that he would take up his old name again. Never could he have foreseen this—the Catholic orders disbanded by a fanatical government. The complacent ones went wherever the NS ordered them: nuns and monks, Fathers and friars, forced back into the lay world, the dull world beyond their cloisters. Those who did not comply met a different fate. Often he has asked himself: Was it cowardice, to abandon Bruder Nazarius so easily, to become Anton again? Should I have fought and died for my faith? For many months, he believed he was a coward, until he heard the voice of God calling. After so many months of black silence, the thunder of certainty came again. He understood that the Lord had preserved him for a new work and was giving him a chance at redemption. God woke him from a long slumber, raised him up like Lazarus. It was not his lot to fight and die—not yet. There is still work to do, in God’s name.