The Ragged Edge of Night(41)

Our confidence and joy shall be . . .

Anton can’t resist the music. He joins the hymn, lending his voice in harmony with the priest. Elisabeth sings, too, entering on the same word, the same note. Husband and wife glance at one another, shy and surprised by this unexpected unity, but they do not cease to sing.

The power of Satan breaking,

Our peace eternal making.





PART 3

THE WAYS A MAN MIGHT EARN HIS PAY

FEBRUARY–MAY 1943





15

The earth lies hard and dead under layers of compacted ice. Along the road, up the slope of its verge, across the flat breast of distant fields, whatever is blanketed by snow is grayed by clinging dust, the thick, colorless residue of coal smoke and woodsmoke, of bombings and fires carried in from the cities by the steady seasonal winds. And everything is covered with snow. February is the coldest part of the year. Why should it be so? It’s the winter solstice, days before Christmas, that marks the darkest hour—that fearful time when night seems to swallow all the world, when even at its best the sun is weak and low, riding through a sky burdened by cloud. Why now, when the days have lengthened enough that you can notice the change, when there is just enough light to see by—why should the cold be so bitter, so persistent? St. Kolumban is flattened against the landscape, and the gentle yellow of its aged stucco walls is paled and whitened by winter. The bell tower is laced in frost.

A footpath, trampled through the snow, crosses the churchyard, a slash of white through the dull, gray stillness of the cemetery. Anton takes the path and knocks on the little side door, the one Father Emil uses to come and go.

“My friend.” That’s how the priest greets him when he opens the door. “Come in, my friend.”

It is Tuesday; the church is empty. Father Emil leads Anton past the small chamber that serves as the priest’s living quarters to the stone stoop, where they cross themselves with wet fingers, and into the grand, sweeping arches of the sanctuary and nave. No matter how many times Anton sees the interior of St. Kolumban, it never fails to impress him. The wooden pews, gleaming from eight hundred years’ worth of polish, bisected by the perfect aisle, roofed over by a dark brick web of sexpartite vaulting. The altar, framed and glittering with what little gold Unterboihingen possesses. To gospel side and epistle side, arching above the chancel, Mother Mary and her saints process toward Heaven. They are painted in flowing robes with halos of brilliant color.

Together, the two men bow to the altar and make their reverent approach. The organ waits in peaceful stillness, tucked behind its rood screen in the shadows of Mary’s statue and Father Emil’s pulpit. That quiet corner, hidden from the congregation, is as familiar now to Anton as the palms of his own hands. He takes his accustomed seat on the bench and plays a few experimental chords. The church swells and echoes with the sound.

“What is the problem, exactly?” He tries another chord, and another. He can detect no sour note, no wavering vibration.

“I don’t know, precisely,” Emil says. He leans against the rood screen’s dark upright beam. Casual, yet without the least air of disrespect—how does he manage to do it? “I was only amusing myself yesterday, plinking about on the keys—I’m not an accomplished musician like you, Anton—and something sounded off.”

He runs up a scale, then down. His fingers know the way, unthinking, like scratching an itch or tying the laces of your shoe. “Which note sounded off? Which key?”

“I, er…” Emil shuffles his feet, clasps his hands behind his back. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

Patient as always, Anton smiles. “White or black? Or was it one of the pedals?” He tests those, too, depressing each long plank of wood in turn with the toe of his wet boot. The bass notes rattle St. Kolumban’s bones, but the sound is true.

He plays a verse, then another: “Mary Walked Through a Wood of Thorn.” What did Mary wear beneath her heart? Kyrie eleison! A little child, free from pain. That’s what the Mother carried in her heart. Jesus und Maria.

“Everything sounds fine and well to me,” Anton says. Hands and feet go still, and the chords’ echoes murmur up there in the arches, among the high ceiling like birds in a sleepy roost.

“My mistake, then,” Emil says. “Entschuldigen Sie.”

“Think nothing of it.” He is reluctant to rise from the bench. He never likes to leave his music.

“It was good of you, to come tramping all this way in that bitter cold, to humor me with my complaint about a broken organ.”

“We should only be glad it’s not damaged. Who knows where we might have found the parts to repair it?”

“Some other church, in some other town, might have had a part to spare. But I never would have known what to ask for. I’d have been obliged to send you off to another village, carrying the message on my behalf.” Emil turns away, heading back for the pews, but the movement is too abrupt. It catches Anton’s attention, holds him in a tense grip. He sits, fingers of one hand spread across the ivory keys from the low G to the octave above. The silence Emil leaves behind is lively, crackling with unspoken meaning.

When he does rise from the bench, Anton finds the priest sitting in the front pew, as is his habit, gazing up at the procession of painted saints. He’s staring at Mary in particular, standing below the rest with her benevolent hands upraised, pointed up a ladder of clouds.