The Ragged Edge of Night(67)

“I’m glad to be here,” Anton says, not at all sure he is. His stomach is churning on the liver. It has been three years since he has entered a classroom, since he has stood in front of so many children as their teacher. Does he still remember how to do it?

Christine leads him toward the school. She keeps her eyes on the path as they walk and keeps her voice low, but she doesn’t hesitate to speak. “I have prayed, night after night, that our town—our children—would be spared.” No need to specify. From lessons this earnest young teacher would rather her pupils never learn. From doctrines of purity and perfection. From the pledges of fealty to Our Leader, repeated week after week, every Tuesday night, with an arm flung out in salute. If you force a man—or a boy—to recite words often enough, sooner or later he will come to believe what he says. “When I learned what Bruno Franke intended, I was outraged.” The way she says the name, with a growl of disgust, makes Anton believe that she, too, has been the recipient of M?belbauer’s lust, his foul propositions. Of course she has; look at her. Lovely, young, and single, this teacher is an apple too tempting for M?belbauer to leave on the bough. Anton can only hope she hasn’t suffered overmuch.

“I was furious with Herr Franke, too,” Anton says. I am furious still.

She stops outside the door, beside the spray of ivy. The green leaves set off her red hair with luminous intensity; for a moment, Christine shines at him, a youthful beacon of hope. “But there’s no need for either of us to be angry now. You’ve come to save our children from that fate.”

He holds the hat against his chest, pressing it to his fluttering heart. “If I manage to save anyone, Fr?ulein, it will be by God’s grace.”

From the moment she opens the school’s front door, Anton can tell where the children have gone. Conversation bubbles out into the foyer from a classroom; laughter hangs in the air, the music of children forgetting to be afraid. They have lingered inside the schoolhouse rather than running home. They have waited there for Anton.

“That room, there,” Christine says, gesturing to the open door, “will be yours entirely, this time every Tuesday, for as long as you need it.”

“It’s very generous. I’m humbled.”

“Think nothing of it, mein Herr. We are all too happy to oblige.”

“The instruments… ?”

“The Kopp brothers brought them over on the back of their truck, just at the start of the lunch hour. You’ll find them all inside the classroom.”

She grins at him suddenly, buoyant with an expectation that is almost childish. He thinks, Where did this teacher grow up? Munich, Stuttgart? Christine is young enough that she couldn’t have escaped mandatory participation in the youth programs when she was a schoolgirl. It makes his jaw clench, to think of this bright, hopeful young woman—any young woman—pressed into the Bund Deutsche M?del, the League of German Girls. In the BDM, they teach our girls to sing “The Flag on High.” They teach our girls to work the farms—Blut und Boden, soil and blood. They teach our girls, above all else, to guard against racial shame. To love a man insufficiently German, to bring forth a child with tainted blood, is a crime worse than murder. He can only thank God such teachings didn’t stick in the heart of this brave young woman.

“Thank you, Christine,” Anton says.

“Call if you need me. I’ll be out here in the foyer; I intend to listen to the music.”

“Don’t expect too much, this first day.”

Laughter and horseplay end abruptly when Anton enters the room. There is a hasty rustle, a scrambling for seats—the children have pushed their wooden double desks into a half circle. Two dozen eager faces turn toward him; some of the younger ones have come, he sees, from the other schoolhouse down the road, the one Maria used to escape in favor of butchering magazines. The Kopp brothers have deposited the trunks at the head of the classroom, just below the blackboard. A remnant of the day’s lesson still shows on the board, a sentence partially erased. The smell of the place leaps to the forefront of Anton’s awareness. Ink, the old wood of well-used desks, chalk dust, and a faint trace of mildew from the pages of aging books. The scents are familiar to him, all of them, as natural as if he’d never left his first classroom behind.

Al and Paul are there among the other children, elbowing each other, glowing with pride, for it is their stepfather who has caused so much excitement. This is almost as good as his story about jumping from the airplane.

Albert—twelve years old. In a few short years, he’ll be as old as the biggest boys in the classroom, and they are old enough to be conscripted, sent away to fight and die, fodder for the Führer’s machine. Most of the older boys would have been sent already, if they’d been made to join Hitler Youth. That program has degenerated into a convenient Wehrmacht reserve, nothing more.

Well, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Even with my band, I can’t prevent these boys from being taken off to war if their names are drawn. I can’t stop their being forced to fight and kill. Nor can I stop them from dying. But I can stop their hearts from turning. I can keep them anchored to love and righteousness. That much I can do.

Anton turns the top hat over in his hands. He sets it on the teacher’s desk—or tries to. He has misjudged the distance, and it falls to the ground. Amid a ripple of nervous, testing laughter, he retrieves it, sets it firmly in place, and then rocks on his heels, looking out at his pupils. Uncertain what to say.