The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

  The crocuses fade, the season of resurrection passes, and still the papers bear witness only to the Führer’s immortality. But where there is love, there is hope. In his moments of despair, Anton takes Elisabeth’s hand. He tells himself, Be patient. In hope, we are saved. Hope that is seen is no hope at all; who asks for what he already has?

  Anton and Elisabeth, husband and wife, fall into a quiet pattern of waiting. They rise in the morning, and they go about the business of life. Between the greetings they exchange with their neighbors, in the meaningful spaces between words, they search for the miracle they’re still waiting for. The radio broadcasts and papers all proclaim that Germany is mighty, Germany is strong, our dear leader is indomitable. But whispers tell another tale. In January, the camp at Auschwitz was relinquished to the Soviets, and what prisoners had survived were freed. In March, the Americans took Cologne—there is no word yet from Frau Hornik. Himmler is gone now, replaced by General Heinrici; the stronghold in Copenhagen has been bombed and destroyed. On the last day of March, General Eisenhower demanded Germany’s surrender. You won’t hear it on the radio, but that’s what rumor insists, and rumor has made its way even here, to our insignificant village.

  The black tide is turning, but not swiftly enough. The NSDAP still holds Germany, but when a wolf is cornered, it’s far more apt to bite. Anton and Elisabeth listen and wait, but they don’t allow hope to bloom. In the evenings, they hold one another, surrendering for an hour or two to the fear that never abates. Sometimes she cries, already mourning what she has not yet lost—and sometimes it’s Anton who weeps. When sleep comes, their dreams are black and gray, shot through here and there with spots of light, like a candle hidden in a pierced shutter. And in the morning, they rise again. They pull back the curtains; they read the news. But still, news of Hitler’s fall refuses to come.

  First the crocuses, then the daffodils. Then the tulips, blushing pink. Anton dreams at night of a place underground, deep in the earth, where only the roots of flowers may go. The dark ground shakes from a ghost’s voice, a memory’s voice. He wakes to the sound and feels its echo ringing in his palm.

  He lies still, watching the sun’s light move slowly around the edge of the curtain. It’s late in the morning. He should wake Elisabeth, but she looks so peaceful in sleep. Let her have the mercy of dreams for a while longer.

  He woke to a sound, and it comes again—so faint, so distant, that he mistakes it for a memory. He’d heard the toll of a bell, and it had sounded like a boy’s voice calling.

  “Father!” The voice is closer now. Louder. And there is no mistaking to whom it belongs. “Father! Vati Anton!”

  Albert. Anton could swear he has actually heard the boy, out among the orchard or running down the lane. He sits up slowly, but the movement is enough to wake Elisabeth. She stirs, yawns, and rubs a knuckle in her eye.

  “Anton? What is it?”

  “I thought I heard—” He won’t say, I thought I heard our son. They have lived without the children for months now—four cruel months, when it seemed winter would never end, a new spring would never come. Every day he has seen the pain in Elisabeth’s eyes. Every day he has known what it costs her to be here with him. He won’t raise hope without cause.

  But she murmurs, “I had the strangest dream. I dreamed I heard Albert calling for me.”

  Then, waking fully, she hears the boy again. They both hear. “Father! Mother!”

  Elisabeth stares at Anton for a moment, pale and frightened. He can read her thoughts, for they are his own. Is this a trick of the Devil? Or has the boy died? Is our child’s spirit trapped between Heaven and Earth?

  They leap from bed in the same instant and fly to the window. Elisabeth’s teeth are chattering with shock and fear. The children cannot be here. It’s too dangerous for them now. If they’ve truly come, Anton must send them away, and both their hearts must break all over again.

  But when they look down to the lane, there is no mistaking Albert—taller than when Anton saw him last but just as pale, just as freckled. He is no ghost. The boy is running, his arms flung out like wings. Behind him, Paul comes skipping and singing, holding Maria’s hand.

  “Mother Mary!” It’s all Elisabeth can say. She runs for the cottage door and the staircase before Anton can caution her. He can’t catch her, either; he can only hurry along behind, reaching for her, trying to steady her as she bolts down into the yard. Barefoot, her hair a mess, clothed only in her nightdress, she sprints across the wet grass and catches her children in her arms.

