The Ragged Edge of Night(5)
The afternoon light flashes on the watch face, running a golden circle around its rim. Time is short. He returns the watch to his pocket, where it settles among the beads of his rosary. With a brisk energy, he sets about making himself presentable.
He opens one trunk, the smallest. Even though he knows what he will find beneath its lid—he is braced for the sight—still the curves of brass strike him with a jolt of pain. Like the other three, this trunk is filled with the musical instruments he has kept for seven months. They are his relics, the last reminders of what was lost. Like bones in an ossuary they lie, silent yet voluble in memory. Their bells hold the echoes of remembered lives, and in the reflections bent and distorted around their smooth curves, he can see the expressionless faces of his children.
A bundle of clothing lies tucked in one corner of the trunk, pushed down deep, below the circle of a French horn. He extracts it; the bundle is tied with a cheerful blue ribbon. That’s the work of his sister, Anita, who had lived as Sister Bernadette until the Führer tore up his own Reichskonkordat and spat in the eye of the Holy See. After their respective orders were destroyed, Anton and Anita both stumbled back to their mother’s house on the edge of Stuttgart, stunned and bereft, neither knowing what to do next. When he’d met Anita at the station, she had stepped off the train in a green dress, sober in color yet fashionably cut, and her shoes had been of patent leather with smart, clicking heels. Her hair was pinned and rolled just like the girl’s, the one back on that last train, who had kissed her fingers to Anton. He hadn’t seen Anita’s hair since she had donned her habit at age sixteen. It was no longer the golden yellow he remembered from childhood, bright as falling water. It had darkened to soft, pale brown, like the velvet of a mouse’s pelt, and there were strands of white caught up in her curls, catching the light and glittering. They were both getting older now, but Anita was still as lovely as she’d ever been. He had thought, How pretty my sister is in laywoman’s clothes. Shame had struck him, cold and hard, immediately after. What kind of man finds a nun agreeable when she has been stripped of her sisterhood?
Anita had faced up to their new reality with her usual pluck and game. “I was a bride of Christ,” she said that day, laughing ruefully and taking her little brother’s arm, “but I suppose He has annulled our union.”
“You shouldn’t joke that way,” Nazarius said—Anton said.
“Don’t worry.” She winked at him, spirited, unsisterly. He could see it still, could feel his own hesitant amusement. He remembered the way she had tilted her head toward him, her strangely uncovered head with its ash-colored curls. “Lord Christ and I, we’ll make it up, as soon as all this mess with the Führer is sorted.”
Anton unties the blue ribbon. The sober cloth of his friar’s habit unrolls across his bed. Anita has ironed and folded his best suit, wrapped it in the habit, but he sets the suit aside and runs his hands over the coarse gray wool. The knotted cord that was his belt is there, too, coiled neatly upon itself, a sleeping serpent dreaming of lost Eden. He can all but feel the cord’s weight swinging from his waist. The habit still smells of the school, St. Josefsheim, Kirchenstra?e. Wood polish and chalk dust, apples from the orchard, the pipe Brother Nazarius smoked each evening when the children were tucked in their beds. He can smell sweet myrrh from a swinging censer and the sweeter hands of the little ones, sticky from the candy he brought from town twice a week if they were good. They were always good.
Perhaps he’d been too na?ve then, a fresh young friar brimming over with earnest desire to heal the world and the unshaken belief that he could do it, too. From his hands would the mercy of Christ extend and pour out into the world like blood from His sacred wounds. And then, this unexpected resurrection: Anton pulled up from the very grave into which they had thrown Bruder Nazarius. This is not the life he pictured when he first donned his habit. But this is not the sort of life anyone dreams of. Even Hitler, he thinks, must be surprised that he ever got so far—that it has all been so simple to take, to destroy. In his moments of despair—and there are many—Anton wonders whether God Himself ever dreamed it could come to this.
He unfolds the suit. Anita, bless her, pressed it perfectly, and scented it with lavender and cedar to keep the moths away. He closes the blue curtain, leaving the note pinned in place. A trace of yellow light filters around the curtain’s edge. He dresses carefully by that dim glow, rolls the old suit in the friar’s habit, and tucks the bundle away among the silent horns. Clumsy hands struggle to recall the necktie knots his father taught him when he was a boy. It has been almost a year since the order was disbanded; that should be enough time for a man to learn his knots again. He frowns into the little round mirror on the wall, talking himself through the motions. Cross over and tuck behind, pinch the top as you pull down. When he has combed his hair and adjusted the angle of his glasses on the bridge of his long, thin nose, he is surprised to see Brother Nazarius looking back at him, despite the suit and tie. Perhaps the old identity is not as dead as he first thought. Did not Saint Francis say, The world is my cloister, my body is my cell, and my soul is the hermit within?
There is work to be done here, in this small village of Unterboihingen—good work and true. After many dark months of silence, of distance, the Lord has spoken. He has called the friar who is no longer a friar; He has awakened Anton to his appointed task. Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in His holy habitation.