The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

  Even if we speak uncommon tongues, sound grants us the mercy of understanding. That sympathetic quiver of the heart, when a harmony rolls in thirds or a seventh resolves into the octave—it’s the greatest miracle God ever wrought, for it shows us that we are one. There isn’t a person among us, German or Tommy, Aryan or Jew, whole of mind or simple, who doesn’t feel what you feel, what we all feel. In his most naïve moments, he thinks, If I could only play for the Führer, I might make him see it, the unity of God’s creation. And once he sees, how could he continue in this course of evil?

  He shivers. The evening is cold; winter is already here, though no snow has fallen yet. In the bare branches of the apple trees, he can hear some animal moving, the hop and rough slide of a bird’s feet against bark. But he can’t see the bird, and it has no song to sing now. He pulls at his pipe, blowing the smoke in the bird’s direction. Smoke fades itself to nothing between dark branches.

  In the deepest part of night, or even in the paleness of twilight, the fact that he goes on living often takes Anton by dull surprise. His life is undeserved, he knows, and any happiness this new arrangement brings is wholly unmerited. But that’s the way of life, isn’t it? You go on. You live. Even when grief turns your insides to lead and a featureless black sea rises. Men aren’t supposed to cry, not even friars, but who in this time and place doesn’t weep when he thinks no one else can see? Along the side of your nose, a track of red, the permanent chap of salt burn. And in your eyes a ready well, deep as the center of the Earth. Regret will do it, raise a flood of tears—regret for the words you might have said but didn’t, and the things you might have done, the touch of kindness on the back of a shoulder or on the top of a small, sun-warmed head. And regret for the gestures you might have made—tied a loose shoestring or buttoned a winter coat up closer to the chin. Everything you might have done but didn’t. Everything that might have been but never can be now. So many bodies lie in their graves, but not yours—not yours. Even when you think yourself motionless, when you try to strike the bargain: Lord, if I trade places with them, the ones You allowed to die—if I stay here, just as unmoving as they—will it be enough to appease You? Will You raise them back to life? But no matter how you concentrate on nothingness, on the great and hungry void, you are never as still as the dead. Your pulse trembles your limbs. It whispers in your ears, taunting and relentless. It nods your head—the slightest movement, a forced confession: Yes, I am still here. Yes, I go on living. My God, why have You forsaken me?

  He tips the pipe out, taps it hard against his heel. Red sparks die against bare earth. The sudden movement startles him, though it’s his own body that moves. Still, he didn’t expect it. The bird in the orchard takes flight; he can hear its abrupt leap into darkness, the faint whistle of its wings through stiff night air. He thinks, I should go back inside, talk to Elisabeth, tell her what I’ll do. How I’ll earn more money, whatever we need. But he has no idea how he’ll do it, and he can’t face Elisabeth’s careful silence now, her way of not looking at him and the resolute movement of her needle. Instead, he goes to the old shed and eases open the damp-swollen door.

  Inside, his breath is a cold mist, and the mist is all he can see as he waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He finds one of his trunks by feel and lifts the lid. A cornet is the first object that comes to hand—his instrument, after the piano and organ. The metal is cold; early winter and early night have intruded here. He rests the cup of the mouthpiece against his lips and breathes into it, livening the instrument with the heat of his body. You can’t tune cold brass. It resists you, until you have given enough of yourself to let it know you are committed, that you will not leave it cold. His breath rushes through the cornet’s compact, elegant curves. The metal warms in his hands, and the three pearlescent keys spring eagerly beneath his fingers.

  A footstep at the open door. Anton turns, guilty, lowering the cornet, holding it stiffly like a child caught in some mischief. He had expected to see one of the children standing in the doorway, but it’s Elisabeth, a dark silhouette backlit faintly by the gray remainder of sunset.

  Blinking in the dim twilight, she comes farther inside. “Is that . . . a trumpet?” Surprised—wary, as she often is.

