The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

  “Your thoughts are dark,” Emil says.

  “My thoughts are often dark, these past years.”

  Emil nods. There is no need to specify; we all know. These years since Poland. And before that, the chaos of the summer of 1930, when there was no parliament to check the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. By the time the autumn came, and tempers cooled with the season, Herr Hitler had won the hearts of the people—or enough people, at any rate, for him to plant his boots in the Reichstag, where he stacked kindling for his fire. Desperate hearts are easy to secure. When her children are starving, a woman will believe any vile promise you whisper in her ear. When a man is cornered, he will trust you if you tell him he cannot sin.

  “But you are not to blame,” the priest says, “for the dark things, for the world’s evil.”

  “I want to believe that’s true. There are days when I can’t convince myself, though.”

  “I know.” The priest chuckles, but it’s a sound without humor. His smile is bleak with disbelief. Look where we found ourselves, reeling, shame-faced Germany, before we even knew we were in danger. “Most days, I can hardly convince myself, either.”

  “How can I do it?” Anton says. “How can I be a good father to those three little children—how can I be a good husband to that poor widow—when I cannot even . . . ?”

  What he cannot do is unspeakable, indescribable. Most of all, it is unforgivable. I can’t turn back time. I can’t tell where we first went wrong—we, this people, this nation to which I belong. And if I could, I would have no way to stop whatever progress has led us here. I am too weak, too human.

  “Come inside.”

  Anton follows the priest into the church. Its beauty strikes him anew, as it did at Sunday’s service. Outside, the building is plain and functional. Inside, St. Kolumban, lit by a few old-fashioned oil lamps, soars with ivory arches lined in dark brick, with white angles that cross and climb and lead the eye up, ever up to Heaven. It is more beautiful than any church in a tiny country village—a place of no consequence—ought to be. This simple act calms him a little, stepping inside the house of God. Together, Anton and Emil dip their fingers in the holy water. They bow as they pass before the altar and sit in the nave’s first row. The priest sighs and puts his feet up on the prayer bench in front of them. It’s this act of familiarity that makes Anton like the man all the more, wholly and beyond all reason.

  “Years ago,” Emil says, “when I was newly come to the cloth, I was called upon to perform an exorcism. Ordinarily, I think, the work would have fallen to an older priest—one with more experience. But this was in a very small town, you see—not Unterboihingen, but much the same—and I was the only priest to hand. It was a woman who thought herself possessed. A mother of four. She was perhaps thirty-five years old.”

  “Thought herself possessed? You don’t believe in possession?”

  Father Emil makes an evasive gesture, not exactly a shrug. Anton understands. The Bible tells us there are demons, and what sort of Christians would we be if we didn’t trust in God’s word? But in these times, what terrors can we find in the common threats of Hell? There is an old, old saying: One man is devil to another. Among the Tommies, the words are different, but the meaning is the same: Man is wolf to man. In this world, evil heaps itself on evil, and the spire of unchecked power climbs higher by the day. This is a tower of man’s own building. Around its base the wolves circle, greedy and grinning—white, cold eyeteeth bared, numberless as stars.

  “I worked with that woman and her family for five days,” Emil says, “but none of my prayers had the least effect. She moaned and shook in her bed; she screamed like an animal in a trap. She wept, Anton—wept for hours, but her tears seemed to have no limit. They fell and fell from her eyes—I can see them still, that far, blinded look. The whole of her spirit was concentrated on some terrible affliction I could neither understand nor reach. Whatever had affected her—grief, pain, suffering—perhaps it was, after all, a demon—I couldn’t close the door. I had no power to banish it, to make it leave that poor soul in peace.”

  The priest falls silent. His gaze is fixed on Mother Mary, painted in broad blue strokes behind the pulpit. His foot tips the prayer bench, rocks it gently on stout legs, forward and back.

  After a pause, Anton says, “What happened? Did the woman recover?”

  “She did.” The bench comes to rest again, squarely on its old carved legs, sure of its place. “She seemed to heal herself. To be sure, it was none of my doing. She was simply better on the sixth day. It was like a fever breaking, or a winter storm passing. Her family thanked me and praised me as if I had done it, but I knew the truth. I had played no part, despite my best efforts.

  “I went on, Anton—carried on with the business of my life. That is the way of things, isn’t it? That’s the way we’re made, to carry on. But the experience stayed with me for a long time. I was far more shaken by my failure—my helplessness—than I had been by the woman’s torment. Her terrible screams, the foul things she’d said in the throes of her anguish—they were nothing beside my fear and my doubt. Time and again, I asked myself, ‘Emil, how can you continue to lead a congregation?’ I lay awake almost every night, knowing myself to be weak, fallible, and knowing that even with God on my side, I would surely fail again.”

  At that moment, the bells ring out the hour. The sound fills the chapel, quakes the weary bones of the world. The notes, massive and mellow in every stroke, shake loose the strictures on his heart. He closes his eyes and the purity of their music fills him; a song spills over inside. There is no room left in his heart for doubt or fear. He thinks, These same bells have rung since long before the Reich existed. And they will ring still, even after it has fallen.

