In the Presence of Mine Enemies (15 page)

Alicia didn't expect anyone to respond to what was obviously a rhetorical question, but a boy held up his hand and said, “
Herr
Kessler!”

“
Ja?
” The teacher was taken aback, too.

“
Herr
Kessler, when will we have a new beloved
Führer
?”

Kessler blinked. “Why, when we do, of course,” he answered. Alicia had no trouble figuring out what that meant. It meant he didn't know, either.

 

Heinrich Gimpel suspected the highest authorities in the
Reich
would have suppressed the first edition of
Mein Kampf
if they'd thought they could get away with it. But plenty of old copies were still floating around, and word of the first
Führer
's startlingly subversive statements spread too wide and too fast for suppression to have any hope of success. That being so, those in high places simply sat tight, hoping the fuss would die down of its own accord.

“Who would have imagined Hitler wrote such a thing?” Heinrich said at work one morning. He didn't like talking about Hitler at all, but the first edition, despite official silence—maybe because of official silence—was so much on people's minds that not talking about it would have seemed odd. He didn't want to seem odd in any way.

“I know what it must have been,” Willi Dorsch said.

“Tell me, O sage of the age,” Heinrich said.

“He must have written the first edition before he got the Party fully into his hands,” Willi responded. “As soon as he did, then the
Führerprinzip
took over, and everything ran from the top down, the way it does now.”

“That…makes a certain amount of sense,” Heinrich said. In fact, it made more than a certain amount. Willi was shrewd, no doubt about it.

He was also smug. “You bet it does,” he said. “And, if you look at things the right way, it makes the first edition an antique, too, something that's not worth getting excited about.”

“Do you think that's the line they'll take?” Heinrich asked.

“I think they'll try,” Willi replied. “Interesting to find out whether they can get away with it.”

“What do you think?”

Willi's grin wasn't quite pleasant. “I could ask you the
same question, but you've never much cared for sticking out your neck, have you?”

“Well, no.” Heinrich tried to sound sheepish, not cowardly. Feeling he needed to add something to his confession, he said, “You don't have to answer if you don't want to.”

“Oh, I will. I can always run my mouth, or stick my foot in it, or stick my neck out for the chopper.” Willi sounded happy, almost gay. He could talk about sticking his neck out because he didn't really believe the chopper would come down on it. Heinrich knew full well the chopper would descend if
he
were discovered. Willi, meanwhile, went on, “Sure, I'll tell you what I think. I think they have a pretty good chance of getting away with it. That's how things always work.”

“You're probably right.” Heinrich made sure he didn't sigh. He wouldn't have sworn his office was bugged, but he wouldn't have sworn it wasn't, either. If anyone was listening to him, he didn't want to do or say anything that could possibly be construed as disloyal to the
Reich
.

“If you bet that tomorrow will be just like today, you'll win more often than you lose,” Willi said. “But you won't
always
win, and you'll look more like a chump when you lose. We wouldn't have gone to Mars a few years ago if we'd thought things would stay the same all the time.”

“That's true.” Heinrich had been no less impressed than anyone else by live televisor pictures from another world. Men had been flying back and forth to the moon since he was a boy, and the observatory there had been a going concern for fifteen years. But Mars
felt
different, even if there'd been not the slightest hint of Martians. The Ministry of Air and Space was talking about a manned mission to the moons of Jupiter. That would be something, if it ever got past the talking stage.

“So anyway,” Willi said, “the people who go on about the first edition are the ones who don't have power, and the people who do have power don't give a damn about the first edition. That's the way it looks to me.”

“Seems reasonable,” Heinrich said, and so it did. Again, he refused to show he didn't like it, no matter how reason
able it seemed. Instead, he looked at his watch. “Shall we head for the canteen and see what sort of experiment the cooks are serving for lunch?” Nobody ever got in trouble for complaining about the food here. Not even the Security Police could afford to arrest that many people.

Today's special included tongue sausage and a cabbage salad with chopped apples, oranges, and grapes in a mayonnaise-based dressing. The sausage wasn't half bad. The menu called the salad Swedish. After a couple of bites, Heinrich called it peculiar.

Willi looked down at his foam plate. His verdict was, “I didn't know the Swedes hated us that much.”

Heinrich took another forkful. After crunching away, he said, “It's probably very nutritious.”

“It would be,” Willi said.

Despite grumbles, they both kept eating. Heinrich sipped coffee from a foam cup. It wasn't especially good, either, but it was strong. He could feel his eyes opening wider. He wouldn't doze off at his desk this afternoon. He'd done that once or twice when he had a new baby in the house. He hadn't got in trouble. He mustn't have been the only one.

As he ate, he listened to the lunchroom chatter. Now it was official: the Americans would fall short on this year's assessment. Plenty of people at
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
wondered what the
Reich
would do about it. Heinrich wondered himself. Someone a couple of tables over said, “The Yankees are lucky bastards. If we had a
Führer
in place, he'd have made them knuckle under, you bet.”

Willi Dorsch heard that, too. “He's right,” he said, and got up to pour himself some more coffee. Heinrich nodded, though he couldn't help thinking that getting devastated by nuclear weapons and then spending the next forty years under German occupation wasn't precisely the kind of luck he most wanted to have.

On the other hand, most of the Americans remained alive. Aside from the war casualties, the conquerors had worked their usual horrors on Jews and Negroes. Even so, the population of the USA was only about a third lower than it had been before the war. Maybe the Americans as
a whole
were
lucky—if you compared them to such
Untermenschen
.

