In the Presence of Mine Enemies (26 page)

“You'd think so, wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong. There are lawyers who deal with
Mischlingsrechts,
” Susanna said. “One of the games they play in the Party is accusing somebody they don't like of having Jewish blood. Most of the time, it's a big, fat lie, which is why the attorneys who specialize in mixed-blood law
don't
go to camps. It happened at the university a few years ago, too, which is how I happen to know about it.” She made a face, as if she'd smelled something foul. “You wouldn't believe how nasty academic politics can get.”

“After all the horror stories you've told, maybe I would,” Esther said. Susanna had her doubts. Her friend was simply too nice to imagine the depths to which people could sink. And if that wasn't an aid to survival in the Greater German
Reich,
Susanna didn't know what would be.

She said, “They ought to threaten to sue, too.”

Behind her glasses, Esther's eyes got big. “Sue the government? They'd get shot for even thinking about it!”

Susanna shook her head again. “No, they'd just lose or
have their suit quashed before it ever came to trial. But if they talk big, if they hit back hard, people will think they must be innocent, because nobody who's guilty acts like that.”

There was, or had been, a saying in English.
The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet
—that was how it went. It held some truth, too. Germans who thought they had the whip hand acted like it. And those who didn't, groveled.

Esther was a quiet and quietly orderly person herself. Susanna wasn't, and never had been. She hit back whenever she could, sometimes in small ways, sometimes not. Up till now, she'd never had the chance to hit back at the
Reich
itself. She'd imagined it—what Jew didn't? But dreams of vengeance remained only dreams. She wasn't crazy. She knew they'd never be anything else. Still, even the prospect of tying the system up in knots looked good to her.

“Do you really think I ought to tell this to the Kleins?” Esther asked doubtfully. “Won't it just land them in worse trouble?”

Susanna looked around. Nobody was particularly close to the two of them. No one was paying them any special heed, either. She could speak freely, or as freely as anyone could ever speak in the Greater German
Reich
. “They're under suspicion of being Jews,” she said. “How can they get in worse trouble than that?”

To her surprise, Esther actually thought it over. “Maybe if they were homosexual Gypsies…But then they wouldn't have a baby, would they?”

“No.” Susanna fought laughter, though it was only blackly funny. The
Reich
had been at least as thorough about getting rid of Gypsies as it had with Jews. She didn't know whether any survived. If so, they too were in hiding. As for homosexuals, the few high up in the Party hierarchy and those who traveled in certain circles of the SS did as they pleased. Others still faced savage persecution. Unlike Jews and Gypsies, they couldn't be rooted out all at once, for they kept springing up like new weeds every year. If nothing else, they gave the authorities something to do.

“We've come all the way to the zoo,” Esther said in amazement. “Shall we go in and look at the animals?”

“No!” Susanna startled even herself with the force of her reaction. She had to stop and think to figure out why she felt the way she did. “I don't want to look at lions and elephants and ostriches in cages, not when I'm in a cage myself.”

“Oh.” Esther thought that over, too. After a little while, she said, “But people like the animals. Berliners have always liked animals.” As if to prove her point, a man perhaps old enough to have served in the Second World War sat on a park bench scattering torn-up bits of bread for birds and squirrels.

“You're right, but I don't care.” Susanna stuck out her chin and looked stubborn. That was the expression
Herr Doktor
Professor Oppenhoff had come to dread. “They're still trapped in there, and I don't want anything to do with them.”

Esther didn't argue. She'd known Susanna long enough to know how impractical arguing with her could be. She just shrugged and said, “In that case, let's head back to your apartment.”

“All right.” Susanna was glad enough to turn around. She sighed. “I never thought I'd wish I were living in England.”

“Why would you?” Esther asked. “Over there, they have their own people watching them, and they have us, too.”

“But they have a party that's serious about turning over a new leaf,” Susanna answered. “We don't. Oh, people say the new
Führer
will be something different, but I'll believe it when I see it.”

“I hope it's true,” Esther said. “Maybe it'll mean easier times for…everybody.” She chose the innocuous word because a man in a brown Party uniform came past them. He looked intent on his own business, but Susanna would have used an innocuous word anyplace where he could hear, too.

