This isn’t supposed to happen. There is a fixed order to their dealings, a way things are done—a way things are not done. Anton goes to Pohl’s towns, wherever the man is scheduled to turn up. His contact doesn’t come to him. No one, so far as Anton knows, was ever intended to come to Unterboihingen. His pulse pounds in his ears, and his stomach swells with sudden sickness. Something has gone wrong. Or worse, something is about to go wrong, here and now, where any of his neighbors—or his children—might see.
Anton sees at once that he must speak to the man, find out what he is up to. But they can’t speak where anyone may see. You’re never alone in a town so small. He is uncomfortably aware of Franke’s shop, just behind his shoulder. He can all but feel the gauleiter’s eyes watching him, prying into his back, into his soul. He ignores the feeling and walks on without any show of fear or hurry until he has drawn abreast of gray Herr Pohl. By chance, each man looks up at the same moment. Their eyes meet across the street, briefly and blandly. Anton turns and goes casually toward the church. But before he reaches St. Kolumban, on an empty stretch of road, he steps across a drainage ditch—dry, in the late-summer heat—and hides behind the crackling hedge that conceals the oldest corner of the graveyard.
He counts seconds. Then minutes. He peers through tiny spaces between yellow brambles and twigs shedding their first leaves—autumn is already eager to begin. There is Pohl, turning down this very road, strolling unconcerned in the direction of St. Kolumban.
Anton waits. He saves his breath until the man is close enough to hear. Then he whispers, “Pohl. I’m here.”
The man gives no obvious sign of having heard, but he alters course and slows. He bends near the drainage ditch, as if he has found something of interest in the dust—a dropped coin, some other artifact intriguing enough to catch a fellow’s eye on a lazy day. He straightens and looks up at the sky, as if wondering whether rain might come. Anton could roar with the torment of waiting. Pohl takes his pipe from his pocket, fiddles with a box of matches, and strikes a single, pale flame alight and dips it into the bowl of the pipe, as if time is his for the spending. Anton can only tremble and pray. He has thought Detlef Pohl a friend—or if not a friend, then at least a reliable colleague. Has he misjudged the man? Have they shared too much information; does Pohl know too much? Perhaps the man has been on the wrong side all along—a sour note planted deliberately among the players in the Red Orchestra. Now he has come to seek Anton out, to exact the vengeance of the National Socialists. This is the way it all falls apart.
Pohl draws on his pipe. A tail of smoke drifts into the hedge and hangs here, overwhelming Anton’s senses with its rich odor. He can just see the man’s back—blocky shoulders, the gray wool of his tailored jacket—through the tightly knit branches.
Anton whispers, “Are we alone?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here, man? I thought you weren’t to—”
“Listen carefully, Herr Starzmann.” Pohl pauses to enjoy his pipe again, but despite his casual air, there is no mistaking the urgency in his voice. “I haven’t much time, and neither have you. I’ve taken a risk, coming to you—but I had to take it. I had to warn you.”
Anton goes cold, down to the rapidly numbing soles of his feet. “Warn me?”
“There’s a man in your town—a gauleiter.”
Anton waits. He says nothing. The quiver of Möbelbauer’s reddening face replays in his mind. That day in the market square, when Anton stepped between Elisabeth and that despicable man. When he said to Bruno Franke, Say one more word to my wife.
“He suspects you are up to treason.”
“Of course he suspects. He’s the gauleiter.”
“Listen, my friend,” Pohl says. “He truly suspects you now. This goes beyond a gauleiter’s natural peevishness.”
“All right,” Anton says. “I’m listening.”
“You convinced this fellow, this gauleiter, to give up his Hitler Youth program in favor of some musical group.”
Anton tries to speak, but his throat has closed tight. Distantly, beyond the welling blackness of his panic, he feels a certain awe, amazement at what a network of eyes and ears can uncover.