At another table not far from the one where Heinrich and Willi were sitting, a colonel growled, “To hell with the first edition! This is all a bunch of claptrap, if anybody wants to know the truth.”

Heinrich took a bite of tongue sausage. Who would presume to argue with such an august personage? Willi looked smug as he came back with his refill. He must have heard the officer, too. He wagged a finger at Heinrich, as if to say,
You see?

But two colonels sat at that table. The second one, a younger man, shook his head and said, “I'm not so sure, Dietrich. I've been a good Party man for more than twenty years now. If there's a way to stay in the rules and let me help choose the new
Führer,
I'm for it.”

“That's the leadership's job,” the first colonel—Dietrich—said.

“Well, yes,” the other colonel answered. “But how do leaders get to be leaders? If the people under them don't want to follow, what have you got? A mess, that's what. Look at France in 1940.”

Dietrich snorted. “Oh, go on, Paul. If the
Reich
ever comes to that, we can all stick our heads in the showers, because we'll be done for anyway.”

“I didn't say it would be that bad—we're not Frenchmen, after all,” Paul replied. “But the principle is the same.”

Another snort from the first colonel. “Principle? What's principle? Something losers talk about to explain why they've lost.”

“Oh, really? Are you saying the Party has no principles?” Paul's voice was silky with danger.

But Dietrich wouldn't fall into that trap. “I'm saying victory is the first principle, and none of the others matters much.” He had a fat cigar smoking in an ashtray. Now he picked it up and thrust it at his friend. “If I'm wrong, how come we shout,
‘Sieg heil!'?
Explain that to me.”

A captain who'd been siting at another table came over and said, “Excuse me, sir, but how does following the
Party's original rules make victory any less likely?” He would never have had the nerve to do anything like that if Paul hadn't spoken up in favor of the first edition, not when Dietrich outranked him by three grades. As things were, he had a protector.

The table with the two colonels quickly became the day's focal point for that particular argument.
Wehrmacht
officers and civilian experts gathered around it. Things got more heated by the moment. Willi's face lit up. “Shall we join them?” he asked.

“Go ahead, if you want to,” Heinrich answered. “But what we say won't matter a pfennig's worth either way.”
And that's been true everywhere in the
Reich
ever since Hitler took over
. One more good line he added to the long, long list of things he couldn't say no matter how true they were.

 

Sometimes a pounding on the door didn't make Lise Gimpel panic. When it came just after half past three, it made her smile. It meant the children were home from school. She hurried to the door and opened it. “Hello, girls,” she said. “What did you learn today?”

“Klaus Frick eats bugs,” Francesca announced.

Alicia and Roxane both made disgusted noises, but not big disgusted noises. From this, Lise concluded her middle daughter was going on with things she'd said on the school bus. The other two girls must have had the chance to start getting used to that lovely piece of news. “How do you know he eats bugs?” Lise asked, remembering how schoolyard rumors could claim anybody did anything.

But Francesca answered, “Because I saw him do it. He caught one and put it in his mouth, and it went crunch.”

“And he's in your class, isn't he?” Lise said unhappily. Francesca nodded. Lise shuddered. “That's…pretty bad.” Eight-year-old boys frequently were disgusting creatures, but this Klaus Frick went overboard.

Roxane giggled. “Tell her the rest!”

“The rest? There's more?” Lise said. “Do I want to know?”

“No,” Alicia said quickly.

From that, Lise got a hint about what
more
might be. But Roxane was still snickering, and Francesca was laughing, too. At their age, what was disgusting was also funny. The potty jokes that had made the rounds when Lise was in the lower grades still circulated. Alicia also laughed at a lot of them; ten wasn't too old. Not today, though. Francesca said, “Klaus said—he said he was eating just like a Jew. He said Jews ate bugs all the time.”

Hearing it again sent Roxane into gales of laughter. Francesca thought it was pretty funny, too. Alicia gave her verdict in one word: “Revolting.”

“He's probably right, though. Jews
were
revolting,” Francesca said. “Everybody knows that.” Her little sister nodded. Alicia started to say something, then very obviously didn't.

Lise Gimpel spoke up before her oldest daughter could slip: “Jews may have been revolting, but how does Klaus Frick know what they ate? How could he? Nobody your age has ever seen one—and I'm sure they don't teach you about bugs in school. I'm with Alicia here: Jews may have been revolting, but your classmate certainly is.”

Alicia stuck out her tongue at Francesca. That was a good, healthy, normal reaction. But Roxane, always an agitator, pointed and exclaimed, “Eww! It's got a bug's leg on it!”

“Enough!” Lise said. “All three of you, go in the kitchen right now and have your snacks.” She held up a warning hand. “I'm not done. The first one who says anything—
anything
—about bugs or Jews or anything else disgusting while you're eating is in big trouble.
Big
trouble, you hear me?”

They all nodded. The two younger ones hurried to the kitchen. Alicia hung back for a moment. “Jews or anything
else
disgusting?” she asked softly.

“That's how you've got to say it,” Lise whispered back, biting her lip. “You have to wear a mask, remember?” Alicia nodded, though the mask had slipped. Lise gave her a little push. “Go on. Eat your snack. This was just foolishness. Don't let it worry you.” Nodding again, and looking a tiny bit happier, Alicia went.