  When the last stroke has sounded, Anton holds his breath, feeling the note’s dying hum. It vibrates in his chest, still, long after sound has faded. He exhales slowly, mindful of the silence, its fullness, its suffusion of hope.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Father Emil says. “The bells. They’ve hung in that tower for hundreds of years; imagine the things they have seen, the worlds they have known. When my thoughts are at their darkest, I listen to the bells and I remember that Germany hasn’t always been what it is now. Those bells remember it—the way we were before.” He casts a sheepish smile in Anton’s direction, and the prayer bench begins to rock again. “I know I sound like a fool—perhaps I am one. They are only bells, yet I can’t help but think of them as something more. Old friends, that’s what they seem to me.”

  “You’re not foolish, Father. I was just thinking much the same thing.”

  Emil turns on the pew and stares up to St. Kolumban’s ceiling as if he can see beyond its layered arches into the night-darkened bell tower. “If I’d had the misfortune to find myself in some other church—one without bells—I think the war would go harder on me. I’d be an unhappier man. But every time I hear them, I hear the past singing, too. I can’t help but remember all the people who came before. The ringing mechanisms are automated now, of course, just like a clock—I will show you how the gears work, someday—but long ago, it was the father of this church who made those bells sing. He knew everything that passed in his congregation. Every birth and death, every baptism, every marriage. Every cause for joy and sorrow. I think of them all—generations of people—families, friends, lovers. Theirs was a different world. They didn’t fear what we fear now.”

  “But surely the bells rang in times of fear, too, as in times of happiness. This church would have sounded the alarm, I imagine, whenever fires or floods threatened the village.”

  “Yes,” Emil says, chuckling, “and—who knows?—packs of wolves descending from the hills. Those were simpler times. Floods and fires and wolves can’t compare to strafing with English bombers. Yet the dangers those people faced in years gone by were no less terrifying to them. No one still lives who remembers simpler days. But the bells remember—they keep the memories for us, so
we will never entirely forget the time when we were all brothers.”

  Softly, Anton says, “That woman—the exorcism. What did you learn? How did you go on leading your church through so much worry and doubt?”

  “I took each day as it came. I still do—what else can any man do? I can’t worry about what might happen in the future; I can only tend to my small flock here and now, today, hour by hour, and pray that what I do is what God wills.”

  “Trust that everything is in God’s hands.”

  Emil makes that strange, evasive movement again—not a shrug, not really, but something akin. He is leaving words unsaid, hanging in the silence where moments before the roll of the bells uplifted. Anton hears the words Emil will not speak aloud. All is in your own hands, just as much as God’s. And whatever your hands may do, do it with all your strength and will.

  “It’s getting late. I should finish my work, then rest. Tomorrow is a new day.” The priest stands, smiles down, his eyes enigmatic. He offers a hand and pulls Anton to his feet. With a squeeze to Anton’s shoulder, he says, “The second of October. Then your new life begins.”

  6

  The bells will ring, even after the Reich has fallen. Everything in me that is sensible, everything that is rational, can’t believe it’s true. The Reich will never fall; it is too strong now, too deeply rooted, fixed in the routine of life. We have accepted. We have moved along, carried on with the business of our lives, and this is what our lives have become. My days are as long and dark as night; this war will never end. The pillar of evil will stand until the last day comes, until the angel neglects to sound his horn and everything that might have been withers, forgotten on an untended vine. But when, in moments of quiet, in my stillness of despair, I dare to ask what yet may be, the black veil parts and light pours in. It strikes me to blindness with its beauty. It floods my soul with tears.

  O God, my Father, why do You do this to me? Can You not content Yourself to leave me in the surety of misery? You have laid bare the frail bones of my grief; You have humbled me before myself and proven to me that I am a coward, unfit for life. Yet I persist. I go on living. I will cling to hope, even knowing, as I do, that hope is worse than futile.

  Why this relentless, this secret optimism—this resolve, hard and hot at the base of my spine, and buried none too deep in my breast? The cancer that gnaws at us is too hungry to be sated. And I am one man—one man. Christ Jesus, I always believed You were merciful, but this is a monstrous cruelty, to make me dream of a time when evil may fall. Whatever sins have brought us here still reside in our blood, even to the third and fourth generation.

  Yet You said, in your boundless love and wisdom, Weeping may endure for a night—joy comes with the morning.

  I cannot help but know it. Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.

  PART 2

  LET LOVE CARRY ALL YOUR WORDS

  OCTOBER–DECEMBER 1942

  7

  October second. A crisp orange bite to the air. Across the field, where spent stems of oat or wheat lie down over furrows of stubble, there is a drift of woodsmoke, barely visible. Summer’s birds have moved on, the better part of them, flown to friendlier places. Anton walks to the church with his new family—today they will be. The boys skip beside him, kicking pebbles into the street. Elisabeth holds herself somewhat apart and keeps Maria’s hand in her own. She is stiff-backed, eyes clear and determined, mouth as hard-set as ever. She looks as if she’s marching into Riga. She is wearing the blue dress, the one he first saw her in, and she looks like a flagging Madonna—face fallen into acceptance, and behind her resolute stare, a well of love for her children as inexhaustible as her body and spirit are not. She looks weary, beyond even God’s capacity to measure.

