The Ragged Edge of Night(93)

And spring will come, you’ll see. The snow will melt away. Winter’s dark can’t last forever.





35

That night, Anton is sitting alone on the last stair outside the cottage. The dampness of the step has soaked through his trousers, and he is chilled, but the cold seems too insignificant to notice. He tries to blow a ring, as Father Emil did that summer when the Egerlander girls laughed in the orchard, but he can never manage it. He sends up one trail of pipe smoke after another to vanish among the stars. The red ember of his pipe is too small, surely, to be seen from above.

How has Anton been allowed to linger into winter? He knows well enough. The Americans have kept Herr Hitler distracted in France, in the Ardennes. Now Bastogne is surrounded, and Germany’s recapture of Antwerp is no longer the easy maneuver it once seemed. But it’s like Pohl said: as soon as their schedules have cleared up, the SS will turn their attention to Anton. There are more pressing matters now, but even in this endless war, matters will not press forever.

He thinks, I must tell Elisabeth: Once I am gone, she should look for another man. Find a third husband who can pick up where Paul Herter and I left off.

He must make her understand. Once they part ways, it will be forever. There can be no hope that Anton will return.

When finally the night is cold enough to make him shiver, Anton goes back inside. Elisabeth has gone to bed, but she has left a candle burning on the old kitchen cupboard. He checks the curtains to be sure they are tightly drawn. Then he sorts through the wood beside the stove until he finds just the right piece, long and heavy with a dense, fine grain.

By candlelight, in the old chair with his wife’s sewing basket near his feet, Anton begins to carve. Christmas is almost here, but he has yet to make a gift for Elisabeth. He will work all night, paring away one resinous sliver at a time, until exhaustion drives the thoughts from his mind and lures him to his bed. And each night thereafter, while his family sleeps, Anton will do the same. In amber light, with one small flame, he will sit with the ghosts of memory. On the fifth night, the gift has taken recognizable shape: a figure of Saint Elisabeth, praying with her neat hands folded. On the sixth, he gives the figure Elisabeth’s own face—his Elisabeth, his good wife, his brave and loyal love.

He speaks to the saint as he carves her. He whispers everything he regrets and everything he does not. In the curls of her hair, in the pleats of her gown, in the traces of a smile around her eyes, he scribes his inmost thoughts, committing them to the small, freshly made body. As if someday, in the act of running her hands over smooth, polished wood, Elisabeth will find the secrets Anton has embedded there and will finally understand.

He tells the saint, I loved you. Never forget that. Whatever you felt for me, I loved you, every bit as much as I loved the children. Our children who live, and the children I lost—and all the people who command my love, though they are strangers. The ones who cry from their graves for justice and those whom we may yet save, if we can stop what we started long ago. Everything I have done—for you, Elisabeth, and for God—I have done out of love.

Christmas, when it comes, is quiet. No bombs fall on Stuttgart, and, thank God, no bombs fall on our village. The children are happy with their nuts and oranges, the simple wartime toys for Paul and Maria. Albert is too grown up now for toys, so Anton gives him books instead. He has saved another gift for his eldest son, his quiet, thoughtful boy—but he must wait to present it until the time is right.

Anton has decorated Elisabeth’s box with the blue silk ribbon, the one his sister gave him long ago. Elisabeth unties it; she looks inside. Her eyes shine with tears as she takes Saint Elisabeth in her hands. She already seems to read with her fingertips the words Anton prayed into the fragrant wood, and when she lifts her eyes to thank him, she is smiling.





36

The new year is cold and hard, bitter with frost. Elisabeth has been tense and irritable since just after Christmas, as if she can sense all the things that must change, if life is to go on: the loss of Anton, the dissolution of her family. Soldiers have been through the tunnel again, breaking free of the frozen earth on New Year’s Day. Little by little, the world is stripping away our shelter, tiny Unterboihingen. The world is tearing back the curtains. Elisabeth’s eyes turn to the sky at the slightest sound, the booming of grouse in the fields or the rumble of a truck’s engine down Austra?e Road. No place in all the world is safe, if Unterboihingen is not.

In her vigilance, her wariness, it’s Elisabeth who hears the news first. She went to town with chicken soup and fresh-baked bread, a relief for Frau Sommer, the mother of a sick child. But she hurries home with the news on her tongue, and finds Anton cleaning his old pocket watch beside the fire. Her cheeks are still chapped from the cold.

She says, “Do you remember when I told you to sell the instruments—when the SS was paying for brass?”

“Yes.” How could he forget?

“They aren’t paying anymore, Anton.” Her brow furrows. “They’re taking brass now. Confiscating it.”

He shakes his head. A small worry, now—and a wonder, that he’d ever been troubled by something so insignificant. “They won’t take the band instruments. It really is the wrong type of brass; I told you the truth when I said as much.”

“No.” She drops to her knees beside him, clutching his sleeve. “Anton, they’re taking church bells. They’ve already taken the bells from Wernau and Kirchheim. Frau Sommer’s family lives in Wernau. They’ve written her and told her all about it. She showed me the letter.”