“Your gauleiter has figured you out. He has realized you never intended this music program to honor the Führer, as you’d originally told him. He knows now that you only meant to keep the children of this town from participating in Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls.”
“How?” His tongue, dry and thick, can barely form the words. “How do you know all this?”
“I only know what I’m told.”
“Then how do they know—the ones who told you?”
The only plausible scenario plays itself out in Anton’s mind, rapidly, dizzying him with the plain, clear sense of it. Möbelbauer himself told all of this to someone—spilled out his suspicions into some convenient ear or scrawled his foul report on a scrap of paper. It was only by chance that the ear Möbelbauer chose feels friendlier toward Anton than toward the NSDAP.
Another chilling possibility occurs. Has Franke already sent his letters? Has he notified his contacts in the Party, convinced them that the sleepy village of Unterboihingen harbors an enemy? The Red Orchestra knows Anton has been compromised—so, then, they must have intercepted one of Möbelbauer’s letters. But how many did the gauleiter send? Was there only one, or are there a multitude of messages working their way across Germany, riding along the black tracks of the railway? How many have reached their destinations already?
“I have a family,” Anton blurts.
“I know. You told me as much, once—poor fool. Your family is why I’ve come.” He puffs on his pipe again, an act so leisurely it makes Anton want to scream with rage, with blind despair. “I’ve come to tell you that you should stop the work immediately. No more carrying messages. Stay here and lie low. Most of all, do not cross the gauleiter. We will find someone else to carry on the work.”
“No.” He says it quickly, but with utter conviction. He doesn’t want to stop. He wants to be a part of this; he needs to be a part of it. The resistance is his calling, as surely as he was called to be a husband and father.
“Listen to me, Anton. The only thing that’s saving you now is the fact that this town is an utter backwater. Who in the Schutzstaffel can afford to pay attention to what goes on in Unterboihingen? This place means nothing, not when there are students in Munich painting “Widerstand” all over the buildings, and feral boys roaming the streets, hunting down the leaders of the Hitler Youth. There was a resistance march in Frankfurt—did you know? It didn’t last long, to be sure; I heard bullets were fired on the crowd, though I don’t know if anyone was killed. As long as these disturbances occur in the big cities, where a greater number of people may heed the message of resistance, the SS won’t trouble themselves with you. But make no mistake: as soon as our friends in black have cleared up their schedules, they will descend on this town and take you. They will execute you and your priest, both.”
“Father Emil? They know about him, too?” It’s an absurd question. Of course they do. They must, if they know so much already.
“Lie low,” Pohl says again. “For the sake of your family, take no more risks. Now I must be gone; I’ve stopped here long enough already. May your God keep you safe, Herr Starzmann.”
Pohl vanishes swiftly from the roadside, but Anton remains hidden. He can still smell the pipe smoke, trapped among the leaves of the hedge, but he is utterly alone. He crouches on his heels behind the hedge and prays, though his thoughts are a useless jumble. In all this time, through his months of buoyant hope, he never really understood that this was what he risked, that this might be his consequence.
Yet now the hour has come. Now he must decide what he will do. God give me strength. God give me some clear direction. Do I fight on, or do I yield to the enemy? Have the forces of evil silenced me at last?
When he has mustered strength enough to stand, he rises on trembling legs an
d takes to the road again. God has provided no answer to his frantic prayer, but there is no question in his mind what he must do next. He goes straight home and climbs the cottage’s staircase in a daze. He finds Elisabeth sewing in her chair.
She looks up, smiling. There is a sheen to her dark hair, a bloom of health and happiness. “Back so soon?” But when she sees the desolation on his face, she drops her sewing in the basket and hurries to his side.
“What’s the matter, Anton? What has happened?”
He won’t keep the truth from her; he can’t any longer. No matter what it costs him, he must come clean.
“Are the children in?”
“They’re outside, playing.”
“Good. I must speak to you alone.”
