In the Presence of Mine Enemies (16 page)

Lise Gimpel's sigh sounded amazingly like Heinrich's. You needed to have a hide like an elephant's to hope to survive. Children didn't naturally come equipped with that kind of hide. They had to acquire it, one painful scar after another. Lise remembered how many tears she'd shed when she was younger.

Jokes about Jews and gibes about Jews went on and on. Lise couldn't remember the last time she'd heard anything about
live
Jews before those few luckless families were found in the Serbian hinterlands.

Everyone needed someone to hate. Americans hadn't hated Jews the way Europeans had, but they'd had Negroes to hate instead. Now there were hardly any Jews or Negroes in the USA. Did people on the other side of the Atlantic still tell jokes about the Negroes who weren't there any more? Lise wouldn't have been surprised. People were like that, however much you wished they weren't.

Back in the ancient days, after David slew Goliath and the Hebrews triumphed in Palestine, had they told jokes about the Philistines? That wouldn't have surprised Lise, either. She didn't think Jews were the
Herrenvolk,
the master race, the way Germans thought about themselves. She just thought they were people like any others, with all the faults and foibles of any other folk. Was it too much to ask for other people to see them the same way?

Evidently.

She sighed again. The survivors remaining in the
Reich
were well hidden. Ferreting them out wouldn't be easy, even for the Nazis. For a few years, Lise hadn't worried much about it. She hadn't even thought much about it. She'd just felt like—
been
—one more person living out her life like anybody else.

But then Gottlieb Stutzman got old enough to tell, and then Anna, and now Alicia. And half of Lise felt like the terrified child she'd been when she first found out the truth. Children made mistakes. Making mistakes and learning from them helped children grow up. But if a Jewish child made the wrong kind of mistake, she wouldn't grow up, and what would she learn from that?

Not to be born a Jew, of course.

“Mommy!” Francesca screamed. Roxane echoed her, even higher and shriller.

Lise raced for the kitchen, her heart in her mouth. What had Alicia done? Had she told her sisters? If she couldn't keep her mouth shut, how could she think they'd be able to?

Alicia stood in the middle of the floor, her face stricken. Francesca and Roxane both dramatically pointed at her. “I'm sorry, Mommy,” she whispered, her face pale as milk—pale as the milk that had been in her tumbler and now splashed all over the floor, along with the tumbler's shards.

Once Lise started to laugh, she had to work to stop. All three of her daughters stared at her. She took a deep breath, held it, let it out. “What did you think I was going to do?” she said. “
Cry
over spilt milk?” The girls made horrible faces. Lise didn't care about that. Relief left her giddy. “Come on. Let's clean up the mess.”

She did most of the work, but she made the girls help. As she mopped up milk and swept up broken glass, she also marveled.
I didn't hear the crash at all. Was I that lost in my own worries? I guess I was.

“I'm sorry,” Alicia said again. No, she didn't like making any mistakes, no matter how small.

“It's all right, dear,” Lise said. And, compared to what might have been, it was.

H
EINRICH AND
L
ISE
G
IMPEL WERE DEFENDING AGAINST A
small slam in spades, doubled, that Willi Dorsch was playing. Heinrich was the one who'd doubled. With the ace of hearts in his hand, why not? One more trick after that, he thought, ought to come from somewhere. That ace had been his opening lead—whereupon he'd discovered, painfully, that Erika had a void in hearts. Willi had grinned like the Cheshire Cat when he trumped the beautiful, lost ace.

One trick for the defenders had materialized, when the clubs split evenly and Heinrich's queen survived. He couldn't see where they would come up with a second one, the one that would set the contract. His two meager trumps were gone, pulled, and Lise had had only one.

Willi led the queen of diamonds. Heinrich glumly tossed out the seven. The ace lay face-up on the table in the dummy's hand. Willi confidently didn't play it, instead choosing the three. Lise didn't even smile as she ruined the finesse by laying her king on top of the queen. “Down one,” she said sweetly.

“Oh, for God's sake!” Willi said. He might have added something more pungent than that, but the three Gimpel girls had gone to bed only a few minutes before and could have heard if he did. He sent Heinrich an accusing stare. “You were the one who doubled. I was sure you had that…miserable king.”

“I doubled on the strength of the ace,” Heinrich said. “When you ruffed it, I thought we were doomed. Let's fin
ish the hand—maybe we'll come up with another trick, too.”

Lise led. Willi handily took the rest of the tricks, but he and Erika still went down one. His wife sighed mournfully.

“I would have played that one the same way.” Heinrich came to Willi's defense.

“Would you?” Erika didn't sound as if she believed it.