“Easier times,” Susanna said wistfully. “I'll believe that when I see it, too, especially with what's going on now.” She wished she hadn't said that as soon as she did; Esther looked on the point of tears. Susanna often talked first and worried about consequences later. When she was younger,
she'd thought she would outgrow it. But it seemed to be a part of her. Sometimes that landed her in trouble. Sometimes it proved very valuable. Every so often, it managed both at once. She knew she had to repair the damage here, and did her best: “One way or another, everything will turn out all right.”

“I hope so,” Esther said, “but I'm sure I don't see how.”

“As long as we act the way any other citizens of the
Reich
would if their rights were being violated, I think we'll do all right,” Susanna said.

“If we were any other citizens of the
Reich,
our rights wouldn't be violated,” Esther said. “Not like this, anyhow.”

“Not like this, no,” Susanna admitted. “But they still would be. That's what the
Reich
is all about: the government can do whatever it wants, and everybody else has to hold still for it. But people don't. Germans don't, anyway. If it bumps up against them, they bump back.”

“Or they get bumped off,” Esther said.

Susanna wished she hadn't put it like that, not because she was wrong but because she was right.
Or they get bumped off
. That had always been the
Reich
's answer for everything—and, judging by the past seventy years, a very effective answer it was, too.

H
EINRICH
G
IMPEL KISSED
L
ISE
,
GRABBED HIS ATTACHÉ
case, and headed out the door. It was a fine, bright summer morning, the sun already high in the sky. The orbiting weather platforms predicted that this heat wave would last for the rest of the week. A heat wave in Berlin would have been nothing in Algiers, or even in Rome, but it was better than the week of rain and mist that could come even in the middle of July.

Volkswagens and the occasional Mercedes zoomed past Heinrich as he stood at the corner and waited for the commuter bus. He'd never seen much point to owning a motorcar. To him, they were just swank, and more expensive than they were worth. With the buses and trains, you could get anywhere you needed to go.

As if to prove as much, the commuter bus pulled up a minute later. He got on, fed his account card into the slot, reclaimed it, and found a seat. A few stops later, Willi Dorsch got on, too. He plopped himself down beside Heinrich with a grunted,
“Guten Morgen.”

“Guten Morgen,”
Heinrich said.
“Wie geht's?”

“Well, I'll tell you, it could be better,” Willi answered. “How's it going with you?”

“I'm doing all right.” Heinrich couldn't tell Willi how worried he was about the Kleins. That would have required too much in the way of explanation. But he could sound sympathetic when he asked, “What now?”

Unlike him, Willi wasn't inclined to suffer in silence. When Willi felt wronged, the whole world heard about it.
And so, all the way to the train station, Heinrich got a blow-by-blow account of his friend's latest tiff with his wife: who'd said what, who'd thrown what, and how Willi had had to sleep on the sofa in the front room. “Why is it,” Willi asked, “that when you have a row with your woman, you're always the one who sleeps on the couch? She stays in bed and she stays comfortable. My back is killing me.”

“I don't know. I never really thought about it,” Heinrich said. Except when Lise was in the hospital after giving birth to one of their girls, the two of them had never slept apart.

“I never thought about it, either, not till this morning,” Willi said. “Erika acts like it's a law of nature—
she
isn't happy, so
I
have to go somewhere else. You call that fair? Do you?”

The bus came up to Stahnsdorf's train station just then. Heinrich didn't need to answer, which was probably just as well. As far as he could remember, he'd never heard of a woman sleeping on the sofa while a man stayed in bed. It didn't seem fair. It wasn't anything he'd ever had to worry about himself, but it didn't.

In the station, he put fifteen pfennigs into a vending machine and pulled out a copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter
. Even in buying a newspaper, he fed the Party's coffers. Were he the good German he pretended to be, he supposed that would have made him feel proud, or at least patriotic. As things were, it left him mildly—perhaps a little more than mildly—irked. He couldn't even find out what was going on in the world without helping to finance his own destruction.

Willi put coins in the machine and got a paper, too. Along with the other people who'd ridden the bus to the station, they went to the platform to wait for the train to downtown Berlin. Heinrich glanced at his watch. They wouldn't have to wait long.