They sit close together on the sofa, and, holding her hand—her hand which grows colder by the moment—Anton tells Elisabeth everything. Somehow, his voice remains steady. He speaks low and level, with a grim sort of calm, while Elisabeth stares into his eyes, pale-faced and frightened. When he has finished—when he falls silent, waiting for her judgment—she breathes deeply, struggling to summon her voice. She shakes her head slowly, as if trying to clear the fog of terror from her mind.
“You must stop,” she says at last. “You can’t go on defying the Party.”
“Do you mean . . . stop the band?”
“Of course.”
He had been prepared for her to say, You must stop carrying messages, as Pohl had done. He had even been prepared for her to leap up in fright, to try to flee with the children once more. But he’d never thought she would say this.
“I can’t, Elisabeth. I can’t do that.” Take away the children’s music—take away their joy. Take this town’s voice, when we have only just learned how to sing.
“Why can’t you?” she demands. “Why is it so important that you go on risking your life—your family’s lives, Anton!—for some silly marching band?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but he can find no words—no explanation she will accept. He wrings his fists, a useless expression of despair. He must make her see what it means to teach again, to lead children away from the dark into the pure, sweet light of happiness. But he can’t make her understand unless he tells her the rest—why he is a friar no longer.
Anton has never confessed to anyone what happened at St. Josefsheim—what happened to him, and the children he lost. He never even told his sister. But Elisabeth’s fear is there before him, written on her face. In the trembling of her lips, in the coldness of her hands, he can see that she has reached the end of her courage. She is ready to break from him and run to safety—or to the illusion of safety, a cruel mirage in a world distorted by war. That morning long ago, when she took the children—their little knapsacks stuffed hastily with their belongings—Anton had thought his heart would shatter as he watched his family walking away. Now it would only be worse if she were to leave. The love he bears for his family is greater now, greater than he can comprehend. It has grown until it has consumed him. It is all of him, the full weight and substance of his soul.
He must keep Elisabeth’s trust at all costs. And so he must find the words, despite his fear. He holds nothing back.
This is why I am no longer a friar. This is why I can never be redeemed.
“I was eighteen when I joined the order. I felt so grown-up then, but I look at Albert now, and it shocks me. I was a boy—just a boy, Elisabeth, barely older than Al. But young as I was, I knew I’d heard the call of God. I went where He directed.
“Early on, when I was scarcely out of my novitiate, the leaders of my brotherhood noted my skill with music. I was entirely self-taught”—he smiles feebly—“as I still am. But they were taken with my humble talents. They asked me to devise a program for children, which I gladly agreed to do. But the father took me aside and said, ‘These are not just any children, Bruder Nazarius. They are the most unfortunate innocents God ever made. They are not whole, not capable like so many other little ones. And worse, they have been abandoned—surrendered to our order for care. Some cannot speak. Some have twisted limbs, or little control over their bodies. They suffer from seizures, or blindness and deafness. Most will remain like children forever, no matter how long they live. They are not ordinary children, but I promise you, Brother, once you come to know them, they are extraordinary. And it is our calling to give these little ones everything their own families never could: a sound education, opportunities for happiness . . . and love.’
“When I first began my work, there were few people, even in my order, who thought those children were capable of learning. But music is a kind of magic, a miracle. It can reach into a person’s mind, even into his soul, and touch the places words never can. Music is the great key; it can open any lock. My students took to their lessons readily. They embraced learning as wholly as any other children would. And the music—my teaching—gave voice to the voiceless.”
Mute with sympathy, Elisabeth takes his hand. Anton draws an unsteady breath, reluctant to continue. But the story must be told. He presses on, no matter how it pains him.
“As the war came on and Hitler’s actions grew more despicable, many in the order told themselves it couldn’t really happen. Not to us.”
“What couldn’t happen?” Elisabeth’s voice is dull, low. She knows how he will answer, but she must hear it for herself, to be sure.
“The T4 Program.”