“Sure I would,” he said. “Lise didn't bid at all during the auction. You have to figure what strength we've got is in my hand.”

“Maybe.” Erika still seemed dubious—and annoyed at her husband. “If
you'd
tried that finesse, Heinrich, it probably would have worked.”

Willi Dorsch didn't say anything. He did turn red, though, as he gathered up the cards. Heinrich tried to defuse things, saying, “Ha! Don't I wish? I've had more finesses go down in flames than the Russians lost planes the first day we hit them.”

“But you don't run them unless you need to,” Erika said. “Willi tried that one for the sake of being cute. We could have made without it.”

She spoke as if her husband weren't there. Willi noticed, too, and turned redder than ever. “We were in trouble if I
didn't
try that finesse,” he insisted.

“I don't think so,” Erika said.

“Whose deal is it?” Lise asked. That might not have been the wisdom of Solomon, but it sufficed to forestall the argument. The next hand was unexciting; the Gimpels bid two hearts and made three. The hand after that, Erika Dorsch made four spades and chopped off the Gimpels' leg.

She didn't say anything to Willi. She made such a point of not saying anything to him, he turned red all over again. “Yes, you're a genius,” he growled. “There. I admit it. Are you happy now?”

“I just played it sensibly,” Erika said. “It's not that you haven't got brains, sweetheart. It's just that you don't always bother using them. If you ask me, that's worse, because you could.” Things would have been bad enough if she'd left it there, but she added, “Heinrich, now, he gets the most from what he's got between his ears.”

Lise Gimpel sent her husband a hooded look. He didn't need it to know this was several different flavors of trouble. The most immediate one was between Willi and Erika. Willi took a deep breath. By the nasty glint in his eyes, Heinrich knew with sudden, appalled certainty just what he was going to say. It would have been crude in a locker room. At the bridge table, it would have been a disaster. Heinrich got there first, saying, “If I'm as smart as all that, why aren't I rich? If I'm as smart as all that, why wasn't I smart enough to pick a better-looking face, too?”

He hoped that would help calm Willi, who was by anybody's standards better-looking than he was. And it might have, if Erika hadn't poured gasoline on the fire: “Some things, we can't choose. Some things…we can.” She was looking straight at her husband.

Willi had managed to get some grip on his temper. His voice was thick with anger when he said, “We'll talk about this later,” but at least he seemed willing to talk about it later instead of having a row right there on the spot.

“Why don't I bring out the coffee and cake?” Lise said. “I think maybe we've had enough bridge for the night.”

Heinrich hoped Erika would hop up and help, but she didn't. She was, he slowly realized, as angry at Willi as he was at her. She might have realized what her husband had almost said, too—or maybe she was angry for reasons that had nothing to do with bridge but came out over the game. Sitting there with them, waiting for Lise to come back, Heinrich felt like a man in the middle of a minefield.

When the minefield went up, though, it went up from an unexpected direction. Erika Dorsch turned her blue gaze on him and asked, “What do you think of the whole business about the first edition of
Mein Kampf
?”

Few residents of the
Reich
would have been comfortable answering that question. It horrified Heinrich for all sorts of reasons, most of which Erika knew nothing about. He tried to pass it off lightly: “What I think doesn't matter. What the powers that be think will be what counts.”

“It's what I told Heinrich at the office: that whole business is nothing but a lot of garbage,” Willi said. “Nobody who counts will pay any attention to it.”

The blue glare Erika turned on him might have come from twin acetylene torches. “I already know what you think. I ought to—I've heard it often enough. I'm trying to find out what Heinrich thinks.”

Wherever that anger came from, it was genuine. Heinrich wondered whether Erika really had her sights set on him, or whether she was only using him to make Willi angry and jealous. Either way, it worked. Willi visibly steamed. Heinrich said, “Like I told you, I don't know what to think. How about you, Erika?” He regretted the last question as soon as the words were out of his mouth, which was, of course, too late.

“Me? I think it's about time somebody brought this up,” she said. “Who is the
Reich
for, if it's not for the people in it? And if it's for us, shouldn't we have some say about who runs it?”

Heinrich agreed with that, to the extent that he could. He would never have dared to say it out loud, though. Willi Dorsch sneered. “My wife, the democrat. This is
why
Hitler changed things after the first edition. Look what that kind of nonsense got the French. Look what it got the Americans. If you go around electing politicians, they'll kiss the backsides of the people who voted them in. You need men who can
lead,
not follow.”

At long last, Lise brought in the cakes and coffee. She set plate and cup in front of Willi. “Here. Why don't you lead off on this?”

“Thanks, Lise,” Willi said as he cut himself a slice of cake. “I don't hear you going on about how wonderful the stupid first edition is. You've got the sense to know it's rubbish.”