  That morning, in the small room over Herr Franke’s shop, Anton stood in a beam of pale sunlight, staring at his thin face in the dim, narrow mirror. Then, he had thought it best to wear his Wehrmacht uniform to the wedding—but now, he can’t say why. The uniform, drab and thick with a forced, upright grimness, is the most formal set of clothing he owns. That must be why he chose it over the suit folded in lavender, the one Anita tied with her blue ribbon. But the uniform makes him distinctly uncomfortable, and not only because the jacket and shirt have grown too tight around the waist. Somehow, in this time of ration stamps and deprivation, he has managed to cultivate the beginnings of a paunch. Too much time spent sitting and thinking; too much time spent slowed and hobbled by bleak memory. This uniform is nothing but a reminder of times better forgotten. Was that, perhaps, the point? Was remembrance his purpose—only now realized—when he pulled the old uniform from one of his trunks and brushed specks of dust from the bronze-green wool? This is his hair shirt, his girdle of thorns, like those some monks wore in ages past—an admonition never to get too comfortable, never to forget how the savior suffered. Monks wore hair shirts, but never friars, until the second of October.

  When they first met that morning in the lane outside the farm, the boys seemed reluctant. Al was quiet, unusually still, even for that thoughtful child. More than once, from the corner of his eye, Anton saw the boy open his mouth and close it again, blushing, as if wanting to speak but knowing a child has no right. Paul followed Albert’s lead, as is the way of younger brothers. But when the boys looked up and saw that Anton was wearing his uniform, their eyes brightened. They wanted stories—soldier’s stories. He obliges them with the only one he’s got.

  “After I left the order”—after it was taken from me—“they scooped me up and put me in the Wehrmacht.”

  “Why?” says Paul.

  Hoping to kill me off, no doubt. I’d given them no sound reason to run me through or shoot me when they came to close St. Josefsheim. What else should they have done with the Catholic menace but send us to the Prussian front? To the boy, he says only, “Someone must fill all those army boots.

  “Russia had been in Latvia for a long time by then, and the Latvian people were very unhappy and afraid. So we, Germany, said to them, ‘We’ll come over and help you.’

  “But it would have been a very long walk, indeed, from Germany to Latvia. Instead, they loaded us all onto airplanes—huge ones, as long as two train cars, maybe bigger. We flew over Prussia in the dark of night.”

  “Like the bombers,” Al says.

  “A bit like the bombers, yes. But instead of dropping bombs, we dropped soldiers. When they opened the plane’s door, the wind was so cold and fast, it stole the breath right out of my lungs. That wind roared louder than the engines. But the commander, he stood beside the door as if he didn’t notice that terrible noise, and he counted—eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf—and every five seconds, one of us jumped.”

  In truth, Anton doesn’t know whether he jumped that night or was pushed, whether some flat, hard hand came out of the roaring darkness and tipped him off his feet into the howl and bite of the plummeting sky. Jumping or falling, the end result was the same. The brute force of gravity, the fury of the wind, the scream of the plane’s engines, somewhere not far above as he rolled through the air. Stars and an inevitable black density—the ground—spun around him. Now and then he could make out, in slow motion, with a kind of momentous and final clarity, the limbs and bodies of other men, paper cutouts against a barely lit sky. And then, like a miracle, the few minutes of his training came back to him. His mind and spirit decided, We will survive this. He felt the downward pull, the frightened, desperate force in the center of his gut, and he oriented around that fear. His limbs spread like the limbs of a falling cat; for a moment, he must have been almost graceful, and the view of the land far below—what little he could see by night—was something close to beautiful, dark and austere. He found that, all along, he had been counting—his mind had sequestered itself in a sheltered corner, far from his panic, and he measured out the seconds with scrupulous care. When the time was right, not a moment before, he pulled the rip cord, and the chute opened above
him, spreading and flapping like the wings of an angel.

  His landing lacked both grace and composure. A man of thirty-eight never thinks himself old until he’s pushed from a plane in the dead of night. The way you land, even with your chute open, it’s enough to knock gouts of blood from your nose or batter the soul right out of your body.

  The boys cheer at the image, their step-Vati a paratrooper. Won’t their schoolmates turn sick with envy when they hear? “What did you do next?”

  “We cut ourselves free from our parachutes, and we formed up in ranks. We marched until the sun came up—and for a long time after that, too. As it grew lighter, I could see more of the land around me. And you know, the road we walked was perfectly straight and flat. I’d never seen a thing like that road before. I doubt I will again.” Immaculately, dismally straight, the road to Riga. “It never curved the least bit, to the right or the left. It never went up or down the smallest hill. That’s the way they do their roads, in Prussia. Very strange people.”