She covers her face with her hands. “Dear God.”
Who can choose the worst of our government’s crimes? If you point to any execution, any plan of extermination, and you say, This is the worst, the vilest thing we have ever done, then you excuse, in part, all the rest. There is no darkest deed for Adolf Hitler and the wolves who follow him. He is one deep pit of foul black evil, and day by day, we sink farther below the surface. There is no act more terrible than the rest.
In the T4 Program, they called the broken ones, the imperfect, life unworthy of life. Little children, even infants, were torn from their mothers. When families protested, they took the rest of their children, too, even the healthy and whole. Or they sent the fathers off to war, to the front lines in the east, to be ripped apart by machine-gun fire. Bishop von Galen, in Münster, called the program plain murder. And when his loyal priests distributed his sermon, the SS took three of those good men into the public square and cut off their heads, like rabbits ready for the spit. The summer of ’41 was dark. The sky reeked of oily smoke, black with the stench of burning bodies.
“I knew . . .” Anton goes on; God alone can say where he finds the strength to continue. “I knew they would come for our children someday. Some of my brothers denied it could really happen, but somewhere in my soul, I knew. I also knew there was nothing I could do to stop the SS when they came. So I went on with my life, teaching my little ones as best I could, giving them all the love the world could not. And I prayed; I begged God, night and day, to spare my students—and me.”
He falls silent. After a long, trembling pause, Elisabeth says, “Did you oppose them? When they finally did come?”
“We did, every way we could think to do it. We pleaded, we threatened, we made barriers with our own bodies, even knowing what they would do to men of the cloth who crossed the Führer. But they were armed, when they came . . . and the brothers, of course, were not.” He shuts his eyes, grappling with the pain, the terrible, sharp rebuke of memory. “But what haunts me, Elisabeth—what I can never forgive—is this: I did not fight as hard as I might have. When my time came to face judgment—when the gun was pointed at my chest—I chose my own life over theirs. I saved myself, instead of the innocent.”
She says nothing. Her hand twitches in his grip.
“But I knew, Elisabeth—I know what they did, what they still do to the men who wear the uniforms. Those men are victims, too—some of them, anyway. Not all are consumed by evil. Some do only what they must, to spare their own children from death. Knowing that, I stepped aside. I didn’t resist as forcefully
as I could have done, because in that moment, I couldn’t choose between the soldier’s pain and my own. But I made the wrong decision. I know that now; I have known it every moment I’ve lived since then. I should have forced that man to kill me. I should have made his every move an agony; I should have plagued him with guilt. It wasn’t his choice, to take the children, and he took no pleasure in his work. But who suffered? Who died that day? The little ones. The ones I was meant to protect. God may forgive me someday, but I will never forgive myself.”
Elisabeth seems to know there is more to his story. She squeezes his hand gently, a gesture that says, Go on.
“After they took the children, my order was disbanded, of course. I went back home to Stuttgart and lived with my sister for a time. She had been a nun, and her order, too, was dissolved. We were a comfort to each other, but we were both grieving for what we had lost.
“Then I was drafted into the Wehrmacht. You know about that, I suppose; you’ve heard me tell the boys. There isn’t much to report, beyond that one jump over Riga. My injured back got me out of the service, and once I was free, I swore I’d never go back.”
“Your back isn’t injured. You’re fit as can be.”
Despite his sadness, Anton smiles. “I suppose that was my first act of resistance. I felt a coward, leaving the Wehrmacht when so many other good men, conscripted like me, remained. But my entire soul, my whole being, revolted at the thought of aiding the Party in any way. They had taken everything I’d loved. I would never serve them again. They could kill me for it, but I wouldn’t serve.”
He has talked this well of memory dry. He sags back against the sofa, his chin falling toward his chest, crumpling in despair. Elisabeth takes his arm; she braces him. “Let’s go out for a walk. It’s a lovely day.”
The Ragged Edge of Night Page 26