Albert says, “I don’t like to see the nest like that, all covered in snow.” The poor boy has been unable to forget the stork since the day the steel door opened. Anton can only imagine what violence fills his son’s dreams—visions of red ripped through white.
“What do you suppose it means for us now,” Al says, “since the stork is gone?”
Paul sighs heavily, kicking his feet in the snow. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but Al persists: “Father Emil said it was the luck of our town.”
“There is another stork,” Anton reminds them. “The other one still lives.”
Paul blurts out an answer suddenly, as if, all at once, something has loosed his reservations and freed his little spirit to confront that senseless death. “But the other stork will never come back. Father Emil says they mate for life. It will never come back because the nest reminds it of its dead mate, and it will never take another mate, either, because it’s too heartbroken now.”
Maria stares at her brother for a long moment. The vapor of her short, rapid breaths rises ever faster as she struggles not to cry. She gives up the fight and covers her face with her hands, keening. Paul blinks and shuffles his feet again. He wipes away his own tear.
“Is it true?” Maria clings to Anton’s hand. “Vati, is it true?”
“No, darling. It isn’t true.” He bends to stroke her hair, to kiss her hot forehead. “Storks do find love again. In time, when it’s not so sad, ours will take another mate. Perhaps they will even come back here, to our town. They might take up in the same old nest on our bell tower.”
“I don’t want them to come back to St. Kolumban,” Paul says. “It won’t be the same! It won’t be our stork, the one we lost.”
“There, there.” He gathers them all in his arms, these three precious children, gifted to him by God and fate. “After a time, you won’t cry over it anymore. The pain won’t hurt so badly.”
And spring will come, you’ll see. The snow will melt away. Winter’s dark can’t last forever.
35
That night, Anton is sitting alone on the last stair outside the cottage. The dampness of the step has soaked through his trousers, and he is chilled, but the cold seems too insignificant to notice. He tries to blow a ring, as Father Emil did that summer when the Egerlander girls laughed in the orchard, but he can never manage it. He sends up one trail of pipe smoke after another to vanish among the stars. The red ember of his pipe is too small, surely, to be seen from above.
How has Anton been allowed to linger into winter? He knows well enough. The Americans have kept Herr Hitler distracted in France, in the Ardennes. Now Bastogne is surrounded, and Germany’s recapture of Antwerp is no longer the easy maneuver it once seemed. But it’s like Pohl said: as soon as their schedules have cleared up, the SS will turn their attention to Anton. There are more pressing matters now, but even in this endless war, matters will not press forever.
He thinks, I must tell Elisabeth: Once I am gone, she should look for another man. Find a third husband who can pick up where Paul Herter and I left off.
He must make her understand. Once they part ways, it will be forever. There can be no hope that Anton will return.
When finally the night is cold enough to make him shiver, Anton goes back inside. Elisabeth has gone to bed, but she has left a candle burning on the old kitchen cupboard. He checks the curtains to be sure they are tightly drawn. Then he sorts through the wood beside the stove until he finds just the right piece, long and heavy with a dense, fine grain.
By candlelight, in the old chair with his wife’s sewing basket near his feet, Anton begins to carve. Christmas is almost here, but he has yet to make a gift for Elisabeth. He will work all night, paring away one resinous sliver at a time, until exhaustion drives the thoughts from his mind and lures him to his bed. And each night thereafter, while his family sleeps, Anton will do the same. In amber light, with one small flame, he will sit with the ghosts of memory. On the fifth night, the gift has taken recognizable shape: a figure of Saint Elisabeth, praying with her neat hands folded. On the sixth, he gives the figure Elisabeth’s own face—his Elisabeth, his good wife, his brave and loyal love.
He speaks to the saint as he carves her. He whispers everything he regrets and everything he does not. In the curls of her hair, in the pleats of her gown, in the traces of a smile around her eyes, he scribes his inmost thoughts, committing them to the small, freshly made body. As if someday, in the act of running her hands over smooth, polished wood, Elisabeth will find the secrets Anton has embedded there and will finally understand.
He tells the saint, I loved you. Never forget that. Whatever you felt for me, I loved you, every bit as much as I loved the children. Our children who live, and the children I lost—and all the people who command my love, though they are strangers. The ones who cry from their graves for justice and those whom we may yet save, if we can stop what we started long ago. Everything I have done—for you, Elisabeth, and for God—I have done out of love.
Christmas, when it comes, is quiet. No bombs fall on Stuttgart, and, thank God, no bombs fall on our village. The children are happy with their nuts and oranges, the simple wartime toys for Paul and Maria. Albert is too grown up now for toys, so Anton gives him books instead. He has saved another gift for his eldest son, his quiet, thoughtful boy—but he must wait to present it until the time is right.
Anton has decorated Elisabeth’s box with the blue silk ribbon, the one his sister gave him long ago. Elisabeth unties it; she looks inside. Her eyes shine with tears as she takes Saint Elisabeth in her hands. She already seems to read with her fingertips the words Anton prayed into the fragrant wood, and when she lifts her eyes to thank him, she is smiling.
36
The new year is cold and hard, bitter with frost. Elisabeth has been tense and irritable since just after Christmas, as if she can sense all the things that must change, if life is to go on: the loss of Anton, the dissolution of her family. Soldiers have been through the tunnel again, breaking free of the frozen earth on New Year’s Day. Little by little, the world is stripping away our shelter, tiny Unterboihingen. The world is tearing back the curtains. Elisabeth’s eyes turn to the sky at the slightest sound, the booming of grouse in the fields or the rumble of a truck’s engine down Austraße Road. No place in all the world is safe, if Unterboihingen is not.
