The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

  Elisabeth crosses the room, unhurried but stern. She tugs the curtain from his hand.

  Maria says, “We keep the windows covered so they can’t find us and drop bombs on us.”

  “Don’t talk of such things,” Elisabeth says at once. Lightly, she claps her hands. “You should all three be preparing for bed now. Go on, get to it.”

  This system of protection is elegant in its simplicity. By night, when the bombs do fall, a village as small as Unterboihingen will be invisible from the air. So long as no one leaves a curtain carelessly open while he reads in bed or finds his way to the toilet, the town will go unnoticed. Stuttgart is far too large for such practical defense, and still too full of life, despite the Tommies’ best efforts. Berlin and Munich, too. So this is how the tiny village has escaped destruction while Stuttgart, less than thirty kilometers to the northwest, has borne one terrible bombardment after another.

  The children haven’t moved. They remain staring at Anton, in awe now of his proximity—of the very fact of a man standing among them. He is a new presence in their household, almost an invader. He stares back, uncertain, resisting the urge to shift from one foot to the other like a hapless boy. Should he say something? Lead them off to their rooms? Where are the children’s rooms, exactly?

  “You heard me,” Elisabeth says. “Off with all of you; get dressed for bed. I’ll be in to hear your prayers soon.”

  “I want the new Vati to tuck me in,” Maria says.

  Hesitant, Anton looks to Elisabeth for approval—perhaps she is not ready for this yet; perhaps in her two weeks of contemplation she has never asked herself, What will I do, and what will I think, if my children take to their new father too strongly? If they turn to him for comfort—this stranger who I have brought into our orderly home—instead of me? But Elisabeth nods, untroubled. This is no surprise to her. She answers Maria readily, practiced and calm. “Put on your nightgown and wash your face. When was the last time you brushed your teeth?” Maria shrugs. “Albert, take this candle into her room so she can dress. Then send her into the bathroom; I’ll see to it that she cleans her teeth.”

  Maria resists. The dentifrice tastes bad. She doesn’t like the way it foams on her toothbrush. She doesn’t like her toothbrush; it tickles her mouth. But the boys pull her dutifully toward her room, and Elisabeth vanishes to the back of the house, and in a matter of moments, Anton is left alone in the dim sitting room.

  He sinks down on the armchair, slowly, wincing. He is afraid it will creak, make some noise that will betray him—betray what? His inadequacy. His confusion. He looks at the empty, sagging sofa. Looks down at the sewing in the basket. This is how Elisabeth makes her meager pay, altering shirts and trousers. Small wonder she needs another income. That is not to say she’s a poor hand. Anton can see little in the dim light of one candle (and that candle across the room), but he can make out enough of the precise, even stitches to tell that her work is excellent, as one would expect from this woman, so conscientious and correct. Who, though, can afford to pay a seamstress? Even in the cities, they have taken to mending and making their own clothes, rather than part with the money. Ragpickers do a brisk business, salvaging useful cloth from blown-apart buildings and God knows what other unthinkable sources. In Munich, the young ladies have made a fashion of it. They sew their own things from whatever they find in the streets or in the knapsacks of the rag boys who come calling, shouting out their wares. One would be thought unstylish now if one were to hire out the work.

  From the bathroom, he hears the children locked in mild argument—a nighttime routine as ordinary as breathing. Elisabeth moves among her children in self-contained quiet. She pushes them apart, steps between, and the children settle complacently. Even Maria quits her protests and brushes her teeth. Below the floor, in the cool autumn air, he can hear the animals rustling, easing into sleep. Warmth rises from their bodies, from their home-scented hides. The dim space around him fills with sweet odors of hay and dry dust.

  “All right.” Elisabeth leans out from the bathroom door. “Maria is done, and she may have her story, if you are willing to tell one.”