  “Yes.” More or less. Caught in the sudden grip of possessiveness, he resists the urge to step between his wife and the open trunk. These are instruments of his heart, his memory. They are relics, imbued with a fragile and sacred past. Why should he let her see, when Elisabeth has shown so little of her own heart? He reaches out to close the lid of the open chest, but Elisabeth crosses the space between them, too quick for Anton to stop her, and holds the lid open. She stares in astonishment at what the trunk contains. Another cornet, a French horn, a baritone horn, disassembled. There is a clarinet, carefully wrapped in thick felt and tied with twine to protect its delicate pads and springs. She can’t see the clarinet through its wrappings, but what she can see is enough.

  “Anton! I remember the boys chattering about musical instruments the day you mended Maria’s dress, but I thought that was something from your past. What’s in the other trunks?”

  He doesn’t want to admit it, protective of the places where his pain resides. But she is his wife now. He knows he must deal with Elisabeth honestly. “More of the same.”

  She looks up at him, astonished and pleased. “I’ve heard the Party are paying good money for brass. The Schutzstaffel want it for casings—ammunition.”

  The mere suggestion is a blow, a stab deep and vicious enough to bleed him dry. He struggles to keep the hurt and anger from showing on his face. He is failing in that—he knows he is. He flexes his fingers on the cornet’s keys, depressing them one by one, fighting to control his temper. “I can’t sell my instruments to the Nazis, Elisabeth.”

  “Why can’t you? We need the money, Anton. Yes, I know Father Emil has been paying you to play at Sunday service, and you play beautifully—but you know we need more.”

  “I . . .” He falters, heart constricting. This is what he came to do, isn’t it? Provider for those in need, protector of the helpless. But he could never have imagined God would be so cruel as to demand this sacrifice. “I can’t, Elisabeth. I can’t sell these things.”

  “Why not?”

  Because they are memory. And miracle. They’re the last proof I have that God exists, that He ever existed in this cold, bleak world. He says, “It’s the wrong type of brass. It’s thin and adulterated with other metals. It would be useless to the SS. They wouldn’t pay.”

  The hard press of her mouth, the narrowing of her eyes—she is desperate, worried. And most of all, she is disappointed in Anton. She gambled on him—committed to him. She took a holy vow that can never be rescinded. And yet this man persists in a stubborn failure to provide. “Scrap metal is always useful,” she says. “The SS will pay something for it. Something is better than nothing.”

  “Damn it, Elisabeth, this is not scrap metal!” He lurches away from the trunk, his fist tightening protectively on the horn he’s still holding. The sudden movement frightens her—and why not? He is still largely a stranger; she doesn’t know him, doesn’t know what he is capable of. He isn’t capable of that—violence. Never; not he. But his anger has boiled over, and he can’t control it now. Unknowing, she has ventured too close to the source of his pain, and any animal in pain will react when provoked—will lash out or gnash its teeth or howl in agony. A small part of him is aware of the look on Elisabeth’s face—the fear, the way she shrinks with hands up, clasped in front of her throat. He regrets his haste in the instant. He hates himself for frightening her. But he is more frightened than she. He forces himself to stand still, giving her room to flee if that’s what she chooses to do. With an effort, his voice strangled by distress, he speaks to her more calmly. “This is not scrap, Elisabeth, and it’s not for sale. It never will be. You’ll have to make peace with that fact, because I will not sell these instruments.”

  Seeing now that he intends her n
o harm—other than the damage already done to her pride and her feelings—Elisabeth gathers herself, icy and calm. “Very well. If you will not do right by your family, let it rest on your conscience, not mine. It is for you to take up with God, Josef Anton Starzmann, not me.”

  She turns and strides out into the dusky yard past Albert’s hens, small round shadows scratching in the mud. Anton takes a few useless steps after her, but he knows she wants no comfort—and what comfort can he give? He is as unused to making up with a woman as he is to quarreling. He watches her march stiffly through the orchard, through trees stripped bare of their leaves, standing gray and skeletal against a darkening sky. She knocks on Frau Hertz’s door. In a moment, the door opens, and Elisabeth is admitted to the bosom of sympathy. Only the angels can say when she might emerge again.