When the train pulled up a very few minutes later, the commuters fed their account cards into the slot one after another. Willi was in front of Heinrich in the queue. He sat down by a window, and thumped the seat next to him to
show Heinrich was welcome. They both started reading the papers.

“Buckliger's going to talk to a bunch of big shots in Nuremberg tomorrow,” Heinrich remarked. “I wonder what he'll have to say.”

“Whatever the
Bonzen
want to hear,” Willi predicted. “What other point is there in going to Nuremberg?” He spoke with a Berliner's cynicism and a Berliner's certainty that no other place in the
Reich
really mattered.

“Maybe,” Heinrich said. “But maybe not, too. He didn't say what everybody expected him to the last time, you know.”

He waited to see what Willi would make of that. Willi started to tell him he didn't know what he was talking about—started to and then, very visibly, stopped. “That's true,” his friend said. “He didn't. But why would you go to Nuremberg to say anything that's out of the ordinary? Out of the ordinary isn't what Nuremberg is for.”

“Who knows?” Heinrich shrugged. “If we're confused after he makes his speech, Horst will tell us what to think about it.”

“Well, of course he will,” Willi Dorsch said, with no irony Heinrich could hear. “Telling us what to think is what Horst Witzleben is for.”

“He's good at it, too,” Heinrich said.

“Not much point to having a Propaganda Ministry where the people aren't good at what they do, is there?” Willi said.

“Oh, I don't know. Look at the Croats,” Heinrich said. The Croatian
Ustasha
did their jobs with an enthusiasm even the
Gestapo
found frightening. The German secret police were—mostly—professionals. The Croats were zealots, and proud of being zealots.

But Willi shook his head. “They want to show how frightful they are, and so they do. The national sport down there is hunting Serbs. And if the Serbs had been on the winning side, their national sport would have been hunting Croats. And do you know what else? They would have bragged about it, too. Tell me I'm wrong.”

He waited. Heinrich thought it over. “I can't,” he said, “not when you're right.”

To his surprise, Willi looked angry. “You'd be more fun to argue with if you didn't admit you were wrong when you're wrong,” he complained with mock severity.

“No, I wouldn't,” Heinrich answered.

“Yes, you—” Willi broke off and sent him a reproachful stare. “Oh, no, you don't. You're a devil, is what you are.”

“
Danke schön
. I do appreciate that.”

“You would,” Willi said. They both laughed. The train pulled into the Berlin station. Everything seemed the way it had in happier, less nervous times. Then Willi asked, “When are we going to play some more bridge? It's been too long.”

Air-raid sirens started howling inside Heinrich's head. He couldn't show them, though, any more than he could show so much of what he felt. He couldn't even show this particular alarm in front of Lise. He'd dug that trap for himself, and now he'd fallen into it. Knowing he had, he said, “Why don't you and Erika come over Friday of next week after work?”

“Sounds good,” Willi said.

Did it? Heinrich was anything but sure. He did think—he certainly hoped—Erika was less likely to say or do anything drastic at his house than at hers. If he turned out to be wrong…
If I turn out to be wrong, Lise will clout me one, and I'll deserve it
. Still, next to some of the other things that could happen, even a clout from his wife didn't seem too bad.

Then he had no more time for such worries. He stuffed the
Völkischer Beobachter
into his briefcase and performed the elaborate dance that took him from the downstairs train platform to the upstairs bus queue. As with any dance, if you had to think about what you were doing, you didn't do it so well. Willi matched his movements as smoothly as one ballerina in an ensemble conforming to another.

Their reward for such a performance was not an ovation but standing room on the bus that would take them to
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters. Someone on the bus hadn't seen soap anywhere near recently enough. Heinrich took in small, shallow sips of air, which might have helped a little. Then Willi muttered, “Who
brought along his polecat?” You couldn't take small, shallow sips of air when you were laughing like a loon.

Once they got to the office, Heinrich phoned home and let Lise know about the invitation: he was a well-trained husband. “That sounds like fun,” she said, which proved she didn't know everything that was going on. Heinrich couldn't tell her, either, and not just because Willi's desk was only a couple of meters away.

