The Ragged Edge of Night(51)

“I will admit, there are times when I have my doubts about the Lord.”

“How not, with so much evil in the world?”

“Once, on a train, I heard a man say he didn’t believe in God because he had never seen Him.”

Herr Pohl laughs, dry and quiet. “A clever man, that.”

“But just because we can’t see the Lord—that doesn’t mean He isn’t there.”

“Can’t see Him, can’t feel His touch. He has no influence in this world, or you and I wouldn’t be here, now, doing what we do. If God ever existed, He is dead, my friend. Hitler himself killed Him.”

What can Anton say to that? He has scarcely felt the Lord’s presence since this war began. He believes because he wants belief—because without it, he will crumble in despair. God is not dead, only absent. Whenever He deigns to return, Anton will be waiting to embrace Him. He will take God in his arms and say, Look what I have done while You were gone. Look how I have tried to uphold Your glory. I am only one man, but my God, I tried.

After a pause, Pohl says, “My name is Detlef. My Christian name, I mean.”

Anton turns to him, grinning. “Your Christian name—then are you a Christian, despite yourself?”

Pohl only shrugs and refuses to look at him. Anton understands his uneasiness. They aren’t supposed to know one another’s names, the men and women who carry out this great and deadly work—except when two resisters work closely together, and on a regular basis, as in the case of Anton and Father Emil.

“I know,” Pohl says, apologetic. He looks up and down the street, casually but with a keen eye. “We aren’t supposed to tell. It’s safer that way—of course it is. But sometimes I find my job rather lonely, don’t you? Sometimes I think, ‘If we don’t remember each other’s humanity, and recognize individual worth, then we aren’t much better than…’” He leaves the rest unspoken, but his meaning is clear.

Anton has felt the same way, now and then. He has shared Detlef Pohl’s dark thoughts. He sees, too, that this is Pohl’s apology, an earnest attempt to mend what this talk of God has broken. “I’m Anton Starzmann. Pleased to meet you—properly, I mean, since we have crossed paths before.”

“Don’t tell me if you have a family,” Pohl says quickly. He toys with the folded newspaper. He spreads it open again, glances over its lines. The scrap of paper with Anton’s message is gone. If Pohl concealed it in his hand or in his pocket, Anton never noticed the subtle motion. Pohl is a man of long experience. “If you have a family, I don’t want to know. In case they ever catch me, you see. I don’t want to tell them how they can get to you, if they force me to reveal whatever I know.”

“I understand,” Anton says. “They can’t force you to say what you don’t know.” He leans back on the bench and turns away again, searching now in earnest for his own bus. Outwardly, he is unconcerned. Inside, his throat has gone tight with fear. Don’t ever tell how they can hurt me. How they can force me to their will.

Pohl says, quite suddenly and with the hint of a laugh, “They call us the Red Orchestra, those of us they know about, those they keep their eyes on. Did you know?”

“I didn’t.”

“It’s their secret code. Or they think it a secret, but we know—we know nearly everything.” Pohl’s voice falls even lower than the cautious murmur he’d been using before. In that sinking pitch, Anton hears the unspoken words: Knowing as much as we do, one would think we could have acted by now. One would think we could have cinched this business up last spring. Von Gersdorff and his damnable bomb.

Anton says, “Why an orchestra?”

“They give us each a special name, those they know about. We are all musical instruments to them. Herr Violin, Herr Clarinet, Fr?ulein Oboe—that sort of thing. Do you know why? Because they think if they ever capture us, they can make us all sing.”

“They don’t know us half as well as they fancy.” It’s a brave thing to say, but Anton has seen firsthand what the SS can do, how they can break a man and force him to their will. He says, “How will this all end, do you think?” He dares not ask when.

“The kingdom can’t be overthrown until the king is dead. What he has built is too deeply rooted in Germany now.” The Party is too thoroughly entrenched, and the people are too cowed, too frightened to resist. They are all too willing to shut their eyes, to pretend nothing evil has happened. They are even willing to accept that these things Hitler does, these things he says, are normal—that the Party has the right of it, and has been right all along. They are ready to believe, now, that mankind was always meant to hate his neighbor, to kill the weak and the outcast, since God first dreamed us into being.

But those of us who resist—we remember what the world was like. There were times before—all the long history of our nation, before Hitler’s rise—when we behaved less like wolves and more like men. We remember; we know. The purging of the press, the suspension of our constitution, the rallies and marches and the Reichstag fire—this is not who we are. Anton sits in silence, listening to the slow rustle of Herr Pohl’s paper. He stares down the road for the bus, but in his mind, he walks backward through time, searching as he did before for the place where Germany went wrong, where we turned aside from our humanity. It was when hunger came in 1918. It was when our jobs vanished, when a man could no longer expect to feed his family, when any crust of bread was a miracle. His efforts are misplaced, in searching for the origin of evil. He knows it’s so, yet he can’t stop asking: When? And why? But when and why don’t matter. If not now, then some other date. If not for Hitler’s reasons, then by the will of some other man. Satan is alive and well; he lives in the hearts of all people. He waits, his sharp ear cocked, for the whisper from a sly politician, or a general’s shouted order. He is always ready to reach out his sulfur-stinking hand and beckon us toward the unforgivable.