  The little girl is dressed in a voluminous white gown of soft flannel. Bouncing on her toes, skipping through the night with her gold curls flying, she looks like a cherub come down from a stained-glass window. This is all an adventure to her. He follows her into the tiny room that is hers alone. It is scarcely larger than a closet; Anton can’t imagine its original purpose, back when the farm was new. A pantry, or a cell for aging cheese? There is a bed stretched from wall to wall, just large enough to hold the six-year-old. Beside the bed, someone has placed a stool with a broken leg, making do for a nightstand. Anton sets the candle on the stool as Maria jumps onto her bed and burrows beneath the covers. He sinks down on the braided rug and folds himself against the wall. He just fits, with his knees pulled up as close to his chin as they will go.

  “You look funny.” Maria clutches the edges of her blanket and sheet.

  He draws the covers up to her chin. “They didn’t make this room to fit me.”

  In the candlelight, he can see that her eyes are red. She cried over the dentifrice after all.

  “I want to hear a story,” she says.

  “Prayers first. Then a story.”

  She closes her eyes and presses her small hands together in a peak just below her lips. She whispers, “Dear God, thank You for sending us a good new Vati. I will try to be nice to him. And please make Mutti less sad now, since she has someone to help her.” She opens her eyes. “Is that good?”

  “It’s a very nice prayer. And now you say—”

  “Amen.”

  “Well done, Maria. If I tell you a story tonight, will you be good tomorrow night, and clean up without your mother watching to be sure you do it properly?” This seems the sort of thing a father ought to say to his daughter.

  As Maria is in ready agreement, he recites an excellent story, a fairy tale about a funny old witch who lives in a house with chicken legs. Where did he hear it first? St. Josefsheim, from one of the other friars? Or did he pick it up in the Wehrmacht, on the long march to Riga? He can’t remember now.

  The girl is getting sleepy. Eyelids heavy, she says, “I thought you would tell a Bible story, since you were a monk.”

  “I was a friar. That’s different from a monk. Do you want a Bible story next time?”

  “No,” she says quickly. “I like friars’ stories better.”

  Before he knows just what he is doing, he is leaning forward to kiss her forehead. The gesture surprises him, but the glad ache in his heart surprises him more—how easily he has come to love these three little souls, how readily he has taken to this new role. Maria isn’t troubled by the kiss, nor does she seem surprised. She sinks at once into sleep, her breath steady and slow.

  Awkward in the cramped space, he stands and edges close to the room’s tiny window. Before he moves the curtain aside, he remembers that he ought to blow out the candle. Out there, in the world beyond this small sanctuary, night deepens over the countryside. Fields and hills ripple one into another, black into dull, dark silver. The autumn stars are pale but numerous, not a single point of light overwhelmed by the distant glow of any city. The western horizon is lightless where Stuttgart ought to be. The city is blacked out tonight—power grid blown or taken out by some earlier offense, inaudible here in our secret village. We are invisible from the sky. Or perhaps in Stuttgart they have only run out of candles. Tonight, with the world black and quiet, no bombs will fall. There is nothing to see, no one to target, and we may sleep without fear.

  He pulls the curtain closed, sheltering his small new daughter from harm.

  When he reenters the sitting room, Elisabeth is waiting in her chair. A man’s shirt is spread across her lap; she’s looking down at it with an attentive air that makes him think she half expects the garment to get up and dance. But she isn’t sewing—only looking. The boys have gone to bed. Tired as they are from the day�
�s excitement, they may be asleep already.

  Elisabeth folds the shirt and lays it carefully on her sewing basket. She rises; half a room apart, they stand together in awkward silence, neither quite looking at the other, neither knowing how to approach the subject of where Anton is to sleep.

  At length, she says, “You might come and sleep in my bed, as there is nowhere else but the sofa, and it isn’t very comfortable. But you needn’t think—”

  “I don’t think,” he says, smiling to put her at ease. “I quite meant what I said—our agreement, you understand. I’ll give you some time to change. I’ll just step outside and have a moment with my pipe.”

  Relieved that the matter is settled, easy as that, Elisabeth disappears into her room, the one at the back of the old house. Anton slips out the door and descends the stairs as silently as he can manage.