  Anton turns his back on the farmhouse. He walks out past the hen yard, past the stone wall that sometimes contains the goats, when they agree to be contained. He walks without seeing, moving beyond this present place, this point in time; he feels himself pulled back, or picked up and dropped suddenly into an unwelcome past.

  He is standing in the courtyard outside St. Josefsheim. Memories wash in, a flood tide that threatens to rise above his head—drown him. Yet he is reluctant to banish that memory, despite its danger. It’s as if he hopes that by reliving his pain, he can make some sense of it. As if by sinking willingly into black water, allowing the current to take him, he might come to understand his past. It’s the instruments that have done this to him. He has touched them, and remembered. He has absorbed what they contain, like poison through his skin. If he were to do as Elisabeth wants and rid himself of the things, perhaps the memories could never haunt him again. But forgetting—that would be another pain altogether, and a far greater shame than the one he already bears.

  Here, in a wide field stripped of its harvest and far from the farmhouse, he is as alone as one can ever be in a small town. And alone, there is ample space for pain to crowd in. He lifts the cornet again. He plays a long, low, melancholy tune and prays the sound will drive away remembrance. But remembrance takes him in its knife-sharp talons, more forcefully than ever before.

  The bus. The children, queuing up, smiling and laughing—most of them—certain they were about to go on a grand adventure. A few—a few were bright enough to realize something was amiss. They looked about with lost expressions, wringing their hands or flapping their wrists to calm their fears. That was the way, for some of them; nothing else could ease their anxiety but to flail their soft little limbs in a soothing rhythm and cry out wordlessly—fragile birds. One of the SS, in his precise black uniform, watched a girl for a moment as she waved her hands in the air—it was Rillie Enns, one of her braided pigtails untied and unraveling. She called out, a high-pitched whine eloquent with fear. She had few words; that cry was the best she could do. But who has words at a time like this?

  The man’s face darkened with disgust. He muttered, “‘Life unworthy of life’ is correct.”

  We should have seen this coming. We have known; we have heard. Since 1939, Hitler has scoured what parts of the world he holds, searching for the deficient, the unwhole, the meek and innocent. It began by scrapping adult institutions, where nurses administered to those who could not care for themselves—those who remained like children all their lives. In those days, there were forced sterilizations, so those deemed unfit couldn’t breed and contaminate the pool of perfection, the Germany Hitler would shape from our imperfect union if we allowed him to do it. And we have allowed it. We have sat by, complacent or disbelieving or relieved that it was happening to someone else, not to us—not to the people we love.

  It began with sterilizations, but it followed a terrible black crescendo, a rising scream. It became something worse. We have read the stories in the papers and in the pamphlets passed hand to hand by the White Rose. Caretakers answered the knocks at their doors and found men in SS uniforms, come to take their helpless charges away. Redistribution. We’re going to place them in a facility better able to care; that’s what the SS say. We will lift the burden from you; there is no need to trouble yourself any longer. But everyone knows, everyone sees (even in our blindness) that those called “life unworthy of life” are only redistributed to their graves.

  We have known, and we have heard—but somehow, we thought it could never happen to us. Or perhaps we willfully blinded ourselves, preferring ignorance and fantasy to the terror of reality. And one day, you look out the window of the classroom to see the gray bus arriving, with the handprints of ghosts clouding its windows, and the trucks emblazoned with the swastika, and men with guns and deadened eyes.

  Rillie Enns looked up at Bruder Nazarius. She had few words, but she was not so simple that she couldn’t see, couldn’t understand. Her cheeks were red with fear. Her expressive mouth opened and she wailed, again and again.

  Anton, in his gray friar’s guise, moved past the muttering SS man to another, one whose face betrayed, just for a moment, a terrible anguish of despair.

  “Please,” he said to that man, the one who had allowed himself to feel. “Please don’t do this.”

