In the Presence of Mine Enemies (34 page)

“Oh, hello, Heinrich—I wanted to talk to Willi.” That was Erika Dorsch's voice. Heinrich winced. He wished he'd let the phone ring. When he didn't answer right away, she asked, “Where is he?” in a way he didn't like at all.

He responded with the exact and literal truth: “You missed him by two minutes—he just went to lunch.”

“And he didn't go with you, obviously,” Erika said. Heinrich
really
wished he hadn't answered the telephone. Willi's wife went on, “Did he go with the lovely and talented Ilse instead?”

“I, ah, didn't see him leave,” Heinrich said, which was true in the highly technical sense that he'd looked down at the papers on his desk before Willi actually opened the door.

“Now tell me another one, Heinrich. You aren't much of a liar, you know,” Erika said. The way she meant it, that might have been true. In several ways she knew nothing about, it couldn't have been more wrong. That she knew nothing about those several ways proved how wrong it was.

He said, “Erika, I'm not his father. I'm not his watchdog, either. I don't keep an eye on him every minute.”

“Somebody ought to,” Erika Dorsch said bitterly. “Is something wrong with me, Heinrich? Am I ugly? Am I unattractive?”

“You ought to know better than that,” he said, too surprised at the question not to give her an honest answer.

“Should I?” she said. “If something isn't wrong with me, why have we only made love six or seven times this year? Why is Willi going around with that round-heeled little chippie instead of me?”

“I don't know,” Heinrich answered, which was also certainly true. If he'd had a choice between…But he didn't have choices like that, so what was the point of imagining
he did? He said, “Don't you think you'd do better asking Willi? He might actually tell you.”

“He'd tell me a load of garbage. That's what he's been telling me all along,” Erika said. “What's he been telling you? That's probably more garbage.”

Heinrich pretended not to hear her. Bad enough to have to listen to both sides in a dissolving marriage. To tell tales from one to the other…He shook his head. No. He didn't know much about such things, but he knew better than that.

“Can you get a little time off?” she asked. “If you come over here, I can tell you how things really are.”

What was that supposed to mean? What it sounded like? If it did, would he kick himself for the rest of his days if he said no? Most red-blooded males would. He could arrange things so Lise never knew, and….

“Erika,” he said gently, “I don't think that would be a good idea right now.”

“No?” She sounded tragic. “You mean you don't want me, either?”

“I—” He stopped. One more question for which there was no safe answer. He did his best: “I'm married to Lise, remember? I like being married to Lise. I want to stay married to her.” He looked around to make sure nobody in the big room was paying too much attention to him. He couldn't do anything about anyone who might monitor the call. It wouldn't land him in trouble, anyhow. He consoled himself with that.

A long, long silence followed. At last, Erika said, “I didn't know people talked that way any more. Well.” Another silence. “She's luckier than she knows—or else you can't get it up, either.” The line went dead.

Heinrich stared at the telephone, then slowly replaced the handset in the cradle. He'd been ready to sympathize with Erika—even if he wasn't ready to go to bed with her—and to think Willi was a louse and a fool for not giving her more of what she obviously wanted. But if she kept making cracks like that, he didn't see how he could sympathize with either one of them—except they were both his friends. He muttered something that didn't help and trudged off to the canteen.

 

Susanna Weiss loved good food. What she didn't love was cooking. She should have; learning to cook, and to be happy cooking, was drummed into girls in the Greater German
Reich
in school and in the
Bund deutscher Mädel
. With Susanna, it hadn't taken. With Susanna, the more something was drummed into her, the less likely to take it was.

Frozen and freeze-dried food had come a long way since she was a girl. A lot of the advances had been military first; nothing was too good for the
Reich
's soldiers and sailors. Little by little, things had trickled out to the civilian world as well. A faint stigma still clung to eating such food too often. It said you were lazy, or you didn't care enough about your family to take care of them yourself. Being a Jew, Susanna didn't worry about stigmas that were merely faint. And she was convinced she had better things to do with her time than stand in front of a stove. When she ate in her flat, she had frozen or freeze-dried food most of the time.

She was eating beef stroganoff that had started life in a plastic pouch when Heinz Buckliger came on the televisor screen. The Russians, those who were left alive, had been pushed east far past the Urals. Some of their recipes lingered on in the Germany they couldn't hope to threaten for generations.

Recorded, abridged versions of
“Deutschland über Alles”
and the “Horst Wessel Song” prefaced the
Führer
's appearance. The screen cut to an image of the Germanic eagle with a swastika in its claws to the
Führer
's study. Like so much Nazi architecture, the room was on a heroic scale that did its best to dwarf the man who occupied it. The walls of red marble with ebony wainscoting rose nearly ten meters to the cofferwork ceiling of rosewood. The televisor camera panned slowly, lovingly, along those walls. Along with gilded Party symbols, they held portraits of Bismarck, Hitler, Himmler, and a new one—over which the camera lingered—of Kurt Haldweim looking Viennese and aristocratic and more than a little snooty.

The picture cut away to the
Führer
's desk. The cabinet
makers who'd created insanely ornate inlaid furniture for French noblemen during the Old Regime would have owned they'd met their match in the craftsmen who made that desk. On the wall behind it hung a genuine Gobelin tapestry from the seventeenth century. Next to the tapestry, a German flag hung limply from a pole. Another gilded swastika-bearing eagle topped that pole.