  Once out of doors, he realizes there is not as much starlight as he’d first thought. The night is as dark as the bottom of a well, and beneath his feet, the steep stairway feels rickety and treacherous. By the time he eases down the unfamiliar steps, he has lost all desire to smoke. In the shadows below the house, the animals sigh. With one hand, he feels his way along the stone foundation and finds the little shed where Kartoffelbauer left his things. The door sticks; it scrapes over the old stone threshold. He opens one trunk, then another, groping through them in perfect blackness, searching for his necessities by feel. The world is so lightless, the night so cold, that he is seized all at once by instinctive terror. The hair at the nape of his neck rises, and his spine burns with a ripple of dread. When he was a child, fear of the dark would take him this way, every now and then, sudden and strong. In those moments, when he froze in the grip of panic, he would often imagine a tiger crouching just where he couldn’t see, its body tight and quivering, gape-jawed and hungry. Or sometimes a Nachzehrer, a blood drinker, wearing the guise of a long-dead uncle or a cousin Anton never knew, trailing its funerary shroud and chewing on its own bones. Those were a child’s fears. Now he dreads something altogether different. The bayonets, the rifles, the gray bus belching smoke from its rotted belly. And in Riga, by the light of a church on fire, women who were once raped by Russian soldiers raped again by their German liberators.

  He finds his bundle of clothing, spins to face the darkness, and leaves the lid of the chest to slam shut behind him. He had expected a shadow moving across the old shed’s threshold, reaching out one black hand to claim him. But there is nothing beside the open door, nothing over his shoulder but a mire of memory.

  When he reenters the cottage with its blessing of candlelight, Elisabeth is still vanished behind her door. He changes into his nightshirt in the empty living room. The candle has burned down to a tiny stub, almost to nothing. He must find out whether his wife has more candles. If she hasn’t, it must be he who gets them, he who buys them. That is what husbands do—husbands and fathers. They see to it that no one goes wanting.

  In his nightshirt, he stands and waits, listening—for what? The house is silent and still, but the air is dense with another remembrance, ripe and heavy with its own sort of hostility. Anton can all but see him—the first husband, the one who will never buy candles again, nor kiss Maria on her forehead, nor share a slice of cake with Elisabeth. The man is restless, besieged by his own heart, angered by all the things left undone. His shade paces around the room in the dull umber slant of shadows.

  To the memory of Herr Herter, Anton whispers, “I only want to be good to Elisabeth, and to your children. God willing, my friend.” He hopes it’s enough to dissipate the chill in the air.

  Anton takes the candle, almost burned away now, and taps on Elisabeth’s door. “Come in,” she says, her voice thin and emotionless.

  He edges carefully into the room. She has placed her candle on the dresser and stands before it—before the square mirror hanging above—tucking her hair into a lace-edged nightcap. She moves away, stepping out of her slippers and placing them side by side just beneath the edge of her bed, and Anton, hesitant, occupies the space she has left. He sets his nearly exhausted candle on the dresser beside her own. The flame thins itself in a pool of oily wax, gathered in the cup of the candlestick. Like the memory of a flame. He imagines Herr Herter, watchful in his grave, gripping one thumb, left eye open.

  “Did you close the curtain in Maria’s room?”

  “I did.”

  “Thank you.” Such a formal thing to say to one’s husband.

  Elisabeth gets into bed. She is so tidy in her movements, so carefully controlled, that he hardly sees her do it. One moment she is standing; the next, she is flat beneath the white quilt. But why shouldn’t she be at ease here? This is her house, her bedroom, her family.

  He blows out the remnant of his candle. Then he pinches the wick of Elisabeth’s light, too. He climbs into her bed, stomach knotted, shoulders aching. There is a tingle on his thumb where he touched the flame. Through the mattress, he can feel Elisabeth’s tension, the stiffness of her back and the quiver of her limbs.

  He needn’t think, and he doesn’t think. He rolls onto his side, confining himself to the edge of the mattress, where he may put his new wife at ease.