  From the steps of the school, someone barked, “Get them onto the bus. All the children, every last one. Check inside, somebody. Search the grounds. Be sure none are hiding. Be sure none of these gray Catholic rats have hidden them away.”

  The anguished man held a Karabiner across his chest. But he couldn’t meet Anton’s eye—Anton, a man of the cloth, armed only with his rosary. “It’s not my choice,” he said quietly, hoarse with shame. “It’s not my doing.”

  “But you know it’s wrong. These are innocent children. Their parents have entrusted them to our care. Who will take care of these unfortunates, if not we?”

  “They’re only being sent off to another facility,” the man said, and it was all he could do to speak now. He was trembling.

  “You know that’s not true. We all know it.”

  “Step aside, Brother. We all must do what we’re told.”

  Anton shook his head. Light, drifting, scarcely believing what he was doing, he placed himself between the SS and the children. “I can’t. I can’t just . . . let you. You know this is wrong. You know it’s a sin. You know you’ll answer to God for it, someday.”

  His fury rising, sudden and swift, the man thrusted the muzzle of his rifle against Anton’s chest. Somebody cried out in a panic—one of his fellow friars—“Brother Nazarius!”

  “Stand in my way again, and I’ll run out the bayonet.” But the man choked on his words. Tears lined his eyes.

  “What have they done to you?” Anton whispered. “How have they made you consent to this?”

  The man shook his head, too pained to speak, but his rifle still bit into Anton’s chest. He breathed raggedly, half sobbing, but quietly, so only Anton can hear. “I have a wife. I have two daughters, nine and twelve. They told me . . . they said . . .”

  The man could say no more, but anyone with a heart could infer. They had told him what they would do if he refused. This man’s wife, tortured. His little girls, raped by dozens of men. This is the knife they hold to your throat. This is the precipice to which they drive you. In the name of making Germany great, we have forced our men to choose between the lives of innocents and their own wives and children. We have cut the flesh of our women while their husbands look on. We have branded them with irons, disfigured them with beatings until they beg for a bullet to end the pain. We have thrown little girls to the rapists’ queue. Deutschland über Alles.

  Because the man’s pain was too much for him to bear, Brother Nazarius stepped aside. No—that was not why he did it, but it was what he tells himself later. Every night when regret wracks him and keeps him from sleep, he tells himself, I let those men take my children because the act was no easier for them than it was for me. Because the men in black uniforms also suffer, and are haunted by what they are made to do.

  But the Karabiner lowered in the man’s shaking han
ds, and the moment it fell away from Anton’s chest, relief overwhelmed him. That was why he let them take his children away: to save his own life. What redemption can he ever hope to find for such a sin?

  “I am sorry,” Anton said to the man in black. “I’m sorry. For what they’ve done to you. May God have mercy on you, my brother.”

  And on all of us. On us as well, merciful Christ.

  13

  When the music is gone, when he has played out the last wringing ache of memory, Anton walks back to the house. The cornet hangs from his hand; it drags through the tall grasses that grow along the irrigation ditch. He has no strength left to raise the instrument. In the distance, small and pale against the night, he can see Paul and Al herding the milk cow into the pen beneath the old cottage. Locking the animals up for the night—life on the old farm goes on, whether Anton is there with his family or no. Life everywhere continues. It is inexorable, and in its persistence, mysterious and infuriating. Life proceeds stubbornly, heedless of one’s wishes, as long as you avoid the men in black uniforms and keep your curtains closed by night.

  Their evening chores finished, the boys scramble up the steps and disappear into the house. No doubt Elisabeth has supper waiting for them, a tough old laying hen stewed over the woodstove or rabbit roasted with potatoes. Has she set out a plate for Anton, or is she still too angry to feed him? As he comes closer, he can smell onions and the faint, warm comfort of freshly baked bread. He’s hungry. It seems absurd, to be hungry, for one’s body to want nourishment. How can we insist on living when so many are dead, when we did nothing to save them?