His wife said, “I'm with Heinrich. I can't do anything much about it one way or the other. What's the point of fussing over something like that?”

“There
is
a point,” Erika Dorsch insisted. “If the Party
Bonzen
know the people are looking over their shoulder and just waiting to throw them out if they do something stupid or feather their own nests, maybe they'll watch themselves.”

Heinrich had the same hope. Wouldn't leaders respon
sible to the people they ruled be milder than leaders responsible to no one but their courtiers? They could hardly be harsher. No matter what he hoped, though, he'd had keeping quiet and staying noncommittal inalterably drummed into him. Silence meant more than security. Silence meant survival.

And that held true for others besides the last few hidden Jews, as Willi pointed out: “When all this is over, when we've got ourselves a new
Führer,
the Security Police are going to take a good, long look at everybody who babbled about the first edition and how wonderful it is. They may figure some people are just fools, and let them off the hook. But some people, the agitators, will win themselves noodles for their big mouths.” The camp slang for a bullet in the back of the neck had become part of the ordinary German language.

All he succeeded in doing was getting his wife angry again. “So what shall we do, then?” Erika snapped. “Sit on our hands and keep quiet because we're afraid? Pretend we're nothing but a bunch of Mussulmen?” That was camp slang, too, slang for prisoners who'd given up and were waiting to die.

Her question prompted only one answer from Heinrich.
Yes,
he thought.
What else is there? Don't you realize what you're up against?

Maybe Erika didn't. She'd lived a life of comfort and privilege, confident she was one of the
Herrenvolk
. So had most Germans in the forty years since the United States went down. They were top dogs, and seldom had to think about how they stayed on top.

Sure enough, Erika stuck out her chin and said, “I'm just as good an Aryan as any of the Party big shots. I'm just as good an Aryan as Kurt Haldweim was—and so are you, Willi, and Heinrich and Lise, if you'd just stand up on your hind legs about it.”

Could sheer Aryan arrogance pave the way for the measures the first edition of
Mein Kampf
outlined? There was a notion that hadn't occurred to Heinrich up till now.
We're all set about everyone else, so we must be equal to one another
. It made a very Germanic kind of sense. But just
because Erika thought it was true, would anyone else? That was liable to be a different story.

Willi said, “I think we'd better head for home. Some nights there's just no reasoning with some people.” Though he did his best to sound cheerful, Heinrich thought he was fuming underneath.

Erika didn't help when she said, “I've been telling you that for years, and you never paid any attention to me.”

They were still sniping at each other when they left the Gimpel house and headed up the street toward the bus stop. Heinrich closed the door behind them. “Whew!” he said—a long whoosh of air.

“Yes.” Lise stretched the word to three times its usual length. “That was a fascinating evening, wasn't it?”

“There's a good word for it.” Heinrich could imagine several other words he might have used.
Fascinating
was the safest one he could come up with.

“I don't think you're part of the problem between Willi and Erika,” his wife said.

“That's good,” he answered, most sincerely.

“I don't think you're part of the problem,” Lise repeated, “but I think Erika thinks you're part of the solution.”

“You…may be right.” Heinrich didn't want to admit even that much. It felt dangerous: not dangerous in the hauled-off-to-an-extermination-camp sense, but dangerous in the simpler, more normal, this-complicates-my-life sense. He was not the sort of man who cared for danger of any sort.

Lise tapped her foot on the tile of the entry hall. “And if I am right, what are you going to do about it?”

“Me? Nothing!” he exclaimed.

The alarm in his voice must have got through to her, because she relaxed—a little. “Good,” she said. “That's the right answer.” She paused pensively. “Erika's a very good-looking woman, isn't she?”

Heinrich couldn't even say no. She would have known he was lying. “I suppose so,” he mumbled.

“Maybe it's not such a bad thing you have more on your mind than most husbands.” Lise tried to eye him severely, but a smile curled up the corners of her mouth in spite of herself.

The same thing had occurred to Heinrich not so long before. He was not about to admit that to Lise. He told himself Security Police torturers couldn't have torn it from him, but he knew he was liable to be wrong. Those people were very good at what they did, and got a lot of practice doing it.

He realized he had to say something. He couldn't just keep standing there. Otherwise, Lise was liable to think he thought it was too bad he had more on his mind than most husbands, which was the last thing he wanted. “I know when I'm well off,” he told her.

That turned the tentative, reluctant smile wide and happy. “Good,” she said. “You'd better.” She paused. “Do you know when you're well off well enough to help me clean up?”

“I suppose so,” he said once more, as halfheartedly as he had when admitting Erika Dorsch was pretty.