  Frau Hertz is running from the farmhouse, waving something above her head, something white and black and fluttering. A newspaper.

  “Anton!” He looks up, and there is Anita, in her laywoman’s dress, hustling down the lane, red-faced and puffing. There is an auto parked behind her, round-hooded, soft gray. She jingles a set of keys in her hands, as if to say, Look what I’ve got; are you jealous? Then she squeals with happiness like the girl she used to be, catching him in a tight embrace. She spins him around and around. “Look at you, in your nightshirt. You slept in too late, Little Brother. You missed the news!”

  “What news? For goodness’ sake, what has happened? Why are you here—and the children?”

  The children squirm out of Elisabeth’s arms, run to Anton, and throw their arms around his body. He is squeezed and patted to within an inch of his life, and he laughs—laughs with the gladness of it until he is wheezing and breathless.

  “You haven’t heard yet?” Albert cries, face alight. “It’s done now. It’s all over!”

  “What? Speak sense!”

  Frau Hertz arrives then. She thrusts the newspaper against Anton’s chest. He takes it and holds it out—he hasn’t put his glasses on, and he can barely read the neat headline. But through his blurred vision, the words seem to advance upon him, resolving with startling clarity.

  FAREWELL TO HITLER

  “He’s dead,” Anita says. She laughs wildly and thrusts a fist in the air. “We heard it quite late, yesterday evening. The Party tried to suppress the news, of course, but the streets of Stuttgart are flooded with talk. Our dear, brave leader took his own life, rather than face surrender. How do you like that?”

  “Are you sure?” Anton clings to his children, gripping them so tightly Maria twists away and runs back to her mother.

  “No one’s sure of anything yet,” Frau Hertz says. “But I suppose the paper wouldn’t have printed this story unless they were certain at least that he’s dead. Dead and off to Hell, where he belongs.” She spits in the mud.

  “You know the Party will deny he took his own life,” Anita says, “until they can’t hide the truth any longer. But it seems the sort of thing he would do, doesn’t it? After all the misery he’s spread, all the people he’s made to suffer, he hadn’t the courage to face the trials and a proper punishment.”

  Did he really take his own life, Anton wonders—or did he choke on turnip stew? It hardly matters now—now, in the morning light.

  “I have to go see Father Emil,” Anton says. “I must know if he’s heard the news.”

  Elisabeth laughs. Tears of joy have thickened her lashes. “Not like that; look at yourself. You can’t go to the priest in your nightshirt.”

  In their home—what a joy it is, to hear the old house ringing with the sound of the children’s voices—Anton and Elisabeth dress as quickly as they can. Elisabeth makes a cursory attempt at tidying her hair, then finally smashes a hat atop her head. “Good enough,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  Anita drives them to the church while the children run along behind the car, hooting and dancing, turning cartwheels between puddles.

  But when they arrive at St. Kolumban, Father Emil isn’t there. The nave is empty. So is his little room in the back of the building.

  Elisabeth’s smile fades. “Has something happened to him? Oh, merciful Lord—they didn’t come for him last night, Anton? Not now!”

  “No, darling—no. Come; I know exactly wher
e we’ll find him.”

  He leads Elisabeth to the field behind the church. The earth is lush with new growth, the soil soft and yielding. A smell of dew fills the air—dew and unfurling blossoms. Emil, in his black robe, is on his knees, pawing through the soil with his bare hands. He looks up at Anton’s shouted greeting. When he sees the family approaching, he jumps to his feet, spry as a boy of eighteen. “Anton! Have you heard the news?”

  “I have!”

  More people must hear; the whole world should know. Anton brings the shovel from the churchyard, and he and Emil dig into ripe, dark earth. Soon Elisabeth and the children join them, moving soil with their hands—Anita and Frau Hertz, too. More hands arrive, more help. Two and four, a dozen, twenty—the field fills with neighbors, all those who have come to the church to give thanks for this new morning.

  “Dig!” Anton tells them. “Everyone, dig!”

  The youngest Kopp brother asks why.

