In the Presence of Mine Enemies (27 page)

“Like how?” Francesca asked, interested but doubtful.

Alicia flogged her muse and came up with a line: “Jews were Germany's bad luck.” She eyed her sister. “Now you find something that rhymes.”

Francesca screwed up her face as she thought. Her sudden smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “That's why we made them a dead duck!” she exclaimed.

It wasn't very good poetry; it rhymed, but the rhythm was off. Alicia started to say so, but then, for a wonder, held her tongue. For somebody in Francesca's grade, it would do. And criticizing it would only get Alicia more deeply involved in shaping the poem, which was the last thing she wanted. Pretending she wasn't something she was came hard enough around strangers. It was harder still with her sisters.

Francesca, inevitably, wanted more help. “Give me another line,” she said.

“No,” Alicia said. “Come on. You can do it yourself.”

Her sister hauled out the heavy artillery: “I'll tell Mommy.”

It didn't work. “Go ahead,” Alicia answered. “You're supposed to do your own homework, and you know it.”

“You're mean!” Francesca said.

“I've got my work to do, too,” Alicia said. Compared to writing rude verses about Jews, even reducing 39/91 to lowest terms didn't look so bad.

“You're so mean! You lie and cheat!” When Francesca got angry, she didn't care what she said. She just wanted to wound.

But she didn't, not here. “That's good,” Alicia said. Her sister gaped at her. “That's good,” she repeated. “That will do for another line, if you change ‘you' into ‘they.'”

“Oh.” Francesca thought about it. The sun came out from behind the clouds once more. “You're right. It will.” She thought a little more. “They are so mean. They lie and cheat./And take away the food we eat.” She looked toward Alicia, who was suddenly a respected literary analyst again, for her reaction.

And Alicia nodded. She didn't think it was wonderful poetry, but she also didn't think Francesca's teacher was expecting wonderful poetry. The lesson was more about hating Jews than about writing poetry, wonderful or not. Alicia stared suspiciously at 39/91. To encourage Francesca—and to encourage her to go away—she said, “See? Just two lines left.”

“Uh-huh.” Francesca didn't go away, but she didn't nag Alicia any more, either. Now that she'd come up with more than two lines mostly on her own, she could make others. “We're glad they aren't here any longer./Without them, the
Reich
grows ever stronger.” She beamed. “I'm done!”

“Write them all down before you forget them,” Alicia advised.

Francesca hurried off to do just that. A couple of minutes later, she cried out in despair: “I forgot!”

Alicia remembered the deathless verses. She recited them for her sister—slowly, so Francesca could get them down on paper. Francesca even said thank you, which would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.

Back to arithmetic. 39/91? Now, 3 went into 39 evenly, but did it go into 91? No—she could see that at a glance.
They're trying to trick me,
she thought.
This is going to be one of those stupid fractions that
doesn't
reduce, that's already in lowest terms
. Then, remembering that 3 × 13 made 39, she idly tried dividing 13 into 91. To her surprise, she discovered she could. 3/7, she wrote on the answer sheet.

Francesca sounded like a stampeding elephant going downstairs (Roxane, who was smaller, somehow contrived to sound like an earthquake). “Listen, Mommy!” she said from down below.

“Listen to what?” the Gimpel girls' mother asked. “I'm fixing supper.”

“Listen to this poem I wrote,” Francesca said proudly. She didn't mention anything about help from her big sister. In most circumstances, that would have infuriated Alicia, more because of its inaccuracy than for any other reason. Here, she didn't much mind.

Her mother's voice floated up the stairs: “All right. Go ahead.”

And Francesca did. Either she'd already memorized it or she had her paper along with her. “What do you think?” she asked when she was done.

If Francesca had written the poem all by herself and then read it to her, Alicia knew she would have been speechless, at least for a moment. Her mother didn't hesitate, even for a heartbeat. “That's very good, dear,” she said, and sounded as if she meant it. “Are you playing a game with Alicia and Roxane, or is it for school?”

“For school,” Francesca answered.

“Well, I'm sure you'll get a good grade. Now go on back upstairs and let me finish dealing with the tongue here. I want to be sure your father doesn't have to wait too long to eat before he gets home from work.”

Francesca thundered up the stairs again. To Alicia's relief, she didn't stop to talk any more, but went straight into her room. That left Alicia alone to wonder about something more complicated than fractions.

She knew she was smarter than most grownups. They sometimes knew more things than she did, but that was only because they'd been around longer, which often
struck her as most unfair. Up till now, she'd never had any trouble learning whatever she set out to learn.

But what her mother had just done was beyond her, and she knew it. How had Mommy managed to sound so natural with no warning at all? Alicia knew Jews had to if they wanted to survive. She'd already slipped more times than she could count, though. She hadn't got caught yet, but she knew she'd slipped. As far as she could tell, her mother and father never slipped, not like that.

She sighed. Up till now, she'd been sure adults ruled the roost for no better reason than that they were bigger than children and could shout louder. That had always struck her as most unfair. But now, after listening to her mother perform, she thought she might be willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, there was something to this business of growing up after all.

 

No word in the
Völkischer Beobachter
. Day followed day, and the Party newspaper said not a thing about Heinz Buckliger's speech to the
Bonzen
in Nuremberg. The longer the silence lasted, the more puzzling it got for Heinrich Gimpel. No matter how much curiosity gnawed at him, though, he couldn't do anything about satisfying it.