In her vigilance, her wariness, it’s Elisabeth who hears the news first. She went to town with chicken soup and fresh-baked bread, a relief for Frau Sommer, the mother of a sick child. But she hurries home with the news on her tongue, and finds Anton cleaning his old pocket watch beside the fire. Her cheeks are still chapped from the cold.
She says, “Do you remember when I told you to sell the instruments—when the SS was paying for brass?”
“Yes.” How could he forget?
“They aren’t paying anymore, Anton.” Her brow furrows. “They’re taking brass now. Confiscating it.”
He shakes his head. A small worry, now—and a wonder, that he’d ever been troubled by something so insignificant. “They won’t take the band instruments. It really is the wrong type of brass; I told you the truth when I said as much.”
“No.” She drops to her knees beside him, clutching his sleeve. “Anton, they’re taking church bells. They’ve already taken the bells from Wernau and Kirchheim. Frau Sommer’s family lives in Wernau. They’ve written her and told her all about it. She showed me the letter.”
The watch falls from his hands and thumps the wood floor. Elisabeth retrieves it, but Anton hardly knows what to do with the thing. He winds its chain around his hand, tighter and tighter still.
He will not let Hitler take St. Kolumban’s bells. But how he is to stop it from happening, Anton hasn’t the slightest idea.
Elisabeth can see his resolve building, breaking through weeks’ worth of surrender, and it frightens her. “Anton, you mustn’t—”
But he must. They are coming for him, anyway. It’s only a matter of t
ime, a matter of freed schedules. His destruction is assured, his death written in stone. What can it matter now, if he rattles Hitler’s cage?
I may as well make myself a thorn in the wolf’s paw. One last time. God willing, he will succeed in this, if in nothing else.
“Anton, your hand!”
The watch chain has bitten deeply into Anton’s flesh, and his fingers are turning purple. Trembling, he unwinds the chain. Elisabeth takes his one hand between the both of hers and rubs it until feeling returns.
“Listen, Elisabeth. This is what we must do.”
“No, Anton.” She can sense what’s coming. She shakes her head, but the protest is weak. She knows already what must be done.
“Yes, my darling. Listen to me. You and the children will go to Stuttgart. You’ll live with my sister.” He hasn’t asked Anita to take them in—this desperate plan has only just occurred to him—but he knows his sister will agree. Anita would never turn away Anton’s family.
“Why?”
“It may be safer for you there.”
“Safer in Stuttgart? Anton—”
“Now that soldiers are coming and going through that damned tunnel, Unterboihingen isn’t the haven it was.”
Elisabeth shakes her head again, more adamantly now. “No place is as safe as Unterboihingen.”
“Then no place is safe at all. Elisabeth, you know it’s true.” He pauses, gathering his thoughts and his quailing heart. He says carefully, “You can’t be here when—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t think it. If we go anywhere, you’ll come with us.”
“They’ll find me.” The SS. The rifle against his chest. “They already know my name. What was that business with the stork if not some kind of threat? An attempt to silence the band, to warn me . . .” He sighs and works his fingers up under his lenses to press hard against his eyes. His thoughts are tumbling, impossible to sort. “Möbelbauer must have told them about me—them, whomever he speaks with, his friends in the Party. He hates me—”
“If he hates you,” Elisabeth says, resolute, “it’s only because of me. I told him I would never betray our marriage. That’s why he’s bent on destroying us both. So you see, it’s my fault. If you stay here, then I will stay, too.”
He takes her hands, muted for a moment by his admiration for her. What strength, what bravery! If only he were half as courageous. He kisses her palms. “It’s not your fault—never blame yourself. But think of the children, Elisabeth. We have a duty to keep them safe.”
She doesn’t try to argue; she knows he is right. “How much longer do we have? Together?”
“I don’t know. But the sooner you leave, the better. We’ve waited too long already, and the waiting is dangerous.”
She looks away, refusing to see the sense in his words. Tears have burned her cheeks. But still, she doesn’t argue.
“Can you have the children ready to travel by tomorrow morning?”
“I suppose, if I must.”
“Good. I’ll write a letter for my sister. You must give it to her when you meet.”
Elisabeth’s eyes flash. “She doesn’t even know we’re coming? Anton—”
“Anita will take you in, and gladly . . . but she’ll want word from me, too. And I want to say my farewells to her, before I’m taken. She was always good to me.”
At the train station, he tells the children brightly that they are going to visit their aunt Anita—though they have never seen her before. They do not know her.
“We’ll all be back together soon,” he says. But he can feel Al’s hard stare as he says those words. The boy can tell when he is being deceived.
Anton takes Albert’s hand, as you would do with a grown man. “I’m proud of you, son. Proud of the man you’re becoming, the man you’ll be someday.”
He removes the watch from his pocket. Albert takes it, startled, and turns it over and over, tilting it so the polished casing gleams.
“My father gave this to me,” Anton says. “I want you to have it now.”
Al nods. He closes his fist around the watch. “I’ll try. I’ll try to make you proud.” The boy is struggling not to cry, fighting with all his strength to hold back his weeping.
Anton takes him by the shoulder and leans close, so only Al can hear. “Men cry, son. All the time. Never be ashamed of your feelings. Your feelings are your compass. They guide you to what’s right.”
The tears break at last, spilling down the boy’s freckled cheeks. “I won’t tell them what’s really happening,” he says. “Paul and Maria.”
“Not until they’re old enough to understand.”
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 danger
ous—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 Möbelbauer’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.
Anton hurries after him. “They’re coming to take the bells. Before they take us, I mean—or maybe after; I don’t know.”
The Ragged Edge of Night Page 29