Willi, for that matter, might not have heard a word he said. Willi was busy flirting with Ilse. By the way she laughed and teased him back, his plot was thickening nicely. “Shall we go out to lunch?” he asked her.

“Why not?” she said.

Heinrich could have thought of any number of reasons why not, but nobody'd asked him. He went to lunch at the canteen, by himself. The meatloaf was grayish, with slices of what he hoped was hard-cooked egg scattered through it. He made the mistake of wondering what sort of meat had gone into the loaf. Then he wondered why he was eating it if he couldn't tell.

A couple of tables over, an officer looked at lunch and said, “They don't waste anything at those camps, do they?” After that, Heinrich finished the boiled beans that came on the side, but he didn't touch the meatloaf again. He was sure the officer had to be joking. He was sure, but still….

Willi and Ilse were a long time coming back from lunch. Heinrich wondered what they were eating. Then, hastily, he wondered where they were eating. That seemed safer.

He eyed them when at last they did come back. Willi didn't look particularly smug. Ilse didn't look rumpled. That proved nothing, one way or the other. Heinrich knew as much. He eyed them anyhow. Curiosity—nosiness, to be less polite about it—wouldn't leave him alone.

Would Willi brag on the way back to Stahnsdorf? The answer turned out to be no; if there was anything to brag about, Willi concealed it. Instead, he went on and on about the havoc he intended to wreak at the bridge table. “In your dreams,” Heinrich said sweetly.

“Sometimes dreams are better than the way things really work out,” Willi said. “Sometimes.” And that, oracular in its
ambiguity, was as close as he came to saying anything about whatever he had or hadn't done with Ilse—or perhaps about the way things had gone for him and Erika. Heinrich thought about asking him to explain, thought about it and then lost his nerve.

The next day's
Völkischer Beobachter
said not a word about the new
Führer
's speech in Nuremberg. Neither did the paper from the day after that. Had Buckliger made it? If he had, what had he said? The
Beobachter,
the chief Party newspaper, wasn't talking. Nor was anyone else: no one Heinrich knew, anyhow. He scratched his head, wondering what the devil that meant.

 

Alicia Gimpel had been helping her younger sisters with their homework ever since Francesca started going to school. Why not? She was bright, she remembered her lessons, and she'd had them only a couple of years before. Sometimes she got impatient when the younger girls didn't catch on right away. That had made Francesca angry more than once. Now Francesca helped Roxane, too—and sometimes got impatient when she didn't catch on right away. For reasons Alicia couldn't quite follow, her father and mother thought that was funny, though they'd yelled at her when she showed impatience.

She was slogging her way through reducing a page of fractions to lowest terms when Francesca came into her bedroom and said, “I'm stuck.”

“With what?” Alicia was sick of fractions, and the one she was about to tackle—39/91—didn't look as if it would ever turn into anything reasonable. Whatever Francesca was working on had to be more interesting than arithmetic.

“I'm supposed to write a poem about Jews, and I can't think of anything that rhymes,” Francesca said anxiously.

“How long does it have to be?” Alicia asked—the automatic first question when confronting schoolwork.

“Eight lines!” By the way Francesca said it, her teacher was expecting her to turn in both parts of
Faust
tomorrow morning.

“What have you done so far?” Alicia asked. Sometimes
her sister got brain cramps and wanted her to do all the work instead of just helping. She didn't like that.

But Francesca had a beginning. “Jews are nasty. Jews are bad./They hurt Aryans and make them sad,” she recited in the singsong way children have with rhymes.

“That's a start, all right,” Alicia said encouragingly. “Only six lines to go.”

“But I can't think of anything else!” Francesca wailed. “Besides, once I've said that, what else do I need to say?”

What would happen if I told you you were writing a poem about yourself?
Alicia wondered. Trouble was, she had a pretty good notion of the answer.
You'd have hysterics, that's what
. She'd learned the word not long before, and fallen in love with it. It sounded much grander than pitching a fit.

She took a deep breath, willing herself to forget what she'd found out earlier in the year. If she imagined she still was the way she had been then, helping with assignments like this one came easier. She said, “Maybe you can say the same thing over again in a different way.”