As the camera shot tightened to the tawny leather chair in which Heinz Buckliger sat, the flag remained at the edge of the picture. Susanna had seen that whenever she watched a speech from the
Führer
. Tonight, she really noticed it, which was not the same thing. She gave a grudging nod of approval. Party propagandists didn't miss a trick. Of course they associated the head of state with the state itself. That they did it so she
didn't
consciously notice most of the time was a testimony to their skill.

Then she noticed something else, and her eyes widened. Heinz Buckliger was wearing a plain gray suit, not a Party uniform. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen any
Führer
in civilian clothes. She wondered if she ever had. She didn't think so. Buckliger's necktie was of a red that perfectly matched the flag. After a moment, she saw it bore a pattern: small black swastikas. Any men's-wear store might have sold it.

What did that say? What did it mean? Anyone alert who watched the televisor looked for meanings behind meanings, for what was said without a word being spoken. What was Buckliger trying to get across here? All Susanna could think of was,
I'm as patriotic as the next fellow, but I'm transposing the tune into a new key
.

“Good evening, citizens of the Greater German
Reich,
” the
Führer
said. “Not long ago, in Nuremberg, I spoke to officials of the National Socialist Party about some of the problems I see facing the
Reich
and the Germanic Empire. You also need to know some of the things I told them.”

As who in the
Reich
had not, Susanna had seen films of Hitler. He'd dominated, whether screaming for war or vengeance, pleading for greater effort, or cajoling people into sacrifice. Himmler, who'd led Greater Germany and the Empire when she was a child, had dominated in a dif
ferent way. His style was flatter than Hitler's, but you could sense the iron underneath. If you caused trouble, you would get it—in the neck. Kurt Haldweim had talked down to people, as if convinced he knew things no one else did. If he happened to be wrong, who was going to tell him? And if he happened to be wrong, would he ever admit it? Not likely.

Heinz Buckliger simply…spoke. “For a good many years now, we have been living off the great deeds of our ancestors,” he said. “And our ancestors
were
great men who did great things. But we are like a family that lives off an inheritance from Grandpa, doesn't take care of its money very well, and doesn't have enough people in it who have gone out and looked for work on their own. After a while, the inheritance runs dry, and they have to figure out what to do next.

“I want to try to figure out what to do next
before
we run dry. We have plundered much of the world. But how long can that go on? Many of the folk of Western Europe and North America are as Aryan as we are. How long can we justify in racial terms their continued exploitation?”

Charlie Lynton had said things like that at the gathering of the British Union of Fascists. Susanna hadn't expected to hear them from him. Hearing them from the
Führer
was like a thunderclap. Like Lynton, Buckliger was using fascist ideology to cloak doing things that would have appalled his predecessors.

“Further conquest is not an option for us, as it was for Hitler and Himmler,” he continued. “Forty years ago, we were lucky the United States didn't do us more damage. We could bring the Empire of Japan to its knees tomorrow—but if we did, Japan would bring us to our knees, too. Both we and the Japanese have too many rockets to make war anything but mutual suicide.

“So what are we to do? Things aren't the way they were in our fathers' time, and they certainly aren't the way they were in our grandfathers' time. Do we go on looking at our troubles in the same old way? This, it seems to me, is foolishness. When Hitler saw the
Reich
with troubles that were new in his time, did he answer them the way his parents
and grandparents had? Of course not! He changed with the times. We must always change with the times, or the times will change without us.”

“He's doing it again!” Susanna exclaimed, too excited to keep quiet. Fascist ideology didn't lend itself to change. What was fascism, after all, but reaction on the march? But, like Charlie Lynton, Heinz Buckliger had seen that, if he appealed to well-established authority to justify the changes he was making, he might have a chance of getting away with them. The Party
Bonzen
—and the Party rank and file—were surely listening to him along with everybody else. What did they think? Did they understand what they were hearing?

Or am I the one who's wrong?
Susanna wondered.
Am I hearing what I want to hear, listening with my heart and not my head?
The last time she'd done that was with the boyfriend who'd turned out to be a lush, the one Heinrich still teased her about every now and then.

She cursed softly. Lost in her own thoughts, she'd missed a few sentences of what Buckliger was saying. “…greater responsiveness to the needs and desires of the
Volk
as a whole,” was where she started paying attention again. “Of course we cannot and will not challenge the primacy of the Party and of National Socialist ideals, but are we not all Aryans together?”

When he said
of course,
he sometimes meant anything but. How many people would see that? Instead of going into detail, as she'd hoped he would, he continued, “This is a topic I will return to in times to come. Staying on old ground is always safe and certain. That is the reason so many of us like it so well. Finding a new way is harder. We may make mistakes. We probably will. But, if we keep going long enough, we will find ourselves in a place we never could have reached by sticking with the tried and true. Let us make the journey together. Good night.”

The
Führer
's study vanished from Susanna's televisor screen—from televisor screens all over the
Reich
. Horst Witzleben's familiar newsroom replaced it. The broadcaster said, “That was, of course, Heinz Buckliger,
Führer
of the Greater German
Reich
and the Germanic Empire.”
When Witzleben said
of course,
he meant it. He blinked a couple of times before going on, “An extraordinary address. A memorable address. The
Führer
set his mark on the
Reich
. As he leads us, as he guides us, so we shall go. That is our only proper—indeed, our only possible—course. A new era is upon us, and in times to come, as the
Führer
said, we shall learn exactly what this means. For now, good night, and I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”