The Ragged Edge of Night(95)

He holds Paul for a long time—he is crying, too, but a boy of his age hasn’t yet learned to feel shame over sorrow. Maria he scoops into his arms and covers with kisses. She is sad to part with him—she tells him so—but her eyes are dry. She pats his cheek. “You’ll come be with us at our aunt’s house, won’t you, Vati?”

“Of course,” he says, heart breaking. “Just as soon as I can.”

Elisabeth clings to Anton. Her mouth is sweet and trembling, but her kiss tastes of bitterness and salt. There is no more time to hold her. The whistle blows; it’s time for them to part.

He thought no pain could surpass that of his first great loss—the children of St. Josefsheim, boarded onto the gray bus and torn from his life forever. But as the train pulls away, rolling toward Stuttgart, a terrible emptiness settles in Anton’s heart in the place where his family should be. The vastness of that void, yawning, opening wider by the moment, frightens Anton far more than any SS man with his bayonet, any tumble from a roaring plane in the sky above Riga. He stands, small and alone, waving uselessly after the train until it has shrunk to a speck in the distance.

Long after the train has disappeared below the horizon, Anton remains on the platform. He stands, hands in his pockets, rosary tangled around his fingers, watching the place where his heart vanished as the evening grows late and cold around him. He can’t bear to think that one of his children might look back now and find him gone.





37

When he locates Father Emil later that night, the priest is half hidden among the ivy, with his back turned to the churchyard. He is busy with some task Anton can’t see—busy at the steel door set into the ancient wall, the tunnel that runs from one village to the next, the damp hollow artery hidden under Germany’s skin.

“Father?”

Emil turns. His face—Anton has never seen the priest look this way, hard and tight-jawed, fixed with a determination he seems to know is as dangerous as it is futile. His lower lip, tense, pulls open to reveal a set of bulldog teeth, small and crooked with shadows in between, avid to bite.

A second before he sees the trowel in Emil’s hand, Anton smells the cement—wet and cool, with a grainy note of mineral dust.

“In mercy’s name, Father—”

“There’s nothing to say, Anton. I’ve had enough.” He turns back to his work. Lifts another thick pat of cement from the bucket at his feet and slides the trowel down the line of the door, pushing the stuff deep into the crack. He smooths it with care, and with a graceful, competent motion of arm and shoulder, as if he’d been made to set bricks in mortar rather than men on the path to righteousness.

“Is anyone in there—in the tunnel?” Anton’s detachment does him no credit. If soldiers are within, creeping blindly through the earth or huddled in a small white kerosene sphere of lamplight, they are still men. Men who will reach their destination after hours of terror, only to find a door that refuses to open. Men—unless they’re loyal to the NSDAP. What do you call a person, a creature, who loves our dear leader more than he loves what is good?

Emil says, “If so, they’ll turn around and walk back to wherever they came from.”

And if someone has sealed the door on the other side? Anton can’t bring himself to think of it.

“This is dangerous,” Anton says, but not scolding, not warning. Merely a statement of fact. Everything is dangerous—the music; the messages; the scrape of a coin over dry paper, the black arms of Hitler’s sigil erased as if they’d never been.

The trowel lowers slowly and drops into the bucket. Emil stares at his handiwork for a long time. He takes something small and white from behind his wide sash—a stork’s feather. He presses the feather into wet cement and says, “They’re coming for us, you know, Anton. For us—you and me.”

“I know, Father.”

Emil straightens his back, stretching it slowly. His gray head tips up to look at the stars, turning in their courses over black silhouettes of trees. He sighs. Then he says, slow and tired, “I’ll have one last stab at the bastards before they take me down.”

Anton knows he ought to clean off that trowel and use it to scrape away the cement before it sets. He ought to pull the steel door open, break the still-wet seal. Those are men down there in the tunnels, and Anton knows all too well that not all of them serve by choice. But if he opens the door, the Nazis will come pouring through. Long has he pitied men who were forced to choose between their own children’s lives and another’s; now he finds himself facing the same decision. And so he leaves the trowel where it lies. His loyalty is here, in Unterboihingen: with the children in the marching band; their mothers, with hollow cheeks and eyes; Frau Bread Maker, and M?belbauer’s quiet, pinch-faced wife; Christine Weber, who learned a dearer truth than “Blood and soil.” Eugin, with his breakfast of leaf lard and his garden white with bird shit, and the Kopp brothers bowing, as if they are one, over a homemade wedding cake. Anger the SS enough, and they will come for us all. They will take us away to the places where we can be broken and safely contained.

“Thank God Elisabeth and your children are out of it,” Emil says. “Thank God they won’t be here to see.” He picks up the bucket. It’s heavy; it drags at him, tilting his shoulders and unbalancing his stride. He sets off through the dark yard toward his church.