  10

  In the morning, Anton follows the children outside to gather eggs. They are glad to have someone to hold the basket; it frees them up to play around the corners of the chicken coop. They lift rocks and tear apart the woodpile to search for salamanders; they jump across the ditch to the hedge, where brambles still hang a few honey-scented berries in patchy shade, the last of summer’s sweetness. Despite their ceaseless movement, their peregrinations about the farmyard, the children are remarkably smart in their work, and the basket fills quickly. Anton settles the handle in the crook of his elbow where the weight is easier to manage.

  When Al decides they’ve collected enough eggs, he leads the way under the apple trees, down the lane with its remnant of hollyhocks toward the village market. The younger children run ahead. They lash tall roadside weeds with sticks, snapping off seed heads and scattering dust in the weak autumn sun. Al remains beside Anton. The boy’s gaze shifts and slides along the rutted road. Al has the strained air of having something important to say.

  Anton waits for him to speak. Finally, the boy says, “We usually get good trades for our eggs—flour, this time of year. And there will be some vegetables, and maybe some marmalade or apple-peel jelly.”

  “Your mother has told me how the town makes trades. It seems a very clever system to me.”

  “Yes, but I wonder . . .” A pause; Al stuffs his hands deep into his pockets, as if reaching for courage down there among the pebbles and marbles he’s collected. “I wonder what you’ll do to support us. Now that you’re our stepfather.”

  “It does you credit, that you think about such things.” What a world we live in, where an eleven-year-old boy must trouble himself with a man’s concerns.

  Anton has often wondered himself what he ought to do, now that he is the father of a large and hungry family. A friar’s staples of bread and tinned beans won’t do, except in extremity of want—and anyway, the modest sum of money he has stretched since his discharge from the Wehrmacht can’t last forever. How will you support them, now that you’re their stepfather? The two weeks he spent waiting for the marriage, pacing above Franke’s furniture shop, ducking his head to avoid the slope of the ceiling, he asked himself that same question more times than he could count.

  “I had thought,” Anton says to the boy, “I might be a teacher. I used to teach, in my life before.”

  “But Unterboihingen has enough teachers already. There are only the two schools, one for the oldest children, one for the little children—and none of them are wanting.”

  “I see. Perhaps I could teach music, if you think there is interest.” Unterboihingen does not appear to have a music teacher. During his strolls through the village, when he walked alone with his thoughts, he detected no signs of lessons—no tempo-less plunking of piano keys, no tort
ured screech of a violin. “What do you say, Al?”

  The boy smiles up at him, shyly, grateful to be consulted like a man. “I think it’s a fine idea—worth trying, anyhow.” But his lips thin for a moment, and he squints thoughtfully after his brother and sister, who, far ahead on the road, have begun to shout at the neighbor’s dog, trying to make it shout back. In Albert’s silence, Anton finds the distinct and uncomfortable impression that he is already something of a disappointment to his new family. A proper father would have had work lined up before the wedding—a good job with steady hours, ready and waiting. A proper father wouldn’t need to ask his son, What do you think I should do?

  Saturday, market day. The square at the center of the village bustles and boils with activity. Boys and girls have come from every farm, and wives and old men, too, with the last of the harvest’s produce to offer up in trade. This system of barter is a quaint tradition, one that would never exist today, in our modern world of automobiles and radio broadcasts, tinned food, and electric lights. It’s war that has resurrected these cunning old ways; deprivation keeps the past alive. But if one good thing has come from the war, surely this is it. Throughout the square, people gather, shaking hands and sharing the week’s news. They display their squashes and sacks of barley with obvious pride. In an improvised rope pen, seven-month lambs bleat and mill, ready for the slaughter, while two young women look on proudly, shoulders thrown back and fists on hips. Had war never come, those girls might have been secretaries or seamstresses, smartly dressed behind a desk in Munich. Now they are shepherdesses with mud to their knees. The work they do keeps the children of the village strong and healthy, well fed and ready to face the winter.