  “You’ll soon find out,” Emil tells him. “Anton will show you where. Bring spades, if you have them. Pickaxes—anything!”

  The field rings with laughter and the shouts of children. Anton straightens from his task, his hands caked with earth. Across the pit, he sees Frau Franke laughing as she tries and fails to brush the mud from her palms. He has never seen the woman smile before, but she is beaming now, though the hem of her dress is ruined with soil. Her husband is nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s Möbelbauer?” he asks, of no one in particular.

  One of the Kopp brothers throws his arms around Anton, crushing him in a hug so tight Anton loses his breath. “Möbelbauer’s gone,” the young man says. “He left last night, running like a dog—running to his SS masters, no doubt.”

  Another Kopp adds, “If he ever tries to come back here, he won’t find a warm welcome.”

  Someone has brought more shovels, and the people of Unterboihingen dig deeper into the earth, and deeper still, though they can’t know what Anton and Emil know—what they will soon uncover. The whole town is laughing, breathless with disbelief. Is it really over? Can it be?

  When the first shovel strikes bronze, the crowd goes still. They back away; Anton jumps down into the pit and clears the last of the earth with his hands. The first bell shows itself through wet black soil, its proud height and strong curve, its domed crown gleaming. A great shout goes up from the townspeople. They cheer with one voice, and the echo of their gladness rebounds from the blue, blue hills.

  “A parade,” Emil shouts. “Let’s have a parade!”

  The villagers cheer again.

  The Kopps bring their two great flatbed trucks out into the field. The people of Unterboihingen lift together; they raise the bells up. Children pick armfuls of flowers and greenery from hedges and ditches, and skipping and singing, they strew petals over the earth; they cover the bells and the beds of the trucks in sweet, bright swags of green.

  “Albert,” Anton says, “run to every house. Knock on every door. Bring all the children here with their instruments. You heard Father Emil; we must have a parade!”

  When the bells are all but buried under wreaths of blossom, the band assembles. Anton heads toward his students, intending to lead the march—but Emil catches him by the arm. “Let them play without a conductor today. You’ve taught them well enough; they can manage.” He gestures to the nearest truck bed. “You belong up there, my friend—up where the whole town can see you.”

  Grinning, accepting the praise, Anton climbs up beside his bells. Flowers and new leaves cling to his wet shoes and to the cuffs of his trousers. The air is rich with the scent of honey. He waves to the crowd; they lift their hands and cheer again, and fill the air with petals.

  Anton reaches down for Elisabeth, intending to pull her up beside him. But she steps back with a shy smile.

  “Come, now. You ought to be the queen of the parade.”

  “I can’t. I’m afraid I’ll fall.”

  “I’ll make sure you won’t. I’ll keep my arm around you the whole time.”

  Elisabeth lowers her voice; he can barely make out her words over the cheering crowd. “No, we can’t risk it, Anton.” And she lays a hand low on her stomach.

  The clamor of the music, the honking horns, the waving banners of color—all that glad madness dies away. Elisabeth is all Anton can see, all he can hear—her happy laughter and the tears shining bright in her eyes.

  He leaps down from the truck bed and pulls her into his arms. She kisses him, unashamed and unreserved, there in front of everyone.

  This is the world as it was before, the life we used to know. And this is the world we will make again, in love’s lasting image.

  HISTORICAL NOTE AND AUTHOR’S REMARKS

  It might surprise you to learn that this is a true story. What’s more, this is a family story: Josef Anton Starzmann was my husband’s maternal grandfather, and I could have written a novel about him twice the size of The Ragged Edge of Night without running low on material. Anton was a fascinating and inspiring man.

  I first heard the story of “Opa and the bells,” as my in-laws say, in 2010 over Thanksgiving dinner. I had only recently begun to date my husband-to-be, Paul, and he had just left on a nearly yearlong deployment to Kuwait. I had fallen in love with Paul far more quickly than was prudent, and even though our relationship was still quite new, I was heartbroken over his absence. When his family invited me to spend Thanksgiving in their company, I accepted, but not without some trepidation. I barely knew Paul at that point, even though I was in love with him; his family were total strangers to me. To make matters worse, Paul had told me of his thoroughly Catholic roots, so I was fairly sure his family wouldn’t approve of the fact that I was still technically married to my first husband. We had been separated for some time, but I hadn’t been able to secure a divorce yet. I knew if I hoped to gain acceptance from Paul’s family, I would have to avoid too many personal questions and tread with care.