He couldn't even show he was curious, not after the first day or two. That curtain of silence had to have fallen for a reason, even if he had no idea what the reason was. Asking too many questions under circumstances like that was dangerous.

Willi Dorsch plainly felt the same way. He kept his head down and his mouth shut. If his ears were open—well, then they were, that was all. Open ears were safe enough, because they didn't show.

But Heinrich was the one who caught the first break. The Friday Willi and Erika were going to come over for bridge in the evening, Willi took Ilse out to lunch again. Heinrich was curious about that, too, and couldn't show he was curious, either. He went to the canteen, ordered the day's special—a chicken stew with heavy gravy and too many onions—and sat down at a small corner table to eat.

He'd got there early; the place wasn't very full. Over the next half hour, more officers and analysts, technicians and
clerks, sweepers and secretaries came in, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in pairs, most often in groups. The loners and pairs took the tables at the edges, while the groups mostly used the bigger tables in the middle of the room. Things got loud in a hurry.

Heinrich did his best to listen without seeming to, even if separating signal from noise wasn't easy. When he heard the word “Nuremberg” from the table behind him, he wished he could prick up his ears. As things were, he could only sit there, slowly eat the unappetizing stew, and try to hear what the two officers—he thought two officers had walked past him and sat down at that table, although he wasn't a hundred percent sure—who were also eating lunch were saying.

“He stuck his foot in it, if you ask me,” one of the men declared.

The other fellow grunted. “The cook stuck his foot in this stew, if you ask me. Troops in the field would mutiny if it came in a ration tin. For people at headquarters, though, it's plenty good enough.”

“Dammit, I'm serious,” the first man said.

“So am I,” his friend replied. “And if I have to finish this, I'll be critical.” He made a gagging noise. Heinrich almost stopped paying attention. Everybody groused about the food at the canteen, which didn't stop people from coming.

But then the first officer said, “He had no business saying things like that to the bigwigs—none, I tell you.”

“No?” the second officer said. “For one thing, we don't know just
what
he said, because nobody's talking on the record.”

“Oh, we know, all right,” the first man said. “And it's because he said that kind of rubbish that nobody
is
talking.”

A longish pause followed, as if the second officer was deciding how to respond to that, and whether to respond at all. At last, he said, “I don't know. If what we hear is what really happened, some of what he said at Nuremberg has needed saying for a long time. What did he say that wasn't true? Answer me that, if you please.”

“Who cares whether it was true?” the first man retorted. “It was—undignified, that's what it was.”

Who cares whether it was true?
If that didn't sum up the way things had gone all through the history of the
Reich,
Heinrich couldn't imagine what would. He was in a better position to know than the vast majority of his countrymen. Another pause at the table in back of him. Then, slowly, the second officer said, “Doing things like going in the red when we're the strongest country in the world—
that's
undignified, if you ask me. Telling the truth about lies we told and mistakes we made a long time ago…What's undignified about that? How do we get better if we don't even know where we were?”

“What has raking up all that old stuff got to do with whether the budget's balanced or not?” the first officer said.

“If my watch has run two hours slow for weeks, I won't get the right time when I look at it, will I?” the other man said.

“If your watch has run slow for weeks, you're a
Dummkopf,
” the first officer said. “You go out and buy a new battery—or else a new watch.”

“That's what the truth is—a new battery. And we've needed one for a lot longer than weeks. It's just that nobody had the nerve to say so.”

The first officer came back with something in broad Bavarian dialect. It sounded pungent, but Heinrich couldn't quite make out what it meant—to him, broad Bavarian was hardly German. And he couldn't sit there much longer without making people realize he was eavesdropping. He got to his feet, dumped the foam plate and plastic utensils in the trash, and headed back to his desk. What
had
Heinz Buckliger said down in Nuremberg? Whatever it was, he had a notion why the
Beobachter
hadn't printed it.

He wondered whether Willi had heard anything interesting at lunch. If rumors about whatever had happened in Nuremberg were starting to circulate here at
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters, they were bound to be bubbling with SS men and Party officials, too. And people liked to blab.

But when Willi and Ilse got back, it was obvious they hadn't been paying attention to anything but each other. He didn't have lipstick on his collar, but his hair went every
which way and his tie was yanked askew. Ilse's blouse was buttoned wrong. When she realized that and fixed it, she got a fit of the giggles.

Well, well—or maybe not so well,
Heinrich thought.
Bridge tonight is liable to be even more interesting than it has been lately
.

 

Susanna Weiss got her first hint of something out of the ordinary that same afternoon, when the telephone in her office rang. She muttered an unpleasantry. She had neither classes nor students on Friday afternoons. If she couldn't do her research and writing then, when would she ever get the chance? Never, maybe. She picked up the phone. “
Bitte?
”

“
Guten Tag,
Susanna. This is Rosa,
Herr Doktor
Professor Oppenhoff's secretary. The
Herr Doktor
Professor would like to see you in his office immediately.”

“Would he?” Susanna muttered. Rosa was a withered old crone; Susanna often thought of her as Grendel's mother, straight out of
Beowulf
. She was also studiedly rude to Susanna. She would never have presumed to call a male professor in the Department of Germanic Literature by his first name: he would have been
Herr Doktor
Professor So-and-So. Susanna, Rosa implied, was no better than hired help herself. But Rosa was Professor Oppenhoff's right hand and two or three fingers of his left. With a sigh, Susanna made herself say, “I'm coming.”