The Ragged Edge of Night(57)

In the heart of the village, the bells of St. Kolumban ring the hour. Anton and Elisabeth turn as one, savoring the sound. The low, rich music spreads itself across the land. It drowns out the memory of airplanes’ engines, of the dry, rattling blasts from Stuttgart. It even silences, for a short time, haunting cries of vanished children and the sound of a gray bus idling outside St. Josefsheim. In the field, the boys stop to listen. Even the goats prick their ears.

When the last peal rolls past the cottage and out to the distant hills, Elisabeth wraps her arms around her knees and speaks. “I love the sound of those bells. I sometimes think I’d go mad without them. They make this place feel like a home, don’t they?”

Anton nods. He chews the stem of his pipe.

“It’s funny—these bells don’t sound quite like any others. Have you noticed?”

“Every bell has a different voice, I suppose. It must depend on how it was made.”

“Or perhaps,” Elisabeth says, “it has more to do with our surroundings. The countryside—perhaps the wide-open space allows them to sing more beautifully. There were church bells in the city, of course, but I never truly loved the sound of bells ringing until we came to Unterboihingen. In the city, they always sounded harsh to me—clanging like some terrible alarm. But here, they truly sing. Here they sound like home.” Wistfully, she smiles. “I remember those bells ringing at Maria’s christening. I remember everything about that day—how glad we all were, how full of hope. The world seemed new, and… not so dark as it seems now. The bells seemed to say, ‘Goodness will come again—goodness like this new baby girl. The darkness can’t last forever.’

“And I remember how the bells rang at my husband’s funeral, too.” She hangs her head. “I shouldn’t talk of it, I suppose—”

“Go on,” Anton says. “I don’t mind.”

For a moment, she sits in pensive silence, her face turned away. But then she rounds on Anton with sudden, despairing passion. “I’m glad he didn’t live, Anton—and I know it’s terrible to say it, terrible to think it, but I can’t help it, all the same. I’m glad. He was such a kind man, so good, so sweet. I’m glad he never lived to see what the world has become.” She sniffs and wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “But I don’t know how to explain it to his children. How do I tell them what the world was like before, and why it has changed?”

His children—my children, Anton thinks sadly. How do we tell anyone?

Elisabeth shakes her head, laughing without humor at her own reaction. “I’m a fool. There’s no point carrying on so.”

“It’s understandable.”

“But it does no one any good.” She straightens, and seems to lift her own spirits by force of will. More brightly, she says, “Every hour, I feel I can’t go on any longer. I feel the world is too wicked to bear, and too broken to be made whole. And then—every hour—I hear the bells of St. Kolumban ring, and I know I can go on. Sometimes I even think that God will manage to patch up this wreck of a world, after all—somehow. Do you know what I think it is about those bells that makes me love them so much? It’s because the whole village hears them, too. It’s something we all share, isn’t it?”

Not a soul alive doesn’t love to hear those bells ringing. And not a soul alive doesn’t feel, between one peal and the next, hope and peace return to the world, if only at the close of the hour.





20

Anton has delivered, by now, more messages than he can count. To Herr Pohl; to a handful of other barely familiar men and women in the towns scattered around Unterboihingen. The woman of fifty or so, with the bent spine and spectacles that are always spotted with dust. The man with the red hair, who appears in Kirchheim whenever Pohl does not. The youth who can’t be older than eighteen—he looks so much like Anton did when he joined the Franciscans, fresh and eager, confident that he could change the world. Countless messages, innumerable handshakes, more folded scraps of paper falling from Anton’s hand to the sidewalk than there are stars in the sky. And still no word from Berlin or Prussia. Still, the Führer goes on.

Returning from his latest assignment, Anton passes the Kopp field on the edge of town. The brothers brought their harvest in early last week; now the spent vines lie flat and brown, wilting down the length of the field. Far across the sleeping ground, Anton can see Paul and Albert loitering near the hedge, just as they’d done that day last summer when he caught them with the dead grenade. As before, he stops to watch. The boys aren’t playing now. They are squatting at the field’s edge, shifting aside dry potato vines. They reach into the soft earth and paw through it. Puffs of dust rise on still air.

What on earth are they doing? Anton squints across the distance, as if that will help him make sense of the strange activity. Then he understands: they are pulling up potatoes, digging them out, turning the tubers over in their hands. He watches as the boys brush soil from yellow-brown skins.

A weight of sorrow drags at Anton’s heart. This is theft; his sons are stealing. Even if the harvest is over, and these potatoes were overlooked, it’s still theft. Without permission from the Kopp brothers, what his boys are doing now is a sin.

He waits in the shade of a roadside oak, careful not to move. He doesn’t want to draw the boys’ attention. He remains there until Paul and Albert rise, brushing the dirt from their knees as they did from the potatoes. They disappear through the leafless hedge—heading toward their forest stronghold, as Anton suspected they would. This time, when he follows the boys, he does it with more dignity than he managed at Easter. The October wood is warm, spiced with the smell of fallen leaves. Its fragile, fleeting beauty wracks him with pangs of melancholy. Death is the very heart of this season—the passing of summer warmth, the fading of all that is young and green. A long, cold spate of colorless dark stretches before him.