The Ragged Edge of Night(91)
M?belbauer’s face darkens; it’s as if he can hear Anton’s thoughts, as if Anton has shouted the words for the whole village to hear. Then, with a toss of his head, M?belbauer breaks Anton’s stare and reaches into the bed of his truck. He lifts something long and black; it cleaves the air in a terrible, slow-motion arc, and comes to rest on M?belbauer’s shoulder. A rifle.
A woman in the crowd screams. Father Emil crosses himself again. The soldiers shout, rip pistols from their holsters; the music clatters to a graceless end. With dull curiosity, caught in sluggish time, Anton watches M?belbauer point the rifle in his direction. Of course the gauleiter is armed. He is loyal to the Party, and all those loyal to the bleak cause may take lives at will. This is their privilege, power over life and death; this is the banner of terror under which the Reich marches on. Neighbor turning on neighbor, brother oppressing brother. For this power, men like M?belbauer have blackened their souls. Their hearts are bitter with the stink of burning powder. Anton wonders, Should I duck? Then, with a stab of helpless agony, he thinks of his son Albert, too far back in the ranks of the marching band for Anton to reach him. He can’t protect Al, but he can save whichever child is closest to hand. He moves without looking, quick as a bullet despite the shattered blankness of his mind. He grabs the nearest child by her shoulder and pushes her to the ground—and in that moment, M?belbauer takes aim and fires.
The shot cracks the air high above Anton’s head; it splits sound, muffles his ears, and an instant later leaves a high, stinging vibration wailing inside his head. But he is unharmed; his chest flushes hot, as if to prove to him that every drop of blood remains inside. He looks up, over the heads of his scattering band, following the trajectory of the shot. When his neighbors gasp, Anton breathes with them, a long, indrawn sigh of sorrow and shock.
The stork on the bell tower has burst. A cloud of feathers curls on the wind. The bird’s body hits the roof tiles and rolls down the slope; where its heart should be, there is a slash of red, dark against white feathers. Its wings spread like the rays of a broken fan. The stork’s body falls into the graveyard below.
The watchers, even the soldiers, give one collective groan of pity. Father Emil presses a fist to his mouth in horror. Children sob; the people of Unterboihingen shout M?belbauer’s name, clutching their chests in disbelief. The soldiers stare at the gauleiter, wide-eyed.
A few feathers drift down to the earth. They land near the lifeless bird and tumble in the breeze. Cold, robbed of his breath, Anton watches the feathers in the grass. Nothing else moves. The world has gone still.
He finds Father Emil beside him. “Our luck has fallen,” the priest says quietly. “Dear Lord, what will become of us now?”
34
There are no messages to carry. Even if there were, Anton would not take them; he promised Elisabeth that much. If he broke his word and forged on with this doomed resistance, Herr Pohl would refuse to meet him, Anton has no doubt. God has left him to hang at a loose end, restless and irritable, consumed by his own dark thoughts. There must be some reason, some pattern to discern in the Lord’s grand design. But if there is a lesson he is meant to learn, it’s beyond Anton’s means to puzzle it out.
Nothing feels more futile than hope. Armed only with that weak weapon, he marches through his days. He hopes, and he tunes in the radio, searching through the hiss of static for words he is desperate to hear. He hopes, and he scours the newspapers every day. Papers and radio alike are in the hands of the NSDAP, but surely, when our deliverance comes, even the Party will admit defeat. They will recognize their downfall. They will concede. He hopes, and he imagines the headline: Our dear leader has choked to death on his turnip stew; The fury of the Reich has succumbed to his morning tea. Hope is all that remains to Anton, so he plies it with ever greater force. He wields it even as it wanes, as it crumbles in his hand. September passes, then October. News fails to come. Hitler and his men go on, as untouched and untouchable as before. After the briefcase bomb in the Wolf’s Lair, the July attempt that left him scarred but still ruthlessly alive, the Führer has taken to bragging that he is unstoppable. No hand can touch him, not even God’s; no man can take his life. Even as he clings to his fraying hope, Anton has begun to believe the Führer’s tale of immortality must be true.
What, then, became of the Red Orchestra’s plot? Did his contacts mislead him? Were they misled by some other party, a person unknown who has played them all for fools? Little by little, the dregs of Anton’s confidence drain. What’s left to him is a shallow, stagnant pool. It’s an insufficient supply for resistance; soon his spirit will thirst, and he will find nothing there to sustain him. How long now, until the SS remembers Unterboihingen and the two frail rebels the village contains? How much life is left to him?
As autumn gives way to the dark of winter, he turns his full attention to the children. To them, he gives the time he never gave before, the care they should have had from their father. If he had known all hope would shatter, he would have spent more time in their company. He would have built for them a world of warmth, memories to shelter them when harsher winds of war rise. He would have prayed that they might survive this endless winter and know peace someday.
They say almost five hundred thousand have died in the cities, and even in the countryside. Five hundred thousand. He must devise some way to move Elisabeth and the children to safety—to a greater illusion of safety. He must do it before the walls come down; that hope of safety will be the last and most important thing he gives his family. He will place it, tattered, in their hands, transfer hope to their keeping, and beg God that it will be enough to sustain them. Can he wait until after Christmas to send them away? Will God and the Party grant them one last Christmas together before he must tear this family apart?