  Fortunately, I’ve always had a convenient, conversation-diverting ace tucked up my sleeve. When I arrived at the home of Paul’s eldest brother, I broke it out immediately.

  “So, what do you do?” someone asked.

  At the time, I was working at a bookstore, and told them so. “But,” I added, “I’m also a writer. I’m trying to make a career out of it. My specialty is historical fiction.”

  Most people love books, and historical fiction has a broad audience. My ace worked its magic; soon I was bonding with Paul’s family over a shared interest in history, and no one skirted too close to any potentially damning information.

  Paul’s eldest brother, Larry, said, “You should write about Opa and the bells. I think it counts as history, and it would make for really good fiction.”

  Over turkey and mashed potatoes—and with an ever-increasing sense of being thoroughly gobsmacked—I teased out this family’s most incredible story, though it came to me piecemeal. The conversation went something like this:

  “My dad hated Hitler,” said Rita, Paul’s German mother. “Absolutely hated him.”

  “Well, who doesn’t?” I chuckled uncomfortably.

  “Yes, but Opa really hated Hitler. I mean, he was willing to do whatever it took to get the guy’s goat.”

  Getting Adolf Hitler’s goat sounded like it had to be an understatement.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, the Nazis almost killed Opa because of what he did.” I love my mother-in-law to death, but it has never been easy to extract a story from her.

  “It wasn’t the Nazis,” Larry said. “It was that jerk in town. What was his name?”

  “He was a Nazi,” Rita insisted. “He might as well have been. It was the same thing as being a Nazi.”

  I cut in. “Wait . . . what did your dad do, exactly?”

  “He hid the church bells. He buried them in a potato field so the Nazis couldn’t take them. They were claiming all the church bells, so they could melt them down and turn them into ammunition. But he wouldn’t
let them have the bells, on top of everything else they’d done, so he hid them. And then, when some SS officer came to get them, he said, ‘Look, the bells are already gone. Somebody else from the SS took them.’ The guy was so mad, but Dad said, ‘What, you didn’t want me to say no to an SS officer, did you?’” Rita laughed heartily.

  “They almost killed him for that?”

  “Oh yeah. You didn’t cross the Nazis. Trust me—you think you know about the Nazis, but you don’t. They were truly evil, and crazy. They’d do anything, for any reason.”

  I wasn’t about to argue. I believed her.

  Larry’s girlfriend, Julie—now his wife, and my sister-in-law—spoke up then. “I thought the Nazis tried to kill Opa because of his band.”

  “Yeah, that, too.” Rita waved her hand, as if defying the Nazi Party not once but twice was nothing remarkable.

  “His band?”

  “He started a marching band to keep the town’s boys out of Hitler Youth,” Larry said. “That didn’t make Hitler very happy.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “Anyway,” Rita said, “they still remember my dad for what he did. He’s the hero of Unterboihingen.”

  In fact, after the restoration of the bells to St. Kolumban’s tower, Anton wrote a beautiful song celebrating their music and history, which is still performed annually by St. Kolumban’s choir in remembrance of Opa and the bells he helped save. In early 2017, I had the privilege of translating his lyrics, titled “Bell Song,” from German to English. As far as I know, it’s the first English translation of the work.

  After that Thanksgiving dinner, the years passed and I came to know Paul better—and his warm, wonderful family (all of whom are far more accepting and open-minded than I had originally assumed). As I learned more about Anton’s life, I pieced together a clearer picture of Opa and the bells. And the more vivid Opa’s story grew in my mind, the more certain I became that I would write it all out as a novel . . . someday.

  Josef Anton Starzmann was born in 1904 in Stuttgart, Germany, to a devout Catholic family. His sister’s real name was Korbel, which my editor and I decided to change to Anita, since she plays a minor role in this novel and Anita is an easier name for English-speaking readers to manage.